UnDivided (10 page)

“I sincerely doubt that,” he says with the resigned grin of a man who's been around the block—and in this neighborhood, that's saying something.

“Well,” says Una, “worst-case scenario, you never see me again, and you're up fifty bucks.”

He accepts her evaluation of their situation, offers her a “You take care, now,” and she leaves to find a pit of vipers called the Iron Monarch.

To say that Morton Fretwell is ugly as sin is a grave insult to sin. He knows this. He's had a lifetime to come to terms with it—twenty-nine years, to be exact. Fretwell's development took him through various comparative species. He began life as a bat-faced baby, grew into a coyote-faced boy, and finally matured into a goat-faced man.

But rather than lament his unprepossessing nature, he chose to embrace it—revel in it, even. His ugliness defines him—for what would he have without it? When he and Hennessey bagged that SlotMonger kid and sold him for a small fortune, Fretwell's share was enough to pick himself out some nice new facial
features, if he wanted. He had considered it, but not for long. Instead he spent the money on some of the finer things in life that his face usually denied him. But now that money is gone, and it's back to the day-to-day of trolling the streets for Unwinds to sell to those who will pay.

As he plays pool alone in a corner of the Iron Monarch he notices the girl. Actually, he noticed her when she first came in, looking like a nice drink of water in the desert. But now he notices
her
noticing
him
.

She's young. Twenty-one, maybe younger. She's alone in a booth, and already there are vultures around the Monarch with their eyes on her. She has dark hair, tied tightly back. When she came in, he noticed how it fell all the way to her tailbone. Fretwell has a thing for girls with long hair.

She doesn't just notice him, she makes eye contact with him now. There may be the hint of a smile on her face, but he can't tell in the dim light of the bar.

There's an ethnic look about her. Hispanic, or maybe even SlotMonger—hard to tell. Either way, there's an untainted aura about her that makes it clear she doesn't belong here. Or at least doesn't belong here
yet
. Clearly she's a good girl who's “slumming it” and looking for low love. And it doesn't get lower than Morton Fretwell.

He breaks eye contact first, and handily sinks his next ball—a tough bank shot. The attention from this somewhat pretty girl improves his mojo. Girls who are actually looking for a guy like him are few and far between, so he's quick to make his move. He grabs a second cue stick, and saunters over to the booth where she sits.

“Name's Morty,” he says “You play?”

“A little,” she answers, stirring the swizzle stick of a drink that she doesn't seem to have touched.

He hands her the cue. “C'mon, I'll rack them up.” She
hasn't told him her name yet. He's confident that she will. He leads her back to the pool table. He lets her break. She takes the stroke with confidence, and the balls scatter at the far end of the table with a hearty
crack
. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they play pool. This is a girl who knows what she wants. Fretwell is determined to learn exactly what that is.

“New in town?” he asks.

“Just passing through.”

She smiles at him and he runs his tongue across his teeth, checking for pizza debris, before smiling back. Then he sinks the seven ball, claiming solids, but intentionally misses the next shot to give her a fighting chance.

“Where ya from?”

“Doesn't matter as much as where I'm going,” she says playfully.

Fretwell willingly takes the bait. “And where might that be?”

She takes a shot and sinks the twelve ball. “Victory,” she answers.

“Nice,” he says with a grin. She misses her follow-up shot, and he puts her in her place by dropping three in a row. “Might have to work for it, though.”

Her long ponytail swishes past him as she slides by to take her next shot. It makes him shiver. She still hasn't told him her name. Maybe that doesn't matter.

“Anything in particular bring you to the Iron Monarch?”

“Business,” she says.

“What kind of business?”

She chalks her cue. “Your kind of business.”

He decides he doesn't have to know her name. He puts his cue on the rack. “Wanna get out of here?”

“Lead the way.”

He tries to reign in his enthusiasm. Must be cool about this. Must play into whatever image of him she has set in her
mind. Bad boy with bad intentions but a smooth way about him. Yeah. He can be that. “Car's out back,” he tells her, and she doesn't bat an eye, so he puts his arm around her and leads her out the back door, his mind already racing miles ahead.

Then just as the door swings shut behind them, everything changes so quickly his racing brain finds itself with neither road nor traction. Suddenly he's thrown back against the jagged brick wall of the alley with more force than a girl this size should be capable of. She has a gun pressed painfully into his neck now, just below his right ear, aimed upward. It's a small weapon, but when a pistol is aimed toward the center of your brain, size doesn't matter.

He doesn't dare move or resist. “Easy, there” is all he can offer up in the way of words. His mojo has abandoned him.

“Let's be clear about this,” she says, in a voice far colder than she had in the bar. “When I said business, that's exactly what I meant, so if you ever touch me again, I will shoot off each of your fingers one by one. Got it?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. He'd nod, but he's afraid the motion would push her trigger finger.

“Good. Now, as it happens, I've caught myself a nice little prize, and I was told that you have the best black-market connections.”

He breathes a sigh of relief, realizing that he might actually survive this encounter. “Yeah, the best connections,” he says a little too agreeable. “European, South American—even the Burmese Dah Zey.”

“Good to know,” she says. “As long as you have a clear line to the people who pay real money for one-of-a-kind goods, we'll have a very happy working relationship.” She backs off a little, but keeps the gun aimed at him in case he bolts, which he's not planning on. For one, if he tries to run, she'll probably shoot. And also because Morty Fretwell's greed has
begun to supplant his fear. What could she possible mean by “one-of-a-kind”?

He dares to ask the question, hoping it won't solicit a bullet to any part of his anatomy. “So . . . whatcha got?”

“Not what, but who,” she says with a grin that's a little bit scary.

He involuntarily begins to lick his lips. There are only a handful of people she could be talking about—a handful of kids whose parts would be worth a fortune. If she's not bluffing, this could be the payday of paydays.

“So who is it?”

“You'll find out soon enough. Set up a meeting between you, me, and your earless friend.”

This nervy thing has done her homework! “He's not earless,” Fretwell says. “He's still got one left.”

“Call him.”

Fretwell pulls out his phone but hesitates, calculating himself important enough in this equation to have a little bit of bargaining power now.

“I won't call him till you tell me who you got.”

She lets out a short exasperated huff. Then she says, “The clapper who didn't clap.”

And suddenly Fretwell's fingers can't dial fast enough.

It's a standard freight container. Eight feet wide, eight-and-a-half feet high, and forty feet deep. During the day it's a perpetual twilight inside, with pinpricks of light penetrating rust holes in the corners. It smells like sour milk with overtones of chemical waste. Lev thought there might be rats, but rats only frequent places where there's something to scavenge.
He's far too alive to be a morsel for the resident rodentia of the freight yard.

Lev's wrists are bound by sturdy cable ties to the far wall of the long container. Una had to buy hasps and attach them to the wall with epoxy because the wall had no inherent way to shackle him and make it look convincing. He had asked Una to give him a small cut with her pocketknife right at the base of his left thumb. Not deep enough to do any real damage, but enough to bloody up his wrist and the cable tie. He knows that small touches like that will lend authenticity and make their ruse seem real. They've also strategically placed various bits of junk they found in the freight yard around the container, to provide camouflage for Una's rifle, which is propped up in deep shadow against a rusted filing cabinet.

The hasps are a bit too low to make him look torturously bound when he's standing, but when he kneels, his hands are higher than his head in a position that looks painful, because it is. Little blond Jesus crucified in a big steel box. Letting his head fall completely slack completes the illusion.

“You look positively helpless,” Una said when she stood back to look at him, “but still a little clean, even with the blood on your wrist.”

So he squirmed and writhed, getting rust and grime all over his clothes, and kicked off a shoe to make it seem as if he'd lost it while struggling.

“I'll keep it up until I break a good sweat,” he told her, which was not hard to do considering that the container was oppressively hot.

Una went to meet their marks, and Lev was left alone with the stench and his thoughts.

That was over an hour ago.

He's been alone in here for way too long.

It's after dark now. The half-light spilling through the
rust holes has given way to darkness as thick as tar. He has a moment of panic when he imagines the impossible—that the two parts pirates have killed Una. He wouldn't put it past them. That would truly leave Lev imprisoned here with no means of escape. If that happened, then this container would be his tomb. That's when the rats would come.

But no. He can't let himself think that way. Una will be back. All will go according to plan.

Unless it doesn't.

He shakes his head in the dark, banishing his anxious thoughts. With his arms secured so uncomfortably, he knows time feels like it's dragging much more slowly than it actually is. He remembers another time he was bound like this, and for much longer. Nelson had held him and Miracolina captive in an isolated cabin. He was bound to a bed frame with cable ties similar to the ones on his wrists now, only that time it was for real. Nelson had played Russian roulette with them; five bullets in his clip were tranqs, and the sixth was deadly. No way of knowing when the killer bullet would come up. He didn't fire at Lev, though—he shot Miracolina each time Lev gave Nelson an answer he didn't like, and each time she was tranq'd into unconsciousness once more.

In the silence of the steel container, Lev's mind now takes him to alternate realities. What if Nelson had killed Miracolina? What would Lev have done then? Would he have had the wherewithal to escape, or would the burden of her death weigh so heavily upon him that it would have crippled him?

And where would Connor be now, if Lev never got free from Nelson? Dead or in prison, probably. Or in a harvest camp, waiting until one of the proposed laws passes that allows the unwinding of criminals.

But Miracolina survived and helped him get to the airplane graveyard. He rescued Connor from the Juvies
and
from Nelson.
He did good. He wishes he could tell Miracolina all the good he's done—but he has no idea where she is, or if she even escaped.

He still cares for Miracolina, and thinks about her often—but so much has transpired in the weeks since he last saw her, it feels like another lifetime. She had been a tithe, which means she might be unwound by now if she held to the ideals she had when they first met. Lev can only hope that his influence had eroded her dangerously self-sacrificing resolve, but there's no way to know. Maybe someday he will track her down and find out what happened to her, but personal curiosity is a luxury he can't afford right now. For the time being, Miracolina Roselli must remain on his list of “maybe somedays.”

He hears a bolt thrown, and the creaking of heavy hinges. The doors at the front of the container open just enough to admit a streak of pale moonlight, and three figures enter. Lev slumps, feigning unconsciousness. Through his closed eyes, he registers the glow of a flashlight against his face.

“That's not him, look at his hair!”

“Hair grows, you imbecile.”

He recognizes their voices right away: Fretwell, the lackluster one, and Hennessey, the one-eared ringleader with prep-school affectations. He was only in their company once, but those voices are burned into his auditory memory enough to make him fill with an angry chill. Lev opens his eyes, and lets his disgust and horror play out on his face, because it serves him to do so.

“I do believe this actually is Levi Calder,” says Hennessey, leaning in to examine him.

“It's Garrity!” Lev grunts.

“Call yourself whatever you want,” Hennessey says with an antagonistic grin, “but to the world, you'll always be Levi Calder, the tithe-turned-clapper.”

Lev spits in his face because he's close enough, and because it gives Lev great satisfaction to do so—and to his surprise, Una steps in and smashes Lev across the face with a brutal backhanded slap that nearly spins his head around.

“Show respect to your new owners,” Una says bitterly. He responds by spitting at her, too.

Una steps forward as if to hit him again, but Hennessey grabs her. “Enough,” he says. “Didn't anyone ever teach you not to damage the merchandise?”

Una backs off, setting down her flashlight on the rusty filing cabinet, painting the space in harsh oblique shadow. She looks away just enough to give Lev a wink that the two men can't see. Lev just scowls at her, because that's something they
can
see. The slap, Lev knows, was key to their illusion, even if it felt painfully real. He wonders if, on any level, Una took some satisfaction from it.