Page 11

11

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Nemo

“Jesus Christ, Midas, I know it’s Los Angeles, and it’s hot, but could you turn the temperature to above freezing in here?” TB groused. “It’s so cold in here my balls have pulled up into my body and popped out as nipples.”

“Pull up your big-girl thong and layer, asshole,” Midas retorted, not even looking up from his computer monitor. “If you’d wear a shirt that was your size and not a shmedium, it wouldn’t be stretched so tight you can see through it. And if those are your balls, I feel bad for Flame. I might need to stop by and see if she has any unfulfilled needs.”

“Fuckwitch,” TB grunted.

Nemo was sitting cross-legged on the end of Midas’ desk, feeding his face with NikNaks and watching the show. He’d originally come into his brother’s new office under the lure of the contraband shipment of snacks they were both addicted to, but then he stayed to watch Haskell on the monitor since Waters banned him from going into the conference room. Every so often, he threw a chip to Scheherazade on the floor beneath him.

“I’m not sure what’s worse,” TB grumbled. “The temperature in here, the lack of windows, or the fact that I feel like I’m living in Orwell’s 1984 with all these telescreens.”

Midas pulled up from his keyboard. “Look, my girls run twenty-four seven, and the space heats up to equator temperature. Windows allow the sunlight in, which adds to the heat factor. They’ll PMS and blow up the building if I don’t keep the room cold. So either put on a jacket, go buy a snuggie, or take it like a man.”

He started to go back to typing, then pulled back, pointing around the room as he ranted. “And as far as the screens go, we’ve got a lot of shit to keep track of on-site alone. I’ve got one screen of thumbnails per twenty security cameras inside this ten-floor heaven we call home. Do you have any clue how many cameras that is? Two hundred and fucking eighty-seven! I’ve got an additional screen that has all the outside cameras except for the roof. That fucker has its own screen with four different views of the helipad.

“You guys want intel? That means I need to know what’s going on all over this big blue marble, so I’ve got six different screens attuned to twenty-four-hour news channels. Do you know how annoying that is? It never stops! All the rest, with the exception of the beauty behind Nemo, are responsible for keeping tabs on whatever shit you all need me to monitor while you’re off playing Doom reality-style.”

“Last, but so not least, is my baby, Nova, on the last screen. She runs this harem when I can’t. She watches over all your sorry asses without any thanks from you ungrateful bastards. She runs everything, from your smart watches, your navigation systems, your computer systems, and even your personal security systems in your apartments. Thanks to the glorious creation the world calls AI, but I call heaven, she’s not just a watchdog spy cam program anymore like Cyclopes was. So get off my frickin’ ass about the temperature in here, or I’ll turn her off and see how well you all function without her.”

TB squinted at Midas. “Do I need to bring you some ice cream? Cuz, I gotta say, you’re acting like Flame used to when it was that time?—”

“Don’t fucking say it!” Midas roared.

TB held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. He looked at Nemo.

Nemo shrugged. “I don’t think he’s eaten yet today. Better order in.” He popped another chip in his mouth.

“You mean one of these eight bajillion monitors can’t do it for him?”

A projectile hit TB in the side of the head—one of the mini rubber cats Midas collected and used as stress balls. TB happened to catch it by default with a grunt. Its body was a stack of pancakes, complete with butter and syrup, and then the head, feet, and tail of a cat. “Kubrick gave you this one.”

“Yes, she did, so give it back, you pathetic shitfucker.”

With a snort, TB tossed the cat back to Midas, who set it back on his shelf behind his desk, making sure it was perfectly aligned with all the others.

TB looked to Nemo for help against his brother. Reaching into the chip bag, extracting a chip, and bringing it up to his mouth, Nemo reminded him, “Normally, it’s me ambushing you.”

“Yeah… speaking of which, neither Flame nor I are cleaning up the confetti in the garage at her house, so you’d better get over there and get sweeping.”

“Sorry. Don’t know how to use a broom,” Nemo lied .

“Why don’t you ever ambush your brother?”

Midas let out a frustrated grunt. “Because you stomp around, yell, and get pissy. He knows that if he did that to me, I’d just fucking strangle him with computer cables. Something I should have done with the umbilical cord as soon as we were out of the womb!” Midas looked over at Nemo, calmly continuing to eat his chips. “And you! Stop eating my chips, you genetic mutant. Order your own!”

“Why?” Nemo asked with his mouth full. “You order enough for both of us.”

A rubber cat designed like an ice cream cone hit Nemo square in the forehead and bounced down into the near-empty bag of chips. “There’s no eating in my office! All the crumbs get in the hardware.”

Nemo shrugged and showed the toy to TB. “From Flame?”

TB nodded.

Nemo tossed the toy over his shoulder to Midas, then continued to eat while he turned his attention back to Haskell on the monitor.

Waters sauntered into the office and snatched a chip out of Nemo’s bag. “Thanks.” He turned to Midas. “Any luck?”

Midas grumbled, “Not since the last time you asked me ten minutes ago. ”

Waters raised his eyebrows at Midas.

Midas sighed. “I’ve found plenty on our little cat burglar. As far as her heists? Since she’s never been caught, the information is either news articles about what she stole, police reports on how she was able to break in and take what she stole, or sensationalist pieces with some of the craziest theories about her identity that I’ve ever seen. That Saturn Diamond job was a piece of artwork, let me tell you.

“As for the never-ending search on this Salieri shit we’ve been on for months? A big fat void, other than what we already knew, that is.”

“Looks to me like we’d get better intelligence on all of that through Nemo. I mean, Sawyer,” Waters quipped, snatching the entire bag of chips out of Nemo’s hands.

Nemo slapped his hand. “Get your own.”

Waters smirked. “Yours are here, though.”

“You mean mine,” Midas grouched.

“Right. Yours,” Waters corrected.

Nemo leaned back on the desk to reach into the shipping container for a new bag, which he promptly opened.

Midas let loose an exhaled nonverbal sound of frustration and went back to banging on the keyboard.

Waters looked back at Nemo. “Kitty cat, right? Isn’t that what you called her?”

Nemo’s eyes never left the monitor. He continued the pattern of reaching into the bag, pulling out a chip, and putting it in his mouth, crunching away. Easiest way to avoid having to answer his team leader.

“Whose kitty?” Steel asked, popping his head into the room around the doorjamb, snatching the bag of NikNaks out of Waters’ hands, taking a handful, and then passing the bag to TB.

“Nemo’s, I think,” Waters answered. “He’s riveted.”

“Fuck off,” Nemo warned around a mouthful of chips. His attention never wavered from Haskell.

Demon was the next to slide into the room. Seeing the bag of chips, he scowled. “Those things are shit for you.” The war within him lasted all of two seconds before he snatched the bag from TB and started eating out of it.

All six of the team were gathered around the main telescreen. They formed a half circle—TB, Waters, Demon, Steel, and finally Nemo, still seated on the desk, Midas behind it, watching Haskell sit in the interrogation room. The only sounds were typing and crunching.

Tired of leaning across people, Waters reached over Midas’ desk, grabbed another bag, opened it, and Midas roared in frustration this time. “Keep out of my chips!”

Steel rolled his eyes. “Dude, we know you have at least five more shipping containers stashed somewhere. You can spare two bags.”

“If it were only two bags, yes, but you all sniff them out and then keep eating them. I’m running out of places to hide things.”

“Finding shit is kind of what we do, Midas,” Demon reminded him.

“Don’t you have a handler to go and handle?” Midas jabbed in return.

Demon glared at him, then reached and got his own bag of chips in retaliation.

When Waters’ bag was finally empty, he shook all the crumbs into a corner, then dumped the remainder into his mouth before crumpling up the bag and throwing it in the trash.

TB watched in astonishment. “Jesus Christ. You and Kubrick really are melding into the same person.”

“Jealous bastard,” Waters teased.

Demon snorted. “Jealous of what? Your gut is going to rot now that Kubrick has tempted you into eating all of that shit she puts in her system. No wonder you’re in the gym for two hours every morning. You need to burn off all the feckin’ calories.”

“That’s not why I’m in the gym,” Waters teased. “Gotta keep up my energy for after work.”

The medic shook his head in disgust, murmuring something about still needing eye bleach .

“Be glad you weren’t Midas,” Waters murmured with a grin.

“Yeah, I needed more than eye bleach. I also needed ear bleach,” Midas complained.

Discarding his half-eaten NikNaks, Nemo pulled a piece of bubble gum from his pocket and began to unwrap it, keeping his eyes on Haskell on the screen. The room was silent. He could feel everyone’s eyes on him, but he ignored them. He vigorously chewed his gum, trying hard as hell not to moan at the sugary taste exploding in his mouth. If the team knew that his bubble gum addiction was because of her sweet taste, they would never let it go. He blew a bubble, popped it by exhaling excessive air into it, then sucked it all back into his mouth only to make it crack as he chewed it back into a blob suitable for blowing another bubble. It wouldn’t be long before the sugary mess lost its flavor, but he had more in his pocket. Lots more. Some days, it was the only thing that helped him keep focused.

All her fault.

It was another solid ten minutes of bubble blowing, chip crunching, keys clacking, and stoic silence from the four standing men. Finally, Waters turned a full one hundred eighty degrees, arms crossed over his chest, and frowned at Midas. “So, nothing at all on the Salieri?”

Completely focused on his screen, Midas replied, “Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Zero. It’s like Gendry, that lying sack of shark chum, made it up. They do not exist.”

TB added to the conversation. “And yet, according to Loki, Gilgamesh, and Medusa, they confirm the Salieri do exist.”

A snort came from Steel, the furthest left in the line. “If you call pregnant pauses and shared glances confirmation.”

“Well, what would you call that?” TB snapped back. “Sometimes it’s what people don’t say that’s most telling. Sometimes, it’s what they physically do that gives everything legitimacy or illegitimacy.”

“So sayeth the interrogator,” Demon mumbled from his spot between Steel and Waters.

Waters broke up the impending argument. “Well, since the triad goes all see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil when we try to ask them about the Salieri, we need to go to our next option. I doubt Nemo’s little cat burglar has as much compulsion to hold her tongue as they do. If she works with them, she might have information she could give us, so we need to start pressing.”

The guys had been so busy talking amongst themselves that they’d been temporarily distracted from the monitor. Nemo had been listening, but his attention had never diverted from the pissed-off pixie on the screen in front of him. He’d been watching her assess the room, looking for exit options. Apparently, she’d found one.

Waters had turned his attention back to the screen by now. “What the fuck?” The man’s voice was soft but nonplussed.

Inside, Nemo was howling with laughter. Typical kitty cat. Go high. If her head fit through a space, she’d try to wiggle through it, too. She had dragged a chair over to a far wall, and she was now standing precariously on her tiptoes on the headrest of a wheeled chair, some sort of mini-tool in her hands, unscrewing the grate of an air vent in a room that was allegedly inescapable.

He leaned forward, hands braced on the desk’s edge. The grate was hanging by the down, left screw only. Her cute little ass was just wiggling through the air vent on the supposedly impossible-to-remove grate.

It was possibly the hottest thing he’d ever seen.

When her feet slid out of sight, he rolled off the desk and made his way to the whiteboard. On it, he wrote “THIRTY DAYS,” underlined it, and then listed each of his teammates’ names underneath.

TB frowned. “What the fuck?”

“She’s mine. In my bed, permanent. No one else.” Nemo stood at the board, arms crossed over his chest, jaw set stubbornly, daring them to challenge him.

The silence in the room had nothing on the proverbial pin drop. Each man in the room was stunned. It was like someone had shot them with an old-style villain’s freeze ray.

The most comical of them all was TB. If a person’s eyeballs could have exploded out of their head, his would have done it. “Repeat that, please.” Once he found his ability to speak.

“Thirty days. She’s it. Her, or no one else, ever again.”

Steel looked at Nemo, his cold snake eyes assessing the youngest member of the team. “Bet is valid under one condition. It also means no other women, dude. You’re cockblocked until she agrees to be yours, even if she never agrees to it.”

Nemo confirmed with a nod. “Don’t want anyone else.”

Demon barked out a single laugh, rounded Midas’ desk, and placed his own bet on the line. “SIX YEARS. And I’m being optimistic,” he added as he threw the marker back into the whiteboard tray. “Feck, it’s payday. First time you set foot outside of the building, you won’t last six minutes before you’re up some girl’s skirt.”

“Nemo,” Midas cautioned, “this is a bit extreme. You can’t back out once we’ve bet on it.”

“Oh, I’m taking this bet.” TB grabbed the marker and scrawled his prediction on the board. “WHEN HELL FREEZES OVER.”

“Not backing out,” Nemo said firmly.

Waters considered Nemo long and hard before he took his turn at the board. “SIXTY DAYS.” He looked at Nemo with a shrug. “I’ve got your back, but I think it’s going to be harder than you expect. I’m actually more concerned about you staying faithful. It’s not really in your makeup.”

Everyone turned their eyes to Steel. The most stoic member of the group was staring at the empty room on the monitor. Then he swept his eyes to Nemo. His expression was blank, but Nemo could tell when the man was thinking long and hard. If anyone would get this bet right, it would be him.

At long last, Steel crossed to the board and wrote down his bet, “NINETEEN DAYS.” After throwing the marker in the tray, he clapped Nemo on the shoulder. “You should have more faith in yourself, amigo .” Then he went back to where he had been originally standing.

Midas looked to Waters. “God going to want in on this?”

“Who the fuck knows,” Waters replied. “I don’t even know where the man is, let alone when he’s going to check in next.”

“Maybe Cherry does,” Demon suggested.

Nemo’s brother changed the subject. “Umm, bro, you better get on with locating your girl. She picks the wrong turn at a junction—she could end up in the furnace.”

Do we even have a furnace? This is Los Angeles.

“Nemo, your?—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it. Midas? Gonna need your golden fingers and Tribe’s blueprints.”

“On it.”

Nemo looked at Scheherazade and made the signal for “stay.” She whimpered but put her head down on the floor and closed her eyes.

After quickly snapping a picture of the board, he put it in a group chat so that no one could change their bet, then dug a plastic case out of his cargo pants. After opening up the case, he pulled his earbuds out and slid one in his ear, pushing it down so it would lodge comfortably in place. Not even diving into a raging ocean swell would cause it to become dislodged now.