Zoey said, “No, I actually own this business, much to my surprise. I’m Zoey, this is Will. He works for me.”
“What? Where are the police?”
Zoey said, “Ah. You’re new in town, aren’t you?”
Dexter answered for her. “Shae moved here in the spring.” He turned to Shae and said, “Ain’t no laws in Tabula Rasa.”
Zoey said, “I’m new myself, I got here less than a year ago. This actually isn’t even technically a city. And the laws do exist, whatever is illegal in the United States or the state of Utah is also illegal where we’re standing. But it turns out laws only mean something if there are flesh-and-blood people around to punish the bad guys. Most of the police here stopped showing up to work a long time ago, so security pretty much falls to whoever owns the property and, like I said, I’m told I own this place. Mr. Tilley here apparently knew that, so, here we are.”
Will went to the wet bar and poured himself a scotch.
Without looking up from his glass, he said to Tilley, “You seem to know who Zoey is; do you know who I am?”
“I know enough. You’re one of her people.”
“One of her people? Open your eyes. Zoey is twenty-three and is wearing a cat shirt and a necklace with a pendant that says MY EYES ARE UP THERE. You don’t wonder how she ended up in charge of an organization that owns buildings like this and has ‘people’ like me?”
“I don’t think I give a shit.”
“You should,” said Will, in his eerily friendly voice. “You see, before Zoey came along, this, and many other establishments, were owned by a man named Arthur Livingston. He helped build this city. This was all a bunch of dusty construction sites just twenty years ago. A whole lot of people tried very hard to stop him at every step of the way. None succeeded. Arthur passed away last year, unfortunately, leaving his fortune and businesses to his daughter, Zoey, who prior to that had been living in a trailer park in Colorado and working as a barista. Some parties who had previously known better than to cross Arthur wrongly decided that his passing was the time to strike. They have since found out otherwise. Do you understand?”
“You people say ‘business,’ when you mean organized crime.”
Zoey said, “It honestly isn’t that organized.”
A swarm of camera drones buzzed outside the hole in the glass behind them. Surely tens of millions were watching by now, waiting to see if this situation would explode. Hoping it would.
Will sipped his drink and seemed unimpressed. Zoey didn’t know if he was annoyed that the bottles were too watered down, or that they weren’t watered down enough.
“Do you mind if we sit?”
Dexter shot a glance outside. “We’re not staying here.”
“We’re not?”
“You think I’m an idiot? My general intelligence is in the ninety-eighth percentile. Look it up. You have a sniper on the fourth floor across the street, behind the fish. Room 412. Chinese-looking dude. Do you not see my people out there, on the street? Do you not hear them? They tracked him all the way up to his perch, reported back to me every step, listening to every word he whispered in your ear. So we’re moving to another room, away from that opening, away from your sniper, away from those cameras.”
Tilley picked up a backpack that looked like it’d never seen a day in the wilderness. If his lethal brain scrambler existed, it was presumably in there, though it looked to Zoey like it was bulging at the seams with clothes, like the kid had packed everything he owned.
“You’re coming with me,” he said to Zoey. To Will, “You’re going to turn your ass around and take the long, sad climb down that ladder. This is between me and her.”
Will said, “You don’t want that. You’re not negotiating with her, you’re negotiating with me. She doesn’t even know what she has to negotiate with.”
“Stop with all that. I know all about this bit, the negotiation, you saying you’re going to do all the talking. I’ve seen the streams, I know what you’re trying to do. And if you say one more word in that direction I will punch your balls into space.”
Will stared down Tilley and in a horribly casual voice asked, “Wu? You have the shot?”
Dexter’s eyes went wide. He snatched Zoey by her shirt and yanked her over to him, his arm around her neck, using her as a human shield. Shae screamed. Zoey didn’t, but did think she was going to piss herself.
Will, calm as wind chimes, said, “Wu, if you hit Zoey two inches below her rib cage and one inch to the right of her spinal column, you’ll punch a hole through her abdomen that she’ll likely survive. Set the round to detonate about six inches later, inside Mr. Tilley’s torso. It will blow him in half, implants or not.”
Zoey said, “We’re not doing that! Wu, do not shoot through me! Don’t shoot at all! I’ll go with him. Will, stay here, that’s an order.”
Dexter Tilley apparently didn’t have too much faith in Zoey’s unquestioned authority over her organization, as he kept her in the human shield position and quickly dragged her backward toward the door leading out of the room. He picked up the backpack and called for Shae to follow.
Zoey thought this would have been a perfect time for the hostage to hurl herself out of the window, jump down to the food truck, and sprint off into the crowd, leaving the problem to Zoey. Instead, Shae climbed to her feet and voluntarily followed them into the hall. Zoey couldn’t blame her. When push comes to shove, almost everyone complies.
3
Tilley slammed the door behind Shae. Will did not follow them through. Zoey knew he wouldn’t.
Tilley asked Shae, “Where are the showers?”
“W-what?”
“The employee showers. In the lounge, you mentioned it before.”
“Th-thirteenth floor. It doesn’t show on the elevator but I can make it stop there with an eye scan.”
“Let’s go.”
Zoey spent the elevator ride up filling her mind with wild guesses about what this guy wanted to do in a group shower setting. She nervously fidgeted with her necklace. They arrived to find the employee lounge was locked behind a sturdy door that wouldn’t even open for Shae—probably some automated lockdown system—but Dexter calmly tore the door off its hinges and tossed it aside. Inside was a break room with a few sofas and vending machines and a huge framed list of staff reminders on one wall. (“If a hand goes under your clothing, GENTLY resist and remind the guest of Rule #4. BE NICE.”)
A couple who appeared to have been hiding out in the room recoiled at the sight of them. The guy was in a white suit with a white cowboy hat perched above unkempt eyebrows, the girl was a stunning Filipino woman half his age.
The woman, whom Tilley apparently did not recognize as Zoey’s associate Echo Ling, screamed, “Oh, my god, don’t kill us!”
Zoey thought it was … fairly convincing. The guy in the hat, Budd Billingsley, acted like a man who was frantically trying to size up the situation while remaining cool, which probably wasn’t a performance.
Dexter nodded toward the door and said, “Out.”
Zoey was hoping he’d demand they stay, as Budd and Echo both had way more experience with this kind of thing than she did. Apparently Tilley thought that’d be too many hostages to control. The couple hurried out of the room and Echo, in her “panic,” left her purse behind. That purse, Zoey was sure, contained some kind of weapon or gadget she could use to disable Dexter in an emergency. Right as they reached the door, Dexter said, “Hey, you forgot your purse.”