Geek Mafia: Mile Zero by Rick Dakan (reading tree txt) 📖

THEY’D been at it an hour when the phone rang. They had no way of knowing if Winston was just making all these people up or if they were actually real Crews out there in the wide world, but he’d gone through about half of his list already, and Chloe’s head was beginning to swim with the possibilities. It would be hard to choose just three. It might prove actually harder to choose three that weren’t really traps.

The truth was, this whole exercise was a stalling tactic to allow her some more time to decide what exactly she wanted to do about Winston. Turning him over to Isaiah along with the killer went against her every instinct. Well, every instinct except her desire for revenge, which loomed large in her brain, like a storm cloud ready to burst at any moment. She wanted to believe that Winston’s info would actually be useful in some way - useful enough to justify letting him and his friend go.

It was Bee calling on the phone from upstairs. Chloe answered her cell and heard Bee say, “Eddie’s outside. And he’s got his friends with him. And they’ve got guns.”

Chloe’s heart jumped into her throat. “Ok, lock the place down.”

“Cops or no cops?” Bee asked.

“No cops!” Chloe said, her voice too loud. Paul and Winston both looked at her in surprise. “And call Sandee.” She clipped the phone back onto her pants and put the wireless earpiece on so she could remain in contact with Bee.

“What’s going on?” Paul asked. He’d taken over note-taking duties after fifteen minutes of Chloe’s painfully slow stenography. “What cops?”

“Eddie’s back,” she said. “Bee says he’s got guns.”

“Fuck,” said Paul, standing up and stuffing the notes he’d taken into his back pocket.

“They’re coming to the door,” Bee said in her ear. “Three of them that I can see.”

“They’re at the door,” Chloe reported as she stepped to the front door and threw the deadbolt.

“Can we get out the back?” Winston asked.

“Bee? Back?” Chloe asked.

“I don’t know. The camera back there’s on the fritz…”

“Did you disable our rear cameras?” Chloe asked Winston.

“I suppose I did,” he admitted.

“Well then, no telling how many guns are back there.” Someone pounded on the door, Eddie no doubt. “Who is it?” she asked in a singsong voice.

“It’s Edd-ieeeee!” he shouted back in a matching tone.

“We’re not decent,” Chloe said, motioning for Paul and Winston to head upstairs. Paul grabbed Winston by the arm and dragged him toward the stairs. “Can you come back later?”

“We don’t have to come in,” Eddie shouted. “Just send the guy who murdered Raquel out, and we’ll take off and let you and your trannie friend be indecent together.”

Chloe whispered to Bee, “Where are they? What’s up with Sandee?”

“They’re all by the front door,” Bee said. “Sandee’s locked up tight in the shed, and they don’t seem to have thought about looking in there.”

“Not yet anyway,” whispered Chloe. “Tell Sandee to stay put; we’ll come to him.”

To Eddie she shouted, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re babbling about, but would you please just get the fuck lost!”

Eddie resumed pounding, but the reinforced door shrugged off his blows with ease. “No I will not! We saw you with him! Now either give him to us or we’ll tell Isaiah.”

“Yeah, you go run to daddy and tell him all about it,” Chloe shouted back as she retreated to the kitchen to lock that door as well. She took a peek out the back window through the porch but didn’t see anyone, which didn’t come close to meaning that there wasn’t anyone out there.

“Let us the fuck in!” she heard Eddie shout from the front. No way the neighbors were not going to notice that. She hoped they didn’t call the cops. As a matter of fact, she should probably be proactive and stop them from doing just that.

“Bee,” she said, “Shut down everything. Lock her up and say goodnight.”

“Really?” Bee asked. “What if we need to call…?”

“There’s no one to call. We’re all here.”

“Ok,” Bee said. “Here goes.”

“I’m coming upstairs,” Chloe said, and she ran back into the front room. As she did, she heard the motors of the automated storm shutters kicking into action. Tough aluminum screens descended from rollers above every window, a common enough safety feature in the hurricane prone keys. Outside the front door she heard Eddie or one of his friends express surprise with a muffled “What the fuck?”

She ran up the stairs as the house around her turned dark. Eddie and company could probably tear off the shutters if they had something to pry them out of their tracks, but it’s not the kind of thing that would go unnoticed, and it would take a lot of time. She was betting they would continue to concentrate on the front door. She wanted to ask Bee for an update but she knew that wasn’t possible. There wasn’t a phone within five blocks of them that worked now unless someone had a satellite phone.

Bee had gotten her hooks right into Verizon’s switching box for the neighborhood and installed a kill switch for just these kinds of occasions. It was controlled by a wireless receiver that Bee could activate with a call from anywhere. More importantly, Bee had similar kill switches in three of the local cell phone towers that provided coverage for this part of the island. No one was going to be talking to anyone for the next hour at least - probably more depending on how long it took the phone techs to figure out what was wrong.

The door to Bee’s room was open, and Paul was standing there, waiting for her. She rushed in, and he slammed it behind her and started throwing deadbolts. Chloe looked at the wall of screens and saw that Bee had them all showing different views from around the house. She saw the interiors of every room from multiple angles along with three different views of the front of the house, two of the side and two of the interior of the shed. Eddie, Marco and the big guy Quentin were all on the front porch, huddled together and trying to decide what to do.

“I thought you said they had guns,” Chloe said.

“They do,” Bee insisted. “Tucked into the back of Eddie’s pants. And the fat one has one too.” She clicked at her screens, and one of them showed a piece of video from a few minutes earlier. It was Eddie getting out of a car that was parked across the street and tucking a pistol into his shorts.

“Ok, I believe you.”

“If you give me a phone, I can call for help,” Winston said.

“No phones,” Chloe said.

“I know you don’t trust me, but…”

“She means no phones work,” said Paul. “We shut down all the phones in the neighborhood.”

“Why?” asked Winston.

“So no one can call the cops and so no one can call for reinforcements,” Chloe snapped. She was looking at the screens. Sandee and the killer were in the shed. Sandee had a shovel in his hand, ready to take the head off of anyone who came through the front door. On the porch, the boys were still debating tactics.

“Which means you can’t call for reinforcements either,” Winston pointed out.

“We don’t have any reinforcements. And right now we outnumber them.”

“Assuming there aren’t more out back,” Winston said.

“And whose fault is it that we don’t know that?” she snapped.

“My people would be able to take care of…”

“Enough!” shouted Paul. “We’re on our own. Let’s formulate a plan.”

“Maybe they’ll go away,” Bee suggested. On the screen they continued to huddle. It looked like Eddie and Marco were arguing. The fat guy stayed out of it.

“If they do come through the door, they’re in for a nasty surprise or two,” Paul said. “I say we let them break themselves on the defenses and sweep up whatever remains.”

“I hate just sitting here like that,” Chloe said. “But I don’t see any other option.”

She watched the screens as the argument on the porch came to some sort of conclusion. Marco tried to use his cell phone but failed to get a signal. He threw the phone at Eddie, who was yelling at him and then stormed down the steps and back toward the car. Eddie flipped him off and then motioned for the big guy to bust down the door. As Chloe watched, Eddie drew the gun from behind him and held it barrel down as the big man slammed his whole body into the door.

Even from their position upstairs and at the back of the house, they felt and heard the building shake from the blow. The guy was sumo big and sumo strong. He slammed again. Chloe knew the deadbolts would hold, but she was worried about the door’s frame, which was no doubt already splintering under the onslaught. She turned to Bee and asked, “Is everything ready?”

“All charged up,” Bee replied, her eyes glued to the screen, her mouse cursor hovering over a button on the screen marked “LIVINGROOM DOOR 1E.”

“This ought to be good,” said Paul.

“He’s pretty big,” Chloe pointed out. “He might be able to take it.”

“No way,” Paul insisted. “He’d have to be an elephant.”

“We’ll see,” she replied with a smile.

About a minute later they did see. The door frame burst on the eighth blow and showered splinters as it gave way and the door came off its hinges. One more kick sent the door crashing back into the room, right on top of the metal plate hidden under the doormat.

“Oh shit,” said Bee. “They’re going to walk right over it.” She moved her cursor off the activate icon on her screen and over to another button marked “LIVINGROOM WALL 2A”

Chloe watched on the screen as Eddie followed the big guy into the room, both of them clambering over the door, which covered an electrical plate that would’ve sent a charge arcing through their bodies strong enough to knock them both unconscious. No one had ever considered the possibility that a broken-down door would cover the defense mechanism. Shit. Now all their furniture was about to be ruined, which totally sucked. She liked that couch.

Eddie was shouting something, waving his gun around like an idiot. It was a revolver, maybe a .38, if she had to guess. Didn’t seem like the kind of