Authors: Mae McCall
20
“Where the fuck have you been?” he hissed at the same
moment that she said, “You’ve got some explaining to do.”
They stared at one another before Jackson spoke again. “Did
you get the file?”
In response, Cleo reached into her bag, withdrew the folder,
and tossed it on the floor. He leapt on it like a starving dog on a bone. “I
read it,” she said, carefully watching his expression transition from surprise,
to anger, to resignation.
“Yeah, I guess I should have known that you would,” he said.
“Listen, I’ll answer what questions I can, but you’ve got to understand that
there are things I can’t tell you. I appreciate you getting this—you have no
idea—but seriously, I cannot talk about certain stuff, and now, neither can
you. It’s too dangerous.”
She nodded once, took a deep breath, and started babbling
excitedly. “Oh, my God—were you really in the mob? Did you ever kill anybody?
Or do they say “ice”? Did you ever ice anybody? Have you ever wanted to ice me?
Are you still in the mob?”—he firmly placed his hand over her mouth to cut her
off.
“Did you even hear a word I just said?” he asked. With a
frustrated sigh, he guided her to the bed and pushed to make her sit down. Then
he straddled the wooden chair and told his story.
He had grown up in Chicago in a shitty apartment with alcoholic
foster parents. When he was sixteen, a man in a shiny black Lincoln had rolled
down the window and offered him twenty dollars to deliver a package to a man at
the butcher shop. Jackson did it without hesitation. The next day, the car was
idling at the curb in front of Jackson’s building when he got home from school.
The man wanted to know—had Jackson opened the package? No, sir. Had he been
tempted to open it? Nope. The man smiled and handed him another package, this
time with a hundred dollar bill and an address on a scrap of paper. It was the
beginning of a career, and being far more lucrative than high school, it soon
became Jackson’s number one priority.
Jackson moved up in the organization faster than most for
two reasons: 1. He followed instructions to the letter; and 2. He was incredibly
handsome, which intimidated men and made women defenseless. But his main
selling point was that he never, ever opened the deliveries. And he was truly
never tempted to. Until he met Carla.
Carla was the man’s daughter, his pride and joy. She was
rich and spoiled and very beautiful, and she had a way of making Jackson lose his power of speech whenever she was around. She flirted with all of her
father’s male employees, but it was Jackson that she met in secret.
He fell in love with her, and she began to tease him with
possibilities. What if we ran away? What if we lived on an island and drank margaritas
every day? What if we had enough money to get away from this life forever?
She planted the seeds, and cultivated them, until Jackson could imagine no other future but the one she described. The only problem was the
money. Jackson was paid well, but not well enough to maintain Carla’s lavish
lifestyle, and Carla insisted that her father would disown her if he knew that
she had run away with the help. So one day, Jackson did something that he had
never even thought about before: he opened the package.
The sparkle was so intense that it refracted off the
windshield. Jackson sat in the front seat of the car, the engine idling, and
stared at the diamonds until his eyes hurt. He reached for the key to turn off
the car, but then he heard Carla’s voice in his mind, whispering about what
could be, if they only had the money.
He called her from the car and gave instructions on where
she should meet him. She shouldn’t bring anything with her, not even clothing,
because it would only get in the way. Besides, it didn’t matter. He had enough
dollar signs in the box beside him to buy her a new outfit every day for the
next twenty years. He was laughing as he pulled into the diner’s parking lot,
where Carla had agreed to meet him. The laughter died a split second before the
bullet shattered the windshield. He barely caught a glimpse of two of his
coworkers standing beside a shiny black Lincoln before he stomped the gas pedal
and bounced over the curb and back onto the road. The rear windshield shattered
at the same moment he ran the red light.
From the few true friends that he had, Jackson learned that
he was, officially, toast. The man had found out from his client that the
package never arrived, and from Carla that it was Jackson who still had it. He
literally had nowhere to go, especially since he knew firsthand how thoroughly
the man’s network permeated the city of Chicago and beyond. It was his friend
Marco that gave him hope, when he related the story of a friend of a friend who
had found herself in similar circumstances and sought out the aid of a woman
named Adams to help her get away.
Desperate, Jackson tracked down the woman and begged for
assistance. At first, she told him no. She only dealt with female clients. But
seeing the way that she fluttered her eyelashes and angled her body toward him,
Jackson turned to his best skill: charm. He flirted his way to salvation that
night. Virginia Adams decided that she would help him after all.
Her particular service was to provide assistance to people
who were being hunted, for whatever reason. It was sort of an underground
version of the Witness Relocation Program, except that the client paid an
extravagant sum and essentially signed her life over to Virginia by living and
working at the Harper Valley School for Girls. It was a perfect cover. Who
would go looking for anyone at an elite all-girls boarding school on a mountain
in California? Most of the staff weren’t trained teachers; they just chose
whatever topic they had the most skill in, and winged the rest. Still, the
staff included a former NASA engineer, two foreign ambassadors, and several
former intelligence operatives (from various foreign governments, some of whom
were not on friendly terms with one another), along with the criminals, mob
wives, informants, and hookers.
To a person without hope, Virginia Adams provided a
beautiful opportunity: a life beyond the reaching arms of whomever was pursuing
you. Someone in this position would be willing to give up anything to find such
a place. And Ms. Adams made sure that they did give up everything.
Not only did they pay for her service (as she well knew that
all of them had squirreled away funds in foreign accounts), they essentially
entered indentured servitude the moment they crossed the threshold of the
school. They were expected to live at the school in the provided faculty
housing, and to teach or serve some other purpose (i.e. nurse, librarian, cook).
All of their needs would be provided for. They were never allowed to leave
campus. Anyone who tried to get away would be in violation of their contract,
and Ms. Adams had a zero-tolerance policy. When she interviewed and accepted
clients into her program, she also compiled a detailed file containing enough
information to either get them arrested, or get them killed, depending on what
phone call she made. Every adult at the school was a prisoner there. Including Jackson.
As the only male at the school, and one who had dropped out
of high school at the age of sixteen to join the mob, his teaching skills were
extremely limited. But Virginia hadn’t accepted him to the program for his
brain. Instead, Jackson became her escort, her bodyguard, a roaming informant
to report about the staff’s comings and goings, her driver, her errand boy, and
her lover. He was expected to charm information out of the women on campus. He
was also the only client who was allowed to leave campus, and he had more
freedom while on campus than anyone else (except perhaps Blue), although he was
kept on a tight leash. His suspicion was that Virginia was trying to figure out
a way to get him to tell her where he had hidden the diamonds. It was the only
piece of information that he had withheld from her when she accepted him into
her program three years ago. She was a cunning woman, and he had long known
that she had him followed whenever he did leave the school. He also knew that
if he tried to leave permanently, his former friends from Chicago would be on
his heels very soon afterward. This is why he needed his file. Without this
information, Virginia couldn’t turn him in. Jackson would be free, able to go
away and start a new life for himself.
Cleo had many questions, none of which he answered (except
to say that no, he had never killed anyone, which was disappointing to say the
least). Finally, they allowed a companionable silence to fall between them
while Cleo made a few notes in her black and white book. “Cleo, can I ask you
something?” said Jackson. “What’s with the notebooks?”
“It’s so I don’t forget the details,” she said, yawning
wide. She was reeling with the information overload, and exhaustion was
creeping down her spine like a serpent. “I’ll have some more questions for you
in the morning, okay?” Jackson nodded, but didn’t say anything else. At some
point, Cleo fell asleep.
***
When she awoke, there was only the faint hint of cologne and
peppermint in the air. Jackson was gone, and she knew it was for good.
Surprising herself, she hugged her knees to her chest and sobbed. He was her
only friend at the school. The ass.
Eventually, she rolled out of bed and went down the hall to
shower and brush her teeth. Being the only living soul on her floor meant no
waiting in the bathroom, but today, she just felt lonely. Later, as she was
getting dressed, she noticed a dark lump on one of the vacant beds. It was Jackson’s hat, and underneath it was a piece of paper rolled around something heavy.
C—
Thanks. Here’s a little something to remember me by.
J.
p.s. Don’t stab anyone who doesn’t deserve it.
p.p.s. If you do, don’t get caught.
p.p.p.s. Hide the hat until you go home. It might cause
trouble if anyone sees it.
She felt the weight of the
switchblade in her hand and traced the elegant
J
with the pad of her
thumb before depressing the silver button on the side. The sound of the blade
flipping open made her grin. With the hat tipped rakishly over one eye, she
played gangster with Waldorf all afternoon.
21
That evening, as she was eating
the last of Blue’s chips and swinging her feet off the side of her bed, Cleo
started to wonder about all that Jackson had told her. Had she really been
walking among hookers and thieves for the last year? If what he said was true
about those files, they held some pretty intense stories. It also offered some
explanation for the behavior of many of the teachers (not to mention Ms.
Shale’s weirdness), as well as the haunted expressions and miscellaneous scars.
Cleo was basically going to school in a prison camp.
The next morning, she examined
her teachers with a more critical eye. Was her Physics instructor the former
NASA engineer? Was her English teacher a prostitute? Her German teacher was
clearly a former spy, and Cleo would bet that she had killed a lot of people.
She just seemed like the type.
It wasn’t until Cleo showed up
for work that she remembered the semi-nude photos of Blue (but with hair!). She
put staples through her finger twice from the distraction of imagining what
life had been like for the Amazon with the doll’s voice. At one point, she
almost asked Blue why she had shaved her head, but thought better of it. Who
knew if Blue was an assassin? Now she was going to walk on eggshells around
everybody, because knowing how much she didn’t know was just too much.
She had to get back into the
basement. Her number one priority was now to read every file and examine every
single photograph. She just had to know.
The curiosity was too much to
suppress completely. Cleo couldn’t help but ask the Physics lady if she had
ever met Neil Armstrong, or the English instructor if she felt any spiritual
connection to Moll Flanders. She stopped making eye contact with the German
teacher.
But mostly, she lived in
anticipation of Friday afternoon, when she would once again penetrate the inner
fortress in search of deep, dark secrets. It didn’t occur to her until she was
leaving her English class that blessed afternoon that she was lacking a very
important tool: Jackson. How was she supposed to get in without distracting
everyone? She was in a foul mood by the time she got to Main Hall for her
shift.
As it turned out, everyone was stressed. Blue slapped a
stack of telephone directories down on Cleo’s desk and leaned forward, bracing
her arms on either side. “I need you to make a list,” she said. “I want numbers
and street addresses for every apartment building, hotel, motel, truck stop,
and brothel, and for anyone with the last name Temple.”
“Why?” asked Cleo, as innocently as she could. Inside, she
was cheering. Apparently, someone really wanted to locate Jackson.
Before Blue could respond, a harpy’s shriek pierced the air.
“BLUE! GET YOUR TATTOOED ASS IN HERE!” Cleo held her breath. Blue’s eye
twitched.
“Just get it done. Fast. Any more questions?” said Blue.
“What’s a brothel?” asked Cleo. Blue rolled her eyes and
went to find out what Virginia wanted. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll just have to
look it up on the Internet,” Cleo called after her.
The books held listings for all of the major cities in California—Sacramento, San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco included—and there was a
huge one for Chicago and the surrounding areas. Jackson could literally be
anywhere in the world by now, but Cleo knew for certain that he wasn’t in Chicago. So, she started with that one. Sure, give ‘em a list. Keep ‘em busy.
By the time Blue came to check on her, she had twenty-five
entries on her list. Clearly frustrated with the total lack of speed on Cleo’s
part, Blue snatched the paper out from under the tip of the pen and jammed it
into her pocket. Leaving momentarily, she was soon throwing a yellow
highlighter at Cleo’s head. “Just rip out the pages and highlight the entries,”
she snapped. “Faster.” And once again, Cleo was left alone.
The solitude was short-lived. First came the muffled sounds
of women arguing. Cleo couldn’t make out any specifics until, quite helpfully,
someone angrily yanked open the doors of Ms. Adams’ office, at which point she
was able to get sufficiently caught up on the conversation.
“…just because YOU told me nobody would ever find it, but
guess what—somebody FUCKING FOUND THE FUCKING FILE,” screamed Virginia,
gesturing so emphatically that her elegant updo practically disintegrated,
leaving thick, curly chunks of hair bouncing with every syllable.
“Just calm down,” said Blue. “I told you, the system is
basically foolproof, but it definitely works better if you DON’T GIVE SOMEBODY
A KEY and the freedom to prance around back here all the time!”
Ms. Adams’ voice was softer now. “Go get my car. You’re
driving me to the airport. And then you’re going to FIND HIM and call me,” she
said as she smoothed her dress and hair.
Blue stormed out, brushing against her hard enough to bounce
her back against the doorframe. Both women had murder in their eyes, and Cleo
said a silent prayer for Jackson. If he thought Chicago would be rough on him, just
wait until Virginia Adams tracked him down….
By the time she got back with the car, Cleo had a nice stack
of phone book pages for Blue, with the requested businesses highlighted in
yellow. She shuffled the papers and tapped the stack against the desk to align
the edges before putting a staple neatly in the upper left-hand corner. Blue
just grabbed it and walked out, leaving a very huffy Virginia Adams to roll her
own Louis Vuitton suitcase to the car.
Cleo had no idea where the nearest airport was, but if Virginia wanted to fly to Chicago, she would probably need a major airline. The school was
at least an hour from a decent-sized town, which meant that Blue would be gone
for over two hours at minimum. With a quick peek outside to make sure the car was
gone, Cleo darted back to her alcove, straightened up the desk, and popped the
lock to the hidden door, swinging by Blue’s office for snacks before heading
back down to the basement.
Someone had been here, and that someone had made a mess.
Drawers hung open everywhere, files were askew in their drawers or lying on the
floor. Virginia had been looking for Jackson’s file, and clearly had gotten
upset at not finding it. Stepping over the financial files, Cleo headed
straight for the blue cabinet with the first batch of employee information. It
was time to learn about her teachers.
***
Three hours later, as she was attempting to rub watermelon
lollipop spit off of the gym teacher’s file, Cleo mentally tallied what she had
discovered about the faculty so far: eight spies (Shale had
reasons
for
being paranoid), ten thieves (ranging from embezzling to armed robbery), five
mob wives or girlfriends, three informants (including Rjoriak, who had had a
sex change to add layers to his cover), and sixteen hookers, in addition to the
NASA engineer (it really was the Physics instructor) and the two foreign
ambassadors (who taught Geography and World History, respectively). And she
hadn’t even made it through all the cabinets yet. There were a few files with a
single red line drawn across the front. These were people that Cleo didn’t
recognize from the faded Polaroid head shot that was stapled to each set of
documents. They must not be at the school anymore, for one reason or another.
She managed another full cabinet before Blue came back,
heralded by the whirring of the elevator car. Cleo ran the full length of the
row and skidded behind a hand truck with a gray quilted moving blanket draped
over it (presumably Blue’s method of positioning file cabinets based on her
organizational paradigm), crouching low just as Blue stepped out of the
elevator. She heard the woman sigh deeply before starting the task of
straightening the basement. Papers were re-filed. Photographs were shuffled and
returned to their envelopes. Cabinets were re-locked. At one point, Blue
stiffened and sniffed the air before waving a file folder under her nose,
confused at the scent of watermelon wafting up from the pages. Cleo could have
sworn that Blue looked directly at her then, and she held her breath waiting
for the woman to call her out. Luckily, Blue just shrugged and continued the
cleanup. It. Took. For. Ever.
Cleo had dozed off with her forehead pressed against the
hand truck. Even with the quilt to cushion it, she had a rod-shaped dent in her
forehead when she finally heard the elevator come to life again. When she was
certain that she once again had the room to herself, Cleo resumed the
investigation. She basically camped out for most of the weekend, reading files,
napping on the sweatshirts, and bingeing on junk food. After every file had
been read, she started in on the photographs. By the time she was finished, she
had seen way too much of some of the school staff, literally. Especially the
former hookers. Those women knew no shame! (Cleo hadn’t realized that some of
those positions were even possible….)
She had barely taken notes during her last basement
escapade, but this time, she filled her notebook with shorthand. When she ran
out of pages, she took stacks of papers and photos up the staircase to Ms.
Adams’ office. The woman had left in such a rush, her computer was still on,
although it did require a password. Cleo slid open the center desk drawer, and
written in black ink on the bottom of the drawer was “Harper76”. In seven
seconds, she was logged in.
As tempting as it was to plunder Virginia’s hard drive, Cleo
had other business to attend to. She had taken a computer class the previous
semester, and already had an email account set up (although she had never
received a message from anyone other than her teacher’s introductory note), so
she methodically scanned each page and sent them to herself electronically. A
lot of the photos were repeats, thematically at least, so she only pulled out
the interesting ones. This cut a lot of time off of what would have been a
massive endeavor.
Unable to help herself, she did a quick search of the grade
spreadsheets, bumping her B in trigonometry up to an A- (modesty was one of her
best attributes), and doling out punishments to certain classmates in the form
of Cs and Ds. Before logging out, she cleared the browser history and made sure
everything looked normal. Then, it was back to the basement to return all of
the documents to the correct locations. Re-filing them all took longer than she
thought, and by the time she was finished, Cleo was fairly certain that it was
midmorning on Sunday. This meant either lying low in the basement until dark,
or risking a daytime exit from a building that was supposed to be locked on the
weekends.
Caution won. There were plenty of unexplored cabinets, and
if she got really bored, she could always whittle away the hours gluing items
to desks and shelves in the offices upstairs. She crept upstairs twice to check
the clock, and when it was after 8pm, decided it was safe enough to leave. But
not without a few more souvenirs from downstairs….
It was tricky—she hadn’t counted on the improvisational
dance instructor (a.k.a. Lisa the Lips, who had spent six years undercover with
a Colombian drug cartel feeding information to the DEA about their American
connections before having to go on the run) leading an impromptu session of Tai
Chi in the garden near the entrance of Main Hall. However, most students tended
to ignore Cleo anyway, so nobody seemed to notice her darting from bush to
tree, zigzagging her way back to the dorm in the twilight. Upstairs in her
room, she shoved a chair under the doorknob and upended her bag over the bed,
giggling as the stacks of hundred dollar bills bounced on the mattress, to the
tune of half a million dollars. She filed her notebook in the bookshelf with
the others, all organized chronologically, and pulled Jackson’s switchblade out
of one of her spare shoes to cut a hole in the mattress large enough to hold
five hundred thousand dollars.
As of Monday morning, Cleomella St. James was in a position
to own people. She hadn’t yet decided how to use the information, but she
thought of plenty of ways to have fun with it. Like whispering the word “metronome”
every time she was near the Statistics teacher (a former bookie who had once
rigged a race with a horse of that name, yielding catastrophic financial
results for a man with certain connections). Or submitting a short story assignment
to her English teacher titled
A One Eyed Man Named Falco
, in which the
title character lost his fortune after his hooker mistress (a high class lady,
of course) betrayed him to his rival, causing poor Falco to lose his shit,
figuratively speaking, and aggressively try to kill her on three separate
occasions. (Cleo had never seen Mrs. Ashbury look so pale, but the story did
rate an A.)
***
At work that afternoon, Blue said, “Where did you go on
Friday?”
Startled, Cleo looked up from her stack of phone books. “To
my room. Why?”
“Because I never said you could leave,” snapped Blue. “I
need this list, and I expected you to still be here when I got back.”
Cleo pouted, just a little. “But, Ms. Blue, you left. And
you didn’t tell me to stay until you got back. And I was here by myself,
unsupervised, alone. So, I thought you wanted me to leave.” She hung her head
and sniffed.
“Whatever,” muttered the tattooed lady. “Just finish.”
Cleo finished the Chicago list, which Blue immediately took
so that she could call Ms. Adams and relay the rest of the addresses. From the
snippets of conversation that drifted to the alcove, Cleo understood that Ms.
Adams was, so far, unlucky in her search for Jackson. Good. She deserved it.