Warning: Cliffhanger.
NOTE: Due to the complexity of the plot and number of original characters, it is suggested that you read Femme Fatale first. Nevertheless...
Recap: In the events of Femme Fatale Aiden tried to dismantle the Chicago South Club by forcing its de-facto leader, Heather Quinn, to turn crown witness. However, Heather manipulated Aiden into killing her husband and thus allowing her to fully take over the Club. She tried to recruit Aiden and when it didn't work, abducted and tortured him. Aiden was rescued by Jordi and his protégé, Mia Perez.
Other Recurring/Notable Characters:
Kenneth Quinn: Heather's husband and Lucky's second son
Carl Herrick: former spec ops agent, running the muscle for the Club
Iain Darcy: Heather's secretary and lover
[summary: chicago's underworld is a non-perfect information game]
[takes place in march 2019]
_Perfect Play – Part 1
Heather was the motionless heart of the hurricane while security cleared the terrace of the Merlaut. The fire-alarm howled behind her, loud and biting, tinnitus right inside her head. From the distance, she heard the sirens from the cops and the firefighters, but for the moment, the terrace became deserted, preternaturally quiet despite the racket just out of reach.
"Mrs Quinn?" someone asked, voice she recognised, one of the Club enforcers she'd ordered to bolster security for the duration of the clean energy conference held in her hotel. They weren't supposed to be up here, they were detailed to keep an eye on the garage and basement storage rooms, away from the guests and the press.
She held out a hand at the enforcer without looking at him. He had enough sense not to question her, he hesitated but then drew back. She even caught his questioning look at the man sitting calmly in an alcove by the balustrade.
As the enforcer lingered by the door, watching over Heather as she walked across the empty terrace, using the moment it took to reach him to assemble the pieces.
It had been over a year since EADA Ramsey had set out on his witch-hunt for her, egged on by Aiden Pearce himself. Ramsey had arrested her, had put her on trial and tried to get her behind bars with everything he'd discovered — or made to discover — but while the trial had been a mess, the evidence hadn't been enough to convict and she'd walked, as she'd always known she would. The damage to her organisation and her public image was much harder to repair.
Ramsey and Pearce had punched holes in every branch of her business, girls, drugs, art, whatever she was dealing in, it had all been dragged into the open. The gangs were fighting each other harder than ever, while also trying to nibble away at her territory. At least they weren't organised in the way they had been under the joint rule of Lucky Quinn and Iraq, giving her enough room to manoeuvre and secure her borders.
For the legal businesses, associating with her had been poison, but one carefully orchestrated step at a time, the trial and the dirty laundry it had aired dropped away into the past. She still had money and reach, and gradually, she'd taken back control of her own brand.
She'd had to lobby long and hard until she'd got a prestigious clean energy conference into one of her hotels. Clean energy was the latest trend, pushed for by Blume and backed by city officials who much preferred Chicago making headlines about its technological advancement over its crime statistics. The latest push was to replace combustion engine cars with electric ones all across the city, something Blume was only too happy about, considering that in their mind, electric and cars self-driving on their software was almost the same thing.
It was the perfect opportunity to attach her name to positive developments, hosting world-renowned scientists and their projects for a Utopia.
Only now, it turned out it had fallen through under a bomb threat on the evening of its opening gala. Fixing this would take even more than it already had, money being the least of her problems. But it could wait, it was too early to decide on a strategy, before she even new the first details of what had happened.
She stopped for a moment, eyes narrowed, then sat down in a chair uninvited.
"What do you think I should say?" she asked. "You aren't on the guest list? Or perhaps I should compliment you, you clean up nicely, Mr. Pearce."
"I'm not here for you," Pearce said. His phone rested on his knee, display brightly lit, making it hard for her not to steal a look at it, but he'd notice and she wasn't going to give him anything, not even her curiosity. There was a small flash of relief running through her at his words, unreliable as the reassurance might turn out to be. It dropped the immediate concern down a few points on her internal list of priorities, gave her a little space in which to judge him. Threatening to fire-bomb hundreds of mostly innocent people wasn't his style, but she wouldn't put the threat of it past him, just to puncture her recovering reputation.
He looked relaxed, though, casually leaned back in the plush of the armchair. He did clean up nicely, making him barely recognisable to human observers, the only system he had to trick the old-fashioned way. With a shave and a hair-cut, a well-tailored suit would make anyone look decent, but his tall, densely-muscled body cut an especially handsome figure. If he didn't blend into the crowd, looking like this, it wasn't because people recognised him as the thug he was. She'd seen a similar effect on some of the Club enforcers, though to be fair, Pearce seemed much less uncomfortable in the getup than them.
He should still have been recognised, making it likely he hadn't been around long enough to give people a chance to take a longer look at him.
"Is this your game?" she asked.
He looked at her intensely, silently, weighing her. She didn't like his silence and there was no reason for her to let him have it his way. He only thought he held all the cards.
"It's going to make a good headline," she said. "A better one than the old 'Heather Quinn the head of the Chicago South Club?' that's going around. 'The Vigilante shows his true colours'."
Like a paper-cut, a small smile crossed his face, never touching his eyes. He still waited, but she knew he was going to answer in his own time.
Eventually, quietly, he said, "This isn't my setup."
"It doesn't have to be," she pointed out. "It'll be enough if people think it was."
He tilted his head at her, watching her in an ongoing revaluation of her worth or threat value or whatever it was he saw in her.
Several security people appeared by the door and Heather spotted the uniforms right behind them. She considered for a moment. Pearce wouldn't have come without some kind of exit strategy, but whatever it was, it would be a fragile construction, he had deliberately exposed and cornered himself. He was certain she wouldn't take the shot.
"We should talk somewhere more private," she said. "Without a bomb squad breathing down our necks, don't you think?"
She looked up, motioned her security people to stand down, gave the firefighter urging her to fucking leave! a bright smile as she walked past him. Pearce strode after her, jaded rich party guest unconcerned by the bombs. She noticed the ripple go through her people as they recognised who he was, the confusion of whether they were required to interfere, but they held back, reading her body language well enough.
With the hotel itself off limits, Heather took Pearce to her yacht moored at the Merlaut's pier. Someone had finally switched the fire alarm off and the wooden panelling in the luxury yacht dimmed the outside sounds. For the first moment inside, when the door fell closed behind Pearce, it was almost suffocating, but Heather refused to let it show.
Without pausing, she strode to the bar.
"Can I get you a drink?" she asked, picked a bottle of cognac and glasses. She sensed Pearce step in too close behind her, he slipped his hand down her bare back, barely a touch, just enough pressure to make her feel it.
"I'll handle the drinks," he said in a quiet rasp.
Inwardly amused, she conceded the point and stepped aside, withdrew to the massive desk and leaned against it, crossed her arms over her chest and watched his back.
He didn't really believe she'd drug him again, it had been just a point for him to make. He didn't even reach for another bottle, briefly glancing over the label, actually recognising it or at least pretending to. He filled two glasses, turned around stepped over to her, half an inch inside her personal space, giving her the choice between enduring it or overreacting.
She took the glass, smiling just slightly.
"You called it, you know," he said.
When she said nothing, he slightly tipped his glass against her's before he drank, edged away from her again and said, "You said the Russians would move in if you're weak."
He took a breath that sounded almost like a sigh. "Well, here they are."
"This doesn't look like their style," she pointed out.
"Their man in New York, Grigori Bragin, called 'Grisha' is known for the big gestures. It's given him a bit of a reputation back in the motherland so he got transferred here. I guess they've figured it wouldn't be that big of a deal in Chicago."
"I've never had trouble with Bratva before," she said, but refrained from pointing out how well her business went with them, or the nature of the merchandise Bratva helped move. It seemed a sore point for him.
"Well, you've never been weak before."
She took her gaze away from him, dragged it around the room while she was thinking it through. She knew the Club dealt with Grisha regularly, but he didn't ring any immediate bells, neither positively nor negatively. The Club dealt with all sorts of people and their organisations, it was nothing special in and of itself.
"So the bomb threat was a warning?" she asked. "Throwing their weight around?"
Shrugging, Pearce nodded, the corners of his mouth tensed in disdain. Transferring the glass into his other hand, he pulled his phone from his pocket, slipped his thumb across the screen a few times, then held it out to her.
Hesitating for a second, she took it. The picture it displayed made her blood run cold for a heartbeat. Explosive affixed expertly to a pillar in the basement. She swiped and saw another explosive on another pillar. Three, four, seven, as the pictures progressed with each shift of her thumb. She was no expert, it looked professional enough, but whether it could've actually brought down the building was hard to judge.
"We did a sweep yesterday," she said, looking up from the phone. "This shouldn't be possible."
"Perhaps you're trusting the wrong people," he said and held out his hand for the phone.
A curt knock on the door interrupted her thoughts and she turned her head to watch Iain storm into the room, visibly agitated, but he stalled suddenly when he recognised Pearce.
"What the hell?" he demanded, looking from Heather to Pearce and back. "What… he…?"
Heather was in no mood to indulge his confusion. She stood up from the desk and walked over, held the phone in his face and said, "How did this happen?"
Still confused, Iain took the phone from her hand, swiped through the pictures with visibly growing horror.
Heather left him to it and turned back to Pearce. He'd dropped his hand and stood relaxed with the brandy in his hand, waiting for them with unconcealed disinterest.
"So Bratva and Grisha attempt to kill me, destroy my business and my reputation."
"No, you're right," he said. "It's a warning. The remote detonator code wasn't set. The charges couldn't explode."
"How do you know?"
Pearce shook his head. "How I know?" he asked back as if it was a stupid question.
"I got the bomb maker locked up. I can deliver her to the cops and they'll handle this by the book, or you can have her."
Someone with the skill and backup to pull off a stunt like this, Heather could make good use of them. Someone who almost certainly had an inside track to Grisha and his plans, who could clue her into whatever else he might be planning to disrupt her organisation. Someone one like that would be invaluable. Perhaps she could even turn her, make her work for the Club instead.
"What's your price this time?"
Pearce said nothing for a moment, then a slight smile curled his lips before it vanished again. He said, "My phone back."
Looking caught, Iain looked up and frowned, still visibly trying to make sense of the situation, looking for a script to follow. He shifted forward uncertainly, held out the phone towards Pearce as if he preferred not to get too close to him. "Uh, sure."
Pearce pocketed the phone and turned his attention back to Heather.
"Bratva is bad news for everyone," he said. "The cops can't handle it alone."
Something in his serious tone tipped her off, for a moment she considered withholding the punch, but then said, "And neither can you. Am I right? You've come here looking for an alliance."
He pretended to be amused.
"You'll get your money's worth," he said, humour like parchment. "I'll let you know where you can pick up your package."
He emptied the glass and put it away, then strode past her and Iain, who tensed in an attempt to not flinch away. Pearce stepped through the door and let it fall closed behind him so quietly it left the vacuum of a thunderclap.
"I could put a tail on him," Iain said.
"No," Heather waved him off irritably. "There'll be plenty of time for that."
The stifling quietness was beginning to rub her nerves raw, it was cutting her off from where she needed to be.
"I want to talk to with whoever's in charge out there," she said. "I want to know if these charges are actually there at all."
It turned out, they were. Though unlike in Pearce's photos, the charges were covered up to prevent anyone from seeing them.
"The thing is," the head of the bomb disposal unit told Heather a little later. "It looks like sloppy work, but… the explosives themselves are high-end, someone knew what they were doing, but… well, you see, you need to get the explosives into the walls and pillars if you want to bring the building down."
Heather considered him for a moment, "It's a terror attack," she said. "It's doing it's job just fine like this. Doesn't need to bring the building down."
It was important to get fixed in people's heads very quickly. Terror attack. She didn't want even one respectable news source to even so much think aloud the idea this could be the opening salvo in a gangster war.
The man nodded thoughtfully, looking past at his men. "Strange times we're living in," he remarked.
Heather spared him a warm smile that failed to reach her eyes, already with thoughts elsewhere. She left the men to work in peace and returned to the yacht which served as temporary headquarter. She was reluctant to relocate somewhere else, she wanted to keep the Merlaut in her sight, even though she knew she probably didn't have much useful to contribute.
Iain got up from her chair when she walked in and she took it.
"I think I need to have a chat with King," she said.
The King, as Jacob King pompously called himself, had taken over from Carl Herrick as the business' security manager. She guessed the scenario was that some of these explosives had already been in place when they'd swept the hotel the day before, there were simply too many to bring them in in just one night, even if they were never meant to explode. For both, bringing the bombs in before and after the sweep, some of King's men must have been in on it. Perhaps without his knowledge, but Heather doubted that, especially if he was already in hiding. He must have known something was going on.
Iain frowned at her and said, "I can't reach him, I already tried."
He paused for a moment, clearly assembling the pieces in his own head before he said, "Do you think he's got anything to do with it? And the little rat's beaten it out of here?"
"Hm," she made, thinking for a long minute, bringing things into a semblance of order.
She took a breath. "It's going to be a long night," she said, though Iain was smart enough to not need the introduction. Without giving him any other warning, she rattled off what she needed him to do. Find a new location for the conference, keep the cops from prying too deeply into her affairs, fix her public image via an interview on TV and social media. She needed to work with few people on this, make sure she could trust them first, because if Bratva had already blown her organisation as wide open as it appeared, she would soon be jumping at shadows. It bothered her, but she could do this almost on auto-pilot. She could quantify these risks, even if she didn't know the details yet.
Pearce was the unknown, even if she had been correct in her assumption and he did need allies. He was good at holding grudges and she doubted he'd forgotten or forgiven their last meeting. Still, he'd put himself on her side in this instance, the trick was to know the moment — when it came — and he was her enemy again. Ironically, this still made Pearce more trustworthy than almost anyone in her organisation. Whatever else he was, he wasn't Bratva.
Aiden Pearce stood on the sidewalk across the street from the police line, lost in crowd of people craning their necks and taking pictures. No one was paying him any attention.
The cops had funnelled the Merlaut's guests into a separate area, but avoiding it had been so easy he could have done it in his sleep, leaving him too much time to be aware of the Merlaut's familiar, glittering shape above. A dark feeling was lingering in his throat, sneaking up on him when he didn't make sure to squash it fast enough.
When he'd seen the unset detonator code on the charges, something had unwound in his mind, like poison. It'd be easy to set that code. He could've waited until the Merlaut was evacuated, before the bomb squad moved in. He could have blown these charges, burned the Merlaut to the ground and all the bad memories with it.
Even now, when it was already too late, he somehow still had to fight against the urge to do it.
With a growl lodged in his throat, he turned his back on the Merlaut, though he felt it looming behind him, stalking him as he walked away. Shrugging the feeling off, he pulled his phone out and a new surge of anger wiped away the throbbing regret.
Seven missed calls, all from the fixer he'd hired to watch over the captured bomb maker. He plugged his earpiece in and dialled him, but didn't waste time and already called on the tracker he'd left on the bomb maker.
"Shit, Pearce I'm sorry," the fixer said when he answered. He sounded breathless. "She fucking got away, but I'm still on her."
"Are you running?"
"Shit yes, bitch is fast, too."
Pearce crossed the street to where a Boxberg was parked.
"Keep the pressure on," Pearce told him. "Don't let her make contact with Bratva."
"Doing my fucking best!"
"Don't kill her," Pearce added in case the fixer forgot about that detail in the heat of it.
"Fuck!"
Pearce hoped that was an affirmative, but decided to let it go. The fixer sounded like he didn't have breath to spare for a prolonged conversation. He got in the car and threw his custom HUD against the windshield. It fed him live information about his surrounding, about ctOS access points he'd unlocked and could use, nearby police presence and a dozen other things he'd customised his system to filter for.
For now, all he was interested in was the location of the bomb maker. The fixer was right, she was moving fast and Pearce was quite a bit out from where he'd had her locked up. Good thing the Boxberg would get him there in no time. He put the traffic lights hack on continuous when he swerved out into the street, pushing the speed limit and other regulations, but not at breakneck speed. The situation didn't warrant it, besides the more time he gave the traffic lights to change, the less disruptive the hack would be and the less attention he was likely to attract. Blume was monitoring these malfunctions and he didn't have time to handle them right now.
He watched the moving tracker on the map, the area wasn't densely populated with little pedestrian traffic, giving the bomb maker few options to just snatch up someone's phone as she went. If he got closer, he could knock out cell coverage for a time, cutting her off, but he was still a few minutes away from that.
The fixer called.
"Where you're at?"
For a moment, there was just panting, then, "I… lost… fuck… fast fucking… bitch."
Despite the situation, Pearce smiled briefly to himself. He said, "Well, she was an olympic athlete."
"… like twenty years ago?"
"Then how's she outrunning you?"
The fixer didn't answer, still trying to catch his breath. After another moment while his panting gradually faded, he said, "Shit… what now?"
Pearce watched the still moving dot of the tracker on his map. He pushed the gas down a little more and the Boxberg slid roughly across the asphalt as Pearce took it to the right lane and overtook a stalling line heading to a crossroads.
"I'll call you," Pearce said noncommittally before he hung up. He could try directing the fixer to the woman's location but by the looks of it, the man wasn't going to keep up either way. Pearce had vetted him primarily for how trustworthy he was, less for his stamina, though perhaps that had been shortsighted.
His phone let him know he was within range of the radio cell and Pearce didn't hesitate to punch in the command to disrupt it. Blume was becoming wise to this particular trick, the cell towers now had redundant systems running which they booted into when something interrupted them. Half the time, these systems ran on the same backdoors the original did, meaning Pearce could easily just knock it out again, but it was an ongoing problem. Eventually, he'd be forced out of the system and would have to rely on hi-jacking the signal and cancelling it on the device end of things. For the moment, however, he had a few more minutes to catch up to the woman when she didn't have the chance to call for help.
Pearce took the Boxberg past a rundown row of houses and into the inappropriate quaintly named Little Village. The bomb maker had veered away from the main streets and into the trash-littered, debris-strewn back alleys of the neighbourhood. The Boxberg was too large and unwieldy to follow, so Pearce took it around a bent, sped up again past where he'd be level with her current position, overtaking her before he stopped the car by the side of the road.
The L rumbled along above him as he got out, phone briefly up in front of him to orient himself and surmise the woman's direction.
Having lost her pursuer, she'd slowed down a little, but was still going fairly fast.
Pearce locked the Boxberg, though the group of 'bangers nearby had already noticed him and the car. He'd be surprised if it was still there by the time he got back, he'd need to acquire another car for the ride back. Someone shouted an obscenity after him, but no one bothered to harass him, the car was more interesting.
He strode along leisurely, slowly circling in towards where the woman was still moving, keeping houses and abandoned dumpsters between them. He came across a homeless camp, huddled together against L-track pillars with the track above offering at least some shelter from the weather.
The woman slowed down more, then stopped completely and frowning, Pearce finally looked up from his phone to navigate the area on his own.
He broke into a run when the tracker revealed the bomb maker had abruptly changed direction. He was still too far away, so she couldn't have spotted him, but something else had attracted her attention and he had a feeling he wouldn't like it.
Finally close enough, he dropped his phone into his pocket, took a quick sprint that allowed him to jump onto two cars, piled on each other. The rusted vehicles swayed a little under his weight but held steady.
In front of him, a shoddy parking lot spread out all the way to nondescript warehouses and a closed and shuttered up Quinkie's. The woman was heading for the latter and Pearce spotted what she must have seen: An old pay-phone, leaning askew by the roadside next to the Quinkie's.
Wasting no time, Pearce jumped from the cars and started running. He hadn't taken a gun into the Merlaut, he hadn't wanted to unnecessarily provoke the Club members while he needed their complacency.
The woman had reached the pay-phone, picked up the receiver, using the moment to look around, spotting Pearce. He was close enough to see her hesitate, caught in indecision between staying and taking him on or running away and hoping she'd lose him like she had the fixer.
The moment of hesitation lost her her advantage. He wasn't sure if he could outrun her, certainly not with these shoes, but the time it took her to reach a decision, drop the phone and turn away wasn't enough to let her reach any speed. Just past the phone, he launched himself at her and tore her down with his full weight.
With his grip on her, he made sure she crashed face first into the ground, she struggled, dazed for no more than a second, then made a swift shift to the side, trying to dislodge him. He caught one of her wrists, pulled her arm out of the way and snapped his elbow into her face. Groaning, her resistance faltered for just long enough he rolled her around, wrists held in one hand, knee laid across her thighs. He slapped a pair of flexicuffs on her wrists.
She shouted at him in French and Russian, though he didn't understand the specifics, he had a pretty good idea of what she was calling him. But it was all she was going to do for the moment so he simply got up and took a step away from her, in case she tried kicking at him.
Realising he was out of reach, she dropped her head back down to the asphalt in resignation.
Pearce wandered back to the pay-phone and picked up the receiver. Surprisingly, it was giving a free-line signal. He hung it up, then turned back to keep the woman in sight while he called the fixer.
"Steve," he said. "I need a pickup."
"On my way," the fixer said. "Uh, I want you to know that this could've been avoided if you'd knee-capped her like I said."
Pearce rolled his eyes a little. "She's useless if she bleeds out."
"Like the Club's not going to hang her upside down…"
"'course they are, but that's their mess. Don't make me wait."
"No, never."
Hanging up, Pearce returned to the woman, pulled her to her feet roughly and dragged her to the shuttered up Quinkie's where he pushed her into a soiled bench. She snarled at him again.
Pearce regarded her for a long minute, staring down at her seated form.
"It's probably a good thing I have no idea what you're saying."
She glared and said, "I'm willing to repeat it."
"Only if you want me to deal with it."
He stepped aside and sat down on the bench, stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles, in every appearance of relaxation, waiting for her to break the silence.
She lasted somewhat longer than he had expected, but eventually she shifted in her seat and said, "You don't want to mess with this."
"Why?"
"Because you have no idea what you're getting into."
He arched a brow, giving her a short glance.
"People keep saying that to me like they think it's gonna stop me."
She chortled a laugh. "We heard all about you," she said. "Trust me, you don't want to get between us and the Club. I don't even understand why you care. Why not let us wipe them out for you?"
"Is that your argument?" he asked, feigning surprise.
"Why do you think it's a bad one?"
He shook his head. "I'm tired of people like you," he said. "You got in my way, that's all."
She frowned at the side of his face, but without looking back at her, he couldn't be sure of her expression. He doubted she'd try to run away again. A few years older than him, she was built like a whippet, no wonder the fixer hadn't been able to keep up, but she wasn't strong enough to mount a descent defence against him.
"What now?" she asked. "You're handing me over to the Club, what for? You think they can actually make me talk?"
He tilted his head and gave her a sidelong glance. "Think of it as helping your boss."
"Are you stupid?"
"Chicago isn't New York. The rules are different here."
"Oh yeah, because there's no ctOS in New York. I hate to break it to you, but Blume's been branching out into every other city and Chicago isn't special anymore. We've got our deals with them. It's not perfect, but we're good with Blume."
"Yeah that's the thing," he leaned back, let his gaze wander across the open, derelict space in front of them. "It's not Blume you've got to worry about."
"What, you?" she laughed and it sounded genuine. Pearce gave her a slow grin, then let it fade as he looked away from her again.
"I'm going to help you," she said with affected kindness. "You don't understand what you're getting into. We have an army. It doesn't matter how many you kill or ruin or… whatever scheme you've hatched. There'll just be more. Bratva didn't want Chicago, we had a good relationship with the Club, but they're too weak now, they're useless to us. If your lackey can't do the job, what do you do? You do it yourself. Heather Quinn will understand it, perhaps there's even some job for her."
She paused for a moment, tittered another mocking laugh. "But you're not going to be there to see it."
"Is this the part where I get scared? You'll have to tell me, because I ain't feeling it."
"What I said is true, so you're either lying to yourself or you're just stupid."
She shifted, pulled at the flexicuffs for a moment, then gave up and settled into silence.
She was in no position to make any threats he'd need to take seriously, he'd already dug through the muddied waters of her past. Lucille Roche had been working with and for Grisha for many years. Pearce hadn't been quite able to figure out their connection, because while most of the information was there, he couldn't read it and translation programmes didn't always provide a coherent result, especially from Russian. How and where she'd been recruited by Bratva was a mystery to him, but he wasn't even sure it was information he'd need. She cropped up in police reports now and then, first in Marseille, then in New York, clearly going where-ever Grisha was running the show for Bratva.
When Steve finally arrived, Pearce slipped to his feet, turned and looked down at the woman.
"How about we forget about this?" she asked lightly, clearly joking. "No bad feelings, eh? I heard you're not a fan of the Merlaut exactly."
He looked at her sharply, a reflex he hadn't been able to check before it gave him away and the smug expression on her face told him she'd been angling for exactly that reaction. No one alive knew about the Merlaut, not enough to put the pieces together. The Club had tried, Heather could probably make an educated guess about what had led him to go after Lucky all these years ago, but the details should've been lost a long time ago.
Lucille said nothing more in self-satisfied silence and before Pearce had time to question her further, Steve climbed out of the car and walked over.
"Oh god Pearce! Let me just say again how sorry I am," he said. A bump was clearly visible on the side of his head and his skin had an unhealthy tone. Pearce looked him over silently.
Pearce dragged the woman to her feet and marched her towards the car, though she dug her heels in the moment she realised he was heading for the trunk.
"Come on, don't," she grumbled. "Don't make me."
"For your good conduct?" Pearce asked. "You're lucky I don't break your ankles."
"Pearce, I'm sorry," Steve said again, standing a little away from them and watched as Pearce opened the trunk.
The woman growled a little, but climbed in without more resistance, but she was beginning to mumble foreign swear words again, glaring at Pearce before she sighed and let her head drop.
"Are we…?" Steve began when Pearce closed the trunk and strode around the car to the driver's side door.
"I'm handling it," Pearce said. "Get your head checked."
On reflex, Steve lifted his hand to his head and felt along the bump carefully, pulling a face. "But… I hate to be that guy, but… are you paying me for this?"
Pearce stared at him, waited for a moment. Of course he was going to pay him, it served no one to be petty about it and Lucille had already punished him for his fuck-up, but Pearce wasn't feeling generous about.
"You need to do what I tell you," Pearce said. "And then I'll think about it."
Momentarily lost in thought, Heather watched the city outside the mirrored and bulletproof window of her Magnate change from the glitter of the Loop to the bare-boned charm of Brandon Docks.
By her side, Iain was speaking on the phone, checking with their hackers if the place had been scouted and was clear. Not that she expected any traps from Pearce, but the bombs in the Merlaut had her worried about more such tripwires being thrown in her path.
"I'm surprised he agreed," Iain said and Heather let an irritated look pass over him.
Pearce had proposed to make the exchange in a far more public place, at the Riverwalk downtown, or at the Botanical Gardens in Parker Square. She'd had Iain refuse both locations and Pearce had acquiesced almost immediately.
"He doesn't care," she said.
"But… public places are a lot easier to control for him, his ctOS access is… well, whatever it is. He's only got himself to worry about, so…"
"He doesn't care," she repeated and gave Iain a longer look until he got the point and fell silent. Iain was right, a public place gave Pearce a few advantages over the Club, but he didn't need to push for it too hard. He could be reasonably sure Heather wasn't going to attack him this early on, not when he was voluntarily parting with valuable information and support.
Heather listened to Iain make another call, then said, "Why can't we find King?"
Iain took a disgruntled breath before he answered, "I'm guessing he switched sides."
"Of course," she agreed. "But why can't we find him?"
"D'Souza said he checked the ctOS logs and King hasn't shown up anywhere. He's lying low, I bet. But I also bet he's still in Chicago."
Heather took her gaze away from him, looked outside the window thoughtfully.
"King's the key," she said. "He's the connection between Grisha and us and everything Bratva has planned, not to mentioned that he knows the names of everyone who's turned on us. If we can't find him, I'll have to ask Pearce."
"Why do you even trust him?"
"I don't," Heather said.
"We shouldn't be doing this," he said. "He'll just screw us over."
She glanced at him again and smiled a little.
"He'll try, but not right now. I'll gladly sit back and watch him screw over Bratva first."
"Unless he's working for them and this is just a ruse," Iain muttered, though more to himself so she left him his musings uncontradicted.
They slowed down, someone lifted the construction fence aside to let them onto the site. Heather's car and the two others drove through and her man pushed the fence closed again. It wasn't the most secure site, but unlike Pearce, Heather didn't have much of a taste for an audience, especially when she wasn't sure if things would go her way.
Her driver drove through the open gate into the empty warehouse, then stopped the car. Her two escorts stopped in a small half circle around them and her bodyguards got out. The cameras here weren't networked to ctOS, only to Taurus, the private security company she owned. If Pearce had access to these feeds, at least they were all on a level playing field.
"No one here who shouldn't be," Iain announced after he'd checked through the feeds. "Pearce isn't here either."
"Fashionable late," she corrected, chuckled a little at Iain's annoyed look and opened the door. She got out and walked a few steps away from the car, taking stock of her surrounding through the thin protection of her sunglasses.
The warehouse was completely empty, old railway tracks cutting it in half, their gates rusted open on all ends. Some trash and other industrial debris had accumulated here and there, dry grass cracking open the old concrete floor. Looking up, several of the windows on the roof and along the wall were broken, letting in streaks of sunlight and an almost uncomfortably cool draft gliding down her neck and back.
Iain had got out and walked around the car, leaning with his back against it as he alternated between looking around and down at his phone.
"It's all clear," her bodyguard said as he returned from the quick round he and his colleagues had done of the warehouse. Iain nodded in agreement and Heather said, "Good, keep your nerves, we're not looking for a fight."
A tiny tightening in the bodyguard's facial expression betrayed his misgiving, but he nodded grimly. Almost everyone in the Club had had some bad experience with Pearce, sometimes not personally, but everyone knew someone who had. Someone's deal falling through, someone's life being lost, someone being crippled for life. Pearce wasn't everywhere, but he was doing a good enough impression to make everyone wary and not a little itchy to take the shot when it presented itself. Not these men, though, Heather wouldn't have brought them if she didn't trust them to follow her orders.
"Here goes," Iain said sardonically and pushed away from the car to step in behind her shoulder.
Pearce drove in over one of the train-track entrances, swept his banged-up old Vespid in a circle and stopped a respectful distance away. He got out of the car, casually dressed in jeans and T-shirt in the unusually warm spring. A baseball cap dropped a shadow over his face and his gaze was completely hidden by black sunglasses, reflecting the light. He was armed, shoulder holster and a smaller one holding the baton on his belt, he'd stuck his phone into the back-pocket of his jeans.
Behind Heather's shoulder, Iain snorted and muttered, "We could kill him. He's not wearing any body armour."
"That's because we're not killing him," Heather said, growing impatient with having to repeat it. At least the others had accepted her decision that Pearce was off-limits for now, but Iain seemed to think he had to keep pushing, as if he thought he needed to protect her from some terrible mistake she was making. He wasn't normally so dense to her reasoning, making it especially irritating that he didn't seem to be picking on this one. Killing Pearce was just one way of getting rid of him, after all.
The Vespid's trunk was tiny and Heather spared a moment of pity for the woman Pearce pulled out of it, hoping she hadn't been in there for too long.
Heather strode forward, Iain behind him and stopped halfway between her people and Pearce. He shoved the woman forward, her hands were bound behind her back and she looked hot and sweat-slicked from her trip in the trunk. She was also not a little incensed, glaring at Pearce before she turned her attention to Heather.
"Lucille Roche," Pearce introduced her. "Born in Nice, France, Olympic athlete, but she got retroactively disqualified for doping. Joined the French army, spent ten years clearing minefields in the Middle East. Dishonourable discharge, worked for Bratva in Europe for a few years, came to New York with Grisha."
"You don't understand the first thing about this, branleur," Lucille sneered.
"Mouthy," Pearce added. "I suggest you hamstring her, she's fast."
Heather made a sharp gesture with her hand. "Pack her up."
One of her men stepped forward, gripped Lucille by the upper arm after Pearce had given her a shove away from him.
Lucille grumbled a curse, but Heather paid her no attention, keeping it fixed on Pearce.
"Thank you," she said, studying Pearce's face, considering how far she could trust him. Showing too much weakness wasn't in her nature and she'd made him fall for it once before, she doubted he'd let it happen again.
"I need your help in another matter," she said. "We've…"
A shot bit through the tranquil air, somewhere behind her. Instinctively, Heather dropped into a crouch and glanced over her shoulder, just in time to see a second shot drive through Lucille's chest after the first one had punctured her shoulder. Lucille was ripped out of the grip of the man who held her, thrown to the ground. A third shot felled the bodyguard.
The shots fell like hail, ripping into the concrete and her bodyguards in that first moment, before they could even react. Iain gripped her shoulder and half dragged her back to the car. He yelped when a shot grazed his arm and his grip of her slipped away.
Cursing, Heather twisted her own arm and pulled him down, dragged him the last inch behind the bulk of the car, where two of her bodyguards were also in cover. Lucille and the dead bodyguard still lay there, but the first shots had hit true and they were both already dead.
"What the fuck's going on?" Heather yelled, not even sure who she was asking. Iain looked as confused as she was, holding on to his bleeding arm.
"Mrs. Quinn!" a bodyguard yelled. "Get in the car! We'll hold them off!"
She had time for a quick glance around, but there were only her people, clinging to the cover of their cars, their guns out but looking for targets. The shots were coming from above, from the roof, through the open or broken windows there.
She had to push the dead bodyguard aside to open the door, scrambled inside with Iain right behind her. Feeling a little better inside the car, Heather lifted her head and got a better look around, froze at what she saw past the driver's tense shoulder.
"Shit," she murmured, not sure if where the breath in her lungs had gone to.
Where Pearce had stood only a moment before was now a large puddle of blood and a thick trail of it leading back to his car. He'd pressed his back against it and he'd had time to draw his gun, though it lay discarded by his side as he clutched at a bleeding wound at the side of his neck.
Heather settled a guiding hand on the driver's shoulder and leaned forward between the front seats.
"Drive between the attackers and Pearce," she said. He nodded, hit the gas and drove the heavy car the short distance, hit the brakes sharply and made the tail swing out a little, successfully covering Pearce from most angles.
"Mrs. Quinn…?" the driver asked, opened his door to over a little additional cover.
"Stay," Heather told him as she pulled back, made eye contact with Iain, his face was grim, clearly in pain from his own injury, but he nodded. She kicked her door open and dropped out. Several shots impacted the car close to her head, and her heart jumped in her throat as she dropped to her knees by Pearce said.
His sunglasses had slipped down the length of his nose, blood smearing along the ashen skin of his face, green eyes far too bright. She had no time to try to read his expression, but he focussed on her, gaze digging too hard into her's.
"Heather!" Iain shouted. "We have to got out of here!"
Heather snapped her head around, fixed on Iain and said, "Help me get him inside."
Pearce had enough presence of mind to help, but he'd lost a lot of blood in an incredibly short amount of time, whatever strength of coordination he would otherwise have, had long since been lost, leaving Heather and Iain to heave him into the back of the car. Pearce's hands slipped away from the open wound on his neck, going limp even as Heather climbed in the car behind him and pulled the door closed.
"Drive!" she commanded and the driver hit the gas again, taking them away from the shootout while the bullets were still pattering against the car, denting the reinforced material alarmingly.
End of _Perfect Play - Part 1
Reference:
branleur (French) = wanker
Author's Note: Nope, couldn't leave it yet.
