Work Order

A burnt-out merc has to hunt down and capture his best friend before he bombs a nefarious nanotech company.

Work Order is a 77,000-word tech-noir thriller. A tech-noir thriller fuses elements of science fiction and noir detective fiction.

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Chapter 1: The Guys at Uboa

The job was simple until Finelli shot the fat man.

“Everyone is somewhere somewhen,” I said.

This was before Finelli shot the fat man.

This was when we were on the roof of a parking structure across the street from the nightclub in Manhattan. We were in Soho, and the club was called Compote.

Odom and I were local contract security. The third guy on the roof, Finelli, worked for the client, Uboa. Uboa was a Silicon Valley company whose new whiz kid, Skate Mateo, was in New York for a weekend of parties and three days of meetings. Skate, twenty-six, was known for going rogue: hence the three of us up top and the three guys on the ground, plus the driver in the Escalade and the helo pilot standing by. 

Skate Mateo was a tech nerd who thought up cool shit at work and said dumb shit online. Corporate types thought he was sexy and exploitable. Regular folks thought he was evil. The media had a thing for the callous geniuses of Silicon Valley. 

I had a thing for money. I was going to bust my ass for five years and rake it in. I had a plan. It was a plan defined by clichés, but all plans were.

“What’d he say?” snapped Finelli, talking about me. 

Finelli didn’t like me. He was a dark-haired fireplug of a guy, defensive, vibrating with spite, the way he tensed up, assuming everyone was plotting against him. Odom and I were tall and fit and better looking than he was, and he hated us instinctively. His hackles went up and stayed up. He kept the both of us on the roof, with him, for no tactical reason but that he thought me and Odom were the snotty kids on his field trip. I said nothing, didn’t want to start with Finelli—wasted energy. 

Odom spoke for me. He usually did. I was the quiet partner, always thinking. Odom was the people person, always moving. “Dex said, ‘Everyone is somewhere somewhen.’”

“Fuck that mean?”

“He’s philosophizing to pass the time,” said Odom.

“You fucking guys,” said Finelli.

We were waiting for Skate to leave the nightclub and get into the Escalade. 

“I said we didn’t need you two on this,” said Finelli.

“Dex means anyone can be a threat, from anywhere, at any time,” said Odom.

“No shit,” said Finelli.

“Okay, boss,” said Odom, backing down. Markis Odom was a handsome devil and tried to hide it, a red-haired All-American athlete with more physical gifts than he deserved, prompting colleagues to sneer, “This fucking guy,” or “Fucking pretty boy.” Odom could take a sucker punch, pin you to the ground in three seconds, and help you up with a no-hard-feelings pat on the back. He’d learned to defuse resentment of his physical gifts with easy smiles, dumb jokes, and innocent questions, all to put others at ease. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. With Finelli, it didn’t.

“I said bringing you in was a waste,” said Finelli. “I told them straight up.”

“We know where we stand,” I said.

“Boss didn’t want to listen to me—they bring you on anyway—that’s fine,” said Finelli. “They’ll learn the hard way, when shit goes down.”

“Shit won’t go down.”

“Shit always goes down.”

“It won’t.”

“This Skate kid is trouble. You don’t know. We know.” 

“We’ve been here before,” said Odom. 

“Many times,” I said.

“We’re different,” said Finelli, meaning his security team. “Hold your dicks, and let us work. You start swinging your meat, and you’ll fuck things. So don’t.”

Odom and I were itching to get off the roof and nearer to the mark, but meantime, we snorted at Finelli in contempt, the way you did when someone new at work thought they were better than you. 

Finelli worried us. Guys like Finelli always worried us. It’s mainly why we were hired for jobs like this. Guys like Finelli worried everyone.

We worked in private security for Adrose Vista, a vendor hired for corporate espionage, special-protection details, and error resolution. The job for Uboa was supposed to be extra coverage for the week Skate Mateo was spending in New York, zipping from conference room to hotel room, from dining room to disco, and anywhere else this billion-dollar brat might veer off to. Odom and I had been partners at AV for six years. Deavon “Dex” Lyle and Markis Odom: we were in our thirties and close, like brothers. I was thoughtful and careful. Odom was charming and impulsive. We were brain and brawn, hot and cold, brothers growing up opposites but getting along, teasing each other, but in balance. 

For this job, we were armed with scopes and lasers, not weapons, to identify potential threats in the crowd for Finelli to assess and, if necessary, act upon. Uboa security agents at street level listened on earpieces for Finelli’s instructions. They thought someone might take a shot at Skate for the bullshit he’d been posting this week. Someone like Skate was always talking shit, and someone, somewhere, was always willing to take a shot.

And that’s why we were getting paid three times our rate. It would be a great week, but I was trying not to dream about the zeroes . . . the zeroes in my account, one after another in a row, glowing green and pulsing with power, giving me a fully charged life. I felt the grit in my knee and ground it in harder to get myself to focus, because they weren’t there, those zeroes, not yet.

I scanned the scene with my scope and noted a fat guy in a blue down vest. In a crowd of men in tight shirts and women shivering in black dresses, this guy wore his blue vest over a zip-up gray sweatshirt. His hair was messy. He was a computer guy, plump from a sedentary life in a gaming chair, dismissive of personal hygiene, out of place in the nightclub scene, maybe there with a grudge against Skate Mateo. 

“Big man, blue vest,” I said, placing a red laser dot on the illustrated eye featured on the big man’s San Diego ComicCon lapel pin.

“Got him,” said Finelli. “My guys had him twenty minutes ago.”

“He arrived one minute and forty-five seconds ago,” I said.

“Fuck you,” said Finelli, manipulating his goggles. The goggles ran a civilian-assessment program Finelli had alluded to in the prep meeting but hadn’t explained.

“So what is it?” asked Odom. “Come on. You see through miniskirts or what?”

“I see fucking packing peanuts is what I see,” said Finelli.

“What?”

“Packing peanuts.” 

“What’s that mean?”

“Civilians.”

“Fuck you.”

“Listen,” said Finelli.

Odom and I braced for the lecture. Why did guys like Finelli feel the need to lecture? Keep it to yourself, pay attention, and learn something. Life wasn’t that hard.

“You got very few in this world pulling their weight and getting shit done,” said Finelli, manipulating his headpiece with touches and nods, “and then you got the rest”—Finelli swept a backhand across the panoramic view of Manhattan humanity—“the packing peanuts.”

“Preach,” I said, not hiding my sarcasm because I wasn’t trying to.

“We’re more finesse guys,” said Odom, elbowing me. “We keep the packing peanuts in the box.”

Finelli said nothing. He’d delivered his lecture. He wasn’t taking questions.

“We should be down there,” I muttered, watching the fat guy trying to make himself small as he excused his way through the beautiful people.

“You’re not going anywhere,” said Finelli.

“Don’t need three up top,” I said.

“You leave,” said Finelli, “and I make sure you get nothing.”

“Dex means we’re redundant up here,” said Odom.

“Zero,” said Finelli. “Fuck-all.”

“We’re horses locked in the gate,” said Odom. “You’re not getting your money’s worth.”

“You are pissing me off,” said Finelli. “You will never work for us again. I promise you that.”

I hadn’t taken my eyes off the fat guy.

Odom let a moment pass, but he was as itchy as I was and couldn’t sit still, couldn’t stand being held back by this smug jackass with a secret. Finelli enjoyed his mysterious surveillance technology, his goggles and screen providing an augmented reality overlaid on real-time views, and Odom didn’t like feeling inferior.

“So what the fuck?” pressed Odom, indicating Finelli’s mysterious gear. “Spill it.”

The three of us watched the fat guy wave to the bouncer, the bouncer wave back, the fat guy push through the crowd, and the bouncer usher the man inside. 

“IT guy,” said Finelli, getting his information from his screen and a voice in his earpiece. “Club’s having some issue. They called him. He’s fine. He’s yellow. He’s their IT guy.”

“Yellow?” asked Odom. 

“Mellow yellow, a regular fellow,” singsonged Finelli.

“What’s that mean?” pressed Odom. “A clearance code?”

Finelli tapped his goggles. “Proprietary, bitch.”

Odom gave up. Finelli would never admit how the technology worked. I kept scanning, but something was bothering me. Here was a line of people waiting outside to get into a Soho nightclub. There was a valet service. It was a cool, dry night in October. Taxis idled at red lights, and Uber drivers circled the block. 

If you wanted to blend in, you entered a routine. You followed protocol. 

“Hey,” I said, slipping my scope and laser into inside pockets. I was traveling light. “Anyone in the back?”

Odom got my meaning. “One of your guys posted back of the club?”

“We got two inside: one front of house, one back.”

“And outside?”

Finelli shook his head.

I was charging to the stairwell when Finelli shouted after me, his curses hollowing out in the tomb of the parking structure.

I hustled down the stairs. We were on Spring Street in a run-down valet-only parking structure across from Compote. I jogged down four flights in the stairwell. Odom and I were dressed in civilian wear, and for New York at night, that meant black hoodie and baggy jeans. I wore Keen utility boots because they looked like trail-running shoes but were steel-toed for crowd work and light enough for running. I needed to stand for hours, sprint up and down stairs, and wade through clots of surging humanity. 

I made my way across the street, around a corner office building, through the first floor of a boutique hotel—where, by the elevators, I grabbed an abandoned tote bag for a fast-casual restaurant called Sweetgreen (I was hoping the meals would be there, but the cartons were empty)—exited the back of the hotel to discover a crappy courtyard, and from that courtyard located the crummy back entrance of the nightclub. 

How did you get through the back door of a nightclub? You found a routine, and you got inside it. I didn’t typically mess with battering rams and lock picks: too much noise, too much risk. I tried the door. It was locked. I knocked . . . waited . . . knocked louder. 

Guy opened up: scowling, impatient. 

I pushed back my hoodie, held up the green tote bag, and said nothing. I had good skin, an innocent face, a halo of messy brown hair—your generic food-delivery guy. I could look like a goofy nobody when I wanted. 

The guy was a worker—Latino, mustache, sweaty forehead—someone hustling in the back of the nightclub, washing glassware, restocking. He nodded, leaned against the opened door, relaxing from vigilance into exhaustion, took out a cigarette, and cupped his hands to light it. 

I slid through the utility hallway and took a post behind boxes of Belvedere vodka stacked chest-high. I had a view of the anteroom for the restrooms.

The pounding bass of the dance music jarred my bones and boomed in the back of my throat. If I’d opened my mouth, the reverberations would’ve been enough to work my vocal cords and make me talk like a puppet. It was a weird sensation, the music so loud, me so sensitive. I was an old man at thirty-five. I carried disposable foam earplugs and considered putting them in but didn’t. A red ambient glow lit the anteroom. There was a potted plant and a plush red sofa. I set the Sweetgreen tote bag behind the liquor boxes. It felt good to be off the roof and in the game.

I was stepping out when a doorway lit up. The side room was about six feet ahead of me, on the left. A yellow light flared into the utility hallway.

Out came the fat man.

He must’ve been working on the computer system in the back office. 

I stepped back behind the boxes of Belvedere.

I kicked the Sweetgreen tote bag and crushed the empty cartons against the wall. 

I froze, hoping the music had covered my mistake.

Fat man waited in the hallway. A guy in an expensive sky-blue suit appeared: the nightclub manager. The manager stood out in his blue suit against the red ambient light behind him, the edges of his suit tinged an electric purple. I’d noticed bartenders and waitstaff often went all out for the latest complicated haircuts and manicured beards, but managers went for simple. They minimized the decisions in their lives. This guy struck me as that kind of guy: everything sharp, nothing frivolous. He followed the fat man into the office.

I looked behind me and saw a milk carton filled with dirty linens. I set the tote bag on top of it. I snuck closer to the office doorway, hoping like an idiot to overhear their conversation despite the roar of the dance music—but you never knew—when one of Finelli’s guys entered the red anteroom.

I froze.

He kept walking. He was headed to the restroom.

I returned to my Belvedere boxes. This was getting tedious. I didn’t want the Uboa guy to see me and report to Finelli. 

Fat man was back in the hallway and heading for the restrooms when the Uboa guy emerged from the restroom, saw the fat man in the gray hoodie, and stared at him. The men froze in a standoff. The Uboa guy listened to his earpiece, nodded to the fat man, and stepped out of his way. Fat man scuttled to the restroom like he’d escaped being thrown into the lockers by the school bully.

That was what I read in the body language. The fat man’s fear made me want to stop referring to the fat man as fat man. It was more professional to call him IT guy, if only in my head. I didn’t trust him either way. 

The nightclub manager strode out of the back office with the jaunty body language anyone could read as pleased as punch. The IT guy must’ve solved the problem. The manager collided with the Uboa security agent, who hadn’t left his post in the anteroom (probably sent there by Finelli to watch out for me). Unlike the IT guy, the manager was pissed at having to confront this hulking obstacle—another servant in his life—and dismissed him with a wave as he strode past him. The manager’s happiness was gone and replaced with a fiery concentration on the business of the night. 

The Uboa agent followed the manager, for some reason, back into the club.

With security gone, I wanted to race into the restroom, neutralize the IT guy, and wrap this up. IT guy was an itch I needed to scratch, but all I had was a feeling.

Out of the restroom, the IT guy stopped to catch his breath. He’d washed his face and matted down his hair. He looked nervous, mustering his courage for something, like he was about to ask a girl if she wanted to dance. Hands in his pockets, he marched into the club.

I followed him.

If IT guy was looking for Skate, Skate was sure making it easy on him.

Skate Mateo was right there, in front of everyone, convulsing in the spinning lights flashing throughout the club, making an offensive spectacle of himself.

A circle had widened around Skate on the dance floor. He’d grabbed a woman’s hips and was pounding his pelvis into her backside, which I guessed was a rough imitation of the way some people danced nowadays (here was that old man in me again), and the woman, in a black dress and black Converse Chucks, wriggled and slapped at his hands, which I read to mean she was rather unwilling to be the center of this kind of attention. It was an odd scene and didn’t make sense to me until I realized people knew who Skate was, and his notoriety could clear space anywhere.  

The woman in the black dress got free, screwed her black Converse shoes into the floor, and slapped him.

The crowd reacted. “Damn!” “Oh, shit!”

Skate had been lunging for her when she’d slapped him, and he snapped back, startled and then pissed off. He punched her.

I’d been doing this work for years and had been to a hundred bars, but I’d never seen a guy punch a woman on a dance floor.

The crowd went quiet. If she’d gone down, the crowd would’ve eaten Skate alive. But the woman didn’t go down. She kept her balance. She wiped the blood from her mouth. The crowd roared to let her know they were on her side. “That’s a bad-ass bitch!”

The woman, energized by adrenaline and the fever of the crowd, charged at Skate, who flinched, but two friends of hers grabbed her and pulled her back. A friend held the woman’s face and looked into her eyes, and the woman collapsed in tears.

The crowd turned to Skate, and Skate knew it was time to go.

This fucking kid.

He charged through the crowd, but I couldn’t get to him. The mob flowed back onto the dance floor, restoring normalcy like what had happened hadn’t happened, and the IT guy, who’d been dumbfounded like everyone else by the spectacle, was in pursuit.

I fought through the crowd. The IT guy was waving something as he chased after Skate. It wasn’t a gun. It was light in color and long, a knife or a baton.

They made it to the entrance of the nightclub. When I arrived at the threshold, they were outside, past the bouncer, on the sidewalk, and I saw the IT guy grab at Skate’s shoulder and clutch at his shirt. He spun Skate, or Skate spun around. The bouncer moved to intervene. The IT guy was waving an object, which I realized was a roll of paper, like a scroll. He was waving it in Skate’s face. Skate shoved him. And the shot came.

The IT guy fell backward into the bouncer.

The bouncer caught his heel on the threshold, right in front of me, and fell backward, the IT guy in his lap.

I was caught in a mosh in the entranceway. I elbowed and twisted and knelt down to the men. The bouncer had been trying to tackle an assailant but was now cradling an innocent: the IT guy didn’t have a weapon, only a rolled-up manifesto, which I pulled from the fat man’s loose fingers.

People scattered in a shrieking panic when another bullet zipped into the fat man’s chest and passed into the body of the bouncer, which I knew because I was holding the bouncer at the shoulder and felt him seize up. Another clue he’d been shot was the big man hollered in my ear, nearly busting my ear drum. The IT guy’s body shuddered gently from the concussion of the second bullet. Skate witnessed this and understood the fat man had been shot dead. Skate promptly lost his shit. He forgot his security detail was nearby, his Escalade at the curb, and instead of running to them, Skate Mateo, the genius, sprinted back into the nightclub. 

I chased him.

I fought against the river of people. I was knocked against walls and barstools while that skinny kid slipped through the club like an eel.

The Uboa security guys charged after me and Skate. The Uboa agents inside the club were getting word in their earpieces, but they couldn’t make out the news. The music was pumping, and there was that confused mix of frenzy and stillness you got in a crowd when people who didn’t know what was happening or what was expected of them freaked out or cowered in corners. And you had the types filming everything on their phones. I’d made it to the back of the club when another shot ripped through the beat of the music.

A woman beside me leapt, like a deer, in reaction to the impact of the bullet. She was running to the back of the club when she was hit. She tumbled into a table. Glass shattered. Her body collapsed and came to a rest in a splayed contortion on the floor, her bare limbs frosted in champagne and glass and blood. 

She wore a black dress and black Converse Chucks.

They weren’t shooting at her. They were shooting at me. They thought I was another psycho threatening Skate.

Fucking Finelli. 

I charged through the utility hallway, passed frightened employees peering around doorways, and burst into the courtyard where I saw Skate, spinning in confusion. I took his elbow. He whipped away from me. He thought I was after him. His eyes were wide with panic as he established a pseudo-martial-arts stance he’d probably learned from a personal trainer in San Francisco. I walked toward him. He kneed and windmilled, and I gut-punched him, enough to knock the wind out of him and render him docile. He puked on my shoes. I told him who I was as I escorted him, stumbling, through the first floor of the boutique hotel.

I met Odom on the street. He knew where I’d be. The Escalade was there. Odom opened the door. I shoved Skate into the back, and we were gone.

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