13. June 15th

JUNE 15TH

TB

W

Kubrick needs a favor. Conference room stat.

"Already?You two have barely been back together for two weeks," he mumbled to himself.

TB hated favors. They made his skin feel like it was sliding over his bones through oil. He could already sense this was going to be messy.

Unfolding himself from his Humvee, he sauntered through the underground parking garage to the elevator that would take him up to Tribe's offices. As he pressed the up button, a Bronco came careening around the corner and slid across two parking spaces. Rolling out of it from the passenger seat came Nemo, and his fraternal twin, Midas, came bursting out of the driver's side. Arguing, as usual.

"All I said was one of these days, you're going to get caught. Fuck in a bed like the rest of the world," Midas yelled.

"Why?" Nemo corrected him, "That's boring." Both were booking it toward the elevator where TB stood. "Morning, Godzilla! How's it hangin'?"

The elevator doors opened, and TB walked in, completely ignoring the blond twin who threw himself in the door, trying to escape his brother's tripping foot. TB looked at the dark twin. "You know, assknockers, there's a reason for those yellow lines in the garage."

"Dude," Nemo interjected, "eight of us work here. Even if Kubrick showed up with her ‘vette, that's nine cars maximum. There's gotta be thirty spots easy."

"What he said," Midas greeted as he spun through the door and punched the button for the lobby. "Morning, TB."

"It's after two o'clock," TB corrected.

"Well, I just rolled out of bed"—Nemo shrugged—"so it's morning for me."

"Try ‘car lot,' not ‘bed,'" Midas groused. "Remind me why I left here and went to pick you up? I'm not an Uber."

"God won't let me bring girls back to this fortress of solitude, so if I choose to sleep elsewhere, that's my issue, not yours. Mom!" He pushed.

"Picking up an accountant from a car dealership, then going back to the lot to test drive the backseats of numerous new cars is not sleeping."

TB looked at Midas. "That's a new one." Switching mental gears, he smacked Nemo up the backside of the head. "Be respectful to your mother."

Midas smacked him as well. "Listen to your father."

"Look, I like the challenge; I can't help it. You're all so frickin' normal in your sex." He glanced at TB. "Well, I guess you're not. You need to tie people up, and that is definitely not normal."

"I don't need to," TB told him. "It's a kink, not a fetish, you narrow-minded toad."

"Call it whatever you want, Mothra."

Midas lectured his twin. "The real point here is that God's told you not to sleep with all these different women who can identify you, but you just keep on doin' it."

"No worries on the identification." Nemo padded his cargo pocket. "Double wrapping prevents DNA accidents."

"Eww. Do you take it with you when you leave?"

"Hell, yes. I just find the nearest dumpster after I'm at least a mile away."

"What the…? Who the hell taught you that? I know it wasn't me, and it sure as hell wasn't Mom."

"Definitely wasn't our sperm donor," Nemo muttered. "Nah. Came up with that on my own."

"We're dead. Your DNA doesn't exist in any system worldwide. What a fuckwitch."

"Yes, but no point letting it slip back into the system somewhere, somehow, now is there?" Nemo reasoned.

"Speaking of fuckwitches," TB interrupted the brothers, or they'd snipe at each other for hours, "any idea what this favor is for Kubrick?"

Midas had a terrible hero worship of Waters' woman, Kubrick, and her language skills. He still hadn't erased the whiteboard tally of her creative swear words, and TB doubted he ever would. If anyone knew what was going on, her evil minion would know.

"Not a clue," Midas admitted. "Waters called, said she needed a favor, here we are."

"And I needed a ride from Carlsbad before the dealership opened, and Cynthia had to go to work, so it worked out perfectly."

TB looked at Midas, stunned. "You drove ninety minutes to pick this loser up?"

"And back," Midas confirmed.

Now it was Midas' turn to get whacked in the back of the head.

After flipping TB off, Midas looked at Nemo with confusion. "I thought her name was Cicely?"

Nemo cracked his gum. "Cynthia, Cicely, Ci-something."

The elevator door opened into Tribe's lobby. TB rolled his eyes. "You are such a whore."

Pointing his finger at him, Nemo informed him, "I do not charge! But I probably should."

Cherry, their handler, was standing there waiting for them. "Perfect timing. You have your physical after this meeting, plus a blood and urine test."

"Bet Demon's excited about that," TB muttered with a look at Cherry.

"So very excited," she agreed. "I believe he requested a hazmat suit from God after the last one. Said he was worried he'd catch something just from looking at him."

"Hey!" Nemo yelled. "That's not nice."

"Then stop sleeping with everything that has a vagina," Cherry snarked.

"I haven't slept with you," Nemo teased.

TB cuffed him around the back of the neck and steered him down the hall, Nemo's arms flailing all the way there. "And you're not going to, Nanoid, so pipe down. Get in there." Midas opened the conference room door, and TB propelled Nemo into the room where Waters was already waiting.

Just as they were sitting down, the door opened again, and the stragglers, Demon and Steel, appeared.

They were an odd group, TB had to admit. None of them looked like they belonged in the same room as each other, let alone working together. But for the past five years, they had done exactly that and did it well. There were moments when he wasn't sure that he liked all of them, especially Nemo, but despite their vast differences, they did work like a well-maintained machine.

Midas had his Oakleys flipped upside-down and riding the back of his head as he booted up his laptop at his seat.

Demon threw his first aid backpack down the length of the conference room table, then threw himself into the chair it landed in front of, making enough room between the chair and the table so he could put his flip-flopped feet up on the edge, crossed at the ankles. He had clearly been out with the waves this morning. While his board shorts were dry, and he wore a tank top over his torso, TB could see that his skin still bore the sheen of salt water on it, and his shoulder-length brown hair was damp, although thrown up in a man-bun, sporting the tangled look of a surfer. He was surly and was quick to throw a punch. Or a chair. Sometimes even a knife if you really pissed him off. The medical bag was not a normal addition at a meeting, however.

Waters must have called him in off the waves. So, the favor involved someone who was hurt.

"Kubrick in an accident?" TB asked, nodding his head toward the backpack.

Waters didn't look up from the papers in his hand. "No, not Kubrick. Someone else needed medical attention."

Steel slunk into the seat between Nemo and Demon. Steel rarely spoke. TB wasn't a chatterbox, but Steel was downright mute. His gray eyes were an oddity in his otherwise Latin features and cold like a snake. And like that same snake, you never knew when he would strike, which made him an incredibly deadly assassin. Together, TB and Steel had made more than a few subjects piss, shit, faint, or vomit after only a few short minutes in their presence.

Waters stood in his usual place at the head of the table and turned on the starfish speaker at the center of the conference table. The telescreen on the far end came to life, connecting to Midas' laptop.

God's voice suddenly boomed through the speaker. "What's going on, Waters?"

Waters looked around the room. "Sorry to drag you all in on what should have been a rare day off. A friend of Kubrick's is in trouble, and while the situation is not normally something we would get involved in, ironically, it connected itself back to our office, and we need to deal with it."

He glanced at TB, an odd look on his face. The best he could describe it would be pensive.

"Remember when I said normal was never going to occur again?" the disembodied voice over the speaker reminded him. "This is what I was talking about."

Waters shifted his attention to the starfish and flipped his middle finger at it, to which their big boss grunted, "I saw that."

"You were supposed to."

"What happened, boss?" Steel interrupted.

"Kubrick got a call just after eleven this morning. A friend of hers was having a panic attack on the other end of the phone. Immediately, Kubrick made me drive over to the woman's house. She was in a catatonic state, and I wasn't allowed to call 911. So, I called Demon in for medical assistance. He treated her for shock, and when she came to, we managed to learn that she's being stalked. It started online, but now her admirer has raised the stakes and brought it to her in person. She received an envelope with numerous photos of her, many of them while she was in the privacy of her house. They were hand-delivered—dropped off at her door sometime after yesterday's mail. Possibly as recent as twenty minutes before she took the mail out of her mailbox. We'll need to check with the post office as to whether or not it was in the mailbox when the letter carrier arrived today, but I'm guessing no."

Tingles started again on the back of TB's neck. He didn't like this feeling. Oily. Cold. Messy.

The conference room door opened, and a very nervous and pale redhead dressed in a mixture of Victorian and Bohemian styles walked in with Kubrick right beside her, an arm around her shoulders as if holding her upright. The pale woman's green eyes darted all around the room, never landing long on any of the men at the table, and then they landed on TB.

Her eyes went round. If possible, she got paler. And then she passed out.

Yup. Things just got messy. Fuck my life.