IN THE MORNING, Bill called and asked if I wanted a ride to work. I gratefully accepted the offer and was delivered to the dispatch office before anyone else had arrived. I followed Bill into the back, thinking I’d help him set up the pickup loads. Instead, to my surprise, he pointed me to a chair.
“We have about ten minutes before Trysta gets here, and I wanted to talk to you,” he told me gruffly. “There’s a camera in this office,” he said bluntly. “I’m not sure what you were looking up on our computers that late at night, and I know you didn’t steal anything, but I’m still not overly impressed with you breaking in here.”
For a moment, I was too shocked to say anything. My boss waited patiently until I got my composure back, then I met his gaze and shrugged helplessly.
“Dead to rights,” I admitted in my soft Southern drawl. “I didn’t know there was a camera, and I know I didn’t damage the lock. I just needed to look up a customer for...personal business.”
Bill nodded. “Look, I know Sarah is involved in something,” he said quietly. “I assumed you were too when she sent you to me. I don’t give a shit if it’s drugs, the mob, or gunrunning—but it stays out of this office. No harm done this time, but if my business gets dragged into whatever you’re messed up in, I will break you.”
All of this was said in the same quiet, perfectly level voice. I could feel his disappointment as a physical thing in the room with us.
“It won’t happen,” I promised. Like I’d told Michael, I didn’t want Direct to get stuck in any of the messes I was involved in. It wouldn’t happen, no matter what it took.
“Good,” he grunted. “Let’s set up the loads.”
The rest of the morning passed in companionable silence until Trysta showed up. She cheered up the office with a bright “Good morning, boys!” and then set to work with us.
By the time the rest of the drivers showed up, we had the first morning loads and pickup routes set up and ready to go. I checked my own schedule and headed out to my truck to program in the GPS.
When I got the text from Michael telling him to meet him, I’d already finished programming the appropriate Starbucks into my GPS. I got there to find him, once again, waiting for me with a steaming cup of coffee.
“You’re going to have to be damn careful about that promise of yours,” I told him sharply as I took the coffee. “My boss is aware that I have ‘connections’ to something, and he does not want that spilling over onto them.”
The Enforcer shrugged his shoulders. “We will do the best we can,” he said. “That is all I can offer; you know that.”
He pulled a small box and a plain white mailing envelope out of his car and passed them to me.
“For the airport again?” I asked, not realizing until I took the envelope that it was unaddressed.
“Not this time,” Michael said, shaking his head. “The envelope is for you—consider it our payment for your services so far. The package has an address on it—Ink Quill Industries; they’re in the northeast near the airport, so delivering there shouldn’t be a problem.”
I glanced at the address on the label. My slowly growing awareness of the locations of things in the city agreed with his assessment of the office’s location. A faint whiff of a spicy scent I couldn’t quite make out caught my nose before the cold wind swept it away.
Sliding the package into my truck, I opened the envelope. It contained cash—crisp, clean twenty- and fifty-dollar bills totaling about a week’s worth of my salary.
“A bribe to keep my mouth shut?” I asked.
“Compensation for services rendered,” Michael disagreed. “We reward those who work with us, Jason.”
If everyone rewarded those who worked with them like the Enforcers and Oberis, I almost didn’t need to work for Direct!
I pocketed the money and shrugged. “All right, I’ll see your package delivered,” I told him. He nodded and returned to his gray sedan with the stylized K symbol decaled onto its wing mirrors.
With a sigh, I got back into my truck, turning the heat up to beat back the city’s vicious cold. On one hand, vampires and fae lords, and on the other, a day job and a “police” force all too eager to exploit said job for their own purposes.
If the vampires didn’t kill me, job stress might.
INK QUILL INDUSTRIES turned out to be a midsized building that looked like it contained a factory, a warehouse and an office, buried in the middle of a small industrial and warehousing district south of the airport. The name of the company was on the side of a large quill-pen logo with stylized drops of red ink on the tip.
The parking lot was all but empty and it looked like the factory was shut down. I pulled in next to a blue compact car and eyed the snow that covered the parking lot. Someone had gone through at some point with a snowblower and cleared off most of it, but it still looked frozen and slippery.
With a sigh, I pulled my gloves on and grabbed my clipboard and the delivery package. Whatever else moving up to Calgary had taught me, it was teaching me a little bit of tolerance for cold.
Not that said tolerance would stop me bitching about the cold anytime soon, and I was cursing under my breath as I half-ran across the slippery parking lot to the office door and ducked inside.
The heavily tinted glass with its silkscreen quill pens had kept me from realizing it was one of those two-door setups, with an interior door a secretary has to buzz you through. Of course, to add insult to confusion, the inner doors were also silkscreened and heavily tinted, and I could barely see through well enough to tell that there was no one at the front desk.
There was a buzzer by the locked inner door, however, and I hit that. I heard it sound on the other side of the glass, faintly. I waited a minute or so and pushed the buzzer again.
I was about ready to hit the buzzer for a third time when I finally saw movement on the other side of the glass. A figure, heavily blurred by the tinting, walked up to the front desk and hit a button. The door in front of me clicked and I entered the building.
A young, fair-haired man stood behind the desk in suit pants and a dress shirt. He waved me forward into the office.
“Sorry, I was in the back, trying to set up a print job,” he said cheerfully. “Most of our guys and gals are totally snowed in; they’re not getting anywhere till something radically melts this snow.”
“I have a package for Ink Quill,” I told him, passing him the clipboard.
“Awesome!” He took the clipboard in one hand and offered me his other. “I’m James Langley, the VP of operations and one of only three of us who made it through this spectacular snow dump.”
The man’s enthusiasm shone through even bad news, and I couldn’t help returning his smile as he dashed off an extravagant signature on the clipboard and passed it back to me.
I handed him the box, and he took a quick glance at it.
“I’ve been waiting for this,” he said. “So glad you could make it through this total wreck of a city. Want a tour of the presses? It totally doesn’t look like we’re getting much else done.”
Somehow while he was enthusiastically proclaiming, the box managed to disappear into the desk.
“Presses?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re a totally radical small independent book-binding and print shop, man,” he explained. “Take special orders for some amazing folks—pamphlets, self-published authors, those sorts of radicals. Helping change the world in our own small way.”