Turkish Thug

"What part of hands on your head do you not understand, mother fucker?"


"Oh, well, if it's your mother . ." Jake mumbles as he half-heartedly brings his hands towards his head. "I'm sure I look like a big fucking threat. Aren't you going to check out Mt. Vesuvius over there?"

The security guard gave Jake a scathing look and turned away to look at the body. As he turned away, Jake saw a tatoo emerging from the back of the guy's jacket. It looked sort of familiar. A curving sickle, adn he could just make out a triangular point to its right. Hmm. The guy moved to nudge the smoldering remains with his toe, and Jake got a little better view. The top of a sickle and a star. The Turkish flag! What the fuck!

Jake started to revive from his resignation to death a little, although he kept his body carefully inert and non-threatening. What was going on here? Had Tolga sent this guy? Why? If she'd sent him to get Jake, he certainly would have done it by now, and there wasn't a whole lot of point in sending him after her own messenger, was there? As his mind was racing, Jake was carefully, subtley working the disc deep into the folds of his mangy clothes. Maybe the message hadn't been for him after all. Maybe it was after George. In which case, this ugly Turkish thug was also here for George. Or if he hadn't been before, he was now.

Jake struggled to his feet. "Hey man, all I can say is I'm glad I don't live in this shithole with this shit going on (gesturing at smoldering heap) and the slow-ass security. I was just using my friend's computer since I don't have one, but fuck this shit, I'm outta here."

Ugly Turk stepped threateningly in front of Jake, who staggered forward, unthreatening but determine. Briefly, he flailed ineffectively against the Turk's arm, but with a disgusted look and a brush of his sleave, the ThugTurk stepped out of his way. Rufus gave a whine from the back room as Jake shambled down the stairs. Once he was out of sight, he broke into a sprint.

He just might make the library drop yet.

Jake’s thoughts turn prescient as he delivers his breakfast all over the tile of George’s entry way. Now that he has stopped moving, he can’t see any reason to start again. Rufus gives up on the temptations beyond the door and trots over to check out the most recent offering. A bird in the hand thinks Jake as he begins to stroke Rufus’ mane.

“Well Ruf, it was nice knowing you.” Jake sinks to the floor, between his own vomit and the door. On the other side of that door lies a smoldering pile of ash and, presumably, someone who is coming to kill him. “Fucking Tolga”

Jake thumbs the package the courier handed to him. No markings on the outside, that’s odd, only one disc on the inside too, more odd. Tolga was infuriatingly thorough and given that she was the new customer, Jake was expecting the drop to consist of a handcart at minimum and possibly a skip loader. With all sorts of shit not adding up and a few minutes left to live, Jake opens the packet and looks inside. There is a single disc placed inside a folded note. The open note has a brief message scrawled inside, “5 days, 12^th Floor, Same Time.” No markings on the disc.

“Some fucking raw deal Ruf, we get to be fubared because some fuck-head comes to the wrong damn house.” He flings the disc across the room, it skitters along the floor, finally coming to rest under the couch. He loses track of time for a while, just sitting on the floor absentmindedly petting Rufus, who has decided to lie down as well. Jake is halfway through convincing himself he’s not going to die today when the door comes crashing open.

Rufus bolts upright, barks ferociously, then runs away to the back of the house. Jake closes his eyes and hopes it doesn’t hurt. “Freeze! ___ Security! Put your hands on your head!”

This is unexpected, Jake turns his head and looks up the barrel of something big, metal, and mean looking. Behind the barrel is one of the ugliest human beings he has seen.

“Put your hands on your head motherfucker!”

Jake puts his hands on his head. “Some bang up security force you guys are, some piece of shit has been smoldering on the step for who knows how long and you guys are just getting here now.”

The Drop

“What are you doing here?” says Jake, although he knows before the guy, short and bald and all kinds of ordinary, the most dangerous kind, says anything at all.

“The drop,” says the bald guy. Somewhere upstairs, Rufus lets fly a half-hearted bark, but doesn’t make a move for the stairs, let alone the door. Some watch dog, that guy.

“Yeah, yeah I know you’re here for the drop,” says Jake. “What I’m asking is, why are you here? We meet at the library. In an hour and a half. Tolga always sends these things to the library. Come to think of it,” says Jake, and now that he’s thinking, he doesn’t much care for the conclusions he’s reaching, “how did you find me here?”

And that’s when he notices that there’s something not right about the bald guy, something more than his uncomfortable walk and over-the-top polyester suit. It takes him a stupid minute to figure it out. The movement’s all wrong, not in the way it normally is, because the guy’s packing all sorts of hidden explosives and concealed firearms on his short frame. It’s more like he’s not in complete control of his own functions. One hand, the right one, twitches a little against the parcel he carries, and the guy lilts, like maybe the breeze now washing across the front of the house will push him over. And then Jake smells it, that metallic-sweet smell he smelled that one time when he and George were kids and George accidentally soldered his own hand.

The bald guy hands the package over. Jake takes it just as the bald guy falls to the ground, right there on George and Jess’s well manicured doorstep. His coat falls open, revealing some grenades and a big ass hole in his abdomen, from which bald guy’s intestines spill, and sizzle, and melt. In ten seconds flat, the guy’s a gooey mess, and within a minute he’s nothing but a pile of polyester and ash. Oh, and a whole lot of explosives.

Jake picks up everything but the ash, and closes the door. He looks around wildly for somewhere to dump the leisure suit. He decides on George and Jess’s trash compactor. He returns to find Rufus, big goofy grin and shoestrings of drool checking out the crack beneath the front door. Flesh is flesh, Jake assumes. He thinks he might be sick.

The Barons

With the corporate equivalent of an embarrassed cough and discrete application of a handkerchief, the Crop Reinvention Barons had reinvented themselves as CRB with minimal legal disputes. They had done this soon after the New Jersey Flavor Barons so brashly came on the scene, building off of what the first Barons had started. The "Barons" part of CRB had of course been the result of panicked and half-joking brainstorming by a group of brilliant but green guys in their 20's as they raced through the streets of New York in a taxi on their way to a meeting with a big funder they never really thought they would get to meet. So they had never really come up with a name. Then they had to, and in that deadline-induced delirium they came up with Crop Reinvention Barons, thinking surely it would change later. But of course it didn't. So there they were.

But now CRB was like the mature and slightly mysterious older brother to the New Jersey Flavor Barons' over-the-top, motorcycle riding, tattoo displaying, adolescent. Where the Flavor Barons ran shameless advertising campaigns and ostentatiously grabbed market share, CRB quietly pushed the boundaries of nanotech and genetic research that provided the basis for the Flavor Baron's cheap products. CRB took a tidy portion of the Flavor Barons' profit in return.

George's branch, intercontinental research into blah-blah-blah, would be messing about with new ways to exploit foreign workers and foreign resources. Jake reached out and tapped "Turkey" in the search box and hit enter.

A long series of events opened up. Wow. Who knew there was so much going on in Turkey? Jake might not have even believed they had internet service there, except for Tolga. he deftly began navigating through the links in each calendar even showing maps of the location, bios and drink preferences of attendees, sometime even detailed seating charts. Jake knew, because it was his job to know, that there was another level of this calendar accessible only to highly vetted highly trusted aides that contained other preferences. He knew, because it was his job to know, what many of those preferences were for many of the men at these meetings.

But that wasn't his job at the moment. Why was CRB so active in Turkey? What was going on? By the time the doorbell rang with Tolga's drop, Jake had a pretty good idea.

“Come on in.” Jess was frosty as usual.

“Is that my favorite pimp!” George yelled from the back.

“Yeah, and you still owe me 50 credits from those twins.” Jake liked to see how far he could push it before Jess lost her cool.

“Can you two troglodytes give it rest for just one week?”

Apparently not very far.

“Ahh come on cutie, let us have our fun.” George had emerged from the back room. Large, disheveled, with his tie half undone his coat half on and a flavor stick protruding from his mouth. “The big guy kept us both up last night, you’re in for quite a treat today.”

“What’s wrong with him.”

“He was moaning all night, had gas like you wouldn’t believe. Jess thinks he ate a scarf, so keep an eye out for it when he does his business.”

“How’d he eat a scarf?”

“Good question, honey, care to answer that?” Jess was tapping her foot now, holding the door open for her husband who had now got the jacket completely on and was reaching for his briefcase.

“Lets not get into the who’s and the how’s, its not very productive. But, if he hasn’t shit it out by noon, give us a call we might have to have you take him to the Doc.”

Jake must not have looked pleased at this prospect. George continued. “I know, I know, I owe you buddy, I promise I’ll make it up to you.” And with that, George and Jess were out the door. Not to return until 6. One hour before the drop. George kicked off his shoes and walked to the back room. There, on a pillow roughly the size of Jake’s apartment, lay Rufus. When Jake entered Rufus turned his massive head and half opened his sleepy eyes towards Jake, and after recognizing him, gave a token three thumps of the tail then lay his head back down and let out a plaintive sigh.

“You and me both Ruf, you and me both.”

Jake plopped himself down on the stool in front of the terminal and looked at the screen.

George had had been checking his calendar when Jake got there and in his rush he had forgot to log off. This presented Jake with quite the moral dilemma. At his fingertips was the intranet of CRB. He really shouldn’t, George could get fired. But then the noxious fumes of Rufus flatulence wafted up to him, hadn’t George said he owed him one?

At half-past eight, Jake leaves his apartment. Jake’s the first to admit that he does a lot more staying than leaving, so he recognizes it for what it is – a Tuesday. He likes to tell George, when he gives him crap about it, that he’s showing commitment. George is a buddy from grade-school and mid-level success story in CRB’s division for intercontinental research into blah-blah-blah (Jake usually stops listening after words like “research”). George seems to like the joke, as only a corporate mid-level success story can. George’s wife Jess, Jake has noticed, also thinks it’s pretty funny, in ways only an ex-girlfriend can.

Jake begins his descent through sixteen and a half floors. It’s a dangerous business, and makes Jake thank himself all over again that he ate that Nutripak sometime in the last eight to ten hours. Every so often, the building gets repossessed, or lost as a spoil of territorial skirmish, or maybe even sold. New owners invariably like to mark the place as their own. Dogs urinate; slumlords build. Usually it’s a new floor, one that doesn’t match, or even match up, to previous architectural achievement. The stairwell widens and narrows. Stairs turn into ramps. Ramps drop off into ladders. Jake likes it, thinks it’s charming. Sort of encourages commitment.

Jake drops the last five feet onto the platform of the subway, just in time to catch the 8:45 downtown. Tolga said the courier drop off was evening. He’ll make it easy, no sweat. Tolga doesn’t do personal drops except in important cases, maybe two or three times ever, tops, but when she does, he meets up with the messenger in the lobby of the public library. Not everybody sees the charm of Jake’s apartment building, he gets that, and besides, they’ll let anybody but anybody into the library. Even the Born-and-Born-All-Over-Agains can’t privatize that fucker, and don’t think they haven’t tried.

Jake jumps off the subway, still moving, to avoid the railway collector, who Jake sees coming a mile away because Central Lines makes their guys wear tall, old-timey hats. Previous experience indicates that the guy is out to tag his ass, and Jake learns from previous experience. He hoofs it the rest of the way, down two streets, over ten, through some back yards, just for scuz. He gets there with twenty-three seconds to spare. He raises his hand to knock, but the door opens before his fist lands.

"Excellent," says Tolga, smoothly. "I will send you the standard information packet by personal courier."

"What, from Istanbul? I guess you're not in a hurry?"

"I most certainly am in a hurry. I did not doubt that you would assist me. The courier has been en route since last afternoon. He will arrive this evening."

Jake nods to himself and signs off with "I'll touch back then. Since you're a colleague, I'll waive the cancellation fee if you come to your goddamned senses."

Immediate business concluded, Jake's attention shifts back to the graph on the right side of the screen. "What the hell is going on over there?" he wonders, shaking his head.

**** **** ****

Tolga stands up from the workstation and stretches deeply. She settles to the pad ever present beside her desk and shifts fluidly into One Legged King Pigeon, then from there to Firefly, alternating Side Crows, flows back to her feet for a Revolved Half-Moon, and closes with a yawn. The post-yoga calm and cleared ears draw her attention to the ticking of the elegant wooden clock on the inner wall. 05:00. Almost time for bed. A low monotonic "bong" from her computer speakers sounds clearly over the clock, and she turns back to the desk.

New mail. Well, new and not new, as it turns out. The message, somehow representing itself as coming from her uncle Murat, offers exciting opportunities in the realms of phallic extension and sustained arousal. She sighs and marks the message as spam. At least they could send her filth addressing her own insecurities. Technology advances quickly but unevenly, it would seem. Or it could simply be the name thing. Life ain't easy for a girl named Tolga.

Grimacing, she stands again and glides to the window. The first rays of morning sun are pouring through her east-facing wall, which is entirely made of glass and devoid of shade save for the UV shielding. Tolga turns and looks around the spare living space and catalogues each item one last time. Beauty sleep will be more critical than ever, and tomorrow will be a busy day. It might be quite some time before she is able to return to this place and relax. Or perhaps she never will. But everything is in its place, nothing is perishable, and nothing offers any clues as to the identity of the sometimes-present owner. She nods to herself and turns her gaze to the window one last time before retiring to the bedroom. Across the Hudson, New York is already visibly waking up from it's half-sleep. The quiet residents of Alpine, NJ, however, are not, and Tolga finally moves to the bedroom, glad to join them.