Special Episode: Trouble (Part II)
This episode is part of a larger story, Soft Touch. If you haven’t yet, you can go back and read it from the beginning right here.
Calla kicks her socked feet up onto the desk, nibbling her lip as she strategizes.
She doesn’t have Ralph’s last name, or any intel on him. All she really knows is that he’s friends with Jamie and Aiden, and that he lives in Ketterbridge. But that’s more than enough for Calla to work with, especially given the tiny population size of Ketterbridge. She cracked the digital security of the Ketterbridge City Hall Archives forever ago, and she’s had access ever since. This is easy mode.
Calla scrolls through old academic files until she’s got a name. There are two Ralphs listed as enrolled at Ketterbridge High around the right time. One in Aiden’s grade year, and one in the grade below Jamie’s.
Calla knows instinctively, immediately, which of the two is the one she’s looking for.
Ralph Lanham finished high school with a bare-minimum GPA, but he knocked every mandatory standardized and state test out of the park, marking perfect scores on some of them. All the non-mandatory ones, on the other hand, show no score. They’re marked as NS, which probably means he didn’t bother to show up for them.
His academic record is row after row of disciplinary issues, suspensions, detentions.
“Yeah, this is you,” Calla murmurs softly.
It abruptly dawns on her that there’s a smile turning up her lips. She quickly drops it, clears her throat, and opens up a new tab to search for the name Ralph Lanham.
No results.
Not for the person Calla is looking for, anyways. She stares at the screen with her eyebrows furrowed, then shrugs her shoulders and switches back to her homemade program. It does better searches, anyways, thoroughly scanning through every database she’s already broken into on top of all the regular channels. She should’ve just started here in the first place. Nothing would come up if she’d searched her own name, either. Maybe Ralph is as careful as she is.
Or else he’s a much more low-grade kind of trouble than she gave him credit for, and there’s nothing about him because there’s simply nothing to say. That would be… sort of disappointing, honestly, although Calla can’t quite explain that feeling to herself.
Her own search program is way more likely to turn up something, so either way, she’ll have her answer soon.
Calla makes sure that the search won’t be traceable to her server network, just in case. She puts in Ralph’s full name, then adds Ketterbridge as a parameter. She knows the program is gonna take a minute to run - it has a lot of data to comb through, and then it needs to pull the results from who-knows-where - so she gets up and stretches her arms over her head, thinking about making herself a cup of coffee.
She stops in surprise when the program chimes to inform her of a result before she can even cross the room.
The result is no new results.
Calla stares at her computer in bewilderment, then comes back over and runs the search again. But it’s giving her the same information she’s already found. Ralph’s academic records, along with some standard hits that aren’t even worth going through. His name on an account at the Ketterbridge power company, on a car registration, all the usual. Stuff that tells Calla pretty much nothing, except for his address, and the fact that he pays his own bills.
On the surface, Ralph Lanham is a perfectly standard, upstanding, law-abiding citizen. But this is way too neat, at least to Calla’s mind. He doesn’t come up anywhere else? There should be something, shouldn’t there? Anything?
“No,” Calla says softly, narrowing her eyes. “You… you had someone scrub your history, didn’t you? Or - what…?”
She hesitates, nibbling her lip, then breaks into a sudden smile. Is she actually stumped again? No fucking way… what’s the deal with this guy?
Maybe there was something else in his academic records that Calla missed. She digs back into the Ketterbridge Archives. Someone has been painstakingly digitizing and organizing them, which makes everything much easier.
“Oh.” Calla laughs softly to herself, realizing all at once. “Thanks for the help, Aiden.”
She’s hoping the Archives keep a copy of the Ketterbridge public school yearbooks, and that they’ll be digitized - yes. Thank you again, Aiden.
Calla tracks down the yearbook for Ralph and Aiden’s senior year, clicks through the pages until she gets to last name L, then sits back in disbelief.
Ralph is listed under the students who were absent for picture day. There’s no photo of him.
Calla laughs again, shaking her head. “Not gonna make this easy for me, are you, Ralph?”
Ralph didn’t show up for picture day his junior year or sophomore year, either. Freshman year is the last time he bothered to show up. At long last, a photo of him pops up on Calla’s screen, from when he must have been fourteen years old.
Calla blinks hard, then breaks into a slow, startled smile. Ralph is kind of baby-faced for presumably being fourteen, but he fixed the camera with such a fierce, dark glare for his picture. The contrast has Calla breathing out a quiet laugh before she can help it.
“Alright,” she giggles, messing with one of her piercings. “Well - that’ll work.”
Calla makes her own file of the picture, then stops, taking a second look at it. Ralph does look young for his age, but at the same time… there’s something unusual about his eyes. Something you don’t often see in the eyes of kids, unless the kid in question grew up way before they were supposed to.
Calla gazes searchingly into those glaring, defiant green eyes.
She drags the picture over to her search program and turns on facial recognition. Just before she hits the button to run it, she realizes what she’s doing and stops.
She winces guiltily, her eyes lingering on the picture of Ralph. Calla is a thief, and sometimes that involves some digital snooping, but she’s no stalker. Normally she really wouldn’t go this far looking into the history of a complete stranger who she’s only talked to once.
She sits there fighting with herself for a minute, then suddenly loses the battle all at once. Before she knows what she’s doing, she hits the button, surprising even herself. The search launches.
Calla sits back, biting down hard on her lip. She’s not gonna do anything with this information. She just really wants to know what kind of trouble Ralph is, because it’s - interesting, and a refreshing challenge, and -
Catching something from her peripheral vision, Calla jolts upright and wrenches her headphones down around her neck.
“Grandma,” she groans, pink-cheeked for no reason. “Please don’t sneak up on me like that!”
“I’m sorry, but how do I not do it when you have those headphones on?” Leyla laughs, stepping into her bedroom. “I just brought you some coffee. It seemed like it was about that time, no?”
“Oh - thank you.” Calla reaches for the mug her grandma is holding out, not sure why the hell she’s so flustered. “Sorry, I meant to come get it myself. I got distracted.”
Leyla affectionately runs a hand over Calla’s buzzed hair. “What’s got you smiling like that, turtle dove? It’s - it’s really nice to see.”
Calla blows out a frustrated breath, but it’s undeniably nice to have her grandma looking at her with a surprised smile. Makes a nice change from all the worried stares she’s been getting since she moved back home after the breakup.
“Nothing.” Calla makes a dismissive flicking gesture with her hand. “Just an interesting puzzle I’m trying to solve.”
“A puzzle, huh?” Leyla breaks into a grin, taking a sip from her own coffee. “What’s his name?”
“Stop, oh my god,” Calla groans, feeling the color rise in her cheeks. “It’s not that, okay? He’s a total jerk, believe me, you wouldn’t believe what he said to m-”
Calla breaks off as her grandma grins a little wider.
Calla sighs deeply, tilting her head back. “Don’t use your interrogation techniques on me.”
“I knew before you said anything, little darling,” Leyla laughs, leaning her shoulder against the doorframe. “A girl doesn’t smile like that at a puzzle.”
“Maybe some girls do.”
“Sure, if it’s a very cute puzzle. A pretty one, or a handsome one.”
“Okay, bye, grandma!”
“All I did was ask his name,” she says innocently, pushing her white hair over her shoulder. “You gave up the rest. I think you want to talk to someone about him.”
“No, no thank you!”
Leyla hesitates, then murmurs gently - “It’s been a long time, Calla. You could try to get back out there again, if you wanted to. Something tells me you’re ready.”
Calla actually has tried to get back out there a few times, with results so disappointing that she’s temporarily given up again and didn’t see the point in telling her family anything about it. But that has nothing to do with this.
She flashes her grandma an exasperated, affectionate look. “It’s really, really not what you’re thinking.”
Leyla gives her an understanding smile, even though she clearly doesn’t believe her. She straightens up and turns to go, then pauses in the doorway.
“Just tell me this, Calla. The man we’re talking about… he’s nothing like the last one, is he?”
The comparison between Ralph and the ex is so impossibly absurd that it actually draws a sharp little laugh from Calla. Her grandma smiles approvingly, reaches over to squeeze her shoulder.
“That’s the only answer I would be willing to accept!” she calls, as she heads off down the hallway. “I like him already!”
Calla stares after her, then whips around to face her computer as it chirps at her. The facial recognition search actually brought back a result.
It’s a thorough, powerful engine. Calla lovingly built it and she’s been slowly refining it ever since - and it came through to direct her into… the Ketterbridge Police Department digital archives. Unsurprising, because some instinct told Calla to have the program search that first.
The result is a logged piece of digital evidence. One single file.
Calla tilts her head to the side, then leans forward to read the evidence log related to the file.
It’s a video file. It was found on a laptop that was confiscated during a drug bust that broke up a pretty major operation run by the Carlins, a known organized crime family. The feds must have had a wealth of evidence against the Carlins, because so-called ‘secondary evidence’ from the raid was handed over to the local authorities and apparently forgotten about. Including the laptop this video came from.
Security footage, reads the file description.
If the laptop belonged to the people running the operation - the Carlins - it must be their security footage, not footage taken by the police. It was transferred with the rest of the hard drive contents into digital evidence, and the date last played is… never.
Calla lets out a snort of laughter. The cops really never fail to amaze. Who the hell knows what kind of evidence of criminal activity might be in this security footage? And they never even bothered to watch it after they logged it. The cop who signed off on the evidence log noted that there was probably little of interest, given that the laptop was old, no longer in use by the Carlins at the time it was confiscated. It had been found in the attic.
Calla downloads the video, then stops again, biting her lip.
“Oh, my god. What am I doing? This is too much, this is…”
She lets out a heavy sigh of self-directed, what-the-fuck frustration. She moves her mouse over the cancel button on the download, and - doesn’t click it.
Ralph’s face matched a face that was captured in this footage. That didn’t really sink in until now.
This is such a strange new angle to the puzzle that Calla honestly can’t help herself. She reads the embedded data on the video, then searches up the kind of security camera it came from. She’s baffled as to why an organized crime family would have security cameras that keep the recordings, even if they’re closed-circuit. Wouldn’t they want to avoid this exact situation?
It all clicks when Calla finds the product page for this kind of security camera. They haven’t been produced for years - this must be pretty old footage - but they’re HD, and they advertise a special feature.
Even when not in record/save mode, in the event of any damage to security cameras, the twenty minutes of footage preceding the damage will be autosaved to the computer, phone, or other remote device linked to your high-def, easy-to-install camera system! Great for insurance purposes!
Calla sits back in her chair and glances at the video file. Exactly twenty minutes long.
The footage was recorded exactly one year before the Carlin’s empire went down in that FBI raid.
She closes her eyes and tries to visualize the puzzle. Ralph Lanham, perfectly law-abiding citizen on the surface, with no infractions to his name aside from a non-stop marathon of misbehavior in high school, with no internet presence to speak of - is somewhere in this security footage, which was taken by a crime syndicate that was eventually busted by the feds. And at the end of this footage, something happened that destroyed the cameras.
Yeah, no. It’s too tempting, and Calla has already gone this far.
She stops her music, presses play on the video, and sits back to watch. Then she freezes, halfway through reaching for her cup of coffee. She snaps upright in her chair with a sharp gasp, her hands flying up over her mouth.
The video is divided up into a few big squares, footage of different rooms taken by multiple security cameras. There’s something to see in each one, but Calla’s wide, shocked eyes stare at the one on the bottom right.
Shown in that square is a small, dark room with no windows. The door is reinforced with steel, and has a tiny window in it. Like a jail cell, almost. The room is mostly empty, except -
Except for Ralph. All alone. Bound, unconscious, and curled up on the floor.
He’s laying on his side, his wrists tied up tightly behind his back. His cheek rests against the floor, his blonde hair falling forward over his closed eyes. A dark bruise has blossomed over half of his face, which is flecked with dried blood, but based on the complete motionlessness of his body, he must have been knocked out with something chemical.
“Holy shit,” Calla breathes, holding tight to the edge of her desk.
The sight of him lying there, perfectly still under his bondage, barely even breathing, his face speckled with blood beneath his closed eyes - it goes through Calla in a strange, overwhelming flash that briefly whites out all conscious thought. She desperately wants to reach into the video and rescue him. Her fingers move towards the screen before she catches herself, like she really could.
Ralph is probably around twenty years old in this video. It was recorded years and years ago, and Calla knows that. Still, she presses her trembling fingers over her mouth, overcome with bewilderment and alarm. A burst of dizzying anxiety rushes through her when she realizes that there’s plastic sheeting spread on the floor beneath Ralph, as if to make something planned for later easier to clean up.
Calla’s eyes dart across the other squares of footage, searching for an explanation. The footage is taken in a house, but not one that looks like anyone calls it home.
One camera feed shows a living room with a few built, burly men hanging out in it, talking over each other and playing cards, their words incomprehensible through the camera. One feed shows the beginning of a long country road outside, leading off into the dark trees. The feed beside that one shows a downward angle on the front porch, where two more men are splitting a cigarette. One feed shows an attic, stacked with some big boxes.
The last feed shows another cell-like room, with a heavy steel door. Calla’s eyes stop on the two other young men locked in this room. They’re tied up like Ralph is, they look closer to his age, and they’re also unconscious.
But - they’re starting to wake up.
Calla’s gaze snaps back to Ralph as he stirs, too. His hands twitch behind his back, and his nose crinkles up, his brow furrowing.
He lets out a choked, raspy cough, then takes a shuddering breath. His eyes very slowly blink open and do a sweep of the room.
He freezes, staring around, his grey-green eyes waking up and widening very fast. Other than that, though, nothing in his expression gives anything away. It’s impossible to tell what’s going through his mind.
He starts to roll over, and Calla flinches. Oh, god, all the blood rushing back into his arm after they left him chemically knocked out on his side, and with his wrists bound, it’s going to hurt so bad -
Ralph lets out a soft, sudden whimper. He curls up around himself, shivering and panting hard, pressing his forehead into the floor. His arm is trembling and seizing violently, straining against the bindings at his wrists.
He forces himself to go still, closes his eyes, and breathes.
When his breaths are coming deep and slow, he opens his eyes again, clenching his teeth. In one swift movement, with a soft hiss of pain, he sits up. He sits still for a second, panting, then staggers to his feet. Somehow he manages not to make a sound as he does it.
He steals up to the barred window like a shadow. He peers through it, checking for anyone in the hallway. Then he drops to one knee, crouching down.
Calla thinks he’s doubled up in pain again, and she doesn’t blame him. But he’s not, he’s - twisting around, struggling to get his hands to the lower leg of his jeans. There are a few fabric patches stitched into the black denim, with punky black designs Calla can’t quite make out, but - the fact that they’re there kind of suggests that Ralph patches up his clothes himself.
He’s pulling hard at the threads holding one of the patches in place. He snaps some vital thread, and the rest all give. The patch falls to hang from the one corner still attached to his jeans.
Ralph must have had something hidden on him, held in place between his jeans and the patch, because a flash of silver tumbles to the ground as soon as the patch gives.
Ralph leans back to pick up the razor-sharp, foldable combat knife. He flicks it open as he gets to his feet and backs up into the shadows.
His face screws up in concentration, his hands shifting in very slow, subtle motions behind his back. Calla can’t see what he’s doing with the knife, but after a moment, his hands break free from their binds.
Ralph bites back a gasp, dropping the knife. He doubles over and lets out a low, almost canine growl of pain as all the blood rushes back into his hands. He slumps against the wall, trembling and hugging his hands to himself, letting out a litany of curses too quiet for Calla to hear.
He snaps back upright with no warning, angrily shakes out his fingers, and seizes the knife. He snatches up the broken bindings that had been around his wrists and stuffs them into the pocket of his faded black jeans, then freezes, listening.
Calla watches in blank fear as Ralph hastily drops to sit on the floor where he was before, putting his hands behind his back as if they’re still bound. The patch on his jeans is hanging loose, but that doesn’t look out of place, considering Ralph’s faded, threadbare, battered clothes.
He levels his blazing green glare on the door, tilts his chin up, and waits.
A man unlocks the barred door and steps into the room, then closes it after himself, leaving another guy waiting just outside.
He’s a big man, with a lot of muscle, wearing a skull bandana looped around his neck, holding an unmarked bottle in his hand. There’s a lot to take in, but Calla’s eyes go straight to the pistol tucked into his belt.
Ralph doesn’t miss it, either. His eyes linger on it for a second before they flit up to the man’s face.
He looks up at the man with perfect calm, as if they’re on even footing.
“You’re awake,” the man observes, with a nasty smile. “You can call me Gage. Nice to finally meet you. From what I’ve heard about you, I thought you’d be older.”
Ralph says nothing, gazing up at the man like he’s taking the measure of him. This seems to annoy Gage, whose leering grin turns darker. Ralph’s eyes drop warily to Gage’s hand as he holds it out to show him something.
“You bit me, fucker,” Gage growls. “Even though you were knocked out. Don’t you ever relax?”
“You don’t realize how badly you’ve fucked up,” Ralph says softly, with eyes like glittering green crystals of ice.
This gives Gage pause, but he recovers quickly and shakes his head, sneering again.
“Can’t believe people have been telling me I should be afraid of you.” He grins at Ralph with obvious, mocking contempt. “Don’t see one reason why that’s the case. What I’m seeing is - pathetic. Pitiful.”
“You… you’re one of Carlin’s boys, aren’t you?” Ralph narrows his eyes at Gage. “How flattering. I’ve never had a sit-down at this level before. I must be rising through the ranks.”
“More than what’s good for you, boy,” hisses Gage, glowering down at Ralph. “You’ve caught our attention, and that, you don’t want.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that.” Ralph lazily tosses his blonde hair out of his eyes, apparently unfazed. “Chloroform ambush, huh? That’s a dirty trick.”
“It’s not chloroform. And it’s not dirty in my book.”
“No?” Ralph spits on the floor. “Sure tastes dirty to me.”
“We made it, we’re gonna use it.” Gage takes an angry step closer to Ralph, holding up the bottle in his hand. “I’ve got more, so behave. Or I’ll put you right back to sleep, and who knows how many fingers you’ll have left when you wake up? You almost bit off one of mine, I have no qualms about taking off a few of yours.”
Ralph tilts his head to the side, to all appearances calm, curious, and vaguely amused. “Can I ask what I’ve done to warrant such personalized attention from the Carlin family? Besides biting you.”
“You’re new to the big leagues, so you don’t know.”
“Know what?”
“That we don’t like newcomers in this game. You’re not welcome here.”
Ralph lets out a sharp, humorless little laugh.
“I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been welcome anywhere. That’s never stopped me before.” Ralph pauses, then adds, almost as an afterthought - “It doesn’t matter, anyways. I’ll be welcome here once I’ve taken your territory over.”
Gage blinks at him in startled, bewildered outrage.
“Carlin will make you pay for those words,” he snaps, his voice seething. “I’ll have to tell him you didn’t get our message.”
“Oh, nah, I did. I’ve got a return message, actually: fuck him, and fuck you, too.”
Calla presses her hands over her mouth, wondering if Ralph somehow forgot that this man has a gun.
Gage is steadily getting more and more pissed off with each amused, cutting word flung in his face. He’s advancing slowly on Ralph, almost into Ralph’s arm span.
“I can make this the worst day of your life,” Gage snarls.
Ralph smiles up at him with such frigid, sub-zero coldness in his eyes that Gage freezes right where he is.
“No,” Ralph laughs softly, still with that terrifying smile. “You really can’t. That’s why you should be afraid of me.”
Calla doesn’t see what happens next. She blinked, and that’s how fast it all went down. Suddenly Ralph is on his feet, and the bigger man is pressed face-first up against the wall, pinned there by Ralph’s hand on the back of his neck. Calla can’t see where the combat knife ended up, but based on how perfectly still Gage is holding himself, it’s pressed nice and snug against his ribs.
“I’m only gonna ask once,” Ralph snarls, right in Gage’s ear. “Where are my boys?”
Gage speaks through gritted teeth, red-faced with fury. “Room - room down the hall.”
“Hurt? I hope the answer is no, for your sake.”
“No more’n you.”
Gage misses it, but a flash of pure relief goes across Ralph’s face.
“If you’re lying to me…” he growls warningly in Gage’s ear.
“I’m fucking not! It’s the other reinforced door!”
Ralph weighs that frantic answer, seems to find it acceptable. He keeps the hand with the knife where it is, but reaches around to wrench the skull bandana free from Gage’s neck.
“Open it,” he says, with a nod at the bottle in Gage’s hand, pressing the bandana over his own nose and mouth.
Gage complies, using his thumb and his forefinger, breathing slowly against the tip of the knife.
“Now take a nice, deep breath,” Ralph tells him.
Gage hesitates, and Ralph drops his voice to a growl so cold it could shatter something.
“Now.”
Gage flinches, curses to himself, then takes a breath from the bottle. He slumps forward into the wall, and Ralph catches the bottle out of his hand as he topples to the ground.
Ralph carefully sets the bottle down and takes a few quick steps back. He stows the combat knife in his pocket and knots the bandana over his nose and mouth. Only when his face is covered does he come back over to cap the bottle.
He rolls Gage over and briskly searches his clothes. With cool, unshakeable focus, he takes Gage’s keys and gun, then retrieves the bottle. He finds a wad of fabric in Gage’s back pocket, and he takes that too, being careful not to hold it too near to his face.
When he’s taken everything he wants, he straightens up to check the window in the door again, leaning at an angle, his back to the wall.
For some time now, Calla has been staring at her screen, stunned into motionless silence, her hands gone limp on her desk. Her cheeks are burning, her heart hammering. Her lips are slightly parted, her eyes enormous, her head tilted so far to the side that it’s almost resting against her shoulder.
She realizes what she’s doing and sits up sharply, the blush in her cheeks spiking.
On the screen, Ralph silently unlocks the door, shifts the wad of fabric in his hand, and wrenches the guard right outside in. He only has time to make the fastest startled little noise before Ralph has the fabric pressed over his mouth. It must have some of the stuff from the bottle on it, because he slumps over almost immediately, just like Gage did.
Ralph leaves him piled on top of Gage. He slips outside and silently shuts the door after himself. He locks it, sticks the gun into the back of his jeans, then glances down the hall into the living room.
The guard disappeared so quickly and silently that no one caught notice, but the hallway opens right into the living room, and there are a whole bunch of rowdy Carlin family boys hanging out in there, talking and eating and playing cards.
Ralph is standing directly in their line of view. All it would take is one of them turning their heads and glancing at the hallway.
Ralph clearly realizes that. He freezes, goes utterly motionless, his head turned towards the Carlin men.
Without making a sound, he turns and goes further down the hallway, away from the living room. Walking at a perfectly normal pace, like he belongs here and he’s not doing anything particularly interesting.
Calla tracks his progress across the camera angles, watching him come down the hallway. He’s mouthing something to himself as he stops and turns to put the key in the door of the other cell room, in full view of any Carlin man who might glance his way. Calla narrows her eyes, reading his lips.
Fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-five, forty-two…
He’s silently doing multiplication tables. Apparently that works for him, considering how steady his hands are as he unlocks the door and steps into the other cell room.
“Shawn, Bailey,” he hisses.
Calla’s eyes flit to the other camera angle as the two young men sitting up on the floor look up in relief, then start to say something very fast to Ralph, trying to warn him. Nodding frantically to the Carlin guard in the room, who’s hunching over his cigarette, about to light it.
Ralph shuts the door after himself right as the guard whips around to face him. Ralph gives him a hard shove before he can find his footing, and the guy crashes back into the wall, gasping. Ralph opens the bottle and splashes it at him, urgently saying something to his guys on the ground, who kick themselves backwards and as far away as possible.
The man had the wind knocked out of him, but he straightens up like he’s about to dive for Ralph - then crumples forward, having taken a few big breaths of the liquid spattered across his shirt.
Ralph freezes, panting, listening at the door for any signs that the commotion was overheard. Then he lets out a breath of relief, caps the bottle, and turns to his guys. He pulls the bandana down as he rushes over to them.
Calla watches with her fingers laced over her mouth as he starts cutting their hands free with the combat knife. They both look up at him gratefully, clearly overcome with relief to see him.
“What the fuck!” one of them is saying, keeping his voice quiet. “The bastards hit us with chloroform? What sort of dirty shit is that?”
“More than that,” Ralph says, tossing his head in the direction of the gun tucked into his jeans. “Check that out.”
“Holy sh- ow, Jesus Christ!” Bailey winces and groans softly as his hands come free. “Goddamnit, that hurts so bad! And they came at us with guns? We should frag ‘em, boss! Give them a taste of their own medicine!”
Ralph finishes cutting Shawn free, then turns around to look at Bailey. Calla can’t see his expression, but Bailey can, and he flinches, shrinking back.
“That’s not the kind of operation I’m running, and you fuckin’ know that,” Ralph hisses, straightening up and pulling Shawn to his feet. “We don’t do shit like that.”
“You sure?” Bailey says regretfully, staggering upright. “Even after today?”
Ralph looks at him in silence, then pulls the gun out and offers it to him, grip-first.
“Go on, then,” he says, looking right into Bailey’s eyes. “Do it.”
He nods at the unconscious guy on the floor.
Bailey blinks hard at Ralph, completely taken aback. He hesitates, rubbing his sore wrists, shifting uneasily. Suddenly he looks a little pale, and he doesn’t reach for the gun.
“That’s what I thought.” Ralph tucks the gun away again with an approving nod. “For a second I was worried I’d recruited the wrong kind of people into my operation.”
“No chance, boss,” Shawn assures him, slapping Bailey’s shoulder. “We’re just - shook up, this has been-”
“Well, get it the fuck together,” Ralph says sharply, then breaks into a grin. “It’s time to have some fun, yeah?”
Both Shawn and Bailey blink at Ralph in surprise, then slowly start to smile, too. Ready to ride on his confidence, apparently, even with their own shaken. Bailey bounces a little, stretching out his sore arms, and Shawn goes to collect the bottle that Ralph left on the floor.
“Find something to cover your nose and mouth,” Ralph orders, quickly checking the door window, his back pressed up flat to the wall.
“Fucking chloroform,” Shawn mutters, wincing as he hands the bottle back to Ralph.
“I don’t think it’s that, man. I actually don’t know what it is, but it works. Carlin likes to mix up his own stuff, so I’ve heard. This is probably something he came up with. Not lethal, clearly.” Ralph glances through the barred window set into the far wall. “How long have we been out, a few hours?”
Bailey turns to squint at the window, too. “Looks like it.”
“Then we’ve got some time before anyone wakes up.” Ralph glances right up at the security camera. “But we’ve gotta move fast. There are cameras here that could be feeding to somewhere off-site. They’re gonna realize something’s up any second and send in reinforcements. Carlin might already be on his way here.”
Bailey and Shawn are restless with gathering energy. Ralph hooks a finger at them, waits until they lean in to listen, then says firmly -
“This is the one and only time we’re resorting to chemical warfare, you hear me?”
“Got a plan, boss?”
“Not a very elegant one, but yeah.” Ralph makes sure the door is unlocked, turns to check that his boys have their faces covered, and gestures for them to fall back against the far wall. They press themselves up against it, near where the barred window is cracked slightly open. “Don’t breathe once it starts. If you need to breathe, get back to the window.”
Before they can ask any questions, Ralph opens the cell room door and leans out into the hallway.
“Hey!” he calls sharply.
The talk and laughter in the living room instantly fall silent as every startled face whips around to face Ralph.
He points to the door he just opened, a faintly puzzled look on his face.
“Is this door supposed to be locked?” he calls.
There’s a bewildered, shocked silence in the living room, and then everyone springs to their feet at once. They rush down the hallway in one stampede, shouts rising into the air. The front door crashes open at the sudden burst of noise, and the guards on the porch rush to join the others.
Ralph retreats back into the cell room and tugs the skull bandana back up over his face. He waits until the door swings open and a horde of Carlin men fill the doorway, then takes a big, deep breath and holds it. He twists open the bottle and throws all the remaining contents in one splash.
It spatters across the chests of the men in the doorway, who make it about two feet further before they stagger to a stop, legs crumpling out from beneath them. The row of guys behind them trip over their comrades, and before they can regain their footing or figure out what happened, Shawn, Ralph, and Bailey rush them. Calla just has time to see Ralph duck beneath a punch and draw his own fist back for a swing before it devolves into chaos.
Everything happens very quickly after that.
When it’s all over, the three left standing rush to the window, gasping in big breaths of fresh air.
“Shit, that worked!” Shawn laughs, staring at the unconscious Carlin men all over the floor.
Ralph breaks into a victorious grin, clasping Bailey’s shoulder. “There’s the taste of their own medicine you wanted them to have, Bailey boy!”
All three of them laugh, and Ralph runs a hand over his darkly-bruised face.
“C’mon, help me,” he says. “Carlin’s gonna show up any minute.”
Calla watches in frozen disbelief as Ralph and his boys drag all of the knocked-out bodies onto the porch, where they gather them into one big pile. When they’re done, Ralph dusts off his hands, then drops down to sit on the porch step, Shawn and Bailey standing tall at his back.
Ralph takes a pack of cigarettes off of one of the unconscious Carlin men, lights it up, and leans back onto his palm, surveying the landscape in front of the porch like this is any other night.
Right as he does, a black car comes whipping up to the house, moving so fast that its nose is visible in the porch camera angle when it skids to a stop. Two others follow it, parking behind the first one.
Ralph takes a slow drag on his cigarette as a man gets out of the car and strides into view of the camera, glowering darkly at him.
He stops still when he sees the pile of bodies to Ralph’s left.
“What - what the fuck?” he sputters, all of the color draining out of his face.
Other men get out of the cars to surround him, and a shocked murmur moves through the ranks before the man in front - Carlin himself, Calla recognizes him from the newspapers from years ago - lifts a hand to make them fall quiet.
“You bastard,” he snarls at Ralph, still staring at the bodies, aghast. “How the fuck - how - what-?”
“Carlin,” Ralph says breezily, getting to his feet. He puts his hands in his pockets, the cigarette dangling from his mouth. “If you wanted to meet me, you could’ve just asked. But instead you decided to fuck with me. That wasn’t very smart, was it? This right here is a monument to your stupidity, really.”
He nods at the pile of bodies on the porch, and Carlin stares at him like he can’t believe his eyes.
“All your men,” Ralph sighs regretfully, like it’s a shame. “Full day of losses for you. Especially because I’m gonna keep your house for my op. I’m gonna have those prison rooms taken out, though. I don’t believe in locking people up, which I see doesn’t factor much into your ideology.”
“I - will - kill - you,” Carlin breathes, his wide eyes still on the bodies.
“That’s not smart, either,” Ralph says lightly. “If you want your men back, anyways.”
Carlin’s eyes flit sharply to Ralph. “Back?”
“Yeah. I’m in a good mood tonight, so I left everyone with a pulse. All of them. Nice of me, right? Especially after the treatment you gave me.”
Carlin blinks at Ralph, then snaps his attention back to the pile as one of the men groans. The sign of life sends another ripple of murmurs through the gathered men behind Carlin, who angrily holds up his hand at them again.
“Your turn to be nice.” Ralph uses his cigarette to point at the unconscious Carlin men. “Get them off of my porch. Now.”
He puts a lot of emphasis on the my in my porch. Carlin stands there with his hands fisted, without answering - and one of his men suddenly darts around him, rushes up to the pile. He grabs one of the guys on top and starts dragging him away. As soon as he does, the other men behind Carlin do the same, rushing forward to retrieve their unconscious friends.
Ralph doesn’t even turn to look at them. He and Carlin stay with eyes locked.
“You don’t want to fuck with me again, Carlin,” Ralph says, in a soft, dangerous voice.
“Maybe now I do. More than ever.”
“Hey, if that’s what you want. I don’t mind going on that journey with you. Just know only one of us is coming back from it.” Ralph inclines his head very slightly to the side, leveling that arctic-cold smile on him. “Do I look worried about which one of us that will be?”
Carlin stares at him like he’s trying to murder him with his eyes.
“Oh. One more thing.” Ralph pulls the skull bandana from around his neck, then uses it to hold up the gun. “If I hear about you pulling any more chemical attacks, this might find its way into the wrong hands. Doesn’t have heat on it, right? ‘Cause none of us have touched it, but there’s probably fingerprints all over this thing. I can’t even guess which one of your boys they belong to.”
Ralph actually has touched the gun, but you would never know from his expression.
Carlin blanches, his face dark with fury. “This isn’t the end of this.”
“No? I give your operation maybe one more year before it goes down in flames.” Ralph grins at him, then takes a drag of his cigarette. “Maybe I’ll be the one to light the fire. Definitely will, if you ever try to put me in a cage again. I might just have to make an example out of you, Carlin.”
Carlin looks like he wants to strangle him right then and there, but he’s also looking at Ralph very differently from how anyone did when he was tied up on the floor.
He hesitates, running a hand over his forehead. “The - the product in the attic…”
“Oh, is there some?” Ralph’s eyes brighten in surprise. “That’s nice. Mine, now. Unless - what’s the quality like? I wouldn’t want to flood the market with cheap shit. Might just get rid of it. We’ll see.”
Carlin is almost panting with fury.
“They told me you always bring your A-game, Warlord,” he snarls, his glaring eyes snapping up to Ralph. “Guess they were right. But you’re gonna need it every day of your damn life, if you’re going up against me.”
Ralph watches Carlin from over his cigarette, the shadows dancing over his bruised, battered face. He leans slightly forward, casting his shadow over the group of Carlin men. He breathes out a long stream of smoke through his nose as he fixes Carlin with a slow, bloodied, ice-cold smile.
“You haven’t seen my A-game,” he says softly.
Without raising his voice even slightly, but a visible shiver goes through the men behind Carlin.
Ralph turns to go back into the house. Shawn and Bailey follow him inside, leaving Carlin to stare in blank fury. But all of his men have been gathered from the porch, and the others look deeply uneasy, desperate to go.
Carlin grits his teeth for a second, then spins on his heel and storms back to his car. It disappears from the camera view as Ralph leads the way back into the living room. Calla’s eyes flit from the car to follow him. He was saying something about calling someone named Noah, but he breaks off when they get back into the living room.
“What do you think, boys?” Ralph asks, breaking into a wide grin. He throws his arms out wide, does a slow turn as he gazes around. “Like our new op house? We’ve gotta take out their security cameras, but hey, I’d call today a win.”
Shawn and Bailey both laugh, shaking their heads in disbelief.
“Can’t believe we didn’t need that,” Shawn says, nodding to the gun in Ralph’s hand.
“You know, boss,” Bailey jumps in, “Some of the boys say you won’t let us use them because you don’t know how to use them, yourself.”
Ralph lets out a snort of laughter, rolling his eyes. “You dopes really think I’d step into the arena without knowing all the weapons?”
“That’s just what the boys have been saying.”
Ralph pauses, glancing sidelong at Bailey. He breaks into a tiny smirk, drops the bandana, and settles the gun neatly into his palm. He looks up at the security camera in the living room.
This must be the moment that the facial recognition picked up, because Ralph smiles right at the camera as he lifts his arm and aims the gun.
The camera must have exploded with enough force to frag the wiring of all the rest, because all squares of the video footage freeze and fuzz out at once.
Calla stares at the frozen screen, reeling, her hands pressed over her mouth. Then she sinks almost all the way down in her chair, turning her blushing face towards the cold breeze drifting in through the window.
Oh, her fast-beating heart sighs.
And then - wait a fucking second.
Warlord…
Warlord?
Calla backs up the video to the moment right before Ralph pulled the trigger. The dark glitter of his eyes looking up at the camera, the wicked little smirk turning up his mouth.
Calla remains completely motionless for a full minute, then slowly sits back, her head spinning.
She never knew who he was, she didn’t know - and that guy, Carlin, whose empire got overrun and picked off piece by piece until it eventually collapsed into the hands of his competitors, right before the FBI rammed down his door, roughly a year after this video was taken - he called Ralph -
Warlord.
Calla presses her fingers over her mouth again as it dawns on her that she slapped a cigarette out of the hand of one of the most notorious drug kingpins on this coast.
Then she spreads her hands at no one in total bewilderment, remembering that he stared at her with enormous puppy dog eyes after she did that, then sent one of his friends to apologize on his behalf for being rude.
Then she remembers the women’s studies textbook, and she sinks down in her chair, out at sea.
Part of her wants to start laughing, part of her is so confused as to go blank, and part of her is still thinking about that doe-eyed, eager, breathless way the Warlord stared at her.
She keeps some rough track of her fellow underworld players, and she has heard of the Warlord. Most of the organized crime in the area runs through long-established families, keeping up the tradition and handing it down through generations. But every now and then a rare talent comes along and breaks into the game from the outside.
There’s currently only one who fought his way in, started with nothing, and rose up through the ranks purely on his unmatched talent and force of will. Everyone had underestimated him, and he’d taken advantage of that to quietly work his competitors into the dust before they even realized what had happened.
Calla has heard about him, some wild rumors, some that had the ring of potential truth. She’d never thought too hard about him, but she did have some innate sense of respect for him. She respects anyone willing to live their whole life on the proving grounds, and the Warlord made that choice the minute he stepped into the game.
Calla knows that he had none of the advantages of his competitors, but still managed to run circles around them and eventually come to dominate his own impressive spread of territory. She respected that, too. And despite the number of operatives he’s known to have, the Warlord and his commandos never seem to get caught. Which is saying something, because the Warlord’s boys are known for being - well - wild. Half the reason why people are so afraid of them is because you never know what they’re going to do.
Calla always pictured the Warlord as an old guy with a cigar, running the show from some palatial compound somewhere. She did not expect the Warlord to be a young man in his mid-twenties. She didn’t expect him to be so very easy on the eyes. She definitely didn’t expect to run into him in Ketterbridge with a women’s studies textbook in his hand.
But - that’s - yeah, that’s him. The same person who looked at her like that.
Calla sits there nibbling the tip of her thumb, then catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror and realizes the deep blush in her cheeks hasn’t gone away at all, despite the cool air.
Before she can even process that, it strikes her that she’s tracked down what must be the only digital piece of evidence linking Ralph Lanham and the Warlord. It’s in the hands of the cops, even if they haven’t realized it. Ralph was somewhere around twenty years old in the video, just taking off as the Warlord. And he didn’t know the cameras would automatically save a recording to an off-site computer if they were damaged. Seems like even the Carlin family didn’t realize that, because they never found or used this footage.
It’s gone unnoticed, but it’s been the Warlord’s one mistake.
Calla stares at her computer for a second, then rushes to get back into the Ketterbridge Police evidence archives. It’s not like anyone is looking for this footage or even aware that it exists, but for some reason her heart is hammering all the way up until she’s got the police copy of the file pulled up.
She corrupts the hell out of it, then adds some surprises to it, until the file is so toxic with viruses that any cop who might click on it would destroy not only the video, but their entire computer. Probably cause a temporary crash of the station’s entire network, too.
Only then does Calla let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding. Now she’s the only one with this video.
She blinks hard, the realization of what she just did catching up to her. She bites down on her lip and gathers her knees to her chest, then snatches up her coffee and takes a sip, like that’ll put everything back to normal.
“Why am I looking out for you?” she asks Ralph, directing the question to his face in the paused video.
She has a lot of questions she’d like to ask him, really. So many.
For some reason she notes the little bump in Ralph’s nose, left there by a bad break. It’s already there and healed in this video, which means it was from some separate, unrelated incident. Some other trouble Ralph must have gotten himself into.
Calla goes over to her bed and stretches out on the homemade quilt, rests her cheek against the pillow. Her eyes fall on the discarded disguises from her earlier excursion. She stares at it all, deep in thought.
She closes her eyes.
In her memory, she looks right into the grey-green of Ralph’s eyes. She watches the burning reflection of the fire as it dances through them.
Something stirs in her chest, reaching out for the flames.
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