Back at the small apartment he rented, Chase was surprised by what he had done earlier that night. He couldn’t remember ever having stolen anything in his life, but the evidence of his criminality was there before him on his living room table: the wallet and the phone.
He understood, of course, why and how it had happened—how it had been the culmination of a series of events that began with him meeting and falling in love in with a young woman, with whom he had moved to Jackson, Mississippi, a city he disliked, from Louisville, which he had quite liked. His girlfriend’s mother and two brothers lived nearby, and she had wanted to be closer to them. So he had given up a job he liked—writing content for a boutique digital media firm—and taken one that he liked far less, as a contracted service associate at a global private equity firm.
In under a year, however, he had lost both the girl and the job. When he lost the girl, it had saddened him, but he clung to the hope that perhaps they could reconcile. Later, when he lost his job—just earlier that day, the day of his theft—he wasn’t sad at all. He was furious. That morning, he had been told that the firm had decided to replace their service staff with an AI platform in which they had invested. No notice, no severance, not even a pat on the back. His manager had handed him and his colleagues flimsy cardboard boxes to fill with whatever personal belongings they had kept at their desks and shove off.
Chase had complied, while down the hall a stern-looking man in an expensive suit—who Chase recognized as a senior partner, or managing director, or senior vice something-or-other—stood watching with arms folded and a look of grim satisfaction as Chase and the rest of the no-longer-needed, nor appreciated, help staff shuffled off.
When Chase climbed into his Ford Taurus, he had planned to just drive home, but on the way to his apartment, he broke out in a cold sweat that clung to the curtain of dark hair that fell over one side of his face. He pulled over to the side of the road and let traffic whiz past him until his breathing became easier and the pounding of his heart slowed to a normal pace.
What would he do now?
He decided the best course of action was to find a cheap bar and drink—which he proceeded to do. He found a particularly rundown, nameless establishment and drank one whisky and Coke after another. He wasn’t much of a drinker, really, so after just a couple of drinks, he felt his face flush. After another, he found that he didn’t so much mind the country music coming from a jukebox that, despite offering thousands of options, seemed set on playing the same half dozen songs.
The clientele looked a little rough to him. His gaze drifted over a landscape of ragged scars and crudely executed prison tats on biceps, elbows, necks and faces.
Suddenly, the door swung open, and into the bar strode a man in a dark jacket and tie, with graying hair combed meticulously over a bald spot that no amount of grooming could conceal. He took a seat in a booth at the far end of the room from the bar, and Chase noticed that he was the very same son of a bitch who had presided over his dismissal earlier that day.
This, coupled with the drinks he’d already had, set his blood to boiling. He ordered another one and watched the smug bastard play with his phone and wallet, then leave both on the table and head to the bathroom.
Overcome by a sudden urge, Chase walked over, pocketed both the phone and the wallet, left enough cash on his table to cover his drinks, and staggered out into the already dark November evening.
Sobriety was creeping in—and guilt along with it. He told himself he would check the wallet and drop it off at the front desk of the law firm the following day.
When he opened it, however, he changed his mind.
There were five twenty-dollar bills and a yellow Post-it note with a short message: Thank you and good luck.
Had that message been meant for him, he wondered? Had that heartless shitbag actually had some sort of pang of conscience and followed him to that crappy little bar to leave him a thank-you?
It didn’t seem to fit what little he knew of the man, and it seemed a strange way of going about things. Why not just send him the money and a nice letter with his last paycheck?
He turned to the phone, which glowed to life at his touch. Above the slide bar was a message: Swipe to Unlock.
Well, he thought, he’d already done one of those two things.
As if in response, the phone unlocked itself.
A few seconds later, it began buzzing with an incoming call, which he answered.
“New job. Delivery. Pays seven thousand,” said the voice on the other end. It sounded English and made him think of the actor Jason Statham in one of those Guy Ritchie movies.
“What? Who is this?”
The caller let the question hang in silence—tense, suspended, like something dangling from the end of a spiderweb.
“Hello?” Chase asked again.
“You’re new, yeah?”
“New? I don’t know—what is this? What job?”
There was a long sigh on the other end of the line. “I assume you’ve recently come into possession of a phone. I’ll spare you the indignity of explaining how that came to be—I can pretty well work that bit out for myself.”
“How… do you know that?” Chase asked, and then after a pause: “What… what else do you know?”
“I know about that sweet little number you like so much. Kaitlyn, is it? I know some bloke she met at the gym two months back is givin’ it to her right now.”
Chase gritted his teeth and clenched a fist, digging his fingernails into his palm. He found himself overcome—for the second time that day—by an uncharacteristic flash of rage.
“I know all sorts of things,” the voice continued. “I’m the dispatcher. It’s my job to know. You have the phone now, so that makes you the runner. I call with jobs. You do the jobs. You get paid. That’s how it works.”
It was Chase’s turn to let the question linger unanswered.
“What if I turn down the job,” he asked.
“That would be a most grievous error of judgment. Let me ask you—does your mom still reside at 1244 Pine Lane in Berks County, Pennsylvania? Neighborhood’s not what it used to be, eh? More crime, from what I hear. Bad things can happen…”
Chase felt a coldness radiating out from his chest through the rest of his body. Between the money—which he needed—and the thought of something happening to his mother, his decision was already made.
“Okay. Okay, I understand. What do I need to do?”
“I’ll text you the address. There’s a truck waiting there for you. Keys in the ignition. Drop off location already programmed in. That’s it. Easy as piss.”
Then, as either an afterthought, enticement, threat—or some combination thereof—the dispatcher added, “I’ll meet you there.”
***
At exactly 12:52 a.m., after some difficulty finding small service roads and side streets, Chase brought the white delivery van to a stop in the parking lot by storage locker forty-four. It was like the ones he’d seen in the show Storage Wars—what looked like a one-car garage, set alongside dozens of others, all equally nondescript.
On the right side of the door stood a burly-looking man in a long jacket, silent and still. Chase assumed that this was the man who called himself the dispatcher. At a glance, not only his voice but his shape did indeed resemble the English actor Statham. But as Chase drew closer, he realized no one would ever actually confuse the two.
The man’s shorn head revealed an oddly lumpy cranium, and it looked as though his facial features had been applied hastily from mismatched parts. His left eye was slightly higher than his right, and they were of two different colors—though in the yellow light of the predawn darkness, Chase could only tell that one was light colored and the other dark. His nose curved to the left, apparently having been broken at least once, and the lower half of his right ear was missing.
His skin was pocked, pitted, and crisscrossed with a variety of lines that had not occurred naturally—the overall effect turning his face into a topographical map of brutality.
“You the dispatcher?” he asked, averting his eyes and looking instead back to the van.
“Aye,” Not-Statham replied.
From around the corner appeared two others who walked briskly towards the van. The shorter of the two was of medium build, with a hooked nose and eyes he kept fixed on the large plastic bin he rolled in front of him. The taller one—clearly the higher-ranking of the pair—sucked on a particularly foul-smelling, unfiltered cigarette, which he flicked away as he reached the back of the van.
The mutant, bizzarro-version Statham lumbered toward the van as well, and Chase followed. They stopped at a respectable distance as the other two men worked.
As the shorter man unlatched and opened the back of the van, Chase noticed an unusual tattoo on the back of his wrist—what looked like the same sort of slide bar that opened the phone he’d filched. The other man had the same marking, he realized.
From inside the van, the smaller man began lifting what appeared to be heavy trash bags into his bin until it was full, then wheeled it off into the storage unit.
“Should we help them?” Chase asked.
“No,” Not-Statham replied. “Your job was delivery. You done that. So now wait till they’re done, then I’ll give you new instructions.”
“What are those tattoos? On their wrists?”
“Means they’re guild members. You don’t talk to them. They don’t talk to you. And if ever you see that mark anywhere but on a job, you make scarce. Understand?”
Chase nodded, even though he was pretty sure he understood none of what he’d just been told.
The smaller man returned, rolling his bin to the back of the van, while the taller man stood beside him, watching a video on his phone. As the smaller man lifted one of the bags, it split, spilling out a few tubelike things that hit the ground with a wet sound.
The taller man looked up angrily from his phone. “Yalla!” he spat, smacking the back of his companion’s head. The shorter man threw up his hands, uttered what sounded to Chase like bitter gibberish, and began lifting the things from the ground.
Limbs, he realized with alarm. Severed human arms, terminating at the elbows and shoulders in ragged, bloody stumps.
Once the remaining bags had been loaded into the cart, the taller man nodded at Chase and the dispatcher, then walked off behind the short man.
“What the fuck is this,” Chase hissed once the two men were out of earshot. “Those were arms. Human fucking arms!”
The dispatcher—whom Chase could no longer associate with Statham—leaned over and said into his ear, “Guess that makes you an arms dealer, don’t it?” He chuckled without mirth at his own joke, then reached into a pocket in his jacket and pulled out a thick manila envelope and a set of keys.
“Pay for your first job. Keys are for the sedan at the far end of the lot. Directions are programmed into the navigation. Drop it off, go home, and wait for your next call.”
Too stunned to reply, Chase simply accepted the envelope and keys, did as he was told, and returned home. He put the phone in the top drawer of the nightstand next to his bed and lay on top of the sheets, staring blankly at the ceiling until sunlight banished the shadows to their daytime hideouts.
***
For three days after the job, Chase existed in a state of limbo that skirted the line between panic and existential dread. Should he call someone? The police? FBI? NSA? He didn’t think he could do so without risking the well-being of himself and his family. And anyone close to him—friends or even acquaintances—he’d be putting in danger.
So he waited and checked the phone every couple of hours. He thought of getting in his car and driving until he came to a river or gorge into which to throw the phone, but that would likely antagonize whatever strange brotherhood (what had the dispatcher called it—a guild of some kind?) he had gotten mixed up with.
On the second day, to try and take his mind off some impending raid by law enforcement, he used some of the money he’d made to buy a new high-end flat-screen television, which he mostly sat in front of without really watching or hearing.
By the third day, he’d started to feel calmer. Maybe they wouldn’t call him again. After all, he thought, if he were part of some international criminal cabal and tasked with selecting someone to run errands, he would be the absolute last person on earth he’d consider for the job.
But then, from another perspective, wasn’t it precisely the sheer improbability of his involvement that made him such an ideal choice?
His internal debate was cut short when the phone began buzzing with an incoming call.
Reluctantly, he answered.
“New job. Alibi. Pays fifteen thousand,” the dispatcher said flatly.
“Alibi?” Chase said. “I don’t think I like the sound of that.”
“You should. It’s an easy one. In ten minutes, you leave your apartment and head to an address I’m texting you now. It’s an old warehouse. Doors open. Go all the way to the office at the back of the building. There’s a pair of gloves and a phone. Put on the gloves. Wait for a call. Answer the phone. Even if it sounds like no one is there, let the call go until it ends. Leave the phone and the gloves where you found them. Leave the building. Go back home. Like I said—easy.”
Chase mulled it over. The idea of making fifteen thousand dollars for listening to a phone made his head swim.
“Okay, but if I do this, I don’t want it to be my last job.”
This evoked no response. Just as Chase began to think the line had gone dead, he received a text with an address.
“I’ve sent you the location,” the dispatcher said. “Go there now.”
The call ended before Chase could confirm that his request had been communicated—and granted.
He put on jeans, a black T-shirt, and a baseball cap pulled low over his face. If it hadn’t been well after nine at night, he might have worn dark glasses as well.
More conspicuous for his attempt at invisibility, he climbed into his car and drove to the destination.
When he arrived, he double-checked the address, parked the car, and pushed through a heavy door which was, as promised, unlocked. He flipped a light switch along one of the walls, but nothing happened. Using the flashlight from his cell phone, he found a stairway leading downward. He brushed away cobwebs, and his footsteps sent clouds of dust swirling through the air.
His footsteps echoed through the space, which seemed to stretch endlessly into the darkness. The poured concrete floor was stained with water that had leaked in through the partially ruined ceiling. The air smelled faintly of crumbling stone, rot, and disuse.
He found the office along the back wall and crept inside. The bare bulb of a lamp—sans shade—bathed the room in sodium-colored light, which deepened rather than dispelled the gloom. There, on a table, were a pair of latex gloves and a phone. He sat down, stretched the yellow gloves over his hands, and waited.
A short time later, the phone rang. Chase answered.
He heard a song—Your Love by the Outfield—nearly drowned out by the sound of wind and things whizzing past. Traffic noises. Someone had called him from a moving car.
He closed his eyes and imagined he was a passenger, zipping down main streets, then onto less busy roads, then side streets. The sound of traffic and wind had faded. The music ended abruptly.
The passenger door opened. The car made a few electronic sounding dings.
Heavy feet crunching gravel.
Then—very faintly—a woman’s voice. Surprised and unhappy.
“Jesus, Charlie, you can’t be here! I have a court order that says if—”
POP!
Chase dropped the phone on the table, eyes now wide open. Mouth too.
A couple seconds later, he picked it back up with trembling fingers and held it cautiously to his ear.
POP! POP! POP!
Three more times—like a car backfiring next to his head.
Then the sound of feet crunching again on gravel. A car door opening. A car door closing. The engine roaring to life.
The call ended, and Chase continued to sit there, paralyzed. He imagined every nerve in his body made of ice, like some weird, human-shaped tree after an ice storm.
He rose with effort and left the building more quickly than he had arrived.
