Like a Boss (36 page)

“I sure hope not,” I said. “Though that’s going to depend on what she chooses.”

He stuck out his tongue and ran into the house.

Ethylene shifted the bag, keeping a firm grip on the straps. “Nineteen thousand, huh?”

“And twenty.”

Ethylene grunted and turned back to the house. She put her fingers in her mouth and blew a whistle that rattled the windows. “It’s a work day!” she yelled. “Get a move on!” There was a clatter of feet, and, within minutes, every working Shavelson had assembled in the front hall. A few of them weren’t wearing pants, but everyone had their kit bags.

Ethylene jerked a thumb at me and addressed her family. “If what this woman has to say is true, then we’re all going back to work. If it isn’t true, you can throw her into the ocean off Sou’s Reach.”

Diesel Shavelson Thompson cracked her knuckles, then cracked her husband’s. I just smiled. “If you’ll all follow me, we can get started.” I hustled down the street, the Shavelsons all muttering amongst themselves. Only Ethylene had a pai; all her kids had to exchange information the old-fashioned way.

When we rounded the corner to Bloor, I saw six other people holding kit bags huddling around the terminal. I stepped back to Ethylene’s side. “Send a little message, did we?”

She
harrumph
ed. “It’ll take more than the sixteen of us to get things rolling.” She smirked. “Besides, if you hadn’t mentioned Jack Lopez–”

“He’s going to get paid, too,” I said. “Everyone is.”

“Yeah,” she said, hitching her kit bag on her shoulder. “But we’re getting paid
first
.”

I sighed. “Rah rah, Solidarity.”

I looked into the terminal’s retinal scanner and spat on its touchscreen. It unlocked, and I saw that big, beautiful bank account balance stare back at me. There was so much I could buy with three million yuan: the best food, the finest men, the kind of life only meant for the upper echelons of Big Three Shareholders. I could fulfill my every physical need for the rest of my natural life. Hell, I could probably extend my natural life. Lord only knew what weird biomedical kinkiness the Big Three had dreamed up while I’d been on Santee Anchorage. Maybe I could buy myself a brand new brain. That would show The Fear who’s boss.

No. There would always be a mess to clean up, and I would rather spend my money cleaning up this mess. Plus, there was the chance to spite the ever-loving hell out of Letty.

I typed on the touchscreen and beckoned to Ethylene. “You’re due back wages from before the strike. This amount look right?”

She glanced and nodded. “What about today’s wages?”

“You get those when you clock out at the end of your shift. I’ve got it punched into the Public, and I won’t be able to cancel the order.”

“You can always cancel an order.”

“But not this one. We square?”

She spat on the touchscreen, and the terminal said, “Contract approved. Congratulations!”

We shook hands, and she squeezed extra hard. “What about tomorrow’s wages?”

“That depends on how much you dock monkeys can send up the cable.”

Ethylene laughed. “You just watch.” She nodded at the rest of the longshore crew, and they all stepped up to spit on the dotted line.

By the time I had paid out that first twenty-one people, another twenty had shown up. Six of them were Freeborn. “You can march right back to the kampong,” said one of the non-Shavelsons, a guy with a wagon wheel tattoo.

“We heard you’re paying back wages,” said one of the Freeborn, a woman with freckles and a tightly wound bun. “We’re machinists. Did a contract with the Roads Committee that ended before the strike. We never got paid.”

“Show me,” I said, pointing at the terminal.

“Oh, like she knows how to use one of those,” said Wagon Wheel. The rest snickered.

Freckles didn’t hesitate. She stepped to Wagon Wheel, keeping a breath away from his face. “You say something?”

Wagon Wheel smiled. “You got hearing problems? Cane in your ears?”

Freckles made a face. “That doesn’t even make sense as an insult.”

“Go back to the kampong, lady,” said Wagon Wheel. “You can mooch off us after we get everything working again.”

I took a step toward them, but a powerful hand gripped my shoulder. I looked back, then down: Ethylene held on to me and shook her head.

Henriette Shavelson, the youngest of the clan, marched up to Wagon Wheel. “You got a problem, Nevniz?”

The man shook his head. Henriette was a head shorter, but Nevniz’s spine began to invert until he was looking up at Henriette. “Hey, I’m just fooling.”

“Fooling. That’s funny,” said Henriette, with absolutely no mirth in her eyes or voice. “I could have sworn I thought I heard you say something disparaging about someone who says they’re due wages. And there’s nothing funny about that. Is there?”

Nevniz swallowed hard. “No.”

“Damn right,” said Henriette. Nevniz took a step back.

Freckles stepped up to the terminal and spat on it. Sure enough, a signed, unpaid contract for five thousand yuan popped up for services rendered to the Roads Committee appeared on her profile. “That should have been a Union job,” said Ethylene.

Freckles shrugged. “Steamrollers don’t care who fixes them. We were in town, we got offered the gig.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Ethylene.

“Of course it does,” I said. “What better way to piss off as many people as possible, than by offering a Union job to non-Union people, and then not paying? Ask around. You’ll find plenty of contracts like this.” I blinked money into Freckles’ account, noting that her actual name was Martha. “And I intend on paying as many of them as I can.”

“Hey, what about us?” said Henriette. “Your brothers and sisters in Solidarity?”

“Today, there’s enough money to go around,” I said. “But that also means everyone goes back to work, right?”

The people mumbled to themselves.

“Jesus, I’ve seen more vitality in a management trainee convention. Are you a bunch of lifeless Big Three drones?”

“Hell, no!” yelled Henriette. A few of her siblings and the Freeborn joined in.

“And are you gonna stand around while the Big Three wait for us to tear each other to pieces?”

“NO.” Wagon Wheel and his crew joined in this time.

“Are you ready to remind those Big Three fuckers that they don’t own us?”

“YES!”

“Are you ready to get the hell back to work and earn?”

“YES!”

“Then get your asses in gear! Go, go, go!”

They cheered and marched up the street, the Freeborn swept up with the Union people. Ethylene gave me a wink as she followed her family. I grinned and kept grinning, even as I pulled up my bank account and saw the tiny dent in the balance. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

Someone tapped my shoulder. I turned around and saw fifty more people lined up. “You covering benefits, too?” said a middle-aged man with one eye. He had a baby in a sling across his chest.

I took another look at my balance and swiped it aside. “Sign in, and let’s see what you’re due,” I said, doing my best to smile. It didn’t work.

By the time that fifty had filed past the terminal, I was down another twenty grand. I was also good and furious after seeing the payments that people hadn’t gotten: injuries on the job, pension installments, childcare. All the basics that the Union had been formed to provide, and Letty had let them slide for a week. People hadn’t saved because they hadn’t needed to. When there were hurricanes or cancelled orders, we came together to get through them. Hell, we had had criminals and lunatics in the Executive Committee before, but even they kept the cash flowing. No one starved. No one got left behind. Seeing these families who’d worked their asses off getting screwed over…

I walked to Shire Square where I found a hundred people standing around the terminal. I didn’t say a word. I just marched right to the terminal and logged in. Out went the yuan by the thousands. The words of Romas Landry, the crusty guy who taught contracts negotiation back in B-school, rang in my head:
Any problem you can solve with money isn’t a problem at all
. Two years ago, spending this money would have felt like pulling teeth. Now it was the most natural thing in the world. It was going to make everyone’s problems go away.

I worked my way southeast, stopping for the ever-growing crowds to spit and swipe. Money flowed like water: it gushed into the accounts of people owed back wages, and it huddled behind dams for release at the end of day’s shifts. I left a wake of open storefronts, raucous buyers, and people who were not killing each other. There was also a crowd of a few hundred people who had attached themselves to me. They didn’t ask for anything or make any declarations. I got it. They just wanted to come along and see what happened next. So did I.

When we turned onto Asa Randolph Avenue, a group of fifty people waited for us. They carried lit torches and machetes. I saw their shirt fronts glitter in the firelight, and I didn’t have to get closer to know they all wore glass Temple pins. I slowed, and my crowd slowed with me.

“We don’t want a fight,” I called out. “It’s time to go back to work.”

A woman at the head of the Temple mob shook her head. She was the one who had led us into the murder house. “We’re going to cut you all down.”

That sent the people behind me into a fury. There were shouts of
Hell, no!
and
You first!
and a whole lot of other babbling bullshit. I turned around and glared until I got silence. It took a while, but the shushes soon overwhelmed the shouts. I looked back at the Temple woman. “No one’s getting hurt anymore. I don’t know what Letty told you, but it’s over. She’s going to be done, and you’ll likely be going back to Maersk.”

She sneered. “We are
never
going back there.”

“You’re going because you broke the law,” I said, loud and clear. Inside, my guts churned. We may have outnumbered the Temple mob, but those machetes could cut down too many too fast. Everyone else would get crushed in a panic. “And you’ll go for whatever else you’ve done this week. We’re going to make sure of that.”

“You got no evidence,” she said. “And you won’t have any now.” She tapped her temple, and a shout came from behind me:
Dammit, my pai!
It rippled through the crowd. Letty had pulled the plug again.

I took a step forward and blinked hard. “I’m recording you right now. Whatever you do to me, it’s going to come back at you. You cut me down, you blow me up, it’ll be on the Public for everyone to see. You want to risk that?”

She laughed. “You think we really care about you? About
any
of you? We busted our asses to get here, and how does the Union repay us? You sent us to that fucking rock to rot!”

Well, that probably has something to do with whatever crimes you committed
, I made sure not to say. “Then why not come with us?”

She gave me a side-eyes glare. “Where?”

“We’re going to the Union Hall to kick Letty’s ass.”

Now everyone in the street started talking. “We are?” said a man behind me.

“You bet we are,” I said. “Because… you know, I’ve been talking about this bullshit for the past day. You want to know why? Ask around. I’m heading there right now. You want to come with? Come with. You want to cut me down? Do it another day. I got work to do.”

I walked up to the woman. She patted the flat of the blade against the palm of her hand. “I’m still going to cut you down,” she said. “That’s what I got paid for.”

“Then I’d rather you find another line of work,” I said. “There’s not going to be any room for any more thuggery.”

She sneered. “Someone always needs to be cut. You’re about to do it yourself. You match my price, and I might even–”

I kneed her in the groin. She doubled over, and I managed to slap the machete out of her hand before she caught her breath. She stood up, murder in her eyes. I took a swing, but we both knew it wouldn’t do anything but piss her off. I got a fist in the stomach and what little food I’d had that evening splattered on the pavement.

I heard the machete scrape. All I could think of was the taste of bile, the way my body locked up, how this angry, angry woman was going to kill me and start another riot after I had paid so much goddamn money to avoid one. I looked up and saw her smile as she raised the machete…

So I punched her in the groin. Hell, a kick had worked the first time.

This time, she held on to the machete as she took a step back. She hissed something that sounded like “Fuck you,” but it was hard to tell from the way she had clamped her lips together. She pointed her blade at the crowd, and they charged in a screaming, roaring mass.

The whole street exploded in a mass of white.

At first, I thought it was a tuk-tuk bomb. What a lovely way to go: instead of getting chopped to pieces by Letty’s thugs, I was blasted to atoms by one of her bombs. It was a great-smelling death, at least. The scent of vanilla hung heavy in the air. Just as well I could only see white fog. This had to have been my brain’s way of masking the terror of death: by making everything smell like a milkshake.

Something nudged my side. “Padma? Is that you?” It sounded suspiciously like Soni.

I couldn’t move, but I could breathe. The fog cracked in half, and Soni looked down at me. She was in a patrol uniform a size too big, and a streak of grime slashed across her face. “Sorry we took so long. Everyone got so hung up on getting paid that I had to remind them they weren’t getting a dime until they went back to work.”

“‘We?’” I said, reaching for her hand.

Soni pulled me out of a cocoon of hardened riot foam. A hundred cops stood in the streets, all of them in regular patrol outfits. None of them had riot armor, but they were all cradling cans of foam. Behind them were fifty or so white, fluffy lumps, like clouds that had plopped in the middle of the street. “Two precincts’ worth of my best people. I’ve got another two spreading out around the city, opening up station houses, patrolling.” She smiled. “You know. Doing the work.”

“Is that going to be enough?”

She rubbed her head, now shaved smooth. “Depends if you’re really going to try and kick Letty’s ass or not.”