The kid squirms. The swillers hold him so his heelies barely skim the floor. “Whole haul! Swear to shit!”
“Pocket so much as a watch fob and I’ll be making diamonds from your cremains,” Sharkey snaps. The swillers let loose the kid and he’s out of the parlor, through the shop, and down the steps outside faster than his blood drops can hit the floor. The welcome bell on the shop door jingles as it slams.
Sometimes Sharkey thinks he should start going along on the raids himself again. Keep an eye on things. But he’s management now. The legwork is beneath him.
Sharkey started working out an atlas of the tunnels more than twenty years back. Now he has the city’s underground drawn down to the manholes, with a key marking what’s been plugged up and what’s yet to be busted through. He calls it his masterpiece. No one’s seen the thing entire, not that they could understand it if they did. The knowledge is his alone. The city has not one but two abandoned subway systems, the Black Line and the Blue, intertwined: city planners didn’t dig deep enough the first time, so whole lines had to be filled with limestone and dirt, hasty graves to prop up skyscrapers. But parts of the original are still there, ghost tracks beneath the streets, with cumulous black scorches on the bricks from where red-bellied locomotives used to blow off steam.
Sharkey knows what’s fastest for crosstown transit and where the last trains are stalled, blocking up the tracks. He can recognize the platforms by their tile. Deeper down, he knows the routes of the sewer gondoliers, those taxis of the damned—their going rates and medallion numbers, how much you have to tip. (It ain’t a bad way to transport product you don’t want scorched, though he’s lost his patience for the smell.) Beyond all that, he possesses a knowledge so eldritch, it wasn’t common even in the city’s youth.
He knows what you have to do to drive.
His book is leather-bound, stuffed with maps and legends, cross sections and blueprints, more a landscape sketchbook from the pit than a travel guide for the uninitiated. The Way Out reads the title page. By Me.
What’s more, Sharkey knows how to storm just about anyplace worth the time: security systems, panic rooms, bank vault–thick locks just add style to an operation, far as he’s concerned. He knows how long it takes to drill up through a concrete basement floor, which name-brand families go hands up at a HowScoot backfiring, and which ones itch to play home-invasion avenger in the name of self-defense.
He knows too that things have changed, these last six months. Money’s leaving the city, in the form of the moneyed; nobody’s stopping the fires. It used to be you could find a penthouse, a brownstone, within blocks of the Outer Walls—you’d rob it and three weeks later you’d rob it again. Now it’s looking like another Siege of Wonland will be in order before too long, not from ambition but from necessity. What happens when there’s nowhere left to raid? Sharkey doesn’t know. But if lean times are coming, he’s stocking up.
Sharkey gives the orders and sends his raiders on their merry way. In return, he gets “pick of the litter”: his choice of the schwag, and an option to buy the rest at a discount. Unless of course the raiders hold out on him. Then he can take whatever he wants, merchandise or a life—he went easy on the kid today. It’s all in the contracts he drew up years ago, when he went through his law books phase. He has the raiders sign them still. Even if their X’s hardly constitute a sig.
Whole haul: Sharkey’s got big plans for this next job. Bigger than anybody’s tried in a while. He’ll send these raiders all the way to the top this time. They can’t say no; they owe him. And if they don’t make it back alive, he’ll just chalk it up to experience.
You never know what’s possible unless you reach for the Heights.
Sharkey takes his place back at the head of the table. Duluth, his most trusted swiller, a twentysomething old-timer built like a fridge, tosses him a fresh undershirt. Sharkey puts it on.
“Next order of business,” he says. The swillers hustle to their seats.
Sharkey doesn’t like having regular employees. He prefers contracting out jobs, like he does with the raids. Employees get to know their boss’s habits, things he’d rather keep quiet: how much currency is in the safe, when he’s got a broken finger or a flat limo tire. That sometimes he keeps the gator in his own bathtub, nights. Not secrets exactly, but knowledge about Sharkey that, if compiled, could create some sort of picture more nuanced than any he’d care to portray. He knows the power of good PR, both for instilling terror and its kissing cousin, reverence. To some of the natives, Sharkey, the oldest man in Torchtown, is half-sacred, half sci-fi: a suspected time traveler, thrown up from a past splendiferous beyond imagining, whose unhindered passage through their era back to his own guarantees the present existence of the world. Natives can believe whatever they want about him as long as they go by faith alone. Which is to say he don’t like snoops.
The swillers he hires are the bare minimum, the skeleton crew he needs to keep operations up and running. Right now, it’s just these three. Officially, Sharkey’s never had to retire one of his own men, and he tries to keep it that way. Unofficially, Sharkey’s sent a few of them out on errands over the years—to buy a jar of hooch at a saucemart, say—that’ve ended with a different kind of firing. “Accidents happen,” is what Sharkey always makes a point of supposing, and his employees never contradict him. The next day’s always like Sunday school around the backroom table.
“Lemme see.” Sharkey flips open his account ledger. “Keelhaul, you got tributes from the Dolls?”
Keelhaul, his newest recruit, a kid with waist-long dreads and second-degree scars on his forearms, forks over a jingle bag. It’s full enough, but Sharkey puts on his pince-nez and counts it right then anyhow: currency, some bangles, two artificial fingernails. He wonders, not for the first time, if Keelhaul’s been skimming, then tables the worry for now. He’ll know for sure sooner or later, probably sooner. Sometimes a swiller’s sly enough to avoid being obvious, for a while, till he gets greedy. Happens every time.
“Bronco, you take care of that thing?” Sharkey asks the bucktoothed hothead sitting farthest from him down the table. Bronco flips shut his gravity knife in mute assent.
“Duluth, what about the Mudpuppies? They pay up?”
Duluth shrugs, a gesture that doesn’t signify much: he’s all shoulders and no neck anyway. “Said they’d have it tomorrow.”
“You squeeze them?”
“Said tomorrow, Shark.”
Sharkey sets down his pince-nez, and Duluth picks at a scabby face tattoo, like making himself bleed might preempt any inklings Sharkey has in that direction.
“You think they didn’t have it?”
“They said that.”
“You think they hadn’t sold the chaw? You think to ask for it back?”
“Next time I’ll squeeze them.”