Page 21 of The Job

It protects us as much as we can be protected in this situation. The fact of the matter is that this is an incredibly dangerous situation, and one that someone would find it difficult to believe that we would put ourselves in voluntarily. We do though, and we love it. If this job checks out and we decide to take it, then it means that we will be preventing an innocent person from being sold to a drug dealer to pay for a debt that’s not even theirs,and in my mind, it makes it worth putting up with a little bit of danger if it means we can keep someone safe.

Plus, I like the line that we walk; we definitely operate in a morally grey area, and I am absolutely fine with that. I always have been. We all have. It’s not like it is a new thing that has happened over the last few years; even when Ever was around, we operated in a morally grey area, albeit not quite as severely as this. We were kids, after all. We would do things like, if we saw a kid being bullied, we would protect the kid but make the bully terrified of us and what would happen if they did it again.

We would steal food for kids who had nothing, and we would take the fall for things that weren’t our fault if we knew that the kid had a challenging home life, and it would physically be taken out on them if they got in trouble.

The kids at school didn’t just start trusting and respecting us out of the blue; we have been fucking earning it from the get-go. They both fear us and like us. Obviously, as we got older, our methods got a bit more extreme, and our Tomlinson feud grew to what it is now, which meant that we had to step up our game. We were already doing the odd job before Atlas came into our lives, but not to the extent that we do now; he put us in contact with the contacts that help us get the jobs.

We enjoy it, and I don’t imagine that we will stop what we are doing any time soon. Even when we go to college, we will be able to carry on the jobs that we do because they take us all over the place, and the contacts that we have will just make sure that they offer us jobs that are near the college instead.

I am actually looking forward to it, a change of scenery will be nice. There are a lot of memories in our town, both good and bad.

Chapter Thirteen

Rafe

Ipull myself back into the present, now is not the time to get distracted and lost in my thoughts. I need to focus on our surroundings and most importantly, Trick. I need to make sure that there are absolutely no threats to him.

If I am being completely honest with myself, this is the part of this process that I hate the most. The client often needs to meet in order to give us as much information as possible, as securely as possible. Obviously, things like emails and phone calls can be traced, intercepted, and hacked into. They aren’t secure and are extremely risky to use. However, the meetings hold a level of risk to us. The clients are the people who need our help for various reasons, but they have usually found us through the dark web, and people who know how to access and use the dark web tendnot to be law-abiding citizens, which means that they are not safe people.

So, although they are the ones in need of assistance, they are also people that we need to be incredibly wary of. We cannot let our guard down around them just because they are in need, it would be incredibly stupid of us to do so.

Even though it is a summer evening, the park is relatively quiet; only the odd dog walker or jogger has gone past me while I have been sitting here. It strikes me as slightly odd, but I guess it could be because this end of the park appears to be in need of some renovation, so it is just not being used, at the moment. Either way, it works in our favor. I check the time on my phone; it’s eight now, and the client should be here any second.

Trick moves into position, near the fountain and sits on a bench there. He has got his hood pulled right up and obscuring his face as much as possible, and he will also try to make sure that he keeps his face angled in a certain way that doesn’t give the client a full view of his face.

My eyes scan the area, looking for any possible sign of the client, but I’m coming up blank. A kid who can’t be any older than eleven rides his bike right up to where Trick is sitting and sits down next to him.

My eyes widen, surely that can’t be the client! He’s a kid and definitely shouldn’t know how to use the dark web.

Fuck. This just got a lot more complicated.

Trick

At first, I think that the kid is just being a kid and has decided to sit down, and then I find myself hoping that is the case.

“Are you T?” the kid asks me, and all hope that he is as innocent as he looks flies out of the window. T is the name that we give to clients so they can identify us and so we can identify them, too.

“I am,” I reply. “How can we help you?”

My voice is automatically softer than it usually would be with another client. He is a fucking kid, and that raises all sorts of red flags. It also makes me incredibly grateful that Luke brought this job to our attention and that we were the ones who took it. There is a chance that if someone else had, then they would have taken advantage of the situation in one way or another.

We most likely won’t even charge him. I don’t even need to hear what he is going to say to know that we will be taking this job.

“My stepdad is going to sell my mom to pay for his drug debt. He owes them a lot of money, but he can’t pay it. My mom hates drugs; she doesn’t touch them, and she hates that I’m around them. Although, I pretend that I don’t know what they are so that she doesn’t feel so bad,” the kid starts to talk, and my anger grows at each thing that he says. He continues, “He hits her. She’s tried to leave him, but we don’t have much money, so it’s difficult.”

I glance at his face, noticing the black eye and big bruise on his cheek, “Did he do that?”

He swallows thickly and nods, “Yeah. I didn’t want him to hurt her anymore.”

“We will take care of it. Don’t worry, you will never hear from him again,” I reply firmly.

The kid's eyes widen and then fill with hope. He pulls out a handful of scrunched up bills, “I-I-I’m sorry I don’t know how much you charge, it’s all I have.”

I shake my head, “Don’t worry kid, this one is on us.”

Determination fills his eyes, “No, I want to pay. We don’t need charity.”

I smile slightly but wipe the expression before he can see, not wanting to insult him. “Okay, if that’s what you want.”

---