Page 4 of Clean Hack
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Don't Get Too Excited
Lucy
Another morning.
Well, I guess you could have called it that. Really, I had no idea what time it was and nowadays, the hours just seemed to blend together. Each day melting into the next. Sure, I got a few hours of shut-eye here and there but I was always too restless and afraid I would miss something to ever really fall into that deep, dead to the world, REM sleep. I had become more of a cat nap kind of person, never really going under deep enough so I wouldn’t hear the things around me. Sometimes I even would swear that I fell asleep while sitting up with my eyes open. Like somehow my brain just gave up and shut down for a few.
But that was how I had to live. It wasn’t that I was obsessed with the criminal world. Or had some weird kink about watching people when they had no idea that I was. Or even constantly looking for that one thing that gave me a reason to call a certain someone—no, not going into that right now. It wasn’t any of those things. In fact, all of those were a side task to the one I’d been on for years.
Allison.
My best friend.
Taken from her home nearly five years before.
That night changed everything for me. As I knew it did hers too.
That was the night I got slapped into reality and began this downward obsession, as my parents had started to call it. Little did they really know what I was doing while they were asleep.
Five years was a long time.
And I was smart enough to know that she could have been long gone by now. Not only out of the city but out of the state and hell, the country as well. I didn’t even want to entertain the idea that she was just permanently gone. That would have been the cracking point for me. So for as long as I could, I was going to keep up the façade that she was still alive and out there.
I was under no illusion that she was sitting back living the life, being fed bonbons by the man that had taken her. This very man had managed to evade all things I was able to slink into. A man that left a trail of scarred and sometimes dead people everywhere he went.
I hated saying his name out loud, therefore I never did so. Unless there was no way around it. I even hated bring that evilness into my mind, but there was simply nothing that could be done about that. Merely the thought of him felt like it tainted my soul, turning the edges so dark and black that they were close to being ash.
“Well, what do we have here?” I asked…well, myself. Because, as always, I was all by myself. Just me in this massive one-room apartment. I didn’t have a dog or a cat. Or even a goldfish. As dogs required outdoor time, and I had—maybe a little bit—become overly comfortable inside my four walls. And cats were too high and mighty for me. Maybe I just wasn’t one for pets in general, or any kind of company.
Before you ask, I did have a friend. One. And that came around sort of by strange accident. The great thing about her was that she wasn’t a huge people person. So it was nice to have someone to talk to that I could also brush off when I felt the need to. Nadya was awesome in that badass, woman power,kill you before you even knew she was therekind of way. She was everything that I’d never be. Maybe sometimes I envied her. But mostly, I was just glad that she was on my side.
Okay, so back to what was going on.
Looked like it was time to make a phone call. The heads-up kind. To the man that…maybe I was mildly obsessed with. But in that curious about him sort of way. Like, I just couldn’t figure him out at all. Not to mention, the guy was hard to track and spy on. He wasn’t a fan of electronics. His phone changed constantly. He didn’t even have a new vehicle with GPS that I could hack and track. So, you see, he was a bit of a mystery. The only times I really got a glimpse of him was when he went to do a job. Those were the times he climbed into my world. It was all about the company he kept and those happened to be the ones I kept my eyes on.
There were strange circles in this underground world. I was still trying to navigate them all. It was weird how there seemed to be all these strings, these tethers, that tied each criminal organization together. Clean was one of those strings. He wove himself in and out of and through many of the different outlaw groups. He was an outsider, one that most of them kept close. He knew things that most outsiders didn’t know and he was more in than he was out.
I’d seen him work only a handful of times, though I’d been watching him for a few years now. It was on those rare occasions that I took in every little thing about the way he worked. Whether he knew he was being watched or not, I’d never know. I wasn’t about to give myself away and ask him. Or more so, I wasn’t about to have a long enough conversation with the man to work up the courage to ask. I kept our calls brief, hiding my voice and giving him a location before dropping the call. I didn’t think he had any way to track me because he wasn’t that kind of guy, not tech savvy at all. And even if he were, I got the feeling that he wouldn’t.
He wasn’t old, I’d have put him somewhere around ten years my senior. Maybe more. I had no real idea because Clean was pretty much a ghost and I was never able to get a super clear image of his face the rare times that I’d seen him pop up on my screen. I had no idea who he really was. And believe me, I’d searched. All I got was a handful of nothing in the end. I couldn’t even dig up his real name. So either he came from out of the damn sky, or he had someone that had helped make him invisible long ago. I was good and all, but there were still things that were just out of my reach. Finding out who Clean really was, well, that was one of them.
“Yeah,” he answered in his oddly calm and smooth voice. We’d done this song and dance enough times that he wasn’t even a little bit fazed by my calls anymore. Which maybe wasn’t a good thing. The more comfortable with something you are, the bolder you get. And I was waiting for the time he started to throw questions my way. “Where am I headed?”
“Dogs of Wrath MC,” I said knowing I didn’t need to give any more detail than that. He’d worked with them before and since they only had one chapter, there wasn’t any room to guess.
“That it?” he asked and I could have sworn I heard something amusing in his usually smooth tone.
I stuttered silently, the air becoming trapped in my lungs as my mouth and tongue had a seizure. See, this was what I was afraid of. The boldness. The questions. The push to get to know more. More about me specifically.
Hang up, my mind screamed at me.Disconnect!
But there I was frozen, listening to his even, calm breaths as they fanned over the speaker. Those breaths somehow came out with little chuckles attached to the end of them. Mockingly. Taunting me. Daring me to say something else.
In the end, I panicked, possibly even let out a squeak, and hung up as quickly as I could get my normally nimble fingers to do.
Then my head hit the top of the desk with a loud thump. I resisted the urge to pick it up and drop it again. Though I did see myself doing it several times in my mind.
