Page 1 of Break for Me

one

JERSEY

Maneuvering an unconscious body into the trunk of a car was never an easy task. It would’ve just been too easy if this man had been some tiny, little bag of skin and bones. No. This greasy, slime ball had a belly that weighed a good two hundred pounds by itself. My phone vibrating from the pocket inside my suit jacket complicated the process that much more. Unfortunately, smart men knew when to not keep women waiting. The call would be from Memphis, and halting the process of stuffing this person into my trunk mid-shove to answer the phone would be easier than having to put up with her attitude for the next week if I inconvenienced her world by making her wait the fifteen extra seconds to answer her call on the third or fourth ring. So, I dropped this guy’s legs and let them dangle awkwardly over the back bumper to fish my phone from my pocket.

“A little busy here, baby doll. I know you know that,” I said into the phone.

“Yeah, that one is a big ol’ no too, Jersey Boy,” she huffed out like she was already annoyed with this conversation. I’d made it my life’s goal to find a nickname for the girl that she would actually allow me to use more than once. We’ve been at this together for nearly five years now and I still hadn’t made one stick. It was harmless and just something we did to make sure we both felt a human connection to one another. This partnership needed to be a strong one for the sake of both our livelihoods. She’d decided on Jersey Boy for me since my operational name was Jersey anyway. I never bothered to voice any opinion about it, regardless of my age and boy being included in a title for me. She could call me anything she liked and I’d play along. I hadn’t worked with any other handler, but I was still convinced that she was the best one out there. I’d never met her or even so much as seen her face, but I knew her better than I knew any other living thing on this planet. I had no doubt that she’d at least seen my face, though. She could hack into any camera system anywhere in the world if she wanted to do it. There was nothing under the sun that could stop her from having a peak right into the security system inside my own home if she was just bored enough to try it. She was the brilliance behind what our job entailed. She handled the logistics of quite literally everything. She handled the technology, she provided the schedule, she organized all of the equipment and the gear that I would use each time, she lined up every bit of intel. And I pretty much did the dirty work when and where she told me.

“President sent another job through,” Memphis said.

“Okay?”

“It’s the big one, Jersey,” she said. “The Retirement.”

Memphis and I had been moving up the list as the team that never failed. My source of information on the topic had only ever been Memphis. The Executioners didn’t speak to one another. We didn’t know each other and had no way to contact one another if the Judges like Memphis didn’t set it up. There were no office parties in this line of work for us to have the opportunity to put names to faces. But the Judges were deeply connected. I always assumed they weren’t supposed to be, because none of us were really meant to be able to find one another. The President probably would’ve preferred they remain in the dark just like we were but I couldn’t imagine he had a way to enforce that with an entire crew of the most tech savvy kids in the world as Judges. If they wanted to find each other and interact, there was no chance at preventing it. Memphis liked to keep me updated on the gossip about the other teams. I wasn’t overly interested in which Judge was gay or which Executioner spent his free time whoring around, but I was always ready to listen when it came to the assignment of the big jobs.

When a Judge/Executioner team outright failed, it didn’t result in the removal of just the Executioner who hadn’t been successful or just the Judge who was responsible for the mishap. The entire team was removed. We’d given up saying that they were fired. No one really knew what did happen to the removed teams, but once they’d messed up a job bad enough that it jeopardized the whole organization, neither team member was heard from again. That was just how it worked. Teams weren’t split apart for any reason. Ever. If a Judge chose to retire willingly, the Executioner was also retired. If an Executioner was killed on the job, the Judge was forcefully retired. We didn’t get new partners.

This all led to a strange hierarchy among the teams. The Judges were solely responsible for that grapevine gossip. They knew who had which job, who was finishing jobs the fastest, who wasn’t doing well. They messed with each other behind the scenes, tried to intervene to make the others make mistakes, tried to weasel their way into getting better assignments. Very, very rarely they called in favors to the ones they considered friends when they desperately needed help. They knew who was given the highest paying jobs and who was called as a last resort when no other team was readily available. According to Memphis, we were moving our way to the top of that hierarchy quite quickly these days. We’d landed comfortably in a workflow pattern that produced nearly flawless results with every job. And it was being noticed.

“Texas failed?” I asked.

“Texas and Chicago failed,” she said.

My chest tightened.

I assumed she sounded upset because she talked about Chicago like they were friends. I heard about Chicago every day. I had no idea if this person was male, female, or completely fictional for the lack of interaction that I had within this business, but Memphis knew this person. And now this person would be disappearing.

My interest was only in their failure.

The Judges talked relentlessly about a job that’d been ongoing for the last several years. That job was responsible for the downfall of multiple teams. No one knew why or what happened in any of those cases; only that the job kept being reassigned to different teams, and that the previous team was removed. They’d all started referring to that particular job as “The Retirement” because of it. I was itching to have it assigned to me though. And Memphis and I were apparently next in line to receive it. This was oddly unprecedented. We weren’t usually given new assignments until we completed the current one.

“Hey, Memphis?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s the protocol here?” I asked. “Am I supposed to follow through with tubby? Or do I just…drop him?” I looked back at the legs that hung out of the trunk of my car. My mind was already trying to figure out how I was supposed to go about stashing an unconscious human somewhere that he could wake up as if I hadn’t knocked his ass out cold for an unknown-to-him reason and then simply dropped him off in a different place for him to resume his regular life.

“Finish what you’re doing, Jersey. Jesus,” she said. “Based on the track record of The Retirement job, what you’re doing now might be the last time that either of us get paid. I’d rather not miss out on the opportunity for one more solid payday before we get started on a nightmare.”

“Yes ma’am. I’ll let you know when I’m done here.”

two

JERSEY

Aside from being nearly four hundred pounds of motherfucking deadweight, tubby really was the easiest job that we’d had in a while. He didn’t wake up at any point through the process. It was still annoying to reach the drop point and have to drag his body back out of the trunk and into the creepy, little storage container but I imagined he would have made it much more difficult if he’d been awake. I used the handcuffs that were left in the container to bind his wrists and hooked the handcuffs to the chain that was attached to the floor in the middle of the space. I rolled the door closed on my way back out and went to my car to call Memphis back.

That was the routine for most of our jobs. We were given assignments. They ranged from the simplest of things like collecting gambling debts in the form of physical dollars to collecting the actual humans who owed those debts when they weren’t in possession of the money. It wasn’t always gambling. Sometimes it went back to someone running drugs and losing a big chunk of their investment when their mule ran off. Sometimes it was retrieving an entire shipment of stolen arms. And once, the missing cargo was a literal fucking horse. I had to rent a motherfucking pickup truck to haul a horse trailer across three states. To this day, I didn’t know why the horse mattered that much to anyone. But that was how it worked. Memphis was given a certain level of background information about each assignment, she worked an inconceivable amount of magic to get me onto a path toward finding the person involved, I found them, and did what was requested. Sometimes it was as easy as delivering money. Sometimes it was as difficult as fighting a whole person tooth and nail every step of the way to put them directly into the hands of someone they were running away from. They were nothing short of lucrative jobs every time. People with way too much money needed to find things, or other people, that they couldn’t locate themselves for whatever reason. They reached out to the organization that employed me and then our company President assigned the jobs based on location or skill level required. It was supposed to be as anonymous as possible with as little human contact as possible along the way. That was the safest way for those of us on this side of the job to remain just outside of detection by any set of authorities across the country.

I called Memphis through the Bluetooth in the car as soon as I was back on the road headed away from the storage container.

“Tubby is done, sweet cheeks.”

“Ew,” she said. “Absolutely the fuck not. That’s the worst one yet.”

“Really? That somehow topped the hot mama fiasco of last year?”

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