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"Here's a freebie." She reached out and turned a picture on that corner of her desk around. Four people standing in a line with their arms around each other, wearing Aloha shirts, flowered leis and laughing. The white-haired man had his arm draped across Donna's shoulders. "He goes by Pogo. Maybe, in a few years, if you play everything straight, I'll tell you where he lives. It'd serve him right."
There was a glint of wicked humor in her eyes.
Seeing his picture sent a flutter through my stomach. Something not entirely unpleasant. I pushed it away as best I could.
"Do I get to ask who we are now?"
"The CUMULOUS program, we're the guys in the basement." She nodded over to the guy at the door "We deliver karma. Bad guys doing bad things to bad people. He runs GREEN for me, it's the more presentable part of the program. I run the whole thing and directly oversee RED. It does the dirty work. That's you."
She meant it when she said "dirty work." Honey traps, badger games, blackmail, murders in back alleys. Whatever it took to win. The targets were human versions of cancer: terrorists, arms traders, human traffickers. Cancers that had to be found and removed.
Using disposable people to do it. People that went unmissed, unloved and unmourned. At least most of the time.
It'd take me a long while to fully understand how dirty it had to be sometimes, but somebody had to do it.
Or Nobody.
***
Post Production Notes:
This one has some unpleasant edges -- I really, really didn't want Tommy and Amber to die. But I couldn't save them. They were, to use an old Scottish term, "Fey." It's often translated as "doomed" but really it means "fated to die and knowing it." Tommy and Amber knew how it was all likely to end and accepted it, even as they wished it were different.
People can sneer at Tommy for loving a whore, or at Amber for loving a tweaker, but in the end, as screwed up as they were, at least they had each other, even if only on Sundays. Which makes them far luckier than nearly everyone else in the story.
I try not to judge Donna too harshly; she has a horrible job that she does to the best of her ability, and it certainly eats at her. She isn't there to save any of the people that she "recruits", and for most of them, they join of their own free will. Still, she tries, when she can.
- COMMENTS
Anonymous5 days ago5 Stars from GW on this one . I would like Hollywood and Needles And Nobody to team up in a story . Save Monster and Pogo for the kids protection .Shameless has kids as does Monsters daughter and Pogo has a son . Pogo Junior Maybe . You and the Missus did real good on this one
Anonymous8 days agoI got real Point of no return vibe at the start. So much so that when I pictured spooky it was Bridget Fonda. You took it in your own direction loved the story.
Anonymousabout 1 month agoBrilliant. The only question I have is “in your description of Spooky’s hotel room you don’t mention a clock yet she knows what time 8 am is for the Tommy pickup. How does she tell the time in her room?”
Anonymousabout 1 month agoThe birth of the ‘Nobody’ legend.
Fantastic Spooky backstory. As always, you exercise subtle artistry in not over-describing the details, it creates an atmosphere (for want of a better term) that invites the readers imagination and emotional engagement. When you tie this in with your Maria Hawthorne’s description of witnessing the mayhem girls’ almost reverential hero worship in ‘The Milk Run’, the grounds for Spooky’s bond with the girls makes total sense given the feelings she has built for Tommy and Amber (only friends she ever had) lost to murder. The theme of Howard’s team members characteristic of fierce loyalty, again a third party character’s brief remark to heft the concept, it just ties together consistently.
Your Shack series stories are among my top favourites for sure. 10# all day long … Hope you still get to see your feedback from time to time, and that life is good for you and the Missus.
Jim
