Troubleshooter – Eight

TROUBLESHOOTER by Andrea Speed Eight She laid her windbreaker on the floor and emptied the contents of the briefcase onto it, and it was surprisingly meager, considering how much this stupid thing had ultimately cost. Once that was done, she gathered the coat into a sort of makeshift bag, and put the slightly mangled suitcase back in the slightly mangled locker. Yes, it would be obvious it had been broken into, but she didn’t care – she just didn’t want to be spotted with the briefcase at the moment. Not until she was ready. Once that was done, she tucked the bolt cutter under her arm, grabbed her “bag”, and headed out the back. It was actually an emergency exit, but it wasn’t hooked up to any alarms. She had already told Shan she’d meet him...

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Troubleshooter – Seven

TROUBLESHOOTER by Andrea Speed Seven She heard the gunshots as she shoved Shan back and took dubious shelter behind a parked car, but in the back of her mind she knew they were wrong – those gunshots didn’t sound right. You could do a lot of things to alter a gunshot: mufflers, silencers (which were not silent, but what else could you say?), alterations of the barrel, even holding a throw pillow in front of the muzzle. But judging from the sound, none of those applied. So what the hell was going on here? She didn’t hear any wasp like noise of bullets whizzing past, nor did she hear thuds of impact or breaking glass. It was quite possible that, even at this proximity, he was a supremely shitty shot. Most people were, no matter how many times they...

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Troubleshooter – Six

TROUBLESHOOTER by Andrea Speed Six Ward’s apartment – if that’s what it was – was horribly sterile, all matte finished wood and beige wall to wall carpeting that should have been an executable offense. But if he was dead, perhaps he deserved it. Blondie kept her distance, not wanting to give Z a chance to capitalize on her obvious inexperience at threatening people with a firearm. She looked more like a machete sort of person anyways. Z figured the time here was hers to waste, so she headed over to their beige striped couch (another crime against decoration – if this was Ward’s home, it looked like a dentist’s office waiting room) and casually threw herself down on it, waiting to get the show on the road. “So why the charade?” She...

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Troubleshooter – Five

TROUBLESHOOTER by Andrea Speed Five Could it be this simple? Z stood on the corner of Perry Street, surveying the block. It was the area connecting the business district to the seedier part of town, and it showed. There wasn’t enough room for a full strip mall, but all the constituent parts were there: clothing chain store, doughnut shop, karate center (why were they always next to the doughnut shop? Was someone trying to send a message?), chain hair salon, two competing fast food joints, and – in a deviation from the norm – a self-storage unit. It still had the fake adobe façade of the Mexican restaurant it used to be, with the second story of huge windows and fake brick looking like it was the top of another building. Some nascent fungal growth...

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