Midnite Moving Co

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Can I speak to the General Manager of  Midnight Moving Co.?”

Jesse, hearing call centre noises in the background, said, “Do you have a thousand dollars cash?”

“I wondered if you could let me speak to the General Manager of Midnight Moving Co., sir?”

“We’re a legitimate company getting telemarketing calls, now?” Jesse asked, appalled. “What is this world coming to.”

“You’re on the list, sir,” the voice chirped.

Jesse pulled at his beer. “Unless you are a customer, who needs to be moved out of your house, apartment, double-wide, overturned excavator bucket, refuse bin, hobbit hole, parents’ basement —“

“Sir, may I speak to the Manager at Midnight Moving Co?”

“Sure, why not.” Jesse caved.

“Do you have any temporary staffing requirements?”

“Nope.”

“Do you have any cardboard box or storage requirements?”

“Nope.”

“Are you happy with your current cell phone service provider?”

Jesse considered this.

George and Michel were giving him burner phones every couple of weeks. Unlike most burner phones, these suckers were so big and heavy he’d had to fire up the sewing machine to make a holster, and people sometimes scoffed at his matte-black brick when he was talking on the phone. They did fit his hands though, even if they felt like a mini-workout.

Of course he had asked why these supposedly cheap phones were like the front end of a Panzer.

George was not very forthcoming. “They’re enormous because they’re custom. The batteries are supposed to be good for three weeks, which is longer than you’ll ever own one.”

The telemarketer spoke into Jesse’s silence with the same cheerful drone.

“Sir, are you happy with your current cell phone service provider?”

“Yup,” Jesse said.

“Do you have five minutes for a consumer survey?”

“Do you have a thousand bucks? Unless you want me to move you out of your apartment in the middle of the night, I have nothing to say to you.” Jesse hung up.

Four hours later, when Jesse was quite impaired, the phone rang again.

“Midnight Moving Co.”

“You move people out of their parents’ basement even when they’ve locked all their belongings in a storeroom?” came the chirpy telemarketer voice.

Jesse gathered his wits from behind the sofa cushions.

“Hello?” the voice said again.

Jesse said, “That sucks. How old is the person being moved?”

“Twenty.”

“Of legal age. Is there a place to move to?”

“My girlfriend’s parents.”

“You’re the client. How old is your girlfriend?”

“What? My age.”

“Do you have a thousand dollars?”

“I’m a telemarketer, what do you think?” and here the irritation bled through his voice.

“This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes,” Jesse said.

“Are you drunk?”

“I can do that on my own time, just as long as I’m completely clear when I’m driving,” Jesse said.

“I don’t even think I care, it’s kinda none of my business. I’ve got five hundred dollars and not much stuff.”

“Is your stuff all locked in a storeroom?”

“Yeah, I got into a fight with my mother and my dad locked all my stuff in the shed.”

“Not exactly legal.”

“They don’t exactly care.  They call the cops on me if I raise my voice to them. They’re going out of town tomorrow for a family wedding in Kelowna; I have to work at seven the next morning so I can’t go, otherwise they’d be dragging me along.”

“I hate weddings,” Jesse said conversationally.

“Once a year my parents make me watch the video of their wedding.”

“The hairstyles alone must be against the Geneva Convention.”

His client snickered. “The hair wasn’t so bad, but the music selections were a war crime, and the bridesmaids’ dresses made the camera go completely crazy.”

“Shiny?”

“Burned a hole in my eyes.  Every year since I was a baby.”

“How far to your girlfriend’s house?”

“It’s maybe five kilometres away.”

“Anybody else living in the house who might give us a hard time?”

“No, but we have to be quiet or my neighbours’ll rat us out, and I think my dad’s set up surveillance.”

“What the fuck is it with people?” Jesse said.

“Word.”

Jesse got the coordinates.

“I’m Jesse,” Jesse said.

“I’m Parker.  Dude, it’s not even all that much stuff, I just need to get it out of there and get the hell away from my parents.”

“I am reading you loud and clear.  I promise faithfully that I’ll leave the drinking until you’re at your girlfriend’s house,” Jesse said.

“If you get me out of there, drinks are gonna be on me. You know I’m going to be asking you to break the lock so I can tell my parents I didn’t do it.”

“My pleasure.”

Michel was busy and Jesse figured he and the client could handle it, so he didn’t call George. Parker confirmed that it would be fine with just the two of them. It was a few sticks of furniture and bags of clothes and sports equipment, he said, easy-peasy.

Jesse pulled up in Richmond, in a residential neighbourhood close to Number 3 Road. The driveway was three times wider than normal, with weeds growing through the cracks in the asphalt. There were no lights on in the house.

He killed the engine and waited. He did feel rather naked without the all-seeing eye that George had proven to be.  To be surveillance-proof in the modern world seemed among the best things about being a Sixer, along with almost everything else, except their general lack of friendliness and their sex lives.

The lack of friendliness he could deal with. Anyone friendlier than his mother was +1 out of the gate.  But the sex — the sex really bothered him.  Most of the being bothered about it was his knowledge that he was trying to throw his mental map of how things should be on an alien species. Even when he knew he was being an idiot, he couldn’t help it.

Expending so much as a single calorie worrying about how other people achieved consensual sex seemed a big waste of his tiny emotional poke, and when it came to humans he had no trouble realizing it. 

His continuing anthropomorphic and apparently useless attempts to categorize alien sex, on the other hand, were really starting to bug him.  To understand it he had to observe their courtship, if that was indeed what the hell was going on, talk to lots of other people, and correct for how most of it happened at depth in the ocean, where he’d never see it, unless somebody got footage of it. He had no hope he could twist events to make such information available. 

He had to take George and Michel’s word for it, and that made him profoundly uneasy.  There were other shapes and sizes of Sixer than the two blobular beige jelabis he knew.  To accept what they said on faith transformed him into one of those ancient chroniclers, who believed whatever they were told by exotic people they met in brothels. 

If he was going to be a stooge, he was going to be a good stooge, a learned stooge, a useful stooge, and a stooge forever prepared for disappointment, because that’s the way life trended over the long haul.

He and Colin had talked about it during an evening of serious drinking.

It had been quite the conversation. He was still buzzing with it; how much they had consumed; how much they had laughed. The relief of having someone to talk to about it who accepted the base-line of craziness without balking or scoffing had been immense.

They’d shared notes, fitting together snatches of overheard conversations; certain subjects that only came up to be set aside.

They had agreed that by human standards, they were all asexual except for Michel and Kima, and as many times as they had sex, they couldn’t manage babies. Jesse wasn’t convinced Michel wanted to be a father; George’s desperation to accomplish it as a single task seemed comical at times. Colin’s imaginative description of the mysterious and thus far invisible Kima had made him choke on his nachos.

His client appeared. The house being dark really bothered Jesse, but Parker called, “I’m keeping the lights off to make it look like there’s nothing going on over here.”

He came toward the truck.  He was dressed in dark clothing.  Ill-at-ease, Jesse slowly got down from the truck and said, “Where’s your stuff?”

“There’s a shed at the back.  I still can’t believe my dad moved all my shit out there.”

Jesse’s unease grew.  “So what happened?”

He got closer to Parker, who moved away and turned his back on him.  Jesse got out his Maglite® and Parker said, “Turn it off, man, my neighbours will think someone’s trying to rob the place!”

After leaving the flashlight on Parker long enough to be able to give a description of everything but his face, Jesse complied.

“So where do you work,” Jesse asked.

“For a telemarketing company,” Parker said.  “Like I told you.”

“Which one?” The walkway was uneven underfoot, and the shed seemed very far from the house.

“Consumer Research Canada.  They are a complete bag of dicks, too.”

Jesse had still not seen Parker’s face.

That seemed weird, and there was something else bugging him too.  He sensed that there was something really wrong but didn’t grasp what it was until Parker said, “Look, about your fee, I feel kinda bad about it because I don’t actually have the money on me. Before you get all mad, we can stop at a bank machine between here and my girlfriend’s place.”

Jesse fished the truck keys from his pocket and said, “Gimme a sec,” and casually turned to go back to the truck. On the way to the truck, he collided with another man, who was entirely dressed in black and wearing a balaclava.

“Stop right there,” the man said, in a disguised voice.

“Fuck,” Jesse said.

Balaclava Man pulled a knife and told Jesse to sit down and shut up.  Jesse obliged. His phone, flashlight, wallet and keys were taken from him.

As he reviewed his naïvety, duct-tape was stretched over his mouth (he remembered to tuck his lips in, at least) and wrapped swiftly around his wrists and ankles. After a moment he faintly heard the groan of a metal door being pried away from its lock, and then came a faint light from the backyard, which he couldn’t see the source of, as he was leaning against the side of the house. 

Jesse stood up, balancing against the house, and painfully hopped in a sideways, staggering motion toward the back of the house. He moved as quietly as he could, scuffing his knuckles against the razor-sharp stucco and grunting softly behind his gag as he went. He heard them coming with the first load and turned and sat down. As they went by, he stuck out his feet and tripped Parker.

It fucking hurt, and it was probably going to earn him a beating, but it was worth it.  The back end of the steamer trunk they carried hit the walkway with a thud, just missing Jesse’s right foot.  Parker, or whatever the hell his name was, fell forward onto it, smashing his teeth and chin. He rose up cursing, holding his mouth.  After spitting out a broken incisor, Parker punched Jesse in the face a couple of times and booted him in the ribs.

Jesse had never been blind from pain before.  There was a tremendous roaring noise, and then he heard Balaclava Man say, “Forget about him. We need to get this stuff onto the truck right now and leave.” Jesse could feel a slow-motion waterfall of blood from his nose dripping onto his lap and down his shirtfront. He felt sick, but knew if he puked he might actually die, and so managed not to.

Good luck with that, Jesse thought, suddenly remembering something.

George, who had no trust in the travelling public, had put another padlock on the truck.  In order to open it, they would have to know where the other key was or take a hefty bolt-cutter — or cutting torch — to it.

They were back in a minute. Parker said to his partner, “Give me the knife.”

Holding the knife to Jesse’s throat, Parker said, all the perky cuteness gone from his voice, while ripping the duct tape off, “Where’s the fucking key.”

“You broke my nose, and now you want my help,” Jesse said, quietly. As he took a breath, his cracked ribs protested.

“Where’s the key or I’ll cut you.”

“Criminal Code of Canada section 264, uttering threats. You’re already up for 5 years apiece for forcible confinement section 279, and common assault section 268, and since you’re abetting, it’ll be share and share alike when it comes to sentencing.”

“You a fucking lawyer? Shut up, asshole,” said Balaclava Man. “Put the tape back on his mouth and cut him a couple of times, he’ll tell us fast enough.”

“That so?” came a voice out of the darkness.

Jesse laughed through his own blood as his assailants spun to face where they thought the voice was coming from.

In a quiet voice, he said, “Gentlemen, meet George, my boss.”

Balaclava Man lost his headgear.

“Aw, look at you, all naked in the face,” George said. The knife clattered on the ground, far away. “Close your eyes,” George said, and turned himself into a twenty thousand watt light, blinding the other two, since Jesse was the only one who obeyed him.

The two men staggered about, and George searched them, recovering Jesse’s stolen items and tossing them into his lap.  He relieved Parker of the duct tape and wrapped the miscreants to each other, back to back, and covered their mouths. Then he shoved Parker hard on one shoulder and the two of them fell down; Naked Face bashed his head on the stucco, as Jesse watched with a tight smile. They had started to screech behind the gags, but George said, “Shh, shh, unless you really love jail that much.”

“How’d you find me?” Jesse said, as George released him. He had felt his cold clammy skin pulling gently at his face, removing the blood. George tidied him up a little and then clapped him on the shoulder.

“Of course I installed a tracker, what am I, a moron? Even if they’d killed you I would have found them eventually and avenged you in true grindhouse fashion.”

“Oh.”

“You didn’t book this run, like you were supposed to. The truck pinged me because it was moving in the middle of the night without authorization. I get a notification when your phone goes offline, too, just in case.”

“Oh.”

“But it’s good you didn’t book this, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“George, I was really stupid,” Jesse said. “Really, really stupid.”

“Is that your idea of an apology?  Seems more like a daily affirmation. Let’s see what their loot looks like.”

It was obvious that Naked Face and Parker thought this was a really bad idea.

“I’ll put them in the back of the truck,” George said. He picked the two men up as if they were kittens, walked them the thirty metres or so to the back of the truck, and opened the tailgate. He then dropped them inside. Jesse heard something snap and one of their prisoners groan.

“Oops,” he said. “Are you going to kill them?”

“I haven’t decided,” George said. He closed and locked the door. In a conspiratorial tone, he said, “Of course I’m not, but they don’t know that.”

George, during his approach to the property, had ensured that no security cameras were working.  He noted a silent alarm, but decided not to worry Jesse about it, since he’d be the one dealing with the undoubtedly armed, and even more undoubtedly pissed-off guys who were headed their way.

The shed was not a cave of wonders, but it was an impressive monument to cupidity. It appeared to be the stash house of a high end fence, and was filled with watches, jewellery, electronics, restricted weapons, ammo and art.

And drugs.  “Cocaine, meth, opium and I’m not actually sure what this is.” George held the bag at arm’s length and viewed it with disfavour. “You know that if I can’t tell what it is, it’s probably really eeeevil shit and ten bucks said the H.A. brought it here.”

Jesse said, “I’m grabbing some of the opium, I’m going to need it,” and stuffed about a g-note’s worth into his upper jacket pocket.

Then they pried open another strongbox, or rather, George did while Jesse held a handkerchief to his face, and they discovered gold bars and coins.

“Jesse, I could kiss you! — except I already did, sort of, when I suctioned all that blood off you,” George said, in that greasy voice.  Responding to the voice rather than the sentiment, Jesse said, “Ew.”

“Is that homophobia or alien squick I detect?”

“I am not a homophobe,” Jesse said, calmly. “Licking blood from someone is not kissing. Shouldn’t we be going? Anybody with a stash like this won’t sit on their ass while we take it and I’d like to get fucked on opium with all due fucking speed. Fucker broke my ribs.”

“Want me to straighten your nose for you?”

“What? No — Ow! you fucker! I knew you were going to do that,” Jesse yelled, and then felt more blood and gagged.

“All that respect and gratitude, I knew I could count on you,” George said fondly.

“I was coming to an equilibrium with the pain and you fucked me up. Yes — I know you saved my life, how could I not? — but you didn’t have my consent for touching me like that and if I’d known I coulda braced myself and that was all way, way too much like my mother.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Mothers are complicated,” George said. It was a vague stab at being conciliatory.

Anything he said now George would attribute to loopiness from pain and relief. “You don’t talk much about yours, so I don’t know,” Jesse said.  He was starting to shake with post-trauma reaction, and trying to control it.  His ribs and his nose were fighting for the title of king of the heap of pain.  His nose was winning by a nose, or maybe two noses since the pain was sometimes making him see double.

“She made me. Wouldn’t that teach you enough?” George said bitterly. With less emotion and more practicality he said, “They’ll turn up soon, let’s load the gold and go.”

Lifting anything made his ribs go insane, and his nose start to bleed again, so George made him sit it out. It made Jesse snicker internally to watch George plod by with the weight of the strongbox pressing him to within a half metre of the ground, while he rested at his ease in a neighbour’s lawn chair. Of course he’d had to take a nasty beating for this spectacle to occur but he’d already chowed down one ball of opium and figured Madame Thursday would be happy to see him if he showed up with even a fraction of the rest. In his briefly upbeat mood of anticipating some relief from the pain he realized that he was the one supposed to drive the truck back and said, “Fuck.”

“You’ll be fine,” George said. The truck made it back in one piece, so he’d been right about that.

Later, he remembered the drive back as an inebriant’s best stab at safety and legality.  Then he thought perhaps stab was not the best word, and felt again the edge against his throat, and his mortal balance being arrested by death.

After this existential pinioning, he was driving reasonably well down Highway 91 when he felt his nose drifting off toward the inside of the windshield. He remembered batting at it ineffectually when George said, rather stiffly, “Would you care to look at the road as a change of scene?”

He applied the brakes just in time and told his nose to get stuffed. George acted as spotter for the rest of the trip home to Burnaby.

“I want to keep an eye on you overnight,” George said.

“Hardly necessary. Going to smoke some and go crash,” Jesse said, and he did. George, true to his word, spent the night, and if he felt relaxed enough to sleep, as Jesse’s rudely applied drugs took hold, he did not boast about it in the morning.

Jesse completely forgot about the two guys in the back of the van, and the gold.  After he fell asleep George dealt with both, and returned to Jesse’s apartment to watch him as he slept. When he finally remembered to ask, George said that the gold was buried in Robert Burnaby Park, and the two men had been driven close to the corner of McBride and 6th and shoved out of the van where the surveillance penumbra didn’t fall.

“As far as I know,” George said, “They’re still alive. What the people who hired them, and the people they stole from are likely to do, I couldn’t guess.”

“Awesome,” Jesse said.

“Who drove the truck?” Jesse asked. after a minute.

“Parker,” George said in surprise.  “You didn’t think I was going to do it.”

George pocketed all but two balls of opium.  Before he left, he said, “We’re going to have to have a company meeting.” 

The business phone stayed quiet which was both predictable and a blessing. It was now the full-on cold-and-rainy season and people were staying put, the way they do when they don’t want to break up right before Christmas or move house in a howling gale.

As a concession to Jesse, George deferred the ‘Inaugural all-hands meeting’ until three days after his beating, and scheduled it for half an hour after sunset.

Jesse had made the best of his ‘time off’.

Kelli, one of Jesse’s women friends, had brought herself and her entertaining carpetbag along the next day, only to stand in the doorway in perplexity at the story his bruises were telling.

Rather than demanding sex, which he had been expecting, she had tended his wounds with arnica and his many aches with judicious, gentle massage, and left him tucked in bed, blasted, with the earphones in and his favourite mix tape going. She hadn’t slept over, and he hadn’t heard her leave.

He called Lark the next day. Lark was dumping him, mostly by avoiding any communication, and he felt grisly about it. The concussion made him irritable, nauseated, and weepy.

I almost died. Whyyyyy won’t she talk to me. But why give a shit that one of your girlfriends is dumping you when your other girlfriend is being A PAL, Jesse thought. There was sarcasm in there, but it was drowned in self-pity.

He called Raven, who came through the door determined to be full of bustle and cheer, only to burst into tears when she saw him.

“That bad?” He laughed at her expression and burst his lip open again.

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“‘Cause George helped himself to some of the stuff they were trying to steal.”

“What?”

“Also, my phone isn’t technically legal, or even technically possible, and George has made it clear that I gotta smash it before a cop gets hold of it.”

“You have a concussion and you’re working for a thief who steals from thieves.” She took a deep breath, and stared at him with narrowed eyes.

“Mebbe, but he was smart enough to put a tracker on the truck and figure out I was in trouble, otherwise you might be arranging my funeral right now,” Jesse said. He fell silent and lay back.  Raven got him to eat something nourishing and inoffensive, and gave him a two litre jug of lime flavoured fizzy water, and then left for her shift.

The head pain was a staircase made of broken glass that he scaled to rational thought at his peril. The nose pain had settled into being crappy instead of overwhelming. It amazed him that with all this pain, he could still clearly distinguish the head bash from his broken nose. He felt resentful that he hadn’t gone to hospital, and also very relieved. He knew that for unicorns like him, hospitals were places where well-intentioned and underpaid people got carte blanche to make fatal mistakes.

George had tended to him, roughly and effectively, even if he’d sauntered off with all the g.d. opium, which seemed paternalistic after they’d looted it fair and square. He knew what George was doing and it pissed him off.

He was on T3s, sourced god knew where, brought by George the next day. George told him not to move or watch TV for at least two more days.

Kelli hadn’t made him move that much, since he’d had the sense to tell her he was concussed. She had complained about him not going to the hospital either.

Jesse thought suddenly of his mother, shoving her face in his face, screaming, screaming, but never hitting, because that would be wrong. 

It was men who’d hit him; tied him up and hit him.  He didn’t mind that they’d hit him, strangely, but every time he thought about them tying him up so he couldn’t defend himself, he could feel his blood pressure rise so that his nose pulsed in agony.  Michel called him and said the whole affair was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.  He must have heard about the beating from George; there was no way Jesse was going to call Michel merely to listen to him Monday morning quarterback his way through everything he’d done wrong. He hung up on him, with a cold, “This isn’t helping me recuperate, you wad,” and Michel had had the decency not to call back. His voice sounded stupid to him, and he couldn’t really breathe through his nose yet.

It was an alien who’d cared for him, somewhere he felt safe.

He couldn’t concentrate.  His thoughts stammered and pinned themselves to trivia.

He was pleased the meeting was taking place on his terms, and annoyed that everyone would see his bruises. He considered himself to be a meek individual, although stubborn if crossed, and wondered if his unevenly colourful face would hurt his chances of making friends or being taken seriously.

In the event, he was fine.

Colin he already knew. They nodded to each other without much change of expression. Michel was sitting on the balcony next to a large blue bucket, which appeared to have something splashing in it; he looked back at Colin, who raised his eyebrows and micro-nodded. So that was Kima. He was finally going to meet her.

He was introduced to Avtar, who was a ‘communication specialist’, and a native guy named Sparrow, who was a fisherman with a sideline as a water-taxi moving aliens around the Salish Sea.