Concrete Underground, Moxie Mezcal [best books to read for teens .TXT] 📗

importantly, she was an insider in Max's world; she knew all the players, and her insight could be invaluable. Basically, she was a calculated risk worth taking.

I made this decision a couple hours earlier, after we left the warehouse party and decided to walk back into town together. Neither of us had a car and there was no late night bus service, as barbaric as that is for a city this size. Max offered to have his driver give us a lift, but the two of us were still so amped up from the party that the long walk seemed appealing. Although honestly, I was really angling for the chance to press her for more information and see if I could trust her. And for her part, I suspected that she would have agreed to just about anything if the end result was spending just a little more time with me.

We left the industrial sector by crossing the Guadalupe Bridge over San Hermes River, then decided to take the long way back and cut through the park. Even though it probably wasn't the safest move and ended up taking way longer than I expected, it gave her time to tell me more about herself and her life.

I half expected to hear some absurd story about being raised by wolves or running off with gypsies, but for once she was refreshingly plausible.

She was born Natalie McPherson nineteen years ago last April. Her parents met when her father was already in his fifties and her mother was in her late twenties. James was just getting over the end of his second marriage, which was ending in divorce. His first wife died of leukemia. Neither marriage had produced any other children.

Natalie's mother was the daughter of one of James's business associates. They met at a charity auction for McPherson's foundation and had a brief romance that ended messily. However, eight months after that messy ending, their daughter was born. Her mother died three days later due to complications that arose during labor. James McPherson was left to care for his only child alone, and named her Natalie after her mother.

She rarely saw her father as a child and was instead raised by a series of nannies. She was an imaginative and gifted kid who skipped a grade in elementary school, but she also had behavior problems. She felt bored and stifled by school, prone to daydreaming and often having difficulty focusing on any single task for a length of time.

While in junior high, she caught the theater bug and began acting in a handful of local children's companies. By the time she was thirteen, she was already in high school and her drama department staged an original play she had written for their spring production. It was they first time they had done a student work. At age fifteen, her works were being performed locally by smaller troupes. She also starred in many of them.

She graduated high school early and decided to focus on theater full-time, but in the three years since hadn't yet managed to making any headway into having a major production.

Nor was she really showing much interest in getting involved with her father's business or pursuing any other career for that matter. In fact, she was fairly open about being generally aimless and unmotivated, which was one of the major factors contributing to the strained relationship with her father.

In fact, practically the only thing the two of them had in common anymore was Max, whom she met when he came to see one of her shows. Her father misinterpreted Max's interest in her as being sexual and, fearing Max's reputation as unrepentant man-slut, tried to keep the two of them apart. Columbine picked up on this vibe immediately, so of course she made a point to spend as much time with him as possible, and the two of them soon became close friends.

"But before I let you in on all the details," I continued, back at the diner, "I need to make sure you realize exactly what's going on here."

"What do you mean?" she asked and inclined her head, intrigued.

"Well, for starters, do you know why everyone is so upset by my article?"

She shook her head and confessed, "Sorry, I don't really read your newspaper. Or any newspaper, for that matter."

"Fair enough," I replied. "In a nutshell, I basically accuse several powerful businessmen of bribing and threatening city officials into giving them fat government contracts. Businessmen like Max. And your father."

"Oh," she responded with amusement. "So I'm guessing that's why you were getting the cold shoulder at your sister's wedding, right?"

"Mostly. A lot of them just flat out personally hate me anyways, but the article didn't help things much."

"I'd imagine not," she chuckled. "So tell me more, I'm intrigued. What specifically did your article say?"

"Well of course the focus was Max, who got the contract to provide citywide free wi-fi, which of course is generating huge ad revenue for him as well as subscription fees from people willing to pay for faster, ad-free service. I have e-mails between him and city officials, including the mayor's chief of staff and the city administrator, where he makes some pretty severe threats if they don't choose Abrasax. And when I say threats, I'm talking both personal and professional - and some just bizarre, horrifying shit."

"Like what?" she asked, intrigued.

"He got so mad at one city staffer who wouldn't return his calls that he threatened to have the guy fired and blacklisted, have his house foreclosed, his teenage daughter violated, and his pet cat flayed alive."

Columbine laughed and shook her head. "I'd like to think at least one of those was an empty threat. So who else did your article mention?"

"Asterion Records Management, who won the contract for the city's records warehousing and digital archiving. Of course, they won the contract because they were the only ones given the chance to bid. Incidentally, their CFO had recently purchased gifts for several city council members, including a honeymoon to Asia for a newly-married member, an original Picasso for the council's resident art-buff, and even paying to remodel the vice mayor's kitchen. I was given copies of e-mails from an Asterion rep to city staff with detailed instructions on how to hide the source of the gifts.

"Then there was Inspiratech, who made millions on their contract to completely redo the network infrastructure in city hall an other city offices. But they won the contract only in the second round of voting. After the first round, the council member who cast the deciding vote against them was recalled from office by a vicious, well-funded campaign. No one knew how a tiny grassroots neighborhood committee behind the recall was able to raise that kind of money, but then I turned up several e-mails to the new council member suggesting he would be well-served by taking a more amenable stance on Inspiratech's proposal.

"And finally," I hesitated a little, "your father successfully lobbied the city to invest millions in redevelopment money in areas where he owns a lot of land, making the property values and the rents that he could charge skyrocket. Again, e-mails between your father's lobbyists and city officials contain a host of thinly-veiled and not-even-thinly-veiled threats. Your father has been a king maker in this city for decades. All ten sitting council members and the mayor won their seats with his backing. You don't ignore threats from a man like that.

"Those are the highlights, at least."

I paused for a moment, unsure how Columbine was going to react.

"Yay, pancakes," she sang.

I looked up to see that our waiter had finally dragged himself away from his ham-fisted attempts to pull some crunchy granola tail long enough to bring our food. He set down a mountain of buttermilk pancakes in front of Columbine and a bacon-and-egg muffin sandwich in front of me. Columbine proceeded to drown her plate in maple syrup.

"Hey, do you think you could see your way to tossing a little coffee into this mug while you're over here? I'm sure she won't mind if you're gone just a little longer," I added, pointing at the redhead, who had picked up a pinch of her cold, congealing oatmeal and started rubbing it in her fingertips, no doubt tripping on the way its lumpy, grainy texture felt against her skin.

The waiter left in a huff and mercifully headed for the pot of coffee sitting on a warmer behind the counter.

"You shouldn't be so mean to people, or so judgmental," Columbine chided gently as we watched him go.

I sucked on my teeth and briefly considered a couple snappy rejoinders, but decided against them. "Yeah, I know," I sighed. "It's just these pretentious fucking drones with all the shit sticking out of their skin, it's so phoney now, it's de rigeur, like counter-culture is just another uniform to wear."

"I think it's neat," she shrugged. "It's like you're taking control of your own body, turning it into something new, something better, not just passively accepting what you've been given. Haven't you ever wanted to be someone else?"

I rolled my eyes in answer just as the waiter returned.

Once he finished refilling my coffee and Columbine had managed to choke down her first impossibly large forkful of pancake, she eagerly asked, "So what do you want me to do to help with your plan?"

"There are a few things I was hoping you could explain for me," I replied, then dug an envelope out of my coat pocket and then laid it out on the table. It was blue and stamped with the crown-and-globe symbol in silver foil, just like the one I'd received the morning of Jenny's wedding.

"What can you tell me about this?"

Columbine picked up the envelope. "Well that's the symbol of the Highwater Society, like Max told you."

"Yeah, but what exactly does that mean?" I pressed. "What is the Highwater Society?"

"It's basically a social club for the richest of the rich. It started way back when the city was founded as an excuse for rich old men to get away from their wives and get drunk. Now they let in girls, and all the young tech millionaires have dropped the median age a good half-century or so, but the idea is pretty much just the same - rich people sitting around together to talk about how much better they are than everyone else."

I nodded to the envelope in her hands. "Look inside."

She opened the unsealed flap and pulled out the sheet of white paper inside. The page was headed "THE HIGHWATER SOCIETY" and contained a list of names with what appeared to be titles or positions. The titles were all taken from members of a king's court - Steward, Chaplain, Seneshcal, Cup-bearer. Columbine's father was listed as as Chamberlain. The rest of the names were all prominent political and business leaders, most of whom were connected to the scandals in my article. At the very top of the list, however, was, "Dylan Maxwell - Fool."

Columbine nodded her head as she slipped the paper back into the envelope. "Those are their officers. Where did you get this?"

"About two weeks ago, while I was still working on my article, I got a call from a woman