Jackson Ford - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

At least the couches are decent. There are two of them, big and leathery and super-comfy, positioned in a broken L-shape in the middle of the room. Annie is sitting on one, head down, bent over her phone.

There’s no sign of Reggie yet. Paul is over by the whiteboard, tapping at something on his Palm Pilot. Yes, an actual Palm Pilot. It has a black-and-white screen, a slide-down physical keyboard and a leather cover. He point-blank refuses to upgrade—even his cell is an old-school brick, which he keeps in a pouch on his belt. Ask that thing to go online, and it would probably melt in your hand. He refuses to own a smartphone, which he says is the worst possible name for something that can be hacked so easily. When I reminded him that Reggie had installed scramblers in all our phones as standard, he just told me I was being naive.

“Hey, everyone?” Paul says. “Just a reminder, after we’re done debriefing —” he looks at me “—we need to talk about a couple of jobs tomorrow.”

Behind me, Carlos mutters something ugly-sounding in Spanish. He’s still rooting around in the cupboards.

I pick up the tie again, waving it at Paul, knowing I shouldn’t piss him off more than I have already, and not caring. “I’m gonna strangle you with this. Seriously.”

“And I am going to make sure that we’re working as we’re supposed to. I don’t know why you still have a problem with it.”

Jobs. He’s not talking about covert special ops stuff. He’s talking actual work.

China Shop isn’t just a name on a tax form. If you’re doing black-bag jobs in a city, it’s pretty helpful to have a way to move around without getting noticed. And nobody notices moving vans. They’re part of the background: the traffic and people and noise that most people in a big city don’t think twice about. When we’re gathering intel for a job, Paul will slap a special removable decal on the side of the van—a big, snorting, grinning cartoon bull that looks derpy as hell—and we’ll case as much of the area as we can.

But somewhere along the line, Paul decided that the whole moving-company thing shouldn’t just be a front—that we should do actual moving jobs, so we would appear more legit. Somehow, he got Reggie on board with the idea. Plus Tanner’s approval. And now China Shop Movers has a website. And a phone number. And every couple of weeks Paul will convince some poor bastard that Annie and Carlos and I are the best solution for moving their furniture around. We will actually go and perform actual moving jobs.

Having PK makes it a little easier—as long as you don’t make it obvious that you’re not exactly lifting a dresser with purely physical strength—but I still don’t enjoy getting up at ass o’clock and hustling to the office, just so we can drive to some godforsaken house in Downey or Torrance to move furniture. Day one: assist in the capture of international drug lord and/or terrorist mastermind. Day two: assist with moving a refrigerator down a flight of stairs.

But that’s just who Paul Marino is. He’s a details guy. Along with running comms on our jobs—ironic for someone with phone tastes from around 1995—he’s the one who gets all our gear for us. Uniforms, equipment, whatever. He takes the clothes we use to be laundered; he keeps itemised lists of everything in the house and the van, and if you even borrow so much as a single screw, he’ll not only know about it, he’ll make you write him a receipt. Yes, we may be a top-secret government operation going on cool missions, but someone has to be responsible for the details, and at least Paul seems to actually enjoy it.

What still blows my mind is how well he seems get on with Annie. She’s like the anti-Paul. They should piss each other off just by being in the same room.

I don’t know a ton about her life—you’ll be stunned to hear that we don’t usually hang out away from the office—but Carlos told me she she has a record. A bad one. The kind of record where they throw you in prison if you even apply for a job that isn’t construction or fast food. She was born in LA—in Watts, to the south—and she’s got a lot of history with multiple gangs. West Coast Bloods, MS-13, 38th Street, even some of the Sureños. Most of those names weren’t familiar to me until about a year ago. Annie was a kind of freelancer-slash-fixer, doing whatever job needed to be done for whoever could pay her. Until Tanner found her.

That’s another thing I don’t understand about Annie. We might not get along, but she is crazy smart. Which kills me. She should have been running a corporation, not getting busted for felonies in South Central. I once asked Carlos about it, and he’d given me a strange look. “You don’t know a lot about growing up in Watts, do you?” he’d said, taking a pull of his beer.

Not even I could argue with that one.

“Hey, does anyone know where the coffee is?” says Carlos.

“Top shelf, left cupboard,” I reply.

“Looked there.”

“Look again. It’s… Fuck.”

I finished the coffee this afternoon. And forgot to tell Paul we needed more.

“It’s fuck?” Carlos says. “What does that even mean?”

“Never mind. It’s fine. I’m actually OK.”

“You finished it, didn’t you? Yo, I wanted coffee too.”

Paul shakes his head, reaching over and writing something down on the whiteboard. “This is why we have a requisitions list,” he says.

“Why do we even need one? I use my PK, I need caffeine. I shouldn’t have to write it down every time.”

“And I shouldn’t have to ask you to not use that abbreviation every time. What is it with you today?”

I brandish the tie at him. “You are this close, man. Death by clip-on. I’m not kidding.”

Paul doesn’t like it when I use the term PK. He spent a bunch of time in Asia when he was with the navy, and speaks passable Korean and Vietnamese. Also a little bit of Cantonese, from his shore leave in Hong Kong. In Cantonese, PK is an abbreviation of pook kai , which means literally, go die in the street. Not exactly a phrase you’ll see in the guidebooks.

“Hey,” Annie says. She’s still on the couch, elbows resting on her knees, arms dangling. Like a boxer listening to an unworthy opponent talk trash at a weigh-in. “Are we just not gonna talk about what happened back at the Edmonds?”

“Oh, we’re going to talk about it,” says Paul, folding his arms.

I close my eyes. “Annie, I didn’t know—”

“Cos that?” She points a finger at me. “That was some straight bullshit right there.”

Carlos squeezes past me, his arms raised in a placating gesture. “Let’s just take it easy.”

“No.” She says. “No, no, no, Carlos, you don’t get to say shit. You were in the truck. You didn’t see what she did.”

It’s all I can do not to start yelling. “I got us out of there.”

“Fuck that. You just did the first thing that came into your head and hoped that it would work out OK.”

“ It did! ”

She shakes her head. “You don’t get it. We plan these jobs for a reason. We put in hours of prep for a reason. Everybody except you. You think you can just show up, do the one or two things you’re supposed to do with your voodoo mind shit, and call it a day. Hell, maybe you can. But what that does not give you the right to do is make decisions when shit goes bad.”

What is she even talking about? Prep? How the hell are we supposed to prep for a job going south like that? Isn’t that when you’re supposed to think outside the box?

“Annie, that’s not—”

“Don’t fucking interrupt me. I’m not done.” She levels a finger at me. “You put us at risk because you couldn’t stop and think for one goddamn second.”