Page 25 of It Takes a Thief

Louder, I said, “What an assmuncher.”

Nothing. Eshan and Jiang nodded at me, so I took control of the mouse and typed:

Dear Asshat, I am personally coming to stick a knife through your swiss cheese brain and pull your temporal lobe out through your ear.

Almost immediately, Noodlum typed,

Ha ha. See if I care. I’m just having fun sitting back here and bankrupting you.

My two engineers gasped. I remembered that Noodlum wasn’t afraid of death. What else could I threaten him with? I had no idea if he had any sisters or mothers, so I typed,

As we’re talking, my man is coming to poison your dog.

There was a brief silence during which I could hear Eshan and Jiang breathing. They’d never been involved in any club business, and their eyes were as big as harvest moons.

Finally, the response came. It was so gratifying, the blood was finally released from my brain and could flow through my limbs.

No! Not my beloved Diesel! I’m going to get you, Illuminati!

Hell yes, you ballhead.

“Call Duji,” I commanded my phone.

But before my top man could answer, Noodlum typed triumphantly:

Ha ha! You fell for that, you dumb fuck! Why would I have a dog?

I had no idea why he wouldn’t have a dog, but I hung up anyway just as Duji answered anyway.

Just call me the Merchant of Venom.

I jogged down the central hallway, shoving admins and estimators out of my way, muttering, “I’m building a fucking bomb.”

I’d carved it up on my beloved Softail many a time, but I think that day took the fucking cake. My pegs were sparking the pavement winding down Mescal Mesa. The job site was twenty minutes away as the crow flies but I got there in a little over ten.

Two lanes went in each direction in this wide canyon south of Pure and Easy. Massive divots were evident in about two hundred yards of rickety, shitty asphalt. The roller was going back and forth making a good faith effort to even out the mess, and men frantically shoveled and raked the jagged edges. And that was before all hell had broken loose.

It was evident the paver had busted across the median strip into oncoming traffic. Patches of asphalt were still being laid down on that lane, leftover material in the machine’s hopper making a patchwork of piles on the old highway. Barricades with ILLUMINATI CONSTRUCTION stenciled on them were knocked all to hell, flung hither and yon along with fluorescent orange donkey dick delineators and traffic signs. Looked like three or four automobiles were caught in the monster’s crosshairs, tossed aside like losing lottery tickets, before something had stopped its forward motion.

Wolf Glaser picked up the story from there, accosting me like a girl at an Ariana Grande concert. I had barely gotten off my ride before he limped up, stiff-legged. I let him babble because he had men in hard hats and safety vests clinging passionately to him, thumping him on the back.

Had Wolf Glaser done something to prevent further damage?

“You should’ve seen it, jefe! Man, I wish you were here!”

“I took a video!” declared a foreman, holding up his phone.

Wolf blathered on. “I leaped off Faux Pas’ ride before he even stopped. I raced like Speed Racer over to the foreman with the machine control, tearing it out of his hands.”

“Not like I didn’t know what I was doing,” said the foreman, whose name I think was Greving.

“Right, right,” said Wolf. “Guy knows what he’s doing. They all do. But they don’t know how to perform a penetration test or a vulnerability assessment like I do. Meanwhile, the paver is going apeshit, like a high-speed chase scene!”

“Completely apeshit!” agreed Greving.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said a burly, hard-hatted guy standing behind them. “Pavers only go three miles an hour.”

Faux Pas said, “It was more like an OJ Simpson slow-speed chase scene.”