Free Breakers by Edward W. Robertson Page A

Morgan Private Stock she liked. "It's sitting behind a desk in a little tech room watching screens."
    "And getting shot like a redshirt if something goes wrong."
    "The guy's Hollywood. If something goes wrong, he'll have a SWAT team in three minutes."
    She mashed her lips together and absently accepted his celebratory rum and Coke. "Don't get hurt, okay? If anything happens to you, I'll run away with the mailman."
    He woke before his alarm, rolled up to the manor eight minutes early. Craig met him on the porch, blear-eyed.
    "Have fun, kid. I was too bored to beat off."
    He learned quickly what Craig meant. For all the break-ins, looting, riots, and fires around Los Angeles County, none of that manifested itself on Murckle's quiet cliffside street. He had the nine closed-circuit screens to watch, but except for the constant soft sway of the fronds, he may as well have been watching nine still lives of palms. He tried to find an internet radio feed for the Mariners and discovered the games had been postponed. For the Mariners, that was probably a mercy.
    He wandered the grounds. A light fog clung to the cliffs, dewing the grass and the planks of the deck. He went back inside. The radio reported riots in a park in New York, three deaths and a couple dozen injuries, armed anarchists clashing with police over accusations the disease was an escaped government project. In Atlanta, crowds had been forced away from the CDC with live ammunition.
    Bill clapped him on the shoulder that afternoon. "Anything go down?"
    "Just my heart rate."
    "Guess them crooks haven't figured their way up to the hills yet."
    Before he left, Hu asked him to drop off a box of files in Hawthorne. The windows of the looted Ralph's were dark, gaping, glass glittering on the asphalt. Men stood on their front porches eyeing pedestrians and traffic, baseball bats and golf clubs dangling from their hands. At a Spanish bungalow with an iron fence around its rooftop barbecue, Raymond handed off the box of files and got home an hour before dark.
    "I made $96 to sit in a room and watch a bunch of TV screens," he told Mia. "I think we'll be okay."
    She gathered her long dark hair behind her head, sticking out her lower lip. "No one tried to break in?"
    "It was so quiet I could hear the mice in the walls plotting their heist."
    So was the next day. When Bill showed up to relieve him, Hu handed Raymond an address. "Mr. Murckle has some files he needs delivered to Torrance. Do you know Torrance?"
    "Enough to get around."
    "When you arrive, knock on apartment 218 and return to the car. When the man comes downstairs to the car, pop the trunk. Do not speak to him. Once he accepts the files, return here and see me before you begin your rounds."
    Down the hill in Torrance, tarps fluttered from smashed windows. In the Sprouts parking lot, cops stood over a line of men cuffed and laid out on their bellies. Ambulances howled down the PCH, shepherding the thinned traffic to the sides of the road. Raymond turned off, passing a bowling alley, liquor stores. He parked in a weedy lot between two beige stucco apartment buildings, stepped out into an afternoon as warm as a dog's breath, climbed the stairs, knocked on 218, and returned to the car.
    A minute later, a skinny white guy with a shaved head and the long, drooping jaw of a basset hound jogged down the steps, reached into the open trunk, and pulled out a briefcase.
    Raymond drove back to Murckle's. Hu opened the door before he could knock. "Everything went well?"
    "Perfectly," Raymond said. "Hey, I think I left something in the control room."
    Hu nodded and gestured him upstairs. Raymond took them at a walk. In the control room, Bill clasped his hands behind his head and gazed blankly at the ceiling. Raymond knocked on the open door and Bill flailed to keep from falling from his chair.
    "Christ, man, I'm trying to goof off in here."
    Raymond closed the door. "You were right. We're into something strange."
    Bill glanced at the door