Free They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy by R. D. Harless

Scotch with me to the table.
    "Go easy on that," Tracey told me as she flipped through the booklet written by the man she had just killed. "Wow, this is some dry reading. Why don't we skip the background info for now and cut straight to the shit that can kill us. Page thirty-one."
    We all turned to page thirty-one without a word.
    Tracey finished her water, opened another bottle and set the cap down on the table in front of her.
    I hated this shit.

Chapter 7
    Recidivism
     
    The next mornin g somehow managed to get worse.
    "I swear to God if Lee doesn't walk his black ass through that door in the next five minutes, I will skull drag him from my Mercedes all the way back to St. Louis and throw whatever's left on his family's front stoop."
    Not even nine a.m. the morning after she had killed Kamikaze, and this was the shit that came out of Tracey's mouth. And she kept humming that Janis Joplin song 'Piece of My Heart,' which was nine kinds of fucked-up. This was the same girl who had made me breakfast in bed in Paris and gone to town on me while I ate it. She'd had no shame. A bottle of wine in her and she would do anything.
    I texted Lee under the table . WHR R U? GET UR ASS HERE NOW.
    Tracey slapped her pen on her yellow pad she was eleven pages of notes deep in. "Why do you keep looking at me, Don? What the fuck is it?"
    My eyes dropped to the blank notepad I hadn't written anything on. "I'm not fucking looking at you."
    She adjusted her low-cut top to cover her cleavage. "They're just tits. You've seen them before."
    I had checked the news back home on my phone the night before; the cops were pursuing an arson investigation for the Wilmont Avenue fire. More than likely, nobody would ever come to my door over it, but if it got enough attention for a Federal psychic to be brought in, which was about my luck, there was a chance they could pull my name out of the aura of the place or whatever. That was the only reason I fucking stayed in Missouri. If they tapped me for that fire and found out about all that shit in Europe, I was gonna need something I could bargain with if I ever wanted to breathe free air again. And this little planning session right here was exactly the kind of shit I could bargain with. Hell, I had already witnessed Tracey commit a murder. If I gave her another day she would probably give me enough shit to get me down to time served from the SCEIA. I just had to stick around and keep my mouth shut. Which was kind of asking a lot from myself, really.
    Under the table, I texted Lee again. Nobody had heard from him since the day before. It wouldn't have surprised me if he had gone back to St. Louis after the Kamikaze thing, but distance meant nothing to somebody like Tracey. There was no running away from her, and I hoped he realized that if he tried it would make his life unpleasant and, judging by the day before, short.
    Projected on the wall in the darkened conference room in front of me, Spencer, and Tracey were the main problems in the bunker we were trying to make a plan to handle. Because that's what we were supposed to be doing here.
    - Recombinant DNA test subjects in storage (not to be harmed)
    - Active denial pain transmitters retrofitted throughout corridors
    - Non-reflective l ight barriers on vault compartments trigger vault lockdown/chlorine gas
    - Radio pulse radiation fail-safe (brain death/permanent insanity)
    - Remote computer reprogramming not an option, no outside connections
    - Computer/nanite interface may not be possible with outdated interior systems
    - Shutting down power will trigger fail-safe
    - Teleporting within the complex will trigger fail-safe
    - Complex shielded from all outside psychic abilities
    Tracey stared at the words and polished off her third cup of coffee. "So you're telling me there's absolutely no way you can cut any of the systems in the complex? You killed a guy with a phone call, but you can't do anything with some 80's computer crap?"
    Spencer answered in a