Brewster's Brood - Part 25 (Patreon)

Part 25

Danny Garney – 3/9/2017 – Friday – 3:22 pm

It had been nice, hanging around the club, not having to worry about Max in motion, but all that was going to change in a few hours, as the food truck headed back out into the city with Max behind the cook's station. That was when things were going to be dicey again, but in some ways, it would be a nice change of pace again, getting back to being a more active threat zone. They were unlikely to be back at the club again until at least Monday or Tuesday, so he was treating it like it was the more relaxed part of the gig, but when Max was out serving meals in the wild, the women were going to be a lot less predictable and manageable, and that was when things were going to need a little more oversight.

Tonight would be the first real test of that, considering Echo Group would be unleashed on him towards the beginning of Max's Friday night shift, and many of those girls had been jonesing for their chance to get their turn in the game. They'd been told that Max was fair game but that they needed to be careful not to make it too obvious or too overwhelming, but Danny had learned that the girls tended to look on those sorts of statements as “guidelines” rather than rules that needed to be followed and respected, which meant he was going to have to put a bit of the fear of God into them early.

He fully expected there would be one girl early on who didn't know how far was “too” far and Danny would politely make an example out of that girl, not so badly that she wanted to leave the game, but enough that everyone would know to keep themselves in check and not let themselves go crazy.

So far, the job hadn't been anywhere near the clusterfuck he'd imagined it might turn into, but he had to constantly remind himself that it was very early on in the game, and not to jinx it by thinking things were always going to be this easy. For a job with this many moving parts, he would've liked to have a lot more people on his security detail, but at the end of the day, there was only one principal, and everyone else was just a bystander who he wasn't being paid to protect.

Max was off spending time with Lisseth Rodriguez for the moment, which meant Danny was basically just keeping an eye on the club itself. It wasn't exactly downtime, but he was allowing himself to relax at least a little bit.

Which was why he was surprised when he saw Esme walking towards him with a confused look on her face.

“What's up, Esme?”

“There's someone outside the gate asking to speak to you. A miss Abigail Tench. Says she's a former colleague of yours and has some business to discuss, something that needs to be talked about in person?”

Danny grinned a little, nodding. “Yeah, sounds about right. You can let her through the front gate and I'll meet her out on the front patio where she and I can have a conversation away from prying eyes. Make sure Max doesn't wander that way for a bit, yeah?”

“I think he's still pretty busy right now, but I can do that.” Esme watched as Danny stood up, stretching his arms over his head before reaching down to grab his shirt, pulling it on. He could feel Esme's eyes on him the entire time, not that he minded. He appreciated the fact that the girls at the club liked to gawk at him when he was hanging around in swim trunks working on his tan. “Danny, can I ask you something?”

“Sure, Esme. What's up?”

“Do you have a gun here?”

He turned to offer her a wry smile. “A gun? No. I have several, but I imagine you knew that already, being that you know what my role here for all of this is. Don't worry – they're all hidden well and I don't imagine anyone will run across them casually. All of them have trigger locks anyway, so it's not like anyone other than me could use them. Why, does that bother you?” he asked her as they started to walk towards the front of the house.

“A little,” she said with a shy nod. “But it's also kind of exciting, knowing we're in some kind of spy situation. Are they necessary?”

“I sure as hell hope not, but better to have weapons and not need them than to need them and not have them,” he told her. “I wouldn't worry about it.”

“Because there's no reason to worry?”

“Oh, there's always a reason to worry,” he joked with a wink. “But worrying doesn't improve your situation any, so if it's really bothering you, just be sure to be vigilant around the club, and then you're doing all you can and there's no reason to worry. Worrying is a waste of energy. If you're hellbent on worrying, then at least direct the energy somewhere rather than just sitting on it and stewing.”

They headed to the door of the building as Esme buzzed the front gate to open, Danny chuckled as he heard the familiar sound of Abby's motorcycle pulling in. Danny moved out to sit down on one of the chairs on the porch as Abby parked her bike next to Danny's, shed and stowed her helmet then started making her way over to him, a wry smile on her face.

Abigail Tench was a good-looking woman, no doubt about that. Brown hair that hung down just to her chin line, bangs in front, framing those chocolate brown eyes of hers that could gain sympathy from the hardest of killers, although she had them hidden behind a giant pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses right now. A slender build, but still muscled in all the right places. They'd never hooked up, mostly because Danny thought of her as kind of his little sister. They even sort of had the same general vibe to their looks, although she made it work much better than he did. His approach was mostly about blending in; hers was about standing out. She had California tan skin and long sinewy limbs that made her look more like a model or a ballerina than a soldier. She was also ex-Special Forces, just like he was. They'd even served together in a unit for the better part of a year.

He liked Abby, thought of her as a friend even, which was why it had broken his heart that she'd gone to work for Bernard Yancy. Oh, it was a prestigious gig, no doubt, and would look great on a resume, but Yancy was a pain in the ass to work with.

“Heya Abs,” he said to her. “Heard you might've been in town.”

“Liar,” she laughed. “You knew for a fact I was in town, and that we were probably going to have to have this conversation sooner rather than later, because it looks like we're on crossing gigs.” She strolled over towards him like she didn't have a care in the world. That was another thing he'd always liked about Abby – whether the stakes were high or the lowest of the low, she always made it all look remarkably effortless. He always aspired to look half as cool under fire as she did. “That's why I'm here, to have us a sit down before shit gets out of hand.”

“If people like you and me are involved, Abs, isn't it already by definition out of hand?”

“Yeah, that's fair.” She moved to sit down on one of the deck chairs and waited for Danny to sit down in the other one next to him. “So we've got a bit of a conflict here. You're running some sort of gag, and I can't really put my finger on what it is or what you people are doing, but there's a shitload of people coming and going from this house, and you had a ton of women all gathered together, including one of the women I gotta tell you, you can't keep around here for whatever it is you got going on.”

Danny nodded, folding his hands behind his head, leaning against the chair with a soft sigh. “We figured that much out. Hell, we even know it's at the behest of your boy Yancy. We just don't know which woman it is, why and where it is you're taking her back to.”

“If I tell you, you gonna let me take her?”

“Let's start with who it is and go from there,” Danny replied. “I need to figure out if you've got the lady's best interests in mind or not. I know we're used to playing all our cards close to the vest, but maybe this is one time where we're not playing poker, but blackjack, and it's us against the dealer.”

“That's optimistic, but hey, we can take this slow for a bit if you want. Tell you what. Answer for an answer, if the other person doesn't feel like it's being truthful enough, we call BS and ask for another answer. That sound fair to you?”

Danny nodded. “Yeah, I can do that. You wanna go first or should I?”

“Let me. Who's running the gag?”

Danny tsked his lips in a smirk, shaking his head. “Wasted question, but sure. I'm still working for Mrs. Churchill.”

“I had a feeling, but you're a smooth operator, Danny,” Abby chuckled. “You might've been picking up work for somebody else during the down time. Your go.”

“Which girl are you after?”

“Adette Schwartz.”

Danny let out a very low whistle, shaking his head once more. “Okay, did not expect that one. Got my next question already but it's your turn.”

“Who's paying for all this?”

“The late Monty Brand.”

Abby turned her head, surprise spreading on her face. “The bajillionaire? Damn. Okay. Now I understand why you're so paranoid. That means there's a lot of money at stake.”

“And a shitload of rules and regs associated with it,” Danny nodded. “Now, the big question – who's hired Yancy's Nancies to take Adette Schwartz away from here?”

“Roland Schwartz.”

Danny's eyes narrowed. “Her father? The hell?”

Abby sighed, tossing her hands up. “He's convinced she's been turned and brainwashed by some kind of cult, and that she's basically being kept here against her will.”

“Well, that's a load of horseshit,” Danny said with a laugh. “Nobody's taken control of the girl to make her do anything she doesn't want to do. She's completely here voluntarily.”

“Yeah, I figured that much when I saw her just hanging at a very posh hotel in Oakland with a bunch of her rich friends, treating it like she was on holiday. She's clearly not under duress. So why is she here, Danny?”

His face scrunched up as he considered her question for a good long minute, not wanting to dismiss it out of hand but trying to find some way he could distill it down to its bare essence of what was going on without telling her too much or getting bogged down in unnecessary details. “She's... how do I put this... she's taking part of a private game show...”

“You think that qualifies as a fair answer?”

He smirked back at her. “You think your question could've been any more open-ended?”

“Yeah, I guess that's fair. Your go.”

“Now that you know that she's here voluntarily, what're you gonna do?”

“I mean, a job's a job, right? I gotta pay the bills somehow and we don't get to pick and choose the jobs we like. I say no, Yancy's gonna fire my ass, and then where will I be?”

Danny scratched his chin a bit. “What if I had another option for you?”

“Like what? You know Yancy's opinion carries a lot of weight around our circle?”

“Like working with me. For Mrs. Churchill. Her opinion carries more weight that Bernard Yancy's does.”

“Can you guarantee me long term work with her, Danny?”

“This job we're on, it's going to run like half a year, when it's all said and done. What our next gig is beyond that, I dunno, but I can guarantee you six months worth of work and a glowing recommendation from both me and Mrs. Churchill. And you wouldn't answer to that shitheel Yancy any more.”

“He is kind of a shitheel, isn't he?” she said with a soft laugh.

“He really is, Abby. I told you that when you asked about the possibility of going to work for him.”

“Just because I bail on this gig, though, doesn't mean Yancy's not gonna keep trying, Danny.”

“Well, if you tell him you're leaving because you're against the job, that might be enough to push him off, yeah?”

Abby sighed, a deeply frustrated and annoyed noise. “I mean... maybe? If I call him and tell him I'm quitting because we were given bad intel for the gig, and that we've always been getting bad intel for his gigs, maybe he'll back down. Would you be willing to talk to him, explain to him enough to get him to recall the mission?”

“He doesn't fucking like me at all, Abby.”

“No, but he still respects you, Danny, and that's more important than his fucking feelings. Tell him to give Roland Schwartz his money back, because his daughter's here on her own recognizance, and he doesn't get to be so overprotective that he hires a military team to abduct his daughter because of a decision she made as a grown-ass woman.”

“Tell you what, I'll do that if you'll quit there and come work with me.”

Abby stroked her chin for a minute. “Who else is on your team?”

“Just technically me and Heather, like it's been for the last couple of years.”

“She still single?” Abby asked.

Danny gave her a sly grin on the side. “She asked about you, so, I'm bettin' yeah.”

Abby scratched the back of her neck and then nodded. “Okay, let's make the fucking call.”

Max Brewster – 3/9/2017 – Friday – 4:03 pm

After his tryst with Lisseth, they'd rested together for an hour or so before Max had to hop into the shower again and start to get ready. He was glad to hear the truck had arrived at around 3 and that Frankie had done his due diligence and restocked their entire pantry of supplies so that they wouldn't be short-stocked tonight, because it was time for them to get heading to Moveable Feast.

The Bay Area had a couple of food truck gathering spots that people were known to stop by, as sort of a traveling caravan. There was both Off The Grid and Moveable Feast, and while Moveable Feast was typically limited to trucks within their network, they'd made a notable exception for a couple of trucks, Max's included. Everybody was always happy to see Constant Rotation show up because nobody was entirely sure what was going to be on the menu, and the idea of getting to try something new and wild before anyone else meant that there were food bloggers who would actually queue up before they opened, phones at the ready to tell their followers what new madness Max Brewster was cooking up this week. Early on, a couple of the 'influencers' had suggested to Max that they'd give him better reviews if he'd give them free food. Max had responded that if his food wasn't worth paying for, they should go elsewhere. One or two of them had tried to diss Constant Rotation as a result, only to be buried by an overwhelming army of commenters, claiming they were full of shit.

Max loved his fans.

A warm breeze had come in through the afternoon and warmed the area up, so Max knew it was going to be the first real party night of the year and that by the end of the night, he and the other food truck teams would be fucking exhausted, cleaning up while enjoying Coronas and whining about how many of them would just be back again the next night to do it all over again.

The truck was sitting in the front parking area of the club, and when he got to it, he was very glad to see Frankie there, double checking everything, including the sales, something he'd never seen Frankie doing before.

“How'd we do?” Max asked as he moved to inspect the cooking area. It was about how he expected it to be – there had been some efforts to clean up the area, but it was still something of a goddamn mess. The brothers were excellent cooks and done very well with managing to execute his recipes, but they'd still never quite gotten the hang of cleaning the prep and cook stations before returning the truck. Max used to yell at them about it, but now simply wrote it off as part of the cost of doing business. He grabbed the bottle of Windex and his paper towels as he began to scour.

“I didn't believe it, based on the amount of supplies we were down, which was why I was checking,” Frankie told him. “But apparently the boys had their best day ever today, and sold out of most of the items they had on the menu before bringing it over. In fact, Joey left me a note that we should double the amount of supplies we ordered for the Cuban Cheesesteak, and that he's willing to bet a week's salary it goes onto the permanent list.”

“C'mon,” Max laughed, rolling his eyes. “It couldn't have sold that well.”

“Joey said it was sold out within their first two hours of the lunch shift. Some guy apparently came back and bought forty of them for his entire office.”

“No shit?” Max leaned over to look through the purchase history on the iPad they used as a register, and sure enough, there was an order that included 40 Cuban Cheesesteaks a little after 1pm. “Hope he remembered me teaching him how to do cheesesteaks in bulk. Normally the I Love Cheesesteaks truck gets those sorts of bulk orders, but ours have done pretty well, especially since they're so different. Maybe that's the draw.”

“It's not just that, though,” Frankie told him. “We sold out lots of things, like, more than we normally do. Usually you've got like 1-3 sold out items, but it looks like by the time the boys closed up shop this afternoon, they were down to just chili dogs and chili cheese fries.”

“At least we didn't run out of chili then.”

“Oh we did,” Frankie said. “Carlos just said they took some of the money out to the register to restock between the morning shift and the lunch shift, because otherwise they were gonna be out.”

“You've gotta be kidding me, Frankie,” Max said, turning back to the chili vat, which was fairly low, but still had some chili left in it. “They did a second batch? Jesus, our profits must've been mad.”

“Yeah, it looks like it really was the boys' best day ever. In fact, if we do well tonight, it might just be the best day the truck's ever had.”

“Damn,” he said, looking around the truck as if the news had blown his organization completely out of the window. “Right. Okay. Right. So let me get another batch of chili brewing while you're making sure everything else is set up, and once it's all in the cooker, you can drive us down to Jack London Square.”

Max didn't even wait for Frankie to reply, immediately getting to work making another batch of chili. There were a lot of secrets to Max's chili, but the one he was happy to disclose to everyone was that the chili never cooked for less than an hour, because otherwise the spices hadn't settled into the meats properly. He also never understood people who only had one type of meat in their chili. For some strange reasons often people stuck to just ground beef in their chili, whereas he would also dabble with chorizo, kielbasa, linguica, stew beef, pastor, bacon, pancetta, anything he could get his hands on.

Once he had the chili on the induction cooker, locked and secured, he and Frankie hopped up into the front and slowly pulled Constant Rotation out and away from Ironwood Estates out into Berkeley proper, heading down the hills towards Oakland proper.

Normally they would have the doors and windows closed while they were driving, but both of them wanted to have the windows down and let the air blow through the truck, just to give them a sense of being mobile again.

It was odd, but Max felt like the fact that he'd been in one place so much of late was almost like it had been a shock to his system. Not necessarily in a bad way, but not in a good way either – just a dramatic change from what he was used to. But he'd always taken great joys in being in motion, on the go, with the wheels in rotation. Standing still every now and then was good, but he needed to make sure he wasn't making a habit out of it.

He had to admit, it wasn't just the past week with Ironwood, but the fact that since he'd started the food truck, he really hadn't taken much in the way of vacations, hadn't traveled, hadn't just enjoyed life for the simple things. When was the last time he'd left the Bay? Where did he go? He couldn't even really remember. He was sure that if he sat and thought about it, maybe it would come to him, but the fact that he didn't have that information quickly on hand was a little jarring.

At some point soon, he was going to need to step away from the food truck. Maybe for a week, maybe even a whole month. He needed to go somewhere, do something, be somewhere new for at least a little while.

Except, of course, it always came back to the almighty dollar.

And the fact that he didn't have enough of them.

Sure, he'd been saving each and every penny he could, and all of that money was sitting in a fund that was his to use any time he wanted, but more than anything else in his life, he wanted to open an actual restaurant, to have some place solid where the patrons came to him instead of it being the other way around with him chasing after wherever the hottest spot he could find was. It was like a bad dating game, where he'd constantly been looking for Miss Right Now and not Miss Right.

It was in that moment that he made a decision, something that wouldn't have immediate effect, but would be something to plan for, to plan around. Before the end of the year, he was going to take a month off from the truck. The Hernandez brothers could run the truck during his absence if they wanted, or maybe he'd hire a second team to cover his vacation, but before Christmas, he was going to get his ass to somewhere new, some place he'd never been before, by hook or by crook.

Maybe, he thought, he'd go to Hawaii. It seemed like pretty much everyone else in California had been to Hawaii at some point in their lives, but Max never had. Never had the time or the money, but Lord knows he was tired of hearing everyone else talk about how wonderful and amazing it was. Even Frankie had been multiple times. It was an idea he put down in his mental notebook as they were starting to pull up towards the gate for them to enter, Frankie giving a wave to the guy at the gate.

The big burly security guy still checked his clipboard to make sure that Constant Rotation was on the list before moving the barricade to allow the truck to drive into the area. Frankie took a minute or two getting their truck lined up properly, a couple of the event staffers helping him move and adjust the vehicle to get it into place.

There were already people starting to mill around the area, even though nobody was technically open yet. That happened from time to time, but based on the attire, Max had to admit, he was wondering what kind of party atmosphere they were in for tonight, since he saw a lot of girls in bikini tops and jean shorts, wondering if they had coats or jackets in their cars for once the sun went down and the cool wind started to blow over the area. Down by the waterfront, once it got dark, the chill happened fast, although there were heater trees littering around the area. It would be fun to watch for the night.

Once Frankie had the truck parked, the two of them started to go through their regular start up process. Frankie flipped open the side of the truck, pushing the shutters open while Max hooked up the truck to the generator provided by the event organizer. After getting the power running, Max stepped around to the front of the truck to take a look at it from several paces back, considering what Sunshine had told him about the suggested redesign. He could absolutely see how much all of her suggested changes would enhance their visibility and performance, although he wondered how much it was really needed, looking at the small crowd of women starting to hover near the truck was indicated.

He headed back into the truck, glancing over at Frankie. “What the hell is going on in my life, Frankie?”

His friend looked a little caught off guard and maybe even a little bit nervous. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I'm used to there being a line for our food, but I don't think it's ever been this many women compared to men,” he laughed.

“Well, there's that convention of pharmaceutical reps in town, as well as that beauty pageant they're holding in downtown SF, so maybe that's it,” Frankie told him. “I'm sure all the girls we were partying with over the last few days told their friends, so that's probably just it.”

“You remember when the worst we had to worry about was drunks?” Max laughed.

“Well, tonight they've got a band playing, and there's going to be a beer truck, so we'll still probably get a couple of drunks hanging around tonight.”

“Cool,” Max said. “Cool cool cool. All of the new chaos mixed with all of the old chaos. If anybody throws a punch tonight, I'm grabbing the Slugger and going out swinging,” he said, gesturing to the baseball bat they kept in the corner.

“Sounds fair to me, man.”