Red Entaries

Eleven

On January fifteenth, Joanna drove to meet her business associate near a Brooklyn district hotel. It was northwest of Lunar Life Corp, the corner of Eighty-fourth Street and Fourth Avenue. A three minute drive of long shadows stretching from the setting sun, where a white orange swirl with black clouds was below the bronze silhouette of an urban skyline.

Turning into Eighty-fourth Street, where it spanned two hundred meters through apartments and housing complexes; Joanne drove, knowing the ambition of herself becoming a Black Viper did wet her appetite.

Before the road's end met an intersection where two hover cars wound by, she slowed down as the hotel emerged from the roadside bushes. A short walk across from an abandoned worksite and to park near the curb where a shedding london plane tree was lit through its spinney pale naked branches.

The car door opened. The air was calm and clammy as she strode near the construction layout and scaffolding shadow; where the pre-planned meeting place was an abandoned worker's lot. Joanna realized a thunderstorm was stirring when she sat waiting at the parking lot's brim. With a vacant vehicle to her right, she looked back viewing a bulldozer and the finer details amid its sandy pit; and her stomach felt ill about it. She noticed tools were left by the building's foundation, and how the sand trap was reserved for a cement roller.

Jo swallowed moments later, turning and seeing a black hover limousine sweep away fragments of industrial glass—flying along the paved concrete—slowly driving right alongside the vacant hover car. Joanna's adrenaline shifted as she stood. She hooked her purse with swinging arms and walked gallantly across the hover car, while her reflection folded down the glossy hood and up the tinted windows by luminous lights. She came around its silver bumper over a cement block, and several feet forth a window zipped down.

Joanne was spotted looking while she thought about what to say and cradled her purse with its strap over her shoulder; then she received a signal from the driver. He opened the door with a smiling nod to receive her greetings. Joanna knew that Mugg awaited her arrival. She strolled quickly down, and Mugg's driver stood with a hand pitted on the door's arch to watch and look out as the meeting took place.

Approaching the last of seven windows, a door seamlessly opened before her where a man reached across—suited in a wide girth black blazer attire—removing a handgun and hat along either thigh. Striped with a crimson white tie, and a rough scraggly beard. He gestured a simple, "hello," nodding over a short smile. "I see you're pretty as they say," he spoke out cleanly and his unkempt hair shook spontaneously by a coughing sound of a grunt. A soft voice and a chestnut parted undercut hairdo.

"I see you're Mugg," Joanna said smiling as a gust blew down tickling over her face, pulling back her flowing hair, and she was shown a sterling silver handgun. Its butt was handled by a gold rubber grip; being six and a half inches long, weighing twenty four ounces, a Black Viper was inked across, strangling the orifice. Mugg saw her relish in his gun waiting for a response.

Mugg assumed Joanne was an undercover FBI agent before she presented the proof of her mission, where Mugg said: "It will take more than a smile to be a Black Viper like me." Mugg was hoping she blundered the operation for a far-fetched scheme to prove she belonged to the criminals, until his vindictive scowl went back to his carefree demeanor, seeing Trevor Trahern's account card. Mugg couldn't believe it, she did what he thought was impossible. Joanna earned Mugg's trust.

Adding trust to ambitions. Joanne became a building block to build upon. Once the Harbinger heard of Jo's mission, he knew she would be his only chance to blackmail Trevor. Mugg was here to clean up the mess after Trev was blackmailed; any loose ends had to be cut off.

Mugg's claim went before the syndicate's throne of malice with cruelty and power by lineage, for riches and pleasures; Mugg waited for the Harbinger's return to Dirge Hold. There were many Black Vipers, but only one could bequeath the Harbinger and share in the treasure of his job.

Mugg nodded at the limo driver and laughed openly, saying; "In a flash...I'll have your payment Joanna, after you sleep with Trahern to blackmail him." Then he entered the hover limousine.

A silent moment later led Joanne to fear Mugg. She saw the driver open his suit to shoot her...but, no, he was trying to save her.

Joanna's life flashed before her eyes. The ladder of viper ranks she climbed: blue-initiate, green-assassin, to white-double agent, and now soon black-regional leader. She was proud of herself, pending the catastrophe that disunited her family. Deep down she knew if her parents weren't killed, where police brutalized them for smuggling weapons ten years ago, she wouldn't have become a juvenile; stealing and selling weapons at black-markets to eventually join the Mob.

The hover limousine doors opened widely. Armed men tried to grab Jo. "You're letting her get killed!" Mugg's screaming voice directed the driver's two missed shots, and lasers blitzed across the now not so vacant car. Joanna's neck was wounded while the gang's driver took one in the chest. Blasts danced at Joanna's striding legs. "She's just a Street Slug," Joanna heard a faint bark as she picked up Mugg's handgun he dropped, and she ran low and frightened by a hard spray of beams on the open pavement into a dark passage...

Joanne's shoulder boned a narrow brick wall hurtling through the first alley over dumpsters and debris. She caught her breath as a young pedestrian strolled by. Waiting...and across the lonely lit road trafficked by glaring ruby lights, she found a second alley, running ten yards down by a steamy dinner backdoor where smoky billows sweated against graffiti inscribed walls. A chef gawked at her as he nearly tripped her with recycled boxes until she ran down the third pathway with vacant two-story buildings. Halfway down Joanna sat between a window's stoop with two lumber piles.

Settling down and calling her hover car with her com. A shock hit her. Not quite the cold breeze hitting up her hair, or passing frosts chilling her nervous fingertips, but anxiety to hold on long enough to see her job through. It was either this, or the fear of Mugg having his way with her if she didn't blackmail Trevor Trahern. She knew what Mugg was capable of and adding to her troubles; she now had to risk her life with a vigilante on the loose trying to catch her.

Joanna's hand started to relax after a second failed attempt when her com began beeping. She quickly spoke and pressed it against her cheek until her ride was underway. She needed a place to rewind and contemplate her next move to find her future. She was hoping to find the answers on her date with Trevor. The finely etched Black Viper handgun in the palm of her hand was a reminder there was something greater than living as a Street Slug.

***

The truth is out, Blake thought, as he continued to squeeze the trigger of his handgun. "I have the evidence caught on my com, now I just need to catch that vixen Lorena, and bring her back to Trevor in chains and tell him she really works for the Mob," Blake said as he ducked for cover. "Then the job I used to have as security chief will once again be in my grasp, not only that, now I hope to have a raise."

The Gangster members tried to recover from Blake's ambush, and that's when Blake pulled out another weapon and began to shoot the limo the gang used as armor with explosive rounds. When the smoke cleared Blake decided to shoot Jo's vehicle as well.

It looked as though Blake the Mobsters had no choice but to make a run for it. The syndicate did run after Joanna in the very same alley, although the criminals did set up a rear guard to help themselves escape. Blake shot down every one of them except for one; and Mugg took off running and tried to hit-and-run Blake with his own hover car, not to forget he now had Blake's car to escape with.

After the shootout, Blake was picked up by armed men in a hover van, they were the FBI. The FBI informed Blake that Joanna was really an FBI agent under the disguise of Lorena, her twin sister; and that Blake almost killed her. If she died then the whole FBI operation would be ruined, and the FBI couldn't follow the blackmailers to catch the Harbinger and the Moon Landers Corp chairman in the act of a crime. The FBI told Blake about the asteroid auction as well.

Blake was offered a job by the FBI to protectTrevor Trahern; he accepted. Later this day Blake called Trevor's bodyguardTyrone and let him in on the scoop, that the FBI were involved, and theasteroid auction would soon be over and we don't want the syndicate to get awaywith blackmailing the companies who bid on it, and that Joanna should be leftin peace so she can do her job of blackmailing Trahern. Blake assured Ty it wasthe only way to catch the criminals in the act and that Trevor wasn't in anydanger from Joanne. Blake let Tyrone know that he also would be useful toprotect Trevor from the Gangsters when the time came.