Ch. 42 – Down in Dixie

A headache was building up behind Derrick’s brow, and it continued, despite five minutes of massaging.

Maxine had stripped Xavier with her own two hands—his protests and resistance were futile against the muscled girl, who tossed him into a padded bra, long dress, and slapped some make-up on him. The result was . . . almost convincing, but the illusion was quickly broken when Xavier started itching his crotch and shimmying around, trying to get comfortable in the bra.

“Look, Maxine, I don’t think this is going to work,” Derrick said. The girl had an outsized appetite for experimentation. It made her the most skilled hacker he could call on, but jobs could be so unpredictable when she got involved. “I still think it makes more sense for us to disguise ourselves as sanitation workers, or repairmen. No one will pay attention to us, and we’ll have an excuse to ask someone to let us into the apartment building. If the front desk asks, we can say the apartment management scheduled us in at the last minute, so it wouldn’t be strange if they weren’t expecting us. Besides . . . I’d like you to treat our client a little better, please.”

Maxine pouted, and let go of Xavier, who immediately stripped his dress and padded bra off, and smeared the makeup off his face with a wet cloth.

“Fine,” Maxine said. “You guys are no fun. Can you at least promise me you’ll bring the disguise as a backup? In case your lame repairman disguises don’t work?”

Derrick sighed. “Okay, fine. We’ll keep them in a hidden compartment in the repairman bag.

“You’ll thank me later,” Maxine teased. Probably not, but Derrick was thankful enough that she had stopped molesting his client.

Xavier yelped, and stuffed his phone into his pocket. “Goddamn bitch, look at how much time you wasted putting me in that drag queen shit. Let’s go, Derrick. I wanna get that pussy tonight.”

“Of course,” Derrick said. He smoothed out his own repairmen costume, and then grabbed the one he had prepared for Xavier. He had cobbled it together from some contraband uniforms Maxine had bizarrely kept in her storage closet. Derrick’s costume fit decently, but Xavier’s would be oversized. “Change into these.” Derrick tossed the clothes at Xavier, who started changing into them with incredible efficiency. The man had a one track mind, and Derrick had to respect that, at least a bit.

Derrick thumbed out fifteen of the hundred dollar bills, and held them out to Maxine. “Fifteen hundred up front, and fifteen hundred upon completion?”

She took the bills from Derrick’s hand, counted them off with a flourish, and then stuffed them in her pocket. “Sure. That’s with my special discount applied, though. Lucky you, getting a good deal from a talented girl like me.”

“Thanks Maxine, I appreciate the favor.”

Xavier came up to them, and buttoned the shirt button on his repairman outfit. The clothes fit him better than expected. “Now this isn’t so bad, but it reminds me of my pops. Worked hard all his life for barely anything, and now where is he? Probably dead in a ditch somewhere.”

Well, what could you say to that? Better to just pretend he hadn’t heard anything about Xavier’s dad. “Are you all ready to go?”

“Yeah. Shit, I better be able to fuckin’ cum after all this crap.”

#

The two got back in the canoe, made the slow and careful trip back to the shore, and then Derrick stopped by Hack Alley to drop the five thousand dollars off. Then, the two of them took the bus toward New Shore City proper. Dixie territory was amid the city’s heart, but it took a while to get that far into the city in the first place.

Many bus routes might have gotten them there, but in the end they ended up walking the rest of the way because they had missed a bus.

New Shore City proper was relatively well-policed, so gangsters didn’t engage in violent crime, but the streets surrounding ‘Dixieland,’ as the locals called it, gave off a different vibe. Storefronts painted in bright, pastel colors had barbed wire atop their short, chain-link fences, and flags from a collection of southern states hung from every other window.

These were refugees: either from the flooded southern coasts, or the ones who had refused to work for the mega corporations that had set up shop on the high ground in the areas they had been priced out of.

When you came across someone who rarely left Dixieland on public transit—they had their own shops and corner stores—you would know from their stare. It was challenging, questioning, doubting the way of life the northeastern elite had envisioned for their new city that was built upon a sunken one.

Hundreds, even thousands, of them were packed into the public housing that the city had built. They had gathered together there like any other group of outsiders, and made their own home.

Just a few blocks away from a shopping center, and Dixieland came into view.

A few men, maybe in their thirties, were leaned against the front wall of a bakery. One of them scraped at a tin pie with his plastic fork, and then brushed at his mustache.

Derrick and Xavier kept their heads down, walking on the opposite side of the street in their repairmen uniforms.

Derrick felt their eyes on him, but kept walking. The apartment they were targeting was close by.

They stepped onto a street full of restaurants with outdoor dining, where more middle-aged men, and a few families, sat. The days were still warm enough to eat outside, if it wasn’t too late. Here, little IoT camera enclosures were welded onto metal poles on street corners, and Wi-Fi extenders were installed every ten feet, as part of the city’s commitment to ensuring public internet access.

In the middle of the street was the apartment. It was tall, and the entrance was relatively clean. Derrick and Xavier pretended to examine a restaurant’s menu across the street from the entrance, watching as a man scanned his way into the building with his Beacon, and tugged his daughter along as they walked in together.

The plan, as Maxine had explained it to him, was to bring her device toward the apartment for it to act as her eyes and ears, so to speak. She would use it to take control of some nearby access points, and identify which devices were sending web traffic to Better Butler’s servers. Derrick coughed and whispered, his earpiece picking up the noise. “M, can you get anything from here?”

Maxine’s voice came over the earpiece. [“No dice. I can’t connect with any unsecured devices yet. But there’s gotta be some; wouldn’t be a city project without any. Keep moving in a circle around the apartment, and then try your best to get inside.”]

“Okay,” Derrick mumbled to Maxine.

“Hey, Taylor,” Derrick said, tapping Xavier on the shoulder. Of course, he didn’t want to use his client’s real name while they were ‘undercover’ so to speak. He had chosen Taylor because, well, if they for some reason had to stuff Xavier into a dress, Taylor was at least a gender neutral name, so Derrick wouldn’t have to memorize two code names and confuse himself. “Find a place to hang out for a bit. I’m going to go for a walk.”

“What, you’re gonna just leave me all by myself?”

“Yeah, but not for too long. Don’t worry.”

Derrick started down the sidewalk, turning onto streets so that he was moving roughly counterclockwise around the apartment, until Maxine beeped into his earpiece again.

[“Got it. Don’t move a muscle,”] Maxine said. Derrick complied, pretending to check his phone for something. [“Alright, keep going.”]

They repeated the process until Maxine had stopped him a total of four times. She would’ve asked for more, but Derrick had cut it short, after a large woman kept bumping her walker into him on purpose. He had cleared his throat, but merely earned glares from the pedestrians around him. He was evidently not welcome in Dixieland.

“Alright, you’ve got four points of reference. Can you locate the device?” Derrick whispered.

[“Yeah, I’m scanning the logs and live traffic. Hm, no hits . . . Guess you’ll need to go inside the building. Tit-zilla’s device could be using a closer access point.”]

Derrick sighed.

[“What? One of you is going to need to go inside to grab it, anyways.”]

“Well, I was sort of hoping it’d be outside, and somewhere easy to grab and get away with it.”

[“Wouldn’t that be great. It isn’t outside, though, so get moving.”]

Xavier had found a seat on a stack of plastic cartons in an alleyway. Funnily enough, he looked right at home.

“Hey,” Derrick said, leaning up against the wall next to Xavier. “She couldn’t find it with outdoor Wi-Fi. We’re going to have to figure out how to get inside, and then she’ll check those access points for if they can see the device.”

“But how the fuck we gonna get in there?” Xavier asked. “They lock the door, and we don’t have a key.”

“Hm.” It was a challenge. If their bluff with the repairmen outfits didn’t work, they would have to steal a card key from someone and scan in that way. Stealing a card key from someone was hard, and if he took their Beacon, they’d definitely notice, given that it was almost as multi-functional as a smartphone these days. “What if we just moved closer to the building? I think the Wi-Fi mesh could probably penetrate through the walls, at least a little bit.” Derrick activated his earpiece. “What do you think, M?”

Maxine’s voice crackled through. [“Could be worth a shot. But you’re just kicking the can down the road, if you can’t get into the building. Wait . . . unless she takes the device out with her. Okay, yeah, go for it. I’ll keep scanning.”]

“Man, you’ve gotta be kidding me right now,” Xavier said. “A Black and Chinese man snooping around the building actin’ like we’re casing the joint. That’s not gonna fly here.”

Xavier was right. And they technically were casing the joint. What sort of excuse could they use to walk closely around the perimeter of the building? Although the building itself was relatively clean, there was detritus around the base of it: discarded soft drink cups and straws, hamburger wrappings.

“I think I’ve got an idea,” Derrick said. There were less stares as they left Dixieland, presumably because the locals had already gotten used to them. After walking past the guys leaning against the wall, they went to a hardware store just a few blocks away, and picked up some brooms and dustbins, on Xavier’s dime.

“Goddamn, this is gonna end up costing me a fortune by the time we’re done,” Xavier complained.

“Don’t worry, you can keep the brooms, alright? Just think of it as an investment.”

They walked over back to Dixieland, brooms and dustbins in tow. With their repairmen outfits, they blended in with the background of a bustling city. The guys leaning against the wall at the entrance to Dixieland gave them another glance, but this time they looked away quickly. They were probably used to construction and sanitation workers from outside the community coming in to do work. Neighborhoods like Dixieland didn’t have the automated street sweepers yet, and there were plenty of refugees who would work for cheap.

They walked up to the building and started sweeping up the debris, dumping it into the garbage bags they had brought along with them.

The shopkeepers and diners paid them no mind, it was like they were invisible.

“Any hits?” Derrick asked Maxine.

[“Nope, keep walking.”]

They kept sweeping around the building until Maxine’s voice screeched through the earpiece.

[“STOP. OKAY, STAY RIGHT THERE.”]

“Okay, yeesh,” Derrick grumbled. The device sat heavy in his pocket as he leaned on his broom and glanced around, acting the part of an underpaid and uninterested sanitation worker.

[“I found it. It’s a cheap-o tablet that’s somewhere on the fourth floor. Hm, hold on, let me bring up the layout of these Wi-Fi access points . . . and the schematics for the building. Which way is the sun shining right now?”]

“Uh, it’s to my left.”

[“Okay, point the front of the device in the same direction as the sun, but keep it parallel to the ground. Hold it there until I say stop.”]

Derrick held it there, actually somewhat enjoying Maxine’s humming that came through the earpiece. It was the jingle for a classic sports drink, which Derrick had guzzled plenty of back when he would play basketball with the neighborhood kids.

[“Okay that was a pretty good calibration. You’ve got steady hands, D,”] Maxine said. [“The device is on the fourth floor. If you go straight from the stairwell, it’ll be the third door to your left.”]

So it wasn’t right next to the stairwell or the elevator. The more they had to walk inside there, the higher their chances of getting stopped were.

Derick relayed the device’s location to Xavier, who scrunched up his face, but kept sweeping. “How am I gonna get up to the fourth floor? Is there security? Some sort of lock on the door?”

“Uhh . . . M is there security or a lock on the door?” Derrick asked.

[“No clue, I either don’t have enough access to the building’s devices right now, or I’m out of range.”]

“Man, you gotta think of this shit if you’re trying to steal something!” Xavier hissed. “You need to bring me up to that room, or I’m gonna get stabbed by some Dixies.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Derrick whispered, before addressing Maxine again.”

“M, is the device moving at all?” Derrick asked.

[“No, it’s staying put. It has been this whole time, too.”]

“Shit.”

Derrick tapped Xavier on the shoulder. “Okay, it’s now or never for the bluff. Let’s try and get someone to scan us inside.”

They loitered near the entrance to the building, but just outside of the viewing range of the camera above the door, and made a big show of checking their phones and glancing over at the door of the building. It was boring and tiresome, but it was necessary to set the bait for one of the apartment’s residents.

Finally, a middle-aged man walked up to the door and scanned his card key. The door unlocked with a latching noise, and the man swung it open by the handle.

“Excuse me, sir!” Derrick called out, running up towards the door, but outside the edge of the camera’s viewing angle.

The middle-aged man looked up at them and frowned. “What is it?”

“Well,” Derrick began, smiling as earnestly as he could. “We’re supposed to be fixing a leaky pipe, but the apartment management never scheduled someone to let us into the building. Do you think you could scan us in, please?”

The middle-aged man recoiled when he laid eyes on Derrick. Even with the make-up on, it seemed Derrick was still hard to look at. “No, I won’t let you tailgate into the apartment,” the middle-aged man said. “I can tell the front desk to talk to you, though.”

Derrick shook his head. “Oh, we won’t be in there too long. I doubt management told the front desk about us, it was a last-minute job.”

The middle-aged man squinted at Derrick and Xavier, while still holding the door half open. “Sorry, but I’m not going to let a complete stranger into the building. Come back when the front desk can let you in.” The man slipped into the building, and through the glass of the door, his face twisted in exertion as he made sure the door was shut behind him.

“Shit,” Derrick said. “There goes that plan.”

“Mhm,” Xavier replied, not even looking at Derrick, but instead at a poster taped to the bulletin board to the side of the building’s entrance.

“What are you looking at?” Derrick asked. The flier had a depiction of a man and woman, together enclosed in a heart-shaped outline. The title at the top of the poster read ‘OPEN HOUSE FOR NEW COUPLES. AFTERNOON ONLY,’ in large, bold letters.

“Wha—” Xavier sputtered, shifting his gaze to Derrick. “Oh. Man check this shit out. Gonna be all sorts of young honeys walking around the building. If they’ve got a punk-ass boyfriend, you know I’m gonna be stepping in to steal ‘em away—”

Derrick tsked multiple times to shut Xavier up. “Can you just focus on the task at hand for now? We need some way to get into the building unnoticed, so that—Oh. Wait a second.” There was an open house for new couples, so another new couple in the mix would definitely blend in. Gross. It almost seemed as if Maxine had planned the whole thing.

“Taylor,” Derrick whispered. “Come on, let’s get out of here for a second.”

“What, I thought we were supposed to be getting into the building, man?”

“Yeah, but I think we’ll have to use our backup plan this time around.”

“What do you mean—aw, hell no.”

“Sorry, I wouldn’t if I could help it, but we would blend right in. Come on, let’s go.”

#

Derrick and Xavier, walked back into the Dixieland square. Derrick had changed out of his repairmen outfit, and into some casual street clothes that Maxine had packed them. Xavier had changed into drag in an alleyway.

Derrick glanced around. The two of them were largely unnoticed, except for a large shopkeeper—wearing an equally large black apron—sitting on a wrought-iron chair in front of her restaurant, who glanced their way every now and then.

Derrick prodded Xavier, and motioned for him to listen as he whispered to Maxine through the earpiece. “Alright, let’s try to get inside the building. If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to come back and try again when she moves the device outside, or when we’ve figured out some sort of cover to enter the apartment.”

[“Hm. Okay. Hm hm hm hm. Hmmmm.”] Maxine uttered each ‘hm’ with a different intonation: some thoughtful, some brusque, and some cutesy.

Just then, the large shopkeeper called out to them, and waved her hand. She tilted her head up, peering through a pair of glasses that seemed too small for her face.

“Uh, shoot. Hold on,” Derrick whispered through the earpiece. He smiled and nodded at the shopkeeper, returning her wave, and then turned around, hoping that was all she wanted. But the intense waving and beckoning coming from the corner of his vision was too much to ignore.

“Come on over, you lovebirds!” the shopkeeper yelled. “Both of you, now!”

Derrick’s and Xavier’s gazes met. It would have been odd to have acknowledged the woman and then just left, especially since they seemed to just be standing around. They walked over, glancing left and right, as if the woman was leading them into a trap of some sorts. But no one else was looking their way.

The shopkeeper smiled, and clapped her hands together.