The Spider

Anna was careful not to rest her hands on the counter. It didn't look like it had been cleaned, since, well, ever. Cleanliness not being a priority of the people who shopped at such a place. She doubted that they came to linger.

Next to her was a placard advertising some kind of menthol cigarettes. In the advertisement, there was some asshole on a surfboard, enjoying the fresh air of a beautiful sunny day. Looked like he'd never had a cigarette, or a bad day, in his whole life.

Outside in the street someone laid on the horn of his car. It was a futile gesture, an empty protest. No one was moving anywhere out there. The usual gridlock in the City. Just another day's stew of bumper to bumper, hot sun, and anger.

The clerk handed Anna a box with her new phone in it. It was a terrible phone, but that didn't matter. She'd filled it up with five hundred minutes, and when those were gone, she would take it hundreds of feet high and fling it off into the night sky like all the others she'd bought when the need arose, letting it smash into a hundred thousand pieces that would be ground into the pavement like the rest of the trash, unnoticed. Untraceable to her in any way. Untraceable to Anna. Untraceable to the Spider.

"You have a nice day," she said, although she really didn't think that he would.

******************************

Later that night, she called the number. Like previously, he picked up as if he had every expectation that it was her calling. She wondered if he had a burner phone himself for only her calls.

"Hello, Little Spider," Just John said, friendly and seemingly happy to hear from her. "I'm glad you called."

"You said you were going to tell me your upcoming illegal venture," she said, not wanting this motherfucker to think she called to chat. "Spit it."

"I wanted to ask you, what are you doing this weekend? The reason I ask is, the orchestra has a wonderful program Saturday evening, anchored around one of my favorite Sibelius symphonies- his Sixth, if you know it. It should be fantastic, and there is a guest conductor this evening who is a young and upcoming talent from Sibelius' native Finland, of course you know our usual conductor has returned to his hometown of St. Petersburg to be the guest conductor there for a season- kind of an exchange program- "

"What the

fuck

." The Spider choked out the words. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Music, Little Spider. The best thing that human beings can ever do, if you ask me. I'm talking about music."

"I'm not going to see some fucking

concert

with you."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

The Spider looked around. She had made her way to the top of a very tall building. It was a clear and beautiful night in the City. She liked it up high. From this viewpoint, the City looked wonderful. From this high up, it looked clean. It looked safe.

Until you got down to where the people were.

"I think you are full of shit," she said. "I don't understand why Farracone gave me this number. I don't understand what games you are playing. But I think I'm done here."

"You want to know what illegal thing I am going to do, Little Spider."

The Spider just sat there silently. Maybe I'll throw this phone away ahead of schedule, she was thinking.

"That will be up to you, what I do tomorrow," he went on. "What will it take to make you come stop me? Drugs? I can get plenty of those going through if you like. Guns? I'll do that- you can stop an ocean of blood in the City if you come stop my shipment of guns tomorrow. Hell, I'll strap bombs to schoolchildren and send them off into the night if that's what it will take."

He fell silent for a second himself.

"But I'll be doing this activity tomorrow night, at midnight, at 1735 Clearfield. That's a warehouse there. You know where that is?"

She did.

"So come stop me, Spider."

"I'm not falling into your bullshit trap."

Just John sighed. "It's

all

a trap, Little Spider. That's the thing. You're already in the trap. It's just how much of my time are you going to waste? Tomorrow. Midnight. Got it?"

The Spider hung up.

She slid the phone into one of the pockets on her utility belt. She descended into the night.

*****************************

She did not go to the warehouse at Clearfield the next night. She knew that he would be expecting her, and she had no need to work on his time. The Spider had learned that taking down a dangerous criminal was a sport, it was like hunting, maybe.

And the important thing about any sport was that you wanted your opponent to be forced into making the moves that you wanted him to make, and not the moves that he wanted to make. You wanted him to have to react, every step of the way.

Only then would the hunt come to the predestined conclusion.

It wasn't immediately clear to her what kind of criminal Just John was at first, so she set out to get some information. She needed to know if he was at all for real, if he was even an active figure in the City's crime scene.

For the next week or so, she investigated him. She found a pimp, broke his arm. He was agreeable after that, and told her what she wanted to know, crying with snot running down his lips, as if he was the little boy again he'd been before he became a monster who hurt women for money.

She found some dozen or so drug dealers, they were always easy to find. She hurt them, she always did, she hated drug dealers. And while she made them talk, drug dealers, in the Spider's experience, never gave up useful information. They were all liars, to start with, and probably long ago lost the ability to know what was truth and what was not. Most of them stupid.

All

of them more scared of what the others higher up than them in the organizations would do to them than they were of the Spider.

Drug

users

, however: that was a complete other story. They didn't give a fuck. They had no allegiance to anything other than whatever substance they had in their pockets that they were throwing away their lives for. They were always more than happy to talk, so they could get to wherever they got their fix together at. And they always knew

plenty

, shifty little bastards and rats, always on the lookout for some kind of small advantage that they could turn into more shit to inject into their arms or shove up their noses.

You didn't even need to hurt them much to get them to talk.

That doesn't mean that the Spider didn't, though.

*****************************

Soon enough, a picture emerged, although not a clear one. Just John was a real person, a real figure in the underworld. He was spoken of with something approaching reverence, and the mystery of where he came from or who he was had something to do with it.

He wasn't from any of the branches or offshoots that comprised the typical crime scene of the City. On any level. He wasn't a street rat that made big, he wasn't some old school mob goon that got hot, either. It didn't seem that anyone knew where he came from.

It wasn't clear to the Spider how Just John made room for himself in the City. Bad as the City was, it wasn't like the old days, when the crime bosses owned the City's aldermen and the fucking mayor and half the cops, also. There was only so much room for criminal activity, and yet Just John became a player in the scene rather quickly, and without the City erupting into war in the shadows.

It seemed like a year ago, he was no one. And then a year later, he was well known.

What

he was known for, though, was a little unclear. Most of the players in the City had some kind of specialty- prostitution, heroin, cocaine, guns, whatever.

Something.

This was a way that the crime syndicates found to co-exist. To not compete for the same prey.

Just John simply existed. He was like a black hole... a force that you only knew was real because of the effect it had on the other objects in its space.

One thing that was very apparent, though: that warehouse at Clearfield was the center of his operations.

Same as he had told her.

******************************

The Spider kept an eye on that warehouse for some weeks after that.

Unlike most of the rest of the neighborhood, that warehouse was not abandoned. It was not at all clear what it was used for, though. She had no luck finding out whose name was on the lease. It was just there. Vacant during the day.

At night, though, there would be a steady stream of cars coming there. Cars, and about once a week, a truck. Light security showed up around 5:00 in the evening, and the cars would come shortly after that. They'd come and go. The trucks would usually come after ten at night.

There was no real pattern to speak of, except that one car was never stopped by the security guards at the gate. One car could just drive through, the guards would only wave.

Over the weeks, the Spider came to suspect that this was Just John. She began to wonder if this was her target... if the hunt was now on, the predator having sighted the game.

It wasn't any kind of unusual car. Nothing that a top lord crime boss would drive. Just a gray Lexus, about five years old.

She'd been up a few stories in one of the adjacent deserted warehouses. "Deserted" being a loose term, she could smell the urine, and see the smoke tracks from where people had lit fires inside to stay warm. There was a mattress in a corner. Bottles everywhere.

But the Spider didn't care about any of that, and she knew that even if the person who used that mattress came back, she could slip past him in the darkness and he would never know she was there.

No one saw the Spider in the darkness, after all.

She went out a window, and perched underneath an overhang. She waited, unblinking.

And she opened herself up. Her senses expanded, and she became able to see things without sight, and to hear things in the cracks and corners. She could feel things from hundreds of yards away, if she focused on them in her mind.

She had always been able to do this. She had never known how. In her younger years, it had been a curse, the world would shove information into her every second of every day. It took her years to learn how to slow it.

It would have killed her if she hadn't learned how to control it.

But on that night, she opened herself up. She let her senses flow throughout the entirety of the warehouse. Most of what she found was empty, open.

Cars would come and go. The guards would stop them. All of them dull, gray, uninteresting.

And then the gray Lexus drove up. Her senses were as open as they could be... but they didn't pick up anything from that Lexus. That Lexus, and whoever was in it, was a black hole.

The Spider expected the Lexus to do what it did every night, drive right past the guards, and directly into the warehouse.

But on this night, the Lexus stopped.

And

he

stepped out.

The Spider had no need of any other senses other than what every human comes with to know that this was Just John. Although he did not look like what she thought he would look like.

Just John was tall, fairly slender. He wore a gray suit, something more appropriate for a summer wedding than anything else, she thought. The suit was completed with a matching vest, and a bow tie, a silken, expensive, hand tied bow tie.

Somehow with her other senses, the Spider could see Just John sitting on a stool, while his assistant tied his expensive tie on for him.

He looked more like a professor of literature or something than a crime lord. He had a full, salt and pepper beard. Seemed to be in his mid-forties- a tenured professor, then. He had a thick, and full head of hair, almost all gray, but piled up high in a leonine glory past.

Just John got out of the car, and he nodded to the guards. He looked out into the night, looked around, it wasn't clear for what.

One of the guards, bored, pulled his cigarettes out of his pocket. Just John waved his hand, said a word, and the guard shrugged and put his cigarettes back in his shirt pocket.

That was it. Just John looked around a bit, and got back in the Lexus, and drove into the warehouse.

******************************

The Spider kept her senses open, but no great amount of information came to her that night. She crouched in the shadows, unseen as always. Her senses, expanded as far as they could go, became a pulse. A throb. A beat.

The Spider laid back, and kept herself open.

She found herself with a hand sliding down into her body suit, sliding past the curves and bones of her hips, across her lower belly. Her hand slid past the elastic band of the purely feminine and silk of her panties.

Her hand soon discovered the wetness there at the center of her, and the Spider slid her fingers past the lips of her pussy and over her clitoris. Her clitoris sprang to life, bursting and throbbing. The Spider slid her fingers deep inside of her.

She spent the next hour or so there, quiet and unseen, with her senses all open and throbbing, her fingers pushing into her wetness in the dark. She pushed her fingers into her pussy and came, her hips bucking on the dirty wood. She slid her fingers over her clit, cumming over and over as her head pounded silently, her lips tingling, her eyes closed shut, the still of the night broken only by quiet gasps of pleasure.