Chapter 291: The Club Had Acquired a Fan Club

By the time we unplugged the tracker, twelve people outside the club had decided I was a vigilante, which seemed excessive when I hadn't even decided whether to shower before stealing something else.

A clip from the dock showed my uncle's men blowing up their own car while I escaped on a heater. Somebody had added heroic music and cut out the part where I shouted that the trolley wheels were digging into my arse.

Lukas played it twice because friendship apparently required reviewing the humiliation from every available angle.

[System: Look at you, mate. Saving the community one stolen appliance at a time, like a charity shop with a criminal record and excellent tits out front.]

If the cow lady heard you describe her business like that, she'd charge us both rent for living inside a fucking idiot.

She stood beside the rear door with the disconnected tracking unit sealed in a clear box. Bridget had saved its route information first, including the surface freight stop and collection time, while I made sure nobody plugged it back in for the pretty light.

Hansen already knew about the club. Removing his tracker didn't hide the building, but it stopped us carrying his collection signal wherever we went next.

The cow lady wanted the heater tested before installation. I wanted to lie on it and claim emotional damages, so Bridget picked a third option and took me upstairs to clean the scrape along my tail.

She worked carefully, pausing when my coils tightened. I kept my jokes going because the alternative involved admitting how much I liked someone being annoyed that I had nearly died.

"You could let the next expensive object stay expensive somewhere else," she said, fastening the dressing without catching a scale.

"I could, sweetheart, but then what would you tell people when they asked why your boyfriend arrived home tied to central heating?"

She kissed my forehead, told me not to earn another explanation tonight and left me resting while she checked the noise downstairs.

I lasted six minutes. That was six respectable minutes of personal growth before Lukas called to say our new admirers had brought a prisoner.

A man in a cheap fish mask stood outside with two companions and a parking-clamp worker trapped inside his own wheel clamp. They had fastened the thing around his boots and were filming themselves presenting him to the club entrance.

The worker had been clamping delivery carts in a clearly marked access lane. I knew this because the sign was directly behind the masked idiot's head, doing its best to contribute to the conversation.

"We caught an extortionist for you," the mask announced when I reached the door. "We thought you might want to finish what you started."

"I started wanting a hot bath, mate, and somehow you've delivered a council employee with his shoes married to each other."

The worker demanded release. The crowd waited for a speech. Old Mate made an interested noise that usually meant I was about to receive advice nobody should print on a motivational poster.

[System: Tell the little vigilante dickheads they need an initiation. First job, untangle that poor bastard before he pisses himself and turns your grand entrance into a splash zone.]

I told the masked group their first test involved fixing the problem they had created. They argued that releasing the worker would undermine the message, so I asked whether their message was that three adults couldn't operate a clamp key.

Lukas leaned against the doorway, carefully protecting his ribs while enjoying every second. The food-truck lady arrived behind the crowd and immediately asked why her supply cart had a fresh penalty notice on it.

He offered to help move it. She handed him the light bag of sauces and said flirting didn't qualify him to lift anything heavier until his doctor cleared it.

The masked man's face disappeared farther into his costume. He produced the key, released the worker and tried to recover his dignity by offering me a folder of targets.

I didn't accept the folder until he opened it himself. Most pages contained photographs of people he disliked, including a noisy neighbor and a takeaway shop that had charged him extra for sauce.

"That bloke wasn't a supervillain because your chips came dry, mate. Otherwise I'd have declared war on half the fucking city."

One photograph did interest me. It showed the collection company's truck outside the same surface freight stop listed on the tracker, loading sealed industrial equipment beside a rented survey depot.

The masked man had taken it that afternoon. I asked him for the original picture and its public location, then told him to stop grabbing people and go home before his costume became useful courtroom evidence.

He wanted to join my team. I said I didn't have a team, and Bridget chose that moment to appear behind me holding the dressing I had pulled loose while coming downstairs.

"He barely had adult supervision," she said. "There weren't any vacancies for making that worse."

The crowd laughed. Somebody filmed her fixing the dressing while I pretended to object, which would probably become another heroic clip with music completely unsuitable for a man being told to stop wriggling.

We closed the door on the remaining spectators and sent the actual customers through the ordinary entrance. The cow lady counted heads, enforced capacity and refused to turn the night into a free show just because I had acquired a fan club by accident.

Upstairs, Bridget put the saved freight photograph beside the tracker route on her phone. A shipping board behind the truck listed pressure-testing equipment and a departure toward the Drop Off the following morning.

I recognized the expensive controller from the cargo label, but the smaller advertisement beneath it stole my attention completely: guided access to the warm obsidian flats, with giant hunting grounds beyond the last fence.

My uncle had left revenge beside a heated reptile lounge and a possible barbecue, and I was starting to think the universe owed me an apology for pretending this was a difficult decision.