It was just how he de-stressed as he waited for the boss to call.

He needed a bit of de-stressing. He’d lost one of his own subordinates the day before. A big takedown. It’d made the damned evening news. Oily Cheeks getting smacked down by a godforsaken bear of all things.

Harald had plans for that boy! He was supposed to add some legitimacy to their entire operation. Oily Cheeks wouldn’t stay behind bars forever. Oh, sure, he was a bit gray, but the kid was clean. His worst infraction had been a bit of fooling around in high school.

But now he was tainted. He’d be watched, and they’d have his name and address, and the moment someone showed up looking too sweaty, or like they hadn’t showered, they’d catch Cheeks in no time.

Harald kept on moving things around. He had a little cloth in his back pocket that he’d use to rub the dust off stuff. Dust always bothered him because he knew exactly where it was, no matter what he did.

He turned toward his desk. The phone rang.

Harald reached a hand over to the cordless and it snapped across the room and into his hand, the device turning on with the same motion. “Yo.”

The voice over the line was muffled and grating, the kind of voice that made it just a bit hard to understand. There was no doubting who it was. “Hello, H.”

“Hey, Big S. How are you?” Homie asked. Not Harald. He wasn’t Harald when talking to the boss.

He winced a bit at the sound of cement rubbing against cement across the line. “Let’s cover things one at a time. Do you still have the drive?”

Homie looked over to his desk where the computer he’d taken was sitting. The drive was in there. As much as he knew about computers from his power-granted osmosis, he still didn’t want to risk popping it out and breaking it.

“Good,” the boss said before he had time to say anything. “Then we can move on to the next step. I’ll need you to bring the drive over to a specific address tonight. You’ll be meeting a contractor I hired. I’ll text you if it’s the right person.”

“Cool, cool,” Homie said. “I can do that much.”

“You’ve been dependable so far,” the boss agreed. “This will almost certainly give us a leg up over the Cabal.”

Homie nodded, and the boss, of course, saw that.

“Very well. The address should be on your burner phone. You know what to do.”

“Yeah, yeah, no worries.”

There was some shifting over the phone. “Now, what happened to your recruit? That is, if you can tell me anything more than what I saw on the news already.”