Jarvis Street Chapter 2
The treadmill beeped, alerting James that his workout was over. He’d only had time to run a couple miles before the others were scheduled to arrive, but it still beat not getting any movement in today, so he’d take it. He stepped off the treadmill and began wiping it down, noting that the box of sanitizer wipes was almost empty. Still breathing heavily, he walked over to the storage cabinet and pulled the door open, moving resistance bands and drink powder samples aside to find the box of wipes.
There was one small, dented box left. He pulled it out and tore the top open. This would last them another couple of weeks. He’d add more to the endless shopping list he had growing on the notes app on his phone.
It was quiet down here in the tiny gym, peaceful. And it was probably the only peace he was going to get for the rest of the day. James closed his eyes as he dabbed the sweat off of his forehead with the hem of his tank top. His legs felt heavier than they usually did after only a couple miles, but he felt more awake than he had when he came down here. As he sat down to stretch one more time, he looked around the room, savoring the last few minutes alone.
They had put the gym into what he could only assume had been the previous owner’s finished basement den. The carpet had been replaced with a rubbery surface that was apparently supposed to be good for working out. It smelled a little bit rank, but considering James had worked here for over a decade and never seen it replaced, he supposed that made perfect sense. There were a couple of treadmills off to one side and a shelf of weights along the opposite wall. An exercise bike that he hated, but the others seemed to like sat near the treadmills.
If they got rid of the bike, they could update the space a little. But the one time he’d suggested it, Amelia had informed him that the exercise bike was more a part of the team than James was. So he’d never brought it up again.
He should really get upstairs and shower, but he knew how this meeting was going to go and he wanted to put it off just a little longer. No matter what announcements the Foundation sent over, he could see it like it had already happened. They’d all be mad about something and go off on at least one or two tangents. He’d fuck something up and the team would politely ignore it. Except for Bradley, but James could just ignore him.
The rest of the team would be politely agreeable with Gabriella, but nobody would make any effort to actively include her in the group after she’d fallen for Robin’s manipulations at the beginning of the summer. And as much as it pained James, he didn’t feel like he had the right to force anyone to forgive her for following Robin’s lead and believing that James had gotten her hurt on her first case. Sure, James had forgiven her. He’d forgiven her even before she’d apologized. But Amelia and Madelyn, at least, were protective enough of James and anyone else in their group that they were still cautious about trusting her.
He wasn’t sure what Bradley’s reason for hating her was, but he probably didn’t really need a reason to be rude to Gabriella. At least he didn’t get too vicious. James knew what Bradley was capable of and, as much as nobody had to love or even like Gabriella right now, he might not be able to resist decking Bradley if he pushed it too far.
James picked up a clean towel and wiped the remaining sweat off of his forehead and out of his short, dirty blond hair. He had about five minutes to get upstairs and shower, then hurry out to the meeting.
The shower spray started out in an icy blast and stayed that way as James waited, naked and impatient, on the bathroom mat. After a moment, the water didn’t get any warmer, so he braced himself and slipped inside. Swearing silently into the stream, he quickly cleaned himself off and got back out.
About five minutes later, he was walking back toward the living room in clean clothes. Amelia and Madelyn were sitting on the couch and he waved hello to Madelyn as he turned into the doorway at the top of the stairs and stepped into the kitchen.
Bradley was in there, pulling something out of the fridge. “Morning,” James said.
Bradley turned around. “Morning.”
He set a small carton of milk on the counter, then went back into the fridge. “You can have that,” he said. “I just need it out of the way.”
James poured a fresh cup of coffee and added some of the milk to it as Bradley searched through the fridge for something. “What are you looking for?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
Bradley closed the fridge without taking anything else out, then picked up his own cup of coffee from the counter. “McManus, when are we meeting to go over the budget?” he asked, voice tight.
James grimaced, both at the question and the coffee he’d just sipped. “I have to be honest,” he said. “I don’t understand anything that’s happening on that budget screen.”
Bradley raised his eyebrows, a skeptical expression on his thin face. “It’s a budget,” he said. “Money in, money out. Do you not have a budget?”
Not a great one, but he wasn’t going to admit that to Bradley. “No, I know what a budget is,” James snapped. “It’s the program, though. I don’t know what the codes mean and they haven’t sent me any instructions for it.”
“It’s been a month.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
Maybe he was being a little too harsh. He was the captain, after all, he needed to show restraint and set an example or whatever. James shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m just- I’m not sure what to do.”
Bradley rolled his eyes, and James cringed internally. Normally after years of working together, he’d have no problem brushing off Bradley’s attitude. But he was running on an hour of sleep and he really should know how to do these things. “Fine,” Bradley said. “I’ll print out the form I use.”
“Does it have the abbreviations?”
“No. That’s all on your end. I have no idea what abbreviations you’re talking about.”
“Codes, I think,” James said, rubbing his forehead to soothe the headache already forming there. “They’re like, codes for each approval, but I don’t know what they mean and I don’t want to- forget it, I’ll figure it out. Thanks.”
He took his coffee and walked out to the living room, where Madelyn and Amelia were sitting. “Good morning,” he said, nodding to Madelyn.
“Good morning.”
Madelyn was a little smaller than Amelia, with short dark hair and glasses. She moved stiffly as she shifted on her chair, but they were discussing their workout plans for the day, so James was relieved to see she didn’t seem to be in a lot of pain.
A few years earlier, Madelyn had been seriously injured on a case and she would probably never fully recover. While the Foundation had made it clear that she would always have a job with them, he knew that being out of the field frustrated her. She might never make it back into the field regularly, they all knew that, but it was a relief to see her able to do the standard workouts.
Was there anything James should be doing for her as captain? He had always tried to respect her medical privacy, but now he had no idea if there was anything special that Robin had needed to do to make things accessible for her. And asking her would be awkward. Madelyn would be polite about it, of course, but that didn’t mean that it wouldn’t be embarrassing for her to have James asking about her private medical information.
Maybe all of this information was in Robin’s office. James glanced at the closed door on the other side of the dining room, beside the living room where they sat. He’d only opened the office door once since Robin died, and it had taken an hour for him to stop shaking afterwards. He hadn’t even been able to step inside. Then he’d had nightmares all night after and hadn’t been able to bring himself to go in again since. The others had all clearly noticed the locked door, but nobody commented or attempted to go in themselves.
The meeting. James tried to pull his attention back to the matters at hand. And then he remembered the encrypted message with the new information on branch protocols. But he didn’t want to go back into the kitchen and deal with Bradley again, so he turned to the other two.
“Do either of you know how the encryption works on the computer system?” he asked.
“Yeah, kind of,” Madelyn replied, to his relief. “What do you need?”
“This is embarrassing, but the Foundation sent something for us to discuss today and I haven’t been able to open it.”
Madelyn stood up on shaky legs and slowly made her way toward the computer bank. James hurried after her, relieved when she sat down without issue.
“Log in,” she instructed him.
He did, and they waited a long moment as the system chugged to life, a cheerful ghost smiling at them as it spun in circles on the screen. Once his messages loaded, James got as far as he could, then stepped aside to let Madelyn work. He tried to follow what she was doing, but her fingers moved too fast on the keyboard and the screen was too flickery for him to try to replicate it later. But finally, the document opened.
“Thank you so much,” James said.
Madelyn gave him a smile, then slowly stood up and went back over to Amelia, who’d been watching them as she drank her breakfast smoothie. Bradley was here now too, sliding onto the other end of the couch, so James quickly sent the document to the printer, then went over to get it before starting the meeting.
“So, we’ve got a few things for today’s meeting,” he said, picking up the warm paper off the printer tray and scanning the first few lines. “Madelyn just managed to get this printed for me, so let me just- oh.”
The others looked over at him as he finished reading the message. They’d been expecting this for years, but for Christ’s sake.
“What is it?” Amelia asked.
James sighed. “So the Foundation announced that they’re cutting much of their internal investigation staff,” he said, paraphrasing the message in his hand. “We’ll be responsible for more investigation work along with the assigned cleanup duties for each case.”
Judging by the others’ faces, everybody else was also unsurprised and unimpressed by this. Up until now, the Foundation had done most of the investigation, determining what was actually happening in the locations, if anything was happening at all. But apparently, the famously cheap organization was looking to save a little more money.
“When does this start?” Bradley asked.
James looked at the page. “Um, immediately.”
“Are you kidding me?” Amelia muttered. “We’re understaffed as it is.”
“They said they’ll try to provide more resources if it should prove necessary,” James said. “But they also say they have complete faith in us.”
“Oh, well, in that case,” Bradley muttered.
“We’re short how many staffers now?” Madelyn asked.
James thought for a second. “Gabriella filled one slot. We needed two. And then…”
He didn’t say the words out loud, but they were all thinking it. Robin was gone, which brought them back to two missing staffers, just to complete a skeleton crew. The Foundation’s guidelines urged branches to have at least ten members on their staff, including specialists. But at the moment, the closest they had to a specialist was Bradley, who had somewhat accidentally fallen into the role of logistics. After ten years at the Foundation, James thought he might actually die of shock if they ever had a full crew.
“So that brings us to the next item,” James said, moving to the next page. “They sent a new case. Two, in fact, but there’s only details for the first one so far. So that’s what we’ll focus on. It looks pretty simple. Um, there’s been a large creature eating squirrels over by Fitchburg State. A few students on the campus for summer classes saw it the other night and a homeowner near there got a pretty clear picture of it.”
He passed the paper to Bradley, who looked at it, then passed it along to Amelia. She sighed. “I’m pretty sure this is the same fucker we went after a few months ago,” she said as she passed it to Madelyn.
“Nah,” James said. “Remember that one exploded.”
“Wonderful,” Madelyn muttered as she passed the paper back over to James.
“Gabriella’s off today since she did the overnight with me last night,” James said. “So Amelia and Bradley, you’re out in the field. Madelyn, you’re on comms. I’ll be here too.”
Amelia looked at him sympathetically. She understood. All he wanted to do was get back into the field, but while they weren’t sending anything useful, the Foundation was sending him all kinds of reminders that he needed to get this administration work done.
James hated sending the team out there without him. Both because he wanted to go out and do the work he loved and because he felt like he was slacking if he stayed behind. Even though he was so busy that his brain was still racing every night by the time he went to bed, he still felt like he wasn’t pulling his weight. And while he knew on a reasonable level that the others weren’t thinking that, he couldn’t help that feeling that maybe they were.
“That’s all I have,” he said, setting the paper down on the table beside him. “The information for the other case should come in later today, so let’s try and get this one done quickly so that we can close it out and focus on as few cases as possible at a time.”
It was normal for the team to have multiple cases going at once. But if they were going to be doing full investigations instead of going in to clean up after the investigations were done, they were going to need to devote more time to each individual case. And that fact brought on so many new implications that James couldn’t even bring himself to think about them all right now. More time meant more case overlaps, which meant either stretching the cases out or overworking the team to dangerous levels. But how-
One thing at a time, James told himself, and forced his hands to unclench. This is a simple case. We’ll get it done and move on.
“Does anybody have anything else?” he asked, setting the printout down.
“One of the treadmills is overheating whenever I use it,” Amelia said.
“Is it your lightning speed?” James asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Or the belt,” she said. “I looked into it. The site I found said it might just need to be lubricated.”
James nodded, then turned to Bradley. “Do you have-”
“Are you really about to ask me if I have treadmill lube?”
“What Bradley does off the clock is his business, James,” Amelia said politely.
Madelyn spit out the sip of water she was drinking as James tried desperately not to laugh. Bradley gave Amelia a withering look, but she just smiled at him. He turned back to James. “No,” Bradley said. “I don’t have any treadmill lube.”
“We’ll order some,” James said.
He took out his phone and made a quick note to order treadmill lube, then put it back in his pocket, ignoring the six missed texts and three hundred unread email notifications glowing up at him. None of those were work-related, he’d get to them later.
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s get ready to catch this squirrel eater. I’m going to get the Foundation’s creature relocation unit on standby. There’s a cage in the van that you just need to pop open. Bring the tranq gun, sedate it, and bring it back here.”
“Bring the cryptid back to our home base?” Bradley asked skeptically.
“Do you have a better place?” James asked. “It’ll only be for a little while.”
“Fang’s going to be pissed,” Madelyn pointed out.
As though summoned by the mention of her name, the old calico cat strolled into the room from beneath the dining room table. She rubbed against James’s leg, then walked over to Bradley and jumped into his lap. His expression was still sour, but he absently scratched the cat’s ears.
“It’ll be caged and drugged,” James said. “But tell you what. I’ll talk to the guys at Creature Relocation. If anyone is at the Barre headquarters today, we’ll drive the thing over there instead. Or see if they can meet you at the campus.”
Nobody seemed to have anything to criticize with this, so James ended the meeting. Amelia headed to the closet to start sorting through supplies for the case as Madelyn came over to the computer bank and began to log in. Bradley stayed where he was, still petting Fang as he read over something on his phone. Relieved at how smoothly the meeting had gone, James picked up the phone and called Creature Relocation.
