I hate this shit.

Nicklaus Zallago reserved all his big words for work. Apart from his job, he was a simple man of short straight sentences.

The situations his work involved him in often pushed him toward opening up his dams but he resisted. If he wasn't careful, big, ugly geysers of sweaty, meaty words that were boiling under the surface would break out. Something his dear old abuela would harshly admonish against.

Keep the lid tight, he repeated for the third time since bringing the bike on the highway. His Harlow, as he liked to call her, was zooming across the Corkscrew Freeway toward Ave Maria - a latter day boomtown where his office had opened a new branch.

"This work has none of the mafia crap," his brother Ermolai had said when Nicklaus was faced with a choice for his future. A mafia thug - didn't matter Russian or Italian, they were all the same in the nitty-gritty - or a lowly bookkeeper for Freddy Booker that would never take him nowhere.

Nicklaus may have ruined his reputation in school by punching a snivelly but physically weaker kid who was preying on the fear of another closeted bookish boy. But he often took great pains to hide the fact that he was a softie at heart and secretly a nerd who loved the hypnotic monotony of addition and subtraction.

And he didn't like talking rudely in people's faces.

In another forty minutes, Nicklaus had arrived at the flat modernized barn that had been recently converted to their office after the farmer went bankrupt. Nicklaus's agency, looking to expand, got it on the cheap. From the inside now, it looked like a spacious hallway with different sections of the office separated by nice stretches of empty space.

Nicklaus reached his desk and logged his activity and progress since nine in the morning. He was coming from his sixth 'visit'. Before him, there had been two late payment collections, one mortgage defaulter, one long session with a small-time landlord who was being lax about his commission splits and one case of an old defaulter from Jacksonville showing up by the coast.

Shit.

An internal message had popped up in the lower right corner of his screen, meaning he'll have to go into the darkest section of the barn - IT. His stubby fingers must have made a keying mistake in the last day's logbook needing to be cleared up.

As he made his way to the IT corner and stepped around the wooden screen, he found quite a group of people there including his team that he usually went out to with in the afternoons and his branch supervisor. They seemed to be arguing about something with their best techie, an energetic, casually dressed young man. The techie went by with one of those ridiculously made-up names of what they all insisted on calling the v-age: MarauderI-95.

"What is going on here?" he blurted.

Some of his buddies shrugged while another IT guy, a lean Indian in a baseball cap and loose t-shirt, waved him in. "Oh, I called you up."

As Nicklaus sauntered over to the guy's terminal and helped him sort out and correct the mistakes, the argument restarted behind him.

"I don't see what's to be so stuck up about this, Maud." Rufus Kaase was swinging his keychain around his forefinger as he goaded the techie, using the more mature sounding name they had all settled on for MarauderI-95.

"Stuck up? Are you kidding me right now?" Maud who had been facing Ms. Negga Friedrick the supervisor, turned to Rufus. "I mean, can you tell me what the hell are we even doing here? We are hunting kids now?"

"We're hunting down defaulters and anybody who owes us big. Be careful with the insinuations." Ms. Friedrick lifted a finger to Maud but her expression was flat.

"What possibly could a kid with that face owe us? And if it's her parents, why aren't we after them?"

That prompted Nicklaus to crane his neck and look at the screen. It was an illustration of a brown-skinned teenage face with thick wavy strands of hair reaching her shoulders. The nose was straight, well-shaped, giving her a generic face that could be either Hispanic or Indian. Zallago knew they couldn't put more stock in any other features as it wasn't a photo and he sided with Maud's quibble. In his three years as a collections agent, he had never received a youngster's image as a target defaulter. It was just absurd.

Ms. Friedrick sucked on her lips and looked at Jamon Tabriz, the most experienced member of Nicklaus's team. "I don't have time for this, Tabriz. Talk some sense here?"

Jamon nodded and Ms. Friedrick went back to her office.

Jamon moved to Maud and placed a firm hand on his shoulder. "Look little guy, it's just a routine thing. They have been looking for the girl for sometime, I think. She was spotted last in Georgia and might have left for the south. It could be a misunderstanding. Just do your routine check and throw it to your 'Done' pile."

"But I can't just do that, can I? I'm your IT guy. I keep your system running. I aid in tracking down defaulters, that's it. I'm not in a secret federal surveillance wing. And I don't think Ms. Friedrick supervises spies here."

"Why don't you just pencil in something, you know?" Nicklaus contributed his two cents but saw the sombre faces of his team members. "I mean, after you've done the routine check, of course."

"I can. With ease. But I ain't doing it on principle, man. Just seems wrong to me! What in the world could that kid have done to earn this attention? We collect mortgage payments for crying out loud."

"Our job is not fishing for the whys," said Victor Pickard, the final member of Nicklaus's team who hadn't spoken till then.

"It's okay," said Jamon in a matter-of-fact tone.

"I'll have the assignment transferred." He looked around the computer terminals lined up along the wall, framed by wooden desks.

"I'll do it." Devon Lancaster raised her hand. "There's probably nothing to it. And I hate people who create too much fuss."

Nicklaus smiled. Devon was a hard-working student who worked through the days to pay for evening classes. She was usually in friction with the loudmouth and self-righteous Maud who was a beloved whiz kid but also a nuisance at least three times a week.

"Sheesh. You guys." Maud rubbed his non-existent stubble and smiled down on them all. "Alright. I give up. My job. I'll do it."

Announcing thus in a dramatic raised-hands fashion he often used, Maud went back to his desk and sat down.

Nicklaus felt a pat on his arm then. It was Rufus.

"Team session. Gotta cover some big ones in the San Carlos area."

***

Striding along San Carlos Boulevard, all her movements were brisk, short of time, always in a hurry. Her mind was ever on high alert, probing, questioning, suspecting.

She found a station in a relatively secluded corner of the public library and settled. Propping the Desktop's screen all the way up, she plugged the data loader into her phone. With a sigh of relief - no phone infection was detected - she went to work on the pop up window.

Even though she used her phone sparingly and was extremely careful with it, she felt thankful every time a data loader cleared her phone of malware. She depended on public libraries for data usage and acquiring another phone, if this one got infected, would be difficult and a big hassle.

She had woken up at the hint of dawn outside Vera's window and walked in the general direction of Tatter Town past several bus points in wait for buses to get. After a cheap two-dollar veggie sandwich-half at a street vendor's in some nameless street, she'd spent the day washing dishes at an eatery that was short of crew for the day. Midday meal was a part of her earnings.

Several times she considered whether to return to Caleb's theater or not. The play could serve as a source of forthcoming income, but she might have had severed her chances by snatching what was hers from before.

Her mother's words came to her from a time so long ago, so far removed from her daily existence, that it seemed like a fairy tale now.

Once upon a time, her mother had said:

A lone woman is treated like a commodity for bartering in men's world.

But there are not just men in the world ... she had innocently countered. God made all equally, didn't he?

He did, replied her mother, but men have a hard time being generous with the half not theirs...

Pushing her musings aside, she focused on this small window of work she had.

Bridges, rivers, and factory waste.

America always had a water pollution problem. But it had been worsening for the squalls - the increasingly impoverished townships in the vast urban wasteland that fell between bigger cities and suburbia.

The Smart Nation Initiative of the 30s had seen a number of these cities go smart. Other cities were in a constant race to join the distinction. The advantages were many: Widespread prosperity. Radical eradication of crime. Minimal pollution. Non-existent poverty. The standards of life was tough and costly in maintenance, which meant even the middle class struggled in smaller cities which had begun to skew dangerously to the lower spectrum of economic success.

The perfect walls-without-walls solution for the elite.

Swallowing the taste of cynicism, she opened a browser to the state department of transportation and a few other sites and went to work.

She had hundreds of pictures on her drive now. Many were of bridges and their load clocks, those that she had come across in the past three years as a fugitive across several states. Most of the pictures were of rivers, lakes and other freshwater sources she had passed by. She was always prompt, researching on each new addition in her collection and neatly summarizing and organizing all into folders.

The latest item in her collection was that bridge she had been crossing the past few nights.

Exactly forty minutes later she was out as planned. Her data and research was safe in the old drive of her obscure email provider. It was a system many considered obsolete in the v-age, but still functioned on PCs.

As she was exiting the library, her foot caught on something and she tripped. She would have fallen flat on the pavement but a small, strong hand grabbed her wrist, preventing her from fall.

"I'm sorry," she hurriedly straightened her clothes a bit embarrassed. "I totally didn't see you there."

It was a young, big-boned boy with sandy hair and rosy cheeks and she was still surprised how adroitly he had helped.

"That's okay, ma'am. I practically ran into you. I'm sorry."

She noticed that a bag had fallen from the boy's hands and opened, spilling its contents everywhere. She helped the boy with the bag gather all the stray items.

The boy looked red and painfully shy, seemingly overcome with gratefulness.

"That's awfully kind of you ... What's your name, ma'am?"

It was quite a little dilemma he had thrown her into. In the last few years, it was her extreme cautiousness - most would call it paranoia - that had been keeping her safe, or so she believed. On the other hand, the boy had been too nice; she didn't have the heart to be rude.

"Roxie," she blurted out. Why that name than any other, she'd have to analyze later. "You can call me Roxie." She looked at the boy in the eye this time with a warm smile.

"Thank you, Roxie, see you next time." Pleased with himself and her, the boy happily jaunted into the library.

Dismissing the fleeting thought that she should have asked the boy's name in return, she practically ran along the row of buildings to get away from the place.

On a whim, she entered St. Felipe Crescent, a pedestrian street through a Mexican market. It was a joyous world of color and sparkles: beautifully painted ceramics, tinkling decor pieces, sequin accessories, and beaded sandals - a smorgasbord of local flavor. It was easy to forget everything and simply enjoy the sights and sounds.

She blended well with the people around her. She'd bought an outfit on clearance at a store before coming to the library and felt comfortably invisible. Everyone minded their daily commerce and she joyfully flitted from display to display of sundry goods.

She had come upon the northern section of the street where the outdoor market gave way to a more urban streetside strip mall, when she felt her skin crinkle up.

"The monops are here!" a boy yelled near her as he cycled past the plastics shop alerting the bystanders.

A group of four sharply dressed well-groomed men, v-phones and GPS trackers in hand, had just emerged into the street between the ceramics and fabrics shop. Shopkeepers and customers were staring at them with various expressions, their ongoing transactions suspended for now. Other patrons were either hurrying away or had halted in the middle of the street, huddling around in groups trying to catch gossip.

Her breath got hitched. Instinctively, she hid behind the last outdoor display of large plastic items and peeked around.

Her mind was already in overdrive. In a single quantum leap, it had jumped back three years on to the biggest thoroughfare of another city. It was a different part of the country and the venue of her first, scary encounter with another group of these 'Monopoly Men'.