“Navigating the White Elephant Exchange at the Secure Drop Site on NE 44th and Mackenzie”
R.E. Dukalsky
Dear Valued Employees,
It is time again for The Organizing and Facilitation Group’s Annual Holiday White Elephant Gift Exchange! The following message contains the operating parameters of this beloved workplace tradition. Please read and review these instructions carefully, as the usual disciplinary consequences will apply for violation of our secure (but festive!) protocols.
This year’s Designated Secure Drop Site is at NE 44th St. and Mackenzie Blvd. As a reminder, no regular OFG business may be conducted through this drop site during the month of December.
- You have been assigned a number corresponding to a day in December, which you can find in your employee app. Please make sure you know your number. On that day, and only on that day, you are permitted to visit the Designated Secure Drop Site to pick up your gift and leave a gift for the next recipient.
- To ensure a successful Gift Exchange, your cooperation with the following protocols is required. Visiting the Designated Secure Drop Site on any day other than your designated day will result in disciplinary action. Interfering with any other operative’s legitimate attempt to access the Designated Secure Drop Site will result in disciplinary action. Deploying lethal force against fellow operatives via your gift or its wrappings will result in disciplinary action and a ban on participating in future gift exchanges.
- Please keep all gifts below $50 in value.
If you have any questions, please contact your regular OFG Liaison. Happy hunting gifting!
Sincerely,
OFG Management
As the bus rumbled past NE 30th, bumping arrhythmically through the potholes on Mackenzie Blvd., Cassia flicked through the gift exchange protocols again while keeping an unobtrusive eye on the other passengers. It was midmorning on a Wednesday, so the crowd wasn’t too heavy. Mostly older folks heading to doctors’ appointments or the grocery store or wherever else old folks went in the middle of the day. Up near the front, a retired couple were bickering in Spanish, in the manner of people who have been arguing comfortably together for decades, about how to unfold a stuck granny cart. A few rows behind them, three teens who definitely should have been in school were huddled together, giggling about something on their phones.
The Black woman across from her, seventy at least, was wearing a Santa hat over her immaculate curls and knitting contentedly, as if this bus ride was the pinnacle of her day. Cassia admired the calm efficiency of the woman’s dark brown fingers dancing with the steel needles and the burnt orange yarn, although she couldn’t make out what the woman was creating. Too big for a scarf or hat, but no visible armholes or yoke…
A slow red pulse from her phone screen distracted Cassia from contemplation of the stranger’s project. She rolled her eyes at the image of a round red Christmas tree bauble with a candy cane-striped “11” in the middle and thumbed the “Dismiss” button. It would be back in an hour, superseding all her other apps, just in case she had forgotten it was her day to pick up her gift from the gift exchange.
The light changed and the bus engine roared as it accelerated ponderously through the intersection at NE 40th and Mackenzie. The next stop was 44th, but Cassia didn’t move to pull the stop request cord. She’d been in the business for too long to get off at the most convenient stop. She’d ride another two, just to be safe, and walk back from the bus transit mall at 53rd. It was almost certainly overkill, but better safe than, well, killed.
She watched her fellow passengers closely nonetheless as the stop approached, alert to any signs of alertness from them. She wouldn’t put it past her associates to put a tail on anyone who got off the bus here. Even though they were all technically colleagues, knowing someone’s daytime identity was valuable information, and no successful assassin ever passed up an opportunity to collect information.
Don’t overthink it, she told herself as the stop slid by without any suspicious behavior. This was the mandatory office gift exchange, a ridiculous workplace tradition management had adopted for reasons she would never understand. They’d been doing this for almost ten years and she’d never had to deal with more than a half-hearted booby trap or a lackadaisical tail. The teens were still giggling. The couple had gotten their granny cart unfolded and it was now blocking the aisle – which meant most of the bus would now have to exit by the rear door where she could get a better look at them. Two rows ahead of her, a man in a line cook’s jacket was snoring gently, his head bouncing against the window.
Someone else requested a stop at the 53rd transit mall, so Cassia buried herself in her phone and pretended not to notice where they were until the very last second. She bounded up with a stifled curse, bent down to snatch the paper grocery store bag from between her legs, and straightened to find the elderly woman with the Santa hat staring directly at her.
“You have a merry Christmas now, and enjoy your walk,” she said, and gave an ostentatious wink.
Cassia froze for less than a second – more than enough time for a killing shot, blow, or needle, said the part of her brain that made her a good assassin. The part of her brain that regularly rode public transit told her she was about to miss her stop. “Uh, yeah, you too,” she stammered, yanking herself from her stupor and practically vaulting out of the bus.
Under cover of patting all her pockets, tugging on her beanie, rewinding her scarf, and looking generally disorganized, she watched the bus as it pulled away, but the woman seemed to have gone back to her knitting. Her back was to the window, her head bent forward over her lap, and she didn’t turn around before the bus was out of sight.
It was possible that she was just a nice old lady who wore a Santa hat in public for fun and liked wishing strangers a merry Christmas. Probable, even. Cassia’s client list was fairly tame at the moment – she hadn’t pulled any jobs in the last few months that were likely to trigger retaliation. No one was going to put a hit on her for participating in the gift exchange, for crying out loud. She was overreacting. It was an occupational hazard; assassins became good by being incredibly paranoid and hyperaware of unusual coincidences; as often as not those qualities were what took them out of the game too. You always had to watch yourself, make sure you were keeping your finely honed suspicions in check.
Cassia gave the pockets of her worn puffer coat – purchased at Marshalls, strategically stepped on and rolled in cat hair to make it look older than it was – one last pat, then walked south.
This part of the city was mainly five and six-story buildings with small businesses on the ground floor and insufficiently ventilated apartments above. Air conditioning units hanging out of windows were the primary ornament, although here and there someone had put up a string of lights in a window. The shops displayed a smattering of holiday cheer, which in Cassia’s experience grew more intense the closer one got to the register. Closer to downtown, the city government put up lights and wreaths on the streetlights; in neighborhoods like this one, the city considered its responsibilities fulfilled if the streetlights themselves were lit.
None of this made for a festive atmosphere, but it was a good environment for a drop site. There were usually plenty of people around during the day, nobody paid too much attention to anyone else unless they were causing a commotion, and if you appeared reasonably clean, sober, and focused on your own business you could pass unnoticed. The city didn’t have surveillance cameras here, and cameras maintained by individual business owners could easily be avoided if necessary.
Cassia walked like she’d just gotten off an early morning shift and was eager to get home: quickly, but with hunched shoulders and face pointed down towards the sidewalk. No one interesting here, just a tired worker looking forward to getting off her feet. She swung briefly into a corner shop and bought a quart of milk, a jar of peanut butter, and a bottle of Coke, plausible grocery purchases that would pack a hefty punch if she needed an improvised weapon. She asked for a plastic bag and ignored the clerk’s pointed look at the paper bag she was already carrying.
As she left the store, she nearly collided with an elderly man with Korean features. He was balding and wearing a garish sweater vest covered with frolicking reindeer, whose noses were red glass beads and whose protruding antlers were the product of a criminal conspiracy of machine knitting. “Pardon me,” she said brusquely.
“You have a merry Christmas now,” he said pleasantly. “Enjoy your walk.”
She spun around on him, automatically rotating her wrist to twist the plastic bag’s handles together and turn it from a satchel to a mace. The man was shuffling away toward the refrigerator case where the eggs were. He was wearing slip-ons and carrying a handmade string shopping bag. He was buying eggs, and she was going to a gift exchange, and nobody needed to die today. Slowly, deliberately, she forced her hand to relax and her shoulders to come down. A flicked glance toward the register showed the clerk was restocking cigarettes behind the counter and hadn’t seen a thing. She could just calmly leave without consequences. She should calmly leave.
She made herself walk out the door, but calm wasn’t a word that could describe her any longer. Two intrusively pleasant elderly people, repeating the same banal wishes, wasn’t much to work with but assassins lived or died by how well they recognized a seemingly small coincidence for what it truly was. She was on full alert, and her fingers itched to touch the silenced gun that she wasn’t carrying, of course she wasn’t carrying, because all she was doing was riding the bus to a diner on a Wednesday morning to pick up a package and not everyone in the world was out to get her.
Get it together, she told herself harshly.
Two blocks later, she got in line at a sidewalk coffee cart because that’s what the tired shiftworker persona she had adopted might do, and it gave her a chance to unobtrusively survey the area around the drop site. Two people were in line ahead of her, a weedy young white man with a bad haircut and an older white woman with beautiful grey curls who looked like she had been born to be a librarian. Cassia pulled out her phone and scrolled absently while watching the Home State Diner across the street.
The drop site was in the diner’s back storeroom. All she had to do was cross the street, walk down to the alley, turn right, and slip through the service entrance. At this hour, it would probably be standing open. She could slip inside, get to the storeroom, open the lockbox, swap the packages, and be out in under three minutes. Then she could take normal evasive measures on her way back home and stop worrying about whether the city’s retirees were out to get her.
The librarian-type had just gotten her coffee. Cassia put her phone away, preparing to order.
“Merry Christmas,” the woman said as she passed her.
“What did you say to me?” Cassia snarled so ferociously that the woman jumped. The lid of her coffee flew off and the coffee slopped over the rim of her cup, splashing hot liquid on Cassia’s jeans.
“I-I just- happy holidays?” the woman corrected tremulously, backing swiftly away.
Long years of training kept an embarrassed flush from staining Cassia’s cheeks. “Sorry, no, you just startled me, I’m just tired,” she said after the woman’s rapidly departing form.
“God, some people are so sensitive about Christmas,” said someone in line behind her.
“I know, just like say thank you and move on,” someone else replied.
Shit. Never draw unwanted attention to yourself was the first rule, the most basic rule, the stupidest rule to break. Now everyone in line was marking her as the bitch who had yelled at a nice old lady librarian.
Unless…that was what the woman had intended. It was a basic ruse every operative learned: how to cause a scene so that passersby took notice of your mark at a particular place or time. Had that woman been trying to point Cassia out to a hidden watcher? Had she spilled her coffee to make Cassia easier to track? She hadn’t apologized or even offered to go grab a napkin. Who doesn’t apologize for spilling on a stranger? Who was hunting her? Another OFG operative? A rival firm? The law? And why?
She wanted to peel away from the coffee cart and take those evasive measures now. Her instincts were screaming at her to get to ground. It’s a gift exchange, she told her instincts. She stayed in line. She ordered her coffee, drip with milk.
“One of those mornings, huh?” the barista asked her. He nodded sympathetically, locks bouncing under his striped beanie. “I hate it when you need the coffee but it goes straight to your nerves.”
Cassia got away with a platitude, but she knew she looked wired. She was lucky he hadn’t assumed she was high. He didn’t wish her happy anything, for which she was grateful.
She couldn’t see anyone watching as she crossed the street and ducked under the worn yellow awning with Home State Diner printed in peeling red letters, but the back of her neck was prickling. There were a couple of old men sitting on a bench outside the front door, but they didn’t greet her, seasonally or otherwise. One of them flicked an incurious eye at her as she walked by, her step deliberately slow and casual.
She felt better once she was in the alley. It was only a block long, and although the garbage bins gave some cover, she could see almost everything. She stood behind a dumpster for two full minutes, listening and watching. Nothing. Not even the sounds of recently dumped garbage shifting inside the bins.
Now that she had her back against a wall and a good chance of getting the jump on any tail, she started to relax and realize how wound up she’d let herself get. Even if someone had put a hit on her, why would they choose her day at the gift exchange to fulfill the contract? It was almost comical now that she thought about it with a clear head.
She stepped away from the wall feeling like she had a grip on the world again. The diner’s service entrance was 25 feet away. Beyond that was nothing but the lockbox and what was probably either a bottle of booze or a fancy aquarium fish, based on her past experience. If it was the latter, well, she already had the aquarium. If it was the former, she’d drink a toast to her own paranoia.
Less than 10 feet from the diner’s back entrance, something hit her in the small of her back hard enough to knock her to her knees. Cassia’s reflexes were excellent, honed by years of practice, and she was up again in a fraction of a second, whirling around, her makeshift bag mace already flying through the air—
—something heavy (and soft?) punched her hard in the stomach, knocking her back against the wall of the alley. She rebounded against the diner’s garbage bins and staggered forward, but hadn’t taken two steps before an icy coldness bloomed on her left hip, and that leg abruptly stopped responding to signals from her brain.
“Wha—?” she looked down in time to see the little old Korean man from the convenience store stepping out of arms’ reach and sliding a hypodermic needle back into its little plastic tube. He winked at her as he dropped the tube into his string bag next to his eggs. Bastard must have been standing behind the bins the whole time she was in the alley.
Both her legs gave out and Cassia slid to the ground. Through sheer luck she ended up slumped against the bins instead of sprawled on her side with her face in whatever was on the ground in this alley.
“I think we got her, Hwan,” said a voice she was sure she’d heard before.
“A new record, I believe,” Hwan said, sounding smug. He shuffled over to stand about six feet in front of Cassia, a distance that might as well have been on the other side of the city given the numbness that was spreading up her torso and down her arms.
She twitched her fingers frantically, even though she knew it wouldn’t change what was happening. Her mouth was so dry. She’d wouldn’t know for at least another thirty seconds whether she was already dead or had just been given a temporary paralytic.
She couldn’t turn her head, but there was movement off to her right and the elderly Black knitter from the bus came to stand next to Hwan. She was holding the thing she’d been knitting, which looked like a long, skinny scarf, one end of which had been knitted into a pouch and filled with—rocks? Bricks? Cassia knew now why the thing that had hit her had felt both heavy and soft. “I do believe it is,” the knitter agreed. “I think we’ll take the prize again.”
“Prize?” Cassia said. It was hard to get her throat muscles to respond, but she could do it with effort. She was afraid, and angry, and vindication was singing through her as surely as the drug in her veins. “I…made you. You said…Chrismas…have…nice walk.”
“I like it when we get a smart one, Anora,” the man said. He almost looked proud.
“It’s good to see the younger generation still has potential,” the woman agreed.
Younger generation?
“Where’s…other one?” Cassia demanded, looking left-right-left as far as her eyeballs could rotate without turning her head.
“The other one?” Hwan asked.
“Woman at…coffee cart,” Cassia said. “Nice hair…l’barian…spilled coffee on…m’leg.”
Her assailants looked at each other and shook their heads. “Honey, I think that was just a lady getting her coffee,” Anora said, too kindly.
Now she was just confused. Somehow she’d been too paranoid and still not paranoid enough. And why was this happening at all?
“What did you bring?” Anora asked.
“Bring?” The woman was looking at her paper bag. “For…gift? Wait. How’d—?”
“Okay, maybe she’s not so bright,” Hwan said with a smile of false pity.
“It’s all that technology these young people rely on,” Anora replied, winking at Cassia and not looking like she believed a word of it. “They think all their doodads will save ’em and they don’t practice the core skills.” She walked over to the paper bag Cassia had dropped when she was hit from behind and peered in. Her face fell. “I’m not winning the betting pool, though.”
“Is it a guinea pig?” Hwan asked, looking hopeful.
The woman reached in and lifted out the orchid in its ornamental pot that, if things had gone as planned, Cassia would already have left inside the lockbox in the storeroom of the Home State Diner. She shook her head at her partner. “I put my money on the beta fish.”
“I bet Ron gets it,” Hwan said. “He always bets on the plants.”
“Operatives are such soft touches,” Anora said with fond disgust, putting the orchid back. “Always buying these fragile living things. You’re just displacing your feelings, you know. Therapy would be better.”
“Are you…OFG?” Cassia asked. She couldn’t tell if her head was swimming because of whatever they’d dosed her with, or just because the situation was so bizarre.
“Ha! Not anymore,” Anora said, with a robust and gleeful snort. “We’re what you call vested.”
“Retired with full pension,” Hwan clarified.
“Retired…’ssassins?” She kept blinking and blinking, as if she could clear away this bizarre pair like a piece of pollen stuck in her eye. “Is…a hit?”
“On you? Not as such,” Anora said. “Just a little holiday fun.”
“It can get boring, being retired,” Hwan said. “We live a life of adrenaline and then,” he snapped his fingers, “suddenly nothing to do. So we invented a little game.”
“You have your gift exchange with its nice predictable rules—one person at the drop site every day,” Anora said, picking up the thread. “We work in pairs. Every pair gets a day. Whoever disables their target fastest wins the pot. Oh don’t you worry honey,” she flicked her fingers at Cassia. “It’s just a mild paralytic. It’ll wear off in an hour or so.”
“…know that,” Cassia said, not caring that she sounded snotty. She couldn’t believe that she’d been outmatched by a pair of geriatric adrenaline junkies for…entertainment? As part of a holiday tradition? It was humiliating. Maybe it was for the best that most people in the business died young.
“See? She’s bright enough,” Anora said to Hwan. He made a noncommittal noise. “Okay honey, we just need our proof and then we’ll be on our way. Don’t worry, we’ll deliver your present for you.” She pulled out her phone, then paused. “Don’t trying anything now, you’ll just hurt yourself.” Moving with more speed and agility than Cassia would have imagined for a woman of her age, Anora stepped forward, pulled the Santa hat off her head, and perched it on Cassia’s. “There we go,” she said, beaming.
It might have been better if they’d just killed her, Cassia thought as Anora snapped the photo. At least then she wouldn’t have to live every Christmas for the rest of her life with the memory of today.
“We’ll be right back,” Anora said. Hwan picked up the paper bag and they walked out of her field of vision. A door opened and shut. A few excruciating minutes later, it opened and shut again. Footsteps came back toward her. Cassia entertained the beautiful fantasy of grabbing an ankle, yanking one or both of them to the ground, hopefully breaking a few hips. But her fingers wouldn’t even twitch anymore.
“Thank you for being such a good sport, my dear,” Anora said above her head. “You’ll be just fine in about 40 minutes. And if you make it to retirement, you’re welcome to join us.”
“Don’t forget her gift,” Hwan said.
“I didn’t, I didn’t,” Anora replied. Her shadow briefly covered Cassia’s face as she set something squishy in her lap. “Looks like I’m winning the betting pool after all. You have yourself a merry Christmas now!”
Their footsteps had faded completely from the alley before Cassia could crank her neck down to see what was in her lap. It was a sealed plastic bag containing a beta fish.
_______________
R.E. Dukalsky lives with her talented, pun-loving wife and a suspiciously intelligent dog in Portland, Oregon.
