Flash Fiction by Scott MacLeod
Fergus MacTurk’s ma used to like to quote old Bobby Burns about mice and men’s best laid plans. Well things had gone about as “agley” as fucking possible. He sat in the back of the gleaming black sedan staring at the back of a couple of FBI windbreakers.
The day had started as bonnie as you like. Perched on the sumptuous patio of his sprawling estate in the Carolina highlands. Where his people had first emigrated over 200 years ago.
He had beaten the RICO case but was only allowed to stay in the country if he behaved.
Fergus was not on house arrest per se but he might as well have been. The conditions of his parole specified that he was not to consort with an itemized list of unsavory past associates, essentially anyone of any value to his business.
His daughter Flora was not happy. She was equally quarantined. In her case to her bedroom.
This morning he was sipping Talisker with Mactavish, an old confederate from the restricted list on the breathtaking terrace of his opulent countryside estate, impervious to the feds. His old mate had been smuggled in through the service tunnel built out in the woods His gargantuan marbled terrazzo was covered with protective netting used in celebrity weddings to cloak his activity from prying drones. They chatted productively about rekindling lost opportunities.
His chief concern today was his petulant 16-year-old. She was strong willed and calculating like her late mother whom Ferguson still worshipped. He had never fully recovered from the last time he saw her, floating on the surface of the firth with her throat cut ear to ear, the so-called Glasgow Smile. But while the mother was as sweet as shortbread, young Flora’s personality tended more to the acrid tang of haggis. An acquired taste indeed.
Today as usual the lass was hoping to use the cavernous back yard for whatever the hell she did all day; she called it content creation. And as was the norm she was banished to her quarters for the duration of her father’s meeting.
“You don’t respect my career,” she shrieked.
“Well, when you’re right you’re right,” thought Fergus.
But no ordinary room it was. A huge second story studio with floor to ceiling glass overlooking her dad’s spectacular veranda. With a large airy balcony of its own looking down on the old man’s rendezvous.
He spoiled her but he felt he owed it to her mom to try to instill some discipline. Hence the insistence she do her filming elsewhere. And his fruitless entreaties that she wear more than a micro kilt and plaid sports bra in her broadcasts.
Flora stormed away to her glass penthouse prison and began her daily output from her own plaza in the sky. She held her phone aloft on a selfie stick for the best vantage point for a battery of undulating candids. Then, from a roof-mounted camera, she used remote control to shoot live video of her gyrations from the high angle she deemed most flattering as she arched her back against the burnished aluminum railing.
Not far away in Quantico things began to unravel for the Scotsman. “I’ve got to show you something, chief,” said Umeka Barnes, the ambitious new analyst straight out of UVa pointing to her desktop screen. “We’ve had a lot of chatter about MacTurk’s getting back in the game. We’ve tailed a few known priors heading his way but once they turn off the interstate into the forest, we lose them. Aerial surveillance shows nothing. I’ve been monitoring his socials. He mostly tweets about soccer. More importantly, though, I’ve been cyberstalking his talentless daughter.”
She zoomed in on an inane Tik Tok showing a writhing post-pubescent in tartan spandex.
“What am I supposed to be getting from this, other than a talking to from HR?” asked her boss.
“Look closer,” said Barnes zooming in again.
And there they were. In the background. At the top of the screen. Behind the influencer. Upstage from the diva. Fergus and his verboten friend sitting and chatting on the open courtyard below as big as life. Next stop, gray-bar hotel. Talk about Scotch on the rocks, the great MacTurk was being put on ice for good.
In the back seat of the Crown Vic, after the agent showed Fergus on his phone the sixty second dance clip that had done him in, MacTurk could only think he should have been less concerned with her outfit and more focused on her field of view. If only he had just let her have her way and moved his sit-down indoors. In the end taming rival gangs and keeping the law at bay was child’s play next to guessing when to give in to a teenager.
Back in Quantico, Barnes’s phone pinged.
“Did it come out clear enough for you?” asked young Ms. MacTurk, lounging with her feet up, finally on the main ground level concourse, surveying the manor that was now truly and properly all hers.
Bio: Scott MacLeod is a father of two who writes from Oviedo, Florida. His work has appeared in Gumshoe Review and Short-Story.me.
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