Repo Men (17 page)

I eventually wrote:

And then, just so there could be some element of truth in this little elegy, I scribbled:

Noise outside. Screaming?

Bonnie and I are leaving the Laundromat. We just got here, but we have no choice. Our first night will be our last.

She was awake and waiting for me in the darkened alley, tourniquet around her knee. I burst through, scalpel in one hand, Mauser in the other.

“Did you hear it?” she asked. I noticed that she, too, was armed, her .38 clutched in that delicate hand, nail wrapped around the trigger guard.

“Yeah. You’re walking?”

“Well enough.”

Another wail shot out from nearby, clearly female, clearly in distress, clearly none of my business. “We should stay put,” I tell Bonnie. “We should hole up and stay put.”

“And if she needs our help?”

“No one needs
our
help in particular,” I pointed out. “If she needs help, someone else who’s not on the run can do it.”

Bonnie wasn’t having any of it. She fixed me with a look intended to make me feel like pigeon droppings, and it more or less worked. “It’s not a Bio-Repo man,” she said, “or she wouldn’t be screaming. She’d be passed out—you know the drill.”

On that, she was right. But I didn’t cotton running into any officers of the state, either. They might like to know what we’d been up to cruising the streets of skid row at night, a couple of nice folks like us, and then questioning would lead to detainment, which would lead to a ride downtown, which would lead to my credit file, which would lead to…

“And the cops won’t be coming by to check it out,” promised Bonnie, following my thoughts. “They gave up on this area a long time ago.”

Another scream jumped through the night to punctuate Bonnie’s sentence, and within moments we were headed across the street, against my better judgment.

Altruism, to whatever extent it actually exists in modern society, is not a required trait for the Bio-Repo man. The personality tests they make you take when you apply for a Union job are designed to detect a certain degree of deviant pathologies, a smidgen of mania, and a healthy dose of clinical apathy, which is the scientific way of saying you just don’t give a shit. The petitioner who passes all these ink blots and name games will be allowed into the training program, but will be watched to make sure his levels don’t get wildly out of control, spewing brain chemistry this way and that; the Union has no urge to license sociopaths with scalpels.

But altruism can’t be found in any of the Union training manuals, and for good reason. There’s no time to be nice when your ass is on the line; more often than not, it will get you killed. Gas, grab, go—the Bio-Repo man’s mantra.

I have violated this rule in the past. Without fail, it has been because of a woman. There is a trend here.

The building across the road from the Laundromat used to be an office plaza, and the very same series of city fires that ravaged Tyler Street must have wreaked havoc with the office plaza as well. Wide, open courtyards with canopies of trees and natural vines, sparkling fountains—it must have been a lovely place for the suits to come and relax during their fifteen minutes of lunch break every day.

But now the courtyard is blackened and dirty, weeds poking up through the cracks, prickly things that stabbed at my legs as I rushed by them. Bonnie and I moved through the main enclosure—Bonnie limping, grimacing with every pained step—toward the back of the plaza, toward the screaming, picking up the pace with every new howl. But the faster we went, the faster the shrieks came, and the faster the shrieks came, the more I wanted to turn around and hole up in the Laundromat. This was not cowardice; this was intuition.

Three floors to the plaza, though half of the building had crumbled to a single story, rubble filling the rooms beneath. We stood by the entrance, waiting for another burst of noise to indicate our next direction. I was double-fisting it: Taser in my right, Mauser in my left. I’d moved the scalpel into my waistband for easy access, the tip of the blade digging lightly into my groin. Bonnie was still holding her .38, but loosely, as if she didn’t expect that she’d have to use it. Dumb move. Always expect to use your weapon. When you don’t, that’s when you’ll need to.

A scream, directly in front of us.

“In there,” Bonnie said, and moved confidently into the building, ducking her head beneath the partially collapsed door frame and disappearing into the darkness. I flicked off the safety, held the Mauser down by my knee, and followed.

His neck was mostly missing, which explained why the girl was screaming so much.

“Calm down,” I said to her, trying to pull her away from the blood and the gore and the messiness. “Calm down, stop yelling. Get a hold of yourself.”

But my bear hug only intensified the fit, her head slamming up and down, chin pounding her own chest, long blonde hair flapping through the air, making me sputter as it flew into my mouth. “Can you do something?” I asked Bonnie, but she just stood there, stroking the girl’s hand, whispering into her ear.

The guy on the floor was dead, no doubt about it, and from what I could tell, his thyroid was gone, too. It’s not a big organ, the thyroid, but when you’ve got as good a knowledge of anatomy as I do—and in specific, a knowledge of where organs should be when organs are not—a heap of blood and tissue doesn’t matter. There’s a hole where there shouldn’t be, and in that hole went a thyroid gland. More likely, in that hole went an artiforg.

“Tell me what happened,” said Bonnie.

The gal had calmed down considerably since we first arrived, but she still took great gasps of air as she spoke, trying to get it all out. “He—he—I was bringing him—bringing him lunch—and I came in and—and I found him—I found him like—like this…” The crying began again, and Bonnie hugged her close.

I was superfluous. Stood there watching these two women hugging each other, not in the least aroused. In one corner of the room, next to an overturned wooden box with food stains on it, I spied a familiar yellow sheet of paper, bloody fingerprints marring the corners. Using the blade of my knife, I drew the paper up from the floor, running it along the wall to eye level so I could get a good look at it.

Official Credit Union Repossession
, it read, and then, below it:
One thyroid gland. Payment 120 days overdue
. The details came next: client name, age, last known address, the works.

Before I could absorb the rest of the sheet, the girl snatched the paper off the wall and knocked away the knife, nicking her thumb in the process; the blood dripped off her hand and joined the pool on the floor. “This is what they gave me,” she sobbed, waving the paper through the air. Bonnie came up behind her, eyes moist.

“It’s a receipt,” I explained. “You get to keep that. For your records.”

Still, she kept sobbing. “They gave me this and they took my boyfriend…”

“They took your boyfriend’s
thyroid
,” I said, the sentences flowing from my mouth in a rapid patter, a torrent of words I had repeated hundreds and hundreds of times over during my career. “They didn’t take your boyfriend. They took their merchandise, and the Credit Union has a right to their merchandise, just like you have a right to yours. If they didn’t reclaim their unpaid belongings, they’d never be able to continue as a corporation, and then all the people who need medical help would be unable to get it. Furthermore, under the Federal Artiforg Code, section twelve, number eighteen, they and/or their agents are under no legal right to resuscitate the bearer of said merchandise if payment had not been met by the—”

That’s when she started crying again. I have this way with women.

The Federal Artiforg Code was the Holy Book to those of us who lived under its protective umbrella. Some six hundred pages long, it detailed every possible scenario between manufacturer, supply house, direct marketer, client, and organ, and served as the ultimate tome in all cases arising from error or miscommunication. Many was the time that I’d had to sit in a stranger’s living room and recite article after article to some widow or soon-to-be widow, only to be hit or kicked or shot at even after all the trouble I went through memorizing the damned thing. They didn’t appreciate the hard work, not a one of them.

Granted, some had legitimate grievances, and I can only hope that those who took these matters up through the proper channels were properly remunerated. A telephone number was listed on the bottom of every repossession receipt—a toll-free number, mind you—and business hours were every Monday through Saturday from nine until six; if there was a problem, these people would listen, get to the bottom of the situation, and sort it all out within a few weeks’ time.

Ran out a small intestine once, back when Kenton was still making the IS–9, and due to a clerical oversight, I was out of ether. So I tagged the guy with a Taser, shot him up with a few hits of Thorazine, and he was out for the duration of the extraction. Problem was, his wife came home midway, and she didn’t stop screaming at me how they’d made the monthly payments on the intestine, how the paperwork had gotten all screwed up, how it was all a mistake. I was sympathetic, but she wasn’t letting me do my job, so I had to Taser her as well. It was legal—section 10, article three of the F.A.C., interference with a licensed repossessor—but I didn’t enjoy it.

So I repo’d the IS–9, brought it back to Kenton, got my commission. Two months later, I’m called in, and they tell me there really was a mistake, that the guy had not only paid up on the device, he’d actually been paying a little extra off in advance. Real swell customer, great credit history, just a screwup down in records. The wife had called the toll-free number after I left and the customer-service folks, ever vigilant, didn’t give up until they found the problem. Kenton sent me back.

I returned to the house bearing baskets of fruit, gifts for the client’s kids, free artiforg certificates for the widow. Refunded the full amount they’d already paid for the organ, plus a few extra thousand bucks on top to ease the pain of loss. Federal guidelines require only a refund in case of a foul-up; the additional money just goes to show what great management they’ve got at Kenton.

I felt like Santa Claus, handing out toys to the children, money to the widow.

And I still got to keep my commission.

But this girl wasn’t having any of it; her screams fell into sobs, which fell into weeps. I tried suggesting that she stand up, jog in place, try to walk it off, but she was inconsolable. Bonnie, who had been with her on the ground, lying next to the girl in an attempt to get her to talk out the pain, stood and brushed herself off. She had the yellow receipt in her hands.

“It looks in order,” she said. “Jessica told me they’ve been hiding out here for a few weeks. Her boyfriend is—was—an electrician, but with the recent layoffs, he lost his job, and after food and house payments, the thyroid…well…”

“I know the story,” I said. I’d heard it all before. Food, water, and shelter is what they teach kids in school. The three necessities; take care of those, and you’re good to go. Liars.

“So they were found out.”

Bonnie nodded. “This morning, when she went out to look for something to eat. She said they’d been hearing noises but thought the building was safe. She left, grabbed some bread and cheese down the street, and came back to…this. It was the first time she’d left his side in ten days.”

“Only takes ten minutes,” I explained. “Five for a gland.”

This set the girl off on a new sobbing jag. While Bonnie attended to her, I took back the yellow receipt and soaked in another good look. Never understood why people forked over money for artiforg thyroids; pills work just fine as a replacement. There’s no need to go to all the pain and trouble of an artificial organ when you can just suck down 30 mg of levothyroxine twice a day and be done with it.

At the bottom of the repo receipt is where they keep the official stuff, coded in such a way that only Credit Union employees can read and understand it. From the string of digits typed neatly along the edge, I learned that the client had a credit rating of 84.4 when he applied for the thyroid—respectable in today’s financial climate—and had been awarded the artiforg at an interest rate of 32.4 percent over a period of 120 months. Again, quite fair, all things considered. My Jarvik unit was offered at 26.3 percent, but that was a special rate afforded me by my former employers. I still won’t be sending them a card at Christmas.

But here’s the reason why we’re moving, the excuse for packing up our goodies and hoofing it out of the Laundromat and away from this part of the city as soon as dawn breaks and the sentinels go back home to sleep off the sunshine:

In the bottom right corner of that yellow receipt was a signature, right where a signature should have been. This is where the Bio-Repo man in charge of the case signs off that the artiforg is back in Union possession, that the client has paid his debt in full, and that the account is now considered closed.

I recognized that signature right away; I’d scrawled my own name next to it many a time.

It was the signature of the repo man I least want to run into. The one who has the best chance of locating me and successfully finishing off the job.

It was the signature of Jake Freivald.