Repo Men (22 page)

But they were just the soldiers and Mary-Ellen was the field general, using her team of attorneys to rip into my bank accounts, my Union stock portfolio, my future earnings. For a woman who claimed to want nothing to do with the repossession lifestyle, she was more than happy to take her share of profits.

I didn’t fight it. After Beth, I never fought any of it. If these women didn’t want to be with me anymore, then who was I to argue? Someday, I knew, I would find a woman who would fit me perfectly. Who cares if it hadn’t happened yet? I was a young man.

The Outsider lived in a four-room flat on the third floor of what seemed to be a structurally sound building. It was good to see running water again. The apartment, though sizable, was separated by a gaggle of Chinese paper screens, set up so as to create a huge maze out of the living and dining areas. As I worked my way in through the front door, I managed to squeeze myself around the barriers, my chest brushing up against them as I slinked past.

He was broad of shoulder yet wiry and slim, the muscular definition above his chest a stark contrast to the rest of his body. Like he’d spent a lot of time shoveling coal or plucking chicken feathers but not much else. A red bandana wrapped around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes, tied back against a thick mop of braided hair.

Bonnie introduced us. “This is Asbury,” she said, and I shook the man’s hand. It was wet, slimy.

“Sorry,” he said, wiping his palm off on a filthy apron before going back for another shake. “Working on an op, and the juice done leaked a pop.”

In the distance, I caught a glimpse of an artificial backbone lying limp on a card table; cerebrospinal fluid dripped to the floor below. “In and gone,” I said, switching into the once-fashionable repo-slang this guy was so fond of using. It was ten years old, this stuff, but it floated naturally off my tongue.

He shot a smile up at Bonnie, clapping her on the back. “You brought me down a wood nymph, I like that.”

“No,” she replied, “he’s not an Outsider.” She pulled down the high collar that hid my tattoo, exposing it to Asbury’s gaze. “He was with the Union.”

Asbury was instantly on the defensive, backing up a step as he eyed me warily. “Why’d you drag me a U-man, baby?”

Palms up, I clarified. “I’m not with them anymore. I quit the rap.”

“You quit,” he asked, “or you were quitted?”

“I was quitted,” I said. “About six months on the back end.”

He nodded, getting a good look at my eyes. Probably trying to see if I was lying or not, but there was the distinct possibility he was sizing me up for artiforgs, wondering if I could be of any financial value to him down the line. Eventually, he dropped his guard and allowed me farther into the flat.

“
Mi casa, cabron.
”

We had lunch inside his small kitchen, standing up at the counter, our shoulders rubbing up against one another as we talked about the outside world, about the Credit Union, about Bio-Repo men and about the black-market artiforg business. Freshly sliced luncheon meats rolled into cylinders, shoved down with our fingers, washed back with seltzer and lemons. It was the best meal I’d had in weeks.

“I can snatch a pumper from a shelf and spin it to quarter value,” Asbury boasted, trying to convince me that he was doing the world a favor, “fly it into the op for half, and still make a credit on the upside.”

“Or the client can do it legally,” I said, my mouth going through the words I’d said a thousand times. “Get full benefit of warranty and customer service.”

“How’s a
vato
in the ghetto gonna up-front the Union?” he asked. “Downtown, all they care about is the equity. Me, the only equity I care about is hanging in your skin.”

“Asbury’s right,” Bonnie chimed in. “He’s recycling. Plus the client gets a cheaper artiforg, so everyone comes out a winner.”

“Except for the supply houses,” I pointed out. “It’s their merchandise, after all.”

I expected an argument, but the Outsider just laughed and turned to Bonnie. “They quitted him, all right, but they shoulda quitted him harder.”

He had nodes in his head, implanted sockets, which meant Asbury did some serious Ghost work in his spare time. Most spooks are satisfied to use headsets and earplugs; only the diehard riders got their own artiforgs and connected directly. As we finished up with the meal, I couldn’t help but ask him about it.

“You licensed to pimp for the Ghost?” I asked.

“Licensed?” He laughed. “No, U-man, I’m not ‘licensed.’ But I’m down with the Ghost. Full sense implants, get a ride every one or two, pick up a system and curl it out. You?”

“No,” I admitted. “Pulled ’em out, but never taken the ride.”

Excited now, Asbury pulled me across the kitchen and over to where a dining room should have been. On another rickety card table was a thin, rectangular box with flat wires like bunched linguini leading out from the center. Ghost processor. Asbury hovered over it like a kid waiting for a plate of cookies to cool, his fingers barely caressing the metal. “Witness.”

I backed away as he held the wires out to me. “I’m no spook,” I insisted. “Node free.”

Asbury had it covered. He reached under the table and rummaged around in a large cardboard box filled with plugs and cords, eventually coming up with the smallest pair of goggles I’d ever seen. I’d heard of sets like this during some of my repo training, but I’d never had to pimp out a visual system before. Furthermore, I had no interest.

But we were here looking for help, and the last thing I wanted to do was offend the guy. I figured there couldn’t be any harm in seeing what all the fuss was about. Some of my pals back on the repo force went full-time spook after riding their first Ghost systems; there must have been something entertaining about the experience.

“You put them in like contact lenses,” Bonnie explained, helping me to keep my eyelids open as I popped the sensors onto my eyeballs. Thin metallic leads ran from the bottom of each lens across my cheeks down to a frayed, open end, and Asbury twisted these onto the wires stretching from the Ghost system. From my perspective, nothing much had changed.

“This guy was a racer,” Asbury explained to me, his hand firm on the controls. “Fritzed on the Q. Got sixteen hours visual Ghost time in here, forty-two audio. You get the vids ’cause the ’verb’s too intense.”

I was going to ask a question, but he turned on the box. Suddenly, I found myself pimping for the Ghost.

Woman on the floor, falling away from me. She tried to stand up but fell back down hard, hitting her head on a chair. Her belly was thick, full. Pregnant. Puddles of mystery moisture obscured the crumbling wood floorboards, and a cat zipped across the room, hair on end. All of this was mute, completely silent. No thunk, no ouch, no meow, just the hum of the Ghost system and the taut breath of Bonnie and Asbury behind me.

“Are you okay?” Bonnie’s voice, but she wasn’t in the room. She was in the Outsider’s apartment, I knew, but in here it was just me and this half-naked woman and a cat that kept jumping on the counter and off again and on again and off again.

“Doing fine,” I replied.

The room shifted, came closer into focus. I saw an arm rise up—from the vantage point, it should have been my own, but it clearly was not. On the filthy fingertip, nails long and unfiled, was a sparkling red powder, glittering in the glare from the exposed overhead bulb. It came toward my mouth and disappeared beneath my field of vision.

“This here’s when he drops the Q hard,” said Asbury. I could feel his hand on my back—
my
back—and he said, “Keep it tight.”

The floor suddenly burst open in a flash of light, exploding out, molten lava streaming from the gaping wound and flowing across the ground. The pregnant girl was caught up in the flow, the liquid heat racing past her knees, but she didn’t notice. Bent over double, she vomited once, twice. The cat sprouted four extra legs and hopped back off the counter, climbing the walls and ceiling before dropping down next to me. Its mouth opened in a hiss, fangs dripping with green saliva, but all was still mute.

Everything pushed away; the body I was looking through must have leaped backward, and suddenly I was staring at the sky through a hole in the ceiling, at a pure, white light streaming down from above. A phalanx of angels with automatic weaponry descended from on high, their guns aimed at me, at the pregnant girl, her belly now distended to encompass half the room, growing with every second, at the cat/spider, caught up in the lava flow, burning as it danced from her to me, all of it rising up, into the air, coalescing into a giant fiery pillar, towering hundreds of feet above my head, ready to crash down and crush me, finish me off—

And I was back in the Outsider’s apartment.

“We broke your cherry, repo man,” said Asbury, gingerly plucking the contacts from my eyes. “I’m gonna tell all my friends at school.”

I’ve had spooks push their machines on me before; like Q users, they’re always trying to sucker squares in on their act. The only good thing about a Ghost machine is that you can only ride one sense at a time. Eyes, ears, the rest—you choose, and you plug in. One customer, one sense—it’s a safety valve. I got the visuals on my ride in Asbury’s flat, but I’m sure if I had the whole experience assaulting me at once, I would have gone just as mad off the drug as any normal Q user.

But now I can say, as my life approaches its potential end, that I have pimped for the Ghost, and that it hit back hard. Doesn’t sound all that impressive, but in the right circles, it’ll get me a free round of drinks.

Asbury ran us past his workstations—tables filled with artiforgs in various states of disrepair, tools I’d never before seen outside the Union compound—eventually leading us over to a comfortable couch. It was good to sit on fabric again. Meanwhile, Bonnie let him have the entire story—we’d been holed up in good digs but the Union was closing in, and we needed a new place to crash.

Asbury listened, nodding and shrugging in the appropriate places. He sympathized, he told us, but didn’t know what he could do, short of offering up his own apartment for a hideout. “There’s cavities up in this hole can’t no scanner ping you,” he promised. “And I got open time to boot.”

But Bonnie wasn’t interested. “That’s not fair to you,” she said. “You’re in enough danger with us coming here as it is.”

The Outsider thought for a moment, snapping his fingers as he stared off into space. I wondered how he and Bonnie knew each other. Was it a friendship from her marriage? I doubted it. Afterward, then? Had they slept together? Were they lovers? Suddenly, jealousy had taken over, and I was ready to interrogate them, then and there.

But Asbury spoke first. “I’m thinking on this one hole, but I gotta crunch down on this man’s data before I let it go. It’s high on the top.”

Bonnie turned to me to translate, but I understood the guy fine. He wanted to know who I was before he let me in on his secret hiding place. He wanted to know how I’d come to the situation I was in. He wanted proof that I wouldn’t snitch him out.

He wanted to know why I was a Bio-Repo man on the run.

Fair enough. It was my turn to talk, anyway.

And this is what I said:

A
bout a year ago, I ran out a set of glands from a pair of circus twins who’d contracted the same genetic malady on their thirty-fourth birthday. Their hypothalamuses had begun to shrink, and it was all doctors could do to get double artiforgs implanted on the same day. They were trapeze artists, good ones, too, who regularly defied death by flying 50 feet above the midway floor, letting go of each other’s hands, and landing in a two-foot pool of water surrounded by glistening iron spikes coated with
curare
. The circus had been upgraded since I was a kid.

But it wasn’t as profitable. Folks preferred to shop or stay at home watching the tube than witness risky, live-action spectacles. For those who were interested in such things, there were always demolition derbies and rodeos. Ticket sales were down; insurance premiums were up.

Which might explain why Hans and Edwin, the Flying Moellering Brothers, were unable to keep up the payments on their new hypothalamuses, and why I had to track them down in a small Midwestern pay-by-the-hour motel. For a fiver, the clerk told me what room they’d checked into. I didn’t think they’d pose a problem, so I didn’t bother gassing the place down. We all make mistakes.

Hans hit me over the head with a trapeze bar as I entered the room, a glancing blow that momentarily stunned me, but I caught the stick as he tried to bring it back up and whipped it out of his grasp. Swung it around in the other direction, caught him halfway down the face. Hans stumbled across the room, clutching his head, moaning in pain.

Edwin, meanwhile, was crouched down behind the far twin bed. I could see his shoulders working at something, twitching like he’d just been shocked. I heard the clicks and the sound of a clip popping into place, and ducked just in time to feel the bullets whiz through my hair. Six shots, each one with my name inscribed on it, and yet each one passed me by. I let Edwin empty the gun into the door behind me.

“You’re a lousy shot,” I said, and stood back up again. Hans was still trying to regain control of his limbs, and Edwin was furiously attempting to eject the clip from his automatic. He never got the chance. I leaped over the bed, bouncing once on the mattress, and sunk a knee into Edwin’s back, pinning him to the floor. I snatched the gun by its barrel and pocketed the weapon.

“We can pay you,” Edwin grunted, his face pressed into the thin, stained carpet. His accent was weak, but still there; he hadn’t yet excised his Teutonic roots. “We pay you, and you say you couldn’t find us.”

I could feel Hans moving in behind me; I spun, kicking out with my legs, my foot cracking into his knee, buckling it, snapping it. The wiry German fell to the floor, screaming in pain. In his hand was not a weapon, but a small wad of cash he’d been trying to push on me.

“I don’t work that way,” I explained to the writhing man. Then, grasping the bills in my hand, I shook them in front of his face. “Is there anyone you’d like me to give this money to?”

Edwin shook his head, tried again. “You keep it—you keep it, and go away.”

“I said I don’t work that way.” Then, emphasizing every word: “Do you have a next of kin?”

Clients hated the next-of-kin question. It always sent them blubbering. I cut off Edwin and Hans’ sobbing with a quick double-shot from the Taser, grounding the Flying Moellering Brothers once and for all. I started in on my work.

Wendy was a wreck by the time I got home. She’d heard about the job from a friend of ours, who’d heard about it from a guy named Chip, who’d heard about it from Frank. All of this in under four hours, but when you nearly get whacked on a gig, it makes the rounds pretty quickly. Everyone’s got their stories, and the bad ones travel faster than the good.

We’d already been discussing a potential transfer for a while, Wendy suggesting I move over to sales, me resisting, her suggesting again in a slightly stronger tone, and then we’d let it drop for a week or two before starting the cycle back up again. I couldn’t argue much with her points: It was safer, it was more befitting of a man of my advancing age, and it would afford me the chance to do the things I really enjoyed doing, such as breathing.

But the Moellering Brothers incident threw her over the edge, especially because by the time the information had come her way, I’d been shot/smothered/decapitated, which is understandably upsetting to a spouse. She grabbed me tight as soon as I walked in the door and only let go to punch me, hard, in the chest, for putting myself in such a dangerous situation. Wendy was no innocent when it came to the repo game; she knew full well that there were ways to anticipate and ways to prep, and that I’d probably gotten sloppy somewhere in the planning stages.

“Tell me you’ll transfer,” she pleaded that night. “Take a job with sales. Frank’ll let you, I know it.”

“It’s not what I do,” I explained.

“It’s not what you do right now. But you
could
.”

I was prepared to fight. Hell, I’d done it with every other wife, every other time. No reason I couldn’t continue the pattern.

But I was tired. It was probably the worn-off adrenaline from the Moellering Brothers that had me in such a receptive state, but I couldn’t work up the energy for a proper argument. Rather than go through the trouble of getting myself all riled up, I suddenly heard myself saying, “Okay. Okay.” And once more, as if I couldn’t even believe it myself: “Okay.”

Jake and Frank did their best to change my mind. Presented rational, cogent arguments as to why I’d wither and die in sales. Why repo was the only place I belonged. But they knew it was a foregone conclusion. Jake, in particular, seemed resigned to it.

“The money’s not as good,” he pointed out. “Nowhere near as good.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’ve got enough money as it is.”

“Even with the five divorces?”

“Four,” I said.

“Four
now
.”

Sure, I’d be losing about a third of my salary by switching over to sales; the commissions were nowhere as high as they were in Repo, but neither were the dangers. My mind was set, and Frank put in the paperwork.

“You’ve got about two weeks before this goes through,” he told me. “You want to take vacation time before you start, or you want a few last pink sheets for the road?”

“Screw vacation,” I said. “Give me some pink sheets.”

See? It’s true what they say—too much work
can
kill you.

The next couple of weeks were a blur of ether and blood, as I tore into the city with a vengeance. I must have logged two months’ work of repo jobs in twelve days. Most nights, I didn’t bother coming home; I’d do a gig and sleep in the car for a couple hours before heading off to the next. Wendy didn’t bug me about it; I think she knew I was just getting the final vestiges of the job out of my system.

Jake and I even had some fun running out a couple nests we’d located down by the old high school. Twenty or thirty debtors hiding together, hoping to find a way out of the system, out of the country, maybe make it to one of those islands where everyone still roams free and clear and fleshy. But the very nature of their operation, huddling so many people with so many past-due artiforgs in one place, made it easy for us to locate and track. We took fifty-seven artiforgs out of twenty-one hosts in just under four hours. I’m pretty sure Jake put a down payment on a powerboat.

I was finally coming to the end of my rush, the endorphins of nearly two weeks of fight-or-flight wearing off, when Frank gave us two more pink sheets. I scored a guy who was five months over on a knee replacement—with that kind of extraction, he had a pretty good chance of limping down to the local hospital for a patch-up job—but Jake grabbed a winner.

“Captain Krunkybean?” Jake scoffed. “That’s the guy’s name?”

“You’re shitting me,” I said, snatching at the sheet, checking the stats. “You got Captain K?”

“You know him?”

“Know him?” I said. “I used to watch him every Saturday morning. You’re telling me you don’t know who Captain Krunkybean is?”

Jake shook his head. “This is a guy from the war?”

“It’s not that kind of captain,” I said. “It was a kids’ show. You never saw it? Shit, man, he was a legend around here. He’d show cartoons and had that puppet zebra, and they’d get kids to come in and tell jokes. I always wanted to do a knock-knock joke, but my parents were too busy to take me down to the studio.”

Jake just shrugged; it didn’t ring any bells. “So, you want him? I’ll trade for the knee.”

“Hell yeah, I want him.” I swapped out pinks with Jake, and took a good look at the sheet. Jarvik unit. Considering the good captain’s age, it wasn’t all that surprising. “He deserves to get his heart ripped out by someone who appreciates his work.”

The captain was holed up in a grocery warehouse district, according to the pink sheet. A snitch had placed him in the general location before losing the scent. Easy enough. I rolled into the area, cut a hole in the chain-link fence to allow myself access, and got situated. Few lights, no dogs, lax security. Large buildings on the perimeter surrounding smaller, one-story warehouses and office buildings on the inside. A fortress of produce.

I flipped on my scanner and started walking. You work the job long enough, you tend to get a feel for hideouts. Knowing where bodies fit, where humans naturally choose to make their caves. I knew, for example, that the most interior of the buildings would be empty; deadbeats always think they’ll get one ahead of the Union by not choosing the most obvious location. So I settled the start of my search somewhere in the middle, concentrating on the medium-size office buildings.

My scanner, thanks to Jake, could not only ping multiple artiforgs at once; its search beam could penetrate almost any substance with the exception of lead. Superman had his weaknesses; so did I. But there wasn’t a lot of solid lead construction around anymore; if folks needed to build something strong, they used titanium, which weighed less, worked better, and, fortunately for me, was not impervious to a scanner’s rays.

I found the captain quickly enough. As I approached the fourth building along the left side, waving the scanner’s beam left and right, a ping came back to me, filling the screen with a flurry of facts and figures. Jarvik–11 unit, model 2a, datebook and calendar option enabled. Manufacture date of four years prior, which was surprising to me; most folks who go welsh do so after a year, tops. Anyone who can pay for four years of artiforg service can usually eke out the rest of the cost, too. Then again, folks can be riding full speed on top of the world, hit one short bump, and fall headfirst onto hard times.

I would find that out soon enough.

Chose not to get a visual. The pink sheet said he’d been holed up by himself, and I had no doubt that the captain’s lonely status hadn’t changed. Maybe he still had Mr. Zebra in his front pocket; if so, the striped fella was about to get a visit from the sandman. From outside calculations, I estimated the size of the office to come in at 900 square meters, but played it on the safe side. I plucked three ether canisters from the pack, each with a 400-square-meter fill. Gas was cheap.

No window on the outside, so I took my time carving out a hole for the tube in the wooden door, slicing away bit by bit with the pencil laser, trying to keep the smell of burning wood to a minimum. Even though Captain K was of advancing age, he probably still retained enough of a sense of smell to be on the lookout for an odd whiff. One wrong move, and he’d be out the back door and running before I even noticed. I had too much respect for the guy to have to chase him down; he deserved some dignity.

After twenty-five minutes of this—my scanner keeping a silent watch on the artiforg inside all that time—I’d scraped out a large enough knot in the wood through which to insert the plastic tubing. Then it was the simple act of attaching the ether canisters one by one, twisting the release knob, and letting the odorless gas do its work. I waited fifteen minutes, slipped on my respirator, and went inside to finish the job.

It seemed so easy.

His body was prone on the floor, chest up, arms splayed to each side, just the way I liked ’em—unless I was doing kidneys. He wore a rumpled blue tuxedo shirt and pants, no jacket, as if he’d just come home from playing a wedding gig at the American Legion dance hall. His features, though wrinkled and worn by time, were still the same round, friendly ones I’d come to love as a child, and part of me wanted to revive him and ask all the questions I always wanted to but never had the chance: How do you make Mr. Zebra talk? Does Polly Persuasion really believe all those things she says? Why don’t you ever wish me happy birthday on the air like you do for the rest of those kids?

But I had a job to do, so I sliced through his clothes, exposing a body covered in thick, graying hair. Next came scalpel, scissors, suction to clear away the blood and let me see what I was doing. Expandable lamp, set up next to the body, throwing a pool of light on the chest. Hammer to crack the ribs, a manual bone saw to finish the job in case I had problems getting through the sternum. The captain remained still, not a movement or peep, and I wondered for a second if he was already dead, the Jarvik continuing to pump blood through a corpse. It didn’t matter, though; the heart was still beating, and that was what I had come for.

The early Jarvik models were notorious for continuing to run long after they were taken from the host bodies, and I knew a number of Bio-Repo men who lost fingers when the titanium valves bit down on flesh and bone. So a few iterations back, they installed electro-pulse monitors that, aside from properly mimicking the heart’s electric beat, enabled a Bio-Repo man to shut down operation when the correct voltage was applied. Like all good Bio-Repo men, I kept my defib unit in the trunk of my car, and brought it along on every potential Jarvik job. Today’s was no exception.

But here’s where it gets a little fuzzy. I remember pulling the defibrillator out of my pack and setting it on the ground. I recall flipping the unit on and hearing the familiar hum of the electric charge. I grabbed the shock pads by their handles and rubbed them together, partially to build up friction, mostly because this was how I’d always seen it done on television. Set the dial to 300, enough to jolt anyone out of this world, and sat back for but a moment, contemplating how easy this job had become, how perfect it was to be so good at a profession that helped so many and paid so well, and how I’d miss it, every day, and in every way.