The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (2 page)

The approaching man wears mirrored sunglasses that present twin microcosms of the prairie’s cold brilliance. “Afternoon,” he says and scans Khan. Then he moves to the third vehicle. Zed is exempt. Nobody scans Zed. No RF device is allowed anywhere near him. Besides, he doesn’t sport the lobe.

The black man completes the third vehicle, and signals to the other man, who opens the gate. The vehicles move on through and head toward the small jet parked at the far lip of the runway. Khan notes the additional guards and vehicles that surround the plane. The rule of law is a hollow, desiccated shell out here. No sheriffs cruise the county roads. No state patrolmen monitor the highways. The rural West is once again the West of the old American cowboy movies; only, the armament has vastly improved.

Zed sinks into the thick padding and looks out the plane’s window at the parched hills as the turbofans whine to life. He reaches into his overcoat, pulls out the plastic bag containing the tiny femur, removes it, and holds it in a slightly palsied grip with a hand densely speckled with liver spots. Without the bone, this entire undertaking would be completely in vain.

From down the aisle, Khan watches Zed rotate the bone with his thumb and forefinger. Everything depends upon it.

“How much more if I suck you?”

The girl leans forward across the booth, her breasts shoving at her tank top and her cleavage a bottomless canyon. Her smoky blue eyes peek out from a cluttered maze of makeup. Twin waves of blond hair flop down to obscure her vision and her bony arms are chemically tanned, probably through a biogene spray. Her forefingers tap the shellacked plywood tabletop with vicious ebony fingernails.

“You know, I’m really a pretty sensitive guy,” Lane answers, “and that makes me feel bad.”

The girl pulls her breasts back across the table and slumps in her seat. “Yeah, sure.”

Lane doesn’t know her name, and she’d lie if he asked. Anonymity is rule number one out on the street, and this shabby little bar is definitely an extension of the street.

“Tell you what,” Lane counters. “I’ll buy you a pipe before we go do the deal. How’s that?”

She brightens a little and sits up straight. “I like that.”

Lane slides out and gets to his feet. The musical blast of the junk crew hits him full on, and he imagines getting a pipe for himself and drifting around inside their percussive crosscurrents. But he’s on the job, even now. Too bad. The crew is good. They’re called Olds, because all their instruments were extracted from a wrecked 1979 Oldsmobile. Hubcaps, radiator, air filter, water hoses, and so on. No lyrics, no amps. Just riffing and chanting.

Lane smiles as he heads for the bar. The department thinks he’s crazy to groove on the junk scene, but then again, the department thinks he’s crazy in general, just like all the other contract cops. But he also knows that their opinions are secondhand at best. Those at the top of the police department never come out here anymore. They stay in the Trade Ring on the other side of the river and calculate the budgetary savings from hiring people like Lane, with no retirement benefits to choke the city’s operating costs. Sure, there are still a few regular cops, but they stick to the West Side and the occasional high-rise homicide or white-collar business fraud. Portland’s Middle East is basically a contract gig, which is to say that the East Side of the city
has mostly slipped out of civil control. It happened in stages. First, they lost the Far East, the big urban sprawl east of the 205 freeway—which the gangs now run as a toll road. Then the blight and anarchy slowly seeped west, until it reached the Willamette River in the middle of town.

Enter the Bird, who now runs everything for fifteen miles out, starting at the river. Lane is reminded of this when he gets to the bar. “Gimme a draft beer and pipe of yellow dream,” he orders the bartender, a corpselike figure with razor eyes and bony knuckles. He turns to check on the girl. She sits staring at her nails and swaying her shoulders to the junk crew. He can’t afford to have her back out now. He’s spent two weeks setting this thing up.

“Twelve crows,” demands the bartender.

Lane turns back around as the bartender shoves the beer and flat pipe with its nickel-size bowl across the bar at him. Lane fishes in his pocket and pulls out a roll of bills. Each is the size of a dollar and printed on banknote stock, but where the presidents usually reside is a picture of a crow, its beak breaking out of the traditional oval. The Bird is vain, and the crow is in his image, a sign of his economic sovereignty over a vast hunk of the city. The Bird is also a very bad man, but that isn’t the problem. Lane is here because the Bird’s monetary power is making bigger ripples than are politically tolerable over in the Trade Ring.

“You take card bucks?” Lane asked, out of idle curiosity.

You could see the fear expand the circumference of the man’s eyeballs. “You fuckin’ crazy, man?”

Lane raises his hand in a conciliatory gesture. “Just askin’. Twelve crows. You got it.” He pushes the bills across the bar, and grabs the pipe and the beer. The punk would clearly take a bullet in the groin before he took Lane’s bank card, a fact central to Lane’s presence here. The Bird collected all the bank cards from each and every wage earner on his turf, including the temps: a minority of the populace, but a relatively prosperous one. The legitimate banks in the Trade Ring and the Chip Mill had always issued debit cards. No more dirty bills or clunky coins. You just shoved data around in abstract ledgers. Eventually, they stopped accepting cash altogether. All the country’s money now had an audit trail behind it, an incriminating thread that embroidered the pattern of your lifestyle for inspection by various regulatory agencies.

Of course, the banks and the government had not anticipated the Bird, an economic genius in the rough. Every payday, his people marched the wage earners to the bank booths, where they deposited the contents of their debit cards into a maze of accounts maintained by the Bird’s bean counters. In exchange, they were given crow money, negotiable everywhere inside the Bird’s turf. The Bird held the equivalent of hard currency, while his flock dealt in the soft coin of the immediate realm. The local merchants exchanged crow money through the Bank of Bird to obtain legitimate funds for outside purchases. The Bird took a simple transaction fee for every bill exchanged.

You didn’t have to be an economist to understand that the Bird and his peers in other cities were now a force of considerable weight in the local business system. But they were equally difficult to bring to justice. By now, there were several ugly cases to prove the point. One was in St. Louis, where a police operation to arrest a local boss resulted in a full-scale urban battle that killed twenty-seven police officers and forty civilians—all with no arrest.

Here in Portland, the Middle East holds maybe a third of the urban population, but exactly how many is no longer known. And in the long hours of the night, the Middle East leaks into the rest of the city, and the weapons pop and the sirens wail. Everyone who can afford it now resides in one of numerous secured compounds surrounded by razor wire, armed guards, dog patrols, motion sensors, and neural-driven video surveillance.

To present the political illusion of positive action, the police have adopted a strategy of hit-and-run harassment. If they couldn’t shut the Bird down, they could at least keep him off balance. That’s where Lane comes in.

The solo crazies writhe like vertical snakes to the call of the junk crew as Lane crosses the floor with the beer and the pipe. In the booth, the girl bobs her head in synchrony with the elusive 7/4 meter, and her palms catch the accents as they descend on the table. Truth is, she looks pretty damned good. Skin smooth and taut, hair thick and shiny. She is in the peak of bloom, and determined to grab what she can before the petals close forever.

Lane sighs inwardly as he sits down. Beyond the immediate call of the girl’s flesh, he knows another force is at work: the raw, unfettered attraction of her youth itself. At forty-six years of age, he can see that quality clearly, much more so than he could in his own youth, when everyone’s age was a given, not a treasure.

She pulls a lighter out of her purse as he pushes the pipe across. The ocher color of the hashish in the bowl tells him it is probably from one of the new Mongolian sources. Lane takes a sip of his beer and watches the girl apply the lighter to the pipe, a lighter designed specifically for this kind of operation. As she pushes a button on the top, a horizontal jet of flame ignites the drug while she sucks greedily to get the best possible hit. Her bosom swells to maximum circumference as she puts the pipe down and holds the smoke in the laboratory of her lungs, where the compounds quickly dissolve into her bloodstream and are pumped posthaste into her brain. When she exhales, he sees her sinuous arms unfold into a smooth plane as the tension dissipates before the onslaught of the psychoactive molecules.

She stares at him dreamily through a crooked smile. “You’re cute. Did you know that?”

In fact, Lane no longer knows that, but this is hardly a time for self-exploration. “So what you gonna do with the card bucks?” he asks.

She focused into the far distance over his shoulder. “I got plans. Yeah, I got plans.”

“What kind of plans?”

He can see her arms begin to knot up again. He’s pushed a little too far.

“Just plans. That’s all.”

He knows her plans, of course. Get behind a gate. Get some nice clothes. Get some fine food and fast drugs. Get plugged into the Feed. It’s always the same. But it won’t happen. She’ll blow the money and be back blowing the trade in no time at all.

As he watches her, he feels himself locked in a nasty little internal cycle. She’s a victim of circumstance, a microscopic effect driven by a macroscopic cause. He should feel her pain, but doesn’t. His years on the street have built up a powerful immune response to this kind of thing, a protective barrier against personal devastation. Yet he hates his vacant heart, his lack of compassion. And on it goes. The only way out is to focus on the job, on the mission.

“Shall we go?” he asks gently.

She looks at him suspiciously. “Let’s see the card.”

He scans the windowless room, a professional precaution. The junk crew blasts on and the crazies gyrate in their singular spaces. The other booths are mostly empty at this time of early evening. At the tables in the back, the Oldies play cards. Looks okay, so he gets out his wallet, keeping it below the tabletop as he pulls out the card and shows the girl. The holographic logo sucks in the dim light and flings it out in a strange braided pattern. She seems satisfied.

“Okay, let’s go.”

He takes a last sip of beer and watches her rise. Her hips and thighs move gracefully against the tight restraint of fabric worn to the point of gloss. He feels a distant longing, but finds it easy to squelch. Far too easy to squelch.

They ascend the stairs and walk out onto Foster, where the inverted heat of early fall fills the street. The trolley rumbles past on its way toward the river, and the scooters dart around it like small fish around a whale. The heat carries the smell of the rice carts and the green stink of cooked cabbage. The Bad Boys are clustered on the corners, feeding off the strength of the pack, but they don’t bother Lane. The Bird is the law here, and the Bird says the Bad Boys will not hinder commerce. They merely posture and drink the fuel of fear they get from the frightened stares of the Oldies.

When they reach the end of the block, they turn off Foster and onto a side street, into the neighborhood, where dilapidated bungalows dwell under the skimpy shade of defoliated trees.

“Sabrina! Darlin’! Don’t leave now! Don’t leave me ’lone! What you say, bitch?”

The voice comes from behind them, an affected whine laced with amphetamines. The girl beside Lane winces. Lane turns to look and sees one of the Bad Boys broken out of the pack and starting their way, skinny hands jammed deeply in the pockets of his car coat. Has to be her pimp. Lane doesn’t like it, but stays cool. Most likely, the punk thinks Lane is a john and is reminding his whore that she’d better settle up with him later. He plays the part, shrinking in fear
and quickening his pace. He checks a half block later, and the Bad Boy is merged back into the pack.

“So, it’s Sabrina is it?”

“Yeah, it’s Sabrina.”

“You know, there was a movie called that one time. They even made it twice.”

“Oh yeah?” The girl seems mildly interested, but not enough to look at him. No matter. He’s just filling in the spaces until the job is done.

They walk past an old Plymouth minivan. Curtains line the windows, and a woodstove chimney pokes through the roof. It’s a curber, pockmarked with rust and settled permanently on flat tires. They populate the curbs for miles in any direction, neighborhoods within neighborhoods, too numerous to tow, too critical as housing to be destroyed. The majority of them are fat, beefy vehicles that carry nomenclatures from an age gone by: Suburban, Explorer, Tahoe, Pathfinder. A time of great economic delusion, when the media regarded the “oil crisis” as a bad dream that had long since passed. In reality, the world began to terminally drain the global oil drum shortly thereafter, when it was discovered that the planet’s “known reserves” had been relentlessly inflated for various political and economic reasons. Suddenly, the rate of petroleum consumption surged past that of production, and prices began a rapid upward spiral, triggering a calamitous series of economic events that eventually spawned the vast population of curbers now lining the world’s streets.

They walk a few more blocks past weed-choked yards and dying houses. Big sheets of weathered plywood cover picture windows. Porches rot and sag. Garbage and rusting appliances fill front yards. Makeshift chimneys poke through dilapidated roofs. Lane takes it all in with a wry grin. The real estate people over here still speak of the “imminent housing recovery.”

“You want to go over the plan once more?” Lane asks.