Repo Men (15 page)

But I wasn’t at all disappointed when Bonnie poked her head into my apartment two hours ago and asked if I’d like to grab some dinner up at her place. “Can you bring a tablecloth?” she asked. “My dining-room set is a little rusty.”

By the time I put on my formal wear—consisting of the one remaining cotton shirt and chinos that had no discernible odor and few bloodstains—and tromped my way up the stairs, tarpaulin under my arm, Bonnie had already lit some well-placed candles, each illuminating a small corner of the room, keeping the rest in enforced twilight. The shadows played across her bright yellow-and-orange sundress, as if daring her to light up the room.

I brought up the tarp, whipping it up and out to spread across the metal table in the center of the room, and a small object flashed through the air, forcing Bonnie to duck as it flew by her head and
thunked
into the far wall.

“Forgive me,” I said, plucking the scalpel out of the dry-wall and tucking it into my waistband. “I thought I cleaned this thing out.”

While Bonnie used a small Sterno can to heat a pot of noodles she put me on chopping duty. Somehow, somewhere, she’d scored a grocer’s dream—tomatoes, onions, cilantro—and was eager to teach me to make the perfect marinara sauce. For a while, I used a plastic butter knife, the only cutting tool she had, but soon whipped out the scalpel and went to town. Bonnie didn’t say a thing when I resumed chopping away with a furor, but I did catch a few sidelong glances.

When the palate has come to accept Dumpster leftovers stolen from alley cats as an average night’s meal, fresh pasta and marinara sauce becomes nothing less than a gourmet orgasm. I barely spoke as we ate, slurping up noodles without benefit of chewing, sucking down as much nutrition as was possible within the shortest amount of time.

“Where did you get this?” I asked between gulps.

Bonnie said, “There’s a market about six blocks down.”

“And they threw this stuff away? Incredible.”

She fixed me with an odd stare. “Threw it away?”

“Oh,” I said, catching her game. “So you stole the food. Kudos.”

Again, I wasn’t getting through. “No, no,” she insisted. “I went down to the market this afternoon and bought it.”

How could I ever consider a relationship with this woman? We don’t even speak the same language.

It wasn’t until we were finishing up the sponge cake she’d purchased—not stolen but actually
purchased
, I understood now, from a real store with cash and a checkout line and everything—that I noticed that strange lilt to her voice once again, and couldn’t help but ask her about it.

“It’s a Vocom,” she said.

“What is?”

“My larynx. Vocom Expressor, actually, one of the newer models.”

Now that it had been isolated for me, I could hear the mechanical tone to her words, the way that everything was pronounced perfectly, artificially, with no slurs or tics. Smooth. Vocom’s a grade-A company with an excellent customer-service staff.

And then, as if to prove it to me, Bonnie reached into her pocket and pulled out a small remote control, no bigger than the one for my Jarvik unit, though outfitted with many more buttons and dials. A push here, a spin there, and when she opened her mouth to speak, Bonnie was no longer Bonnie.

“It has a four-scale frequency modulation,” she said in a smooth, meaty bass that thundered from her throat.

“Do you do that often?” I asked.

“Recently,” she squeaked, adjusting the device to a chipmunk trill. “Sounding like someone else comes in handy when you don’t want to be found.”

I’d run out some Vocom systems before, though these jobs were usually given over to the Ghosts, mainly because of the artiforg’s ability to record the last forty-eight hours’ worth of the clients’ speech. Sort of like the black box they put in planes, but the Vocom Expressor only retained the words coming from the client, not from whoever they were conversing with. As a result, transcripts from Vocom boxes tend to be stilted, one-sided affairs, with so-called conversation experts left to decide what the other party had been going on about.

Once, toward the end of my career, I’d been sent in to repo a bladder from a Kenton client who’d overstayed the grace period by a good four months. Now, I’d been told that this guy had maxed out his credit all over town with a host of other manufacturers, but my job was with Kenton, and Kenton only. Even if I cut the guy open and came across an artiforg stomach or lung that I knew to be overdue, it wasn’t my job to take ’em out. There are guys who work like that, freelancers who’ll rip out any old thing and drop it off at the supply house in hopes of getting a cut of the commission, but I worked straight, and if my papers ordered me to lift a Kenton bladder, then a Kenton bladder I would lift.

Some folks don’t move when you open them up; some jerk all over the place. “Dead herring,” “live tuna”—those are the repo terms. This guy was somewhere along the lines of a weakening trout, movement-wise, but he babbled through the whole thing, even though I’d gassed him down proper. Shot him up with an extra hit of Thorazine, then applied the Tasers, and even though his senses were shot, the fool didn’t stop gabbing about how sorry he was, how he’d make everything right again, even as I dug the scalpel deep into his midsection. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t care. I preferred to work in silence, and he was mucking up my day.

The bladder was there, in perfect condition, and as I reached for my tissue clippers, I suddenly heard a woman’s voice echo through the room; as a reflex, my bloody hand dug into my jacket, flipping the Colt I used to carry into firing position even as I spun in a circle, ready to take aim and defend myself however necessary.

The room was empty.

Another cut, back to business, but a second later, a deep, throaty shout blasted into my ears, an anguished cry sped up to quadruple speed while still retaining its low tones. Another spin, another probe with the pistol, and nothing.

Then I isolated. Concentrated. Looked down at the client, locked in on his voice. It was coming from him, all of it, and just to make sure, I flipped the scalpel at his neck, drawing a new river of blood but locating a glint of silver and the Vocom beneath. It wasn’t the Expressor model—those are relatively new on the market—but one of the old Communicator types, non-upgradeable. Just then, I felt something crack beneath my foot, and I looked down to find that I’d been stepping on the Vocom remote operating device all along; I’d been changing the voice as I worked, spooking myself in the process.

And somehow, I’d activated the recall procedure, which explained why the sap never stopped talking—the Vocom was in playback mode, the larynx still reciting its own transcript of some prior conversation. Unable to figure out how to make it stop, I resumed work with this new soundtrack playing at full volume.

By the time I had the bladder tucked away in its protective Styrofoam container and ready for shipment back to the Kenton supply house, the client was certainly dead; all breathing patterns had ceased, his limbs were finally still, and I was unable to detect a pulse. But the Vocom, hardy artiforg that it was, continued its chant.

“Baby, you know I love you,” the dead man yelled as I made my way out the front door. “Come on back, I swear I’ll never hurt you again.”

That’s one of the things I had sworn to Melinda when she left me, that I would never hurt her again, that I would guard her against pain and suffering and the ravages of dealing with a chronically absent and absentminded husband, even though I knew that it was a promise I could never live up to. I’ve always done that with promises: One side of my brain does the swearing, the other secretly crosses its frontal lobes.

Of course, I didn’t know until that night twenty years later how badly I would break my oath to Melinda. Even then, there was no way for me to know.

Bonnie had mentioned that the Vocom wasn’t her only artiforg, and in my desire to learn what I could about my fellow tenant, I couldn’t help but wonder if she was a fellow Jarvik host, too. But before I could convince her to let loose about the rest of her implantations, Bonnie’s brow furrowed, and I noticed her neck arc slightly to one side, like a dog keying in on a far-off howl. She hushed me up quick with a delicate finger to my lips and tiptoed over to the penthouse window.

Keeping my eyes locked on the street beneath, I followed right behind. Didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, but stood still out of deference to her intuition. All but one streetlight had been busted long ago, darkness brought to the city streets courtesy of your friendly local hoodlums, and shadows crawled the pavement, obscuring anything I was meant to see.

Don’t look
, Bonnie mouthed to me, stepping back from the window.
Listen
.

And listen I did. Straining myself into silence, trying to project myself to the street below. In the distance, a mutt barking. A husband, yelling at his wife that if she screwed half as good as she cooked he’d sleep at home more often. A car, screeching as it sped through the intersection, cornering on the sides of its tires.

Nothing,
I mouthed back.

Reaching out, Bonnie grabbed hold of my ear—her fingers were cold, long frozen sticks grabbing my flesh—and twisted the lobe back and forth. “Are these natural?” she whispered, and I nodded emphatically.

“Oh,” she said, her voice low and compassionate, as if she was pitying me my unenhanced state. Digging into her jacket pocket, Bonnie fumbled around, metal clanging against metal, and soon came up with a compact pair of headphones: one wire, two pads.

Forcibly turning my head toward hers, she pulled me close and placed the instrument across my scalp and over my ears, fitting the speakers into my ear canals. Now all external noises were cut off, only my breathing amplified, and I nodded back at Bonnie as she nodded at me. The headset wire dangled impotently to the floor, electric lead scraping against the ground.

I took a glance back down toward the street—was there movement? Was it human?—and moments later, my hearing returned. Only this time there was depth to it. Range. Sounds I hadn’t heard before, heard ever, made their way into my mind, filling my ears with noise. In that house with the yelling parents was a young child begging for them to stop fighting, for Daddy to quit yelling at Mommy already; the dog in the distance was barking at a softly mewling kitten.

I turned to find the wire from the headset around my ears leading up and into Bonnie’s ear canal, dug in tight like a snake wiggling into its hole. As I stepped closer, I noticed that her lobe had cracked open a notch, the metallic edges glinting in the moonlight, and a panel near the eardrum had slid aside to allow for the wire’s insertion. A Vocom corporate logo beamed out in a brilliant gold leaf just inside the socket.

“Artiforg ear?” I guessed, my voice doubling back to me through what was now Bonnie’s hearing—my hearing—our shared hearing.

“Both of them,” she said, and the words had a peculiar echo tone, sounding to me like
I
was the one doing the talking. “Now shush up and listen.”

As I concentrated on the street below, Bonnie fiddled with the control panel inside her lobe, amplifying the ambient sounds by meager increments, filtering out the chaff. These speakers packed a wallop for their size; one slip of her fingers and she could blow my natural hearing out of commission, but the lady was careful, and soon we were past the dogs and the families and the cars below and focusing in on roach burps and mice titters.

And as we amplified and screened, amplified and screened, the workaday noises of the city were filtered out, until only one sound rode high above the rest: a high-pitched hum, warbling, shaky, underscored by a rhythmic, persistent
ping
. The music of electronics, and I recognized that sound from years of utilizing the only machine capable of making that noise, the tool that all Bio-Repo men cherished and all deadbeat clients feared:

We were being scanned.

I
whipped off the headphones and fell to the floor, cupping my gun, checking the ammo and restocking the clip even before my knees hit wood. Glancing up at Bonnie standing there in front of the window, such an easy target, such an easy shot, I motioned her down, grabbing for her arm in an attempt to drag her to safety. But she pulled away, laughing and shaking her head.

“It’s too far away,” she said to me. “They were scanning someone else, not us.”

“I heard it—it was downstairs—”

“It was downstairs and two miles away. I keep this ear set to local standards,” she said, pointing to her left, “and the other on long-range; I picked up the hum on the right ear. They’re way too far away to pick us up.”

I needed to check my weapons, prepare for the battle ahead. She still wasn’t getting it. “There’s no such thing as too far,” I told her.

“Scanning range is one eighth of a mile—”

“Standard, yeah. But no one works off stock equipment.”

That, at least, got her attention; she moved a few feet back from the window. “How far?” she asked.

“Far enough.”

A scanner’s legal range is one eighth of a mile in a single linear direction. The Supreme Court has repeatedly handcuffed the Bio-Repo industry, knocking down scanners with wider circles of influence, claiming that they represent an excessive infringement upon the right to privacy. They cite some constitutional amendment—I’m not sure which—that the Union has been trying to get repealed for years now.

But few Bio-Repo men actually use regulation scanners. We’ve got our own black market, a thriving industry that realigns the specifications of the devices so that they can be used up to a distance of two miles, as well as examine multiple directions at the same time. The scanner I used while on the job—Beth, I called it, for the manner in which it could do all number of people at once—was set to a mile and a half, and could give me facts and figures on the artiforgs of five different clients within seconds of each other. Jake was the one who had it recalibrated for me, and at a fraction of the price it usually cost.

Jake’s scanner had a range of three miles, if I remember correctly. He paid more than fifty grand for the upgrade, and said it was worth every dime. Said it could sniff out an expired artiforg in every cardinal direction at once. Said he’d never lost a client once his scanner locked on. Not once. Good a reason as any to stay indoors.

As I went through my mental calculations, trying to figure out how long it would take me to run downstairs, grab my weapons, and either make a stand or run for it, Bonnie took the initiative. She scooped up a blue tarp lying on the floor and headed for the door to the hallway.

“You’re running?” I asked her.

“Not exactly,” she said.

“If it’s a fight you want, it’s a fight you’ll get. These guys—the Union—they don’t back down. You’ll need more than a tarp.”

“I know,” said Bonnie, “but I also know my hotel. Come on downstairs, and I’ll let you in on a little secret.”

Tony Park’s scanner, it turns out, has a radius of 2.6 miles, more than enough to do the job on that particular day. I heard him before I saw him, stomping up the stairs, making no effort to conceal his approach. The repeated
ping
of his scanner became louder and more frequent as he stepped off the landing on the sixth floor and made his way down the hall, huffing and puffing with the exertion.

“Making too much noise,” I called out. “I’m in 604. In case you want to hurry this up.”

His florid, ruddy face appeared before the rest of him, peeking into the room from the hallway, as if expecting some sort of trap. Like I’d be the kind of guy to spring that on him.

I sat at the far end of the room, cross-legged, casual as could be. To my right was the Taser, resting simply on the bare wooden floor. The blue tarp Bonnie had taken from the other room covered the middle of the floor, plates and makeshift silverware scattered as if in the aftermath of a grand picnic.

“Good way to get yourself killed,” I said to Tony, “making all that racket. You could do with a little cardio work now and then, too. Bio-Repo lesson one: Never be too hasty.”

Tony took a step into Room 604 and cracked his neck. “You got some property that ain’t yours. And I’m gonna have the time of my life taking it back.”

The tattoo on his forehead, I noticed, sported an extra thunderbolt. “You get a little promotion there, Tony?” I asked, still cool as November.

“Bet your ass I did. Since some punk-ass couldn’t handle his shit, there’s been some extra work around lately.”

“Glad to be of service,” I said, uncrossing my legs and making a show of stretching my hamstrings as I stood. “So. Should we get on with this?”

“Gladly,” Tony growled, and went for his Taser.

“Typical,” I sighed, and made a show of leaning back against the hotel window.

True to form, Tony stopped mid-draw. He was always under the assumption that I was looking down on him; of course, he was always right. “The hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I’m just saying you’ve got me here, in a room, just us, no protocol necessary, no forms to fill out, the chance to do what you’ve always wanted to do, and still you go for the easy way out. It’s a bit…typical, that’s all.”

He must have known I was goading him, but didn’t care. Tony outweighed me by at least thirty pounds of pure muscle; I didn’t have much of a chance in a fair fight. Fortunately, this wouldn’t be fair.

Tony didn’t bother with words; he grunted like a hippo, lowered his head, and charged, headlong, meaning to take me down and rip my heart out with his bare hands. I stood my ground, flexing my knees as if to welcome the oncoming blow, Tony rushing across the wooden floor of Room 604, straight at me, right across that blue tarp—

Which is when he plummeted through the rotted-out floorboards beneath. The tarp went with him, sending the plates and silverware flying, shattering against the nearest wall as Tony fell through the next three stories, his massive bulk smashing through the rotted wood on each successive floor. By the time he landed in Room 204 with an audible
thunk
, I was relatively sure he wouldn’t be bothering us—or anyone else—any longer. We’d go down, make sure he was finished off, and, if not, do the job manually.

At least, that’s how it was supposed to happen.

Bonnie, who’d been standing in the shadows in the far corner, shotgun in hand just in case Tony’d chosen to run around the tarp instead of straight over it, stepped to the edge of the hole and peered down. “He’s not moving,” she said, and looked up at me with a smile sweet enough to send me running for a new pancreas. “That was entertaining.”

Before I could answer in kind, though, I heard the sharp crack of wood, saw the splinters pop up from the floor. Bonnie spun just in time to see the ground beneath her give way, the rotted floorboards unable to cope with the trauma of Tony’s fall. I didn’t even have time to scream, “Look out!” before she’d vanished through the hole.

Like I said, I’ve got a soft spot for women who run out on me. They just don’t usually do it so vertically.

She landed on top of Tony, which was something of a double blessing. In addition to cushioning her fall, she must have contributed to Tony’s already massive internal bleeding. By the time I ran down the stairs and found my way to 204, a steady stream of blood was pouring out of Tony’s nose, and his chest was making thick gurgling sounds. I’d heard it many times before—he was minutes away from choking on his own blood. Now, I’ve got no love for the guy, but I’m not a monster, and even though I’m pretty sure he was unconscious, that’s no way to go out. I quickly ended it with a well-placed scalpel, and within moments, he was done.

Bonnie was another matter entirely. Blood and ’forg fluid leaked out of a wound on her right leg; she’d taken the brunt of the fall upright, messing up her artificial knee something fierce. The light was too dim for me to see much, but it wasn’t like I was going to try and fix it here. If there was one thing I knew, it was this: If Tony Park had found us—if that dumb galoob with the forehead tattoo had enough where-withal to track me down—then the rest of the Union cadre couldn’t be far behind.

It’s time to leave home.