Repo Men (20 page)

The nursing home was on the edge of town, next to some low-rent apartment buildings, a gas station catty-corner. Litter on the sidewalks, the hedges untended, cars zooming by on the busy street below. Three meals a day, all gruel, recreation room stocked with two board games missing a third of their pieces. This was where loving children sent their parents and grandparents in order to exact revenge for not getting the Auto-Go toy car they wanted for Christmas lo those many years ago.

Note to Peter:

Kill me if you want. That’s fine.

Hunt me down and exact revenge. Torture me. Make me scream. I’ll understand.

But if you put me in one of those places, if you hole me up in some home and keep me rocking with sixteen pills an hour, then you’re outta the will, sonny boy.

Mrs. Nelson’s Jarvik unit was a Model 11, one of the midrange prototypes without all the whistles and bells. Her precise artiforg information had been loaded into my scanner in order to make it easier for me to locate her among what were sure to be countless numbers of artificial organs inside the nursing home. It was futile for me to try and gas down the place; I didn’t have the ether, and the old folks weren’t about to try and fight me off. I didn’t enjoy repossessing from the elderly. Their time was short, they knew it was coming, and here I waltzed in to rob them of whatever moments they had remaining. Still, they should have paid the bills.

I took a front-door approach, walking into the lobby, shushing the front-desk girl with a simple touch of the lips. She was new. Sat straight up as I approached, fear ratcheting her to the chair. Just for fun, I flicked on the scanner. It beeped. She jumped. I blew her a kiss and moved on.

Jake had already gotten my scanner modified a few years prior, so I was able to soak in great circles of information as I walked through the hallways. It was hot, so I’d worn my black tank top that day, the Credit Union tattoo blasting out from my bare neck. Residents shuffled down the hall, some with walkers, some on their own, each looking at me and muttering, some turning away in a futile attempt to cover up their own unpaid artiforgs. “I’m not here for you,” I told those who looked the most frightened. “Go about your business.” It eased their worry. They might end up as my clients next week or next month, but there was no need to let them know that.

The pings came at me from every side, and I read off the specs as fast as I could, looking for Mrs. Nelson’s Jarvik–11. There were too many artiforgs to take in at once. Decreasing the range of the scanner, I stopped in the middle of one hall, turning in slow circles, trying to isolate. When the number 11 flashed past, I did a quick rewind and locked on. By the time the specs had flitted across my screen in full detail, I was at the room.

Two women. One old, one young. One with an artiforg, one without. One in bed, one in a chair. One sleeping, one wide awake. This wouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

The younger one, a nurse, I guessed, started in with me. “You’re in the wrong room,” she said. “Please leave.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said, “but I have a job to do for the Union. You might want to leave, yourself. It can get messy.”

She stood up to me then, came right for me, but I held my ground. We ended up nose to nose. She was tall, nearly my height, with a thin, pointed face and a head full of auburn hair. Her posture was incredible. “I know who you are and I know what you do, and I’m telling you, you’ve got the wrong room. This is Selma Johnson, and she doesn’t have what you want.”

Checked the scanner, and the old lady’s Jarvik–11 pinged back at me. Early model, no options, four chambers pumping away to eternity. Couldn’t draw a serial number or name, for some reason, but recalibrated scanners were known to malfunction in certain areas. Give and take of technology.

“She’s got the Jarvik–11 I’ve come for,” I said, trying to circle around the nurse and make my way to the woman on the bed, “and I need to get it back before nightfall. It’s a job, lady.”

“I know it’s a job, but you’re still wrong, you knucklehead.” This was the first time Melinda ever used her pet name for me, and even then, long before we would marry, it sent chills of pleasure down my spine.

This was also when I learned how stubborn my third ex-wife could be. I could have just Tasered her into unconsciousness, I know, but something in me let the conversation go on without electrical stimuli. It was as if I wanted to fight with this woman. It set off the pleasure centers in my brain, like arguing with her was something I’d been missing all my life.

Carol’s therapist had a field day with that one.

“It’s an Outsider implant,” Melinda said finally. “All right? You can’t take it back for the Union because it’s not theirs.”

“It scans the same—”

“Oh, and no one has the same artiforg,” she said sarcastically. “Can you pull a serial number off of it?”

“Well,” I began, “no, but—”

“Because it’s black market. I know—I helped her find the Outsider to do it.” I was stunned—most people are too frightened to talk to Bio-Repo men in the first place, let alone admit to steering others toward Outside help. But this girl—this
woman
—was a cyclone of righteousness. Suddenly, the room was hot.

“Do you want to go grab some lunch?” I asked her.

“Will it get you to leave the room?”

“Yes.”

“Then yes, I would,” said Melinda.

And, after she led me up three flights of stairs to Mrs. Nelson’s semiprivate suite and stood by with her arms folded as I repossessed the Jarvik–11 that did, indeed, belong to the Credit Union, my third ex-wife and I went on our first official date. We sat in a booth and ate sandwiches and talked about the day. I left the heart in the glove compartment.

Speaking of life-changing meals:

Three days after the war ended was the first time I ate any African food. We’d been stationed there for nigh on two years, and not counting the meals in the field, that would have given us approximately 212 chances to sample the native cuisine. Not once did we try it, though, until those days just after the war.

We reached Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, well after nightfall, rolling our tanks down the narrow, rocky streets, waving to the surprised townies as our heavy metal crushed their roads into rubble. Me and a few of the other guys who’d driven the last few clicks into town were given forty-eight hours to party it up in a city that hadn’t seen a disco ball during its thousands of years of existence, but we made it our mission to find some exhilarating way in which to celebrate the end of the African conflict.

They did not have a red light district. That was fine by me. I didn’t need another wife.

But we did find an all-night eatery, a tight, curtain-lined restaurant that served great, heaping bowls of steaming meat covered in a succulent sauce. Potato-like vegetables swam in the mixture, their unpeeled knobby brown roots scratching at my throat as they went down. The meat was tough, gamey, but satisfying, and even when one of the gunners who spoke a little Afrikaans figured out it was goat, I kept on chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing.
This is what I should have been doing all those nights in those little desert townships
, I thought as the stew filled me up, warming me from the inside. The waiters kept coming, bringing plate after plate after plate—even as I was suddenly shamed because I’d been eating so ethnophobically all the way through the war—and I sucked it all down like a crash dieter given one last reprieve.

Twelve hours later, I was doubled over a good old U.S. toilet, revisiting my repast, as was every other man who ate in that god-awful establishment. We may have ruined their homeland, but they took out our digestive tracts.

Something took out Bonnie’s, as well. On the way out of the café, I badgered her into letting me guess at three more organs, and this time, I went internal. Stomach, liver, kidneys.

“My stomach”—Bonnie sighed as if it bored her—“is a Kenton ES/18, Lady Mystique model, with a three-point-two-cup capacity. The model I purchased was the best at the time, but it doesn’t have an expansion/contraction regulator like the new ones. Still, after I eat enough food to fill the artiforg, it sends a message up to the esophagus—which, since it’s part of the whole system, I might as well let you know is also from Kenton—and effectively shuts down the swallowing muscles of my throat. It also happens to be robin’s-egg blue, my favorite color. The unit was on sale the day I went in for the surgery, and we secured a loan directly from Kenton at twenty-two point six percent.

“My liver is a Hexa-Tan, which is a specialized supply house out of Denmark. It doesn’t do anything other than clean the toxins out of my system, and the loan came through a number of international intermediaries working with the Credit Union, financed at thirty-four point two percent, with a point-one-percent drop every year due to excellent payment history.

“And my kidneys…my kidneys are two different models. The left one is a Credit Union generic, twenty-four percent flat, and it’s been starting to run down a bit recently, but my insurance has lapsed and I can’t get into the hospital to have them take a look at it. The right one, which was implanted six months later, is top-of-the-line Taihitsu, with every option included, from a built-in ketone monitor for diabetics to this little device that adds a nontoxic dye to the urine so I can fool my friends into thinking I’m pissing out blood or blueberry juice or whatever. I haven’t used that option yet. Either way, the loan was eighteen point two percent, the lowest on my body.”

I had a feeling she could go on forever.

Taxi drivers are notorious for snitching to the Union; some make more than 90 percent of their take-home pay from reward fees. I had a network of cabbies on my personal payroll, fellows who didn’t mind hauling in a couple of extra bucks by getting on the horn and alerting me to where they’d dropped off a wanted client. Now, if they recognized a face and
really
wanted to pull in the dough, the smart ones took a “shortcut” to wherever the client asked to go, and a few minutes later pulled up at the Union back door instead. I’d be at the curb with a short-range Taser long before the deadbeat figured out that this was his time to make like a gazelle.

One time, just a couple of days before the end, when Wendy was leaning on me hard to transfer over to sales, we had a barbeque over at the house. Just me, Jake, Frank, a couple of the other repo guys from down at the shop, throwing a football and shooting the shit. There was beer, hot dogs, steaks, a fun afternoon to be had by all. Peter had even shown up; by that point, he was already in school, and Melinda had gone off on some trip or another and hadn’t come back yet. We were starting to get concerned, me and Peter, but Melinda had a habit of doing that sort of thing; she’d show up in a few weeks, no doubt, talking about her latest jaunt to Peru or how she helped out an indigenous family in Louisiana.

So there we were, kicking back and relaxing, when a call came in. I answered it to find a cab driver I used as a frequent snitch on the line; he said that his engine was running a little hot, which was his code that he wanted to make a delivery to the Union.

“I’m not at work,” I explained, waving to Wendy, who stood nearby talking to Peter. “It’s not a good time.”

“I think it’s running at least a six or seven,” said the taxi driver. Six or seven months overdue, according to the un-licensed scanner I’d given him a few years back. That was bound to be worth some serious money to the Union, even if it wasn’t one of my official assignments. I didn’t need the cash, but it’s hard to turn down bills when they come straight at you like that.

“Outside in five minutes,” I said, and gave him my home address.

I hung up and returned to Wendy and Peter, giving my wife a peck on the cheek. “I’ve got to run out for a few minutes, pick up some more beer. Be back in a flash.”

I nodded over to Jake, across the backyard, who instantly picked up on the situation and followed me through the house and out the front door. He’d grabbed the filet knife from the grill, the blade dripping with beefy juices.

“Isn’t that a little unsanitary?” I pointed out.

“So we’ll shoot him up with antibiotics.” Jake always had an answer. “Heads up, here they come.”

The cab roared into the driveway and screeched to a halt, and the fare was already freaking out. He barely had time to bark out a “no” before we had the door open and hit him with a Taser. As Jake and I worked, locating and reclaiming a half-year-overdue kidney, I could see the cabbie peering at us in the rearview mirror, watching us do our thing.

I tossed him two hundred bucks for the delivery, and an extra fifty to get rid of the body. But as I pulled myself out of the cab, BBQ apron bloody and stained, I saw Wendy standing at the front door, watching the entire scene with a look of disappointment on her face. She turned on her heel and headed back inside.

“Come on, baby,” I called out, “don’t be like that. It’s only a kidney.”

“Yeah,” Jake added. “He’s got another one.”

So Bonnie and I were loath to risk our lives by hopping a taxi to her friend’s place. And since it was clear across town, and walking a hundred blocks with a duffel bag full of artillery was out of the question, public transportation became the only option. One of the first things they taught us in repo training is that subways make a great place for deadbeats to hide, because the crush of people makes it difficult for a scanner to isolate one artiforg from the rest. Density was what we needed; we headed underground.

I suggested hopping the entrance carousel; instead, Bonnie once again paid for us both, and we walked onto the platform like genteel citizens. I didn’t know how much loose change she had on her, but I imagined that it all must have been of the nickel-and-dime variety; otherwise, she’d have bagged ’em, tagged ’em, and paid off those organs long ago.

Sixth year on the job, and I was sent by the BreatheIt Corporation into a housing project in order to repo a pair of lungs. BreatheIt was a new supply house at the time, and rumor was that a majority of their capital had come from certain extra-legal sources who were interested in laundering their money to a golden shine. I didn’t care; they were paying me a commission 6 percent higher than standard Union rates, so I was happy to shut up and do the job with a smile.