Repo Men (27 page)

“Click of a gun,” she said morosely. “He’s in the room.”

Jake hadn’t changed much since I’d seen him last. His stubble had given way to a scraggly beard, his wiry hair clipped hard against his head. A black leather jacket, similar to mine, covered the standard-issue black tank top, and the gun in his hand, holding Asbury in place, was the same he’d been using for years: .9 mm Mauser, the Bio-Repo man’s favorite.

He started talking, his mouth moving at great speeds, and Bonnie, though quick to keep up with the audio, was still a few seconds late coming in with the dialogue. It was like watching a film that’d been knocked off track.

“He’s talking about the gall bladder,” she said, trying to keep pace. “He’s saying that they know about his implant, and they know he stole the merchandise, and that the Union doesn’t appreciate Outsiders.”

“Give it to me like he’s saying it,” I suggested. “Word for word.”

Bonnie tried, her Vocom Expressor dropping an octave as she spoke. “Now, there are situations in which we can be friends, ways we can be friendly about this. I’m not a monster, I’m not here to get you. Sit down. Back on the couch, like you were, sit down. Let’s talk.”

And Asbury’s motions followed the orders. Worried about my balance, I took a seat on the sofa, as well, my leg brushing up against the dead Outsider’s. The movie continued.

“I know you’ve been seeing some friends of mine,” Jake was saying, his voice Bonnie’s but the words all his. “One man, one woman. They were seen entering your building.”

Silence, as Asbury spoke; though residual sound should clearly be picked up on any Ghost audio system, the device weeded out the client’s own voice to avoid feedback loops. That rock-concert whine of a microphone and amp could permanently deafen if localized within the eardrum. But I could see hand gestures out of the corners of my eyes, and I knew that the Outsider was trying to talk his way out of it.

Jake cut him off. “I know you know where they are,” he said. “And I’ve spent too much time and energy looking for them.” Bonnie’s voice cut out again as I watched Jake spin and walk to the far side of the room. He brought back a Union pack.

The lips moved again, Jake was talking, but Bonnie wasn’t dictating. “What’s he saying?” I asked. “What’s he doing?”

I felt her presence next to me, and scootched over so she could join me on the couch. Jake was still standing over me—over Asbury—sharpening his scalpel, jabbering on and on.

“He’s talking to you,” she said. “He knows you’re watching.”

He wasn’t, of course, but the assumption was not far off. The things Jake said to Asbury hit me closer to home much more, I’m sure, than they affected the Outsider. I held my breath, watched those lips, and listened to Bonnie channel my old friend:

“Can you see me? Can you? Are you listening?” He was leaning into Asbury’s field of vision, Jake’s face filling the room. I imagine that the Outsider had shut himself off in anticipation of what was to come. Turned out the lights. Jake knew the trick. “It’s no use, my friend. I’ve had men pass out on me, rip out their own tongues, and I still got what I wanted. And you’re next on the list.”

The room was shaking, vibrating; Asbury must have been terrified. I watched as Jake knelt down next to the sofa, taking the Outsider’s hand in his own, stroking it gently. “This is the man,” he said, holding up my Credit Union mug shot, “and I’m sure you know the woman he’s traveling with. He’s an old friend of mine, and it’s killing me to do this—but I don’t have much of a choice. It’s what I do. You understand that, right?

“The thing is, I want to apologize to him. That’s all. An apology, and I’ll be on my way.”

Bonnie was silent for a moment, and Jake’s lips stopped moving. Asbury must have been asking a question.

“Oh, I apologize when it’s warranted,” Jake said. “See, this friend of mine was a Bio-Repo man, one of the best, and I made a mistake. I tried to help him, tried to make him see what I could see—that he wasn’t meant to be a regular Joe like everyone else. That he was repo, through and through. We’re cogs in a machine, yeah, but we’re the most important cogs there are. He wanted out, but I found a way to keep him in. At least, I thought I did.

“And I just want to say I’m sorry before I have to rip out his heart.”

Watershed days in my life:

And the new one, learned this afternoon from Jake Freivald’s own lips:

I
t came in flashes, sudden bursts of realization entering my brain, like data downloading in huge, unwieldy chunks. He’d been trying to keep me from sales since Wendy brought up the idea, knew that I could make a go of it on the sales floor so long as I didn’t have too many expenses. The only way to keep me around, keep me by his side and doing the things we’d done together for decades, was to get me in deep to the same system for which we worked.

Jake Freivald, witness to my weddings, godfather to my child, friend for life, might have tried to have me killed, but I can’t knock the guy on his long-range planning.

They’ve called out two code blues here in the hospital during the last thirty minutes; it must be the right day to die. It’s amazing to me how they announce it like that, blasting a cardiac arrest over the hospital loudspeaker. For all of their problems, hospitals have evolved over the rest of us to a point where they don’t see death as something to be feared. With their amplified call of Code Blue, it’s as much a part of everyday life as birthday announcements, bingo calls, and annoying Christmas music.

The contacts popped out of their own accord, falling to the stained carpet by my feet. The apartment swam back into focus, left much the same as it was when the Outsider’s Ghost system got the signal from his dying brain to finish up with the recording process. Bonnie plucked the wire from her ear and sat next to me on the couch, hands curled around her head.

“We can’t go back,” I pointed out. “He’ll be looking at the Gabelman.”

“That’s okay,” she said, lifting her head and smoothing out the tears that had rained down those cheeks. The time for crying was over; Asbury was gone, and Bonnie was all business. “My husband’s friends can still help us out if we need it. They’ve come through when I needed them to, doctors in the private sector who—”

I cut her off. “Wait. Wait.” I didn’t need an artiforg audio system to hear the elevator door pinging open, footsteps coming down the hall.

“A resident,” said Bonnie. “There are fifty flats on this floor—”

Between the footsteps, the even clunk of heavy-soled shoes, there was a hum, steady and sure. A hum and a ping, to be precise, followed by a single, rumbling laugh that I’d known for years.

One morning when Peter was in his early teens and I was between my marriages to Carol and Wendy, Jake drove up to the house I was renting on the edge of town in a brand-new Italian convertible. We tumbled out of the house in our pajamas, gasping over the wheels and the engine and the sticker price. It was a two-seater, so I let Jake take Peter out for a spin around the block; he screeched out of the driveway and around the corner, and was back before I’d grabbed the morning paper from the front walk.

Later that afternoon, after Jake had taken his plaything to show off to others, Peter asked me why his godfather had a car like that, and his father didn’t.

“Jake makes a lot of money,” I explained.

“So do you,” said my son. “You do the same job.”

“That’s true. We just have different ways of getting it done. I like to take my time.”

“So is Uncle Jake better than you?” he asked.

And I gave it a moment’s thought, despite my immediate inclination to laugh it off. I didn’t want to lie to the boy; perhaps Jake was, indeed, a better repo man. Was he better with the gas? With the extractions? With the necessary weapons?

The answer I eventually gave Peter was, as far as I could tell, the correct one, and it’s the same answer I’m holding out for today:

“No,” I told him. “I’d say we’re about equal.”

We met in the hallway, just beyond Asbury’s door. Jake was laughing, mid-chuckle when we appeared, and it took him a moment to sober up as Bonnie and I shuffled out of the apartment.

“Halfway there,” Jake began, talking as if we were three friends casually meeting at a bar, “I realized you’d probably flown the coop already. The Outsider told me it had been three days, and I guess I figured…Hell, it doesn’t matter. We’re all here and cozy, now.”

“You set me up,” I said. It was all that would come out of my mouth. “You fucked with my defib unit.”

Jake shrugged. “Had I known you were going to be such a pussy about the whole thing…”

“You tried to kill me.”

“I tried to
save
you!” yelled Jake, taking a decisive step in our direction. “You’re not a goddamned salesman, and you never were. You think that’s living? You think that’s life? That’s the walking dead, brother, and I’m sorry it ended up like this, I really am, but you ain’t much worse off now than you would have been then.”

“How sweet of you,” said Bonnie, her own anger rising. I wanted to shield her, to tell her to run and get out, block her exit with my body, but I knew she’d never go.

There was nowhere to run. It would be him or us, one way or the other. Jake said, “I wish you would have done a better job of running.”

“That makes two of us,” I replied.

Jake nodded and picked at his ear, pulling out a gob of wax. “So. I guess we should get this over with.”

It should all be a blur, considering the speed at which everything happened, but I can pinpoint this afternoon’s activities perfectly, close my eyes and see it go down, as if I were still plugged into the Outsider’s brain, watching from afar:

Jake moved first, dropping to one knee as his right hand dove into his jacket. I was on the ground two tics later, hitting hard with my shoulder as my other arm flipped to the gun in my heel. I caught a glimpse of Bonnie diving to the side, impossibly fast, slamming into the door of a nearby apartment, breaking it in with incredible strength.

The first shot from Jake’s Mauser zinged over my head, the bullet racing down the hallway and crashing through the window at the far end. By then, my finger was a rapid-fire blur, unleashing the clip in Jake’s direction, plaster flying off the walls, shots lodging in the walls. I kept rolling as I fired, mindful of the trail of gunfire following me across the wide hallway.

We must have run out of ammo at the same time, because as Jake was reaching for his next pistol and I was reaching for my scalpel, Bonnie burst out of the apartment with my Taser in her hand, aiming to bring Jake down like she did Mary-Ellen. The prongs flew out of the base, trailing wire following behind, clipping him on the knee. His body buckled for a second, legs falling out beneath him, and I watched the look of surprise and anguish stretch his face into putty.

But the shot was slightly off-kilter, and the prongs, instead of digging in, bounced off Jake’s leg, the electrical stimulation cut short. He staggered to his knees.

I was up, backing away, pulling Bonnie with me. We ran through the living room, put our heads down low, and crashed through the sliding-glass doors at the far end, aiming for the balcony beyond.

No fire escape. No ladder. The drop was fifteen stories down. Free fall. We’d never survive.

“That’s breaking the rules,” came a panting voice from behind us. We turned slowly to find Jake, two-fisting it, a .45 aimed at me, a .38 at Bonnie. “That Taser is Union property, and you’re not licensed.”

“It’s honorary,” said Bonnie. “I’m learning from the best.”

“The fox isn’t a hound,” Jake replied, “no matter how much he hangs out in the backyard. Seeing as you’ve got no place to go, let me do my job correctly. I’ll do you both at once, if you don’t mind. Time crunch.” He cleared his throat, making a big show of the cough, shaking his head, getting into character:

“You have both exceeded the time limits given to you in payment on your debts for artificial organs, loans which were granted with full faith and trust. Do either one of you have your payments in full?”

“Jake,” I said, trying to stall, “let’s figure something out.”

“I’ll take that as a no. Ma’am?”

Bonnie didn’t even try. “No,” she said, head high, keeping eye contact. “I do not.” Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed her hand dropping slowly toward her hip; I hoped Jake did not.

“Excellent,” he said. “Then it’s my duty to let you know that once you are immobilized, I will begin the repossession procedure. If there are any questions or problems, your next of kin may call a toll-free number listed at the bottom of the receipt I will leave on your bodies.

“Good-bye, brother,” Jake said. “It was a pretty fun ride, huh?”

The voice came from inside the apartment, from just behind Jake’s back, loud and insistent. “What’s going on in there?”

In that moment, three things happened: Jake whirled around. Bonnie went for his legs, I went for the arms. We all fell down in a six-legged heap.

Surprise was on our side, anger fueling the fire; within seconds, I had my hands around his head, smashing it into the ground to stun him as Bonnie bound his arms and legs with a few strands of artificial ligaments we found inside one of Asbury’s miscellaneous boxes. At my urging, Bonnie dragged Jake’s pack over to me, and we extracted a sizable can of ether from the depths. I shoved the tube into his mouth, keeping it there until the ether release had lulled him to sleep.

We sat on the floor, catching our breaths over Jake’s unconscious form. “That voice,” I said, “the one that turned him around…”

Bonnie grinned and pulled out the remote control for her Vocom Expressor; a yellow light flashed on and off. “Ventriloquism mode,” she said, the sound popping out of the air behind my head. “Ten-thousand-dollar option, but I figured it might come in handy someday.”

We didn’t kill him. It would have been an option, to let the ether stream into his lungs, slowly choking off the oxygen until his brain collapsed from starvation, but neither Bonnie nor I was interested in such an ending. Those days were behind me; besides, it wouldn’t help our situation. Another Bio-Repo man would be assigned to our cases in his stead, and this one might not give us the chance to get the drop on him. We left Jake tied up, certainly, and unconscious, but it wouldn’t be long before he came back up and figured a way out of the bind.

And then he’d be looking for us again. That much was clear. It still is.

A friend of Bonnie’s, more precisely, a friend of her ex-husband’s, found this broom closet at his hospital for us, said it would provide a modicum of security while we figured out what to do next.

I’ve done that already. I have fifteen minutes left.

I have loved seven women. I could have loved more. I have loved some men. I could have loved more. I have watched my friends and my family die and be killed around me, watched their spirits shrivel into raisins because of my actions, watched them fall off the edge of their own psyches trying to save mine, and I have never done a thing to stop it, never helped bring them back to safety, never shed a tear.

I have been sacrificed for and sacrificed for and sacrificed for, and not once have I stepped under the hammer myself. And if it has taken me a lifetime of doing and a month of typing to learn one thing, it’s that there’s no hope for someone who doesn’t even know what hope is.

When I called Jake two hours ago, he didn’t care about my explanation. Didn’t want to reopen old wounds or relive old memories. “If you’re turning yourself in,” he said, his voice still drugged, groggy from the ether, “then come down to the Union in two hours. I’ll meet you at the Pink Door.”

The deal we made, the one he’ll have ready for me in writing, is that if I willingly turn myself in, hand over my Jarvik–13 and relinquish all rights to the rest of my body, the Union will take Bonnie off the Hundred Most Wanted list. Despite the fact that she’s still in possession of millions of dollars of Union-financed equipment, they want me more. I’m number twelve, she’s number one, but because I was once on the team, I’m more of an embarrassment to management.

So that’s the deal. I give it up, they give her up. They’ll drop her into the regular pool of non-pays; hunted, certainly, but not with ferocity. It will give her extra time, years, perhaps, and hopefully a chance to get out of the country, out to that island we talked about, where they don’t know from mechanical parts.

I will leave this manuscript behind, not so that Bonnie can know what I’ve done, but so that perhaps she can one day pass it on to Peter. I don’t look for forgiveness; I don’t deserve it. I don’t look for understanding; there is none. But if these pages can help my son in any way, even if they teach him to run his life 180 degrees different from his pop, then I owe it to him not to burn these sheets.

Or scatter them if you want, Peter. Scatter them along with my ashes. Find me a place on the bad side of town, an empty lot, a darkened alley, an abandoned hotel. Find me a place and toss me around. Coat me good and hard on the walls. Let me hide out for all eternity. It will be good to know I’m safe, for once.

My watch says I’m right on time. The taxi I called should be waiting downstairs. Bonnie is sleeping next to me, curled up on the sterile hospital cot, her breath strong and even, her soft skin begging for my touch. I think I’ll kiss her once, on the forehead, wrap my hand in hers for a heartbeat, and whisper good-bye.

A Lifetime Can Be Yours!