Repo Men (7 page)

“It’s not showing up on the screen,” he said, frowning at the display. “You’ll have to open the box.”

“It’s leaded crystal,” I patiently explained. “That’s why you can’t see through it. Look, it’s very tightly wrapped, and if I try to—”

“Open the box, sir, or we’ll do it for you.”

I made a big show out of snatching the box from the guard’s hands—the proper amount of insolence for a potential customer who feels he’s getting the shaft—then set to opening the thing, carefully untying the very complicated knots I myself had made not thirty minutes before.

A minute passed, two, and the line of sycophants behind me, still stopped up, waiting for me to be given the go-ahead or be dragged out screaming bloody murder, began to murmur and mumble among themselves. Three minutes, four, and now there was audible dissent, snippets of criticism being hurled at me, at the guards, at the Mall in general.

“Get it open already,” threatened the guard, one hand already moving toward that gun.

“You gonna shoot me over a box?” I asked incredulously. Behind me, the other customers were shying away, wishing to remain clear of blood and shattered crystal.

But he bypassed the weapon and came up with a pocketknife. Snatching the “gift” back from me, he tore into the ribbon with a vengeance.

The empty vase tumbled out and onto the stopped conveyor belt with a heavy
thunk
, setting off a palpable release of tension within the line. The guard stared down at the hunk of crystal for but a moment—long enough to decide on his next course of action—then walked away without even so much as a hint of apology.

“I’m gonna have to get more ribbon now!” I called out, but by that time he was already past me and eagerly abusing the next withering supplicant.

Thirty minutes later, I showed up again. Same line, same tech, same box under my arm, this time wrapped up in even more strands of ribbon. And once again, as I tried to pass through, the guard approached.

“You again.”

“I needed to get it rewrapped. You cut up the ribbon last time.”

He gazed at the display monitor, at the gray opaque shape clouding the screen, a grimace forming about the corners of his mouth. “The vase.”

“The vase.”

Impasse. As I stared at the guard, he stared at the display, and no one was going anywhere while we waited for a decision on the matter. The guard knew that if he asked me to open it again, it would take a good five, ten minutes to work out the knots, and that cutting the ribbon with the knife would only bring me back a third time with yet another layer of gift-wrapping.

I could wait all day.

The guard could not; even as we stared at each other and the package between us, the other X-ray techs were calling for his assistance in some matter or another, as if they were personally physically unable to badger customers into opening their bags for inspection.

Despite the tension—despite the very real possibility that I would be found out right here, right now, and shot on sight, my heart ripped from my rib cage and thrown into a chemical de-sanitizer somewhere behind the Credit Union walls—not a single drop of giveaway perspiration came from my brow. Bio-Repo men—the good ones, anyway—do not sweat. It felt like an hour, but the final decision must have come in less than ten seconds:

“Move along,” said the guard, and stormed away, turning his back on me for the second and—as far as he hoped—final time.

I grabbed my box, shot a sheepish grin at the X-ray technician, and shuffled into the heart of the Mall, ensuring that my shoulders were slumped and my stride properly devoid of any victory or cock-of-the-walk strut.

Inside the closest bathroom, I entered and locked the farthest stall, tore open the ribbon with my teeth, pulled out the leaded-crystal vase, and extracted the .9 mm Mauser revolver from within.

My fourth wife, Carol, had a store the in the mall before it became the Mall, but she’d sold out her space to the Credit Union long before we’d ever met. Wise decision. Those few holdouts who clung to their family-run businesses were quickly expunged from every credit file in the known universe, and faster than it takes to say
Equifax
, their means of doing business on any financial level was nullified. It was those who sold out for gobs of cash who prospered. This is the way it always works.

Carol’s store was called All Things Good, and I remember going into it once, long before I knew Carol and longer still before she would throw me out of the house and divorce me on trumped-up charges of adultery. I’d gone in, if I remember correctly, during one of my few off-hours from the job to find a six-month anniversary present for Mary-Ellen, the second of my lovely brides. It would be our only anniversary together, but that’s nothing I could have known at the time, unless you count the weekly threats of divorce as some type of precognition.

All Things Good was decked out in a frilly red-and-white checkerboard pattern with stuffed bears of all shapes and sizes peeking out of the window displays. Hand-knit sweaters and hooked rugs lined the walls, and big wooden bins filled with down-home goodies sat heavily on the floor. It was country mouse meets city mouse, and I remember wondering how it made any money.

It didn’t, I later found out.

But it was in the back of the store, behind the jars of preserves and fresh-baked bread, beyond the stacks of homemade glycerin soaps from which you could slice your own chunk and pay by the pound, past the hand-carved jig-cut wooden puzzles interlocking in a thousand different directions, where I found the items of most interest to me. Tucked beneath an unassuming canopy was a small glass counter displaying ten different types of long, rectangular plastic boxes, each sporting two stubby metallic prongs at the far end. They looked familiar, somehow, but the juxtaposition among all this rural paraphernalia had my recognition center twisted and bent.

I called over the shopkeep—can’t remember now if it was Carol, her sister, or one of the high-school kids they hired during the summer—and inquired about the boxes.

“They’re Tasers,” she said plainly.

“Tasers.”

“To stun people.”

I knew what they did—I used them nearly every week, in fact. If my client wasn’t in a controlled, closed environment like a car or an apartment, ether release wouldn’t do the job I needed it to, making the Taser the next best method of inducing immobility. What I couldn’t understand is how the electrical devices had found their way into this otherwise homey store.

“I thought this was a crafts shop,” I said.

The clerk shook her head. “It’s called All Things Good.”

“Tasers are good?”

“Safety,” she told me, placing a hand over mine. “Safety is good.”

I could have loved that woman, too. If it was Carol, I did.

The Credit Union queues were short this afternoon; the line stretched out the door, of course, but only by thirty feet or so. On a busy day, one of those Tuesdays just after a long holiday weekend when middle-aged beer-gut warriors burst themselves silly playing sports twenty years too young for their bodies, the lines could run a hundred yards or more, snaking around and about the mall, twisting through one another in a monstrous human braid. Once upon a time, the Mall management called in a famous theme-park designer to regulate the line movement, but even he was unable to tame the haphazard twists and turns of misery.

But earlier today, there were no more than fifteen or twenty folks poking out of the gleaming alabaster double doors of the Credit Union, not enough people to lose myself in the crowd. Even with the fake beard and mustache, there were too many people who knew me here; I couldn’t take the chance of getting noticed.

I walked past the Credit Union and toward the back bathrooms, where I knew of an emergency exit that led out to the loading dock. Years ago, smokers who weren’t allowed to do their business indoors had figured out how to jam open the exit without tripping the alarm, and no one had ever bothered to fix it. My plan was to sneak in through the back door of the Union and do my business that way.

Fortunately, I saw an even better option. Sitting on the edge of the loading dock, his two blue furry legs dangling off the side, was Larry the Lung—or at least the bottom half of him. The top of the mascot costume sat, lifeless, on the ground, while the teenager who the Union had hired to play the organ dragged on a cigarette. He took long, slow puffs, releasing his stress into his own cardiovascular system.

I approached from behind, tapping the gangly kid on the shoulder. He must have been six-one, six-two, and couldn’t have weighed more than a buck fifty. As he turned, I plucked the cigarette from the Lung’s mouth. “Aren’t you setting a bad example?”

“Hey, pal, what the fuck,” he started, “I’m on a break.”

That’s about when he got a look at me, and probably—no, definitely—wet himself. Even with the fake beard and mustache, he knew exactly who I was, and his bladder didn’t like it. “What’s the waist size in that thing?” I demanded.

“What?”

“Your waist size. What is it?”

“Twenty-eight,” he said.

Fucking metabolism. I knocked him out with a quick elbow to the head and dragged him out of the suit. His urine had already stained the lower capillaries, but this wasn’t a time to be picky.

I wasn’t 30 feet from the Credit Union doors when a pudgy man and his similarly chubby wife jogged up to me, breasts flopping. “Hi, Larry,” they chimed. “Can we take a picture?”

The last thing I wanted to do was get involved in any Kodak moments, but I had to play the part to keep up the charade. I gave a little thumbs-up with my lung fingers, and the two of them crowded around me while they got another potential client to snap the photo.

After it was over, the husband kept talking. “Third try today,” he said, a bit sadly. People tend to talk to each other in these lines, I’ve noticed. Sharing their suffering as a way to defeat it. Spread the wealth around. All I could do was shake back and forth in a gesture of lung-sadness. Pantomime’s a rough art.

As he nodded furiously, the second and third chin beneath his mouth jiggled back and forth. “It’s her pancreas. Cancer’s what they say. We stood in line for two hours at Kenton this morning, but they turned us down. Gabelman, too.”

There are other suppliers, I wanted to say. They didn’t have to go to the Union just yet. The supply houses, direct-lenders of their goods, tend to be more lax in their percentage rates and, should it come down to it, nonpayment grace periods, so it’s always a good choice to try them before outsourcing to the Union.

As if reading my mind, the woman piped up, “We got ourselves too many negative checks already. One more and they’ll never take us.”

On that, they were right. Every time a supply or credit house turns down a prospective customer, the black mark of rejection gets instantly applied to their file and sent out into the informational ether for any and all to enjoy. I had no doubt that the Credit Union counselor would take one look at their file, shake his head softly, and promptly press the
UNAPPROVED
button on his keyboard. They could try other houses, other private loan options, but more likely than not, it’s all over for Ma and Pa Kettle. She’ll be dead within months.

A Lifetime Can Be Yours!

I shouldn’t mock the marketing departments; they’re what makes the entire industry tick in the first place. That’s what people don’t understand about the artiforg business—the marketing folks are the ones driving the car; the technology isn’t doing much more than mindlessly stomping on the gas.

Let’s say the Taihitsu Corporation decides that it’s going to roll out a brand-new line of artiforg spleens. This is a top-level decision, often the brainchild of a new VP who wants to make his mark on the company before his almost certain ouster from the corporation eight months later. Hollywood studio chiefs have nothing on artiforg management when it comes to preparing resumes.

So spleens it is, and the idea is sent first to the marketing department; those folks neither bother with nor care about the medical components of the system—what a spleen does, how it works, why it works, how this spleen can do it even better—because they’re workaday concepts and, in a marketing sense, boring. So they brainstorm up some extras first, like which color options the client will have, or whether the new spleen should also be able to detect police radar. There’s a lot of one-upmanship in the artiforg business; if one supply house tacks on a new feature, the rest are sure to follow and raise the hand. From what I understand, the competition is fierce and incredibly draining, so the marketing people tend to take a lot of lunches and attend a lot of seaside conferences.

The ad campaign is created next, most often revolving around the new design features. A spleen, for example, might get a full television workup, with maybe some film product placement, especially if they can work in the radar detection during a chase scene. Print ads are distributed, billboards are erected, TV commercials are blasted, and the publicity machine gears up.

Orders are taken. No one wants the old Spleen-OMatic anymore; sure, it still helps the body fight off infection, but what’s the point of a spleen if it won’t help you do ninety-five on the freeway? The frenzy takes over, and soon there are thousands of potential clients forking over reserve deposits and down payments, and the VP who thought it all up in the first place goes on a two-month vacation to Fiji.

Finally, they go to the company medical engineers, who are told they actually have to build the damned thing, using five-color ads from fashion magazines as their blueprints. The important thing, the engineers are told, is to work in the radar detection. If that fails, so does the business.

Somehow, the engineers are able to reverse-design this thing so it actually works, and in enough time to beat the Christmas rush. Now Grandma can conquer that nagging cough and drag down the boulevard without fear of police reprisal thanks to the Taihitsu Corporation and their miraculous splenetic efforts.