Repo Men (8 page)

But before the artiforg is delivered to and implanted inside Grandma, it takes a run through the Taihitsu security offices. Here, a crew of specially trained Bio-Repo assistants being paid just over minimum wage weld a passive transmitter into the framework of the device, a rectangular chip no larger than a hair on their knuckles. It is placed in an inconspicuous, nearly invisible spot, so that even if the client were somehow able to access his own artiforg’s interior, he would be unable to detect and remove the chip.

And there it sits, dormant, quiet, happy, and content in Grandma’s new spleen, until a Bio-Repo man walks by with a scanner and pings it into life. Instantly, the scanner’s readout displays the artiforg’s manufacturer, date of construction, and leasing supply house. If the Bio-Repo man in question is not looking to repossess a spleen, or if the client to which he’s been assigned is not an elderly woman, he strolls by with a tip of his hat and continues to scan the rest of the neighborhood, confident that he will soon smoke out the deadbeat.

If, on the other hand, Grandma hasn’t been paying her bills…

This is why I rarely venture outside.

After twelve more photo opportunities and a couple of babies I was somehow supposed to kiss through two inches of fur and Lycra, I was through the double doors and inside the belly of the beast, the Credit Union itself. Here is where things could have gone terribly wrong, and nearly did, so listen up:

I was looking for a wanted poster.
My
wanted poster. It might have been sheer folly on my part, overextended megalomania, to believe that I’d be important enough to make the Union’s Hundred Most Wanted List, but I had a feeling that they’d want to rein in their former employee as soon as possible. As it was, I’d stayed out of their clutches for three months now, slipped like water through their fists and remained alive longer than 99 percent of the non-pay cases, and the bare numbers alone had to rankle the higher-ups.

Heavy iron railings snaked their way through the Union lobby, directing traffic in a manner they were never able to establish and maintain outside the sliding doors. It reminded me of a trip I took to the Middle East once when I was tracking down a deadbeat sheikh who skipped town with six-hundred grand worth of Union-financed intestine. The guy bribed me in the end, offered to pay off his debts and give me a little extra on the side, but he caught me between marriages and in a rotten mood, so I took what I came for and left him on the floor of a brushed marble ballroom in the middle of his desert palace.

Point is, on the way into the country, I was routed through a series of concrete bunkers set up in a serpentine path at a distance from one another that made it impossible to drive straight through the border at any speed over 16 kilometers an hour. And, to make matters crystal clear to any vacationing tourist no matter how obtuse, loyalist soldiers were stationed atop these bunkers wielding automatic weapons of indeterminate origin. All I knew was that one pull of the trigger would make Swiss cheese out of my rental car, so I took it slow and easy on the drive, little old lady from Pasadena all the way.

That’s a bit how I felt this morning, trapped between these waist-high rails, a cadre of Union security goons strutting up and down, barking at us to have our papers ready and in order once we reached the front of the line. I tried to worm past the riffraff, waving and dancing a lung-ish dance as I went, aping the moves I’d seen the real Larry make countless times in the past. Had I not been acutely aware of the Tasers and pistols all around me, I would have felt like a complete idiot. As it stood, I was glad for the anonymity, however pathetic.

If I ever see that kid again, the one who usually inhabits the lung costume, I’ll cut him a little more slack. The peripheral vision in that thing is nearly nonexistent, and I probably knocked over a few ailing clients along the way. At one point, I bounced off the railing and into what felt like a wall—albeit one with thickly muscled arms.

“The fuck outta my way,” growled a voice, and even before I got the mesh eyeholes turned around to see, I knew I’d made a big mistake.

Tony Park’s beady little eyes and gigantic forehead pressed hard against the fabric of the costume, as if he was trying to climb inside with me. “Sorry, sir,” I mumbled, trying to disguise my voice with a post-adolescent break.

Tony didn’t give up. If anything, he only leaned in farther. A rank odor came off his body, like seaweed gone bad. “Keep your fucking eyes on the road or I’ll pluck ’em out of your goddamned head.”

I gave the best thumbs-up I could with the big white mittens I was wearing and shuffled away as best as possible. I could feel Tony’s eyes boring into the back of my head—lung head—but didn’t stop and turn. No need to give him any more reasons to bother me. It’s not that I’d mind throwing down with the guy; he deserves to be taken down a peg. I just didn’t want to waste bullets when they might be needed elsewhere.

Halfway up the line, the railing joined up with a wall, and I was able to peruse the abundant literature lining the gleaming marble. Most of it was come-on advertisements, hot talk designed to get a customer to part with more of his organs in favor of higher-grade, longer-lasting goods.
Can’t belt it back like you could in grade school?
asked one ad in bright beer-colored yellow.
Try a new Taihitsu Liver today!

But farther ahead, past the ads and the veiled threats, was the meat-and-potatoes of this wall, the frowning faces of the Hundred Most Wanted. Each poster measured a robust eleven by sixteen, and aside from a full-color photo and basic statistics on the debtor, the attached info sheets went so far as to list last known address, phone numbers, credit card statements, health records, hygiene habits, and shoe size of the wanted individual, as well as similar information about close friends and relatives. There is no privacy where the Union is concerned; the forms they make you sign in triplicate make that abundantly clear.

Sad sacks, all in a row. Ten by ten, a collage of mug shots. Faces of lawyers, of carpenters, of dentists. Fathers, brothers, it didn’t matter. I was a bit surprised to see that a woman rode the top of the list, that some blonde lady had gotten herself in bad enough with the Union to make that dreaded spot, but soon another grimace stole my attention:

Second row from the left, two posters down, a familiar face, a familiar half-worn grin, a fuck-the-world-and-its-mother-too stare to the eyes that was mine and only mine lo those many years ago. This was a shot culled from my original Union identification card, and something in me burned at the knowledge that the bastards had used an element of my previous identity against me.

I am the twelfth most wanted Union fugitive. Makes a man feel important.

I’ve been on Union lists before, of course, but only on the other side of the oozing red line. During my marriage to Melinda, I was awarded National Employee of the Month on two separate occasions, each during a radically productive period of Union growth that saw profits triple and expenses cut in half.

During most average weeks, I brought in two, maybe three artiforgs; during those cash-soaked heydays, I turned over at least twice that, spending every night on the prowl, caught up in the hunt. My ether consumption had skyrocketed so much that the dealer thought I’d gotten myself hooked on the stuff. But it was just a good month or two for business, and I worked the incoming cases like a pro, sometimes turning over as many as four artiforgs in a single evening. As a result, I was given my own parking space.

Melinda didn’t come to either one of my award ceremonies. She didn’t even cook me dinner when I got home. Jealousy is an ugly thing.

Seen my face, gotten the skinny, and without even having to read the fine print on the bottom of the poster, I knew instantly, just from my position on the list, that I was going to be assigned a Level Five. Not too long ago, it’s a job I would have gladly taken on myself. The Union was sparing no expense to bring me in; I realized in that moment that I’d been lucky to stay alive this long, and that if I wanted to continue the breathing process for any significant length of time, I’d better stop taking foolish chances like this one.

But now that I was inside the Union, I was
inside
the Union. You don’t make waves inside the Credit Union, not if you don’t want to draw attention. Jumping the line is like leaping off the
Titanic
: You’re gonna die one way or the other, but you might as well give yourself a fighting chance. Most folks who are in need of a little body replenishment don’t reconsider midstream, so they tend to stick around to the bitter end, and even though I was dressed up as a lung, that’s just what I was going to do. Get up to the front, wave to the guards and salesmen and any repo guys I saw along the way, then hustle out the back door and head on home to the grand ol’ dump.

I think I was ten slobs from the front when the alarms sounded and the large men with rifles streamed into the lobby. Coulda been twelve; I wasn’t really counting.

Due to the nature of my profession, I’ve been around death quite a lot, and while I’m not exactly on a first-name basis with the Reaper, we’ve exchanged business cards enough times to give each other a friendly nod when we pass by on the job. So it wasn’t the sight of sixteen carbine rifle barrels pointed in my direction that sent my blood racing into high-G turns around my veins, nor the spectacle of sweaty, overgrown guards leaping the railings and barriers like world-class hurdlers. More than anything else, it was the way the crowd reacted, the way that my supposedly fellow comrades responded to what was essentially a small army descending upon the helpless and downtrodden masses stacked fifty deep here in the lobby:

They did nothing. There was no covering of heads, no fingers flayed in front of faces, no cowering and pleading for mercy. I expected maybe a few gasps, a mother covering up her infant child, something on the order of your basic peasants-in-the-square kind of mentality. But the only screaming or crying noises were those that had already been going on since I got into the joint, most of them emanating from the main credit room in back. Otherwise, there was little but silence, submission, and sadness—and that’s what scared me most of all. Even sheep run for cover when wolves jump the fence.

The Mauser was tucked into the waistband of my pants, wedged between my sorely empty belly and a fourth-hand belt I had pinched from a nearby garage sale. As soon as the guards made their first grunts, launching themselves up and over the rails, rifles held high, fingers glued to the triggers, my right hand pulled itself out of the latex sleeve and grabbed the butt of my gun tightly, with speed, precision, and a comforting familiarity. I shoved the gun back into the dangling lung-arm, using the barrel as a makeshift fingertip. From the outside, it probably just looked like Larry the Lung was pointing his finger at someone,
j’accuse
style. But by the time the second Credit Union stooge had landed on our side of the bar, my finger was on the joy button and I was ready to play.

Odds calculation took a millisecond longer. Sixteen guards, eleven already over the rail, five on the move, another squadron of five in the distance, streaming into the lobby, each one sporting a weapon with approximately three times the firepower of my own pathetic piece. Grouping the folks around me into bunches of twenty-five, I counted one, two, three and a half—maybe ninety civilians in the way, each one a potential shield. No natural forms of cover, and the few metallic objects around were too small to hide behind. I might be thinning out from my back-alley diet, but no matter how much I get into this anorexia, no handrail is gonna cover up the more critical parts of my sorry ass.

Possible plan of attack: Fire a single shot at the fire alarm 15 feet away. Short out the circuit, send the sprinklers raining down. Next, grab the sap in front of me, tuck into a somersault, using his back to absorb the bullets that are aimed at mine. On the way up, kick out and throw his suddenly limp, probably bloody body into the nearest phalanx of attackers, then rinse and repeat. Duck and run through that lobby like a kid practicing his fire drills, blanketing my exposed surfaces with civilian flesh, taking whatever potshots I can at the walking body armor advancing my way, hoping to get in a lucky between-the-eyes shot. Flip out into the Mall proper and start a riot with a few well-placed bursts from the Mauser. Mass confusion, rip off the costume, sink into the crowd, run screaming out of the Mall with the rest of the stampede and disappear into the anonymous streets and alleys of the city on my way back to the safety of my abandoned hotel.

Odds on the plan working: A million to one against.

Odds on winding up in a body bag within the next ten minutes: The proverbial sure thing.

Here’s what Sergeant Ignakowski used to say about the Sure Thing:

A big gambler has a dream one night: He’s walking through the woods, minding his own business, thinking about the ponies, when a fuzzy little bunny rabbit bursts out of the brush, wrinkles his cute pink nose, and says “Five!” A few feet later, a chipmunk scurries up his arm, leans into his ear, and whispers, “Five!” Guy walks a little farther, and soon comes across a tree bending back over itself, the trunk deformed, mutated. But on closer inspection, it’s simply twisted to look like a number 5. The clouds above are puffing in and out, forming
5
s and
55
s and
555
s, and soon enough the birds are singing and the animals are chanting and every living thing around him is pulsing
five, five, five, five, five
.

Poof, the guy wakes up. First thing he thinks is
I gotta get to the track
. So he takes a leak, shoves on some clothes, hops in the car, and takes five minutes making the five-mile drive to the horse races. Grabs a racing sheet as he goes inside, and opens it up to race number five. There it is, running in the fifth race, in the fifth slot, a five-year-old horse that comes from five generations of racers and that happens to be named Five Alive. Without another moment’s thought, he goes to the fifth bank of windows, approaches the fifth teller, and bets most of his life savings, $55,555, on Five Alive to win in the fifth race.