Repo Men (9 page)

Sure enough, the horse comes in fifth.

That’s why I never bet the sure thing and always play the long shot: There’s no room for depression. If you’re going to lose anyway, you might as well rage against the odds.

But just as I was in the middle of pulling out the Mauser—just as the barrel had cleared my waistband and prepared for takeoff—just as my finger had already begun to depress the trigger and my reflexes had already trained themselves on the perfect shot to set off the overhead sprinklers—a guy in the next row over decided it was his turn to hog the insanity stage.

“Is this the return line?” he asked, his voice shaking with fear. “Somebody tell me, where’s the return line?”

He was middle aged, graying around the temples and had a slight rasp to his voice, but otherwise seemed in perfect health. The man wandered through the line, stumbling against the other penitents, his limbs flapping against flesh, trying to clear a path. The Credit Union patrons were more than happy to oblige, and they did a Red Sea for the bozo, dropping away to either side in order to avoid getting caught by what was bound to be stray shrapnel.

“Please, just tell me where to find the return line. I’m trying to be helpful here.”

As my hand casually slid the Mauser back into its waistband sheath, I followed the rest of the crowd as we backed up against the walls, allowing the guards a clear path to their target. No matter his age, he was about to reach the end of what was once a somewhat natural life span.

“I—I want to return it,” he stammered, feet tripping over each other as the spiral of guards began to close around him. “I’m here to—I mean, I missed a few payments, and I thought, rather than make you guys come out, we could—we could make a plan or something—”

But the guards, who have been trained to expressly ignore any and all wheeling and dealing on the Credit Union floor, continued their march, guns at the ready. One was already on his phone, calling for the necessary backup and reinforcement. “We found him,” he said. “He’s right down here, in the lobby. Tracer worked fine. Send down a Level Three.”

By the time I’d looked back to the soon-to-be-ex-customer, he’d already begun to disrobe, his dark navy sport coat splayed across the floor, hands working furiously at his pants, his starched-collar shirt buttons. “I didn’t want to make it difficult,” he was saying. “I know how hard it is, all these deadbeats—I know how hard it is to keep a profit margin these days—”

The lead guard approached, keeping his gun barrel aimed at the customer as a free hand reached out to provide an aura of support and understanding. “Please calm down, sir,” he said. “No one here wants to hurt you.”

But even if the guard hadn’t been lying through his ceramic dentures, even if he had indeed been sworn not to lay a finger on the clients, the man in front of him had taken the A-train way past the sanity station. “I know how much you have to pay the—the Bio-Repo men,” he choked out, “so I figured I’d help you guys—you know, maybe you could cut me a break—”

“Sir, please stop—”

“Maybe, maybe if I did it for you…” And as he whipped off his pants, nearly falling over backward as the last cotton leg pulled free, something silver and shiny in his hand glinted with the reflection of the overhead halogens. “Maybe you’d give me a break.”

Before the guns sounded, before the crowd screamed and scattered, before the blood really started flying, I got enough of a glimpse to make sense of the whole three-ring circus:

A knife, flashing through the air, turned out, in, and sliding into flesh, as the customer whipped the weapon into his own body, slicing a ragged incision just below his stomach. The blood flow was instantaneous, a thick river of it pouring to the ground below in a crimson waterfall. The guards, who had been ready to shoot first and ask no questions later, stepped back to watch the first act.

Soft grunts choked out from the man’s mouth as he dug the knife deeper into his own viscera, slicing up his stomach with little regard for skill or precision. Now the crowd was beginning to murmur, but more out of morbid curiosity than disgust; I saw a few parents covering their children’s eyes, but for the most part, all attention was focused on the floor show.

A step backward, a drunken stagger, and the man raised his left hand—devoid of any weapons—high into the air. With a dramatic lurch, that arm swept down, axe-like, as his free hand plunged into the new, bloody body cavity. Another groan escaped his lips, followed by a gush of fluid, but he didn’t pause for a moment. As his body lurched about the Credit Union floor, torso heaving, legs shaking in a herky-jerky dance of death, the deadbeat grabbed hold, and grabbed hold tight. And then, with what must have been his last remnants of strength and will, he yanked.

And as he stumbled forward—his mechanical PK–14 Marshodyne fully functional pancreas with Auto-Insulin release clicking away in his bloody, outstretched hands, the titanium receptacle catheters still attached to the frayed ends of torn veins and arteries—the guards, who had not been at all put off when this man was wielding an 8-inch-long hunting knife, got spooked enough by the sight of a fellow offering up his own artiforg for repossession to launch into a full-scale assault, even though the man was, by all rights, only seconds from death.

All sixteen rifles fired at once.

By the time the attack was complete, the crowd was in an all-out panic, running for the doors, trampling each other in their effort to escape the onslaught. The Credit Union doesn’t have any policies in place for curtailing stampedes in their own offices; in fact, staff members are encouraged to let events play themselves out. At the very least, a few customers are bound to get stepped on in all the wrong places, creating a whole new profit base for the company on the next go-round. It’s no coincidence that Union money spearheaded the effort to get the “fire in a crowded theater” exception stricken from the First Amendment some years back.

That’s when I chose to make my exit along with the rest of the sheep, but I was pinned in long enough to see Frank arrive from upstairs with a Bio-Repo man in tow. He was a Level Three, just like they’d requested, his black tank top and bare neck displaying the Union tattoo belying his rank and profession. Hair cut short, military style, muscles firm and toned, a practiced scowl on a hardened face. Thin, wide-set eyes, blunt nose. In olden days, he’d have been a common street thug. In today’s marketplace, a Level Three was good as gold, nearly as close to Midas as a mortal could get. I’d been a Level Five, of course, but this wasn’t exactly the time to pull rank.

The Bio-Repo man flashed a scanner, pinging the already-quite-dead client, and confirmed that the artiforg was, indeed, Union property. Frank just stood there and stared at the bullet-riddled body on the ground, the outstretched arm holding the still-clicking Marshodyne PK–14. He spun on the contingent of guards, anger twisting his face into a scowl. “Who reclaimed that organ?” he bellowed, his voice carrying over the din of rioting customers. “Who reclaimed this goddamned organ?”

“The customer, sir,” replied the guard. “He did it himself, sir.”

“Customers don’t reclaim their own organs,” said Frank.

“This one did, sir.” He pointed to the hunting knife in the dead man’s hand with the barrel of his gun, as if to let the picture speak for itself.

I was halfway through the Credit Union door by that point, but as I hustled myself out, I could hear Frank spit in disgust. “Customers. Don’t know their goddamned place anymore.”

A
few more words about my current abode: It ain’t quite the Ritz.

To be more specific, I am staying in the burned-out remains of the Tyler Street Hotel, a formerly low-to-lower-class establishment that, when it was a functioning place of lodging, boasted no celebrity clientele and a complete lack of standard facilities. There is a lobby with the customary broken chandelier, a shaky staircase leading up to rickety hallways, and six bathrooms for every twenty-four so-called “suites,” two of which are currently functional. This would have been considered a “European style” hotel, which means, on top of everything else, that it was dirt cheap. None of the actual Europeans I know would have ever stayed in this place longer than the time it took them to don a respirator and haul their ass back out to the cracked parking lot.

On the ground floor, a long, narrow room with ash-covered walls and crumbling support beams represents what may have once been a coffee shop, but it’s hard to tell in its current charred, decrepit state. There were fourteen floors to the Tyler Street Hotel once upon a time, but they called the thirteenth floor the fourteenth and the fourteenth floor the penthouse, so the fact that I’m living on the sixth floor means little, except that I’m about halfway up the place, with a stellar view of the brickwork on the high-rise next door.

My room is a good 4 meters square, and I’ve got ample space to walk around, squat, do my morning regimen of push-ups, crunches, and lunges, as well as a cozy corner in which to bed down for the night. The walls, formerly orange and beige, have been tarnished with the ash of some long-forgotten blaze, but the original color peeks through in spots now and again, so that the whole wall resembles one side of a monstrous cheetah.

My weapons are stashed in what remains of the hallway closet, haphazardly hidden beneath a rotting tarpaulin I found in the trash heap of a sporting goods store down on Savoie Street. The guns are tucked within a double fold, as if that were enough to buy them any type of added protection, but I make do with what I’ve got.

The same tarp that covers my only means of self-defense also serves as protection against the elements. It is my mattress, my quilt, and my pillow, and sometimes, late at night, I can almost pretend that I’m not sleeping on the hard, cold floor of an abandoned hotel, but instead resting the night away in an uncomfortable but well-kept bed-and-breakfast. My security blanket is the crossbow; some nights, I’ll grasp it between my arms, cradling the wooden stock like a child.

And this typewriter is kept as near to the middle of the room as I can get it. A nearby portion of the floor has rotted away, and I take great pains to keep the typewriter away from that spot, in fear that I will come back to the hotel one day to find it, smashed, three floors down, a gaping rabbit hole leading the way. But it’s close enough to the center that the relative distance from all walls should afford me some type of auditory block from the rest of the world while I jot down these notes.

But here’s the point of all of this: As I’ve said, the Tyler Street Hotel is burned out, abandoned, an empty husk of a building that now serves no purpose other than to shelter me and my sins. The lobby is empty, the rooms unoccupied, the elevator long since crashed to the bottom of the shaft. The Tyler Street Hotel is mine and mine alone.

Or so I thought until this evening.

I returned from the Mall via a serpentine route, making sure to drop any and all tails that I may have picked up on my rapid departure from the Credit Union. Odds were slim that I’d been followed—most repo men don’t wait until their client returns to the relative safety of their home to finish the job; an alley will usually do just fine. So the very fact that all of my major organs—artiforgs and regulars—were inside and intact a hundred yards down the road was a good sign.

But it didn’t stop me from traversing the town, dropping in and out of parking garages, hot-wiring cars as a matter of course, slipping through culverts and washouts every time I got even the slightest glimpse of the law. The boys in blue aren’t aligned with the Credit Union, but, like the rest of the public, they get kickbacks when they snitch on an artiforg deadbeat, so it always pays to steer clear.

By the time I got back to Tyler Street, it was nearing midnight and I was too tired to use the entrance I’d become accustomed to. My muscles were limp noodles, too weak to scale the back wall, leap for the fire-escape ladder, and climb in through the third-story window before beginning the rest of the ascent to Room 618. So I did what any careless on-the-run Bio-Repo man would do: I went in through the front.

So, what with the worry between being followed and the lack of security in making a front-door entrance, it’s not too surprising that it took me ten minutes before I noticed that there was a sheet of paper sticking out of my typewriter, a sheet of paper that I had definitely not placed into the machine myself.

As I approached, my mechanical heart getting the signal from the rest of my body to speed up pumping action, I noticed that this was no ordinary sheet of paper, blank and begging to be typed upon. There was a message, not typed in the heavily inked letters of the Underwood, but scrawled in a tight, furious scribble of red ballpoint. I spun around, legs suddenly leaden, the world slipping into a slow-motion crawl, the camera inside my head panning around in a dramatic lurch as my vision settled on the paper and its freshly written sentence.

For ease of use, I will simply include the two-word note, original sheet and all, right here, right now. This is what it said:

S
HUT
U
P
.

The reality that I have been found out, that I am no longer alone, does not bother me as much as I thought it would; perhaps the concept of companionship, invisible or otherwise, is enough to blunt the dull fear of having been located and asked to silence myself. Odds are it’s not a Bio-Repo man; they rarely leave notes, and when they do, they tend to be short explanations addressed to next of kin. Certainly, I’m not worried enough about it to follow the letter’s rudely phrased advice and silence myself for any length of time. If the clacking of this typewriter is bothering my fellow hotel dweller, then he or she will simply have to find another abandoned building in which to bunk. Even if I were inclined to give up, that two-word order has lit a new fire under my ass, so now I’ll type all through the night, pounding on that keyboard with every stroke until my knuckles lock up and my wrists are shot through with carpal tunnel lightning. I have never taken well to direct instruction.

The first night overseas, Harold Hennenson and I climbed off the cargo plane in Italy, leaden duffel bags slung over our shoulders, and made our way through the throng of fellow soldiers to the nearest ground transport. I’d been laboring under the impression that a throng of women would be crowding the tarmac when we landed, bearing flowers and kisses and keys to hotel rooms. But whatever pop-star fantasies I had cultivated dissipated as soon as the plane doors opened to allow a rush of angry male voices to filter into the open cabin. Orders flew by at top speed, and I didn’t know which were directed at me, at Harold, at the rest of the grunts who were running around in circles. By the time I figured out where I was supposed to be, I’d already marched in time with three separate platoons and belted out two rum-tum choruses of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The lieutenant in command had ordered me to get the hell out of the airport and not stop running until I found the platoon to which I’d been assigned. But as I sped out of the airport’s double doors, my designated compatriots already having neatly boarded a series of open-bed trucks, a young, raven-haired Italian beauty stepped into my path, forcing me to skitter to a stop. Her breasts were not large, but swelled against her tube top in a way that instantly stopped my feet and made me forget about the United States, its military forces, and any traces of sexual morality.

“Soldier,” she said, carefully forming each syllable with a pair of thick, pouting lips. “You go off to die for me.” And with that, she fell into my body, wrapped her arms into a tight belt about my waist, and treated my tonsils to a long, slow, sensuous tongue bath.

I don’t know if it was because I’d been expecting to see a parade of adoring women at the airport, if I’d been missing Beth, if I wanted to impress the woman with my sense of duty, or if I was just a horny young kid who wanted to get some action, but I leaned into that mouth and that body for all I was worth, working my lips and tongue into a mandibular cha-cha that would have gotten my ass a permanent restraining order from any county-fair kissing booth.

I do know this: The bitch stole my wallet.

“Gypsies,” huffed Harold later that night as we unpacked our duffels. “Gotta watch out for ’em. They’ll steal anything that ain’t nailed down.”

“She seemed nice enough,” I said.

“Nicer still with another fifty bucks in her pocket.”

Most of Harold’s possessions seemed to be of the food-supplement variety. He had cans of protein powder, jars of specialized enzymes, and energy bars in six different flavors, each one of which managed to taste exactly like sawdust. As we spoke, he removed these supplements one by one, laying them in precise little rows at the foot of his bunk.

“Marines are gonna serve you food,” I told him. “You don’t have to eat those.”

His answer was typical Harold. “Marine food is good,” he explained. “If all you wanna be is a Marine.”

“And you want to be more?” I asked.

“I don’t want to be
a
Marine,” he replied. “I want to be
the
Marine.”

What he would finally be, of course, was nothing more than a splotch of red on an otherwise dun-colored desert. Poor Harold—at the very least, he would have liked his corpse to provide nourishment for a cactus or two, but the tank explosion pretty much took care of all the surrounding foliage.

The picture made the papers, though—T
HREE
K
ILLED IN
A
FRICAN
M
ANEUVERS,
read the caption, and I’m pretty sure the
Stars and Stripes
photo caught my left sleeve as I was mourning my good buddy’s loss. Snapshot of the charred earth, a wrecked heap of indistinguishable metal center stage. A few soldiers gathered around, staring mutely at the crash, impotent to do anything but look at one another and shrug.

But back in Italy, Jake and I were finishing up unpacking our gear, while Harold was downing his first powdered meal of the day. It was getting on past three, and we hadn’t met up with our senior officer yet—he was away in the veldt, we were told, and wouldn’t be back until nightfall.

As a result of our sergeant’s non-appearance, the entire platoon had loosened up a notch from our usual basic-training shell shock. Jokes flew and barbs hit home as we spent a few hours meeting a bunch of other knobs who were just turning loose into the early war effort:

Ron Toomey was nineteen, from Wyoming, and had a sister who looked like she belonged on Mount Rushmore. Wasn’t so much the granite features as it was the facial hair.

Bill Braxton’s father owned a used car dealership back in Albuquerque and had told his son that he’d turn over the keys to the business as soon as he graduated from high school. Then his father said he’d get the job when he finished four years in college. Then it was a graduate degree. Then a Ph.D. And still Bill Braxton’s father clung tight to the reins of his successful dealership. When the suggestion of going to business school came up at a family dinner, Bill calmly stood, left the table, the dining room, the house, drove his father’s prized 1964 Mustang down Main Street, ran it headlong into a telephone pole, stepped confidently out of the smoking wreckage, walked down to the local Marines recruiting office, and signed on up. He was thirty-four, nearly twice as old as the rest of us, and the Marines was his first paying gig.

Ben Rosner was slight of stature, short on words, but his girl had been featured in the December issue of last year’s
Hootenanny Hooter Review
, and caused quite a controversy when she wore her department-store-issued Santa’s Little Helper cap and absolutely nothing else in a two-page centerfold. The department store in question dismissed the poor girl and promptly threatened to sue
Hootenanny
, but the ensuing hubbub got her a gig as a full-time model for phone-sex ads. She was the girl you looked at when the sixty-three-year-old hag on the other end of the line was trying to get you off. Ben proudly passed out photos to each of us like a grandfather handing out pictures of the new baby, and we scarfed them up and hid them away for future enjoyment. We knew that once we hit Africa, it would be a long time before we saw any women.

Every once in a while I think about Bill Braxton, the Ph.D. Marine—Doctor Jarhead, as we affectionately called him—and something he said one night after lights-out. He had the bunk two down from mine, and over the snores of Elian Ortiz, a Colombian with some serious apnea issues, we discussed the nature of the cosmos and the breast sizes of various female celebrities. Mostly the nature of the cosmos, though.

To be fair, Bill did a lot more talking than I did; he was pretty damned well educated, and though I only understood half of what he said, and retained far less, occasionally he’d blow my mind.

“There’s a scientist,” he told me one night, “back in Germany, or Holland, I can’t remember, and he proposed this experiment with a cat.”

“So, what,” I asked, “he’d give ’em drugs or do autopsies on ’em?”

“No,” Bill explained, “it wasn’t like that. It was a physics experiment, sort of. And he never really did the experiment; he just thought it up.”

“What’s the use of that?” I asked.

“It’s theoretical physics. It’s doesn’t have to have a use.”