Repo Men (12 page)

“No.”

“Good,” he said. “Soul-suckers are taking everything back.”

“So am I,” I said.

He nodded. Took this new info in, and quickly made his peace with whatever gods he saw fit. “I see. Could I please finish this song?”

I looked at my watch. There was another outstanding job that day, but I remember thinking that it was just as easily done later that night or the next morning. “Of course,” I told him, stepping back to wait my turn. “I’m a big fan. ‘Baby in My Sleeve’…fantastic.” I stopped before going whole-hog fanatic on him; it wouldn’t have been the professional thing to do.

But he turned then, got up and came toward me—he was a wiry fellow, tics of energy flipping his limbs into spastic jerks—grabbing my arm, leading me toward the board. “You can help,” he said. “I haven’t had an assistant for months.”

I protested that I wasn’t trained, that I’d never even touched a mixing board before, but he claimed it was no matter. “Song’s just a mess of little parts,” he said, “all working together. All you need to do is listen for the parts inside the whole. If you can isolate the parts, pull ’em out and mix ’em around, we can improve the overall effect.”

I told him I thought I might be qualified for the job.

The song I helped him mix that day—“Tailor Made Five” by Susan Lundi’s Orchestra—became a posthumous platinum hit, and though I didn’t get any credit on the inside jacket, I told everyone down at the Union that I’d helped out a little on the trumpets and vibes.

After two and a half hours, we were done with the mix, the sound was hopping, and the producer had already sucked up enough Q to kill a Clydesdale. He offered me the sparkling red powder on six or seven occasions, each time forgetting that I had flatly refused it not ten minutes before. I wasn’t surprised to find, when I finally got the neuro-net out of him, that the central processor was crusted over, filthy with crystallized cerebrospinal fluid. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re hooked on the Q, and it’s a shame that even after the most expensive of artiforg implantations, he wasn’t able to reprogram himself to beat the habit.

He’d been on his own for nine months, he told me, after his wife had taken their twin baby girls and fled to their second home in Jamaica, and since then hadn’t seen another soul until I broke in to steal his brain. He’d somehow been operating via the U.S. Postal service, connecting with the music companies, the bands, and the rest of the outside world solely by the slowest means of modern communication. As a result, his conversations were impossibly stunted, gaps of understanding and intent inherent within three-week-long mail deliveries, and it was this, more than anything else, that had contributed to his final detachment from reality. True loneliness, I learned that day, isn’t the lack of others. It’s the lack of others quickly.

Good news:

I went out for Thai food tonight, which is to say that I broke into the back room of a local restaurant, stole some cooking smocks, and snuck into the kitchen of my favorite eatery dressed as one of their own. I had two orders of pad kee mao and one of panang chicken curry stuck beneath my jacket before any of the regular kitchen staff noticed that I was neither Thai nor anything remotely resembling Thai, and I was out the door seconds later. Took the long way back to the hotel, slurping up one container of noodles as I went, staring up at the surrounding high-rises as I walked. If I stared hard enough, I could make out shadows even in those apartments and offices without lights, dull silhouettes moving back and forth in the darkness.

Rather than zip up to my room as usual, I stood outside the Tyler Street Hotel, grabbing a seat on the sidewalk across the street. The concrete was cold, but soon warmed up as I set to eating the chicken, the fiery spices of the curry sending beads of sweat up to my brow. I kept my eyes trained on the building above, not staring at any one spot too long. The trick to seeing in darkness—without an infrared scope, of course—is to keep the pupils moving back and forth, scanning horizontally for movement before locking in on a location. This was one of the tricks they taught us during tank training. Then again, they also taught us how to defecate in place without squatting, making a sound, or removing our pants, so not everything that came out of my military experience translated completely into civilian life.

After forty-five minutes of scanning and sucking noodles, I was prepared to tuck in for the night. But as I flipped onto my haunches, preparing to sneak back inside the hotel, a burst of shadowy movement up on the top floor caught my attention. I looked, glanced away, then looked back again, and sure enough, there it was, a vaguely human-shaped silhouette that had not been there before. It had stopped moving as soon as I spotted it, but I got the distinct impression that as I was staring up, it was staring down.

I bolted into the hotel lobby.

Thirteen floors later, I was still running strong, and I slammed open the stairwell door with a mighty crash. No use being quiet now; it was too late at night for any nearby residents to care about the noise, and I was more than happy to spook out whoever was sharing the hotel with me.

The penthouse was empty. Floor-to-ceiling windows—some intact, others not so much—afforded a view of the downtown slums and the bright possibilities of the city beyond, but the room itself was abandoned. The walls were coated in the same dull ash as mine downstairs, only these looked like they may have had some semblance of a normal color beneath the char.

The floor, though, was curiously devoid of dust, and the one other flat surface, a rusted-out metal table in the center of the room, was clean enough for even the most ardent of germaphobes to eat off.

For a moment, I considered jogging back downstairs and grabbing one of the few scopes I had, maybe an infrared to pick up on lagging heat signals, but I realized that in the time it would take me to go down and back up, I’d lose whatever traces might be lingering around, waiting to die off.

So I ran a check the old-fashioned way. Fingers along the floorboards, eye to the walls. Searching for hairs, for nails…

For clothing fibers. On an inside doorway, one foot above the ground, a broken rusty nail poked its way out of the wall. I squatted down and took a gander, focusing my eyes as best I could on that minuscule shard of metal.

Beige. See-through. Stretchy. It was a smidgen of nylon. Someone had run through here in a hurry, and someone had torn her pantyhose.

So, as I said, good news:

I’m living with a woman again.

T
he tank training facility was ten miles away from base, set on what used to be a vineyard near the Amalfi coast. The Marines, I’d been told, had offered the owner a fair settlement for his land, but had been refused on three separate occasions, even after they repeatedly raised their price. The vintner held firm, and though he was always polite with the emissaries who were sent with cases of cash, he stuck to his guns and sent them away every time.

The next season, this elderly gentleman with three children, eight grandkids, and a great-grandson on the way found his crops overrun by a ravenous grape bug never before seen on Italian soil, a particular strain of beetle that was surprisingly resistant to any and all mass-market pesticides. When the harvest came around and it was time to pick the fruits of his labor, there was only enough to make a hundred cases of wine, as opposed to the three thousand cases the vineyard usually produced.

He sold the land two months later for half of the government’s initial offer.

But it made for a great place to train; wide, flat land that could be built up by artificial means into any terrain desired, ringed by mountains to deflect the horrendous sound of heavy artillery, nearly impossible to spy upon, except by satellite. We were ten hours out in the field at a time, except when we trained combat style, in which case the training exercises could run into days.

When we first arrived at the facility, Tig showed me, Jake, Harold, and the rest of the tank crew to our bunks. Bill Braxton, the guy whose father owned the car dealership, was with us—his unusually large cranium was evident from the outside, so maybe we were the ones with the small brains—as was a smattering of other knobs I’d seen around base from time to time.

Rather than give us standard-issue military cots, the boys in Tank Group A were assigned “control chairs” for all our sleeping needs. These were replicas of the seats inside the Marine tanks, padded contraptions almost exactly like those in which we’d taken the dreaded concussion test.

“You will sleep in these,” Tig told us, cutting off any comments we may have had, “and you will get to like it. I promise you that after a month of sleeping inside your control chair here on base and two more years of living in it out in the field, you will find that any other bed just won’t do. When your time is done and you flip back to the real world, you will want to bring your control chair with you. You will lie on your back and wish you were curled into a ball. Your limbs will contract of their own volition, and you will find yourself spending nights at the dining-room table, tucked into a chair, elbows to the wall, knees into your chest. Your wife will not understand why it is that you will not sleep in the bed with her. There will be fights, and there will be confusion, and still you will resist. It may look funny now, but your control chair, gentlemen, will become your blue blanket.”

I hated the sonofabitch for telling us these things.

I hated him again two years later because he was right.

Speaking of my wife and the bed that we would never again share:

Beth’s letters arrived with less frequency. I told myself this was because I’d switched training facilities, because the Italian mail systems were notoriously faulty, because I hadn’t exactly been writing up a storm myself. But there were suspicions, and there was doubt.

I didn’t have any illusions about being married to a hooker. I knew she’d meet up with strange men, that said strange men would pay her for the privilege of doing unspeakable things to her body, and that it was all just a day at the office, no different from running accountancy spreadsheets. Sometimes the thought of it made me ill, literally queasy to the point of gagging, but most of the time I convinced myself it was nothing more than spreading a leg to this side and a leg to that side and letting the rest of the body go numb. She needed the cash, and I wasn’t pulling down enough in the military to keep her in the style to which she’d become accustomed, which included such luxuries like eating on a regular basis.

But the longer I sat in that control chair—my body contorted into a suspended fetal position, unable to squirm, turn over, or scratch my ass—the more my mind wandered and filled itself with fascinating scenarios. Beth taking off with another client. Giving up the life altogether and running away to the Arctic. Holding a free-for-all session with the Green Berets, no extra charges, no money down.

After a week-long interval, I received a short letter from her, the usual news about her parents, about San Diego, about how she went to a street fair and bought an elephant ear and remembered the time a few days before we married when I burned my tongue on the hot oil from a stick of fried dough, which was pretty much like an elephant ear only without all the powdered sugar, and how it made her laugh, only I wasn’t there to see it and she hoped I’d be able to come home soon.

And there was a perfume on the letter, like usual, but this time it didn’t smell like Beth. It didn’t even smell like anything Beth would, in theory, ever deign to wear. It was rougher than her usual ten-dollar bottles, muskier. Men’s cologne? Why would there be men’s cologne on her letter? Was another man, not just a client but a
lover
, standing behind her as she wrote it, caressing her breasts, sucking on her neck, letting his fingers drop between her legs, into her, making her moan even as she wrote false words to her husband halfway around the world?

In this manner, the nights passed.

The mornings, on the other hand, left me no time for my torturous little fantasies, filled as they were with the thrill one can only get from sitting in a tank and watching blips on a radar screen. Sounds like primetime for daydreaming, of course, but the blips could turn into bleeps within milliseconds, and if you didn’t lock on target and fire, you were dead where you sat.

Not actually dead, per se, not during the drills in Italy, but come Africa, we were told, it would be shoot or be shot. Killer or victim, everyone got to play his part. Another hastily constructed military lie, I later found out. In Africa, you could choose to shoot, or you could choose to sit still and watch the enemy bungle themselves out of a victory, but the only folks who were going home in body bags were those who pissed off Fate.

We got a quick lesson in this on the third day of tank training. The first two days had been out-of-uniform classes, boring lectures during which we took notes and tried to absorb the more interesting parts of what our instructors had to say. Paper airplanes shot about the room. One kid had a spitball contest going with Bill Braxton, who wasn’t too keen on returning the salvos. It was like grammar school, but they couldn’t have expected any different; they tried to cram everything from fluid mechanics to weapons ballistics into our noggins, and I’d be surprised if more than two or three bits of information were still there an hour later.

But the third day they let us at the tanks, splitting us up into teams of three, and we ran to them like kids let out for recess. This was strictly a hands-off session; we were there solely to familiarize ourselves with the equipment inside the machine, not the manner in which everything worked. That, we were told, would come later.

I climbed into the tank from the rear, as our commanders had ordered, crawling past instrumentation and tubing on my belly before reaching the front control chair. The previous three nights of aborted sleep had, at least, introduced me to the inner workings of the seat, so I was able to get myself righted and in place before all the commotion started.

There was a bang, there was screaming, and there was the distinct smell of smoke, and when it was all over, a twenty-year-old private I never knew was dead.

Come to think of it, he was the spitballer, so maybe while he was supposed to be learning what buttons not to push, he was instead launching a gummed-up wad of tissue at Bill Braxton’s hairy forearm. I don’t know why he yanked the lever he did, or why he would have yanked any levers at all, but even if I knew the reason, it wouldn’t bring him back. Nothing brings you back when you launch an ejection seat without first opening the hatch above your head.

The penthouse is still empty; I’ve just been up there, snooping around. Two days since I found that clue. Two days for me to wonder who this woman is, what she’s like. Questions naturally arise. For instance: Is she a hider? Is she a seeker? And what sort of woman wears pantyhose in an abandoned hotel?

The penthouse floors are still devoid of dust, but I believe I may have detected a scuff mark on the floorboards, and from the size of it, I would venture to say it’s been left by the mystery woman. She’s been back, undetected. Not for long.

One of the few nonsurgical tools the Credit Union supplied us with was a motion detector, truly the device of a thousand and one uses. I’ve done everything from trap animals to snare dates using this thing, and though I was reluctant to use it before in preserving my own life—my chief worry that the reliance on technology would sap me of my inherent skills—I’m more than happy to put it to a field test and see if we can’t scare up a loose critter.

The device is half an inch square, with a mostly invisible ray of light beaming out from one side. I say
mostly invisible
because it can be detected by a few means, one of which happens to be suffusing the surrounding area with smoke. I had a friend in the Union who died when the client he was tracking got wise to the motion detector, thanks to a nasty cigar habit; the deadbeat saw the beam, got a gas mask out, tripped the sensor, and when the Repo man gassed down the house and came strolling in, he got whacked on the back of the head with a 1959 Fender electric guitar, made way back in the day when they didn’t know from lightweight rock ’n’ roll.

But I doubt the interloper upstairs smokes, and even if she does, it won’t help her to notice the motion detector; I’ve got it set low, knee level, so unless she’s a leprechaun or does a mean limbo, the remote sensor in my back left pocket is bound to go off sometime soon.

Meantime, I’m sleeping with a gun in each hand.

Mary-Ellen, my second wife, hated guns. Hated all weapons, in fact, and although her father was a decorated Army colonel, we were forbidden to talk about the military during cocktails, at the dinner table, and all the way through dessert. If we wanted to discuss “the science of hate,” as my loving wife put it, her father and I were forced to stand outside in the chilly winter air—our marriage didn’t make it through to the summer months—and huddle in the warmth of a pipe and cheap tobacco.

When we met, I was a third-year Bio-Repo man still coming hard off a four-year-old divorce. I’d been bedding every woman I met, taking into them with a vengeance, trying to make a hooker out of every one, but never finding my Beth. It was after a job, actually, when Mary-Ellen and I ran into each other, though if she knew then where I’d been an hour earlier, she not only wouldn’t have married me, she would have run from the diner screaming like a chimp.

Sonny DePrimo was the son of Harry DePrimo, who was cousin to Sonny Abate, who was underboss to the second-largest crime family in Chicago, and none of this would have ever concerned me, except for the fact that Sonny DePrimo was enough of a screwup with the mob that they pulled some strings and got him into the Credit Union training program. Only problem was, he was more of a screwup as a Bio-Repo man than he ever was as a bag man, but with more serious consequences. He was mired in the old ways, I guess, unable to understand that needless bloodshed and splatter only made the job more difficult than it already was, and brought a lot of bad publicity to a company that needed all the good will it could get. Gas, grab, go, that’s all there is to it.

It didn’t help that his mentor was none other than Tony Park, who’d already made a life out of gleefully taking others’. All of Sonny’s worst tendencies were only amplified under Tony’s tutelage, and soon Sonny was making a habit out of beating the clients before taking what he’d come for, often dragging them into a public spectacle that helped neither the Union’s image nor his own. The final straw came when he was given the delicate assignment of retrieving a Klondike P–14 pancreatic unit from the ailing daughter of one of Chicago’s former mayors, a man loved throughout the state of Illinois and beyond. She was already on death’s doorstep, no more than three or four weeks away from ringing the bell and stepping inside; her debt to the Union was large, certainly, and unpaid, but was due to other mounting medical costs and a series of legal actions she’d undertaken against the wolves in the media who would have otherwise fed on her father’s good name. Clearly, a simple, quiet repossession would have been the wisest option, but Sonny was the Bio-Repo man on call that evening.

He dragged her out of the hospital, onto a thirty-minute ride on the El—shouting obscenities all the way—and down to the Union offices, where he ripped out her Klondike with an unapproved bowie knife and left her to die six feet away from the lobby doors and a host of shocked, would-be customers.

The Union was displeased with Sonny. They sent me to talk sense into him.

An hour later, I walked into the Federal Way Diner, clothes beneath my jacket still sopping with blood, and met the gal who would soon become my second ex-wife.

“You gonna eat the rest of that?” I asked her. She hadn’t touched the second half of her tuna sandwich, and the effort I’d just exerted on the job had me starving. A patch of skin that used to belong on Sonny DePrimo’s neck was folded up neatly into fourths, sitting in my jacket pocket. The Union had wanted their tattoo back. “Never seen anyone nurse a sandwich like that.”

“Never had a stranger ask for my food before.”

“Firsts for both of us, then,” I concluded, already sizing her up as an easy catch. Different from my usual type. More of an Earth-mother feel she had going, as opposed to the trashy things I’d been bringing back home, though perhaps I’m confusing what I know of her personality now with what I expected from her body then. In either case, she would most certainly do for a night of entertainment.