A nature special on the modern Bio-Repo man would go something like this:

He is omnivorous by nature, almost definitely male, likely to be without a mate. He feeds on processed foods and beverages, or on the leftover comestibles of his clients when his time is scarce. Always looking over his shoulder for some unseen adversary, he is cautious, wise, cunning. He wears a watch, sometimes two, always synchronized with local time. The Bio-Repo man, with his array of tools and weapons, is able to see in the dark, scan foreign objects at great distances, and outpace his clients in nearly any foot-race. He tends to drink too much, smoke too much, mistreat his body in every way he can imagine, and when his creativity has run dry, he will solicit advice from others on how to continue the abuse.

When the Bio-Repo man follows his clients, he blends into the shadows, working with the night in a friendly partnership. Few can see him. Fewer can escape him. The only sound he makes is that of ether hissing from one of his portable canisters, and by the time the client has recognized this noise, it is usually too late. The calling card of the Bio-Repo man is a yellow receipt laid across the fallen body, signed in triplicate.

The Bio-Repo man is nocturnal.

 

All of that, by the way, would be underscored by music, preferably in a minor key. It’s crucial for a Bio-Repo man to maintain a proper air of mystery.

 

Having lived that exact nature special for the better part of my life, we knew enough to leave the Laundromat during the day, when all good Bio-Repo men would be home sleeping off their lives. When the sun popped up sometime around six, Bonnie and I crept out of the crumbled building and tried to blend in with the rest of the skid-row bums who were just getting ready to begin their long day of begging. Bonnie, whose face had grown more and more maddeningly familiar with every hour we spent together, had loaned me a long duffel bag in which I transported many of my weapons, though I kept my scalpels and the Mauser tucked away in various pockets. Bonnie was packing heat, too, though it was impossible to tell exactly what she had on her and where; the weapons disappeared perfectly into her form-fitting overcoat.

Twenty minutes down the road, we found a dingy, poorly lit diner, grabbed a booth in the back, ordered eggs and toast—Bonnie was treating—and tried to figure out where the hell we were going.

“A safe house,” I suggested. “A buddy we can hole up with.”

Bonnie shrugged. “I’ve lost most of my friends.”

“I never had many to begin with. Not outside the Union. And we’re not going down that road.”

She nodded, pursed her lips. “How late are you?”

“Late enough,” I said. “After three months, what’s it matter anymore?”

She took a sip of the warm tap water they’d offered us. “You ever talk to a credit manager?”

My laugh was unintentional; it just slipped out. “My credit manager is my old boss. Once I skipped out on the job, he wasn’t about to start cutting me deals. You?”

“Sure,” she said. “I had three different managers—”

“I’ve never even heard of that.”

Bonnie smiled, and the rest of the diner dropped away. Nothing else mattered. “I’m full of surprises. So how bad do they want you?”

“I’m on the Hundred Most Wanted List,” I said, feeling in a perverse way as if I were actually bragging about it.

“Oooh, a bad boy.”

“And then some. I’m number twelve.”

If Bonnie was impressed, she didn’t show it. Just went on sipping her water and taking in the diner. Staying safe.

“So what’s new in you?” I asked. “You’ve got the Vocom, some ears—anything else?”

“A few,” she said. Was she deliberately being evasive?

“Such as?”

Narrowing her eyes into tight little slits, I got the feeling that she was inspecting me again, trying to get ahold of me. For a moment, I was pretty sure I could hear mechanical lenses focusing, spiraling in and out. “You get to choose three body parts to ask me about today,” she said.

“You’ve got three more artiforgs in there?”

“Choose.”

So many organs, so little time. I already knew about her ears and her larynx, both top-of-the-line Vocom models, so I decided to make my way across the face. “Eyes, nose, mouth.”

And this is what she said:

 

“Both of my eyes are Marshodyne Dynamics, each with standard 100× zoom capability and full-spectrum color enhancement. The left one has an additional lens that slips into place when I blink three times in succession, and can increase the long-distance zoom capacity to 300×, but that’s when I tend to get headaches. The right eye has a macro feature that allows me to go microscopic, up to 200×, but that one makes me nauseous. If I use them both at the same time, I mostly end up walking in circles, slamming back aspirin, and puking. I got the financing from Marshodyne through the Credit Union at a rate of twenty-nine point eight percent.

“The cartilage of my nose is a silicone variant made by the Boone Corporation out of Virginia, but the actual sensors and nerve pathways are Credit Union generic. The sensory modification on those is slight, but I’m able to block certain foul odors and enhance certain sweet ones. Recently, it’s been pretty useful. The financing came straight from the Union, and this was at a special rate of twenty-seven point four percent.

“And my mouth is basically a department store of brand-name artiforgs, but since you seem interested, I’ll give you the whole tour as a freebie. Lips are my own, but the sensors are Kentons at thirty-two percent, the tongue is a variable polymer of some sort with fourteen times the number of taste buds and shutoff features a lot like those nasal ones—that’s also Credit Union generic at twenty-eight point four percent—and the teeth are a plain set of dentures my orthodontist ordered up for me. No finance charge on those.

“Does that answer your question?”

 

That’s when I figured it out: As Bonnie spoke at length, giving me a litany of artiforg details, she leaned forward to replace her juice glass, and the motion of her arm brushed away that frustrating strand of hair that always fell into her eyes. As it dropped to one side, I finally got a good shot of her face for the first time since we’d met, and suddenly, instantly, I realized why she looked so damned familiar.

“You’re number one,” I gasped, lowering my voice as some other patrons turned and looked our way. “You’re right up at the top—”

“And you might wanna keep it down.”

“I saw the list,” I continued, dropping to a whisper. “In the Mall lobby, I was looking for my name—”

“I know, I’m number one on the Big Hundred. You think I’d be alive this long and not know a thing like that?”

Before I could say another word, the waitress arrived with our breakfast. The heavy plates hit the table with a clunk, and I took a stab at the bacon strips before continuing on.

“How long have you been running?” I asked, keeping volume in check. “Must have been awhile, to get listed that high.”

“It’s not the time,” Bonnie corrected me. “It’s the quantity. Later, you can ask me about my torso.”

 

My favorite Credit Union commercials, in no particular order:

• 1) “What’s New In You?” Even though the phrase is practically a mantra these days, I’d be surprised if anyone remembers the ad itself. It was one of the earliest Credit Union spots, the one with the three little multiethnic kids singing about their newly implanted artiforgs. They tap-danced all over the great structures of the world, bringing life and love to the people of Earth. A new pancreas at the Taj Mahal, a shiny new bladder at Big Ben, everyone showcasing their excellent health after a speedy operation and recovery. More than the commercial itself, I’ve always been impressed at how easily the phrase slipped into the popular culture. Now, it’s almost more proper to say, “What’s new in you?” than it is to greet someone hello. The marketing folks got a big holiday bonus for this one.
• 2) The introduction of Harry Heart and Larry Liver. I know it’s outdated, I know they’ve been marketed through the roof, that everyone’s sick to death of the cartoon and the plush toys and the theme park and the fast-food tie-ins, but I can’t help but love this rascally duo’s animated adventures. Harry and Larry’s Magical Journey was the first six-minute infocast to hit the marketplace, and it did wonders for the Union’s image. The best part was when Harry and Larry squared off in the boxing ring made out of ligaments before realizing that they worked better together than they did apart. Moral lesson for kids, right there.
• 3) “Ask me about my brain.” Probably the funniest commercial to come out of the Union marketing department, though it was actually a supply-house ad for Kenton’s first Ghost system. It’s the one with the guy who has that incredible memory and runs around town with the film undercranked, moving ten times normal speed, and when he gets back to the office and they ask him what he did, he blurts out this laundry list of his adventures without missing a beat. And like, “What’s New In You?” it created a new phrase for every artiforg patient, a way in which they could introduce their new organ into conversation. Finally, there was no shame in having an implantation.

I’m sure there are more, but these three stick out. Maybe it’s because I’ve forgotten all the others. My memory, in general, isn’t what it used to be; perhaps I should have gotten that Ghost system implanted when I had the chance. Nowadays, all I can say is Ask me about my heart, but after more than a year of that, the glamour has sort of worn thin.

 

Funnily enough, the first Credit Union commercial I ever saw was during a rerun of The Six Million Dollar Man. Not the original, or the remake, but the second remake that ran for three seasons, back when they’d first given up on original programming. The commercial was for a heart, I think, the Jarviks being ahead of the game when it came to safe implantation, and I remember being not so much surprised at the irony as I was saddened by it. The truth is, even with the excellent credit history that Steve Austin no doubt sported, there’s no way he’d get out of that hospital these days for a penny less than 12 million.

 

None of my wives had any artiforgs, with the exception of Melinda, though she did not have the implantation while we were married. Back then, she was all natural and proud of it, scoffing at the clients whose houses I visited nightly.

But when Peter was around twelve and over at my apartment during a court-ordered weekend, he let it slip that his mother had been into the hospital for some surgery.

“What sort?” I asked him.

“Kidneys,” he said innocently, with a hint of wide-eyed excitement. “She got some new ones!”

“What kind?” I asked, trying to make the question seem nonchalant. I didn’t know back then that nothing is nonchalant to a twelve-year-old.

“Gabelmans,” he replied. “My friends are so jealous.”

And that was how I found out that Melinda was packing metal. I suppose it was better for me to know then as opposed to finding out later on, but I wonder if things would have changed had Peter kept his big mouth shut.

Probably not. I would have killed her either way.

 

Bonnie had a place we could go. Rather, she had a friend who might know of a place we could go, which was good enough for me, as I was fresh out of ideas.

“So you’ll call him?” I asked her as soon as we were a few blocks away from the café. Most of my attention was taken up by the throngs of people that passed by; I inspected every one of them for the hardened grin of a Union stooge, waiting for the hum and beep of a scanner to give us away.

“No phone,” she told me. “But we can go to his place. He can probably help with my knee, too.”

“No,” I said emphatically, “we can’t trust anyone else—”

“He’s clean,” she promised. “He’s outside the Union.”

Outside the Union. This was the preferred term for a black-market artiforg dealer, and though I’d done some repo work for them, I didn’t like the type. Usually they’re ex-loan officers who score a deal with a shady buddy back at a supply house; they steal the artiforgs off the manufacturer’s shelf, then sell ’em at discount prices with cut-rate financing. The more ambitious and sleazy “Outsiders” follow licensed Bio-Repo men to their assigned jobs, then wait until they’ve done the dirty work and scurry inside to pick at the bodies for remaining parts. A Union man only takes what he’s assigned to; the Outsiders scavenge the rest.

But in terms of our personal safety, we were clean. This guy was bound to be as much on the lam as we were, and would have no interest in calling the Union down on our asses, no matter the reward money.

And what other choice did we have? We went to see the Outsider.

 

For most of my professional life, I spoke every foul word against the Outsiders that I could; they were the competition, and their tricks stole food off of our tables. Special task forces were formed every so often to search out their nests and hunt them down, but most of the time we came up empty-handed. We were the lions, and they were the vultures. But if it hadn’t been for their meddling, I never would have met Melinda.

Sixth year on the job, and Mary-Ellen was all but a memory to me, a slight twist in my stomach that could easily be put off to indigestion. Work was going well, and I’d recently been promoted to clearance level three, which meant that I would be allowed to undertake certain repossessions that previously would have been off-limits to me. This included high-level professionals and celebrity clientele, as well as repossessions under difficult extraction conditions.

To that end, my supervisor called me into his office and handed over a case file that had all the trappings of an easy night. An elderly woman, her time all but expired, had stopped payments on her Jarvik unit a few months back; the Union wanted it out before she died and ended up buried with the device. There had been situations like that before, ugly little scenarios necessitating messy exhumations that wreaked havoc in the PR department, so it was up to me to recover the unit before anything untoward occurred.

The nursing home was on the edge of town, next to some low-rent apartment buildings, a gas station catty-corner. Litter on the sidewalks, the hedges untended, cars zooming by on the busy street below. Three meals a day, all gruel, recreation room stocked with two board games missing a third of their pieces. This was where loving children sent their parents and grandparents in order to exact revenge for not getting the Auto-Go toy car they wanted for Christmas lo those many years ago.

 

Note to Peter:

Kill me if you want. That’s fine.

Hunt me down and exact revenge. Torture me. Make me scream. I’ll understand.

But if you put me in one of those places, if you hole me up in some home and keep me rocking with sixteen pills an hour, then you’re outta the will, sonny boy.

 

Mrs. Nelson’s Jarvik unit was a Model 11, one of the midrange prototypes without all the whistles and bells. Her precise artiforg information had been loaded into my scanner in order to make it easier for me to locate her among what were sure to be countless numbers of artificial organs inside the nursing home. It was futile for me to try and gas down the place; I didn’t have the ether, and the old folks weren’t about to try and fight me off. I didn’t enjoy repossessing from the elderly. Their time was short, they knew it was coming, and here I waltzed in to rob them of whatever moments they had remaining. Still, they should have paid the bills.

I took a front-door approach, walking into the lobby, shushing the front-desk girl with a simple touch of the lips. She was new. Sat straight up as I approached, fear ratcheting her to the chair. Just for fun, I flicked on the scanner. It beeped. She jumped. I blew her a kiss and moved on.

Jake had already gotten my scanner modified a few years prior, so I was able to soak in great circles of information as I walked through the hallways. It was hot, so I’d worn my black tank top that day, the Credit Union tattoo blasting out from my bare neck. Residents shuffled down the hall, some with walkers, some on their own, each looking at me and muttering, some turning away in a futile attempt to cover up their own unpaid artiforgs. “I’m not here for you,” I told those who looked the most frightened. “Go about your business.” It eased their worry. They might end up as my clients next week or next month, but there was no need to let them know that.

The pings came at me from every side, and I read off the specs as fast as I could, looking for Mrs. Nelson’s Jarvik–11. There were too many artiforgs to take in at once. Decreasing the range of the scanner, I stopped in the middle of one hall, turning in slow circles, trying to isolate. When the number 11 flashed past, I did a quick rewind and locked on. By the time the specs had flitted across my screen in full detail, I was at the room.

Two women. One old, one young. One with an artiforg, one without. One in bed, one in a chair. One sleeping, one wide awake. This wouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

The younger one, a nurse, I guessed, started in with me. “You’re in the wrong room,” she said. “Please leave.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said, “but I have a job to do for the Union. You might want to leave, yourself. It can get messy.”

She stood up to me then, came right for me, but I held my ground. We ended up nose to nose. She was tall, nearly my height, with a thin, pointed face and a head full of auburn hair. Her posture was incredible. “I know who you are and I know what you do, and I’m telling you, you’ve got the wrong room. This is Selma Johnson, and she doesn’t have what you want.”

Checked the scanner, and the old lady’s Jarvik–11 pinged back at me. Early model, no options, four chambers pumping away to eternity. Couldn’t draw a serial number or name, for some reason, but recalibrated scanners were known to malfunction in certain areas. Give and take of technology.

“She’s got the Jarvik–11 I’ve come for,” I said, trying to circle around the nurse and make my way to the woman on the bed, “and I need to get it back before nightfall. It’s a job, lady.”

“I know it’s a job, but you’re still wrong, you knucklehead.” This was the first time Melinda ever used her pet name for me, and even then, long before we would marry, it sent chills of pleasure down my spine.

This was also when I learned how stubborn my third ex-wife could be. I could have just Tasered her into unconsciousness, I know, but something in me let the conversation go on without electrical stimuli. It was as if I wanted to fight with this woman. It set off the pleasure centers in my brain, like arguing with her was something I’d been missing all my life.

Carol’s therapist had a field day with that one.

 

“It’s an Outsider implant,” Melinda said finally. “All right? You can’t take it back for the Union because it’s not theirs.”

“It scans the same—”

“Oh, and no one has the same artiforg,” she said sarcastically. “Can you pull a serial number off of it?”

“Well,” I began, “no, but—”

“Because it’s black market. I know—I helped her find the Outsider to do it.” I was stunned—most people are too frightened to talk to Bio-Repo men in the first place, let alone admit to steering others toward Outside help. But this girl—this woman—was a cyclone of righteousness. Suddenly, the room was hot.

“Do you want to go grab some lunch?” I asked her.

“Will it get you to leave the room?”

“Yes.”

“Then yes, I would,” said Melinda.

And, after she led me up three flights of stairs to Mrs. Nelson’s semiprivate suite and stood by with her arms folded as I repossessed the Jarvik–11 that did, indeed, belong to the Credit Union, my third ex-wife and I went on our first official date. We sat in a booth and ate sandwiches and talked about the day. I left the heart in the glove compartment.

 

Speaking of life-changing meals:

Three days after the war ended was the first time I ate any African food. We’d been stationed there for nigh on two years, and not counting the meals in the field, that would have given us approximately 212 chances to sample the native cuisine. Not once did we try it, though, until those days just after the war.

We reached Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, well after nightfall, rolling our tanks down the narrow, rocky streets, waving to the surprised townies as our heavy metal crushed their roads into rubble. Me and a few of the other guys who’d driven the last few clicks into town were given forty-eight hours to party it up in a city that hadn’t seen a disco ball during its thousands of years of existence, but we made it our mission to find some exhilarating way in which to celebrate the end of the African conflict.

They did not have a red light district. That was fine by me. I didn’t need another wife.

But we did find an all-night eatery, a tight, curtain-lined restaurant that served great, heaping bowls of steaming meat covered in a succulent sauce. Potato-like vegetables swam in the mixture, their unpeeled knobby brown roots scratching at my throat as they went down. The meat was tough, gamey, but satisfying, and even when one of the gunners who spoke a little Afrikaans figured out it was goat, I kept on chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing. This is what I should have been doing all those nights in those little desert townships, I thought as the stew filled me up, warming me from the inside. The waiters kept coming, bringing plate after plate after plate—even as I was suddenly shamed because I’d been eating so ethnophobically all the way through the war—and I sucked it all down like a crash dieter given one last reprieve.

Twelve hours later, I was doubled over a good old U.S. toilet, revisiting my repast, as was every other man who ate in that god-awful establishment. We may have ruined their homeland, but they took out our digestive tracts.

 

Something took out Bonnie’s, as well. On the way out of the café, I badgered her into letting me guess at three more organs, and this time, I went internal. Stomach, liver, kidneys.

“My stomach”—Bonnie sighed as if it bored her—“is a Kenton ES/18, Lady Mystique model, with a three-point-two-cup capacity. The model I purchased was the best at the time, but it doesn’t have an expansion/contraction regulator like the new ones. Still, after I eat enough food to fill the artiforg, it sends a message up to the esophagus—which, since it’s part of the whole system, I might as well let you know is also from Kenton—and effectively shuts down the swallowing muscles of my throat. It also happens to be robin’s-egg blue, my favorite color. The unit was on sale the day I went in for the surgery, and we secured a loan directly from Kenton at twenty-two point six percent.

“My liver is a Hexa-Tan, which is a specialized supply house out of Denmark. It doesn’t do anything other than clean the toxins out of my system, and the loan came through a number of international intermediaries working with the Credit Union, financed at thirty-four point two percent, with a point-one-percent drop every year due to excellent payment history.

“And my kidneys…my kidneys are two different models. The left one is a Credit Union generic, twenty-four percent flat, and it’s been starting to run down a bit recently, but my insurance has lapsed and I can’t get into the hospital to have them take a look at it. The right one, which was implanted six months later, is top-of-the-line Taihitsu, with every option included, from a built-in ketone monitor for diabetics to this little device that adds a nontoxic dye to the urine so I can fool my friends into thinking I’m pissing out blood or blueberry juice or whatever. I haven’t used that option yet. Either way, the loan was eighteen point two percent, the lowest on my body.”

I had a feeling she could go on forever.

 

Taxi drivers are notorious for snitching to the Union; some make more than 90 percent of their take-home pay from reward fees. I had a network of cabbies on my personal payroll, fellows who didn’t mind hauling in a couple of extra bucks by getting on the horn and alerting me to where they’d dropped off a wanted client. Now, if they recognized a face and really wanted to pull in the dough, the smart ones took a “shortcut” to wherever the client asked to go, and a few minutes later pulled up at the Union back door instead. I’d be at the curb with a short-range Taser long before the deadbeat figured out that this was his time to make like a gazelle.

One time, just a couple of days before the end, when Wendy was leaning on me hard to transfer over to sales, we had a barbeque over at the house. Just me, Jake, Frank, a couple of the other repo guys from down at the shop, throwing a football and shooting the shit. There was beer, hot dogs, steaks, a fun afternoon to be had by all. Peter had even shown up; by that point, he was already in school, and Melinda had gone off on some trip or another and hadn’t come back yet. We were starting to get concerned, me and Peter, but Melinda had a habit of doing that sort of thing; she’d show up in a few weeks, no doubt, talking about her latest jaunt to Peru or how she helped out an indigenous family in Louisiana.

So there we were, kicking back and relaxing, when a call came in. I answered it to find a cab driver I used as a frequent snitch on the line; he said that his engine was running a little hot, which was his code that he wanted to make a delivery to the Union.

“I’m not at work,” I explained, waving to Wendy, who stood nearby talking to Peter. “It’s not a good time.”

“I think it’s running at least a six or seven,” said the taxi driver. Six or seven months overdue, according to the un-licensed scanner I’d given him a few years back. That was bound to be worth some serious money to the Union, even if it wasn’t one of my official assignments. I didn’t need the cash, but it’s hard to turn down bills when they come straight at you like that.

“Outside in five minutes,” I said, and gave him my home address.

I hung up and returned to Wendy and Peter, giving my wife a peck on the cheek. “I’ve got to run out for a few minutes, pick up some more beer. Be back in a flash.”

I nodded over to Jake, across the backyard, who instantly picked up on the situation and followed me through the house and out the front door. He’d grabbed the filet knife from the grill, the blade dripping with beefy juices.

“Isn’t that a little unsanitary?” I pointed out.

“So we’ll shoot him up with antibiotics.” Jake always had an answer. “Heads up, here they come.”

The cab roared into the driveway and screeched to a halt, and the fare was already freaking out. He barely had time to bark out a “no” before we had the door open and hit him with a Taser. As Jake and I worked, locating and reclaiming a half-year-overdue kidney, I could see the cabbie peering at us in the rearview mirror, watching us do our thing.

I tossed him two hundred bucks for the delivery, and an extra fifty to get rid of the body. But as I pulled myself out of the cab, BBQ apron bloody and stained, I saw Wendy standing at the front door, watching the entire scene with a look of disappointment on her face. She turned on her heel and headed back inside.

“Come on, baby,” I called out, “don’t be like that. It’s only a kidney.”

“Yeah,” Jake added. “He’s got another one.”

 

So Bonnie and I were loath to risk our lives by hopping a taxi to her friend’s place. And since it was clear across town, and walking a hundred blocks with a duffel bag full of artillery was out of the question, public transportation became the only option. One of the first things they taught us in repo training is that subways make a great place for deadbeats to hide, because the crush of people makes it difficult for a scanner to isolate one artiforg from the rest. Density was what we needed; we headed underground.

I suggested hopping the entrance carousel; instead, Bonnie once again paid for us both, and we walked onto the platform like genteel citizens. I didn’t know how much loose change she had on her, but I imagined that it all must have been of the nickel-and-dime variety; otherwise, she’d have bagged ’em, tagged ’em, and paid off those organs long ago.

 

Sixth year on the job, and I was sent by the BreatheIt Corporation into a housing project in order to repo a pair of lungs. BreatheIt was a new supply house at the time, and rumor was that a majority of their capital had come from certain extra-legal sources who were interested in laundering their money to a golden shine. I didn’t care; they were paying me a commission 6 percent higher than standard Union rates, so I was happy to shut up and do the job with a smile.

I’d been to housing projects all around the country, of course; as a Bio-Repo man, you live practically every working day in some diseased pit or another. But Reagan Heights was one of the worst, vermin-speaking, that I’d seen in a long time. It was like the rats rented the place, only they had a bad human infestation. I double-parked my car in what was essentially an automobile graveyard, ancient rusted domestics from forty years ago left to rot away into three-wheeled heaven.

The Federal HUD had long since been disbanded, of course, and the state-funded departments that sprang up in its place never quite got on the ball in terms of bringing functional aesthetics to the ghetto. I walked past towering high-rises competing for space with small, low-slung duplexes and blocking out their light, depriving the whole ugly mess of any sense of coherency. Pinks and greens and yellows, all faded, all chipping, fought with the browns of the untended, out-of-control lawns, and the building names and street numbers had all but fallen off of the stucco, making identification difficult, if not impossible.

But I knew where I was going. I’d followed the guy home from the porn shop.

Couldn’t gas down the place, because his duplex was connected to others via a common air shaft, and I’d heard the high-pitched clatter of children nearby. The last thing a new company like BreatheIt needed was to gas a couple of kids onto the evening news. I picked the lock, slipped in the front door, and found the deadbeat in an easy chair, preparing to pleasure himself.

I waited in the shadows, watching as he placed the nudie mag on the rickety end table, unbuttoned his filthy jeans, and pulled them down to his ankles. Immobility.

“Breathing okay?” I asked as I stepped into the light. The client fell hard into the chair, shoulders shaking. I lunged out with a flashlight, shining it into his eyes, forcing him to scrunch up his face. Pantsless, shaking, squinting—this could not have been his finest moment.

“I—I’ll call the cops—” he stuttered, making feeble attempts to reach a phone halfway across the room. I pulled out a Luger I was fond of at the time, complete with a long-barreled silencer, and shot the phone three times before it fell to the floor, smoking.

“You’ve got some property that doesn’t belong to you anymore,” I explained, calmly removing the paperwork from the inside pocket of my leather jacket, “and I’m here to take it back.” As long as there was no ether involved, it was always easier if you could get the clients to sign off on their own repossessions—less red tape back at the office—but it was a rare occurrence.

Now, either this guy was on narcotics or I wasn’t looking as fierce as usual that night, because the son of a bitch actually tried to fight me off. As I approached the trembling man, yellow receipt and pen in one hand, Luger in the other, he leaned back in the chair and kicked out with his naked legs, landing a solid shot to my midsection. I doubled over.

It only took a second to recover, but by then he’d managed to waddle out of the easy chair and hop for the far bedroom. Reaching down to my boot, I lashed out with the Taser, the darts soaring across the room and slamming into the door frame just as he leaped through. Sighing, I calmly strolled to the door, reloaded the Taser gun with two fresh darts, and entered the bedroom.

And there he was, sitting on the floor, still in his skivvies, cracking open jar after jar of loose change. It was a swimming pool of nickels and dimes, cascading around his legs in tinkling waterfalls. “I got—I got the money,” he stammered. “It’s all here, right here.”

“I’m not counting that.”

“I’ll count it,” he whined.

“And I’m not trusting you.” My first move was for the Taser, but a niggling thought soon stopped me. I didn’t quite remember BreatheIt’s policy on late payments. Kenton, for example, would rather the Bio-Repo man take the money, if in full, than repo the organ. I didn’t want to botch my first job for this new supply house, and I didn’t want to call the office and profess my ignorance on the matter. So I played it safe.

An hour later, and we were at a local bank. I’d stolen some pillowcases from some of Reagan Heights’ more absent tenants and made the guy fill them with his change. Sixteen pillowcases, all told, and I held him at gunpoint while he dragged the change up to the bank’s bulletproof window. The teller wasn’t too keen on counting change that hadn’t already been rolled, but I had a nice discussion with the bank manager, and after dispensing a few free artiforg credits, all was settled. We were given a helpful V.P. to assist us in a back room.

According to the receipt, the deadbeat’s bill, with late payment penalties and all, came to just over sixteen thousand dollars. The kicker is, he almost made it.

“Fifteen thousand, eight hundred and twelve,” said the kind woman with the bouffant hairdo. “And forty-five cents.”

The client was thrilled. His face, previously blanched of color, returned to a normal hue, and I thought for a moment he was going to hug me. “Take it,” he said, pushing the mounds of change toward me. “Take it all, and I promise to pay every month.”

“You’re two hundred short,” I pointed out. “That’s not payment in full.”

He started screaming then, shrieking like an alarm siren, begging the bank teller to help him, but she wisely scooted out of the room as I brought the Taser to full power. The bank employees were good enough to stay out of my way during the fifteen-minute extraction, and as I shuffled out of the bank with both BreatheIt lungs still pumping away beneath my arms, they told me not to worry about the mess, that they’d clean up.

I could have loaned him the two hundred bucks, I guess, but I had a feeling that the guy wouldn’t be good for it.

 

Sometimes, despite my best efforts, I allow trust to jump the fence and play for my team. Trusted my wives; that worked out swell. Trusted my staff sergeant; good sense there. Trusted my boss and my friends at the Union; jury’s still out on that one.

 

“You want to know how I got here,” Bonnie said to me once we were on the subway. It wasn’t a question, and she was correct.

“Tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

We kissed on it. Our first. A light peck, lip to lip, the electric hum of her tongue stopping just short of mine. We were the only folks on this side of the train—number one and number twelve on the Union’s Hundred Most Wanted List, a fortune in flesh and metal waiting for any smart snitch to get a glimpse—yet we were somehow able to relax enough to stretch out across the seats, lean back, and tell our tales.

Bonnie went first:

 

She had been a housewife, plain and simple, the loving spouse of a Union-registered surgeon, an internist who specialized in quick, nearly painless pancreas and kidney implantations. They had a lovely home in the hills and a winter cabin in Park City that wasn’t too big, wasn’t too small, but was perfect for short ski trips with friends. She and her husband owned three imported automobiles, one domestic convertible muscle car to tool around in on the weekends, and a small sailboat they kept in a rented slip up in Vero Beach. They had no children of their own, but showered their love and affection on their nieces and nephews, planning elaborate birthday parties and holiday trips, purchasing toys and clothes and games for them, waiting for the day when the little red line on the early-pregnancy detector would finally turn into a plus sign, and Bonnie could give birth to the child of their dreams. The obstetrician said it would come any day now, as long as they held a positive attitude and kept trying. “Have a lot of sex,” he told them. And they followed doctor’s orders.

Two years passed, then three, and though they’d had enough sex to make it a chore, there was nothing. That’s when the tests began, long complicated procedures involving tubes and blood and needles. “I was a baked potato,” Bonnie said to me on that subway train. “They kept poking me to see if I was done.”

One afternoon during the third year, as Bonnie was doing her weekly shopping in the local grocery store, she felt something warm and wet running down her leg. Her first thoughts went to blood, mucus, any of the signs of miscarriage she’d come across so many times these last few years. But as she looked down at her pants, she realized in horror that it was urine, and that she had no way of stopping the flow.

That’s when the tests really intensified, and that’s when they found the growth. The cancer had begun not in Bonnie’s bladder, but in her uterus, and the only way to stop the spread, they told her, was to remove the uterus and bladder at once, replacing them with top-of-the-line artiforgs from Kenton. Her husband, a wealthy man with an excellent credit history who loved his wife very much, quickly convinced her that this could be the only sane, rational course of action.

“They opened me up,” Bonnie said. “And they put ’em in. They said the artificial uterus was better than the real thing, that it had special womb-forming gen-assists built into the lining, that I’d be pregnant before I turned around, but I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it.”

And it wasn’t. The cancer spread.

By the time she went back for a checkup, malignant cells had taken over her ovaries, destroying the eggs along with their nest. Emergency oophorectomy. Now they had that cancer beat, they told her, and even though Bonnie’s eggs were gone, the scientists assured her that they could find a way to combine some of her DNA with her husband’s sperm, and as long as they found a suitable egg donor, the two of them could still be natural parents.

Until her stomach went, too. And her liver, and her pancreas. And her spleen and her kidneys and…

They’d never seen anything like it, they said; the cancer moved in a blitzkrieg, storming each part of her body, seemingly taking it without a fight. Her organs were France, and the cancer ravaged the countryside of her body.

But the faster the disease spread, the faster her husband ordered new artiforgs, securing loan after loan after loan for his dear, dying wife. Two more years passed in this way, her days filled with trips to the hospital and supply houses, her natural organs replaced one by one with perfectly designed replicas, as good as or better than the originals.

By the time they were all done, by the time the cancer truly had been excised from her body, Bonnie was 74-percent artificial.

 

“My skin is my own,” she told me, “and a lot of the fatty tissues, lucky me. I got to keep one breast, and for the other they implanted a Quattrofil, inflated to look exactly like the real one, only it’s got a refillable milk pouch to help me breast-feed more naturally. Ha. A lot of my bones are natural, but they said that as I got older and osteoporosis took over, I’d need to have those replaced, too, or the titanium support beams that make up the rest of my body might overwhelm my whole frame. The skull is mine, though most of the sensory sections of my brain are shot through with Ghost wires, and around half of my tactile experiences are stored in a suspension gel accessed by a solid-state processor. Sometimes, when I’m thinking really hard, I can hear my memories squishing around for space. The infrastructure is all there, but it needed a lot of reinforcement.

“Basically,” she said, “I was retrofitted back to life.”

 

But here’s the best part:

“And your organs…” I asked, “the big ones…?”

“All artiforgs—with one exception. The cancer raced through my body, hitting everything it could, but for some reason it left my heart alone. Every time they opened me up, they expected to have to fit me with a Jarvik, but the cells in there stayed pure. Still, the doctors wanted to set me up with one, figuring if the rest of my body could live to a hundred and fifty, why not my heart, but I refused. If it hadn’t been touched by the cancer, then I didn’t want it out. The doctors were reluctant, but they couldn’t go against my wishes. My husband tried to talk me into it—what’s another artiforg in a body filled with them, right? But I can be bull-moose stubborn when I want, and the discussion was over before it started. So that’s where I am today—real heart, fake container.”

I laughed then, loud and clear, my first good laugh in months. It started low, in my belly, and exploded up through my mouth, startling Bonnie and drawing the attention of the few other passengers who’d boarded the train. But I didn’t care—I laughed and laughed until my sides ached, unable to explain to Bonnie why it was all so damned funny.

I had an artificial heart. She had an artificial everything else. No wonder we connected from the start. Me and her, we were the perfect jigsaw puzzle.