Present day, present time, and my heart rate is back to normal—the audible series of beeps from the remote control welded onto my hip tells me I’ve reentered acceptable ranges—and I imagine my adrenaline levels have cooled from their nuclear-reactor fury. Hard night tonight. Hard night every night, but this is one for the books.

I went out this afternoon, a little reconnaissance mission into the heart of enemy territory. To be fair, pretty much any place outside of this stinking twenty-by-twenty room is enemy territory, but this time we’re talking the big HQ, the see-and-don’t-be-seen, the pigeon-in-the-hole:

I went to the Mall. Dangerous digs, no doubt, but it’s a necessary evil predicated by my own seclusion. When it comes to staying alive for any length of time, playing badger is no way to survive. In order to run from the Union, a nearly impossible feat to sustain for any length of time, you have to know where they’re looking, how they’re looking, who they’re using to look. Every Bio-Repo man has his own style, his own way of smoking out the bees, and if you know who’s on your tail, there’s that much more of a chance that you can blow the fumes right back in his face.

The “non-collection” rate for the Credit Union runs about .2 percent. That’s one “escape” for every five hundred welshers, and those odds are regularly stated in big, bold ink at the bottom of every page of every artiforg contract. They must be initialed and signed in duplicate after a trained Credit Union reading clerk has dictated them aloud and ascertained that the client has, indeed, understood the nature of his debt to the Union, as well as the odds of his escaping the Union’s clutches should he decide to flee with his as-yet-unpaid-for organ into some far-flung territory.

During my time with the Union, my personal non-collection rate was 0.0. That’s a doughnut followed by a bullet hole, and it’s a number that won me acclaim in the department as well as with the national Union reps. No one got off free and clear, and even those who evaded me for a year, two years, three at most, eventually wound up flopping around on a floor somewhere, wondering with their last thoughts how I’d finally tracked them down.

That’s until the end, of course, but I don’t think that one slipup counted. Then again, I hope it did. I’d hate to have ended my career as a Bio-Repo man without even one blemish on my record. No one should be too good at this job.

 

Some years ago, the Mall used to be a sprawling pedestrian marketplace in the heart of the city’s west side, a mecca for trinkets and overpriced semi-designer clothes, much like any other consumer factory in any other town. Mothers scooted their children from store to store in bright red strollers provided by the management, girlfriends searched for gifts for their boyfriends, boyfriends searched for edible panties to force on their girlfriends, a lot of cash was transferred from hand to grimy hand, and all was right in suburbia.

The Credit Union was still in its infancy when the Kurtzman supply house bought out a doublewide storefront previously owned by The Gap and, two months later, opened the doors to the first artificial organ walk-in service station. E-Z Credit, open to the public, no qualified customer turned away. Atop the Kurtzman Walk-In sign, a bright neon heart—not the cartoonish Valentine’s symbol, but an accurate representation of the bulbous, vein-ridden organ—pulsed in crimson and pink, the tubing flashing in a steady, even rhythm. And in time, as if to match the cadence, a singsong chant emanated from hidden speakers, the tune wafting its way through the Mall, luring customers like cartoon dogs inexorably drawn to the smell of fresh-baked pies. Let’s all go to Kurztman’s, let’s all go to Kurtzman’s, let’s all go to Kurtzman’s, where a lifetime can be yours…

The lines were out the door within an hour.

 

Arnold Kurtzman, who made his initial fortune recycling old NBA basketballs into cut-rate inner tubes before shifting his assets to the artiforg business, was a short, plump, balding man who never failed to attract the most dizzying array of young, beautiful women to his side. He was also a liar, a thief, a bad karaoke singer with a worse temper, and an absolute devotee of the French cinema. But despite these voluminous negatives, the man had a checkbook the size of the Eiffel Tower, and the cash he spread around kept him groin-deep in female flesh for nearly all of his life.

Frank, my boss at the Credit Union, had a genetic dislike of Arnold Kurtzman that went far beyond professional envy, and he passed the hatred down to me. It didn’t help that we all attended the same conferences, were forced to sit through his endless, patronizing speeches during interminable seminars. There were few creatures on Earth I disliked more than that foul-tempered, spittle-lipped old man, which is probably why I lobbied for the job of ripping out Kurtzman’s artificial lungs two years after his business and bank accounts went belly-up.

I was tickled to no end when I found him in a ramshackle motel, roaches crawling over his bloated, sweaty body, his brain partially eaten away by whatever syphilitic diseases had taken hold, his only belongings scattered in a pathetic pile on the stained carpet next to the bed. There wasn’t a woman in sight.

 

Kurtzman’s walk-in supply house was an instant hit with the public, his A Lifetime Can Be Yours motto the buzzwords on everyone’s tongue—both real and polyplastic—and it wasn’t long before the other artiforg manufacturers were angling for their own little piece of the Mall. Gabelman, Kenton, Taihitsu—they lay in wait like snipers in the underbrush, biding their time until a retail space came up for lease; then, at one minute past midnight on the day in question, they would descend upon the Mall leasing office like storm troopers in blitzkrieg and throw wads of cash at the rental agents until they cracked beneath the green, green pressure and informed Banana Republic or Pottery Barn that their time together, though fruitful, had drawn to a close.

The unions and artiforg manufacturers swept like a tidal wave through the Mall, demolishing everything in their path. Soon the entire third floor of the place was filled with supply houses, with the exception of one holdout company, The Greatest Cookie Ever. This was a rocking little bakery that served a regular clientele with custom-baked erotic dessert treats, and—go figure—they somehow had the cash to match the supply houses when it came to lease-renewal time.

Nowadays, they’re The Greatest Cookies and Organs Ever, and they do a brisk business in artificial taste buds.

 

Earlier this afternoon, the Mall (recapitalized some years back by overwhelming vote of the aggregate supply houses leasing office space) was an anthill of activity, medically challenged petitioners scurrying this way and that among the storefronts, trying to get someone, anyone, to give them a line of credit. There are no more holdouts inside the Mall, no last-ditch efforts to sell clothing or shoes or pastries of any sort. It’s all artiforgs now, and it’s the place to get up and go when your body won’t.

The Credit Union sports the largest of the storefronts, a big gleaming portal practically slapping you across the face as soon as you walk in from the parking structure. Technicolor lights stream about the entryway, drawing customers inside, leading them down the path to a new, improved way of life. Ponce de León be damned—the new Fountain of Youth is inside a shopping mall.

Harry the Heart and Larry the Lung, two of the more popular Credit Union mascots, were out in force this afternoon, dancing in the way that only overstuffed, underpaid teenagers dressed up as artificial organs can dance. There’s no sound box on these things—it’s not like the ones they have down at the Union theme park (motto: Where Entertainment and Rejuvenation Meet)—so the two cartoon characters spent most of their time waving at the customers, tapping their shoes against the mall’s tiled floor. At one point, Harry entertained a group of cancer patients by launching into a jump-roping act using a prop aorta while Larry the Lung clapped in time to the music.

I dated the girl who played Patty Pancreas once, but the relationship didn’t take. Every time she climbed into that costume I had to fight back the urge to rip her right out again.

 

I left most of my weapons in the hotel this afternoon; it’s hard enough to get through the weapons detectors without worrying about loose scalpels falling out of my pockets. Even in the city, it’s the kind of thing that might attract suspicion.

I chose the Mauser, one of my smaller handguns, and loaded it with enough ammunition to get me out of a moderate jam. Should I find myself up against a Bio-Repo man, I told myself this morning—even two—three, if they’re fresh meat newly culled from the short training program—I will not hesitate to blast my way to safety. Should I find myself up against more than that, or even a single Level Five Bio-Repo, I will run like a roach with the lights turned on.

Turns out I was being optimistic. Go figure.

 

The weapons-detection device at the Mall was easy enough to beat, though it’s a sad state of affairs when you can sneak through any object as metallic as a semi-automatic German handgun. I followed my plan, culled from years of collected tricks and treats:

On the way downtown, I jumped into a china store and pilfered a leaded-crystal vase, along with an attending box from the trash Dumpster outside. My movements were swift and assured, but it didn’t preclude me from taking momentary glances over my shoulder or executing 180-degree spins to check for tails. For all I knew, a team of Bio-Repo men could have been waiting for me just beyond the next corner, ready to snatch me up in their arms, throw me into the back of a waiting van, and end it all right there and then. I didn’t think I’d been spotted or followed, but that’s the lure of many a talented repossessor. Silence is bait.

A quick ride on public transport—here the odds of being recognized dropped considerably, as the hangdog faces inside the bus didn’t even look up as I entered, more concerned with their own misery than that of a fellow sad sack—and soon I was a block away from the Mall, a massive structure faced in beige travertine sprawling across 200,000 square feet of prime real estate. Word was they knocked down a V.A. hospital for this place, memorial stones and all. A steady stream of customers poured in and out of electric sliding doors set into the three-story structure; those entering did so with looks of determination and not a little anxiety, while those leaving were broken into two camps: smiles and tears. Hey, that’s the breaks—sometimes you get a loan, sometimes you don’t. But thanks to today’s no-equity credit application, it’s the rare down-on-his-luck sap who doesn’t qualify for at least a bladder at semi-usurious rates.

Stooping by a small hedge, I unearthed the Mauser from within the folds of my jacket and buried it beneath an outcropping of leaves, digging the barrel into the dirt, using the gun like a miniature shovel. Standing up again, I strode purposefully toward the Mall, making sure to place the proper look of pain, degradation, and anticipatory humiliation on my face. The fake mustache and beard I wore were affixed with a strong resin that I had fished out of the trash behind a costume shop, and I hoped that it wouldn’t give way to a firm tug by a security guard, let alone a strong burst of wind.

“All packages on the belt,” droned the X-ray tech. I was twelve back in line, the lone metal detector able to accommodate only one customer at a time. Behind me, a young man held a small shih tzu dog to his chest; the fluffy thing panted heavily, its fur undulating with each breath.

“He’s not feeling well,” said the guy, noticing my stare. People rarely brought their animals with them into the Mall; it was very low class and generally frowned upon to drag a pet into any credit department. Loan officers were not impressed with man’s best friend. “He needs a lung.”

“Who does?” I asked.

“Muffin.” He nodded down to the dog, and the thing stared up at me pathetically, big brown eyes rolled back in its head. “Yes, that’s right,” the man cooed to his ball of fur. “We’re gonna get you a biddie widdle lung.”

“What’s that cost?” I asked. I’d heard of people getting artiforgs for their pets, but that was mostly celebrities who could afford to fund in cold, hard cash.

The man shook his head, saying, “I don’t know yet. The vet told me he could set up a payment plan at eighteen hundred a month, but I thought I’d get a second bid.”

“Good luck,” I told him, then turned back to my place in line. Good luck, indeed. No union or supply house is going to extend credit to a guy who’s only got his goddamned dog to lose.

The linchpin of the artiforg credit system is that all equity rides within the body itself. That way, when it comes time to foreclose, there’s no way for the client to cut and run.

 

“Box on the belt, sir.” The X-ray tech motioned for me to drop my package on the conveyor, and I gladly did so. Taking a step through the metal detector—the Mauser still hidden beneath that shrub outside—I came up clean and reached for my package on the other side.

My hand was grabbed, held. “What’s in the box, sir?” A new guard, this one outfitted with a gun of his own. There were no external markings on his uniform to distinguish him from the woman still sitting on her butt five feet away, but I had a feeling he’d been trained to use that revolver with some degree of competence.

“A birthday gift,” I explained. “For my credit advisor.” This was commonplace, in fact, and not in the least out of the ordinary. In order to secure a line of credit or more favorable interest rates, customers often brought lavish bribes to their advisors, disguising them as birthday and holiday presents so as not to alarm the higher-ups. Of course, everyone knew it was going on, and everyone tolerated it, because the advisors would throw some of that booty up to their supervisors, who would, in turn, toss a few crumbs to their own managers. The series of kickbacks was endless, a thick layer of grease facilitating the slide up and down the pyramid. It was like Amway, only not quite as cutthroat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

“You again.”

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

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

“The vase.”

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

I could wait all day.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

It didn’t, I later found out.

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

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

“They’re Tasers,” she said plainly.

“Tasers.”

“To stun people.”

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

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

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

“Tasers are good?”

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“Your waist size. What is it?”

“Twenty-eight,” he said.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Lifetime Can Be Yours!

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 5s and 55s and 555s, 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.

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.”