The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (3 page)

“Nope.” The girl is still sailing on yellow dream, but she has her wits about her. It’s a good combination. She’ll go through the routine without arousing too much suspicion.

Lane and Sabrina round the corner back onto Foster and come to a deserted storefront with soaped windows. “This is it,” Sabrina announces. The door is unlocked, and they walk into an open space with a warped wooden floor populated with the posts and ropes of a queuing system, which is now empty. At the end of the maze, a steel-lined doorway leads down a short hall bathed in feeble white light from the overheads. As they duck under the ropes to shortcut through the maze, Lane hears a mechanical thumping coming from the floor above and smells the pungent solvents and inks of a printing plant.

He’s hit it. He’s found the bank, where debit card balances turn into crow money. More important, he’s found the mint where the money is printed.

Now they can see the length of the hall, which is guarded by the arch of a metal detector
with a security camera mounted on top. In the space beyond, a man sits at an old metal desk, a slender man in a cheap suit and Ivy League tie. He gives them a sour stare as they advance down the confines of the hall. The pale yellow walls are smeared with a cloud of grime at child level and a jungle of graffiti above, a spontaneous documentation of boredom in the extreme.

As they near the metal detector, Lane can see that the clerk is flanked by two men who slouch arrogantly in metal folding chairs. They wear the car coats and wool slacks of the Bad Boys, with the coat collars turned up and fronts left open with the big wooden buttons hanging limp. One wears lensless glasses with black plastic frames that are highly compressed along the horizontal, giving him an Asian cast.

They ignore the girl and focus on Lane, and he knows what they see. They are looking at a middle-aged man of six feet who is in better shape than a middle-aged man should be, a handsome man whose thick brown hair is salted with just a hint of gray, a man whose bright eyes devour the detail around him and convert it into a physical calculus of self-protection.

He puts them on edge, but he doesn’t care. He’ll do the deal, present his card, get his crow money, and get out. He already has what he needs: the physical location of the Bird’s bank, the central terminal in his financial operations. Back downtown, they’ll use the data to set up a surgical strike to take out the operation. A sudden storm of men, machines, and weapons will race through the facility and lay waste to the computers, the microwave links, the presses, and the networks.

“One at a time!” the clerk shouts in a voice of castrated authority. “Girl first.”

Sabrina advances through the metal detector and places her card in a slot on a raised spot on the desktop. The Bad Boy with the glasses continues to watch Lane while his partner eyes the girl. Lane looks back down the doorless hall, which is only two people wide. He has to admit it makes for good security, minimizing the strength of any frontal assault on the banking room.

The debit card Sabrina inserts has a ten-dollar balance, her compensation after a 50 percent cut to the Bird. When the card is fully inserted, the display activates and a floating image shudders into view a foot above the desk. A duplicate logo appears and does its serpentine fold in three dimensions as the clerk watches. The card is legit. Then a column of figures materializes, with a blinking line at the bottom showing the card’s balance.

“Five bucks,” the clerk announces. His voice is picked up by an invisible microphone, and the figures change on the screen to show a zero balance. At the same time, the logo image unknots, and a whirring sound comes from inside the desk. At the front, five bills in crow money spit out into a curved trough.

Sabrina turns away and starts out. “Say, how much pussy does five bucks buy?” the clerk asks with a leering grin. “Can you tell me that, sweetheart? I don’t get out much anymore.”

The two Bad Boys respond with minor grunts that approximate a chuckle and the clerk
belches out a disgusting giggle. Sabrina ignores it, walks past Lane and on down the hall. She’s done. She’s gone.

“Okay, big boy,” the clerk says to Lane. “Whaddya got?”

Lane already has his card out as he shuffles through the metal detector. The Bad Boy with the glasses comes out of his slouch and straightens in his chair. His hands stay in his coat pockets, one of which undoubtedly holds a cocked pistol of medium caliber. Lane senses trouble, but can’t pin it down. He puts the card in the slot and watches the display come up with its contorted logo dance.

“Seventy-five bucks,” the clerk announces. “Big guy, big money.” He looks up at Lane as the cash lands in the trough. “Big guy. Right?”

Rather than acknowledge the humor of this little clerical martinet and prolong the exchange, Lane simply puts on a faint grin and reaches for the money. Then it all goes wrong.

“Hey, buddy,” the Bad Boy with glasses says as he comes to his feet. “Where’s your lobe? How come you ain’t sportin’ the lobe?”

Lane’s heart jumps, a quick pre-atrial contraction. He knows immediately what’s happened. He’s forgotten to put on his cover lobe after removing his real one. The cover lobe was issued by the department and recovered at the end of the assignment. It was, of course, a vast work of data fiction. A square centimeter of false information polished to high gloss, installed in a fashionable setting of platinum and worn as an earring. Birth records, school records, medical records, résumés, taxes, finances, felonies, genome profile. It was all there.

But somehow Lane had forgotten, and his naked earlobe was screaming trouble to the Bad Boy. But no time to worry. He gauges the distance between himself and his adversary. Too far. And now the other one is coming to his feet. He has to stall until the position is right. His best move is to go on the offensive.

“You didn’t scan the girl. How come you gotta scan me?”

The clerk smiles and settles back like someone anticipating a critically acclaimed piece of entertainment. “Seen the girl around,” he smugly explains. “Never seen you around.”

“Doesn’t mean I haven’t been around,” Lane shoots back. “Just means you haven’t seen me.”

“Don’t think so,” the clerk replies. “Think I’ve seen just about everybody.” He turns to the Bad Boy with the glasses, who stands several feet to Lane’s right. “Wouldn’t you say so, boy?”

“Yeah, I’d say so,” Mr. Glasses offers. He shoots Lane a nasty smile and moves forward. “I think we better have a little talk about this, friend. And I think we’ll start with you putting your hands behind your head.”

Because of the metal detector, they’ve assumed Lane isn’t armed. As he crosses his hands
behind his neck, his thumb and forefinger reach down his shirt collar and close on a slender plastic cylinder holding a single charge of pressurized pepper spray.

Lane glances to his left and sees the second Bad Boy on his feet, hand jammed in his gun pocket but not moving. It’ll be close but he can do it. If he doesn’t, he’s a dead man. The police don’t recover bodies anymore. They just cancel your contract and put the balance due back into the operating budget.

Mr. Glasses comes forward to check Lane’s pockets. As he moves into range, Lane draws the pepper spray out of his shirt and brings it front and center. Mr. Glasses raises a hand toward his head for protection, but it’s too late. Lane squeezes hard on the tube and the burning mist rockets out, bursts through the empty glasses frames, and saturates both of the Bad Boy’s corneas. As he howls in pain, Lane lets go of the tube, steps forward and reaches into the man’s coat pocket for the gun he knows is there.

By now, the second man has come to his senses and drawn a pistol. Lane feels the gun handle in the pocket of Mr. Glasses and pulls the weapon free. At the same time, Mr. Glasses lurches in agony, cups his eyes, and spins to face the second man.

“Shoot him!” the clerk screams at the man.

Reflexively, the armed man obeys in a panic and fires three shots from a medium-caliber automatic. The bullets rip through Mr. Glasses’s torso, leaving foaming tunnels of wasted tissue through the lungs, heart, and liver. One bullet lodges in the spine, but two others exit out the back just as Lane starts to bring his gun up. The bullets smack his multilayered vest hard enough to knock him back a few inches, but not enough to stop him from taking aim before he loses the temporary cover of the dead man.

As Mr. Glasses remains pitch forward, Lane fires two shots that punch through the second man’s sternum within an inch of each other. One vaporizes the aortic arch and terminates all circulation, and the second man falls backward and collapses.

By now, the terrified clerk has run to a steel door with no handle, and is pounding on it as he drops to his knees. “Get me out! Get me out! Please, God! Get me out!”

Lane makes a cynical note that the little asshole has suddenly got religion now that the goons are gone. He leaps over the body of Mr. Glasses, runs down the short hall and out into the open space with the queue ropes.

“He’s out there! Get him! Kill him!” the clerk screams.

Lane has a major problem: In a second or two, armed men will be running down the short hall and will catch him in the open room, without cover. The path to the exit is blocked by dozens of rows of ropes and posts.

He has only one option. He sprints down one of the rows, and hurdles the rope at the rear just as he hears a shot fired and feels the shock wave of a bullet tickle the air near his head. He
makes an airborne leap and folds into a ball as he crashes through the soaped window. A shell of exploding glass cuts the hot air and forms a brief copper mist against the setting sun. On the sidewalk, he rolls once, scrambles to his feet, and sees a trolley nearly upon him. He sprints across its path and then runs along the far side until he matches its speed, grabs a railing by the rear door, and pitches himself aboard. As he takes a seat by an Oldie, he looks back to see three Bad Boys clambering out the vacant window and looking up and down the street. He discreetly tucks his pistol away in the belt of his jeans. Before the last round of budgets, he had a cell phone with a direct connection to police dispatch. No more. He can’t deliver the location of the press until he gets back across the river.

“You’re pretty old to be a Bad Boy.”

The Oldie is a sweet woman in her seventies, with pink cheeks, a mischievous smile, and lively blue eyes. She issues her judgment without malice, and seems highly amused by what has just transpired.

“You’re right,” he replies. “Maybe it’s time to try something else.”

“Well, I suppose you could,” the woman speculates, “but there really isn’t much else, is there?”

“No, there’s not.” Lane slumps in his seat and suddenly feels a stabbing pain in his forearm where he collided with the pavement. He tries to ignore it and think about the upside of what he’s done. By now, the Bird has been notified, as he lounges in his downtown high-rise and barks orders to his minions on this side of the river. They will try to move the bank before they’re hit by the cops, but there’s too much gear and not enough time.

Lane looks up at the promo cards that line the trolley walls. Most are for the Temp Malls, the big halls that broker transactions between temporary workers and the companies that hire them. Their ads deliver feverish pitches about bigger bucks, shorter hours, and better conditions, when, in fact, they all contract with the same pool of companies.

Lane closes his eyes. The thought of the Temp Malls, with their long lines and empty promises, makes him even wearier than he already is. Even by the standards of a contract cop, this has been a bad day. There have been fewer than half a dozen times in his career when he’s wound up in a jam like this and resorted to extreme violence. And in all the others, the precipitating circumstances were beyond his personal control. But this time, the whole ugly episode came down to one simple fact.

He forgot his cover lobe.

Jesus, that was like forgetting your wallet. Was he losing it? It was a terrible mistake that might’ve got him killed, and there was nobody else to blame. Damn, he’d always had a pretty good memory and an excellent eye for detail, but now he had to wonder. If a major item like this had slipped through the cracks, what else had oozed out?

Maybe he was just getting old.

These days, that in itself was terribly wrong. The national safety net was now completely unraveled and the populace left in free fall. No Social Security, no pensions, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no welfare. A world where both nuclear and extended families had dissolved into a transient goo left no one to look after Grandpa and Grandma.

Lane glances over at the Oldie next to him. The woman senses his gaze, turns his way, and smiles. Lane has to wonder if the smile is genuine or a learned device to solicit compassion, her only defense against the predations of strangers. At the same time, he notices the bulge on her neck. Some kind of tumor, maybe like his mother’s, a lymphoma or some such thing. She’ll wind up at one of the Palliative Centers. He remembers passing one a few weeks ago, with its windowless front and discreet signage. Some wag with an airbrush had scrawled
THE LAST PAL YOU
’
LL EVER NEED
on the wall beside the entrance.

For the first time, Lane imagines himself sitting where the woman sits. It frightens him. More than the Bird, more than the Bad Boys. He turns away from the woman and looks ahead, where the sun is setting and little wisps of cirrus stretch across the fading light.

“Know what they call that?” The desk sergeant at the Justice Center says as he points at Lane’s forearm, which is now grotesquely swollen and radiating a low but persistent pulse of pain. “Hematoma. My uncle had one. A real asshole. Tried to smack my aunt, but he missed and hit the wall instead. Served him right.”

“Wonderful,” Lane says. “Makes me feel a whole lot better.”

“You know, you better have that looked at,” comments the sergeant.

“Yeah, I’ll do that.” Lane wonders if the sergeant has any great ideas about who might pay for all this. Contract cops don’t have any benefits, and a trip to the emergency room is going to tear his financial guts out. What a nice reward for pinning down the Bird, he thinks. Especially since everybody at the briefing seemed so pleased with his work. In fact, the Chief himself popped his head in and gave Lane a nod.