Electric Church

X YOU ARE NOT A BAD MAN. I AM A BAD MAN

Gatz and I got out on the street and I looked for Kieth’s three cops. Even though they’d been clear as day on his little monitor, I couldn’t find them. It freaked me out. System Cops are not subtle; they do not deign to fucking worry whether we see them coming or not. Seeing three of them do the undercover thing made sweat pop out on my forehead, because the only thing that made it possible to deal with them was their arrogance.

I swallowed hard. Gatz trundled along behind me, and who knew what the fuck that freak was thinking?

Your whole view of the world changes when you’ve killed someone for money. You can solve anything through murder. Someone shoves you in the street, you can follow them all day until they’re alone in a darkened stairwell-and pop! Problem solved. Someone shortchanges you or doesn’t pay up, you could wait for them, and pop! Problem solved. When you killed someone for money, you realized that the world was just a fucking machine. Push here, something happens. Pull here, something happens. Push and pull in a coordinated sequence, and you could make just about anything happen.

Your behavior changes, and thus everyone’s reaction to you. I walked with Kev Gatz through the crowds, hundreds of people just like me and him, nothing better to do, lean and hungry. But everyone got out of my way. Everyone made room. When you killed someone, you were a god, if only for a few moments. It clung to you afterward, the faint scent of godhood. All the gray people around me could smell it, and they shied away.

You didn’t just walk in Manhattan, not these days. You performed. You did a little performance just to get across the street. I scanned the crowd, hardassed, trying to project complete disdain. The thieving, roiling mass of arms and sticky fingers was my enemy and they were all looking to get over on me. You couldn’t let that happen, because if you let one of the bastards get over on you the rest swarmed.

Gatz and I made our way on foot like all the other shlubs, pushing and shoving our way through the wall of meat. The problem with being hardassed all the time was everybody was hardass all the time. And I had a rep that inspired people to be twice as fucking rude to me just to show they weren’t afraid. Fuckers.

So it was pretty obvious what was going on when the crowds kind of miraculously began to thin, and Kev and I found our way much easier.

I glanced at Gatz. “Fuck me. We’re going to start getting a reputation.”

Gatz looked like he’d swallowed a stone. “Start?”

By the time the cop cleared his throat behind us, the street was deserted except for a trio of Crushers who lounged against a crumbling wall, looking unwashed and grubby in their ill-fitting uniforms, their faces careful and stiff. Otherwise, we owned the street. I could have set up a table and had high tea with the Pig and no one would have bothered us.

I turned. “Colonel Moje,” I said. He was about three feet behind us as we turned. He almost shone in the dirty gray light of Manhattan. The man could wear a suit. It was dark purple, pinstriped, with stylishly flared lapels and cuffs. He carried a dark black walking stick like a scepter, waving it unnecessarily. “How fucking delightful.”

He grinned, his beard trimmed expertly, the flashes of gray in it giving him a distinguished, professorial look. Then he tossed the stick in the air, caught it deftly, and swung hard, hitting me in the stomach.

I exhaled my kidneys and went down to my knees like a sack of shit. I tried to breathe, experimentally, but it felt like a small rubber cork had been shoved down my throat.

“Mr. Cates,” Moje said, breathing hard. “My name is Elias Moje, please don’t ever forget it, because you have been brought to my attention.”

Oh, fuck. I thought. This guy takes himself pretty fucking seriously. At my altitude all I could see were his shiny, shiny boots.

“I was inspired by certain parties to pull your file, Cates, and spent an afternoon reading it. You think you’re world-class. You think you’re a bad man. Let me tell you something, Mr. Cates: You are not a Bad Man. I am a Bad Man.”

With a large rock lodged somewhere in my windpipe, I could only stare at his incredibly shiny shoes while dark red spots crowded in on my vision. I thought, Shit, who’s paying this son of a bitch to run me off this job?

“I know that you’re working for Marin, that fuck,” Moje hissed. “I’m telling you to back off. Don’t get into shit with the Electric Church, got it? I’m telling you to go away. Go hide somewhere.”

A pinhole opened in my throat and I sucked hoarse, wheezing air through it. Moje nudged me roughly with his boot. “Got me, shithead?”

I put my hands palms-down on the pavement and panted, the pinhole getting wider. “Yeah, I got you.”

“I’ll be watching you, Cates. Behave yourself.”

I watched his boots scrape their way off, and Moje receded into a smaller version of himself, and was then swallowed by the suddenly returned crowd. Gatz eventually helped me up, and I wiped spit off my chin and watched where Moje had been, burning with a shameful fury.

“He doesn’t like you,” Gatz offered.

“Lots of fucking help you were,” I snapped. “And it has nothing to do with me, fuck. That bastard’s getting paid.”

It was pretty common for corporations or very rich private citizens to hire System Cops as bodyguards or what have you-officially illegal but the DIA winked at it, usually, if they even knew about it. Whoever’d paid Moje had obviously cheaped out and not gone full-price to just have me murdered. Or maybe they just thought I was your typical street rat, and easily scared. Or maybe they had paid Moje to kill me, and he was just trying to rip them off, take their yen without breaking a sweat. Or maybe Moje was too terrified of Dick Marin to just kill me-who knew? And if that was the case, who would terrify Moje enough to even get him to go this far against the King Worm? Thinking this, it hit me: If Moje wasn’t collecting a check from the Electric Church, I’d eat my fucking shoes. If the stupid motherfucker thought his sad display of power would somehow make me less terrified of Dick Marin, the stupid motherfucker was in for a lesson.

We blended again, becoming just another pair of unhygienic assholes in the mass. Milton Tanner were living a straight life up in Old Chelsea, running what, from all reports, was a profitable store selling artistic little bric-a-brac to rich fucks. I hadn’t heard much about Milton Tanner, as they were before my time, and were over forty, to boot, adding a layer of unbelievability to it all. I didn’t know anyone over forty, except Pick. It was like Gatz and I were going to meet a leprechaun.

The streets thinned out as we headed uptown, and the empty shells of buildings gave way to merely decrepit, sagging old stone structures that should have been blasted away and replaced with the shining new metal ones, except that everything ground to a halt twenty years ago and never quite got started again. Even those shining new buildings uptown were starting to look a little run-down.

The shop was called Tanner’s, and the windows on the street were big and clear and unbroken, filled with the most ludicrous bullshit I’d ever seen. Little figurines, wooden jewelry boxes, crap like that. I felt grimy and dirty, and self-conscious-we’d lost our camouflage and stood out against affluence, even the very edge of affluence. I looked at Gatz and he just shrugged raggedly. I squinted at him.

“When was the last time you ate, man?”

He shook his head. “Food just makes me sick.”

Tanner’s was warm and inviting, filled with all kinds of useless crap. Furniture, lamps, knick-knacks, art pieces lined the walls and tables. There was barely any place to walk. I felt huge, shouldering my way through all the dusty shit, my eyes scanning the ceiling for the obvious security measures. Just as I was wondering where in fuck Milton and Tanner were, I turned a corner and stopped short, finding a tiny, craggy old woman blocking my way, arms akimbo.

“I hope,” she snapped, “that you didn’t come in here thinking to be robbing us, kiddo. You’re on the system, and you wouldn’t get far.”

I smiled. “I look that desperate, eh? To rob this fucking place?”

It was insulting. I was a Gunner. I worked for a living. I didn’t have to steal.

She looked me over from foot to head. “You look like a punk.”

That was insulting. I turned the smile off. “I see the fucking cameras, Mother, and I see the field trips embedded in the walls. I didn’t come here to rob you. Pick suggested your name for a job.”

She shifted her weight slightly and suddenly seemed quizzical, less pissed off. She even smiled a little. “A job? What the hell do I want a job for? Do you have any idea how much money we make with this place?”

I looked around. “This crap sells?”

“It sure does, kid,” a voice came from behind. I turned, startled, and found the same woman standing behind me. She was even standing arms akimbo, and a brief moment of complete confusion shuddered through me. Fucking twins.

“All right,” I said, nodding. “Which one’s Milton and which one’s Tanner?”

The second woman shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”

The first said, “Come on in the office, then, sonny, and we’ll talk business.”

The second added, “Bring your scabby little friend, too.”

The first, “I don’t trust him out here alone. Sticky-”

The second, “-fingers.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, gesturing at Gatz, who was, indeed, examining some of the shit closely, as if it might profitably disappear into his skeletal hands. “He’s coming. I insist.”

The two women cackled simultaneously, freaking me out. “He thinks-”

“-he’s got-”

“-some pull, like it ain’t us-”

“-that’s got the guns on him!”

I scanned the room again, gritting my teeth against the embarrassment of having to. I didn’t see anything. I looked back at the first one. “No fucking way.”

She sneered at me. “Gunners.”

The back office was plush, carpeted, and climate-controlled, dominated by a huge wall-mounted Vid and two oversized wooden desks, ornately carved, pushed together head-to-head. The twins each took a seat and left Gatz and me standing. I glanced around, shrugged, and shoved a pile of papers off one of the desks with a flourish, hefting myself up onto it, facing them both simultaneously. I was about as uncomfortable as possible, but I wasn’t about to tell them that.

They looked at the papers on the floor sourly. The second one said, “Your boy’s gonna clean that up before he leaves, yeah?”

I blinked. “Probably not. And I’d like to see you make him. I’m here with a job offer. You interested, or are you making so much skag with this bullshit you’re just enjoying breaking my balls?”

The second one shrugged. “Sonny, we like breaking balls.”

The first one nodded. “We earned it.”

“Wasn’t for Pick, we wouldn’t even talk to you,” the first one said. “He’s the only fucker we know of ’round here that’s older than us.”

“How do you know Pick?” I asked, to be polite. Polite did wonders for the oldsters. Anyone who’d been an adult before Unification, a few yessirs and noma’ams could go a long way.

“School,” they said simultaneously.

“We worked with him on some government projects, back when things were still sane,” the first one continued.

“Genetics,” the second one added. “It was amazing to have the chance to work with him.”

I tried to picture these two as scientists. It was an amusing image, these two leathery old broads rubbing their chins wisely, wearing white coats or some shit. It made sense, though; a lot of the best crooks after Unification had been real brains, scientists and economists and shit. Unification had done some weird things to people, people you’d never expect. It had killed my father, who’d seemed tough as steel to me when I was a kid, and it had turned these two freaky twins into thieves, and good ones. It was hard, after twenty years of living life on the streets of New York, to picture these two as fancy academics, but I’d seen stranger things.

“Fucking Joint Council tried to recruit us all,” the first one said with a grin full of shockingly good teeth, yellowed but strong and unbroken-sort of like the women themselves. “We were living in a commune upstate-remember?”

The second nodded, her eyes on me. “Sure, sure-Freedom Gardens. Naked fucking kids, every-fucking-where.”

“We were living up there with Pick, just watching everything happen, after the schools were all shut down and our funding cut off, and the JC sent a couple of shiny new undersecretaries up there to offer us all jobs. Some project they were all working on, right after the JC formed, something top secret, very hush hush.”

They both grinned. “We told ’em to stick it!”

They glanced at each other without moving their heads, just eyes sliding to the side. “Shit,” the first one said with a sigh. “They fucking raided the place a month later. Pick had a bolthole and we got out, but they tore the place down.”

“We’ve been making our way off the books ever since.”

“In other words, kid, Pick and us, we go way back. And that’s the only reason we’re talking to you, okay?”

“So get-”

“-interesting fast.”

I shook my head. “You’re talking to me because you’re intrigued. Look at you. Sitting here rotting away selling bullshit to people you used to rob.” I grinned. “Come on. You know me. You know I don’t waste time.”

They looked at each other. I could almost hear the static of communication between them. They looked back at me, creepy as hell.

“We heard the name, Mr. Cates,” the first one said. “You call me Milton.”

I winked at the second one. “Tanner. Let’s hear it.”

They may not have bought the act, but they bought the job. When I was done with my high-concept gloss on the whole mess-boiling what was likely months of work and endless complexity into two sentences-they looked at each other with that crazy light of excitement and greed I recognized very well. Every crook got that look when you really got him interested.

Milton-or Tanner, who the fuck knew? — leaned back and regarded me. “You’re either the most fucked-in-the-ass Gunner I’ve ever met, Mr. Cates, or onto something great.”

“He’s fucked,” Gatz said lazily. “Obviously fucked.”

“Either way,” the other one said, “we want to be there to watch.”

“What’s our cut?”

I gave them a number, and for the first time since we’d walked in, they were silent, staring at each other, using that twin telepathy to hash it out with waggled eyebrows and dilated pupils, Morse code. Finally they looked back at me.

“We’re in, Mr. Cates,” they said simultaneously. “When do we get started?”

“Tomorrow night,” I said, sliding off the desk and making for the exit. “I’ve got a few arrangements to figure.”

From behind, I heard one of them call out, “Word is there’s a System Cop’s got your name tattooed on his ass. You still gonna be alive by tomorrow night?”

I didn’t look back. “Probably not.”