“Told you,” clucked the attendant. “Pass them back. Don’t get fancy and waste my time.”
I nodded and grinned and thrust them back through the hole in the cage, as if lowly equipment clerks’ reprimands were the highlight of my day.
I fingered the coin-sized, scaled-down models pushed through the wire mesh, passed through twelve yols and thrust the goods in my dusty pockets as I fiddled for a home-rolled cigarette. The air was stifling and my head swam to a babel of voices. I was reaching my limit of how many shoulder jostles I could take from druggies and tough guys today. I sauntered out of the depot, whistling a tuneless jingle out of the side of my mouth. My meeting with Marty came up in the hour. A shoddy place The Bodega, but it would have to do.
As I slogged through the puddles from a recent rain toward the market, I could hear the beats of techno-music exuding from the tarped-up shanties down the way: all bass and some mid-range slurred female voice-overs in an unrecognizable mash. A glut of offworlders roamed about, a slum of small tent-like enclosures made from pieces of old rubber tires and broken vehicles. Rusty oil drums with smoking garbage burned away. Several grubby figures congregated in a huddle. An altercation broke out and knives suddenly flashed in dirty hands. Then the crash of broken glass through the grimy window of what looked a clapboard salami shop. Two ham-handed men stood arguing over who had chopped the last livers and mixed them with the pork, or some dumb thing.
As I stopped to ponder, I felt a tug at my pantleg. A mousy brown boy sat, legs splayed in the dirt and puddles, his leg missing below the knee, begging for coins. I crouched down and gave him a few of the loose yols I had, catching the dull look in the sunken, young eyes, drinking deep of the sorrow mirrored there then moving on.
My eyes wandered over him and other such sights with a familiarity that created tiny ripples in my soul. I’d had to steel myself to the suffering of others to get the jobs done that put food on the table. Only a rare glimmer of compassion did I let steal over me from time to time. The universe was what it was. Long ago I’d accepted such travesties as fate; they would continue on, regardless of what I did or didn’t do.
A sickly glow permeated the sky with the sound of thunder promising more rain. I trudged through the rubble and the mud puddles, skirting wide piles of bomb debris. An air-speeder whistled past close overhead. I gave it little attention, little concerned with the comings and goings of the privileged and few. That, and the rattle of electric three-wheelers on the dingy streets whose riders wore their goggled ski-masks, racing the odd ramshackle van or lorry to the next barricaded junction.
I came to Drenny’s. An eatery of fine repute, of battered brick and energetic graffiti scrawled on front, wide swoops and swirls of the lost symbols of modern vernacular. Overhead, mothers’ laundry dripped and kids screamed from the balconies of squalid apartments. The city cops, aka hired mercenaries, came to this meet-place of smugglers, dope dealers and lowlifes less often than the hotter places closer to downtown. A collection of mixed sorts huddled about in drab clothing, generally trench coats and beat-up boots, sitting at tables and mumbling monosyllables or milling around at the bar. Some machines stood at the back, upright gambling units and old pinball machines, while low, distorted lounge music huffed out a muffled beat.
Marty sat over at a far table. He hunched in the dimness, bullet head and chin tipped down in the haze of blue smoke. He sat away from the hubbub and the bar. He got up and waved when he saw me. I approached with measured confidence and he took my hand with a firm grip and nodded, the faintest of grins. “Rusco, been a while. You look good.”
“Could be better.”
Marty patted my back with more vigor than necessary. “Attaboy! Keeping up the faith?”
I shrugged. Marty, a shock of mustard-colored hair that clung to his oiled scalp like a fish fin, was a short, heavy-boned bully with thick lips and crooked grin. But fast. Last guy who underestimated Marty lay in a shallow grave.
Marty was a good guy, well-informed but somewhat of a fanatic for odd jobs, volatile, headstrong, violent, ready to plug shells into a problem rather than think it through. Don’t ever get him angry or he’d rip your head off and shove it up the next guy’s ass. That’s Marty. Got to know him in Rega. We’d been drinking, shooting the shit at the local casino bar, and got to musing… ‘you know, like maybe we should join forces or something and capitalize on the smuggling market, a couple of delivery wise guys like us, we could be peddling and fencing weapons and contraband versus collecting the chump change we’re making now.’ So we got to thinking and the old gears got whirring. Now I was a little ahead of Marty in big picture planning and could play three angles at once where he could only play one, so I humored him into thinking it was all his idea—you know, the whole let the big bad dog think he’s the alpha-male, pissing on every corner, while the nice little white dog keeps his head down.
“So what’s this about?” I asked.
“Got something down the line. Some easy pickings on the river way in the warehouse district.”
“What, those abandoned factories and chop shops?”
“Yeah, something like that. Some small time gangsters run out of there, moving stuff new and old, you know? Big stuff.”
“Yeah, like what?”
He scratched at the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, this and that.”
“What?
