Repo Men by Eric Garcia Read Free Book Online Page A

come for. He’s going to leave the donor dead or dying, with nary a look over the shoulder. Heck, we’re only trained in very basic paramedic techniques, and most of us play dice in the back row during the mandatory seminars.
    Even if I’d known how to resuscitate the guy and sew him back together, I sure as hell wouldn’t have done it. The bastard could drown in his own blood for all I cared. He made me waste two pints of ether.
    I broke his ribs, his hips, and his sternum, tossed the metal plate out an open window, and walked out of that bloody bedroom with his precious Kenton ES/19 artificial stomach tucked beneath my arm. Appalling.
     

    Harold Hennenson never would have accepted a lead plate in lieu of strong, natural stomach muscles. And even if he had, it wouldn’t have helped him to be any less dead.
     

    We went out on forty-eight hours’ leave one Labor Day weekend, me and Jake and Harold Hennenson, and had ourselves one rip-roaring hell of a good time. San Diego was the nearest big city, and we lit it up with the fervor of religious missionaries, intent on bringing our message of inebriation to all of the unsullied masses. I knew of two bars with closing hours well past the city curfews, and through conversations with regular patrons we found some after-after-hours clubs as well.
    Sometime during that blurry bender, I up and got myself a tattoo on my right biceps, as anyone who is good and properly drunk must at some point do. It says W HEN THE B OUGH B REAKS in bright blue letters, and I still have it to this day, even though removal would take only ten minutes and twenty-five bucks at the nearest chop-doc shop. I don’t know what When the Bough Breaks means exactly, or why I would choose to have it indelibly inscribed upon my flesh, and I doubt I knew it even back in the tattoo parlor. But it scares small children and entices large women. I like it. It has style.
    I have another tattoo now, of course—my Bio-Repo insignia, a small circle of black shot through by five golden arrows inscribed upon the left side of my neck. That one will never come off, no matter how many times a doctor takes his lasers to my skin. Long after I die and my flesh and bones have crumbled into dust, I imagine that it will remain, floating ethereally above my ashes, a message to future generations that I was a member of the most feared profession on the planet.
    Plus, chicks dig it.

CHAPTER 4

    I met my first wife, Beth, on that trip into San Diego. She was a prostitute, and she was incredibly beautiful. She would divorce me six months later while I was sweating it out in the steaming heat of a desert tank. Our marriage had put a strain on her career.
     

    “I know a place,” said Jake, leering at me and Harold through his half-empty beer glass. We had been in the bar for more hours than I could count on the blurry wall clock.
    “We got a place,” I drawled. “Look around, good as any.” Our waitress came over, a pleasant college student who had been pushed too far that night by three soldiers with alcohol running wild laps through their addled brains.
    She asked, “Anything else?” and amid some sloppy compliments and mishandled passes, we managed to order up yet another round of beers for ourselves. The waitress trotted away from us as quickly as she could, and we resumed our present business of moving from stone drunk to dead drunk.
    After a few minutes, Harold remembered where the conversation had left off. “Jake said he knows a place,” he mumbled.
    “You said that already. You’re repeating yourself.”
    “No,” he insisted, building his voice into a whine, “a place. You know, a place .”
    Jake winked as best he could. “That’s right. A place .”
    “Oh, a place .”
    “Yeah, a place .”
    I shook my head. The room spun. I resolved to speak to the manager about that. “We don’t need a place. We got willing girls right here.”
    Right on cue, the waitress appeared with our drinks, plopping the