Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (19 page)

Freddy was sitting in an oversized padded desk chair, in a second floor room furnished with waiting-room armchairs and a desk dominated by an oversized computer monitor. His T-shirt stretched over muscles that indicated his mansion housed an exercise room. He gestured at them with his drink, but he didn't bother to stand up.

"You've been watching Arly," Freddy said. "She's a friend of ours—a very good friend—and we don't know anything about you."

Gerdon had known he could be in serious trouble when they started up the stairs that led to the second floor. He had let himself drift into a situation in which his little trick couldn't protect him. There were too many of them and he only had one line of retreat. He couldn't create a diversion that would keep all of them busy and leap for the first gap that opened up.

He had let that happen when he had first gone to sea. There were always places on ships where three or four hooligans could crowd a skin-and-bones kid into a corner. There had been nothing he could do about it when they started punching and kicking.

He had been burning with outrage the first time he had guided a wine-soaked oaf over a rail. He had been savagely aware he didn't know what would happen. Could he swap back to his own body before his target slammed into the deck machinery thirty meters below the rail? Would he die if his target's body died while he was inside it? He didn't care.

He still didn't know what would happen if somebody died while he was swapped. Would the other person live out their life in his body? He had always made sure he had time to escape when he killed somebody. Drowning was the safest. Walk them off a bridge into deep water a long way from shore. Zap back to your own body while they were still thrashing around. Go on your way.

He had never thought of himself as brave. Courage, in his opinion, was an over-rated virtue. Hoodlums liked to strut and act nervy but they always had size and numbers on their side. They had left him alone when they noticed bad things happened to people who attacked him.

"I'm the person you hired. To get some information you wanted."

Freddy scowled. The muscle turned his head and studied Gerdon as if he was looking at an object that had suddenly acquired a new level of interest.

Freddy gestured at Arly. "I think you and Dan should have a drink in the rec room, Arly."

Arly straightened up. "Can't you tell me what this is all about? You could have just told me you wanted to see me."

It was the first time she had said anything since they had arranged themselves in the car. Gerdon had spent most of the ride staring at the back of her neck, as she slumped inside her shoulder belt.

"I need to talk to this guy," Freddy said.

The muscle gripped Arly's arm and led her toward a side door. She looked back at Gerdon and he turned away from her before she met his eyes.

He had put her through two swaps. She had looked out of his eyes twice. She had to know something funny had happened.

"That's how you do it?" Freddy said. "You follow people around?"

"I ran into some problems."

"You were going to beat it out of her?"

He couldn't even tell himself she was some poor little innocent. He hadn't pinned down all the details when he had rummaged through her head in front of the restaurant, but he understood the general drift. They were working a scheme involving chemotherapy drugs. Arly manipulated the records and delivered the goods to Freddy's customers. She was supposed to get a percentage of the take on each delivery, but she had been lying about the size of the sales. She was carrying all that fear around because Freddy had warned her he wouldn't tolerate that kind of behavior.

She wasn't even very smart. She'd let Freddy pile the whole thing on her. Freddy set her up with a customer and sat on the sidelines collecting 80 percent of the take. Gerdon had picked up flashes of her after-work life and it looked like she had spent most of her share wandering through stores buying clothes and trinkets like expensive handbags. Freddy had given her a chance to do some extra shopping and she'd lunged at it.

It was a small time operation. Run by small time people. Milking small time gullibles.

"It's her," the tall guy said. "I saw the way he looked at her."

Freddy raised his eyebrows. "Is that it? You like skinny women?"

"I needed more information."

"And you thought you could get it following her around? We hired you because your contact told us you could get the information we needed faster and cheaper than anybody else. With no fuss. You were supposed to phone it in almost twenty-four hours ago."

"It's her," the tall guy said. "He's some kind of geek. He likes female geeks."

"We have a business relationship with Arly," Freddy said. "We think she may be falsifying the amounts she's supposed to pay us. We thought we'd run a little audit on her accounts and make sure we've been getting the right figures. We have a business relationship with you, too. We gave you half in advance. Up front. On your contact's recommendation. Give us the information we paid for, you get your other half, we're done."

"What happens to her?"

The tall guy laughed.

"We aren't going to kill her, if that's what you're worried about. We'll just make sure she understands she has to stick to our arrangement. I haven't thought that through yet, but it probably won't take much."

Gerdon nodded. They wouldn't need to raise a bruise, given the fear he had detected. They could show her the evidence, have a little fun with her, and send her back to her job knowing she had placed herself in a permanent trap.

You could even say Freddy was being kind. He was looking for evidence before he locked her in her cage.

Freddy lowered his head and thought for a moment. "I hired you—whoever you are—so we could get the account numbers without bothering her. Painlessly."

"If we can't do it that way...." the tall guy said.

"They're in my inside pocket. In my notebook."

Freddy held out his hand. Gerdon ripped the page out of the notebook and Freddy waved at the cheeryface with the bow tie.

The cheeryface stepped around the desk and bent over the computer. Freddy pushed his chair back and watched Gerdon while he followed the action on the screen.

"We owe you some money," Freddy said.

"You got her?" the tall guy said.

"I presume you'll accept dollars. I can throw in a few euros."

Gerdon was sitting behind the desk, looking at the startled expression on his own face staring at him across the desktop. He jerked open the drawer on the right side of the desk and saw the gun sitting there, just as he'd expected.

It was a nine millimeter self-loading pistol—the commonest private firearm in the world. He worked the slide as he pulled it out of the drawer and fired two shots upward, as fast as the gun would operate, at a point on the tall guy's coat just below his right collarbone.

He had never been the kind of person who enjoyed shooting. The kick and noise of a gun had felt hard and brutal the first time he pulled a trigger and his feelings hadn't changed.

The computer whiz had jerked erect. Gerdon twisted in his chair and fired into a well padded thigh. He was thinking coolly and rapidly, as he always did when these things happened, bolstered by the knowledge he was one step ahead of surprised, confused adversaries who didn't know what he was doing. He wasn't trying to kill either of them. He just wanted to put them out of action. There were people who could absorb everything he had done and rip your throat out before they let it stop them. He had watched them ravage his birthland. This crew didn't look like bonaf ide human wolves.

He turned back to the shocked version of himself on the other side of the desk. He placed the gun on the desktop. He pushed against the floor with his legs and rolled backward.

Then he was inside his own body again. He stumbled as he stepped forward but the confusion only lasted a second. He picked up the gun and aimed it at the man rolling away from him.

Freddy had good ref lexes. He had been through a complete round trip,
zip, zap,
and he was already twisting like he was getting ready to throw himself to one side.

This time Gerdon went for the kill. He lined up the sights, elbows locked, and pressed the trigger four times, firing each shot at the standard aiming point in the center of the upper body. One of the bullets went wide but he could see the strikes of the others.

The computer whiz was staring at the blood on his leg. The tall guy was bending over the desk with his weight resting on his good hand, wheezing with pain.

The side door swung open. Gerdon turned and saw Dan the Muscle crouching on one knee in the doorway, gun in firing position. The gun swung toward him and he put Freddy's gun on the desk and lifted his hands.

Dan stood up. He checked out the three casualties and stared at Gerdon with the kind of intense, screwed-up concentration Gerdon had seen on the faces of ship handlers who were steering mammoth vessels through narrow passages with volatile currents.

"You took that gun from somebody. You didn't have it when you came here."

The computer whiz was sitting on the floor. The tall guy had given up fighting the pain and let himself slump to his knees, with his head resting against the desk. Gerdon wondered if either of them even carried a gun. The only person in this group who looked truly dangerous was pointing a gun at him.

The computer whiz grunted. "Freddy. Freddy shot us."

"Freddy shot himself?"

"He shot Freddy."

Gerdon knew he had to move as soon as he saw Dan's gun waver. Dan had looked out of his eyes. Dan had punched his partner in the same way Freddy had shot the two men bleeding in front of him.

He was staring at another jump into unknown territory. Usually he did one swap—two at the most—and stayed locked inside his own head until he got another job weeks later. Now he had done three in the last few hours. One in the last two minutes. Did he know what he was doing? Did he have any idea where this would take him?

The world trembled. Thunder cracked somewhere—in his mind, or some place in the real world, whatever the real world was. He stared across Dan's gun at the body the universe had given him—or loaned him, if you wanted to be more accurate.

Dan was just as fast as Freddy. He started diving behind the desk seconds after Gerdon recovered from his own confusion. Gerdon dropped to his hands and knees and sent the gun sliding across the floor.

Could he get back to his own body again so fast? Yes, he could. And there was the gun, just two steps to his left. With Dan on his hands and knees staring at the floor.

He picked up the gun. "Where's Arly? Stay where you are."

"What are you?" Dan said.

"Where's Arly?"

"Watching TV. In the living room."

"Can she hear you if you call her? Tell her to come here."

The two men he had shot were looking sicker by the second. He didn't look at Freddy.

"What the hell are you?" Dan said.

"Please call Arly."

Dan raised his voice. He couldn't produce a proper shout from his all-fours position, but Arly wasn't as engrossed in TV as he had indicated. She stepped into the doorway seconds after he called her and responded with an appropriately nineteenth century display of horror. She even covered her mouth with her hand.

"You'd better come with me," Gerdon said. "You can't stay here."

Arly stared at Freddy's body. He could try another swap and walk her across the room, to the door that opened on the stairs, if the swap worked. But that would mean she would be inside his body while he moved. Holding the gun. Buffeted by an emotional storm that would have floored an astronaut.

"What are you?" Arly said.

"You can't stay here with them, Arly. They know what you've been doing."

"Is that what you're trying to do?" Dan said. "You're trying to protect her?"

Arly's hand had jumped back to her mouth. She let out a little choked sob and Gerdon decided he had penetrated the storm and triggered the fear that had made him change course and veer into a minefield.

Arly turned around. She stumbled down the hall on the other side of the door and Gerdon watched her turn into a door. He heard Dan shift his weight and he automatically locked his elbows and pointed the gun directly at Dan's upturned face.

"It's all right," Dan said. "I'm not stupid. I don't know exactly what it is you're doing but I am not going to do anything stupid."

Arly came down the hall dressed in the coat she had been wearing when they picked her up. She maneuvered around Dan with her head lowered and walked toward the back door as if she was a demure example of eyes-lowered female modesty, instead of a modern shopping-obsessed woman who apparently couldn't leave an expensive coat behind if her life depended on it.

Freddy's gun was still lying on the desk. Gerdon shoved it into his coat pocket and started backing toward the door. The two pound weight in his pocket felt heavy and awkward but he wasn't going to leave a gun where somebody like Dan could pick it up.

The car was still sitting in the driveway. The dark figure behind the wheel was still jittering in time to the earphones he had settled on his head when they got out. He abandoned his post without any fuss when Gerdon showed him the gun.

He hadn't thought it through. He had just acted. He had stuck Freddy's gun in his pocket because it looked like the right thing to do. But was it? They could have told the police Freddy had shot them and shot himself. Gone berserk for no reason. How could they do that without a gun?

You couldn't take gunshot wounds to a hospital without saying something. Unless you had connections. Did they have medical arrangements? Were they too small time to have a doctor on their payroll?

"Do you have any idea what you're doing?" Arly said.

"They knew what you've been doing. You were in very serious trouble."

"You think they would have killed me? You think a bunch of small timers like that would give up the money I'm funneling them?"

"They didn't have to kill you. They would have... taught you a lesson. And sent you back to work. On their terms."