The Price You Pay

by Aidan Truhen

  Well that was big and loud and masculine.

  You loved it.

  You’ve actually weaponised being an asshole.

  I know right?

  It’s fascinating.

  So are you in your freaky naked murder room now?

  I am not in any kind of freaky murder room now.

  I see what you did there. Doc whose side are you on?

  I’m very pissed off with you Price.

  How so?

  Because you came and did something really ridiculously fucking stupid and obnoxious and mentally unsound right in front of me and then you just left.

  Well I figured I had to do what Fred said and go treasure my last night’s sleep on Earth.

  You got twelve hours left and what you want to do is sleep? Who the fuck are you and what have you done with Price?

  Now that you say that no. But you didn’t answer me.

  Tell me something instead.

  Shoot.

  What was the detonator attached to?

  What was the blue mark on my hand?

  Biodegradable microfilm suspension of a modified CRISPR-Cas9 genetic modification tool.

  I’m guessing that would not have been good for me.

  No. What was the detonator attached to?

  Nothing.

  You’re an idiot.

  Fuck you.

  Oh at last.

  I’m not playing games doc.

  Nor am I. The next sound you hear will be the doorbell Price and you better fucking open it or I will kick it down.

  I’ll shoot you.

  You really want to spend your last night alone in some cheap bed with a dead woman who only wanted to have sex with you lying on the floor in the hall?

  Wait is that a thing?

  Open the fucking door Price. I can smell you. Come and breathe in.

  This is crazy. Okay I’m here.

  Breathe. Softly. You won’t notice it at first but your body will know I’m here. You’ll get flashbacks because scent is closely associated with memory.

  Nothing’s happening.

  Yes it is.

  No it’s…Fuck.

  Yes Price.

  Fuck.

  I am going to have sex with you now.

  You can break in here and ravish me but you can’t make me enjoy it.

  As a matter of fact I can. Open the fucking door.

  SITTING IN SOME PLACE. Diner. Espresso bar. Whatever. Morning on the last day, one way or another. Coffee and sex instead of sleep. The doctor knows things. How do I feel? I feel alive. Vulnerable. Clean like I’ve had a shower which I haven’t. Fresh like I’ve been swimming in the lake. New born like I’m baptised. Walking down a wide avenue with green trees all up and down it like it’s hardly the city at all. The fuck am I gonna tell you I’m happy like a happy normal person not just like a man uncorked and allowed to do terrible shit. Seems like Fred has a point. Maybe I have grown as a person in these days like I’ve rediscovered something human inside me through electroshock sex and Scandawegian gaffing hook parties. I’ve been on the run. I’ve been declared a dead man by the Demons and I’m still here. Maybe I understand this whole place a little better now. Maybe I made some kind of transition from saying goodbye to the old city every day to living in the new one. Maybe I’ve come home.

  Yeah, I’m surprised too.

  Crosstalk on the news: Hey buddy turn it up what’s that?

  Home invasion it’s on all the channels.

  New show like that makeover thing where they—

  Naw man it’s real. There’s been this citywide thing like people being dragged out in the street. Just ordinary people dragged outta their houses onto the street. Poor folks rich folks whatever. Perpetrator comes out of nowhere for no reason.

  And then what?

  He fucks them up. Cracked a guy’s head open, eyeball hangin’ right out. Bad things man. A bunch of them died like ten like twenty no one knows. Maybe more. I heard it was hundreds but who knows. It is fucked up man. They’re all connected to this one woman. This lawyer.

  Shit.

  What’s that?

  Nothing man just old-fashioned. I do not like to see a lady in distress.

  (Can’t have been hundreds. There hasn’t been time. Figure I talk to Fred, then at least half an hour to evolve the plan, ten minutes average per victim including travel which is if they all live close together and they don’t so figure…Sixty maybe. Sixty-five, tops. Even so that is some classic appallingly monstrous playbook shit that I have to take my hat off to. You do not see that in this city in this day and age that is old-school bespoke murder is what that is. These Demons they just do not care. And where are the cops? Regular citizens got a right to expect some assistance from the cops. Fucking failure of command and control infrastructure is what. Compromise of basic capability by an external operator. Man heads are gonna roll.)

  Picture of Sarah on the screen. Her professional portrait.

  Yeah. It is kicking off.

  FIFTY-SEVEN PEOPLE. Motherfucker has dragged fifty-seven individual people out of their homes into the street and killed them in public. Sure they’re framing me for it of course they are but that is not the point. That is just housekeeping. This is performance, for Sarah.

  Hi, Fred. I see you there.

  Fred is not doing that for my benefit because he knows I don’t give a shit. I never will. I can like people perfectly well. Maybe I can even be in love but when you get right down to it there’s me and there is everything else on the face of the earth. The doc is exactly the same. She can have whatever it is we have and still if she has to she will shoot me in the face. She’ll be sad later maybe for a while. She’ll remember me what do you call it fondly.

  But she will shoot me in the face because that is who we are. Myself I’d probably shoot her in the throat because memories but honestly I’m not really a gun person so who the fuck knows how that would play out. I’d probably blow off one of her ears or something and have to try again. But I would is what I’m saying.

  God the sex is great. I’m thinking about it now. The curve of her, the clench of her. Plus she has this chart. They should hang that thing in schools. It is—

  Anyway where was I? Oh right yes Sarah.

  Sarah.

  Sarah gives a shit which is why she in the end hates me and thinks I am a monster because she does care. If you tell Sarah that she has a choice? That she can come to you or you kill her clients and then her colleagues and then move on to her family unless she comes to find you? Doesn’t matter where she is. If she hears that, she is coming back. And if I show up they can let her go I mean after they have me she’s worthless she’s just some woman in the street.

  If I don’t come they can still kill her after being polite.

  You know in my present mood I got this weird instinct to sit down and think about this. Weigh things in the balance but that’s not it. That’s not it at all.

  There is a perceptual issue here is what.

  YEAH A PERCEPTUAL ISSUE. ANOTHER ONE.

  The Seven Demons are the untouchable bastards of the whole entire criminal universe and world and this is how they roll. They go into a place to do a job and they do horrible shit until the job is done. If the job is not done they escalate. They do shit that is more and more horrible. They do shit that torturers and murderers and monsters everywhere think is totally fucking excessive and then they do it again to make the point that the first time was not an accident and then again because they want to practice and they’ve got time before happy hour. For sure, the thing that never happens is that someone reaches out and does horrible shit to them.

  Except now show me where on the doll Uncle Jack put Leo’s head. The untouchable people have been touched and that is horrible for their brand, which is part of the poin
t, but now it also begins to be a problem for me in terms of you might call career progression. My whole white-collar do-no-harm coke dealer to the financial aristocracy thing is pretty much burned. It was burned when I killed Johnny Cubano right in the Kenzo and since then it has only gotten more so and when I launched an anthrax attack on my home nation and evaded a city-wide manhunt…leave us say I cannot exactly just go back to what I was doing.

  Problem is what you call in personal branding the heroic narrative. The narrative has to satisfy. Most specifically it has to end in a new stable state. You got your criminal news consumers out there in a vast economy of badness. You got bandits and pirates and slavers and drug runners, and traditional gangsters and new money gangsters and brigand aristocrats, and corporate evildoers and private military combines, and terrorists and intelligence agencies and sicarios of just about every church and state, and there is some vicarious fucking satisfaction here in what I have done for every aspiring professional bastard on earth—but it has to end high. What I do next has to be unequivocally bigger and scarier than where I started otherwise somehow despite everything I will have showed a soft belly and then I am D E A D dead. Unless I can produce a new normal in which everyone knows exactly their place and that there is no room for tumultuous realignments of this kind to continue, there will be points scored by the first jackass who jacks Jack’s ass, and I do not propose to spend the next decade hiding in Guam. Don’t get me wrong I love Guam, but I’m not in the end a Guam guy.

  That means it is not enough to win. I have to win epic. And that means a measure of risk.

  INCOMING SMS MESSAGE:

  Price?

  Yeah.

  They have your lawyer.

  Yeah I figured.

  They have the girl too the computer girl who pissed Karenina off so much.

  Wait they have Charlie?

  Yes Fred has been working on your hinge points Price.

  Price?

  Price?

  Price has he found them?

  OUTGOING VOIP CALL.

  I say: Doc I bought that man a melon out of the sheer goodness of my heart.

  It’s a fucking melon Price.

  Yeah but I bought him a gift and I honestly did offer him a way out of this.

  Price for fuck’s sake what the fuck does he care?

  Not what he cares doc it’s me I care. I bought that man a present and this is how he responds? Fuck him doc fuck him. Jesus I had just plain forgotten, owing to your fine company and your ladyparts, just exactly how much I hate that asshole. Do you know what is appropriate in this context doc? Do you? Because I fucking do, and you do not want to be in my way. There’s been this kinda nice ambiguity in our relationship to this point and I have something of an addiction to your presence and I don’t care that one day you’re gonna kill me with some rare moth venom or maybe I will see it coming and have you fired into space in one of those really unreliable private space rockets and that way I could look up at the stars every night and think of your perfect body frozen and orbiting me forever. But you got to understand I’m going to finish this now. And if you get in the way I will kill you and I won’t have time to make it poetic. You got to choose doc. We’ve gone about as far down this foes-with-benefits thing as we can. I’m gonna call another meeting with Fred and this time it’s going down. High noon doc cowboy time. Just fucking guns everywhere and bombs and shit and whoever doesn’t get blown the fuck to pieces is the winner. I don’t fucking care. I’m taking him down.

  Doc you there?

  Doc please do not say that I’m making you hot right now because that is not where I’m going with this. You gotta choose.

  Okay doc, here’s what it is. If you go in my coat pocket right now by the door you’re gonna find a note. And if you look in it, you’ll know where to find me and what I’m gonna do. You’re either in or you’re out but—

  I have already come to a decision Price.

  Cold. Cold so cold.

  She has beautiful eyes, the doctor, clear and sharp like a hard goodbye. Mouth just a little tight like there’s something she’s forgotten at home as she pulls the hood out of her pocket. Slow motion and fireworks and glockenspiel music and the cold so cold and the taste of mulled wine and I remember the way she looked at me when she said there will be pain I remember that so clearly.

  Count backwards from I’m dead.

  WAKE UP AND I’M A MAN IN A HOOD. Certain curious arrangements. Okay. Start talkin.’ Jack Price is what. So I talk.

  Hey Fred what’s good? I’m guessing you’re around.

  I am, Mr. Price—and you are not.

  Well that’s a little on the nose. You gonna take the hood off now?

  No, Mr. Price I don’t think so. You are unable to move, of course, because of the drugs my colleague gave you earlier, but I rather like you with that extra element of the pathetic. Sitting in your chair with that bag over your face, you will be able to hear what is happening and you will know in your heart what is happening but you will see it only in your mind’s eye—at least until the last minute. I believe that the situation will become resonantly familiar. I think if I approach this matter correctly you will scream for me. You will lose yourself in echoes of the past and I will finally hear you in real pain.

  I bought you a melon man this is totally uncalled for. An actual melon with my own money.

  I do hope you will retain your good cheer. Let me explain what is happening around you. I wish the meaning of everything to be very clear to you. Sarah Kessler is on your left and on your right is your punky friend with the graphic design diploma and the regrettable sense of humour that so incensed Karenina.

  Punky? Fred how the fuck old are you anyway?

  I myself am not on your roof I am on another with an excellent view. I speak to you by the magic of radio. Oh, and Tuukka has a roof, too. It’s a little bit lower than mine because I’m the boss and I like expensive seats. But all the same you are in a crossfire, if you understand me. Even if you should free yourself you would certainly die before you could take any kind of action. You are helpless, Mr. Price. I must say I find that pleasing. Say hello, Tuukka.

  Price? You are dead now.

  Yeah wow that’s okay that’s also really pretty much direct there’s just no poetry in you guys at all.

  Go to hell.

  Yeah again. Look Tuukka you know what your brother was into? He was really into the idea that one day he’d just completely outclass you man just like you’d finally have to acknowledge you were the family idiot and he was the smart one. He was sad. Sad his whole life and you know what? That was all because you teased him about his name when he was a little tiny Aryan farmboy. That’s pretty much what made it possible for Volodya to kill him. He wanted someone to believe in his importance as an individual and not your bagman, because I mean let’s be motherfucking honest Tuukka you just didn’t. So yeah I had it done but it was down to you. That’s got to make you feel a little bit bad.

  …Fuck you Price! FFFF-FUCK YOU!

  Jesus Fred is he crying? When you were recruiting your Demons did you like put an ad in Pussy Weekly or something?

  I LOVE MY BROTHER PRICE!

  Yeah man whatever. I’m just saying if you’d been a little bit nicer to him while he was alive, he’d most likely not be dead. And we all wouldn’t be in this unfortunate situation right now.

  GNNNNNNAAARRRRHHHHH!

  Very good, Mr. Price. I do commend you. Now, Miss Sarah and Miss Charlie can you hear me?

  Sarah says: Yes.

  Charlie says: It’s Mx you fuck not Miss not Ms. you fucking dinosaur Mx Charlie like a non-gendered post-hierarchical form of polite address for if you’re not a total human abcess.

  I shall take that as a yes from both of you. Very good. Now you will see that my colleague the doctor is placing two pistols there on the ground in front o
f you: if one of you has not killed the other in the next minute after I tell you to begin I will shoot you both through the head. Mr. Price: if you speak at all I will likewise kill both of them. Starting three. Two. One. Now.

  I’M PRETTY SURE THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS. Pretty sure. I’m pretty sure Sarah looks at Charlie and Charlie looks at Sarah and right at that moment they know one another. Charlie looks at Sarah and she sees what I’ve always seen. She sees a good woman who deserves to live. She sees a good lawyer working the bad part of town because she’s too good for the places where your clients have money and expect results. Charlie looks at Sarah she sees the whole fucking sorry story of her doing the right thing and getting fucked over. She sees her perfectly, in this weird translucent moment between life and death right this spiritual moment almost between—

  When Sarah looks at Charlie she cannot quite meet her eyes. All the same she sees this emo goth design chick with all manner of weird habits and this dorm room vibe who likes books with elves and monsters in them and original Mike Hammer comic books in black and white and she sees a kid sister kinda person with this vibrant wellspring of life thing going on under the white foundation. But even so she knows what’s going to happen here. Sarah knows in this bad moment that she has been wrong. She is not ultimately different from me. She’s desperate to survive and she knows the cost of that choice. She can see it and as she reaches for the gun she finally meets Charlie’s eyes to say god I’m sorry god I’m sorry Charlie I don’t I can’t I don’t—

  What she sees is Charlie looking back at her and there is nothing in that look at all that gives one tiny atom of a fuck.

  My cocaine branding manager shoots Sarah in the head.

  I’m sorry boss. I really am because I know she was your favourite lawyer and everything but you know this is an exigent situation.

  That’s okay Charlie I quite understand.

  You do?

  Yes Charlie I do. It’s what I would have done.

  Yeah boss that’s what I was thinking back there I was like what would Mr. Price do? And that was pretty much my answer.