Fatboy Read online

  The door of the car behind him opened and an arm reached in and circled his throat. Brolin was screaming obscenities. KR pushed him away and allowed himself to be pulled out of the car and onto the bank of melting snow. He covered his head with his arms and lay still. The first kicks were in the ribs. Then there were kicks aimed at his kidneys as well: Brolin had got out of the car and joined in. He stayed passive. Brolin screamed at him some more and then he heard the car doors clicking shut. The engine whined and the tires screeched.

  He lay still and thought about what kind of a day it had been, and how the cold was masking some of the pain, and how good it had felt to tell Brolin he was going to beat the shit out of him.

  Then he struggled to his feet and staggered drunkenly down the street and hammered on the door of his girlfriend’s shack.

  The next day, his whole body hurt. KR wanted to let Fatboy loose on Brolin’s patrol car. He and Sol talked to Fatboy’s auxiliaries and mission controllers about it, down in the workshop basement, and they mocked up a couple of attack scenarios and watched the simulations. They had Fatboy jump the vehicle from behind, smash the rear window and then peel back the roof, sending Brolin and his partner into cardiac arrest. They had Fatboy attack from the front, leaping onto the hood and smashing the windscreen, reaching in with its clawed appendages, and again sending the two cops into cardiac arrest. They also war-gamed some other scenarios, mainly an attack on the station house where Brolin and his buddies hung out, and where they had holding cells for felons awaiting arraignment.

  KR felt more than surrogate satisfaction, he felt fired up and angry, as though he was teetering on the edge of going into battle: all it would take would be for Brolin to hassle him over Dolly, or one of his top guys to get arrested, and he’d give them what they deserved, exercise the power that he now possessed. And it would feel great.

  But for now all they could do was send Fatboy into Popeye territory and demolish their antique gunship. They scoped out a mission with the aid of satellite data, and set the timing for three in the morning. When they returned to the basement soon after seven, Fatboy was back safe and sound and they were able to watch the video record. Fatboy had to break open six garages before it found the gunship, and then it got locked into a firefight with a couple of ambitious custodians. The video slowed down by a factor of ten so that they could watch the jumps and feints and circlings of Fatboy as it harried the gunmen and drove them terrified from the garage. Then it cut the gunship into pieces.

  “You see?” Sol shouted in triumph. “It did everything right, nothing unnecessary. This cat is learning how we slice and dice, how we run the business. It ain’t just a hunk of tin with no brains.”

  “Why doesn’t it talk to us?”

  “It can talk, man. You want it to talk? Wait a moment.” Sol, surrounded by processors and screens, muttered a few phrases.

  At last a hollow voice said, “Situation secure, Mister Sol.” And then it said something in another language.

  “What was that?” KR said.

  “The same thing!” Sol said, waving his hands. “The same thing in some kind of Nigerian!”

  “Why?”

  “Covering all the bases, man, that’s all!”

  Chapter Seven

  After Sara paid the $700 to the Nigerian charity, she felt unhappy with herself for several days. She tried to conceal her mood from Dolly, but when she was by herself she stomped around and made faces and muttered to herself about not giving in to extortionists.

  Foster had been more resilient than she had expected; and in truth there was a lot of common sense in the points he had made.

  The money was nothing, he said, even if the demand was repeated month after month. For God’s sake, he would pay the money himself if it was really going to have some impact on her business. Foster earned an academic’s salary, which wasn’t high, but she knew that he was right: the loss of $700 a month would have little impact on the way they lived.

  Anyway, he said, it won’t last long because they’ll get caught. They can’t go on breaking in to places of business and blowing out people’s windows without somebody reporting these things. Of course he didn’t want Sara herself to report them, but all the same she could see he had a point.

  What really got her down was that she had failed to manage her business in a way that kept her husband safely on the sidelines, oblivious to her problems. Instead of that, she’d practically given him a heart attack, and introduced him to a whole new source of worry. She was furious that she hadn’t seen the possible consequences of non-payment, furious with the ghetto crime lords for holding hardworking citizens to ransom, and furious with the police for letting such abuses gain traction.

  And somewhere at the back of her mind, largely covered by her sense of guilt, was resentment that Foster didn’t seem to understand about the need to fight. Okay, it made sense to buy some time by paying the money, but then you’ve got to think about nailing these bastards, rather than simply hoping they go away. It wasn’t his fight, of course, but still, she’d like to see some signs of moral outrage, some support for a more proactive defense. So at work she continued to stomp around and feel that she had sold out to the enemy; while at home she had to make an effort not to think less of Foster for so quickly urging surrender.

  The picture changed again when Frank phoned with some news. The locksmith asked her if she had heard about the death of Mattie Goldberg the previous night.

  “What? Mattie is dead?” All kinds of images chased through her mind.

  “Yeah. Not good, uh? Did you go and visit him, by the way?”

  “Yeah. We kind of agreed to... keep in touch. What happened?” Sara realized her voice was sharp and nervy.

  “I don’t know much. It looks like a robbery that ended badly. This was at home rather than at the store. There was a burnt-out window at the back, and it looks like Mattie had a gun and blasted away at somebody.”

  “So what killed him?”

  “A zombie, maybe? Who’s now wandering the neighborhood with holes in his chest? Who knows? It wasn’t on the news so far.”

  “Not even cause of death?”

  “No.”

  She badly wanted to know how Mattie had died, and after closing the link with Frank, she surfed the local news sites but failed to learn anything new. It looked a little as though he’d been attacked or threatened at home in the same way that she had; but he’d known it was coming, or responded very quickly to the destruction of a window, and had attempted to shoot the intruder; with a bad outcome for himself.

  Foster would say how right they’d been to pay the money. But Mattie might have died not because he wouldn’t pay, but because he’d counter-attacked. Which didn’t entirely invalidate Foster’s point: if they hadn’t paid already, they’d sure as hell be paying now.

  She called him and got him at his desk.

  “You know what?” he said in his precise, thoughtful tones, when she had told him the story, “I’m inclined to believe the agency we’re facing here is a robot. Probably a counter-insurgency robot with a lot of sophisticated capabilities. Otherwise how does it operate eight floors up the outer wall of an apartment block like ours? How does it survive being shot at?”

  It was at this point that she remembered the manner in which her mannequin had been attacked: a military type of weapon, Dennis had told her. She still hadn’t told Foster about that, and she decided not to mention it now; but it gave some credibility to his theory. Instead she said:

  “Why would a robot get involved in nickel and dime extortion?”

  “Good question. The obvious answer is that it’s owned and run by nickel and dime criminals. Of which I suppose you’ll find plenty in the ghetto.”

  “Well anyway... I want you to know that... stubborn as I am... you made the right decision.”

  “I just want to keep you safe. You know that.”

  “Yeah. And I will keep safe. I’ll be fine. See you later.”

  She shook her
head slowly, thinking unfairly, Safe for what? Running my business and not causing trouble? But the truth was, Foster had been supportive and hadn’t blamed her for anything, so probably she was expecting too much. It was her fight, her business, and she’d have to work out her own solutions.

  Dolly arrived for work later on in the morning. Sara had begun to look forward to her presence around the store: she was cheerful and enthusiastic, good with customers, naïve about a few aspects of business, but quick to learn.

  After chatting for a few minutes, she put Dolly to work going through the boxes of clothes from dealers and charities that arrived most days in the warehouse. She settled down herself to calling customers and answering queries. She was beginning to think about lunch when Dolly burst in from the warehouse.

  “Look at this, look at this,” she said, spreading a dress reverentially out on the counter. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”

  Sara went across and fingered the material. It was a long ball gown in mustard yellow shot silk with some unusual decorative ruffles. Early twentieth century, she decided. It wasn’t beautiful in any obvious way, but it breathed class, and the shifting colors of the shot silk were, indeed, gorgeous.

  “You want to try it on?” Sara said.

  “Oh, gosh, me? I’m too tall. Too bony.”

  Sara spread the dress flatter and made a guess at the dimensions. “You’re probably right. Although too big in the waist is obviously better than too small. What do you think it’s worth?”

  “Say... five hundred dollars?”

  “Make that three thousand. We’ll offer fifteen hundred. Come on, Dolly, you’ve earned yourself some lunch. Let’s order some nice sandwiches.”

  When they settled down to eat, Sara said, “Dolly, you’re doing really well. I really like having you around. I hope you’re going to say you’ll carry on with this.”

  “Sure I will. I love it here. And, you know... it’s so hard to get an interesting job these days.”

  “I guess you thought about a government job?”

  “Yeah, but...” Dolly hesitated, dropped her gaze. “You have to kind of work the system, don’t you? You have to be the right kind of person. I never felt...” She stopped, looked uneasy.

  Sara decided not to press her. “I get it. Too much politics. Anyway, the government’s loss is my gain. Let’s hope between us we can make enough to keep this thing viable.”

  Towards the end of the lunch she suddenly decided that if she was going to give Dolly more responsibilities, perhaps leave her in charge of the building, she had to trust her with a full knowledge of the break-in and its aftermath. As she told the story, Dolly looked uneasy, but not, as Sara had been afraid, outright terrified.

  “Is it just you?” Dolly asked when she finished, her right hand fidgeting with her necklace. “Is it something special against you?”

  “I know of at least one other,” Sara said. “A jeweler called Mattie Goldberg. I spoke with him about it a few days ago. I thought if a few of us got together we could, you know, put up a fight... Anyway, Mattie was very courageous, he said he’d never give these scum a cent... but unfortunately... Dolly, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, and I don’t have all the details, but I’m trying to be as honest as I can... Mattie was killed last night.”

  Now Dolly did look frightened; in fact shocked. She stared at Sara, eyes wide.

  “It might have been nothing to do with this business,” Sara said. “He might have got really unlucky, targeted by somebody else. I don’t even know how he died.”

  “But you paid... You decided...” Dolly looked distracted, her eyes moving restlessly around.

  “In fact, my husband Foster decided... although in the end I agreed with him. But I wasn’t really happy about it. Dolly, it won’t have escaped your attention that we’re close to a very deprived area here, just over the canal to the east. It’s what you’d have to call a ghetto, I suppose. It’s a breeding ground for crime and violence. It’s a scandal and nobody, the city, the police, social services, nobody seems to get a handle on it, clean it up, get it under control. And those of us round about suffer as a result. So when I say I wasn’t happy about paying the money, it’s because in the end you’re just going to make the whole thing worse. My instinct is, you’ve got to fight. I don’t know how at the moment, but I’ll think of a way.”

  “Even if they try and kill you?” Dolly said in a small voice.

  “Forgive me,” Sara said, switching to a lighter tone. “I’m making this sound like the Gunfight at the OK Corral. For the moment, we’re paying the money and nothing’s going to happen. If I go on the offensive I’ll let you know, and you can choose to stay at home for the day.”

  Dolly looked down at her fidgeting hands and seemed unable to speak.

  “Is that okay?” Sara said, leaning towards her and patting her arm. “Or have I totally spooked you out?”

  “No, no, it’s okay,” Dolly said with a little shake of the head. “I’ll, I’ll... get used to it, I suppose.”

  Chapter Eight

  “What the fuck we do now, smartass?” KR said.

  “Oh man, oh man,” Sol said, rolling his eyes.

  They were in one of the hangouts of his gang, a fast food outlet near to his corner store, eating a bucket of chicken. KR still felt sore all over. His right heel was tapping up and down in a nervous rhythm.

  “We knew this could happen, right? We knew this thing had a crazy streak, liked to attack things. Like the mannequin at the Barnardi place, or the dog at the home bakery. So why didn’t you just tell the fucker in plain English, ‘Don’t attack things, never do that kind of stuff, especially people, living human people. This is not a part of your mission.’”

  “I did, I did, man! Fucking right I did. ‘Do not do this stuff,’ I said.”

  “So how come it didn’t listen? Robots do what you tell them, always. Isn’t that what you said? How come it wades in and fries this Goldberg guy?”

  “Because this Goldberg guy was blasting away with a fucking great bazooka, man!” Sol wailed. “Come on, man, give Fatboy a break. At least it ain’t no pushover, crawling away on its belly. What do you expect of a robot that’s done time in Africa? It probably thought it was doing us a favor.”

  “Robots don’t think. Robots do what they’re told.”

  “So this one was wired a bit different. That’s what you get when you buy stuff straight from the battlefield.”

  KR stared sourly at his companion and bit into some chicken. For a smart guy, Sol could be pretty goddamn disconnected at times.

  “So what do we do?” he said. “Tell it to go dispose of itself? The cops ain’t going to leave this one alone. A decent citizen, cut down in his home? That could bring in the feds. And if they suspect it’s a robot...”

  “They ain’t going to suspect it’s a robot, man! Fatboy didn’t leave nothing out there, nothing at all, images, tracks, witnesses, nothing! Maybe that’s why we’re ahead of the game with Fatboy taking out Goldberg. Maybe that’s why it killed him, because it could tell that Goldberg had seen it. It wasn’t the gunfire. I know I said it was the gunfire, but maybe it wasn’t. It was because Goldberg was a witness.”

  KR thought about that. He took another piece of chicken from the bucket. “It’s still bad news.”

  “Why? Why?”

  “It gives people reason to talk. They’re scared, but they want to know what the hell’s going on. Am I going to get killed next? And they know each other, these people. They’re in business. They talk to each other. And one of them says, we can’t just do nothing, we can’t just wait around while someone else gets killed. And he goes to the cops.”

  “No. You’re wrong, man.” Sol was waving his arms, getting excited as usual. “When you’re scared you don’t trust nobody. You stay at home and drink a lot and piss a lot. You pay the money on time. You sure as hell don’t go to the cops. Are you kidding, man? You think it’s just us don’t trust those slobs? That’s the last thing you do. What, patro
l cars calling, reports filed, detectives asking questions? The last thing, man, I’m telling you.”

  KR ate some chicken and stared at the table, his right leg jogging up and down. Sol could be right and anyway, what were the options? Throw away his investment? Send the fucker back to Africa? Give in to the Popeyes, and Brolin and his friends, and all those other people out there trying to grind the life out of his community? So one poor sucker was dead, because he was stupid enough to take pot shots at a robot. Too bad. That’s what happens in a war.

  “Look,” he said, “you got to talk to Fatboy’s archives and behavioral modelers and all the rest of that junk and get across the clear instruction that killing people is not an option. Okay?”

  “Okay, okay. But you know? I think Fatboy usually gets it right.”

  KR walked from the chicken place to his corner store. Most of the damage done by the Popeyes had been repaired or painted over. He walked around it a couple of times, his mind veering back a couple of times to the Goldberg killing. He knew he had to live with it, but it still made him uneasy and ashamed. What the hell would his mom say if she found out? His mom had been around a lot longer than he had, and she knew that bad things happened, and that sometimes people died, but an innocent guy like Goldberg... Just ’cause he hadn’t paid his seven hundred bucks? Shit. She really wouldn’t like it.

  He went into the store and focused on the jobs that had to be done. Tank had run into a problem with the drug synthesizer, which was occasionally demanding a kind of feedstock that he didn’t recognize and certainly didn’t have. KR went down to the basement and interrogated the machine, but didn’t fully understand what it told him. He talked to the guys in New Orleans and plugged them through to the machine, but they couldn’t work it out either. He suspected the Popeyes of concocting some kind of fake drug spec, in order to sabotage his machine, but Tank believed the drug orders involved were genuine.