Escalante

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  The other man managed a few strides of frantic retreat before Roland clamped onto his shoulder and dragged him kicking and yelping into the air. The woman, who Roland had ignored up to this point, began shrieking even louder and the sound grated on his already failing temper.

  He dragged his prey back to where the other man had gone down and turned to the hysterical female, “Will you SHUT UP!” he roared, letting the prodigious air volume of his bionic lungs turn the order into an ear-shattering bellow that rattled the windows up and down the street. Yellow squares of illumination began to appear, dotting the edifices of the tenements as other homes awoke to the commotion in the street.

  Roland tossed the still struggling man to the ground next to the now silent woman and pinned him to the street with a size-21 foot. Windows up and down the street had begun to open and curious heads were popping out like inquisitive groundhogs. This suited Roland. The more people that heard and saw this, the better.

  He addressed the downed man and the whimpering woman, but his voice was pitched to carry through the cool night air to as many ears as cared to listen.

  “I do not give a flying fuck who you are or why you are shouting in the middle of the street. But this is MY street, now. It’s four o’clock in the fucking morning and you need to get the fuck inside and shut the hell up if you value your life.”

  He grabbed one of the fallen pistols and held it aloft so everyone could see it. It reflected dull gray and flashed dimly under the weak glow of a dying streetlamp.

  “If I ever have to come down here and deal with you again...?”

  A meaty fist closed and the pistol disappeared briefly, only to reappear as a rain of crushed pieces that fell like broken twigs to clatter noisily against the pavement. The conscious man’s eyes glazed over at the sight of this.

  Roland looked up at all the open windows and all the meek faces peeking out at this bizarre bit of street theater. He adjusted his voice so everyone could hear him clearly.

  “My name is Roland Tankowicz, I’m new in town, and I like peace and quiet. Please come see me in the morning if you have an issue with this. I apologize for the disturbance. Good night.”

  He released the man under his foot and turned his back to the three unfortunates fate had decreed would mark Roland’s first interaction with his new neighbors. He paused after a few steps, then turned back to them, “Do not be here when the sun comes up. Do not come back.” Then he whirled and stomped up the stairs to his apartment. He crawled back into his bed and slept the deepest sleep he had slept in a very long time.

  Years later, no one would remember or remark upon this moment, but it was a turning point for that dirty little borough. That early morning action marked the first time Roland Tankowicz ‘fixed’ a problem in Dockside.

  It would not be the last.

  6

  Roland woke late, which was not typical. A compulsive early riser, he was surprised and confused by the piercing beam of sunlight that was trying earnestly to burn its way through his eyelids. The sound was strange, too. Sunlight did not make sounds. It certainly didn’t make sounds identical to a door chime. The sun was shining and a door was chiming and he suddenly realized - his door was chiming.

  Roland sat up immediately as the memories of his pre-dawn temper tantrum came flooding to the front of his mind. He groaned. What the hell have I started? He wondered, why couldn’t I just leave shit alone?

  The door chimed again, and Roland realized it was not going to stop until he opened it. He was still wearing the baggy gray sweatpants from last night, but his skin had shifted back to flat matte black. He was going to need some long-sleeve shirts and gloves if this was going to keep happening. He pressed a finger to his palm and twitched his pupils in the pattern that would shift the skin of his body to match his head and neck, and then he stood. He was not stiff, at least. Roland’s body could not get ‘stiff’ the way another’s might after sleeping on the floor, and he rose smoothly from the tangle of blankets where he had slept.

  “Alright! I’m coming,” he barked at the impatiently cheerful ringing of the doorbell and he stomped over with footfalls that were probably heavier than they needed to be. A grumpy slap of the access panel slid the door open and let all the searing light of the mid-morning sun into the apartment at once. Roland’s eyes were not bionic, and so it took a moment for them to adjust from the dim gray interior of his empty apartment to the searing brightness of the street.

  When they cleared, he saw his landlord on the stoop, shuffling uncomfortably from foot to foot and looking upward with sheepish embarrassment at his looming tenant. Roland was instantly apprehensive. He had been living there only one day and already the landlord was there to complain. He stammered nervously, which sounded ridiculous coming from someone his size and with his deep gravelly voice, “Ah... Mr. Granovich, I’m really sorry about last night, uh, sir. I don’t want to be any trouble...”

  The older man shook his head, “No, no, no, Mr. Tankowicz. Please. Is OK.” His eastern European accent was still thick, even though his English was quite good, “I am not here to evict you, sir.” He held up his other hand, which held a soda bottle. Roland could tell that that it did not contain soda at the moment. “May I come in, please?”

  “Uh. Sure,” Roland shrugged. Nervous, but curious as well, he waved his landlord inside the still-dim apartment. He had no furniture and no possessions to speak of. Other than his charging dock, he had very little but the clothes on his back so there was nothing to hide from the man.

  Granovich looked around at the empty living room, “You need furniture, Mr. Tankowicz?”

  “Working on it, sir,” Roland replied. He was still instinctively calling everyone older than him ‘Sir.’ He needed to stop doing that.

  “I will call my friend. He has warehouse in Sprawl. Many things there your size.”

  Now Roland was confused. He had assumed he was about to get chewed out for smacking his neighbors around, but Granovich was treating him like some kind of celebrity. Granovich continued, “You have much weight?”

  “Much weight, sir,” Roland agreed, still off-balance.

  Granovich nodded, “Will not be problem.” He waggled the soda bottle and a very light copper liquid swirled, “Do you have glasses?”

  “Sorry, sir. No.” Roland felt strangely uncomfortable. He had been to dozens of planets, and interacted with multiple cultures, but he was never good at it and he was well beyond confused at this moment.

  His landlord shrugged and passed him the bottle, “Like in old county then?” and he smiled as if it was a very funny joke. Roland understood this part, so he took the bottle and opened it. Ethanol vapors assaulted his nostrils and carried the light fragrance of plums to his nose. He recognized that aroma instantly, and it made him smile. In the interests of politeness, Roland took a good long pull from the proffered drink and enjoyed the comforting fire of strong hooch blaze its way down his esophagus to nestle in his stomach. He was nearly incapable of becoming drunk under most conditions, but a brief, expert-drinker’s assessment of the shockingly high-proof of the beverage told Roland that if he wanted that particular job done, this stuff had a chance of doing it.

  He grinned at his landlord, “My grandmother used to bring us rakhia when she visited. Thank you.” Roland had very few pleasant memories left, and the traditional restorative of his eastern European ancestors was one of them.

  His landlord smiled and took the bottle back. He swigged on it with as much gusto as Roland had, which was impressive since Mr. Granovich did not have a thousand pounds of mass and a bio-engineered super liver to deal with the powerful beverage. If Grandma’s stories about the old days were true, then Granovich had probably had this stuff in his bottle as a baby, though.

  “I figured a good ‘Tankowicz’ boy might appreciate a taste of home every now and then, yes?” The landlord pronounced the name in the old way, as ‘tehn-KO-visch,’ which also reminded Roland of his grandmother.

  “Yes,” he
agreed, “So you aren’t here to yell at me for last night’s, uh, incident then?” Roland asked.

  Granovich snorted a derisive laugh, “Of course not. Those three have been shitting on this street for three months now. I have lost four tenants because of them. Fuck them. I hope they die.”

  “Ah. I see.” Roland didn’t see. Not the big picture, anyway.

  “Now they leave. You scared them. Is good thing you did. Now I have favor to ask...” Granovich looked uncomfortable with this.

  “What is it?” Roland asked when his landlord did not continue.

  “Do it again, please?”

  “What?” Roland could not form a more eloquent reply.

  “Docks come here ten years ago, yes? Docks bring jobs. Money. Need workers. I buy most of buildings on this street because is slum and they are cheap. I fix them up and I rent to new workers. Good people with good jobs who pay rent on time.”

  Roland began to see where this was going, and he listened intently, now.

  “But slum is still slum. Still has gangs. Drug dealers. Criminals. They like Dock workers too because dock workers have regular money not like junkies. Now instead of junkies fucking with each other, we get organized gangs fucking with tenants.”

  He paused to take another hard pull from the soda bottle then handed it back to Roland. Roland drank as well. It was polite.

  “Tenants won’t pay good rent if gangs run street. Gangs won’t go away unless I pay them to.” He shrugged, “I am fucked. Can’t charge good rent, can’t afford to pay off gangsters.”

  “What the hell did I do last night?” Roland asked, suddenly aware that he may have kicked a much bigger hornets’ nest than he thought.

  Granovich smiled a mean little smirk, “Those were drug dealers. Stupid, small-fry pieces of shit who bother my tenants. Are gone now. But more will come. This is good neighborhood. Hard workers with good paychecks. Honest people. Too nice of target for gangs to leave alone unless made to. You made them go, so they went.”

  “I’m no cop,” Roland started, but Granovich interrupted him.

  “The gangs, they have many soldiers. Some are ‘hunters’, some are ‘enforcers’, some are ‘runners.’ But there are also the ‘fixers.’ These are people who do not join gangs, but solve problems between them to keep from too much fighting. You understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. I want to hire you as ‘fixer.’ Keep gangs off my street. Keep tenants safe and happy.” He smirked again, “Keep rents high, yes?”

  Roland gestured for the soda bottle and Granovich handed it over, watching the huge man intently as he pulled another big gulp of Croatian plum brandy. “So you want me to make this street so unpleasant for gangs that they go bother other neighborhoods?”

  “Yes.”

  Roland was a young man, but he was an expert in the field of urban combat and the quagmire of counter-insurgencies, “You know that it will get worse before it gets better, right? If I do this, the gangs will escalate to try to push me out.”

  Granovich nodded, “Yes. Of course. I have lived in Croatia when the Russian gangs moved in after the expulsions. We did similar thing there before I move here. Hired many fixers. Retired soldiers with skills that frightened the pimps and thieves. After Venus, was plenty to go around, yes?”

  Roland thought for a long moment. His survival was very much predicated upon not calling attention to himself and keeping his abilities as secret as he could. But this was just shooing flies away from an industrial tenement. How hard could it be? He could use the money after all.

  But that was not why he was considering this plan and he knew it. He was going to do this, and he was going to do it for one simple reason.

  It was a mission.

  Roland had never understood how badly he needed a mission until he did not have one. Two days out of the Army, just two days after being released from a nightmare of captivity, slavery, betrayal and murder, and Roland was losing his mind with boredom and depression. Now someone was offering him a mission? Not just any mission, either. A beautiful, righteous mission with easy-to-identify bad guys and clearly defined objectives. The betrayal of Project: Golem and the horrors of what he had been made to do under its thrall had changed Roland. They had burned his idealism to a blackened cinder and aged the young man into a jaded cynic. It had left him with nightmares and doubts. It had left him only ten percent human and deeply damaged psychologically. The forges of the industrial-military complex had beaten the love and loyalty that had defined a young soldier into a wrought-iron core of rage and hate. They had gleefully destroyed something beautiful, and they had done it all for the greed of a few evil men. It had changed Roland forever.

  It had broken him.

  Since his escape, Roland had resigned himself to a hermit’s life with no real purpose other than to survive another day to spite his tormentors. Every day he lived was a day they had to look over their shoulders. Every day Roland walked the earth might be the day Roland came calling to collect on debts owed.

  Any given day could be the day when the man who was Roland Tankowicz might give in to the weapon they had called 'Breach.’ Donald Ribiero had bet on the man always winning that war, and Roland would never let Don down. He owed the scientist that much and more. But the rest of them would live their lives in fear that their greatest creation may yet turn on them. It had not sounded like much of a life when he thought about it, but it was all he had and it would have been enough for the limp dead thing in his chest.

  But now?

  A mission?

  A battle?

  A purpose.

  That burned out cinder couldn’t have been all the way dead because his enormous bionic heart leapt at the thought of it.

  Roland held out a gargantuan hand, and Granovich took it and shook it firmly.

  “I believe we have a deal, Mr. Granovich.”

  His landlord raided an eyebrow, “But we have not discussed rates yet.”

  Roland answered honestly, without thinking first, “Doesn’t really matter.”

  “Is Dockside, Roland!” the landlord looked scandalized, “Rates always matter.”

  7

  Walter Bixby’s morning calls were getting out of control. He had feared it would come to this. He despaired of it the moment he had spoken with Tankowicz.

  Every night this week some group of opportunistic street punks had run afoul of the big vet and gotten their asses kicked. Part of him had held out a secret hope that nothing would come of the big man’s arrival, but he was far too cynical to have given it too much credence. Still, hope was an insidious thing and he found himself disappointed that this particular problem had not been avoided.

  Further compounding his woes, the last two nights, the groups had been from Rodney’s crew. The South East residential quarter was hotly contested territory, filled as it was with good blue-collar folk making decent money. No one had established supremacy there as the gang wars were stretching everyone thin just holding onto their regular territories. It looked like The Dwarf was making a play in earnest, which struck Bixby as counter-productive. Rodney had been warned that Roland was supposed to be left alone, and yet he was deliberately poking at the bear.

  He’s testing Roland. Scouting him.

  Far be it from Rodney McDowell to let an opportunity go unexploited; the creepy little man was trying to see if the new guy was a potential ally or enemy. He was using the contest for that quarter to test his limitations and motivations. The problem, Bixby theorized, was that Rodney was treating Roland like a potential score, not like a military objective.

  If Roland decides that Rodney is a viable target, he is going to service that target just like in a war. Bixby knew the type well. Roland may be a top-secret special-forces cyborg, but he was a soldier as well. The Dwarf probably thought he was baiting a fish before reeling it in. What he was really doing was hunting whales in a dinghy. Bixby could not have that. His informants were talking about pressure from Uptown rackets over
in the Guts that was causing friction with Gateways. Nobody was taking that rumor seriously and that terrified Walter. Gateways was not going to let this “Combine” control the docks no matter what happened, and a real shooting war was going to come to Dockside if that did not get dealt with. But instead of dealing with that he was relegated to playing whack-a-mole with street hoods who didn’t know enough to stay away from the meanest dog in the yard.

  Walter pondered the crappy turn his week had taken while he sat at his desk and drank burned coffee from a plastic cup. His hands shook because he opted not to put bourbon in it, and every part of his brain was encouraging him to add just a splash, if only to improve the taste.

  Get thee behind me, Satan! Bixby tried to make a joke of it in his head, but the pull of the demon liquor was strong and he nearly crumpled under its insidious crooning.

  The truth was that Walter Bixby was scared. Things were happening too fast in Dockside. Too much money from shipping, too many new faces, and way too much attention from the big crime families. The rest of his department was all too willing to play ball with the new players, but the last good cop in Dockside had only his principles left to cling to.

  That and the booze, anyway. Which is why Walter was laying off of the stuff. If he let the booze play this late in the game, it would be no different from surrendering. The same as dying, really. He had fucked up so much of his life at this point, he could not let that happen. Might as well put his gun in his mouth.

  Walter shoved the night’s reports back onto his desk in disgust. If he didn’t get out of the office he was going to start drinking, so he decided to go visit Tankowicz. It was obvious that Rodney was too stupid to stay away from him, so he’d play it the other way.