The Price You Pay

by Aidan Truhen

  Billy’s wife says: Hey, Jack, thanks for coming I’m still just so sad.

  Hi Laurie. I got no idea what to say do we know what happened?

  They’re saying it was terrorists Jack and honestly I just don’t know.

  So I hug Laurie and I go over to the peanuts. You will always find Rex by the peanuts. Even if the Rex I am looking for is not in the building or the city there is always a Rex just grazing on the peanuts and looking like a guy who knows he should have stopped eating like five mouthfuls back but now he can’t he’s locked into salt fat beer salt fat beer and so on. He’s going home with all kinds of digestive distress.

  Hey Rex.

  Hey Price.

  Sorry about Billy.

  Yeah well that’s the world man.

  It is the world, but it is also assholes.

  Yes. My whole job for this year just came to a halt this morning. They lost the fucking paperwork. Now I’m just holding my dick waiting for the word. They say a week at least, and what am I supposed to do in the meantime just sit on my ass?

  Rex there’s a parcel for you on the hall table which might ease your pain it’s maybe not ideal for you to open it in company it’s more a private sort of thing a professional matter for you at your office you get me?

  Yeah man I read you loud and clear. Thanks man that’s actually gonna help my boys a whole lot maybe let off some steam.

  No problem listen Rex let’s say this one is on the house but you recall there’s something I need from you too sort of a quid pro quo by which I mean a favour for a favour.

  Yeah man I know what that is but of course.

  I might need more than just a little access is what I’m saying.

  Well what more we talking?

  Well Rex we’re talking I need to borrow some stuff of yours and to be entirely honest you might not get all of it back.

  Shee-it Price that is a serious fucking quid for my quo.

  I know man but it’s a good cause. I’ll be straight with you because I trust you. It has relevance to this sad occasion.

  Man the terrorists? You’re going to do something about that?

  Am I going to do something about that? I have done things about that which our people will remember in songs for hundreds of years, Rex. From here to Mexico man from here to fucking Abbottabad they can hear the echoes of what I have already done. And what I’m going to do will be like a California fire. It will burn and burn until there is nothing left. You know I was talking to a guy from the Japanese FBI yesterday, okay? I been dealing with heavy-as-lead motherfuckers from your Scandawegian commercial intelligence sector and just these last few days some very international bad people. Yesterday I saw a lady who was a chief suspect in collusion with others—and not from here man—take a gaffing hook in the motor cortex. She is now residing in the sump of a fishworks by the water. She actually fucking sleeps with the fishes, man. So I am going to do something about that. For Billy and for my country I am.

  Wow man.

  Yes Rex.

  Wow man that is awesome man that is like patriotic is what that is.

  I believe that it is Rex I believe this is the great patriotic fight of our time. We are the fucking colonial marines facing the redcoats and the fucking aliens from space and whatever else this hostile universe is going to throw at us. And we are showing them what it means to. Mess. With. The. WRONG. Son-of-a-bitch. Is what.

  (Rex does this kinda yodel thing like a war cry which I could not pull off but on him it kinda works because he is this huge ugly fuck who smells of peanuts and beer but at the same time obviously this is kinda not the time and so a lot of people look at us and Rex says: Sorry.)

  I say: Primal screaming therapy man. It’s the best for grief and it’s totally making a resurgence on the West Coast. Rex, man, call me. There are things we need to do.

  OK Jack. Hey Jack you mind I call you Captain?

  No Rex that would be fine although you want in on a secret my actual rank in the Resistance is Colonel. By the way can I borrow a hand detonator like right now? I’ll send you a list for the rest, but I don’t need anything else today. Just the clicky red light part that scares the crap outta people.

  Oh shit man okay yeah of course. Thank you, sir Colonel Price.

  At ease Rex. This is a democracy.

  OUTGOING SMS:

  Hi doc.

  Price.

  Seems like a bad thing happened.

  Yes it does.

  And you were not there.

  No I had something else to be getting on with.

  You know I can’t tell when you do that whether you’re like arms folded and pissed or all melty and come hither?

  What do you want?

  Like to have a grown-up discussion.

  Oh god we’re not eighteen please tell me this is not about—

  No for god’s sake doc no this is about professional matters.

  Fine. Go ahead.

  First I need to know if you’re wearing clothes.

  Of course I’m wearing clothes Price it’s the middle of the day.

  You’re not even slightly naked and sitting in a fake execution chamber pretending you’re about to go under and getting real excited?

  What? No. Price that’s just warped. Also I’m at work.

  I just figure that’s how you spend your free time.

  I go to movies and eat sushi. I like books but not non-fiction. I have a great sense of humour but most people don’t really get me.

  Really because I have that same exact thing.

  Price. Please.

  Okay I want to meet and discuss something.

  Anything you want to say you can say to me here.

  Doc I don’t wish to be in any way rude or diminishing of your personal importance in my life but it ain’t you I want to be discussing with.

  You’re not serious.

  Yes, doc, I am. I want to sit down with Fred and say my piece. I even bought him a present.

  You’re out of your mind.

  He’s a sniper so I got him a watermelon. Snipers love watermelons right it’s a whole thing?

  See above.

  That I think is well-established fact by now but that don’t change that it’s hurtful you would say it like it’s a bad thing. Come on doc humour me.

  …Fine. I’m sending you an address. One hour.

  And for Christ’s sake get some clothes on I’m a fucking respectable guy.

  Fuck you Price.

  Fuck you too doc.

  …Fuck you.

  Fuck. You.

  Fuck. You. Right. Back.

  ARMS DEFINITELY FOLDED and definitely not naked in a freaky sex room. Doc waiting outside the restaurant and you need to hear me saying that word with all its parts: rest-oh-ront because that is emphatically what this place is. It has grown-up style coming out of its plucked Italian buckskin ass. Too new to be an old favourite and too old to be the new thing. It’s just right here and I musta seen it a bajillion times and never been in. Not my kind of place but the more I look I realise it’s no one’s kind of place. It exists for meetings between people who don’t want to meet. It’s got calm in the green-and-gold decor and the fat-handled cutlery and icy detente woven into the thick velvet curtains between the booths. This is where you bring your wife after the divorce. This is where you come with your mistress to meet her baby. Probably where the guys from the UN go when someone invades Afghanistan and that’s how it stays open. This is a place where you can yell and pretty much only the sommelier can hear you.

  For really fucked-up situations like this one they got private dining.

  Tuukka waiting in the car. Not welcome at the party I said on account when I see him I think of that godawful noise his frozen leg made when he tried to walk on it and shit fell out and that is no
t conducive to enjoying the fucking terrine is what. Doc wrote it all down because she is very precise.

  Fred. Hi Fred.

  Mr. Price.

  Fred does not look the way Fred should look not when you get close. You’re hoping for some kind of physiological indication of the man’s deep and primal nature like he should have this big dramatic scar or smoke coming out his nose. Fred is the First Demon after all and that kind of thing should leave its mark on a man but no. Fred looks a little bit dull and a little bit irritable like I’ve made him late for his daughter’s tuba recital and Fred is pissed because he really secretly wanted to miss that tuba recital but he’d resigned himself to going and was in that place where parents got to go to where they love every blarting hoot of a tuba recital with biological fucking certainty and now he resents the everliving shit out of life that he cannot go.

  Look I got you this melon.

  What?

  It’s a melon. For you like as a gift.

  Why do I want a melon?

  I thought what with you being a sniper—no never mind I’ll keep it—Jesus no one’s into the classics any more. Listen Fred I need your attention for some preliminaries okay just so we don’t have any embarrassments?

  Proceed.

  Fred what the fuck is proceed for god’s sake? Okay, never mind, look at this object here in my hand do you know what this is?

  That is a remote detonator for an explosive device of some sort.

  Yeah only it ain’t all that remote at this precise moment is what. This is my insurance. I press this every so often and nothing happens. I press it in a particular fashion and something does happen. So my plan is that you and I walk out of here at the same time. You pick your exit and that way there are no regrettable but shortlived disagreements between us. You get me?

  If I attempt to kill you at this time you will have the option to kill us all.

  Plus if you succeed I don’t push the thingy and—

  Yes I understand—

  Boom.

  Thank you for explaining that to me.

  I figured it was best to let you know in advance of whatever appalling shit you were considering.

  Yes, I do see. A strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction, of course, very much an artefact of the 1970s in which you were born.

  I’m a child of my time Fred. We are the Radiation Generation. You know I grew up outside the city? Turns out there was one hellacious power plant out there and when I was in school they showed us a Geiger counter and the two most radioactive objects in the room were my chemistry teacher’s old watch that his daddy gave him and also me. And apparently I read where people from my area when we’re buried we’re technically toxic waste.

  Is that so?

  No Fred that is bullshit but I had you going.

  Oh, indeed. May I, in turn, make an observation, Mr. Price?

  Be my guest.

  Thank you. I was curious to meet you today, Mr. Price. Curious because you are fascinating to me. I did not intend you any harm. There is time enough for that tomorrow.

  What’s happening tomorrow?

  You will die. Anyway, as I was saying: I was curious to know whether you would be the man I had envisaged. Which you are, of course.

  Not following you Fred.

  Then allow me to elaborate, Jack Price. You have referred to me occasionally in the course of this remarkable affair as a PR guy. That is, in fact, not strictly accurate. I have worked in public relations, as well as serving in the military both as a solo sniper and as a psychological operations officer, but my training is in behavioural economics and abnormal psychology. That is to say I am a scientist whose field of study is a combination of the way in which people make economic decisions and the functioning of the mind and the brain in cases where someone’s mentation—that’s to say their thinking—is outside the normal societal range. For a while, I even worked with—though not at—the Federal Bureau’s noted profiler unit at Quantico. I very much enjoyed profiling serial killers, I must say. Although tragically it has to be acknowledged that what you might think of as gut profiling—qualitative and symbolic judgement as is most often depicted in film and television—is vastly less accurate than brute data modeling. Although at the sharp end of the model is a small group of very intelligent persons who must apply the right guesses and turn knowledge of the general population into theories of the specific.

  Fred when I said I wasn’t following I did not mean please do more of the same with more bullshit.

  Yes, it pleases you to affect foolishness. Yet your actual functional level of intelligence is very high. You’re an extremely intelligent man with almost no restraints or inhibitions at all. And I believe you characterise yourself as quite without emotional attachment either to objects, possessions, your profession, your home, or to the things most people value such as pets, friends and family. You blame the aftermath of your curious dislocated and vicarious encounter with a terrorist outrage but although that was genuinely traumatising for you it was not the root but rather the moment at which you allowed your bad genii out of the bottle. It was an excuse, if you like, to be who you have always wanted to be—and we were the next one. We allowed you to cut loose your residual empathy and behave like a monster while feeling that you had no choice. But you have always had a choice, and you have always had emotional attachments. You know this, however much you fight it. Thus you are doomed. In the end, you will act the hero because you must. It is who you are and who you have always been underneath. You are a man who needs excuses, Mr. Price. You need reasons to suppress your compunction and you have found them. But in the process you have also taken steps to protect the people for whom you care and those people have become fewer and more obvious. I think you have learned that love is still in you. Humanity is still in you. And I think that in learning that you have become ever so much more vulnerable to someone like me. So whatever you wanted to say to me, here is what I came to say to you: when you go to sleep tonight it will be the last time you ever do. Tomorrow I will call you and I will make you an offer which you will accept. You will choose to give up your quite empty if colourful life in exchange for an end to the suffering of those you care about. You will do this because beneath it all you possess compunction and you know that I do not.

  Well gosh Fred.

  Mr. Price.

  Is it my go now or is there more where that came from?

  Please, take your turn.

  Well okay Fred you know that you all were hired to kill me because Sean Harper murdered a mad old lady who looked like an explosion in an ugly elderly paint factory?

  I am aware of Didi Fraser’s death.

  Okay well so the whole point of that exercise completely fucking escapes all of us right? I mean can we agree that this whole thing between us is way past the point where it has anything to do with Didi?

  Agreed.

  But it is your technical reason for being here. Like I know that even if Sean called you off you’d obviously still want to disembowel me with a lemon squeezer but technically you work for him?

  Quite so.

  Well so Fred here is what it is. You forgot about Sean and I didn’t. I never gave a crap about him either, but I at least understand compunction—even if I got no idea whether it’s still in me or not if I’m honest. But I get the logic by which the world works and here it is. Either you stand up now and take off all your clothes and walk out into the street and you shout JACK PRICE KICKED MY BALLS UP OVER MY HEAD or else when you call me tomorrow I will shoot Sean once in the face and twice in the—wait that’s backwards isn’t it. You definitely want to start with the chest right, and then pop pop? Fuck it. You get the idea. I will kill Sean boringly but effectively. And I know you won’t care on a personal level but I figure I’ve pretty much demolished your personal brand already. But if I kill your client now, you’re finished. You can re
build the Seven from here it’s not impossible but if Sean dies ain’t no one going to have any respect for you. Seven Demons will be finished until someone takes them from you and they will Fred they will. I hear where Volodya the Sniper is in town already sniffing around. Hell even Tuukka might think it was time for some new management he has to be carrying some dissatisfaction in his heart. Even the doc here she might reckon to say goodbye to your boring condescending ass in your grey suit. She’s got her a wild streak behind the eyes. But you will be done. So why don’t you just start to strip. Fred.

  Mr. Price, I’m not sure I understand what I get out of this deal, as you put it. You seem to have left me disgraced either way.

  Oh shit Fred did I? Dang you’re right. Oopsies. What can I say I’m not a smooth polished professional like you. Oh, on that subject, I went down to the harbour and picked this up. I’m pretty sure it’s Karenina but you know it’s real hard to tell from just a femur. But I figured it’d be good for you to have something to remember her by.

  Price…

  Yeah Fred look at that. You got a temper too, just like me. So let me just make one thing clear: you came here with Seven Demons. Now you got two and a half. You know what that is Fred? That is the Price you pay. THAT IS THE PRICE YOU PAY YOU WEAK MOTHERFUCKER. Are we clear?

  I will speak to you tomorrow, Mr. Price. Sleep well.

  Yeah you too. Oh wait that was like a death reference right and I completely trod on your cool exit line? Sorry man.

  OUTGOING VOIP ENCRYPTED CALL:

  Hey Rex?

  Colonel is that you?

  Yeah Rex it is. Looks like we’re on buddy. You good?

  Yes sir. I am.

  And the right people know?

  Yes sir they do. Word is out, sir.

  Rex this is going to be some tough fucking action. There will be consequences Rex I ain’t gonna lie.

  No sir I know. But the Tree of Liberty sir.

  God bless you Rex.

  God bless you Colonel.

  INCOMING SMS MESSAGE: