Black Rust

by Bobby Adair

  Lutz nodded as much as he was able given the barrel of my pistol pushing up under his jaw.

  I lowered my weapon. “We got a good thing going. We both make good money. I’m not going to screw it up to steal one crooked spotter.”

  Lutz leaned back in his seat and rubbed the underside of his jaw.

  I couldn’t tell if it was fear, respect, or a craving for revenge I saw in his eyes.

  “If you don’t trust me,” I told him, “then let’s wrap up this business with the dirty kill, get our asses off the hook, and split. You go your way. I’ll go mine. There are plenty of Regulators around you can partner up with.”

  Lutz mulled his response, ginned up his courage, and said, “Don’t you ever—”

  I ignored him, got out of the car, walked around to the rear, and leaned against the back window, not caring that caked red dirt was getting on my clothes. A night of tromping through the woods and killing degenerates had already left a pretty good layer of crud on me.

  The Hispanic man who’d let us in had turned his back and was walking across the floor toward the far side of the building where a multilevel structure of offices or apartments had been built along the wall. The building was a big empty warehouse under a corrugated steel ceiling thirty or forty feet up. Besides the relatively small structures built against opposite walls, it was empty. From the ceiling over that empty space hung various items—nets, sheets, punching bags, obstacles for what was flying through the space, drones, weaving in and out, up and down, racing along a course that was visible to them but hidden from my view.

  A deep voice said, “Everybody wants to be the best drone pilot.”

  I turned to see a wiry, tall man with shaggy red hair coming toward me. He looked very familiar. “Everybody?”

  He pointed at the structures against the far wall. “I rent space to some other spotters.”

  “You rent to them?” I asked, trying to figure out where I knew the tall man from. “You own this place? The spotter business must be good.”

  “I’ve got the whole shopping center,” he told me. “I squatted back when there was still unclaimed real estate to squat on.”

  “I missed that boat,” I grumbled. I was too young in those days and didn’t know shit about anything when Brisbane took both my parents. “I pay rent. Where do I know you from?”

  “Basketball probably.” He glanced into the car to see Lutz.

  I looked over my shoulder at Lutz, who was still in the driver’s seat. I said, “He’s pouting.” Looking back up at the tall man, it clicked. “You’re Ricardo George. You used to play for the Rockets.”

  He extended a hand to shake.

  I put my hand out to be engulfed by his and introduced myself. “Christian Black.”

  “You’re the mysterious partner with the skills.” Ricardo made two pistols with his fingers and pretended to squeeze off a few shots.

  I turned and opened the rear door of the Mercedes. “Sorry about your drone. I shot it. Sorry.”

  Ricardo leaned over to look inside. “You got money?”

  “To pay for the drone?” I asked.

  “You did shoot it down.”

  “I don’t want to buy a new one. If you can fix it, I’ll pay for whatever you need.”

  Ricardo straightened up and didn’t look pleased. In fact, he looked like he was contemplating a violent response.

  “Or I can buy you a new one,” I told him. “And we’ve got these two others. Maybe there are some parts you can use. Maybe you can sell them to your tenants.”

  “After I have some time to look at those video drones, I’ll let you know. All this stuff is hard to come by.”

  “Isn’t everything?”

  Ricardo grinned. “That’s why it’s expensive.”

  “More expensive because they have bullet holes?” I asked, trying to gauge where this whole thing was going.

  Ricardo shook his head. “I don’t do business like that. You’ll pay me a fair price, but I don’t think the price will be the problem.”

  That made me curious. “If the money isn’t the problem, what is?”

  “You need to pay me tonight. Cash.”

  Shit. One more goddamn complication.

  I didn’t know how much Ricardo would want for his drone, but I knew I had enough cash in the safe at my house to cover it. I just didn’t want to burn off an hour and a half driving to get it. Time was going to turn into a problem. Still, keeping Ricardo happy was high on my priority list. He had the video containing the evidence that could get me locked up in a work camp or set me free. “I’ve got the cash.”

  Ricardo smiled. “Good.”

  “Why tonight?” I asked. “I can get my hands on the money and bring it back here, but it’ll be a pain.”

  “I need my money tonight because you might be in jail tomorrow.”

  Crap. That wasn’t encouraging. “Is the video that incriminating?”

  “There’s an arrest warrant out for you.”

  Chapter 13

  I stood. Lutz sat in a rolling chair. Ricardo sat at a long desk in front of a bank of monitors, six sets of three. Each of his drones had three cameras with wide-angle lenses mounted on the bottom to provide a three-sixty view. Six sets of monitors meant six drones in the air. One set of screens was conspicuously black. All of the other screens were alive in shades of black and green from the night vision cameras being used. Some of them displayed real-time, sharp video feeds from those drones close enough to the city to get a broadband signal. Others—those further out—cached their video and sent back only low-resolution, low-frame-rate images. Those screens were choppy and hard to watch.

  The video Ricardo played for us looked like that—the one that showed me murdering dancing degenerates. Due to the angle of the video, Lutz was mostly blocked by the trees. So though he showed up at the end of the choppy video, right before I took his rifle and aimed it at the drone, the video showed little direct evidence of Lutz killing anything. And depending on what got back to the police from the two dead video drones in the back of the Mercedes, Lutz might get off.

  Most of the guilt was on me.

  Without looking away from the wall of video monitors, Lutz told me, “You should run.”

  Run?

  That would get Lutz off. Based on what we’d seen so far, if I disappeared, he could spin whatever story he liked, pin it all on me, no problem for him.

  And why not take the whole rap? What difference would it make? Ten years in a work camp? Twenty years? I couldn’t do a single one.

  Still, he might be right.

  If I ran, I’d have other problems. I could get no legal jobs. I could get no illegal work—the Camacho brothers problem. Avoiding a slow death in a dirty back room somewhere down in what used to be Mexico was high on my list of wants.

  New identity? Sure. That would be fine for a job in a factory or for babysitting toddlers, but getting a new Regulator ID with a fake identity wouldn’t fly. Regulators were akin to law enforcement, and they received the same degree of scrutiny prior to hire, the kind of scrutiny my background couldn’t suffer.

  I’d already spent too much money on the bribes to get my current ID. Then it had taken a long time before I started making a real profit on the deal, which only happened after I hooked up with Lutz. Would I be able to find a Lutz 2.0 in the next city I fled to?

  What about staying? Lutz and I had a good thing going. We were banking a mountain of cash. If we could keep it cranking another year without killing each other, I’d save enough money to pay what I owed the Camacho brothers.

  Then what?

  Too far in the future to think about. Too many obstacles.

  I looked at Ricardo and asked, “What do the video operators have?”

  Ricardo shrugged. “Enough to get a warrant.”

  “Don’t play coy,” I told him. “The sanction was never approved. A kill went down. That’s all the cops needed to issue a warrant. You know that. The video from your spotter drone was eno
ugh. The video from the voyeur drones is just the icing, the confirmation. I need to know what went through the network back to their operators.”

  “A warrant is just the start of your sentence,” Lutz whined. “Once they arrest you, it’s over. They toss you in the can, and then they convict you. Everybody gets convicted. Then it’s a work camp.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.” I had no doubt Lutz was exaggerating.

  “Maybe things were different where you came from,” said Lutz.

  There was no law where I came from.

  “He’s right,” Ricardo told me. “You prove your innocence before they pick you up, or forget it.”

  “They don’t investigate?” I asked.

  Ricardo and Lutz both laughed.

  It was a naive question but one I should have known the answer to. I’d been outside the reach of governments for so long I was guilty of remembering them how they used to be when I was a kid. At least back then they went through the motions of administering a judicial system.

  “If I were you,” said Lutz. “I’d run.”

  Ignoring Lutz’s squawk-bird repetitive bullshit, I focused on Ricardo. “You sold the location of the kill to the video voyeurs. You know who they are. Have you talked to them?”

  Lutz got up and headed toward the door. He muttered, “I gotta pee.”

  Shaking his head and showing me his empty palms, Ricardo said, “I don’t front-run kills to those guys. They can’t be trusted.”

  “That’s bullshit.” I yelled it. I shouldn’t have, but I was tired, and I was getting frustrated.

  Ricardo stood up and looked down on me. “If I were lying, I wouldn’t be offended, but I’m not lying, and I am offended. Now you can apologize.”

  Ricardo stood a head taller than me. He was twenty years older, but solid. I put a hand on one of my pistols.

  The door opened on creaky hinges, and Lutz stepped through.

  Ricardo cocked his head toward Lutz.

  What? I turned away from Ricardo. “Stop.”

  “No.” Lutz didn’t look at me when he responded.

  “You better stop and answer a question.”

  “You didn’t ask me anything.” Lutz pulled the door to close it.

  “If you make me come after you—” I left the threat there.

  Lutz put on a defiant face and stopped.

  “It’s you. You’re selling the locations to the video operators.”

  Lutz didn’t answer.

  “You fucker.” It was the best I could come up with at the moment.

  Chapter 14

  I apologized to Ricardo.

  Lutz took his leak, came back into the room, and took a seat. “Don’t get pissed at me because I know how to make a buck.” Apparently having his dick in his hand had convinced him that indignation was the best response.

  Lutz irked me for a lot of reasons. Him making more money off our work than I did only served to strengthen my animosity. He was becoming a less and less palatable partner. Making no attempt to hide anything I was feeling toward him, I said, “We need to know what your video drone guys have, which means we need to know who they are—don’t give me any shit about keeping it private. Until we know what they’ve got, this is your ass on the line just as much as mine.”

  Ricardo added, “He’s right about that.”

  Lutz looked at me with suspicion. He turned to Ricardo. “You got pen and paper?”

  “I live in the twenty-first century.” Ricardo made no move to check any of the drawers under his desktop.

  “People with real lives still use real pens and real paper.” Lutz huffed and took out his phone, turned his back to me to block my view, and went to work with his thumbs. He glanced over at Ricardo. “I’m sending you their contact info.”

  Ricardo shook his head, disappointed.

  After Lutz finished, Ricardo spun around in his seat to look at his screens. He pulled up his email client and opened Lutz’s email on a screen three feet wide.

  I laughed. “I guess it’s no secret now, Lutz.”

  Ricardo spun back around in his chair and looked at Lutz, daring him to say something.

  Lutz chose to keep his mouth shut.

  “I know who these guys are,” said Ricardo.

  “Will they deal with us?” I asked.

  “They’re scammers, but everybody likes to get paid,” he replied.

  “Can you find out what they have?” I asked. “Find out what they want?”

  He looked at Lutz, and told me, “I can make a better deal than he can.”

  “Have they posted any of their videos yet?” I asked.

  “I haven’t seen anything,” said Ricardo. “Maybe that’s because they’re still trying to figure out what happened to their drones. They’re like me—they’ve got to keep a lot of drones in the air to keep the cash flowing. That’s the game. Everybody loses a drone from time to time. Everybody’s got a guy they know who’ll go out and find the downed ones. Nobody loses sleep over it. Maybe these guys both think their drones dropped out with a battery problem. Maybe they never saw the low-res, low-frame-rate pics come back across. Maybe they don’t know anything. Or maybe they saw what was coming, and now they’re both waiting for the HD video to come through so they can plaster it all over the Internet or sell it to a reality TV show. That’s how these guys make their money. A lot of people like watching d-gens die. More gore means more money. A lot of people hate degenerates, and a video of dirty kills and guilty Regulators will generate an ass-ton of traffic, especially with as many as you guys shot tonight.”

  People working a morally ambiguous angle to make a buck? Sounded like the kind of people I’d always dealt with. “If we can bribe these guys, will they give us the video they’ve got?”

  “They’ll give you a copy,” said Ricardo. “But a copy of the low-res is all you need, even if they decide to take your money and throw you to the cops.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “We’ve got the high-res on the data cards from those two video drones you dropped.” Ricardo looked at Lutz then back at me. “If you’re going to stay in Houston, then the smart thing to do is alter the three high-res copies—mine and the other two—and feed them back to their respective owners. Oh, and we’ll have to alter your gun cam video as well.”

  “So,” I said, “you’re saying we alter the high-res copies so they jibe with the low-res copies but still provide exonerating evidence.”

  Ricardo nodded. “Like maybe showing cannibalistic behavior or showing them attacking you before you fired. Everybody has the right to defend themselves.”

  “And you can make that happen?” I asked.

  “Pay-offs to Lutz’s two video buddies—” Ricardo’s grimaced at the mention of the two, “pay them for their lost drones, finding some video guys in the middle of the night, paying them to get out of bed and making it worth their while to work through the night and get this all done by morning—”

  “How many video guys?” I asked.

  “Six,” answered Ricardo. “It’s a lot of video to fix in not a lot of time.

  “That’s bullshit,” Lutz whined. “Stick a dead kid at the beginning and the rest is justified. Easy.”

  Ricardo shot Lutz a glare that made me think he might jump up and punch Lutz in the face. “Sure, but the kid has to be the same kid from five different angles, and you have to show some kind of cannibalistic act. Or just murder would do. So, it’s not just a body, unless maybe you alter one of the animals on the fire. Then it’s not just at the beginning. What happens to the body after you kill everybody? Does it just disappear? Or does it lie there the whole time like the rest of the corpses? You got to use your brain and think when you’re constructing good lies and manufacturing evidence. That’s why you run through the woods and shoot d-gens in the middle of the night instead of sitting at a desk in an air-conditioned office, Lutz, because you’re not smart. Now be quiet unless you’ve got something intelligent to add.” He looked back at me. �
�This all needs to be wrapped up before too late in the morning. Then you gotta pay them to stay quiet about it. Then you gotta pay me to put it all together. Everybody’s got to get paid.”

  I nodded. I didn’t have a problem with it. “How much?”

  “A hundred thousand.”

  Lutz choked, turned red-faced, and coughed before he sputtered, “You should run, Christian.” He apparently still thought I was the only one on the hook here.

  A hundred thousand was a whole lot of money, nearly a quarter of what I’d put away in the seven months I’d been working with Lutz. But if I paid the cash and it bought me another year with Lutz, I’d earn enough money to pay my debt. One hundred thousand was a setback, but it wasn’t the end of the world. I looked over at Lutz.

  “This is on you,” he told me. “I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “What do you have?” It was a challenge as much as a question. He needed to come up with something.

  “I’ve got debts,” he said. “I’ve got bills.”

  “It’s a lot of money,” said Ricardo. “But if you can’t do it, you can’t do it. Pay five thousand for my drone and I’ll send you on your way.”

  “Five thousand for a crashed drone?” Lutz snapped. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Don’t pretend you know what a drone’s worth just because it’s more than you want to spend,” said Ricardo. “Pay the man or go to a work camp.”

  “Lutz,” I asked, “what can you do? How much can you kick in?”

  He put his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. In a weepy voice, he said, “I can’t. I’ve only got three, maybe four thousand. I gotta run.”

  I sighed. It wasn’t unexpected. I told Ricardo, “I can cover it.”

  “You?” he asked. “By yourself?”

  “I’ve got the cash.” I looked at Lutz. “You owe me. When this is all done, you’re paying me back your half.”

  Lutz didn’t look up. He didn’t say anything. He nodded with his face still in his hands.

  “It’s got to be tonight,” Ricardo reminded me. “You’ve got to get me the cash. None of these guys are going to take a risk on credit. Not on your credit. They don’t know you.”