The Ferryman

by John E. Siers

  “If Rosita walked up to you right now and rubbed those pudgy little boobs against you, I’ll bet your pecker would jump right out of your pants…and for once, your pecker would be right. At my age, I’ve learned to approach such things with at least half my brain engaged. If you put Rosita in a lineup with a dozen of those plastic Barbie Dolls from your school, guess which one I’d want to jump in bed with?”

  “Rosita?” Jimmy looked doubtful.

  “She’s real, you idiot! You’ve been wasting your time chasing rubber sex toys. More importantly, there’s a chance she might even like you!

  “The sex toys have been conditioned to like guys who’ll give them what they think they want—money out the wazoo, high-fashion wardrobe, travel around the world, party with all the right people. The guys have been conditioned to think they want the sex toys—for unlimited sex and nothing else.

  “So they get together, and the average marriage at that level of society lasts less than three years—followed by divorce, fights over property, court battles. The only ones who come out on top are the lawyers. I’m surprised your mom and dad have lasted as long as they have, but they started before your dad got rich. I give them maybe another two years before they split.

  “How do I know this? Because half the people I snuff here are rich bastards who played the same game and got beat, over and over again, until they couldn’t take it anymore. They come here—just like you did—so I can put them out of their misery.

  “But they’re mostly people who played the game for years, and they’re too far gone to get out. You’re not. You can take your toys and go play somewhere else, and you might just live happily ever after.”

  Mark sat back and glared at him. Jimmy still looked miserable.

  Damn! What’s the matter with me? I’m not supposed to be the kid’s guidance counselor. I’m supposed to take his money, sign him up and snuff him out.

  Wonder if Lisa’s watching…Sorry, Love, not myself today. I’m still upset about Lacrisha and her mom, wish I could have done it better with Vanessa, but most of all I’m upset about what happened to you yesterday. I guess all that got mashed together into this screwed-up mess with Jimmy.

  Got to wrap this up. I’ve done all the preaching I’m going to do. The kid either got the message or he didn’t.

  “So here’s the deal.” Jimmy’s head came up at the sound of his voice. “You’ve got two choices. Right here, right now, you have to pick one.

  “You can sign a contract with us, pay the rest of the money, and go home. You can come back in three days, and we’ll take you upstairs. We’ll strip you naked, tie your hands behind your back so you can’t mess anything up, put a rope around your neck, and drop you through a hole in the floor.

  “When the rope snaps tight, it’ll break your neck. You’ll dangle on the end of that rope, kicking and twitching for a minute or so. Then your body will relax, and you’ll piss and shit all over yourself. You’ll be dead.

  “After that, we’ll dump your dead ass into our disposal system, maybe grind it up for dog food. We’ll donate your clothes to the local homeless shelter. We’ll send a little note over to California DHS to tell them you’re dead. Unless you leave them a note, your folks may never know what happened to you.

  “Or…you can choose Door Number Two.” He held up two fingers for Jimmy to see.

  “You can keep the rest of your money and go home. You can keep your mouth shut about it—as far as we’re concerned, you were never here.

  “You can use your superior intelligence to get around Mama, avoid all those rich bastards at school, and maybe reach out and touch Rosita. Do not go running down to the barrio. Rich gringo boys stand out in a place like that, and you might not get out alive. Just drop her a private message on social media, start a conversation.

  “If that works, you can meet her on some neutral ground—she’ll be as unwelcome in your rich-bitch neighborhood as you will be in hers. Doesn’t matter, there’s plenty of places to go where nobody will notice the two of you together.”

  “But if you decide to go on living, you’d better be thinking about more than just getting laid. You’re going to graduate in a few months. Go home and tear up those applications to Ivy League colleges your parents want you to go to. Flush ‘em down the crapper, burn ‘em, get rid of ‘em. Find a school that teaches something you want to learn, not one that teaches rich assholes how to act superior to the rest of us. When you find that school, beat up your parents to send you there.

  “If you don’t know what you want to be just yet, OK. That’s understandable. I’m serious about this—go talk to your local military recruiter. Maybe you’re not cut out for the Marines, but there’s still the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Any one of them will teach you more about life than any fancy college will.

  “So what’s it going to be, kid…Door Number One or Door Number Two?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Interlude

  As promised, Mark closed the office early and went upstairs—straight to Lisa’s apartment, rather than his own. He found her in bed—still in the middle of the nest, but now clad in shapeless, fuzzy flannel pajamas and a soft terry robe—watching a silly so-called reality show that featured characters that bore little resemblance to real people. He nodded with approval at the half-empty box of chocolates by her side.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  “Much better,” she assured him. “Your prescription is working very well, doctor—nothing like chocolates to bring a girl back to life.”

  “Of course, there’s a lot to be said for ice cream, too,” she purred. “There’s a gallon of butter pecan in the freezer. All I need is a big hunk of a man to fetch it for me…”

  She gave him her best starving little orphan girl look, and he found himself magically teleported to the kitchen, where an ice cream scoop jumped out of a drawer and into his hand.

  How does she do that? He chuckled as he dished out the ice cream. Maybe I need to send her over to LEI to be tested for SAD.

  LifeEnders’ Special Activities Division was rumored to be involved with magic and paranormal phenomena. Mark had never actually seen any evidence of SAD in action, but he had it on good authority that it wasn’t just a myth or urban legend.

  “So…” she said a few minutes later, as she licked the spoon. “I see we didn’t get the contract.”

  “Lisa…”

  “I love you.” The dish and spoon fell by the wayside as she lunged forward and wrapped her arms around him. “I love you so much.”

  She put her head against his chest, and his arms went around her automatically. For some strange reason, she was even more exciting all bundled up than naked. Then her hand worked its way into his pants, and he almost lost it. He wanted to throw her down on the bed and unwrap that bundle, but he stopped himself. He reached down and retrieved her wandering hand.

  “No…we’re not going to do that,” he told her. “You need at least one more day to heal up.”

  “But tomorrow’s Thursday,” she pouted. “It’ll be Time-Out.”

  “Then I guess you get two days to heal up,” he told her.

  “You know you saved that kid’s life today,” Lisa said softly. “You were amazing. I’ve never seen you like that, so in control, so…fatherly.”

  “Fatherly? Did you just say fatherly?”

  “Well…maybe that isn’t quite the word, but you were the authority figure he needed to smack some sense into him. You were wonderful.”

  The two of them were seated at Lisa’s kitchen table. They’d settled for a few kisses and a fond embrace, then gotten out of bed and smoked a joint to mellow out and tame their sexual appetites. Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, marijuana is not an aphrodisiac. In fact, it usually has the opposite effect, reducing hot passions to a warm feeling of mutual contentment.

  It did tend to produce hunger, however. Deciding that neither of them wanted to cook, they’d ordered take-out from a local Chinese restaurant, once again de
livered by drone to the balcony. Now they picked over the remains of the meal while reviewing the events of the morning.

  “That’s funny…I didn’t feel like I was in control. In fact, at one point, I thought I was over the top, that I’d gone too far. For sure, I wasn’t being very professional—at least as far as the Ferry’s interests go. I was wondering what you were thinking, seeing me doing that—yes, I knew you were watching, or at least I was fairly sure you were.

  “I’m still not sure why I did it. The only thing I can come up with is that the kid pissed me off, just for being what he was. I mean…here’s a guy with a Matrix of 172, and he lets people walk on him who aren’t smart enough to operate a TV remote without technical support.

  “And when it comes to the opposite sex…hey, you know how dense I am sometimes, but this one wouldn’t know a real woman if she walked up to him and pulled his pants down. I was thinking maybe I should send him off to see one of Lezzie Liz’s business associates—maybe one of those whips and chains specialists they hire for Beverly Hills bachelor parties.”

  Lisa had collapsed into a fit of giggles at the mental image of Jimmy Fenton in the hands of a professional dominatrix. “No…please,” she said. “Shoot him, hang him, anything but that! The kid would probably be afraid of women for the rest of his life.

  “Anyway,” she got serious again, “do you think he’s going to follow up with Rosita? I thought that was absolutely the sweetest thing you could have done…for both of them.”

  “Hmmm…you know, we can check on that. NorthStar gave us the keys to his social media accounts.”

  Mark picked up Lisa’s pad and pulled up the Fenton file, then selected a couple of hack links NorthStar included in their report.

  “Hah! Chat message from Jimmy to Rosita: ‘Hi, Rosita. Somebody told me you were into robots. I love robots—software, anyway, but the hardware is tough for me.’

  “Hmmm…that’s actually a great pick-up line,” Lisa mused. “Perhaps Jimmy isn’t totally devoid of social skills.”

  “Well, yeah, I suppose it’s better than ‘Hi, Rosita, somebody told me you have nice tits. Can I come by and feel you up?”

  That sent Lisa into another fit of giggles, but she took the pad from him and brought up the full conversation.

  “Bingo!” she exclaimed. “Look at this! She not only responded, she sent him a dozen pictures of robots she’s built—and the girl has talent. These are really neat.”

  “Anyway,” she handed the pad back so he could look, “I’d say Jimmy is about halfway into her pants already.”

  “Or she’s into his,” Mark said with a grin. “It works both ways, you know.”

  Later, they lay in bed, just cuddling in the spoon position, waiting for sleep to come.

  “Mark,” Lisa said softly, as they were both about to drift off, “you really are good with kids. Maybe we should have some.” She turned around to see his reaction.

  “Don’t give me that deer-in-the-headlights look,” she told him with a chuckle. “I’m not talking about next week. My implant still has three years to run, anyway.”

  Modern medical implants gave women five years of protection from pregnancy and reduced the monthly menstrual cycle to almost nothing, a mere one-day annoyance at most.

  Most women claimed it also increased their sexual appetites, though some of that may have simply been due to the freedom from worry about unwanted pregnancy. Mark had once asked Lisa about it, but she’d told him she wouldn’t know—she’d been a nymphomaniac since puberty, even before the implants became available.

  After a long silence, Mark finally spoke.

  “Lisa…I love you more than anything, and I would love to have children with you, but I think we’d have to get out of this business we’re in. I mean, can you imagine the kids at school? Show and tell: ‘My mommy and daddy have their own business. They kill people. They do it all kinds of different ways, and sometimes it gets really messy.’”

  “Point taken,” she acknowledged. “Not to mention the extracurricular activities. Imagine Mark Junior and his sister Lilly coming home early from school and finding Mommy or Daddy having sex with a client. Most parents only have to worry about their kids catching them having sex with each other, but…”

  “Right…and then we’d have to put a lock on the meat locker and make sure the kids are asleep before we do any processing. We’d probably have to schedule all executions during school hours…”

  “At least until the kids are old enough to understand…” she said in a perfectly serious tone.

  “Huh?” he gave her an incredulous look.

  “Well, I mean, somebody has to take over the business when we’re ready to retire.” This time he saw the twinkle in her eye.

  “Oh…right.” He snorted. “Mark Junior and his sister Lilly take over the family business and run it just like Mom and Dad. That wouldn’t work, Darlin’—unless you want to add incest to the list of social evils in the family dossier. In case you haven’t noticed, I have sex with my business partner more often than with prospects or clients.”

  “Well…as long as they maintain the Time Out days,” she said, with a serious look on her face. “I mean…by then, it would be like a family tradition.”

  He stared at her, and she collapsed into a giggle fit. “OK—you win,” she told him when it subsided. “You get the Straight Man of the Year award from Lisa’s Comedy Talent Search.”

  “The scary thing,” he told her, “is that I’m never really sure you’re joking.”

  “The scarier thing,” she insisted, “is that I’m never sure, either.”

  They lay quiet for a while, and Mark was just starting to drift off to sleep when Lisa spoke again.

  “Mark…would you fuck me if I were your sister?”

  “In a heartbeat,” he told her. “Go to sleep.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The Actress

  “I have to be dead before Monday,” she insisted.

  “So you told us,” Mark looked at her with chagrin. “That’s why we granted you an early interview. Would you care to tell me why you’re in such a hurry?”

  More than a week had passed since Lisa’s ordeal with the bikers, and it was Thursday morning again—a Time-Out day. They usually didn’t do prospect interviews on those days, but the application had come in yesterday, flagged ‘urgent’ on their system, and they decided to make an exception.

  Honey Ryder—her legal name, though not the one she was born with—was an actress. She had appeared in over a hundred films, but never in a starring role. Moviegoers would recognize her immediately, would remember the films they had seen her in. They would probably not recall her name, lost among the fine print credits nobody bothers to read.

  At 42 years of age, Honey Ryder was just three feet tall, afflicted with the most common type of dwarfism, known as achondroplasia. Her torso was short, though not abnormally so, but her limbs were extremely short. Her head—home to an attractive, feminine face—was normal-sized, but looked large on her small body. She had long blond hair that would have fallen below the waist on a normal-sized woman. On her, it fell to her ankles when she chose to let it down.

  She had started her movie career in the porn industry, and her breasts had been significantly enhanced by cosmetic surgery—to the point where she needed to apply significant squeezing to encircle her large boobs with her short arms. Hollywood loved to cast her in the role of a dwarf prostitute, stripper, or just a bar-hopping nymphomaniac—mostly for brief, comic-relief scenes with a male star.

  “Something—I’d rather not say what—is going to hit the news feeds on Monday,” she said. “By Tuesday, they’ll probably have warrants out for my arrest, but that doesn’t matter, because I probably won’t live long enough to go to trial. You know…LifeEnders…”

  “Really?” Mark raised an eyebrow at that. He wondered if maybe it was connected to a recent high-profile LifeEnders hit—a prominent Hollywood producer arrested and charged with pedophilia-r
elated crimes that included the disappearance (and presumed death) of two inner-city nine-year-old boys, and the sexual molestation of several well-known child actors.

  The producer, Andrew J. Papadrious, best known for a series of highly successful children’s films—had arrived for arraignment at the courthouse with a trio of high-priced lawyers. Surrounded by local media reporters, he’d had his brains splattered all over the courthouse steps by a LifeEnders agent masquerading as a TV cameraman.

  Mark had done his usual checks with LifeEnders, but so far Honey Ryder was clear on that score. She wasn’t on the “No Hit” list, and so far no one had put out a contract on her. He was clear to sign her up.

  “Yeah, really,” she told him. “You’ll understand when you see it on the news. Of course I’ll be gone by then, but…”

  “You’ll be gone on Sunday if we sign the contract today. That covers the three-day waiting period. We don’t have any choice about that.”

  “Fine. Where do I sign?”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute. First, I have to go over some of the contract provisions. I know you probably don’t care about any of this, but the law says I have to cover it with you.”

  He went over the basics and—as he expected—she waived everything. None of it mattered; she just wanted to be dead as soon as possible. When he got to the part about her body becoming the property of the Ferry, she offered a sardonic comment.

  “So what’re you gonna do? Stuff me and put me in a museum?”

  “Does it matter? Whatever we do, nobody outside the Ferry will ever know about it.”

  “Nope! Doesn’t matter at all. Dump me in the ocean, for all I care. Like you said, nobody will ever know what happened to me—and that’s probably for the best.”