The streets thinned out as we headed uptown, and the empty shells of buildings gave way to merely decrepit, sagging old stone structures that should have been blasted away and replaced with the shining new metal ones, except that everything ground to a halt twenty years ago and never quite got started again. Even those shining new buildings uptown were starting to look a little run-down.
The shop was called Tanner’s, and the windows on the street were big and clear and unbroken, filled with the most ludicrous bullshit I’d ever seen. Little figurines, wooden jewelry boxes, crap like that. I felt grimy and dirty, and self-conscious-we’d lost our camouflage and stood out against affluence, even the very edge of affluence. I looked at Gatz and he just shrugged raggedly. I squinted at him.
“When was the last time you ate, man?”
He shook his head. “Food just makes me sick.”
Tanner’s was warm and inviting, filled with all kinds of useless crap. Furniture, lamps, knick-knacks, art pieces lined the walls and tables. There was barely any place to walk. I felt huge, shouldering my way through all the dusty shit, my eyes scanning the ceiling for the obvious security measures. Just as I was wondering where in fuck Milton and Tanner were, I turned a corner and stopped short, finding a tiny, craggy old woman blocking my way, arms akimbo.
“I hope,” she snapped, “that you didn’t come in here thinking to be robbing us, kiddo. You’re on the system, and you wouldn’t get far.”
I smiled. “I look that desperate, eh? To rob this fucking place?”
It was insulting. I was a Gunner. I worked for a living. I didn’t have to steal.
She looked me over from foot to head. “You look like a punk.”
That was insulting. I turned the smile off. “I see the fucking cameras, Mother, and I see the field trips embedded in the walls. I didn’t come here to rob you. Pick suggested your name for a job.”
She shifted her weight slightly and suddenly seemed quizzical, less pissed off. She even smiled a little. “A job? What the hell do I want a job for? Do you have any idea how much money we make with this place?”
I looked around. “This crap sells?”
“It sure does, kid,” a voice came from behind. I turned, startled, and found the same woman standing behind me. She was even standing arms akimbo, and a brief moment of complete confusion shuddered through me. Fucking twins.
“All right,” I said, nodding. “Which one’s Milton and which one’s Tanner?”
The second woman shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”
The first said, “Come on in the office, then, sonny, and we’ll talk business.”
The second added, “Bring your scabby little friend, too.”
The first, “I don’t trust him out here alone. Sticky-”
The second, “-fingers.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, gesturing at Gatz, who was, indeed, examining some of the shit closely, as if it might profitably disappear into his skeletal hands. “He’s coming. I insist.”
The two women cackled simultaneously, freaking me out. “He thinks-”
“-he’s got-”
“-some pull, like it ain’t us-”
“-that’s got the guns on him!”
I scanned the room again, gritting my teeth against the embarrassment of having to. I didn’t see anything. I looked back at the first one. “No fucking way.”
She sneered at me. “Gunners.”
The back office was plush, carpeted, and climate-controlled, dominated by a huge wall-mounted Vid and two oversized wooden desks, ornately carved, pushed together head-to-head. The twins each took a seat and left Gatz and me standing. I glanced around, shrugged, and shoved a pile of papers off one of the desks with a flourish, hefting myself up onto it, facing them both simultaneously. I was about as uncomfortable as possible, but I wasn’t about to tell them that.
They looked at the papers on the floor sourly. The second one said, “Your boy’s gonna clean that up before he leaves, yeah?”
I blinked. “Probably not. And I’d like to see you make him. I’m here with a job offer. You interested, or are you making so much skag with this bullshit you’re just enjoying breaking my balls?”
The second one shrugged. “Sonny, we like breaking balls.”
The first one nodded. “We earned it.”
“Wasn’t for Pick, we wouldn’t even talk to you,” the first one said. “He’s the only fucker we know of ’round here that’s older than us.”
“How do you know Pick?” I asked, to be polite. Polite did wonders for the oldsters. Anyone who’d been an adult before Unification, a few yessirs and noma’ams could go a long way.
“School,” they said simultaneously.
“We worked with him on some government projects, back when things were still sane,” the first one continued.
“Genetics,” the second one added. “It was amazing to have the chance to work with him.”
I tried to picture these two as scientists. It was an amusing image, these two leathery old broads rubbing their chins wisely, wearing white coats or some shit. It made sense, though; a lot of the best crooks after Unification had been real brains, scientists and economists and shit. Unification had done some weird things to people, people you’d never expect. It had killed my father, who’d seemed tough as steel to me when I was a kid, and it had turned these two freaky twins into thieves, and good ones. It was hard, after twenty years of living life on the streets of New York, to picture these two as fancy academics, but I’d seen stranger things.
“Fucking Joint Council tried to recruit us all,” the first one said with a grin full of shockingly good teeth, yellowed but strong and unbroken-sort of like the women themselves. “We were living in a commune upstate-remember?”
The second nodded, her eyes on me. “Sure, sure-Freedom Gardens. Naked fucking kids, every-fucking-where.”
“We were living up there with Pick, just watching everything happen, after the schools were all shut down and our funding cut off, and the JC sent a couple of shiny new undersecretaries up there to offer us all jobs. Some project they were all working on, right after the JC formed, something top secret, very hush hush.”
They both grinned. “We told ’em to stick it!”
They glanced at each other without moving their heads, just eyes sliding to the side. “Shit,” the first one said with a sigh. “They fucking raided the place a month later. Pick had a bolthole and we got out, but they tore the place down.”
“We’ve been making our way off the books ever since.”
“In other words, kid, Pick and us, we go way back. And that’s the only reason we’re talking to you, okay?”
“So get-”
“-interesting fast.”
I shook my head. “You’re talking to me because you’re intrigued. Look at you. Sitting here rotting away selling bullshit to people you used to rob.” I grinned. “Come on. You know me. You know I don’t waste time.”
They looked at each other. I could almost hear the static of communication between them. They looked back at me, creepy as hell.
“We heard the name, Mr. Cates,” the first one said. “You call me Milton.”
I winked at the second one. “Tanner. Let’s hear it.”
They may not have bought the act, but they bought the job. When I was done with my high-concept gloss on the whole mess-boiling what was likely months of work and endless complexity into two sentences-they looked at each other with that crazy light of excitement and greed I recognized very well. Every crook got that look when you really got him interested.
Milton-or Tanner, who the fuck knew? — leaned back and regarded me. “You’re either the most fucked-in-the-ass Gunner I’ve ever met, Mr. Cates, or onto something great.”
“He’s fucked,” Gatz said lazily. “Obviously fucked.”
“Either way,” the other one said, “we want to be there to watch.”
“What’s our cut?”
I gave them a number, and for the first time since we’d walked in, they were silent, staring at each other, using that twin telepathy to hash it out with waggled eyebrows and dilated pupils, Morse code. Finally they looked back at me.