Free Repo Men by Eric Garcia Page B

to decide on his next course of action—then walked away without even so much as a hint of apology.
    “I’m gonna have to get more ribbon now!” I called out, but by that time he was already past me and eagerly abusing the next withering supplicant.
     

    Thirty minutes later, I showed up again. Same line, same tech, same box under my arm, this time wrapped up in even more strands of ribbon. And once again, as I tried to pass through, the guard approached.
    “You again.”
    “I needed to get it rewrapped. You cut up the ribbon last time.”
    He gazed at the display monitor, at the gray opaque shape clouding the screen, a grimace forming about the corners of his mouth. “The vase.”
    “The vase.”
    Impasse. As I stared at the guard, he stared at the display, and no one was going anywhere while we waited for a decision on the matter. The guard knew that if he asked me to open it again, it would take a good five, ten minutes to work out the knots, and that cutting the ribbon with the knife would only bring me back a third time with yet another layer of gift-wrapping.
    I could wait all day.
    The guard could not; even as we stared at each other and the package between us, the other X-ray techs were calling for his assistance in some matter or another, as if they were personally physically unable to badger customers into opening their bags for inspection.
    Despite the tension—despite the very real possibility that I would be found out right here, right now, and shot on sight, my heart ripped from my rib cage and thrown into a chemical de-sanitizer somewhere behind the Credit Union walls—not a single drop of giveaway perspiration came from my brow. Bio-Repo men—the good ones, anyway—do not sweat. It felt like an hour, but the final decision must have come in less than ten seconds:
    “Move along,” said the guard, and stormed away, turning his back on me for the second and—as far as he hoped—final time.
    I grabbed my box, shot a sheepish grin at the X-ray technician, and shuffled into the heart of the Mall, ensuring that my shoulders were slumped and my stride properly devoid of any victory or cock-of-the-walk strut.
    Inside the closest bathroom, I entered and locked the farthest stall, tore open the ribbon with my teeth, pulled out the leaded-crystal vase, and extracted the .9 mm Mauser revolver from within.
     

    My fourth wife, Carol, had a store the in the mall before it became the Mall, but she’d sold out her space to the Credit Union long before we’d ever met. Wise decision. Those few holdouts who clung to their family-run businesses were quickly expunged from every credit file in the known universe, and faster than it takes to say Equifax , their means of doing business on any financial level was nullified. It was those who sold out for gobs of cash who prospered. This is the way it always works.
    Carol’s store was called All Things Good, and I remember going into it once, long before I knew Carol and longer still before she would throw me out of the house and divorce me on trumped-up charges of adultery. I’d gone in, if I remember correctly, during one of my few off-hours from the job to find a six-month anniversary present for Mary-Ellen, the second of my lovely brides. It would be our only anniversary together, but that’s nothing I could have known at the time, unless you count the weekly threats of divorce as some type of precognition.
    All Things Good was decked out in a frilly red-and-white checkerboard pattern with stuffed bears of all shapes and sizes peeking out of the window displays. Hand-knit sweaters and hooked rugs lined the walls, and big wooden bins filled with down-home goodies sat heavily on the floor. It was country mouse meets city mouse, and I remember wondering how it made any money.
    It didn’t, I later found out.
    But it was in the back of the store, behind the jars of preserves and fresh-baked bread, beyond the stacks of homemade glycerin soaps from which you could