<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #17

Esco was in the driver’s seat smoking a long thin filterless through the open window. The ruler-straight lines of his carefully trimmed mustache arched and jumped as he mouthed along to the music. Spanish death-metal thundered through the cab of the tiny Toyota truck, the three of them sitting sticky, side-by-side in the sweat-slicked heat. A Puerto-Rican flag hung from the review mirror, jumping and shimmying with the bass.

Next to him and dwarfing him physically sat Pepe, his hugely muscled shoulders hunched carefully forward to avoid crowding the other two, the gearshift digging into his thigh. Pepe was new to the team, younger, and was working very hard to keep his arms from twitching under his experimental hormone therapy and hurting somebody. On the far side of the cab sat Baby, the pudgy Puerto-Rican clad in a gleaming white jumpsuit, his gold Nikes tapping in time to the music. Baby’s head was wrapped in a carefully filigreed viewset, the Virgin Mary etched out in ruby plastic over his forehead. A sinister-looking black joystick sat casually in his lap. From time to time Baby gently caressed it, making minor adjustments.

The song ended in a crashing guitar riff, the flag slowly settling.

“Mmm-hmm” murmured Esco in approval. Across from him Baby smiled. Another song started.

Pepe twitched, shaking the car. Baby swore loudly in Spanish, invoking actions from Pepe’s mother which nature had surely not equipped her to commit.

“Fuck, man!” said Esco. “That’s it. Get the fuck out of the car.”

Esco slid out of the seat, the neat creases in his trousers flagging sadly. He waited until Pepe had squeezed by him and slammed the door shut behind them, reached through the window to click the auto-shut. He winked at Baby through the rising glass as he moved back towards the younger man.

“What the fuck’s going on, man?” he asked. “You losing it on us here?”

Pepe shook his head quickly, a muscle on the right side of his neck seizing up for a second before he could wrench his head back level. Esco raised a carefully plucked eyebrow, the cream-colored skin of his forehead wrinkling briefly, inexplicably.

“You’re not impressing me, man” he said. “Pharoe tells us you’re good, that we got to take a chance on you. Baby’s in there running two fliers at once. You jostle him and we could lose it all. Not good, man.” He sighed. “Not good.”

Pepe shuddered briefly, sweat staining the stretched-out sleeveless t-shirt pulled taut across his chest. Pepe was new to the mod scene in Florida, his cousin letting him crash on his couch after he had jumped a ’liner from the islands. The only thing he had going for him was that he was big, and Pharoe had offered him a chance to make good on a loan to get the muscle work he wanted done to get bigger. His English wasn’t that good, and the hormones made him paranoid as well as self-conscious. He was a wild card. An expendable one, as much as nobody wanted to say it.

Esco sighed again and leaned carefully back against the side of the truck. He looked up at the oversized plywood bed cover, its insulated white plastic sealant gleaming in the hot sun. He ran his eyes over the carefully lettered advertisement for landscaping services picked out in red, the foot-high glyphs of men in sombreros hefting shovels. He pulled out another cigarette and lit it, shook his heavy golden Rolex into place and turned towards Pepe.

“Look. You’re new here, right? Maybe freaked out a little that you just arrived and get sent out to the boonies, yeah?” Esco suspected that Pepe had never been out of the boonies before arriving in Florida, that part of the reason Pharoe thought he was a good choice for this job was that he could make it in the swamps if he had to.

“So let me give you a little advice.” Esco held his cigarette in his carefully pursed lips as he tucked in the back of his shirt with his free hand, adjusted a fold on his shirtsleeve. It was pink linen, and set off the tiny golden cross around his neck nicely. Esco was one of very few men in the world who could wear a pink linen shirt and still look mean enough to be taken seriously. It was part of the reason Pharoe had had him manage this job.

“You want to stay alive this trip, you keep it cool. Ain’t no big thing what we’re doing out here. We get the signal, fire off the big gun, and you go in and get our man. That easy. No need to get excited, no need to go running around all crazy-like. It’s business, those Boers understand that. You follow?”

Pepe nodded, once, his big brown eyes following Esco’s.

“What we do not want” Esco said, tapping ash carefully away from his personal space, “is a big mess. Pharoe doesn’t like messes. You keep shaking like that... Well, it’s messy.”

Esco eyed Pepe meaningfully, waited a moment while the younger man tried to process this. Eventually Pepe responded; “Why are you in the Mod crew?”

Esco took another drag from his cigarette, frowned slightly and looked past Pepe’s shoulder.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

Pepe wasn’t from here, was ignorant. He didn’t know that he was getting into dangerous territory. He peered at Esco and pointed one thick trembling finger at him.

“You’re not mod.”

The edges of Esco’s nostrils flared ever so slightly, thin wisps of smoke curling out of them as he let out his breath in one long controlled sigh. His eye snapped over to Pepe’s.

“I’m more mod than you are, fool” he said quietly. Pepe took a step back, unconsciously, his hands balling into fists. Esco’s pink linen shirt crinkled slightly around his shoulders as he cupped one elbow in his hand, took another drag.

“I got more mods on me than you do by a long shot, but they’re all aesthetic, see? I’m carefully designed, planned out.”

Esco leaned forward off the truck, towards Pepe.

“This isn’t crude” he stabbed his cigarette at the larger man, “bullshit” again with the cigarette, “muscle mods.” He bit off the word with teeth clenched, his thin mustache wrinkling under an angry sneer. Pepe’s face twitched and jerked, degrading synapses trying to decide between anger and fear. Esco’s face dropped back into blank, formal beauty.

“What I got is subtle. Takes a long time. It’s art, see?” He watched Pepe carefully, noted his gaze shift between his eyes and his shoes, waited until he was sure the larger man knew who he was, if not what he meant.

“Doesn’t matter” he said softly, flicking his cigarette into the bushes. “Just keep it cool, okay? Go check the rig again. We should be hearing something soon.”

Esco climbed back into the cab, death-metal filling the air. He twisted the knob with a casual flick of his wrist, leaned back to rest his arm on the back of the seat.

“Boy’s a fucking idiot” he said.

Baby nodded, smiling, his face hidden behind the viewport.

“Anything new?”

“Nope. Same readings. The big gun ought to do it, we get digital coverage from Tonx’s guy. They spaced out their screamers pretty good, but I got them all marked. They put timers on them so a casual scan wouldn’t see them all. Clever fucking bastards.”

“Whatever, man. Just so long as we’ve got the situation under control.”

“Yup. I’m bringing back a flyer — keep an eye on the other while I do it.”

Baby tapped the joystick and the review monitor flickered from scraggly swampland to the front side of a small cabin. A beaten-up petrol Studebaker was parked in the lot, a large mail sack holding a body — hopefully a live one — slumped across the front porch next to the screen door.

“He still okay?” asked Esco.

“Mmm-hmm” mumbled Baby, his hands busy. He was taking the other flyer in through the woods so it wouldn’t get spotted, but it wasn’t easy.

“He’s still breathing, anyway. You want to hear him blubber go ahead and pipe it through the radio.”

“No thanks” said Esco, snorting in disgust. Fucking French eurotrash. What the fuck was he doing out here?

The truck shuddered as the flyer suddenly slammed onto the hood of the truck. Esco jumped, the back of his head hitting the rear of the cab.

“What the fuck you do that for?” he shouted at Baby. The pudgy pilot shook with laughter, keyed in a mounting sequence. In front of them the long, tubular flyer bobbed and weaved as its three legs adjusted themselves, slowly moving around until it was level, pointing straight at the sky. The flyer was pornographic pink, thirty inches of rubberized plastic wrapped in three rims containing silenced fans. Esco didn’t like the thing. It seemed — dirty.

Baby got out of the car and strolled over to the flyer, carefully unpacked a set of hydrogen filters and a small bottle of water. He bobbed his head back and forth as he worked, casual confidence plain in his movement as he went through the familiar motions. Baby was one of the best pilots in Florida, and Esco was glad to have him. He worried about the cerebral implants he was considering, figured that the eyejacks were good enough. But it wasn’t his business. A man’s mods were his own; you just had to respect that. It was part of what made being a mod great.

The rearview monitor bleeped and Esco pulled out a tiny voice comp, syncing it to the truck’s comm before placing it next to his ear. It was ceremonial, of course, but that was part of Esco’s composition. He listened to the voice that came through it and nodded, twice, before hanging up. The music resumed as he clicked off the comm, and he sat a moment as the chorus ended before turning it off. Esco stepped out of the car, saw Pepe standing more or less where he’d left him. He called to Baby over his shoulder, nodded at Pepe.

“Gentlemen, it’s time.”

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