Kim Newman: Patricia's Profession

When the call came, Patricia was going FF through the latest snuffs. She was a subscriber to the 120 Days in the City of Sodom part-work, but, since Disney had run out of de Sade and been forced to fall back on their own limited psychopathology, the series had deteriorated. After a few minutes of real-time PLAY, she had twigged that the 104th day was just one of the fifties with a sexual role reversal, Mouldy chiz. Colin broke into the vid-out.

"Patti," he said. "Goto PRINT."

Colin had blanked before she could work out whether he was live or a message simulacrum. The printer retched a laconic strip.

JAY DEARBORN, DEARBORN ESTATE, TWENTY ONE O'CLOCK HIT, 2-NITE.

The mark was on screen. The Firm had a four-second snip from regular call, Dearbone was a sleek, expensive, youngish man. He had on a collarless, fine stripe shirt. Silently, he repeated a phrase. Something about cheekbones, Patricia's lip-reading was off.

She switched to greenscreen and speed-read Dearborn's write-up. Executive with Skintone, Inc., the second-largest fleshwear house. Married, Euro-citizen. Not cleared for parenthood. No adult criminal record. Alive. Solvent.

Colin came back, real-time. "Our client is Philip Wragge. More middle management at Skintone. He likes us. He's used us before."

"Why does he want Dearborn hit?"

"Getting curious, Patti?" Colin smiled. "That's not in your usual profile. I think it's the mark's birthday."

Patricia's birthday was in August. When she was little, her parents had always taken her to their cottage in Portugal for the school holidays. She had escaped until she was twelve. That year, Dad's job became obsolete, and the cottage had to be marketed. At tea-time on her birthday, the other children had come round to Patricia's house and killed her.

Colin faded, and the scheduled program popped up on the slab. Patricia rarely watched real-time. A Luton house-husband guessed that Seattle, Washington was the capital of the US. The Torture Master grinned, and his glamorous assistant thrust his/her bolt-cutters into the hot coals. "Wrong," sang the man in the dayglo tux, "I'm afraid it's Portland, Oregon. That puts you in a tricky spot, Goodman. You have only three questions and two toes left, so take your time with this next one. Who, at the time of this recording, is the Vice-President of the Confederate States of America…'

Patricia off-switched. It was twenty to nineteen. Chord would be here soon. She put her uniform on. Black spiderweb tights, black lace singlet, black arm length talon glove, black butterfly tie. She shrugged into the white shoulder holster, and pulled a comfortable heavy white Burberry over her shoulders. She perched a black beret on her Veronica Lake bob. She white fixed her face, and blacked her lips and eyelids. Neat.

She palmed her desk-top, and the safety cabinet unsealed. She took out the roscoe and disassembled it. There had been some question about the foresight, but it seemed okay to her eye. She replaced the lubricant cartridge and snapped the machine back together. She shoved a new clip of slugs into the grip, and holstered the roscoe.

It could manage up to one hundred and seventy rounds per second. At that rate, the slugs left the eleven-inch barrel as molten chips. At Sixth Form College, the Firm's instructor had given a demonstration. She had turned a cow carcass into a piece of abstract expressionism, a study in red and intestine. Patricia didn't like to use her roscoe as a hosepipe, and usually kept the rate adjusted to a comfortable twenty-five r.p.s.

Outside, the car called to her. Patricia sealed her flat, negotiated the checkpoint in the foyer, and stepped onto the steaming pavement. If she stood still for a few minutes, the yellow ground mist would eat holes in her unprotected shins. Harry Chord, at ease in his reinforced chauffeur's puttees and Lone Ranger mask, held the Old's door open for her. She slid onto the sofa-sized back seat. The Olds purred. Chord took the console.

The sturdy, box-like, black car had only recently been converted. Chord had done the job himself, and was quietly pleased with it. When they stopped at the Gordon's station to tank up, he pointed out the minute scars on the hood and running boards. Otherwise, it was impossible to tell from the exterior that the cash-wasting petrol engine had been replaced with the latest model booze-burner.

Patricia was tense, impatient. As always before a hit. She had been to the lavatory twice since Colin's call, but there was still a tingle in her lower abdomen. Some of the other girls pill-popped, but she needed, and wanted, the cold-rush of unfiltered sensations.

Of course, there had been less popping since Rachel. The girl had taken too many zippers, waltzed into her mark's office singing 'Paper Moon', and shot the man through the brain. By the time the termination officers arrived, she had switched to 'Stardust'. The firm had lost its 100 percent efficiency rating.

Patricia had heard Chord, and several of the other back-up personnel, refer to Rachel's humpty dumpty hit, "… all the king's horses, and all the king's men…" The flippancy irritated her. Killing people might seem like a fun job, but you had to take it seriously. If nothing else, Rachel had proved that.

The Dearborn Estate was out in the Green Belt. They were well ahead of schedule, so she had Chord program a route that would avoid the disemployment centre. Shit City, the claimants called it. Nissen huts covered in ghastly, mock-cheerful murals. The dope dole. The Ghetto Blaster gangs. There had recently been a rash of documentaries, but, having spent six years in Shit City, Patricia couldn't get off on poverty porn.

Evidently, Dearborn's wife was in on the hit. At the estate entrance, a cobra terminal snaked into the Olds and hovered over Patricia's lap. HELLO! IDENTIFICATION? She palm-printed the slab, and keyed in the Firm's trademark. PURPOSE OF VISIT? She had typed MURDER before noticing that the need for a reply had been countered on the print of Gillian Dearborn. HAVE A PLEASANT VISIT.

The crackling electrodes in the gravel drive went briefly dead as the Olds rolled over them. There were other cars, low and streamlined, ranked in front of the house. Over the roof landing floated a small dirigible, shifting gently on its mooring. The house, Victorian but remodelled in early Carolian, was lit by banks of old-mode disco lamps.

Dearborn was having a birthday party, with live music. Patricia recognised the popular song "Throw Yourself Off a Bridge". The ballad was being performed by a small swing combo; an unfamiliar, somehow inapt, arrangement. A girl sinatra was trying to croon to the up-tempo,

When I get too depressed,

Crawling along in a ditch,

I get right up,

Walk on down,

And throw myself off a bridge…

Patricia left Chord with the Olds, and walked unconcerned across the lawn. A few stray guests, in designer rags, noticed her. She hated Depression Chic. The bulk of the party was behind the house between the L of its two wings and the skimming pool. She tried to move easily among the rich.

A man with a plumed mohawk, an epitome of the New Conservatism, reached inside her Burberry. She sliced his forehead with a soporific talon. He fell onto a trestle table, between the swan cutlets and the cocaine blancmange. He would be able to tell the other Young Rotarians he had won second prize in a duel.

I could put myself through a mangle,

I could drink the water in Spain,

From a home-made noose I could dangle,

It's the end to all my pain…

Dearborn was an easy mark. He was holding a helium balloon with BIRTHDAY BOY on it, he was squiffed, but standing. A plump, dapper man, and an elegant woman with fashionable facial mutilations were propping Dearborn up. Wragge and Gillian? They saw her coming and confirmed their identities by rapidly moving out of her line.

Abandoned, the mark lurched forward into a personal spotlight. No hole-in-the-head innocent bystanders in the way. Terrific.

If I feel like cracking up

And locking myself in the fridge,

I get on out

And take a high jump,

To throw myself off a bridge…

Patricia reached with her bare hand for the roscoe. The Burberry slid from her shoulders. There were a few werewolf whistles. She shimmied across the lawn, getting in close to compensate for the possibly dodgy foresight. She did a few elementary gold-digger steps, and adopted the Eastwood position; legs apart, weight evenly distributed, left hand on right wrist, elbows slightly bent to absorb the kickback.

The bandleader, surprised but adaptable, had his instruments segue into "Happy Birthday to You". The sinatra picked it up immediately, and led the less out-of-it guests in the chorus.

The mark was looking around, gasping. "… Phil? You…" The balloon went up.

She took out his left kneecap. He staggered sideways, tripping into an abandoned urn but not falling. She upped the r.p.s. and sprayed Dearborn's flailing right arm. His hand came off at the wrist. Most of the guests had to laugh. She closed in, and fired a final, free-ranging burst into his torso. She had a glimpse of churning innards. He did an awkward piroutte and, with a satisfying splash, fell into the pool. The purple scum rippled. There were cheers. Patricia took a bow.

By the time she had retrieved her coat, the resurrection men were there. The kildare was passing a vivicorder over the corpse. A nurse Patricia knew ticked off the necessary repairs. Most of the vat-bred organs and ossiplex bones would be in the Firm's ambulance. The front man was assuring Gillian Dearborn that her husband would be on his feet by morning, and preparing the legal and medical waivers for her palm.

"Good job, lassie," Wragge hugged and kissed her. Even for a regular customer, he was overdoing it. "When Jay sees himself on the playback, he'll die all over again.

He stuffed a thousand note down her cleavage. Not a bad gratuity. He also gave her a hundred in Sainsbury's Redeemable for Chord. She was invited to the resurrection party, but cried off.

Tired, she gave Chord authority to get back to town by the quickest route. As she drove through Shit City, she cleaned the roscoe. She remembered her own deaths, and wondered whether the DHSS still had a budgetary allocation for resurrecting the underemployed.

She hadn't had the kind of luxury treatment Dearborn was getting. There had been problems with her anglepoise vertebrae throughout her middle teens. She had not had the funds for a proper rebuild until she started working for Killergrams.

That first time, the other children had dragged her out of the house and hanged her from a swan-neck lamp-post. Her party dress was torn, and her legs were badly bitten by midges. Dangling in the late afternoon, the last thing that had crossed her mind was that this was supposed to be funny.