Fiction River: Risk Takers, page 19
“I would love that,” I said. “As soon as you get past the father part.”
She laughed. And for the next hour we sat in my office, our feet up, looking out over Las Vegas, and I learned the history of the woman I loved.
The more I learned, the more I realized my risk being with her had paid off with the wonderful reward of a complete partner.
Even though she was a thousand years older than I was. A minor complication I could overlook without a problem.
And for some reason, this felt like a new beginning.
Introduction to “Rats”
When you’re married to another writer, you often see work before anyone else gets an opportunity to read it. Kris initially wrote “Rats” for a mystery magazine, but I insisted on buying the story for Risk Takers.
In 2013 and 2014, Kris wrote six novels in her Retrieval Artist series, as well as a dozen short stories. Each month, starting in January, those novels will appear. I published an excerpt from one of the novels, A Murder of Clones, in Moonscapes, and Kevin J. Anderson published another excerpt in Pulse Pounders.
“Rats” has no sf element. It doesn’t need one. The rat details are accurate, as I can attest after facing down one of those sorry rodents one drunken night in Manhattan several years ago. The rats provide only one risk in this story. There are many more.
Rats
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
They try not to bring him in on just any job. Sometimes Nic thinks he’s the only exterminator in the entire state of New York who gets paid month in, month out, even though he rarely shows up for work.
It’s not like he doesn’t try. He spends every day at the gun range. Twice a month he heads out to his cousin’s place upstate and does some long-range shooting. He attends every single staff meeting, including the ones he’s not required to go to, and he buys the latest equipment.
Some of his neighbors think he has this job because he knows someone who knows someone.
But this isn’t a patronage job. This is a failure job. Whenever the guys he works with fail, they’re forced to call him.
And they hate it.
Just like they hate him.
***
The call came early on a Monday morning, late August, when the heat was so thick the pavement shimmered. Even with the air conditioning on high in his little one-bedroom apartment, Nic hadn’t slept well. He felt sticky and chilled all at the same time.
The phone woke him from an uneasy doze. He knew before he picked up the receiver what the call was about.
Because this was garbage weather, roaches weather.
Rat weather.
And whenever it was rat weather, someone called him.
Usually a little too late.
***
He took the rifle kit and his night vision goggles, and locked them in the trunk of his Crown Vic. Then he paused for just a moment, weighing the heat versus the risk.
He liked to forego the Kevlar on hot nights. The stuff made him feel like he was on a truck transport outside Kuwait during the first Gulf War (the good war).
The air there always smelled of smoke mixed with rotting flesh. He preferred the smells here—beer, mingled with exhaust, and just a hint of garbage.
He went back to his apartment for the Kevlar. He also made sure that he had the easy-to-read identification.
The last time, he’d needed it. The last time, he’d lost the target because some petrified citizen thought he was a bad guy, out to shoot the President.
That had happened last fall. Crazy hot like it was now, even though it was late September. The United Nations was having a General Assembly, and for some insane reason—maybe the heat—they’d invited the nutball from Iran and President George W. Bush all in the same week.
The town was tense, traffic was horrendous, and everyone was convinced some kind of attack would happen.
Then Nic had gotten a call, and he’d had to climb to the top of an apartment complex about three blocks from the U.N. and stare into an alley below.
Of course, a neighbor called the cops. Who wouldn’t call the police during a week like that, especially if you saw a single guy wearing shorts and a t-shirt, with night vision goggles and a rifle, peering off the roof of a building close enough to the U.N. to target anyone standing near the flags.
He’d been lucky that night. The cops who’d come to the roof had heard he was going to be there. They’d cuffed him, sure, but before they had reached into the back pocket of his shorts and pulled out his wallet, complete with ID.
Then they’d apologized, and told him this was probably not the week to be hunting rats, and let him go.
He’d refrained from telling them that he didn’t hunt rats. He hunted one particular rat. The hard-to-kill rat, the rat that had gotten the best of entire teams of exterminators.
When Nic got that rat—the neighborhood tough, the monster who controlled all the other monsters—he went back to drinking coffee in his apartment, shooting at the gun range, and waiting for yet another call.
What he did do that night last fall was call his boss, and chew the bastard out. The boss was supposed to let the police know whenever one of the designated hitters sat on a roof with night vision goggles and a sniper rifle, because if he didn’t—in these days after 9/11—some slap-happy anti-terrorist cop might shoot first and forget all about the questions later.
Which was why Nic brought the Kevlar. He still had scars from the too-tight cuffs. He didn’t want new bullet scars as well. He certainly didn’t want his signature wound coming just because he’d been hired to kill some almighty rat.
***
When he got called to headquarters, the procedure was pretty much the same. First he’d be briefed on the problem. Then he’d be introduced to the failure squad, the ones who tried but never managed to get the monster rat.
Here was what Nic knew about rats: they ran in packs. Most New Yorkers were aware of them, but rarely saw them, not in the numbers he did. The rats shadowed the urban population because they ate the same food people did, and in a city this size, garbage (even in the years when the sanitation workers weren’t on strike) was always a problem.
Rats only ate in the open if they felt safe. Otherwise, they took their meals back to their nests. And their nests were usually underground, in the forgotten city—the abandoned subway tunnels and the boarded-up hotel basements.
Headquarters had somewhat different opinions about rats. Headquarters believed that each pack had king rat. Nic didn’t.
But that belief provided him work, so he never talked about what he really knew.
Headquarters was an upscale name for a downscale place. It was in the ground floor of an old brownstone not far from Battery Park. The offices had been there since the 1950s, when everyone seemed to think the rats were a poor people problem, and not part of the city’s entire infrastructure.
Now people knew differently. They hired exterminators to “get rid of” the problem.
Only exterminators no longer exterminated. Too many regulations on toxic chemicals. Now exterminators had to call themselves “pest control operatives” to lower expectations.
The pest control operatives (Nic refused to refer to himself that way) worked for corporations with names that hid the business’s purpose, usually with acronyms (his was NYRC, Inc.—back in the day, they’d been known as New York Rodent Control, Inc. but they’d legally changed their name to the initials sometime in the 1980s—and the poor receptionist who answered the phone was instructed to say, “Nurk, may I help you?” which always made him think of a Three Stooges routine).
Of course, Nurk handled more than rats. They handled any kind of small mammal, especially those that nested or died between the walls. They also handled cockroaches and beetles and fly infestations. They’d even branched into bedbugs of late, something that “pest control specialists” hadn’t dealt with in more than thirty years.
He didn’t know a lot about the insects, and he’d never been called out for mice. He’d only been hired to shoot rats, and then only because of his long-distance skill.
He’d taken the job because being a sniper was the one thing he was good at, and the one job that didn’t translate well into a non-military world. He could’ve gone underground, of course, and worked for one of the crime families. Or he could’ve hired out—some kind of mercenary, traveling the world.
Instead, he had come home to shoot rats, and although he wasn’t proud of it, it made him feel like he was putting his talents to good use.
People could handle the normal run-of-the-mill rat, the kind that vanished into its hidey-hole at the first echo of a footstep, the first glare of a light.
But those self-confident rats, the kind that stood on their hind legs and seemed to say, bring it on, asshole, those kind of rats took a special kind of exterminator.
Those kind of rats needed someone like him.
***
This time the failure was a guy named Harold Waters. Waters was an old-timer, just like Nic. They’d joined Nurk at the same time and for the same reason. Waters hadn’t been in Nic’s unit (not many guys had) but he’d had a specialty too—he’d been in charge of chemical components, although he’d never said in what capacity.
Waters was a good guy, older now, balding, with a bit of a paunch. He’d never been one of the failures before.
Nic thought it odd to see him, and Waters wouldn’t meet his gaze. When they talked about the rat—“Big fucker,” Waters said. “Too damn confident.”—his face flushed, and he rubbed his right hand on the left sleeve of his jumpsuit.
“Bite you?” Nic asked. He always asked when he saw that movement. He knew what a bite meant. It meant six days off, mandatory rabies response (a series of painful shots in the abdomen) and two rounds of debriefing.
“Of course I didn’t get bit,” Waters said and dropped his hand from his arm. But the response sounded hollow, and his flush grew deeper.
This had clearly become a personal fight between Waters and the rat, and the boss wanted Nic in the middle of it. Nic didn’t mind—he’d been in the middle of man-vs.-rat battles before—and he always told the man with the vendetta to think of him as the hired gun, the guy who showed up toward the end of the movie with the superior equipment, a laid-back attitude, and no personal involvement at all.
But Nic didn’t say that to Waters. It would have offended him. So Nic just nodded and said, “Bring me to the rat.”
***
Waters worked Midtown. Lots of tunnels down there, mostly abandoned subway tunnels from the days when Penn Station had towered over everything.
Madison Square Garden didn’t help. It had cannibalized some of the tunnels around Penn Station, just like Macy’s had. Nic had heard that during Prohibition, there had been two dozen speakeasies within spitting distance of Herald Square, which made sense, since some of the city’s finest hotels used to be on that corner.
A lot of those speakeasies made their own grain alcohol, and the grain got abandoned when Prohibition ended. The rats found the sites a perfect nest—safe, dark, with a ready supply of food. And when the food ran out, there was even more on the ground level.
The food never went away, although many of the hotels had. The bars were legal now, and the restaurants here, while plentiful, were noted for their prices, not their food.
Midtown was full of monuments (as the press liked to call them), including the building that the City of New York and Homeland Security considered one of the most-high value targets in all of terrorism: the Empire State Building.
Nic believed that the City of New York and Homeland Security showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the terrorist agenda. If the terrorists—at least the ones run by Osama Bin Laden and his ilk—ever struck Manhattan again (God forbid), Nic believed they’d go for Wall Street, maybe even the New York Stock Exchange itself.
Both times Bin Laden had gone after New York, he’d gone after the World Trade Center—not because it was the tallest building in the city (hell, for a while, it’d been the tallest building in the world) but because it was called the World Trade Center, and it housed international financial firms.
Bin Laden wanted to affect the world’s markets and currency, not its tall buildings. And anyone with a brain—and nothing to do but shoot sniper rifles upstate once a month—could easily figure that out.
But on the job, Nic kept his opinions to himself, even the one that surfaced when Waters showed him the area that he believed housed the rat’s nest, a small block between Fifth and Sixth, about a block away from Empire State.
Which made Nic’s job a whole lot harder.
He tried to make it easier by holding tough: He stood next to the boss while the boss called both NYPD and the Terrorism Task Force, informing them that Nurk would be hunting rats in the general area of Empire State.
He also made Waters take him to the site in the middle of the afternoon, when he could introduce himself to restaurant and bar owners and any hotel managers that might be on site.
A few of the restaurants looked like they’d been there since the area was known as the Tenderloin, and a few others since the days before the Sixth Street El had come down, back when this part of Manhattan was known for its brothels.
It was actually a sign of Waters’ team’s success that the king rats had moved above ground; it meant that their nests below were being disturbed enough that even the fat and sassy had to mingle with the common man instead of dining on room service in the vaults below.
But Nic didn’t say that either. It wasn’t his place to make Waters feel better.
Instead, Nic went from building to building, introducing himself and claiming he was here to rid them of their rat problem.
As Nic made his way from one end of the block to the other, one side of the street to the other, he noted a couple other nests. One was inside a doorway that led to a wholesale clothing shop. An extra large piece of cardboard, well used, leaned against a grate, and next to it, just a tiny bit of cloth, a marker, showing anyone passing by that this doorway—recessed enough to keep out most of the weather—was taken.
The other nest was just a few yards away, near the entrance to the subway. This spot wasn’t nearly as well protected, but it looked well used. Nic suspected its owner abandoned the site in the winter months, but found it comfortable in the summer—and probably even snuck into that tiny little triangular park known as Herald Square.
Nic made a mental note to keep an eye on those nests because the homeless were as territorial—or maybe more territorial—than the rats.
“Okay,” Nic said to Waters after marching around every aboveground inch of that block, introducing himself to anyone who could possibly be there after nightfall, “show me where the rat lives.”
***
Of course, Waters couldn’t show him, not exactly. That was part of the problem.
Instead, Nic heard the saga of the rat, which was honestly, not what he wanted, but what he was stuck with.
The problem started in a deli mid-block. Something was getting into the food. The deli padlocked the meat locker, but couldn’t stop whatever it was from getting into the leftover bagels, muffins, and cakes.
Waters came in, found the access area under the basement’s subfloor, sealed it, and thought the problem solved. It wasn’t. The rats came in through the wall, and then through a different wall.
“That,” Waters said, pointing his finger for emphasis, “is when I knew we had a king.”
Nic wouldn’t’ve thought so. He would’ve assumed the problem was older than the deli owners thought, and the rats had become emboldened. But he let Waters tell the story of the back and forths, the failed traps, the little victories, the agonizing defeats.
When Waters finally managed to seal off the deli, the rats moved to the hotel kitchen next door, and from there, to another restaurant. Waters was chasing them through the block, never finding the original nest.
He tried drastic measures. He went underground, thought he found the nest, and put traps in it.
Then he stayed outside for two nights, watching in disillusionment as the rats kept coming out of that sidewalk.
“The biggest mutherfucker you’ve ever seen walked right up to me,” he said, “and got on its hind legs, chittering. It was like it was taunting me.”
That was when the man versus rat battle began.
Nic stopped listening at that point: he’d heard it all before. The escalations, the back and forths, the impossible-to-find nest. What he always assumed in stories like this was that there were a hundred nests and a hundred “biggest mutherfuckers” and that the failed exterminator didn’t recognize his tormentor—because it wasn’t one, but several.
The exterminators, no matter how much training they had, thought of these creatures as some kind of army, where one great brain led the others to impossible feats.
But Nic believed the rats were more like terror cells, loose organizations of conspirators without a real leader, and no real guiding principle—just the desire to accomplish a goal or to die trying.
He’d learned over the years that all he had to do was kill one of the bigger rats, and he’d keep his job for another year. Didn’t matter if the rat incursions continued. Didn’t matter if another monster rat was sighted.
The boss would just assume that some other rat took over for the leader, and the pack needed to be destroyed.
Sometimes Nic would get called again. But rarely. Once the failed exterminator got rid of his rat bogeyman, he’d do fine with the remaining group.
When Waters finished the story, he was standing in front of a fairly innocuous sidewalk crack. It was wider than most, and it did lead into a half alley, blocked off by a crane and some construction work. There wasn’t a lot of garbage here, but there were other cracks—and, more importantly, the heat of the subway rising through a nearby grate.
