Ch. 35 – Return of the Mike

The next day, Derrick had an unwelcome pair of guests.

He hadn’t noticed it the last time they had met, but one of these guests had a horrible, gaudy looking grill on his mouth. It was misshapen, and probably bad for the man’s teeth, but Hack Alley was not a dentist’s office, so Derrick would keep his own mouth shut.

They called him Big Mike, and he had come to collect what was promised. The pounding on the—newly repaired—front door to Hack Alley’s shop grew louder.

“HURRY UP AND OPEN THE DOOR,” Big Mike shouted.

Derrick winced away from the peephole, and put his hand around the doorknob. He had locked the door because he was reorganizing the shop, including the cash that they kept hidden in little corners.

But he had to open for customers at some point, and Big Mike seemed insistent that ‘some point’ meant ‘now.’

The banging continued, and Derrick unlocked the door, and opened it, moving out of the way of Big Mike’s rapping fist. The White Leopard stood in the doorway, accompanied by the same kid who had accompanied him last time he came looking for protection money. Big Mike’s white jacket looked just a bit dirtier than last time, too. More ketchup stains.

Derrick pulled his beanie farther down to cover his eyebrows. The White Leopards under Theo had already gotten a good look at his new face, but it didn’t hurt to obscure his features a bit around the rest of the gangsters.

“How can I help you, sir?” Derrick asked. “Ah, are you here for your appointment?” Of course, a White Leopard like Big Mike would only come by if he was collecting protection money, or thought he could get a repair for free. Unfortunately for him, neither would be happening.

“I’m here to get my leg fixed, free of charge. What do you think?”

Derrick grit his teeth. He had sent a message to Big Mike using the contact info from when they had made the appointment, but the gangster had never replied. “Of course, sir, I remember. But regarding the fee, didn’t you hear about the White Leopards’ agreement with our shop?”

Big Mike made a face. “What agreement?”

“Well, the White Leopards have agreed to waive Hack Alley’s existing debt, and put a hold on the protection fee for the time being.”

“Bullshit,” Big Mike said, glancing at his partner.

The kid narrowed his eyes, and then ducked his head and muttered.

Big Mike roared, slapping the kid in the back of the head. The slap made a dull sound as it was cushioned by the kid’s layered hair, but his head still flew forwards. He glanced back at Derrick.

“Not to worry, sir. I’d be more than happy to work on your leg mod as you’d previously scheduled. We would still charge you our normal rate, but I do have a suggestion.”

“And what’s that,” Big Mike asked.

“You can ask your boss to front the bill. Since we had the agreement to do your mod repair in exchange for our protection payment, and the payment has since been waived by the White Leopards . . . the payment for this service would therefore lie with whoever is fronting the protection money right now, which is effectively the White Leopards.”

Big Mike scowled and ran a hand through his buzz cut. “Wait wait wait. So you were gonna pay the protection money to me, and now we’re paying the protection money to . . . ourselves, so I should . . .”

“—Possibly be compensated by your organization, right! I’d imagine you probably get a cut of the protection money collected, right? I’d suggest you explain the situation to your boss. He might not reimburse you the full cost of this repair job, but maybe a portion of it.”

“Okay . . .” Big Mike said, still scratching his head. “You’re off the hook for now.”

“Anyhow, let’s get you inside, shall we?”

Derrick led the—noticeably more sheepish—Big Mike in. The kid Leopard followed closely behind, craning his neck as he looked around the shop.

“Watch your step, please. I’ve cleaned the place up, but the floor is still a bit busy. Our examination room is in the back, so follow me.”

Big Mike walked in an interesting way. When Derrick had first seen him, his leg prosthesis would shudder with each step. But now he would take a few steps normally, and then his leg prosthesis would shudder more intensely. As they crossed a particularly narrow path between two stacks of boxes, Big Mike stumbled and leaned on the kid, who had rushed forward to catch him.

“Fuck!” Big Mike cursed. “This place is a dump.”

“I’m horribly sorry about that, sir. Here, allow me,” Derrick said, offering his shoulder to Big Mike. The man leaned hard on Derrick, perhaps purposefully, and the man’s bony arm dug into Derrick’s neck.

They shuffled into the operating room as a unit, and Derrick ducked out from under Big Mike’s arm, rubbing his neck to ease the pain.

“Could you set his leg up on the leg-rest? Great, thank you.” With the help of his partner, Big Mike was comfortably seated on the examination chair, with his prosthesis elevated. It jerked around from time to time, seemingly on its own. An orange Beacon—dirtied with grime and dust—was slotted into an indent on the front of the thigh, and held in place with a strap that ran lengthwise across it.

“So, how long has this problem been happening?”

“How long? Months, now! It feels like it’s been happening forever.”

“Okay, so a few months, let’s say? Um, can you try and move your prosthesis for me? I’ll hold my hand up here”—Derrick placed his hand directly above Big Mike’s leg prosthesis, high enough so he wouldn’t get kicked—“and you try to extend your leg to reach it. Don’t raise your thigh, just extend through the knee joint, so that you’re raising your leg.”

Big Mike grunted, and the leg responded, jittering as it rose up to meet Derrick’s hand.

“Perfect, thank you. Now, let it relax—yup, just let it stay on the support like that—and take a deep breath. I’m going to roll up your pants, alright?” Derrick walked over to Big Mike’s side, and rolled up the man’s damp gym shorts, keeping them in place as the muscles around Big Mike’s leg prosthesis and his stump relaxed more and more with each deep breath. Derrick watched the stump, and then held it lightly in his left hand. The muscles at the stump weren’t rapidly contracting at rest, so it wasn’t an issue of an always-active spasmic signal being sent to the prosthesis and then triggering it to jitter—he’d have to be referred to a specialist if that was the case.

“Alright, now go ahead and extend your leg again.” Although the vibrations from Big Mike’s jittering leg prosthesis propagated to his stump, the muscles around the stump seemed to contract like normal.

“Great, great. You can relax now.” Derrick unfolded Big Mike’s gym shorts, and smoothed them out. “So, I can’t see anything wrong with your mod, or the muscles in your stump, right off the bat. So let me ask you a few questions before I start investigating the mod itself. Do you remember anything that happened around that time a few months ago when you started having the problem?”

“Shit, I dunno,” Big Mike said, blowing air through his nostrils. “I was walking the beat. Collecting some money. Had to take a bus to get my driver’s license renewed. Damn. Can’t remember a thing now, I’ve been so busy since then.”

“Did you hit your leg at any point? Run into something, or did someone run into you?”

“Nope. I mean I did kick a few people, but that wouldn’t break the mod, would it?”

‘Kick a few people’ like the drifter that Big Mike and his Leopard cub had beaten in front of Hack Alley?

“Well, it might.” Derrick shrugged exaggeratedly; he could get away with acting a bit ironically towards White Leopards during an examination; they were too anxious about the results to care that they’d been slighted. But he wouldn’t push his luck too far. “Even if you kicked them with your natural leg, you could break your toe and be injured for weeks. Even if your leg mod is from Stoneridge—and they do make good stuff, I’ll be frank—is it that hard to imagine you’d break some of its delicate machinery if you abused it like that?”

Thump. Big Mike slapped the examination chair. “Okay! I get it. So did kicking those idiots break my mod or what?”

“Sorry, let’s slow down for a second. I don’t want to jump to conclusion right away. Can you try to remember anything else that might’ve happened a few months ago?”

Big Mike squinted at Derrick. “I already told you—,” and then his eyes went wide. He yanked his shirt down, as the collar was riding up toward his neck, and leaned back into the chair, folding his hands across his belly. He looked surprisingly docile: like a patient at the shrink. “Back a few months, huh. I forgot to mention it before. I was . . . uh, in the middle of a crowd.”

Big Mike fell silent. His lips moved a bit, but Derrick could hear nothing, even after leaning in.

“What happened in the crowd?” Derrick asked.

Big Mike cleared his throat, and got quieter and quieter as he went on. “The crowd didn’t like me much. I got pushed and shoved, and thrown in a fountain. So I guess if something happened to my leg, it could’ve happened there, but I didn’t notice anything until the day after,” he finished, ending almost in a whisper. He closed his eyes, and then flicked them open and glanced at Derrick. “That’s all I can think of. Now help me fix the damn thing.”

“Alright,” Derrick said, swallowing. “Thank you for sharing that. That incident in the crowd certainly seems like it had the potential to damage your mod. Let me read some basic info from the mod itself, and then we’ll move on to disassembly and investigation if we can’t find anything there.” Derrick wheeled the swivel chair towards the tool cart and tapped the space bar on the shop laptop. The screen flickered to life after a brief delay, opening up on the general purpose diagnostics software.

“Excuse me, I’m going to search for a small port on your mod. It might be hidden, so I’ll be feeling around. ” He grabbed the cable coming from the laptop, and felt around the leg prosthesis for a diagnostics port. The leg was well engineered, with few crevices or breaks in the exterior shell, or any hint of a plug that would be concealing a port. There was one spot on the mod that might have been hiding something: the big orange Beacon that had been slotted into the thigh.

“I think it might actually be underneath your Beacon. Can I remove it? Or do you have some special software running on it right now?”

“It’s fine. Take it out.”

“Great, thanks.” Derrick undid the strap securing the Beacon in place, and picked at the edge of it with his fingernail. It fit tightly in the slot, and there wasn’t any good place to grab the beacon, or any mechanism on the mod to eject it.

“So, how long have you had this Beacon installed?”

“Uh . . . they gave it to me when I got my driver’s license renewed. Like I said: a few months ago.”

“What sort of integrated features have you set it up with? Payment? GPS?”

“Nah, I didn’t turn any of that shit on.”

It stung that a brutal gangster had the chance to participate in modern society while Derrick couldn’t, and it stung even more that he wasn’t even using the Beacon to its full potential. Beacons were ugly, and their in-built synthetic voices were annoyingly upbeat, but they were incredibly convenient.

Derrick finally got a good grip on the Beacon and pulled it out of the tight slot. The orange, plastic, rectangular device was thick and heavy in his hand. The small green LED slowly pulsing on its side indicated that it was still juiced up and operational.

The diagnostic port was indeed located at the bottom of the shallow indent where the beacon had been slotted in. Setting the beacon down on the examination tray, Derrick threaded the cable around the cart and towards Big Mike’s leg, which was rather difficult, as he kept extending his leg in a smooth motion . . . wait—

Big Mike yelled, as he laughed and marveled at his seemingly functional leg. The jitters were completely gone, and it extended and flexed as smooth as butter.

“Huh?” Derrick said.

Big Mike said, still grinning. His grill glinted in the glare of the examination light.

Derrick glanced at the Beacon on the examination tray.

Actually, he did do something. He had pulled the Beacon out of the leg.