The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 78

Ellie thought about what to do.

She could hit Terry. Or hit someone else while Terry watched, like his family. Assuming that some of his family were here in the compound with him, which they probably were. Or she could avoid physical violence, and use another kind of coercion instead. She could threaten to have him imprisoned, for instance. It would be quite easy to have Terry imprisoned. All Ellie needed to do was think up some large, arbitrary expense she’d incurred during the day’s operations and then bill Terry for it, so that when he couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, he would be put in a workhouse to service the debt. And he would be put in a workhouse for non-payment, because she would take his wallet from him and throw it away before she invoiced him, which would make sure he was. And she would tell him what she intended, very clearly, before she did.

She could do those things to him. She could do a lot of things. She could hit people, or put forfeiture notices on his house, or hound him from his job, if he had one. Or she could just hit him. She could threaten Terry with any number of unpleasant things, and threatening him might make him tell her what she needed to know, but it might also make him stubborn.

It might very well make him stubborn.

She had a feeling he was that kind of person, or he wouldn’t be here in the first place. She had a feeling that trying to make Terry do as she wished might go wrong, and that threats of being slapped around or locked up for a few weeks with a false debt claim weren’t especially alarming threats, not to a Měi-guó debt-resistor like Terry. And that was bad. It meant that Ellie might have to do more than just threaten, and more than just hit people carelessly. She might have to escalate this beyond just pushing Terry around, and do something worse.

She might have to threaten him with something awful.

That was why she’d been so hateful earlier. It was why she was usually hateful, why she called people nasty things, and didn’t try to stop Sameh shooting at people who just happened to walk past. Seeming cruel, seeming unreasonable, those were actually useful things to be. It helped, at moments like this, to have a built-up store of fear and uncertainty in the minds of those she spoke to.

If Terry thought Ellie was dangerous, or callous, or even just a casual bigot and biased against debtors, then Terry might believe she would do something awful more easily than he otherwise would. She needed that, to make her threats believable, mainly so she didn’t have to carry them out. She needed her threats to be believable, and she hoped that by now, with the dead all over the compound, with the drone hovering overhead, with Terry’s people disarmed and the noncombatants in the building right next to her, Ellie hoped she could make a credible threat. She could point guns at people, for instance, and say that if he didn’t tell her what she needed to know, right now, then someone died.

And Terry might believe her. And then she wouldn’t need to kill anyone.

He might believe her, but he might not, and that was the problem. It meant that if she began saying such things and he just shrugged and said he didn’t care, then she might need to go through with it and actually kill someone just to prove to him that she would. And she didn’t know if she wanted to do that.

She wanted to find some other way. She wanted Terry just to do as she asked, without everything becoming stubborn and heroic and difficult. She just wanted him to tell her about the missing kid without the need for more killing and violence.

She might still have to kill someone in the end, she supposed, and she probably would do it if she had to, but first she wanted to try just talking to Terry, trying to make him see that there were better ways out of this for both of them.

So she stood there and thought about what to do.