by Matt Ruff
And you thought this was Dixon’s way of taunting you? By manipulating the TV schedule?
If it had just been the once, I might have put it down to coincidence. But after that, whenever I got near a television…I mean, I know they like to repeat stuff on cable, but how many times can they cycle through the same handful of shows?
And it wasn’t just TV. I started noticing little digs in the radio playlist, too. I’d be in the shower, singing along with KFOG, and all at once I’d be like, oh, “The Kids Are All Right,” are they? And if it wasn’t the song itself, it was the band…The Pet Shop Boys. Remember the Pet Shop Boys? They dropped off the charts, what, a decade ago? But suddenly they were in heavy rotation again.
Michael Jackson too, I suppose.
Don’t even get me started on Michael Jackson. If I never hear “Billie Jean” again in this life…
So what did you do about this…harassment?
At first I tried to ignore it; when that didn’t work, I went back to popping Valium. That helped for a while, but then Dixon started to play nasty. One day in the grocery checkout I realized I’d forgotten to get butter, and when I ran back to the dairy case, someone had turned all the milk cartons so that the missing-kid photos were face-out. They were all boys, and all looking at me with these disappointed expressions.
That was just too much. I mean, Harold and Maude, OK, that was funny in a demented sort of way, but this, to me, this was no joke.
So next I got this idea that I should leave town again. It didn’t really make sense, because Dixon’s jurisdiction wasn’t limited the way the SFPD’s is—Malfeasance is everywhere. But it was all I could think to do at that point.
What made you choose Las Vegas as a destination?
It wasn’t my choice. Where I wanted to go was the Pacific Northwest, Seattle or maybe Portland. I figured it’d be a nice change of climate, plus that part of the country is Mecca for serial killers, so I knew I’d have lots of work once True let me out of the doghouse. But it turned out True had other plans for me.
I went to this travel agency that specialized in helping people plan moves, and asked for some info on Washington and Oregon. The woman behind the desk looked at me like I was nuts. “The economy up there is terrible right now. Have you thought about Nevada?”
“Nevada?”
“Las Vegas is booming. It’s one of the only cities in the country that hasn’t been hurt by the recession. They’re building thousands of new homes a month.”
“Sorry, I’m not interested.”
“No, really, you should think about it. Just wait here, Jane, let me get you some literature…” She went into a back room, and I got the hell out of there. I hadn’t told her my name.
Back at my apartment, I gulped down three Valium and turned on the TV. I’d programmed it to skip over stations that showed movies or sex-offender trials, which didn’t leave a whole lot. Can you guess what the theme on the Travel Channel was that night?
Las Vegas?
Three shows in a row. You’d almost think the L.V. chamber of commerce was paying the network to advertise. And then when I clicked over to ESPN, they were covering a poker tournament at Binion’s Casino.
I switched off the TV and picked up the phone.
“Jane Charlotte.”
“Yeah, I’m calling for Bob True again. Tell him I got the message.”
“Look behind you.”
I turned around to see True coming out of my kitchen. “What’s in Las Vegas?” I asked him.
“An operation we believe you’d be perfect for.”
“You don’t have anything perfect someplace nicer?” True just arched an eyebrow, as if to say, You want me to cut you off for another three months? “Yeah, OK,” I said. “So what is it?”
“The details will be given to you by your handler after you arrive.”
“You’re not supervising me on this one?”
“I’ll be along later, but during the initial phase of the operation, you’ll be working with a colleague of mine named Robert Wise.”
“Is everyone in Cost-Benefits named Bob?”
“Wise isn’t with Cost-Benefits,” True said. “He’s a Scary Clown.”
“You’re teaming me with a Clown? What kind of op is this?”
“It’s not the nature of the operation so much as its location. The Scary Clowns consider Las Vegas to be their fiefdom, and they are extremely territorial. It’s not really possible for us to run an operation there without including them. But don’t worry, Wise is a good man. He’s…much less random than some of the others.”
“Great. So when do I leave?”
“We need you ready to go by Thursday. Catering will handle the travel arrangements.”
“OK. I’m going to need some money, though. The bobblehead people aren’t going to give me a paid vacation, and I’m already way behind on my rent.”
“Yes, I know. I was just coming to that.” He handed me a Jungle Cash ticket that had already been scratched off.
“Um, True,” I said, looking at the prize amount. “This is too little.”
“It’s enough for a long-term storage locker. A small one. You don’t have that many possessions.”
“You want me to give up the apartment?”
“Weren’t you planning to do that anyway?”
“Well yeah, but…How long is this Vegas operation supposed to last? I mean, does it make sense for me to burn all my bridges here?”
True held up the crumpled eviction notice that he’d fished out of my kitchen garbage can. “I’d say this bridge is already blazing, wouldn’t you?”
I put my stuff in storage. I stopped by the bobblehead company, intending to give my notice, and instead managed to talk this guy in payroll into giving me two weeks’ pay in advance. Then I called Black Helicopters, the subdivision of Catering in charge of transport. Even though I should have known better, I was honestly expecting them to fly me to Vegas. Hah.
“At five p.m. this evening,” the voice on the phone said, “go stand in the parking lot outside the Safeway supermarket in Pacific Heights. Someone will park within sight of you and leave their keys in the ignition.”
“What kind of car will it be?”
“At five p.m. this evening, go stand in the parking lot outside the Safeway supermarket in Pacific—”
“Yeah, yeah, I got that. But how will I know it’s the right car?”
“The license plate will have an even number.”
It was almost six by the time a black SUV pulled into the Safeway lot, driven by a mother with two kids; the kids were screaming at each other, which gave their mom a perfect pretext to forget her car keys. The SUV’s license number ended in an 8, and it was a Nevada plate, which I thought pretty much clinched it—but just in case, I waited until Mom had dragged the kids into the store before making my move.
I found a Mobil credit card in the glove compartment and used it to top off the tank. Then I blew town. As I drove south, I thought about the Scary Clowns.
The Clowns are the remnant of another secret society that got taken over by the organization way back in the day. They specialize in psychological ops: mind-fucking for the greater good. Like everybody else, they’re supposed to answer to Cost-Benefits, but because of their special history they’re actually semiautonomous, and their insistence on playing by their own rules creates a lot of headaches for the bureaucracy.
What sort of headaches?
Well, one of the things that distinguishes the Clowns is that they’re a lot less publicity-shy than the other divisions. They consider urban legends a form of tradecraft. It’s how they got their nickname.
I don’t recall an urban legend about scary clowns.
It was a variation on the old Men in Black gag. Used to be, when the organization got wind of a predator operating in a small town or a suburb, they’d send in a bunch of guys in freaky clown makeup to drive around and menace the locals. The idea was to raise awareness, get people to lock their doors and s
top trusting strangers, until Bad Monkeys could eliminate the threat. It was a pretty effective gimmick, but they had to stop doing it after this one clown actor named Gacy got a little too into his role.
John Wayne Gacy was an organization operative?
Not one of the better ones, but yeah. He’d worked in Panopticon before switching to psy-ops, so he knew how to spoof Eyes Only surveillance; that’s how he managed to rack up so many bodies without getting caught. And then when the cops nailed him, before the organization could? You can bet heads rolled in Malfeasance over that screwup.
Anyway, after that, they quit using the Scary Clown gimmick—mostly—but the name stuck.
So this was the group I was going to be working with. You can see why I felt kind of ambivalent about it. The job wasn’t likely to be boring, but if I drew the wrong psycho for a partner, I might find myself wishing I was back with the bobbleheads.
I stopped in Bakersfield for a late dinner. Not long after I got back on the highway, the gas gauge, which had been telling me I still had almost a third of a tank left, suddenly dipped into the red zone. Fortunately there was a Mobil sign at the next exit.
The Mobil station was in a one-stoplight mountain town that had rolled up its sidewalks hours earlier. Coming down the main drag, I got a weird vibe. The street was deserted, but the kind of deserted you see in a horror movie, right before the zombies start coming out in droves. I’d been planning on pumping my own gas, but when I got to the station I pulled up to the full-service island instead.
The gas-station attendant wore a hooded sweatshirt that hid his face in shadow. “Chilly night,” he said, when I cracked the window. “Would you like to come inside for some coffee?”
“No thanks. Just fill it up with unleaded.”
I kept an eye on him while he pumped the gas. As he was putting the gas cap back on, he did this funny ten-second freeze with his head cocked, like he’d just heard a branch breaking out in the dark somewhere.
Then he was back at my window: “You sure you don’t want that coffee?”
“Positive.”
“It’s really good.” He tilted his head, and his right arm started twitching. “Trust me, you’ll be very glad you tried it.”
“Sorry, I’m a Mormon. Caffeine even touches these lips, I go straight to hell.” I made my own twitching motion with the credit card, and reluctantly he took it from me. He went into his office and stood just inside the door, tapping his feet. Then he came back out again.
My NC gun was stuffed in a brown paper bag next to my seat. I reached for it as the attendant came around to my window for the third time.
“This card’s no good,” he told me.
“Oh yeah?” I said, slipping the gun off safe. “I hear it works a lot better if you actually run it through the machine.”
“It’s no good.” His whole body was jerking violently to one side now.
“OK, give it back to me then. I’ll pay cash.”
“It’s against the rules for me to give it back. I’m going to need you to come inside with me.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Miss—”
“You want to keep the card, go ahead and keep it. But I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Miss, please…”
I came this close to shooting him. But as he leaned in to plead with me, I finally got a glimpse of his face, and saw that he was scared silly. And then—probably because I was already in a horror-movie frame of mind—it occurred to me that I’d heard this story before somewhere.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Are you acting weird because there’s a guy with an ax crouched behind my back seat?”
The gas-station attendant blinked. “You know him?”
“Well, we haven’t been formally introduced, but I’m pretty sure his name is Bob.”
“Oh,” the attendant said. “OK. I’ll just go run your card, then…”
He went back into the office; I looked in my rearview mirror. “Robert Wise, I presume?”
“If I weren’t,” Wise said, “you’d be dead. Or wishing you were.” He got up, and despite the tough talk and the double-bitter in his hands, my first impression was that he wasn’t all that scary. He didn’t look like an ax murderer; he looked like an army ranger who’d gotten lost on his way to chop some firewood.
“How long have you been back there?” I asked him. “Since Bakersfield?”
“Does it matter?”
“I just want to know how cranky you are. If you’ve been sitting on the floor all the way from S.F., your butt must be pretty sore by now.”
“You’re funny,” said Wise. “True mentioned you were funny.” Then he said, “Wait here,” and got out.
I watched him walk towards the gas-station office, ax swinging at his side. As Wise came in the door, the attendant looked up from the credit-card machine and started to raise his hands. Then the office lights went out.
Two minutes passed. Wise reappeared, minus his ax. He trotted back to the SUV and got into the front passenger seat. “Here,” he said, handing me the credit card.
“Uh…What did you just do?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“What did you do, Wise?”
“I’ll tell you later. Right now, we need to get away from here.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Sometime in the next forty-two seconds would be good.”
The wristwatch glance stopped me from arguing. I put the SUV in gear and drove, counting “one one thousand, two one thousand,” under my breath. When I got to “forty-two one thousand,” bright light flared in the rearview.
I took a hand off the wheel and reached for my NC gun. The paper bag was empty.
“That’s all right, Jane,” Wise said. “I’ll hang on to the weapon for now. You just concentrate on driving. And don’t worry about that guy back there—he had it coming, I promise.”
“What the hell—”
“Just drive.”
I drove. Wise didn’t speak again until we were in Nevada. A few miles past the state line, he had me leave the highway for an unpaved road that snaked north into the desert.
“We’re not going to Vegas tonight?”
“No. My place.”
The road ended at a fenced compound whose gate opened automatically for us. Wise directed me inside, to a long, low, warehouse-style building with a sign that read LAWFUL GOOD PRESS. As soon as I’d parked, he took the keys.
“It’s OK,” I told him. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m too tired.”
“Yeah, well, this way I don’t have to worry about you driving off in your sleep.”
“What if I walk off in my sleep?”
“There are coyotes,” said Wise. “So don’t.”
I followed him into the warehouse, to a musty room where a cot had already been set up for me. “Bathroom’s straight back if you need it,” he said. “Other than that, if you get an urge to snoop around—”
“I know. Coyotes.”
I woke up in the morning to a vision of swastikas. To the left of my cot was a bookcase labeled ARYAN LITERATURE, filled with display copies of books with titles like A Hoax Called Auschwitz and The Illustrated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I got up, rubbing sleep from my eyes, and checked out the other bookcases lining the room, each with its own subject: White Supremacy; Black Supremacy; Religion; Firearms and Silencers; Knife-Fighting and Martial Arts; Bomb-Making; Biological Warfare; Torture Techniques; Confidence Games; Phony I.D. and Identity Theft; Computer Hacking; Money-Laundering and Tax Evasion; Stalking; Revenge.
I’d wandered over to Bomb-Making and was leafing through The Patriot’s Cookbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Brewing Explosives and Chemical Weapons at Home when Wise came into the room. He was showered and shaved, and in a much mellower mood than the night before. “Found something you like?”
“Lawful Good Press,” I said. “Is that a joke?”
“I don’t know. Are you laughing?”
I held up The Patriot’s Cookbook. �
��Is this a joke?”
“It’s no substitute for a college chemistry degree, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“The recipes don’t work?”
Wise made a seesawing motion with his hand. “The quality of the information varies. The smoke-and stink-bomb recipes are pretty solid; the ones for TNT and plastique, not so much.”
“What about this one?” I pointed to a line in the table of contents that read, “Sarin Gas.”
“Look at the equipment list.”
I did. “What’s a Gallinago flask?”
“A very specialized piece of hardware—so specialized, it doesn’t actually exist. But if you ask for it at a chemical-supply house, or try to search for it on the Internet, bells go off in Panopticon.”
“Are the books bugged, too?”
“Some of them. Eyes Only on selected volumes, plus Library Bindings on some of the hate literature. And of course we keep a mailing list.” He took a remote control from his pocket and pointed it at the picture of the Reichstag that hung above the Aryan Lit. bookcase; the picture slid aside, revealing a computerized map of the U.S. covered in blinking points of light. “Green dots are customers we believe to be harmless—people who think it’s cute to have How to Find Your Ex-Wife as bathroom reading copy. Red dots are customers who want to do damage. Yellow dots, we’re not sure yet.”
“Lot of red dots around Vegas right now,” I observed.
“Yeah, we noticed that too. But here, take a look at this…” He pressed another button on the remote, and all the dots vanished except for one in southern California. A picture and a name appeared at the bottom of the screen. “Recognize him?”
“The gas-station attendant.”
“He had some unfortunate ideas about anthrax and the U.S. Postal Service.”