A Union station mechanic near where they had parked had driven out and gone over the car and finally fixed it up at a cost of thirty dollars. Nothing else seemed wrong, except that the mechanic had examined the left front suspension for quite a while.
“Anything wrong there?” Arctor had asked.
“Seems like you should be experiencing trouble when you corner sharply,” the mechanic had said. “Does it yaw at all?”
The car didn’t yaw, not that Arctor had noticed. But the mechanic refused to say more; he just kept poking at the coil spring and ball joint and oil-filled shock. Arctor paid him, and the tow truck drove off. He then got back into his own car, along with Luckman and Barris—both of whom now rode in back—and started north toward Orange County.
As he drove, Arctor ruminated about other ironic agreements in the minds of narcotics agents and dealers. Several narcotics agents that he had known had posed as dealers in their undercover work and wound up selling like hash and then, sometimes, even smack. This was a good cover, but it also brought the nark a gradually increasing profit over and above his official salary plus what he made when he helped bust and seize a good-sized shipment. Also, the agents got deeper and deeper into using their own stuff, the whole way of life, as a matter of course; they became rich dealer addicts as well as narks, and after a time some of them began to phase out their law-enforcement activities in favor of fulltime dealing. But then, too, certain dealers, to burn their enemies or when expecting imminent busts, began narking and went that route, winding up as sort of unofficial undercover narks. It all got murky. The drug world was a murky world for everyone anyhow. For Bob Arctor, for example, it had become murky now: during this afternoon along the San Diego Freeway, while he and his two buddies had been within foot-seconds of being wiped out, the authorities, on his behalf, had been—he hoped—properly bugging their house, and if this had been done, then possibly he would be safe from now on from the kind of thing that had happened today. It was a piece of luck that ultimately might mean the difference between him winding up poisoned or shot or addicted or dead compared to nailing his enemy, nailing whoever was after him and who today had in fact almost gotten him. Once the holo-scanners were mounted in place, he ruminated, there would be very little sabotage or attacks against him. Or anyhow successful sabotage or successful attacks.
This was about the only thought that reassured him. The guilty, he reflected as he drove amid the heavy late-afternoon traffic as carefully as possible, may flee when no one pursues—he had heard that, and maybe that was true. What for a certainty was true, however, was that the guilty fled, fled like hell and took plenty of swift precautions, when someone did pursue: someone real and expert and at the same time hidden. And very close by. As close, he thought, as the back seat of this car. Where, if he has his funky .22 single-action German-made nowhere pistol with him and his equally funky rinky-dink laughable alleged silencer on it, and Luckman has gone to sleep as usual, he can put a hollow-nose bullet through the back of my skull and I will be as dead as Bobby Kennedy, who died from gunshot wounds of the same caliber—a bore that small.
And not only today but every day. And every night.
Except that in the house, when I check the storage drums of the holo-scanners, I’ll pretty well know pretty soon what everyone in my house is doing and when they do it and probably even why, myself included. I will watch my own self, he thought, get up in the night to pee. I will watch all the rooms on a twenty-four-hour basis … although there will be a lag. It won’t help me much if the holo-scanners pick up me being given a hotshot of some disorientation drug ripped off by the Hell’s Angels from a military arsenal and dumped in my coffee; someone else from the academy who goes over the storage drums will have to watch my thrashing around, unable to see or know where or what I am any more. It will be a hindsight I won’t even get to have. Somebody else will have to have it for me.
Luckman said, “I wonder what’s been going on back at the house while we’ve been gone all day. You know, this proves you got somebody out to burn you real bad, Bob. I hope when we get back the house is still there.”
“Yeah,” Arctor said. “I didn’t think of that. And we didn’t get a loan cephscope anyhow.” He made his voice sound leaden with resignation.
Barris said, in a surprisingly cheerful voice, “I wouldn’t worry too much.”
With anger, Luckman said, “You wouldn’t? Christ, they may have broken in and ripped off all we got. All Bob’s got, anyhow. And killed or stomped the animals. Or—”
“I left a little surprise,” Barris said, “for anybody entering the house while we’re gone today. I perfected it early this morning … I worked until I got it. An electronic surprise.”
Sharply, concealing his concern, Arctor said, “What kind of electronic surprise? It’s my house, Jim, you can’t start rigging up—”
“Easy, easy,” Barris said. “As our German friends would say, leise. Which means be cool.”
“What is it?”
“If the front door is opened,” Barris said, “during our absence, my cassette tape recorder starts recording. It’s under the couch. It has a two-hour tape. I placed three omnidirectional Sony mikes at three different—”
“You should have told me,” Arctor said.
“What if they come in through the windows?” Luckman said. “Or the back door?”
“To increase the chances of their making their entry via the front door,” Barris continued, “rather than in other less usual ways, I providentially left the front door unlocked.”
After a pause, Luckman began to snigger.
“Suppose they don’t know it’s unlocked?” Arctor said.
“I put a note on it,” Barris said.
“You’ve jiving me!”
“Yes,” Barris said, presently.
“Are you fucking jiving us or not?” Luckman said. “I can’t tell with you. Is he jiving, Bob?”
“We’ll see when we get back,” Arctor said. “If there’s a note on the door and it’s unlocked we’ll know he isn’t jiving us.”
“They probably would take the note down,” Luckman said, “after ripping off and vandalizing the house, and then lock the door. So we won’t know. We’ll never know. For sure. It’s that gray area again.”
“Of course I’m kidding!” Barris said, with vigor. “Only a psychotic would do that, leave the front door of his house unlocked and a note on the door.”
Turning, Arctor said to him, “What did you write on the note, Jim?”
“Who’s the note to?” Luckman chimed in. “I didn’t even know you knew how to write.”
With condescension, Barris said, “I wrote: ‘Donna, come on inside; door’s unlocked. We—’ ” Barris broke off. “It’s to Donna,” he finished, but not smoothly.
“He did do that,” Luckman said. “He really did. All of it.”
“That way,” Barris said, smoothly again, “we’ll know who had been doing this, Bob. And that’s of prime importance.”
“Unless they rip off the tape recorder when they rip off the couch and everything else,” Arctor said. He was thinking rapidly as to how much of a problem this really was, this additional example of Barris’s messed-up electronic nowhere genius of a kindergarten sort. Hell, he concluded, they’ll find the mikes in the first ten minutes and trace them back to the recorder. They’ll know exactly what to do. They’ll erase the tape, rewind it, leave it as it was, leave the door unlocked and the note on it. In fact, maybe the unlocked door will make their job easier. Fucking Barris, he thought. Great genius plans which will work out so as to screw up the universe. He probably forgot to plug the recorder into the wall outlet anyhow. Of course, if he finds it unplugged—
He’ll reason that proves someone was there, he realized. He’ll flash on that and rap at us for days. Somebody got in who was hip to his device and cleverly unplugged it. So, he decided, if they find it unplugged I hope they think to plug it in, and not only that, make it run right. In fact, what they really should do is test out his whole detection system, run it through its cycle as thoroughly as they do their own, be absolutely certain it functions perfectly, and then wind it back to a blank state, a tablet on which nothing is inscribed but on which something would for sure be had anyone—themselves, for example—entered the house. Otherwise, Barris’s suspicions will be aroused forever.