“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 stop 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.