“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.”
“If he was a bad monkey, shouldn’t I have taken care of him?”
“Well, if you’d bothered to check the back of your vehicle for stowaways, we would have had time to discuss that. As it was, it just seemed simpler to handle him myself. Plus I really was feeling pretty cranky. You hungry?”
Besides the printing press and bindery, the building had a full industrial kitchen. I sat at a stainless-steel counter making small talk while Wise cooked me breakfast.
“So how’d you end up a Clown?” I asked him. “I mean, axwork aside, you seem like a normal guy.”
“Don’t let the haircut fool you,” Wise said. “I was originally in intel, but when I came out here to start up the Press, the head of the Scary Clowns made me an offer.”
“Panopticon to Clown seems like a popular career path. Did you know—”
“Gacy?” Wise shook his head. “Before my time.”
“What about a guy named Dixon? You ever cross paths with him?”
“You could say so. I was his Probate officer.”
“You trained Dixon?…So does that mean you were in Malfeasance?”
“No, regular Panopticon. Dixon was too at first, but he was bucking for a Malfie post from day one.”
“Did you like him?”
“He was a good student. A little overzealous, maybe. Why, what’s he to you?”
“He’s running my background check.”
Wise laughed. “I bet that’s fun.”
“Thrilling. Listen, maybe you can explain something to me: when Dixon called me in for an interview, I had to wear this wristband…” I described it to him.
“Sounds like a shibboleth device,” Wise said.