“So when are you going to tell me why I’m here?” I said. “What does Phil want from me?”
“What does Phil want?” She rolled her eyes. “This isn’t about Phil, Jane. It’s about you, playing for the wrong team.”
“You want me to join the Troop.”
“No, that’s backwards. You want to join us. And we’re going to grant your wish.”
“My wish? My wish is to get my brother back, and for you to go to—”
“Are you auditioning, Jane?” She grinned. “Trying to show me what a great bullshit artist you are? Trust me, I know you’ve got that down cold. And hey, it’s a useful skill, we can definitely put it to work for the Troop, but right here and now? I need you to start coming clean with yourself.” She pointed to a door at the end of the bar. “In there.”
“In there what?”
“The thing you’ve been denying for the past twenty-three years. Your true nature. Go on in and check it out.”
I looked at the door. I didn’t move.
“Go on,” she said, and the door opened on its own, and then I was moving—not walking, you understand, just moving. I passed through into this darkened space, and the door slammed shut behind me, so it was like total blackout, and that was bad, not for the dark itself but because I knew it wouldn’t last. She gave me a few seconds to think about what was coming, and then she said, “Now look,” and the lights came on, and there he was, staring at me from every angle. John Doyle.
His wanted poster, you mean. The one from the post-office lobby.
Yeah. Officer Friendly may have kept one copy, but the Troop had a million of them. Every inch of wall space in this room was plastered with them. The ceiling, too, and I didn’t even need to look down—I could feel the paper crackling under my feet.
“He really was a creepy guy, wasn’t he?” said the bad Jane. “Some child molesters, you know, they’re actually very sweet when they want to be, but J.D. wasn’t one of those. He was more the come-with-me-now-kid-or-else type.”
“Did Phil…He told you what I did?”
“At the post office? Yeah, that’s still kind of a sore spot with him, but he told me. Showed me the tape, too.”
“The—”
“The surveillance tape. Probably you guessed this already, but the organization doesn’t have a monopoly on Eyes Only technology. We’ve got our own version. Have had for years.”
“The wanted poster…?” I said. She nodded. “And that’s…how you find victims?”
“Recruits,” she said. “Yeah, that’s one of the ways. You think about it, it’s not a bad profiling strategy: show someone the face of evil, see how they respond. Your brother’s reaction was classic. That look of vulnerability on his face, like he was just begging someone to come in and start rewiring his brain—I can see why the powers that be snapped him up. What I don’t understand is why they didn’t recruit you at the same time.”
“Me?”
“Jane…” Suddenly she was right behind me, with her hands on my shoulders. “Don’t be coy, now. You know what I’m talking about.”
“No.”
“You were standing behind Phil, just like this, whispering in his ear, saying…Let’s see, what were your exact words again? Oh yeah: ‘That’s the guy, Phil, the one who kidnaps little kids for the gypsies. I told him all about you: where you live, where you play, where you sleep…’”
I shut my eyes.
“‘…and when he comes for you, Phil, you’d better not scream or try to run away. That’ll just make him mad, and then he’ll hurt you. And don’t go crying to Mom about this, either. She can’t protect you. He’ll hurt her too, maybe even kill her, and he’ll still take you away afterwards.’”
“I was just messing with his head!” I said. “I was teasing him! I didn’t know—”
“Teasing him?” She touched the side of my face and I flinched. “I think you’re teasing me, Jane. I mean, I saw the tape. Phil was practically pissing himself from fear, and you: you were into it. Teasing! You were being evil. You liked it. You were good at it. Good enough to make a casual observer think that maybe you’d had some practice…”
“Fuck you! I wasn’t—it was just that one day.”
“Yeah, right. That’s a hell of a coincidence, Jane. The one time you give in to a sadistic impulse, put on a performance that couldn’t have been better if you’d been trying out for the Troop, and we just happened to be there to record it…You know what I think? You had ten years with Phil before we took him, and I bet if we picked any day out of those ten years and put J.D.’s poster in a room with the two of you, we’d have caught something just as telling. Jane being evil? Hah. How about Jane being Jane?” She touched my face again, and whispered: “Bad monkey.”
This time instead of pulling away I turned on her, but my fists punched empty air. I heard the sound of her laugh off to my left and lunged for it, still swinging.
“Open your eyes, Jane,” she said. “I know you don’t want to see, but you’re never going to catch me blind.”
I opened my eyes. She was right in front of me, and this time I actually managed to get my hands around her throat before she melted away.
“Stop doing that!” I complained, as she rematerialized, just out of reach.
“All right,” she said. “You want a fair shot, I’ll give you one. Here, I’ll even give you a handicap…” She brought out the knife she’d used to kill John Doyle, and tossed it to me. “Now come on,” she said, showing me her empty hands. “No tricks this time, I promise.”
“OK,” I said. “Just one other thing…” And I lunged at her, leading with the point of the knife blade. She sidestepped, caught my wrist, and threw me face-first into the nearest wall.
“So where did it all go wrong?” she asked, pinning me effortlessly. “After such a promising start…Were you actually sorry when Doyle took Phil away? Or was it that business with Whitmer? I mean, no offense, that was pretty impressive for a fourteen-year-old, but still. You think taking out a serial killer makes you some kind of saint?”
She released me and stepped back, and I whirled around, slashing with the knife.
“Or was it the organization?” she said, dancing clear of the blade. “Talking to Catering on the phone, I can see how that might have an effect on a young girl, even a bad seed. Weird though, how they waited so long before actually recruiting you…Why do you suppose that is?”
I cut at her again, and this time she ducked beneath my arm, hooked a boot behind one of my ankles, and jerked my feet out from under me.
“Was that just a bureaucratic oversight, you think? Or did they maybe have a reason for not rushing to take you on?”
“I had a life,” I gasped. “They hoped…They wanted me to do something with it.”
“Oh, that line.” She laughed. “So why didn’t you do anything with it?”
When I’d landed on my ass, I’d dropped the knife. I tried to pick it up, but she got there first and toed it out of my reach.
“They did recruit me,” I said. “Maybe it took twenty years, but—”
“Yeah, and how’s that been working out? Word from our spies is, not great. Your mission failure rate is kind of an embarrassment. And why is that?”
I made another try for the knife. She kicked me in the face.
“What’s the problem, Jane? Are you just a titanic fuckup? Or could it be that your heart’s not really in it?”
As she hauled back to kick me again I sprang up and locked my hands around her throat. I felt her try to pull away and thought: Got you now, you bitch! But then her own arms came up, breaking my grip, and she spun me around and slammed me into the wall again, eye-to-eye with John Doyle.