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He looked out at the identical homes, the clean streets, the streetlamps glowing in the dusky summer evening. Orange County, California, he thought: home to the Happiest Place on Earth, a baseball team called the Angels, an ocean called the Pacific and over two and a half million people, many of whom are beautiful women who need the company of men.

And I’m a part of this place.

I, Big Bill Wayne — alluring blond bachelor and lover of women.

First he cruised the parking lot of a giant entertainment complex known as the Big One. It had twenty-one screens and a bunch of restaurants. The parking lot was large, outdoors and not well lit. He parked and followed a couple of nice-looking women toward the complex, aware of their perfumes trailing back to him, attuned to the click of their shoes on the asphalt. Like most women together they talked incessantly and paid him no attention whatsoever. He got into one of the long lines behind them and moved closer.

His knees felt weak and his heart was pounding as he tried to strike up a conversation about movies. One of the girls had brown eyes that shone like candlelight. The conversation seemed to be going well until one of them made a joke he didn’t hear, then they both laughed and turned their backs on him. And that, he thought, is the essence of what I hate most about women: the way they can change their minds so fast. He felt the white cold fury rise up inside him. He knew it would come because it always had and it always did. It grabbed his heart and made his muscles ready and brought a very sly smile to his face.

Bill followed a crowded walkway to a bar called Sloppy Joe’s, which was advertised as a replica of Hemingway’s favorite bar from Key West. The hostess was lovely.

He paced slowly along the bar, hands held behind his back and head slightly down like a man with heavy ideas. In the mirror behind the bar he admired his long coat and vest, his golden flowing hair and thick mustache.

He looked at the women’s faces, too. So challenging, their eyes, so haughty. He toured the perimeter of the place, analyzing pictures of the handsome writer — many with women — and wondered if writing a book would help him form relationships.

But it troubled Bill that writers needed to have a conscience to write good books, because he knew for a fact he had no such thing. He’d heard about it all his life — the way you were supposed to have feelings that guided you, helped you decide if what you did was right or wrong. Conscience.

It was easy to understand what you were supposed to feel. Parents and teachers, priests and cops, doctors and judges, TV and movies were all eager to tell you how to feel. But if you never actually felt it, if your actions generated absolutely no clear sense of either right or wrong, if those ideas were simply not present inside you, the way that some people are born without certain organs, then all you could do was fake it. And sometimes it was difficult, manufacturing the illusion of those emotions upon your face for someone to read correctly. Well, no use feeling sorry for yourself.

A few minutes later he cornered the hostess against one of the empty tables and tried to ask some questions about Ernest but she got away by leaning into a chair that slid away with a bark and she disappeared into a door marked Employees Only. A moment later a hefty young man came through the same door and glared at him.

Bill swept from the room, hands behind his back again and head forward, imagining what it would feel like to pump a round into the man’s heart and watch the expression of disbelief on his stupid face. Watch his eyes roll around like the last two olives in a jar.

Back up the freeway then to more familiar ground, better hunting actually in the indoor malls where women fearlessly wandered alone and were always so distracted by merchandise you could hover about undetected and think anything you wanted about them. His kit, shopping bag, bedsheet, the Deer Sleigh’R, Pandora’s Box and three purses were all back there, everything but the Deer Sleigh’r locked in two large metal toolboxes. He’d imagined more than once just what a policeman would think if he saw his things. But no officer could search his van without probable cause and Bill was not about to offer them anything remotely like probable cause to search his vehicle. He was clean. If pulled over routinely, or caught in a CHP sobriety checkpoint, his fake CDL from the counterfeiter in Little Saigon was a good one, descended from the high-quality false passports so indispensable in the early days after the war.

But thank God for the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights, Bill mused, because without it, his Deer Sleigh’R — advertised as “a great way to protect your trophy’s meat and hide from dirt and damage caused by rough, jagged ground” — would send your average cop into fits of suspicion. The purses would sink him. And what would they make of Pandora’s Box, he thought: it was a prototype, unique and one of a kind, just the sort of thing that would alarm a low-IQ policeman. An explanation would be demanded.

He remembered that it was about time to go see the box’s maker again, get the thing repaired. It wouldn’t even turn on the last time he tried it. Like the battery was dead, or a fuse blown or something. Luckily, he hadn’t needed it. But the inventor could figure it out and fix it — he’d created the damned thing in the first place.

So he drove through the exhaust-fragrant night to a newly remodeled mall called the Main Place. He cruised the lot once to get a feel for whether it was hot or cold. He liked the Main Place because it was small and seemed kind of homey, for a mall. In order to harvest he’d have to park safely away from the Main Place, in a construction zone he’d scouted months earlier where he could make the transfer from car to van. Where he parked the van was critical because it had to be safe for the transfer but not too long a walk or bus ride to the parking lot.

But he wasn’t in good enough spirits to collect tonight. No. Tonight was a night for tasting, for preparation, for inspiration. A night to be a scout, like the great Kit Carson.

Bill spotted a very attractive woman walking toward the Nordstrom entrance but her shorts and T-shirt disappointed him. Summer was always a time when women dressed down, it seemed, definitely harder to find one wearing good fashionable clothing.

The positive side was that many liked to wear their hair up against the heat, and hair up always signified to Bill breeding, class, education, sophistication and ungovernable carnal appetites. But this one had her hair down and wore unflattering flat-soled sandals and didn’t even roll up the sleeves of her T-shirt to expose the deliciousness of the upper female arm.

White trash, he thought: common as sparrows and about as interesting.

A blond woman in a red dress and red shoes: too flabby.

A lanky Negress: too young.

A Central American woman: rich and dark as coffee but what do you say to her?

A stubby little clerical type with a hop in her step and a face like a frog: um, sorry, ma’am.

But then out of the blue came a very interesting possibility, getting into her beat-up old sedan now, so Bill brought his van to a stop behind her and off to one side as if wanting her parking spot. She was tall with curly dark hair and an intelligent forehead and shapely legs. Her skirt wasn’t short except when she lowered herself into the car, but her shoes were high enough and her blouse was rich purple and sleeveless. She knew how beautiful her arms were. He imagined her face captured by photography on her driver’s license, and her physical characteristics listed beside the picture, in plain black and white. It was really something to have so many facts about a woman contained on a concise, durable, stackable card. You never forgot a birthday. And there was more truth on a CDL than most women would tell you in a lifetime.

He rolled down his window to give her a good look at his handsomeness. He motioned her out when she turned and looked through her window at him. She smiled and waved. Lovely teeth.