We got back to the motel in about two minutes, breaking two states’ speed limits. We parked in the back, where we’d been before, and rushed around to the door, my arm around her waist.
While she was wiggling the key in the lock, I started to get a bad feeling.
The key had worked fine earlier.
Had we left a light on?
She pushed the door open and suddenly gasped. “Oh, shit.”
In the center of the bed, the long cardboard box with my name and address on it. Beside it, a fresh box of ammunition.
The phone rang.
Jack in the Box
1.
I picked up the phone and didn’t say anything. “Are you done wasting gasoline?” the female voice said. I turned on the recorder in my shirt pocket.
“Who are you?”
“You asked that before. I can’t tell you.”
“Then I can’t do anything for you.”
“Not to wax philosophical, but for whom were you working when you killed all those people in the desert?”
“I’m not going to go there.”
“You were killing people in order to stabilize the price of a barrel of oil. To use your own words.”
“I was drafted.”
“Yes, and as you’ve said, you could have gone to jail instead. You don’t have that option now.”
“Why don’t you just do the job yourself? You threaten me and Kit with murder. Why not just kill this poor schlub yourself?”
“That may be clear later.”
Kit had written a note: PLAY ALONG SEE WHAT THEY WANT.
I nodded, but could feel a slippery slope under my feet. “Maybe if you told me something about who the target is.”
“That’s progress. But not yet.”
“So at least tell me why you’re using me. There must be a thousand guys who would do it for pocket change.”
“You already know part of the reason. The rest will become clear.”
“Maybe if I knew who you were…”
“You will never know that.”
I took a deep breath. “So okay. Tell me what to do.” Kit’s eyes widened but she nodded, lips pursed.
“The first thing is to take that recorder out of your pocket and leave it on the end table. Second, put the rifle in the trunk of Ms. Majors’s car. Third, get a good night’s sleep. Finally, in the morning, keep driving south, toward the Gulf of Mexico.” She hung up.
“What is it?”
“Keep going south, she said. First get a good night’s sleep.”
“Sure. Lots of luck on that.”
I put the recorder on the end table. “And leave this, she said. I guess we should assume they can hear everything we say.”
She nodded. “I hope you all eat shit and die,” I said to the recorder. “I mean that sincerely. I want to watch.”
“I don’t know if we should provoke them,” she said quietly. “These people are crazy.”
“And I’m fucking getting there.”
We hadn’t slept two hours when the sun started to show through the blinds. I set up the coffeemaker and we squeezed into the shower together, unsexily. One small bar of soap and no shampoo.
Over a breakfast of acid coffee and stale chocolate-chip cookies, she said it before I could: WE CAN’T HANDLE THIS BY OURSELVES, she wrote down. COPS OR FBI OR WHAT?
I nodded and wrote, HOMELAND SECURITY? ASSASSINATION? She thumbed a query on her iPak and showed me the screen: a map of Springfield, Illinois, with an arrow pointing to the Homeland Security office.
We didn’t say anything about it; just got in the car and headed east. It might have been an excess of caution, but we didn’t even use the car’s route guide; she’d drawn out a map on a piece of paper.
About two hours of secondary roads through farmland and small towns, then a half hour on high-speed cruise, and we parked below an oblong grey building with extrusions like upside-down ells, which managed to look both heavy and arachnid.
“Imposing,” she said.
“Haunted by the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover. I don’t suppose we want to take the gun in with us.”
The reception area was arctic cold and government-grey. The room listing by the elevator didn’t have a Department of Mysterious Weapons Left in Cars, so we opted for Domestic Terrorism.
A matronly clerk listened to our story and settled us in a waiting room with a curious selection of magazines, a mixture of well-thumbed hunting and fishing journals with three pristine copies of Harvard Law Review, not the swimsuit edition. After more than an hour, she asked for my driver’s license and escorted us into the office of agent James “Pepper” Blackstone.
Blackstone was a slightly plump pale white man with aquiline features. He seriously studied us as we came in and sat down, and then glanced at the screen inlaid on his desktop. There was nothing else on the desk, and nothing on the walls but a standard picture of the president and a calendar.
“This rifle,” he said with no preamble, “we knew it was in your trunk, of course, before you got out of the car. If you’d tried to take it out of the trunk, you would have been stopped.”
“Good to know you guys are on the ball,” I said, and he didn’t react. “Of course the rifle is why we’re here.”
He looked at his screen.
“You found it in your car… twice?”
“Once outside my door,” I said. “I left it in Iowa City, in the trunk of a parked car, but someone evidently retrieved it and put it in our motel, while we went out for dinner last night. They also broke into my apartment and took the mailing carton it had been in.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know! To scare me.”
He considered that for a long moment. “A preliminary investigation shows three sets of fingerprints.”
“You took it out of my car?” Kit said.
“It’s a weapon associated with a crime, Ms. Majors. We’re allowed to.” He didn’t look at her. “Your fingerprints, Mr. Daley, and those of the two Iowa state troopers. There are no other fingerprints at all, which is interesting. What is more interesting is that the surface of the rifle is completely sterile, outside of those points of contact. There’s not one nanogram of organic substance. It’s as if the weapon had been autoclaved and then put in the car’s trunk by someone wearing sterile gloves.”
“Not just wiped clean?” I said.
“No; that might obliterate the fingerprints, but there would still be traces of organic material, or perhaps of a solvent used to remove it. This was a very careful job.”
“Well, I’m glad it’s not just a bunch of amateurs.”
“I wouldn’t rule that out. Amateurs can be compulsive.” He took off his glasses and leaned back in his chair, which squeaked, and began a long soliloquy. “Being a writer, Mr. Daley, perhaps you can appreciate this: the tropes of terrorism and the mechanical aspects of spy business are so deeply imbedded in our culture that private citizens have used them to harass other private citizens; make them think they’re being followed by someone—us or the FBI, the CIA, the KGB… or some mysterious organization whose three initials are known only to a few. Ask yourself this: If you had the desire to do to someone else exactly what is being done to you… would it be impossible? Would it even be difficult? If you did have the desire and the money to spare.”
I thought for a second. “The rifle is common enough, though I’m not sure how I could buy one without leaving a paper trail. Hire somebody to do it; a mule, I guess. The phone calls could be made with throwaway cells. But these people know exactly what I’m doing, all the time, as if they were in the same room! How could I do that?”