Bad Monkeys

Look Both Ways

THE VOICE ON THE PHONE SAID: “Jane Charlotte.”

“Yeah, I’m supposed to make an appointment to meet my Probate officer…”

“Southeast corner of Orchard and Masonic, tomorrow, eight-thirty a.m.”

“Do you know what this guy looks like? Or will he know me?”

“Southeast corner of Orchard and Masonic,” the voice repeated, “tomorrow, eight-thirty a.m.”

Dial tone.

Oh well, at least I knew where I was going. That intersection was in the Haight, and assuming I had my compass directions straight, the southeast corner was just across Orchard Street from the elementary school that Phil and I had both attended.

Next morning I was there, standing under the awning of a candy store where I used to shoplift Mars bars, and playing “Who’s the Probate officer?” with the other pedestrians. Despite the drizzle there were plenty of prospects: a guy waiting at the bus stop who didn’t check the numbers of the buses pulling up; another guy who’d been out in the wet so long that the newspaper he was reading had soaked through; a bag lady who had her forehead pressed up against a utility pole like she was trying to mind-meld with it; a bored-looking school crossing guard.

My money was on the crossing guard. His uniform didn’t fit him, and he held his stop sign the way a circus bear would, like this meaningless prop some midget had just handed to him. He also didn’t seem to care whether any kids made it across the street in one piece. At the school, the second bell had already rung, but there were still a few members of the Jane Charlotte tribe racing to get in under the wire; if the guard happened to be facing the right direction when they darted out into the crosswalk, he’d make this token gesture to stop the traffic, but for the most part they were on their own.

So I decided this was probably my guy and tried to make contact with him, which wasn’t easy, because he wasn’t paying any attention to the adults around him, either.

“Hey,” I said, waving a hand in his face. “Hello?”

Three more kids ran into the street behind the crossing guard’s back, on an intercept course with a speeding delivery truck. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the bag lady come to life. She whipped her shopping bag up in a circle and let fly; the bag arced above the heads of the jaywalkers and burst on the truck’s front hood, spraying cans everywhere. The truck screeched to a halt; so did the rest of the traffic, and every pedestrian within earshot.

The bag lady went charging at the kids, shrieking, “Look both ways! Look both ways!” Two of them bolted straight off; the third, definitely my tribe, stood his ground long enough to give the woman who’d saved his life a one-finger thank you.

She went after the crossing guard next: “Not…paying…attention!” She started smacking him on the chest and shoulders—“Pay attention! Pay attention!”—sloppy, overhand girly slaps that he was too stunned to defend himself against. Then her slaps turned into punches and he got mad; he stiff-armed her and raised his stop sign threateningly. The bag lady fell back into a cringe, chanting “Hit me? Hit me?” (Or maybe it was “Hit me! Hit me!”—when I thought about it later, that seemed more likely.)

“Get the hell out of my face!” the crossing guard said, and she did—but as she turned to go she stumbled and fell into me, hissing three words in Latin into my ear. Then she was gone, fast-walking east along Orchard.

“What do you want?” said the crossing guard, finally acknowledging me. I gave him the tribal salute and took off after my Probate officer.

By the time I caught up to her she was in full schizophrenic muttering mode. Most of it was impossible to make out, but here and there I’d catch a few words: “Pay attention!..Watch! Watch!..Not on the rocks, Billy!”

She led me to a delicatessen called Silverman’s. A sign in the window said CLOSED FOR FAMILY EMERGENCY, but when she stepped up to the door, it opened for her.

Inside, Bob True was sitting at a table by the meat counter. The bag lady breezed right past him, going into a back corner of the room and putting her face to the wall. True gave her a moment, then called out gently: “Annie. We need you in the present day.”

She straightened up and came out of her corner. The craziness in her eyes had gone back a bit but it hadn’t disappeared, and when she offered her hand to shake I had to push myself to take it.

“Annie Charles,” she introduced herself.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m the last of the Brontë sisters.”

“Let’s begin,” said True, gesturing. I joined him at the table. There was a third chair, but rather than sit, Annie stood behind it, wringing her hands and making little noises.

“Your Probate assignment,” True said. He handed me a school notebook, the kind with the black-and-white speckled covers; the name ARLO DEXTER had been scrawled in the “I belong to” box in red Crayola. I figured it was an official case file, like the Deeds and Loomis SAT booklets.

The notebook was full of crayon drawings. Page one showed a frowning stick-figure boy—ARLO, according to the caption—in a short-sleeve shirt and black short pants.

On page two, Arlo stood on a chair beside a workbench, his tongue sticking out in concentration as he performed some kind of surgery on a teddy bear. On page three, Arlo was walking, holding the teddy bear out in front of him. On page four, he’d set the teddy bear on the ground and backed away; a second stick-figure boy—ROGER OLSEN—approached from the opposite direction. On page five, Roger picked up the teddy bear, and Arlo covered his ears. On page six, the teddy bear vanished in a cartoon explosion. On page seven, Roger stood crying with his face covered in soot and smoke rising from his head; Arlo, watching from the sidelines, smiled.

On page eight, Arlo was alone again, and unhappy…

The same basic sequence was repeated over and over. Each explosion was a little more powerful than the last one. A boy named Gregg Faulkner who picked up a booby-trapped cereal box didn’t just lose his hair, one of his eyes was X-ed out. A girl named Jody Conrad lost both her eyes, and a boy named Tariq Williams lost a hand. In the most gruesome scene of all, a boy named Harold Rodriguez jetted so much blood from the stumps of his arms that Arlo had to break out an umbrella.

I looked over at True. “You know, I know you guys are obsessed with secrecy, but this is like beyond tasteless…”

“What you’re holding isn’t an internal organization report,” he told me. “It’s a facsimile of a notebook discovered during a search of Arlo Dexter’s apartment.”

“He drew this himself? How old is he?”

“Thirty-two. That’s chronological age, of course. His mental self-image—”

“Who cares?” I interrupted. “When do I kill him?”

“Soon. But there are some questions we’d like answered first, if possible. Turn to the next page.”

On the page following the Harold Rodriguez bloodbath, Arlo was center stage again, but this time he’d been joined by three other stick figures. Not people. Monkeys. Two of them had him bookended and were whispering to him in stereo; the third monkey stood nearby, holding a black briefcase.

On the next page, the briefcase was lying open on the ground, and Arlo was on his knees beside it with his hands clasped and his mouth forming an O of perfect joy. The monkeys clustered behind him, looking pleased by his reaction. As for the briefcase, the drawing didn’t show what was in it, but whatever it was was pumping out yellow and orange rays of light, and given Arlo’s habits it wasn’t hard to come up with possibilities.

“Do we know who these other guys are?” I asked.

“That’s one of the questions we’d like answered.”

“I suppose Al Qaeda would be too obvious, huh?”

“Not too obvious, just unlikely. Arlo Dexter is an apolitical psychopath, not an Islamic jihadist. Besides, look at the way he’s drawn them. To depict Arabs as monkeys would almost certainly be an expression of contempt. But Mr. Dexter isn’t contemptuous of his new associates. He admires them.”

“How do you know that?”

“Turn the page.”

On the next page—actually a two-page spread, and the last drawing in the notebook—Arlo was on the move again, carrying the black briefcase towards some sort of fenced-in area where a huge crowd of stick-figures was gathered. I could tell it was Arlo carrying the briefcase because he was still wearing his shirt and short pants. But he had a new head on his shoulders: he’d become a monkey too, now.

“I take it you don’t know what his target is, either.”

“No,” said True, “and that’s the most important question of all. If Dexter’s confederates aren’t imaginary, then stopping him may not be enough; there could be other monkeys with briefcases.”

“Have you thought about just asking him who his buddies are? I mean, you guys do do interrogations, right?”

“We do, and it may come to that. But the more effective methods of extracting information tend to be time-consuming, and we don’t believe we have much time. So we’ve decided instead to keep a close watch on Dexter and see what he does. Your job will be to help with the surveillance and perform any other tasks that may come up; and if it looks as though Dexter is about to complete his mission, you’ll see to it that he doesn’t succeed.”

“Cool,” I said. “Where’s my gun?”

“It’ll be delivered to you shortly. For now, go with Annie and do as she says; she’s been fully briefed on the details of the operation.”

“With Annie, right…Listen, True, can I talk to you privately for a second?”

“Later,” True said, getting up. “We’re on a tight schedule, and I have other things to attend to.”

Right. I knew a brush-off when I heard it—and Annie, for her part, knew a vote of no confidence when she heard it. When we got back outside, the first thing she said was: “You’re frightened of me.”

“‘Frightened’ is kind of strong,” I lied. “You do freak me out a little, yeah, but—”

“You don’t need to be frightened.” She flashed me this brittle smile. “I know how I seem, but I’m really very dependable. God keeps me focused.”

“Oh-kay, well that’s good to hear…So what does God want us to do first?”

“How much money do you have?”

“Not a lot. Maybe twenty bucks and change.”

“Give me the twenty.”

Two doors down from the deli was a corner grocery that sold scratch lottery tickets. “Which kind do you like?” Annie asked me. There were fifteen varieties to choose from, most with some type of gambling theme: Lucky Poker, Scratch Roulette, Twenty-One, Three-Card Monte…Then I noticed this one kind called Jungle Cash that had pictures of animals on it, including a baboon that was being stalked by a pair of tigers. “That one,” I said, and Annie nodded approvingly.

Jungle Cash tickets were two bucks each. Annie bought ten, and when we scratched them all off, nine were winners. We left the store with over three hundred dollars.

“Does that always work?” I asked.

“‘There will be water if God wills it,’” Annie replied, and flagged down a taxi.

The cab took us to an address in the Richmond, a Pentecostal church called the Chapel of the Redeemer. It reminded me of the Diazes’ church in Siesta Corta, and, already keyed up by Annie’s God-talk, I got worried that my training curriculum was going to include speaking in tongues. But then I noticed the chains on the front doors, and the sign that said PROPERTY FOR LEASE.

“What is this place?” I asked, thinking maybe Arlo Dexter was using it for a bomb factory.

“Home,” said Annie.

“You live here? You and God?”

“Not inside,” she said. “Around back.”

Around back was a small cemetery. Like the church doors, the cemetery gate was chained and padlocked, but Annie had a key.

Her home was a refrigerator box covered with a waterproof tarp. The open end of the box faced a grave marked WILLIAM DANE. The grave plot had been neatly outlined with stones, and Annie was careful to step around it.

“I’ll just be a minute,” she said, and crawled into the box.

Some questions you don’t ask, especially of a crazy person. So while I was waiting, I decided to treat this situation as one of the organization’s test puzzles, which for all I knew it was. I hadn’t seen a ring on Annie’s fingers, so William Dane probably wasn’t her husband. He could have been her lover, I thought, but then when I took another look at the plot, I noticed the stone outline was too small for an adult-sized coffin.

“All right…” Annie reappeared, wearing a light blue knapsack that clashed with her bag-lady couture. She crouched beside the grave and patted the headstone in a way that dispelled any doubt Billy Dane was her son. Then she looked up at the sky. The rain had stopped but it was still overcast, and I could tell she didn’t like the idea of leaving the kid alone in bad weather; I half expected her to pull the tarp off the refrigerator box and use it as a blanket. But she resisted the impulse, and got back up after giving the headstone one more pat.

“Where to now?” I asked.

“Just follow me. And pay attention.”

We set off on foot in the general direction of downtown. We’d gone maybe a block when Annie started doing the muttering thing again. This time I couldn’t make out a single word. I tried to just ignore it, but I couldn’t do that either—the babble coming out of her mouth had this weird insistent edge to it, like fingernails on a blackboard.

“Annie?” I said. “Snap out of it, Annie,” but all that did was up her volume a couple notches. People on the street were turning to stare at us, and so I started craning my head around, looking up at the clouds, at the buildings we passed, my body language sending out the message: “Just because I’m walking next to this person doesn’t mean I’m with her.”

Then suddenly the mutter cut off, and Annie’s hand caught my wrist. I looked down; my right foot was in midair, about to step down onto the jagged base of a broken wine bottle.

“Pay attention,” Annie said.

So after that I watched where I was walking, while Annie’s mutter wormed its way into my ear and set up shop in my back brain. Next thing I knew we were back in the Haight, in front of a hotel called the Rose & Cross. The doorman nodded to Annie and slipped her a set of keys.

We went up to the second floor, to a room with a single twin-size bed. The bed was just made, the covers turned down invitingly; Annie pushed me towards it and said, “I’m going to take a shower. You sleep.”

“Sleep?” I said. “It’s like eleven o’clock in the morning…” But the truth is I was exhausted; the miles of listening to her babble had worn me out. I kicked off my shoes and climbed under the covers. By the time my head hit the pillow I was elsewhere.

I was in a classroom, sitting at a pupil’s desk, third row center. Up at the blackboard, a younger, saner-looking Annie was sketching out an organizational chart. The boxes in the chart formed a rough pyramid; the one at the very top was marked T.A.S.E. Directly below this, connected to it by a double line, was a box labeled COST-BENEFITS. More lines radiated downwards from there, linking to other divisions and subdivisions, some of which I already knew about (Catering, Random Acts of Kindness), but most of which I didn’t (Scary Clowns?). I was kind of disappointed to see that despite having a direct link to Cost-Benefits, Bad Monkeys was at the bottom of the pyramid.

While Annie finished up the chart, I looked around for a distraction. There were no other students, so note-passing was out, and the classroom windows didn’t offer a view, just this white glow, like the school was floating in a cloud. Then I lifted up my desktop and found a textbook inside, something called Secrets of the Invisible College. It sounded interesting.

It wasn’t. The pages were full of that dense, tiny type that you know is going to be boring even before you try to read it. I started flipping through the book to see if there were any pictures (there weren’t), and somebody kicked the back of my chair.

Phil had materialized in the seat behind me. Not the grown-up Phil, who I liked; the ten-year-old Phil, who’d bugged the shit out of me back before I was sent away. “Knock it off,” I warned him. I turned back to the textbook, and Phil kicked my chair again.

“Knock it off!” I whirled around, brandishing the book with both hands. But Phil was gone.

A sharp rapping came from the front of the classroom. “Jane,” Annie said. “We need you in the present day.”

“Yes ma’am,” I heard myself say.

“The subjects to be covered in today’s lesson include the organization’s command structure, the proper handling of the NC gun, and the use of the Daily Jumble as a covert communication channel. Please turn to page one thousand, four hundred and sixty-five…”

Long dream. The worst part of it was, unlike a real classroom, I couldn’t just drift off, because I already had.

When I finally woke up, it was nighttime. Annie was over by the window, looking out; she heard me fumbling for the bedside lamp and said, “Leave it off.”

I joined her at the window. Across the street from the hotel was a model-railroad store; there were apartments above it, and in one unit on the second floor, I could see a thirtysomething guy walking around in his underwear. “That’s him?”

“That’s him.” Annie gave a nudge to a shoebox on the windowsill. “This came for you.”

My NC gun. I took it out, hefted it, and did a couple quick integrity checks that I’d learned about in dream class. Once I’d verified it was in working order, Annie said: “Now let’s review…Suppose I asked you to shoot him from here. Could you?”

On the MI setting, the NC gun’s effective range is about fifty feet; on the CI setting, around half that. “I could probably nail him with a heart attack,” I said. “But I’d need to open this window, and get him to open one of his.”

“Why not just shoot him through the glass?”

“Doesn’t work. The gun can penetrate ordinary clothing, but anything more substantial will either absorb the shot or bounce it in a random direction. Reflective surfaces are bad.”

“And another important implication of that is…?”

“Unless I’m so close that I can’t miss, I never want to shoot at anybody standing in front of a reflective surface, either.”

“Good,” Annie said. “You were listening.”

“Yeah, so now I’ve got a question: are you asking me to shoot him? Because I could just go over there and ring his buzzer.”

“Not tonight.” She handed me a wireless headset. “This will put you in touch with the rest of the surveillance team. If it looks like he’s going to leave the apartment, let them know. Otherwise, just keep an eye on him.” She went over to the bed. “Wake me at dawn, or sooner if something happens. And Jane—”

“Yeah, I know. Pay attention.”

Annie didn’t go to sleep right away. I heard her praying, and then, for a while, she talked to William. Maybe a half hour after she finally got quiet, the lights went out at Arlo’s place. After that it was just me in the dark, with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs.

I was tired. I know that probably sounds strange seeing as I’d slept the whole day away, but the thing about dream school is, it’s not restful. Also I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and my feet hurt from the walking. I decided to sit down for a while, only there weren’t any chairs in the room, so I ended up on the floor with my back to the wall beneath the windowsill. At first I was good about poking my head up every few minutes to check on Arlo’s apartment, but pretty soon I was nodding.

I started awake in gray dawn light. A fog had come in off the bay while I’d slept; through the haze, I could see that Arlo’s windows were still dark, but whether that meant he was still in bed or had already gone out was anybody’s guess.

What did you do?

Said “Oh, shit!” a few dozen times. Then, for variety, I tried calling myself a stupid bitch. I had some other choice phrases lined up, but before I could get to them, someone came out the front door of Arlo’s building. In the fog, all I could make out was a figure, but this person, whoever he or she was, was carrying some kind of case.

I tried calling it in to the surveillance team, but all I got for an answer was static. The figure with the case went into an alley beside the model-railroad store. I gave the headset one more try, then grabbed my gun and ran downstairs.

By the time I got to the alley, the figure was nowhere to be seen. The headset went on hissing static. I was going to look for a pay phone, but then something else caught my eye, something that seemed out of place in the dinginess of the alley: a china doll with a bright yellow bonnet. It was jammed into a dumpster, with its arm jutting out over the lip like it wanted to shake hands.

Without thinking, I started to reach for it, only realizing at the last second how stupid that was. I backed up, grabbed a rock, wound up to throw it, realized that that was pretty dumb too, and then just stood there indecisively.

“What are you doing?”

True had come up behind me, silent in the fog. I nearly brained him.

“What are you doing?” he repeated.

I looked at the rock in my hand like, How did that get there? and tossed it aside as casually as I could. “I thought I saw Arlo come this way. I tried to call it in, but the headset’s broken or something.”

“It’s not broken. The surveillance team got tired of your snoring and turned off the receiver.”

Oops. “Why didn’t they just wake me up?”

“They tried. The volume only goes up so high.”

“Oh…Well look, I’m sorry about that, but Arlo—”

“Dexter is still in bed.”

“How do you know?”

“How do you think?”

“You bugged his apartment?”

“Of course.”

“Well if you’ve got him covered, what do you need me watching him for?”

“Are you sure this is a line of questioning you want to pursue?”

“When you put it that way, no.”

“Good. Now get back upstairs, and try not to fall asleep until you’re told to.”

He started to turn away.

“True.”

I thought I heard him sigh. “Yes?”

“Annie,” I said. “What’s her deal?”

“You’ve already worked out most of it, I’m sure. She had a young son, and a house on the bay. One day, she let her attention wander.”

“The kid drowned.”

“Yes.”

“And now she’s insane.”

“Not clinically,” True said. “She was a grammar school teacher, but she’d studied to be a psychologist. In the aftermath of her son’s death, she used her knowledge of mental illness to construct a refuge for herself.”

“She pretends to be crazy to keep from going crazy?”

“It’s slightly more complicated than that, but essentially, yes. Spend enough time with her, and you’ll notice she only acts out when it’s safe or advantageous to do so. Where sanity is required, she’s sane. She’s very dependable.”

“Yeah, I got that memo. ‘God keeps me focused’?”

“You don’t believe in God.”

“No. Sorry.”

“No need to apologize to me. But I’ll tell you a secret about God: if you’re careful not to ask too much of Him, it doesn’t really matter whether He exists. Annie doesn’t ask much.”

“Just three squares a day and a cardboard roof over her head, right?”

“She wants to be useful. It would be very easy for someone in Annie’s position to spend the rest of her life paralyzed by guilt, but she wants her remaining time to count for something. The organization gives her a purpose; God holds her to it.”

“And you’re not worried about the Almighty countermanding your orders during a mission?”

“If I feel a need to worry about disobedient operatives,” True said, “Annie won’t be the first one who comes to mind.”

“Yeah, yeah, OK…Point taken.”

“I hope so.”

“Seriously, True, I get it.” I reached up and tapped my headset. “So can I order breakfast on this thing?”

It was actually a couple more hours before I got to eat. After I went back and woke Annie, she took forever in the bathroom—I guess when you live in a box, you can’t get enough of indoor plumbing—and nearly as long choosing an ensemble from the collection of rags in her backpack. I was good, though: I only got a little impatient. Finally we made it out the door and went to Silverman’s Deli, where I pigged out on bagels and lox.

From there, we fell into a routine: we went for a post-breakfast walk; Annie muttered; I listened. Then, back to the hotel, where I had dream class while Annie—the waking Annie—took another shower. Then, all-night sentry duty. Then, more Silverman’s. Rinse and repeat, for seven days straight. By the time we were done, I knew everything a Bad Monkeys operative is supposed to know.

On the morning of the eighth day, Annie told me I’d completed the initial phase of my training. “Go home and relax,” she said. “We meet back here in seventy-two hours.”

“What about Arlo?”

“If we’re very lucky, he’ll have been taken care of by then. If not…you’ll want to be sharp.”

I went home, crashed, and slept for a day. I woke up starving, but the thought of more smoked salmon made me queasy, so I gave the deli a rest and went to this pub I knew instead. I was working on my second plate of cheese fries when Phil showed up.

“Those must be really good,” he said. “You look happy.”

“It’s not the fries. I got a new job.”

“Is it the one you’ve been looking for?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I think it might be. If I don’t fuck it up.”

Did you tell him what the job was?

No. I could have, I mean, Phil’s probably the only person I know who’d have believed me, but…no. I just called it a “public service” job, stayed vague on the details, and Phil, he knew enough not to push. He smiled like he was proud of me, though—like he would have been proud of me, if I’d told him everything.

I did tell him about Annie. I called her my supervisor and had her living in a homeless shelter instead of a cemetery, but other than that I stuck pretty close to the truth. “She’s growing on me. At first I didn’t want to be around her, but now that I know the crazy thing is mostly an act—well, not an act, exactly, more like a coping strategy—I’m starting to like her…The God thing still bugs me, though.”

“Why?”

“Besides the fact that it’s just stupid? I can’t see giving the time of day to a God who let your kid drown.”

“Well,” said Phil, “it wasn’t God’s responsibility to watch the kid. It was hers.”

“What, and God’s too busy to pick up the slack the one time she takes her eyes off him?”

“Was it just the one time?”

“Shut up. Annie’s not like that. She wasn’t a bad mother.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know her, OK? She’s a little weird, but she’s not a bad person. This organization we work for, they’ve got standards. They wouldn’t keep her on if she was bad.”

“Maybe she’s not a bad person now. But before…?”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure she used to be a real terror. Hey, here’s a theory, maybe God killed her kid as a character-building exercise: ‘Go on, Billy, jump in the bay, it’ll help Mommy get her priorities straight…’ How’s that sound?”

“I don’t know. Could be.”

“Could be? Are you fucking serious?”

“Or maybe it’s the job. You say you’re doing important work. But would this woman even be a part of that, if her son hadn’t—”

“Jesus, Phil, are you trying to piss me off?”

He swore he wasn’t, but he kept doing it anyway, and pretty soon I told him to take a hike. Goddamned Phil…Nine times out of ten, you know, talking to him made me feel better, but that tenth time left me wondering why I even bothered. I spent the rest of my break alone at home, sacked out on the couch with a bottle and my post-Ganesh drug stash, watching spy shows on cable.

When I reported back to work, Arlo Dexter was still alive. Eleven a.m. on a weekday morning, Annie and I were watching from the Rose & Cross as he opened up the model-railroad store.

“So is that his shop?”

“He runs it,” Annie said. “But his grandmother holds the lease and pays for the inventory. She covers the rent on his apartment, as well.”

“Generous grandma. Did the organization check her out?”

“Yes. She’s not evil, just lonely.”

“What about employees?”

“He doesn’t have any. Not many customers, either. He’s not what you’d call a people person.”

“So basically the store is just a private playroom for him.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“And what’s our play? We just hang out while Arlo fools with his trains?”

“That depends,” Annie said. “I spoke with True earlier this morning, and he told me that Cost-Benefits is divided on how to proceed. Some members feel that we should continue to watch and wait. Others, including True, think that this is taking too long. They’d like to provoke Dexter into making a move, if we can come up with some way of doing that.”

“You mean if I can come up with some way of doing it, right? Is this my final exam?”

“Do you have any ideas?”

“Yeah, actually…Did your son like model trains?”

Her expression got all brittle again, but then she said: “Model planes. Billy wanted to be a pilot when he grew up.”

“OK, planes, same difference. The point is, you’ve been to a hobby shop.”

“We went every Saturday.”

“And the geeks who ran the place, you remember how they reacted to having a woman in the store?”

She nodded, seeing where I was going. “Yes.”

“Yeah—and those guys probably liked having customers.”

Annie turned back to the window and looked down at Arlo’s shop. “You want me to go in?”

“No,” I said. “Let me mess with him. I’ve got a mood I feel like sharing.”

A taxi sat just up the block from the model-railroad store, its driver working the Daily Jumble and picking at a carton of chicken vindaloo that had come from Catering’s kitchens. If Arlo made a break for it, the taxi would help track him, or, if necessary, run him down. That was the plan, anyway, but there was a wrinkle. As I crossed the street, this black guy approached the cab and tried to hire it, and when the driver belatedly flipped on his off-duty lamp, the black guy took it personally. They were arguing as I slipped inside Arlo’s shop.

The front of the store was packed with shelves and display cases, but the back was given over to a huge train layout, complete with model scenery and a scale-model town. Arlo stood in front of the layout reading a magazine, while toy passenger and freight trains made an endless circuit of the town.

I gave the door a good slam. Arlo jumped and dropped his magazine.

“Hi there!” I said, in a loud and cheery stupid-chick voice. “Do you sell trains here?”

Instead of answering, Arlo just stared, wide-eyed, as if he expected me to whip out a gun and shoot him on the spot. That should have been a hint, but I was way too pleased by his reaction to pick up on it.

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to scare you…But can you help me out? I need to get my brother a birthday present…Oh, neat!” On a shelf to my right was a stack of boxed miniature evergreen trees. I grabbed one off the bottom and brought the entire stack tumbling to the floor. “Whoops!” Bending to pick up the trees, I slammed my butt into the opposing shelf, scattering more boxes.

This broke Arlo’s paralysis. He came dashing up the aisle, but stopped short as I straightened up again.

“Sorry,” I repeated, waving my hands at the mess. “Maybe I’d better leave this for you, huh?”

“What do you want?” Arlo said. He had a high voice, and sounded like he might break down crying at any moment.

“Well like I said, I need a birthday present for my brother. I mean, between you and me, he’s been kind of a shit lately, so it’s not like he actually deserves anything, but lucky for him I’m not the type to hold a grudge…Anyway, this last year he’s gotten into the whole toy-train thing, so I wanted to get him some stuff.”

“What kind of trains?”

Reverting to stupid-chick mode: “Oh, you know, the kind with wheels?”

“What scale?”

“Scale?”

“HO? O? N? Z?”

“You see, this is why I had to come to a brick-and-mortar store instead of just buying off the Internet. I have no idea what you just said.”

“The scale of the trains. HO is 1:87. O is—”

“One to eighty-seven what?”

“It’s a size ratio. HO-scale model trains are one eighty-seventh the size of real trains.”

“Oh…Well, I’m not sure. I know the trains he’s got are small, but I’ll be honest, I was never that good with fractions…What scale are those?” I raised my arm to point; Arlo ducked sideways as if my finger were the tip of a spear, which gave me an opening to move past him. I walked up to the train layout. “Yeah, these look about right…” One train was approaching a bridge near the edge of town; I plucked the locomotive from the track, sending half a dozen passenger cars plunging into a river gorge. “Is this HO size?”

Arlo’s cheeks were billowing in and out, and he’d just about bitten his lower lip off. “Sorry,” I said again. “This is the right size, though, I’m almost sure…Do you have any like this?” Unable to speak, Arlo gestured to a nearby display case—and immediately regretted it.

The display case was locked, but by jiggling the glass doors I managed to knock over a couple of the train cars inside. I turned to Arlo: “Could you open this up for—”

“No.”

“I just want to look at—”

“No.”

“OK.” I shrugged, and jabbed a finger at a random locomotive. “What’s that one called?”

“The Burlington-Northern.”

“And that one?”

“The Union Pacific.”

“And that one?”

“The Illinois Central…Listen, I don’t have time to name every—”

“Ooh! What about that one up there?”

“The Southwest Chief.”

“That one’s pretty slick. Does it come in other colors?”

“No, it doesn’t…Now I’m really kind of busy this morning, so if you aren’t sure what you want—”

“What about monkeys?” I said.

“Wh-what?”

“Monkeys.” I smiled at him. “It’s freakish, I know, but when we were kids my brother was a big-time Curious George fan, and he never totally outgrew it. Do you have any trains with monkeys on them?”

“No. I don’t have anything like that. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“What about a case?”

Arlo bit his lip again.

“You know,” I continued, “like a carrying case? Since my brother got into the hobby, he’s made some…interesting new friends. So I thought he might like a case to carry his trains in, when he goes to visit them. You got anything like that, say about this big? In a nice black, maybe?”

A phone began to ring in the store’s back room. Arlo turned his head towards the sound. “You want to get that?” I asked him. It was obvious he did—at least, he wanted to get the hell away from me—but it was just as obvious he was afraid of what might happen to his toys if he left me alone with them. “It’s OK,” I assured him. “I promise I won’t touch anything while you’re gone.”

That really made him nervous—as he headed into the back, he took a last look at the train layout, like he was sure I was going to trash it the minute he was out of sight.

Which, come to think of it, wasn’t a bad idea…

As I stepped back towards the layout, my foot kicked something. It was the magazine Arlo had been reading when I first entered the store: Model Train Enthusiast’s Monthly, something like that. The cover photo showed a sleek locomotive chugging towards a railroad crossing, where—this was weird—a pewter figurine of a boy with a soccer ball had been placed on the tracks, his back to the oncoming train.

The locomotive had a monkey on its side. Not Curious George, or any other friendly cartoon simian—this was a badass nightmare monkey, with sharp fangs tipping a blue-and-red snout. THE MANDRILL, screamed the caption, ON SALE TODAY.

Inset in a box in the lower right-hand corner of the magazine cover was a second, smaller photo, of two women in train-conductor uniforms. The uniforms must have been digitally added, but the doctoring job was so skillful that I almost didn’t notice that the women were me and Annie. The caption on this photo read: “They’re coming for you—details, pg. 23.”

The door to the store’s back room was locked. I kicked it until it wasn’t. The space beyond was lined with more shelves, but instead of trains they held teddy bears, cereal boxes, and toothpaste dispensers…There was a workbench, too, covered with papers and tools, and a couple of empty soccer-ball cartons.

Arlo was gone, of course. I ducked out a side door into the alley. There was no sign of him there, either, but that china doll I’d first seen almost two weeks ago was still sitting in the dumpster, still holding out its hand to shake. Someone had dropped a paper bag over its head.

I broke out my headset: “Hello? Anybody?”

“This is True.”

“Arlo’s on the run,” I told him, hoping this wasn’t news.

“What happened?”

“The short version is, his monkey friends sent him a warning…Please tell me you saw him leave.”

“We’ve had some difficulties with the surveillance.”

“Ah, man…”

“I’m tasking additional resources to the search as we speak; Dexter shouldn’t get far. How long ago did he—”

“Hold on.”

A corkboard had been mounted on the wall above Arlo’s workbench. Looking back at it from the alley door, I noticed that the board didn’t hang quite flush. When I grabbed it by the edge and pulled, it swung outwards. “Holy shit.”

“What?”

“I found the briefcase.”

“You did?”

“Arlo must’ve been in too much of a hurry to take it with him.”

“Perhaps,” True said warily. “But before you open it—”

“Too late.”

There was a brief silence, and I had this clear mental picture of True pursing his lips. “Very well,” he continued. “Describe the contents, without touching them.”

“Right…The case is foam-lined, with slots holding what look like digital stopwatches. Each watch has three small buttons on the left side and one big one on top—don’t worry, I’m not going to push any of them. The brand name on the watch-casings is—”

“Mandrill.”

“Yeah.”

“This next question is very important, Jane. Are any of the stopwatches running right now?”

“Counting down, you mean? No—trust me, that’s the first thing I’d have mentioned. But there is some bad news: Arlo may have left the briefcase behind, but it looks like he took a couple of the watches with him. Two of the slots are empty.”

“All right, I’ll notify the other teams. What I need you to do next is look around the area where you found the case. Can you see anything that might indicate where Dexter is headed?”

“Maybe…” I moved aside a soccer-ball carton. “There’s a map of SFO airport here.”

“Are any of the terminals circled?”

“Yeah, all of them…Listen, True, assuming these watches are what I think they are, is Arlo going to be able to get them through airport security?”

“That’s an irrelevant question.”

“Why?”

“He wants to blow up a crowd, not an airplane. All a security checkpoint will do is save him a few steps.”

Oh, right. “OK then, let’s stop him before he gets there. You want me to go after him on foot, or—”

“No. Stay with the briefcase until Catering secures it.”

“What? Wait a minute, I’m supposed to be hunting Arlo, not—”

“You’ve done your job,” True said. “Stay with the case; another operative will get Dexter.”

“Shit, True…”

He wasn’t listening. I could still hear him on the headset, but he was talking to other people now, ordering a close watch on all bus stops, cab stands, BART stations, even the parking garage where Arlo’s grandmother kept her car. Between that and the general surveillance blanket already covering the neighborhood, Arlo would almost certainly be picked up within a matter of minutes, and there was no way he was getting to the airport. I should have been happy about that, and content to have done my part without any foul-ups, but of course I wasn’t.

I stuck my head out the alley door again, on the off chance that Arlo had doubled back to let me take care of him personally. No such luck. I locked the door, and carried the briefcase into the front of the shop to wait for Catering.

Arlo’s train layout was still running. I watched the remaining passenger train wend its way through town, past the miniature city hall, the department store, the candy shop, the church, the police station, the school…

The school. It was wood, not brick, but just like the real elementary school at Orchard and Masonic, it had an attached playground: a fenced-in lot, packed with tiny figures.

I got back on the headset: “True, forget about the airport. I know where he’s going…True?…True?”

I ran outside. The taxi had taken off, and when I looked up at the second floor of the hotel, Annie was gone from the window. I kept trying the headset, getting back mostly static; but in between the stretches of white noise I caught snippets of other transmissions, enough to figure out that I wasn’t the only one having communication problems.

The school was only seven blocks away, and Arlo had enough of a head start that he might already be there. I had to hope that, knowing we were looking for him, he’d opt for a slow and stealthy approach.

I took off running. Four blocks later, as I rounded the corner onto Masonic, I saw an off-duty cab stopped for a red light just ahead. “Hey!” I shouted, and started towards it.

The world changed color. Like the firing of an NC gun, the explosion of the Mandrill bomb was silent: a bright noiseless flash of orange and yellow with a translucent cab-shape at its center. I felt something pass through me—the shockwave, I guess, though it was more like a jolt from a power outlet—and then I was flat on my back.

I sat up slowly. Steam was rising from my arms, and my face felt hot. I got to my feet—we’re talking at least another minute, here—and went to check on the taxi.

The vehicle itself had suffered remarkably little damage. The windows and mirrors had all shattered and fallen out, but the chassis seemed untouched, not even lightly scorched. The driver was a different story. It was like he’d spontaneously combusted: all that was left of him was a pile of smoldering clothes. I leaned in for a closer look, caught a whiff of something awful, and pulled back gagging. That’s when I noticed the pedestrians: three separate pairs of shoes in the crosswalk in front of the taxi, each with its own accompanying clothes-pile.

I gagged again, and my knees buckled. It was OK: I needed to check beneath the taxi anyway. Sure enough, in the shadow of the undercarriage I saw the remains of a burst soccer ball.

I got back on my feet. In the distance I could hear the school bell ringing: recess. I tried to hurry, but the best I could manage was a drunken stagger.

By the time I reached Orchard Street, the school playground was already full of kids. Arlo Dexter stood just outside the fence, slipping another soccer ball from a canvas bag. I pulled my gun and tried to draw a bead on him, but my arm wouldn’t steady.

I needed to get closer, like point-blank range. I stepped off the curb and immediately stepped back as a car swerved to avoid me. Arlo heard the horn blare and looked over his shoulder. We locked eyes. He smiled and stuck his tongue out, then raised the ball above his head and cocked his arms to throw.

A shopping bag full of soup cans caught him square in the face. He went down hard, dropping the ball, which only bounced once before Annie swooped in and grabbed it. She did a neat half-pirouette and relayed the ball down the block to another cab driver, who dropped it into an open manhole at his feet.

“Are you all right, miss?” someone asked. It was just some guy walking by; he’d missed the show across the street, but noticed me. “You should be careful waving that around,” he said, pointing to my NC gun. “The cops, especially these days, they might not realize it’s a toy until it’s too late.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Thanks for the tip.”

I swayed a little on my feet, and he reached out to steady me. “You sure you’re OK? You’re not on anything, are you?”

“Not yet,” I told him, “but I hope to be, soon.” I started laughing.

Then I looked across the street, and my laughter died. Arlo had gotten back up and had his hands around Annie’s throat; she was smacking him in the head to try to get him to let go. As they grappled, they were edging towards the curb.

“Annie!” I shouted. I raised my gun again, but this was an even more impossible shot. All I could do was watch as their fight carried them out into traffic.

This time, the delivery truck didn’t even try to stop. Arlo went down and got swept under the wheels, but Annie was knocked up and away. She flew diagonally across the intersection and crash-landed on the hood of a parked car.

She was still conscious when I got to her. I pushed my way through the crowd that was already gathering around her, and immediately launched into a line of bullshit about how she’d be OK if she could just hang on. She shut me up with a glance.

I’d like to tell you that she died at peace, relieved at the thought of being reunited with her son. But this was no Hallmark ending. She was in a lot of pain, and she was scared. Maybe just scared of dying, but maybe—I think this is it—scared that saving that playground full of kids hadn’t been enough, and where she was going now, she wouldn’t see Billy again, even looking both ways.

Right before she went out, she grabbed my wrist and said, “Pay attention,” one more time. Then she muttered something, which, as usual, I couldn’t quite make out. But I was in tune with her now, and so I knew it had to do with the truck that had hit her.

I looked up, and the crowd parted, and I saw it: a black-paneled truck, idling in the distance. The driver was leaning out the cab window, watching Annie’s death scene through a pair of binoculars. Watching me. When he saw that I saw him, he pulled his head back inside the truck cab. The truck’s taillights flashed, drawing my attention to the mandrill painted on the back door.

“Hey!” The crowd had closed up again; I started pushing people aside, flailing my arms. “Hey! Stop that truck! Stop that truck!”

But no one would listen to me, and by the time I fought my way clear, it was already too late—the truck had turned a corner, and like a model train going into a tunnel, it vanished.