Bad Monkeys

Malfeasance

I PASSED PROBATE.

I wasn’t expecting to; you’d think letting your Probate officer get killed would pretty much guarantee an F. But the Loose Ends team that collected Annie’s personal effects found a half-finished progress report that said I showed “real potential,” which I guess was enough to bump me to a D-minus.

A month later I got my first assignment as a full-fledged Bad Monkeys operative, at an old folks’ home in Russian Hill. A doctor in the critical-care ward was playing God with the senior citizens. He’d put stuff in their IVs to cause a cardiac arrest, then call an emergency code and bring them back to life. Sometimes he’d “save” the same patient two or three times before their systems couldn’t take it anymore.

He’d been at this long enough that the nurses on the ward were starting to get suspicious, and he probably would have been busted eventually, but the organization got wind of him first. Panopticon did a background check and found out he’d worked at three other old folks’ homes before this one. When Cost-Benefits heard that, they decided enough was enough.

I got a job sweeping floors on the night shift. My first night on, I caught Dr. God alone in the break room and gave him a taste of his own medicine.

That was it for the Bad Monkeys op, but I decided to keep working at the home for a while. I needed the money. It turned out Annie’s lottery stipend was a special deal just for her; whenever I bought scratch tickets, they were losers.

You didn’t ask Bob True to provide you with a salary?

Nah. After squeaking through Probate, I figured I wasn’t in a position to ask for anything. Besides, when I thought about it, it made sense: I was supposed to be doing this for the good of the world, not for a buck. And it’s not like they had me killing bad guys every day. I had more than enough downtime to manage a second job.

So I stayed on at the home, and even took a shot at having a personal life. I made friends with some of the night nurses and started going to breakfast with them after our shifts ended. There was also this cute doctor, John Tyler, who came in to replace Dr. God. I tried to get something going with him.

Did you?

No. I’d hang around the break room with him, you know, dropping hints, but he wasn’t interested. And not that I’m God’s gift, but I figured that probably meant he was gay. Then one night when he was off-duty I was sweeping the floor outside his office and noticed the door was unlocked. I decided to snoop a little, see if I could confirm my suspicions—or if he wasn’t a lost cause, find some clue to what might float his boat.

There was nothing out in the open. Nothing in his Rolodex, either. I started checking desk drawers, hit one that was locked, grabbed a paper clip…and then, when I had the drawer open and saw what was inside, I reached for the phone.

True was waiting for me on the roof of the nursing home at dawn. Catering had set out chairs and a buffettable, and as I came out of the stairwell, I saw a guy puttering around the tea service. I might have taken him for a waiter, except he looked more like nearsighted Gestapo: blond crew cut, black leather trench coat, and these thick pebble glasses, you know the kind they stopped making once plastic lenses were invented?

And this was Dixon?

Yeah, although I didn’t catch his name right away. He didn’t introduce himself, and I was in too much of a hurry to tell True what I’d found to insist on the niceties.

“The drawer was full of pictures,” I said. “Pictures of little boys. Not, like, hardcore stuff; they were cutouts from mainstream magazines, product ads mostly: little boys in blue jeans, little boys in bathing suits, little boys in underwear…I suppose there could be an innocent explanation, but what makes that hard to believe is how many of them there were. I mean, we’re talking stockpile, hundreds of images…”

“Five hundred and forty-four, at last count,” said True. “There’s also a catalog of parochial-school uniforms hidden at the back of the X-ray drawer in his filing cabinet.”

“You already knew about this?”

“Eyes Only,” True said.

It took me a minute to get my head around the concept. “You bug children’s underwear ads?”

“An obvious strategy for identifying pedophiles. Though perhaps not as cost-effective as initially hoped.” He glanced at the guy in the pebble glasses, who was sitting down now, stirring his tea.

“So I was right. Dr. Tyler is a bad monkey.”

“He has potential.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that so far as we know, he’s never laid a hand on a real child, or even tried to. He just thinks about it.”

“So what?”

“So, wicked thoughts alone aren’t enough to classify someone as irredeemable.”

I couldn’t believe it. “You’re not going to do anything?”

“We’re evaluating him. If it’s warranted, we’ll arrange a Good Samaritan operation to get him some counseling.”

“That’s it? You might make him see a shrink?”

“I was referring to moral counseling, actually,” True said. “If his own conscience isn’t enough to keep his impulses in check, I doubt psychiatry will be much use…What is it you’d like us to do, Jane? Execute someone for keeping magazine clippings?”

“Well if you’re not going to send me in, you could at least let people know about him.”

“And beyond ruining the reputation of a man who’s done nothing wrong, what would that accomplish?”

“Jesus, True, do you really need me to spell it out?”

“I do appreciate your feelings in this matter…”

“You appreciate—”

“You’re a proactive personality,” True said. “When you see a potential threat, you want to eradicate it. That’s a useful instinct in a hunter, and it’s one of the reasons you’re in Bad Monkeys. My desires are a bit different, however. Like you, I want to fight evil, but I want to fight it effectively. In particular, I want to make sure that when the organization acts, it’s out of a reasonable expectation of a positive result, and not just for the sake of doing something. That’s why I’m in Cost-Benefits. And that’s why you take your orders from me.”

I didn’t trust myself to respond to that, so instead I jerked a thumb at Pebble Glasses. “And what does he want?”

“This is Mr. Dixon. He’s attached to Malfeasance.”

Malfeasance is the Panopticon subdivision that investigates operatives; it’s the organization equivalent of Internal Affairs. “Did I do something wrong?”

Dixon looked up from his tea. “In my experience,” he said, “the proper question isn’t ‘Did I?’, but ‘How much do they know?’ Then again, there’s a first time for everything. I’ve always wanted to meet a truly innocent person; maybe you’ll be her.” He plucked a card from a hidden pocket in his coat sleeve. “This is the current location of my office. Come by this evening at eight o’clock. We’ll chat.”

“Uh, my shift here starts at nine-thirty. Will that be enough time?”

“Eight o’clock,” Dixon repeated. He stood up. “Don’t be late.”

I waited until he’d left, then turned to True: “What the hell is this about?”

“I don’t know. Dixon called me last night, right after you did, and said he wanted to meet you. I assume it has something to do with your background check.”

“I thought I passed Probate. Why would Malfeasance still be running a background check?”

“They’re always running it.”

“And you have no idea what they might have turned up?”

“Dixon didn’t say.”

“Well, is there some way I could find out before I go see him?”

“Try asking yourself,” True suggested.

“Asking myself what?”

“Whether you’ve ever done anything evil.”

The address on the card was for a video arcade in the Mission District. I was surprised to find it open for business. I stood by the entrance, checking out the crowd—most of them were too young to be anything but civilians—and wondering if I had the right place, until this guy in a change apron came up and tapped me on the shoulder. He pointed to a sign on the wall that read, ALL TOY WEAPONS MUST BE SURRENDERED BEFORE PROCEEDING.

I looked at the guy. He tugged at his earlobe, which was pierced with a monogram earring that had the letters OMF in gold. I gave him my NC gun. He tucked it into his apron and brought out a yellow elastic band that he slipped around my wrist. The wristband was tight and had some sort of metal contacts on the inside, and right away it started my skin tingling. While I was still adjusting to that, the guy slapped an ice-cold can of Coke into my other hand. He pointed to another sign: FREE SODA WITH SURRENDER OF WEAPON. Then he nodded towards the rear of the arcade and said, “He’s waiting for you.”

I started back. The Coke can was freezing my hand, so to warm it up I popped the tab and took a big gulp. It was like drinking liquid nitrogen; my whole mouth went numb, and when the Coke hit the back of my throat I spiked an ice-cream headache that made my eyes water.

The arcade seemed to go on for miles. Every time I reached the end of a row of machines, there’d be another one, and as I went farther in, things started to get strange. The kids manning the joysticks were replaced by gnomes, blond gnomes with pebble glasses and leather trench coats. The machines changed too, Virtua Fighter 3 and Dance Dance Revolution giving way to games with more of a Seven Deadly Sins theme. And the images on the screens…Let’s just say, the Concerned Parents Association wouldn’t have approved.

Finally I came to a door marked EMPLOYEE INTERVIEWS. I took another sip of Coke, knocked, and went in.

Dixon’s office had a single overhead light fixture, like a search lamp mounted in the ceiling—the bulb was like a thousand watts or something, and if it had been angled at the door instead of aimed straight down, I’d have gone blind on the spot. A long folding table had been set up in the cone of the lamplight. The left side of the table was piled with paper, mostly old-fashioned computer fanfold printout. The right side was reserved for a sleek laptop, its screen flickering with a cascade of green figures.

Dixon stood with his back to the door, flipping through a sheaf of printout and pretending he hadn’t heard me come in. I took this for a standard interrogation tactic: he wanted me to speak first, to establish that he was the one in charge. Instead I drank more Coke, slurping it. The belch at the end seemed to get his attention.

“It’s 8:09,” he said. “I told you to be here at eight.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t tell me about the walk in from the street. How long is this building, anyway?”

He turned around. Some sort of device had been attached to his glasses: a tiny arm extended from the top of the right lens, dangling a clear plastic rectangle a half-inch in front of it. The rectangle flickered, green, in tandem with the flickering of the laptop on the table. It was completely geeky, but it was also kind of hypnotic.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Dixon asked.

Another interrogation tactic: get me to guess what I’d done, and maybe I’d volunteer something he didn’t know about. I shrugged and played dumb. “True thought it might have something to do with my background check. So what, did you find some unpaid parking tickets?”

“Der schlechte Affe hasst seinen eigenen Geruch.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a saying we have in Malfeasance. Not as pithy as ‘Omnes mundum facimus,’ but it serves us.”

“Well don’t keep me in suspense. What does it mean?”

“It’s an observation about human nature,” Dixon said. “One difficulty we have in running these background checks is that our information-gathering apparatus is so effective, we end up drowning in data. Of course we have technology to help sort through it, but even machines have their limits, and a brute-force search of an entire life—particularly one that hasn’t been all that well-lived—eats an enormous number of computing cycles. So we try to find clues to help us narrow the search space…Loosely translated, Der schlechte Affe hasst seinen eigenen Geruch means that people are most deeply offended by moral failings that mirror their own. The minister who preaches a tearful sermon against fornication: he’s the one you’ll find sneaking out of a brothel at midnight. The district attorney who crusades against illegal gambling: look for him at the track, betting his life savings on Bluenose in the fifth.”

“If you’re trying to say that people are hypocrites, that’s not exactly a newsflash. And what’s it got to do with me?”

“Who told you to search John Tyler’s office?”

“No one.”

“You just intuited somehow that there was something to find?”

“No, I was just being nosy. I’m like that.”

“How many other offices did you search?”

“Well…none.”

“What about the nurses you’ve been having breakfast with? Did you go through any of their purses?”

“No.”

“What about their lockers?”

“No, but—”

“So you’re not that nosy. Why single out Dr. Tyler?”

“I thought he was cute, OK?”

“Oh. So you were stalking him?”

“No! I was just checking him out…I mean, I don’t know, maybe I did get a vibe off him.”

“A vibe.”

“Yeah, like you said, an intuition. That there was something not right there.”

“But then what about the nurses?”

“What about them?”

“Two of them have been stealing painkillers—shorting their patients’ dosages—and giving them to their boyfriends to sell. Strange you didn’t get a vibe about that. Maybe if they were taking the drugs for personal use, your intuition would have picked up on it…”

“Look, where are you going with this? You think I zeroed in on Tyler because I’m like him?”

“Are you?”

“Hey, if you’re worried I’ve got my own collection of magazine clippings, you’re welcome to search my apartment.”

“We already did.”

“OK…So you know your schlecky-affa-whatever theory doesn’t hold water.”

“It’s often a related transgression, rather than the exact same one,” Dixon said. “Just to be thorough, I ran a check of your reading history to see if there were any signs of inappropriate sexual interest.” He held up the batch of printout he’d been looking at when I came in. “That search was more fruitful. Tell me, do you recall stealing a book from the San Francisco Public Library when you were twelve years old?”

It was such a left-field question I almost laughed, but the funny thing was, I knew exactly what he was talking about. When he said, “Do you recall,” it was like my brain got zapped with some kind of flashback ray.

And what was he talking about? What was the book?

Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus. Moon’s mother had a copy, and Moon and I used to read it to each other during sleepovers. Eventually I decided I wanted a copy of my own, and hooking it from the library was easier than shoplifting it.

“How do you know about that?”

“Library Binding,” Dixon said.

I thought he was talking about the anti-theft strip: “But I didn’t take it out the front door.”

“No, you tossed it out of the second-floor girls’ bathroom window. That branch of the library lost a lot of books that way.”

“OK, I’ll cop to stealing it. But what’s so inappropriate? I mean, Delta of Venus is smut, but it’s literary smut.”

“It’s a curious sort of literature, though, isn’t it?” Dixon said. “For example, the third story in the book—the one entitled ‘The Boarding School’—concerns a young student at a monastery who is ogled by priests and sexually violated by his classmates…This is what you consider wholesome erotic entertainment?”

“I don’t remember that story.”

“Don’t you? I’d have thought it was a favorite. According to my records, you read it nineteen times while the book was in your possession.”

“According to your records?”

“Library Binding.” He offered me the printout. “There are some other items here I’d love to get your comments on.”

I started going through it. It was crazy: a catalog of every piece of porn and erotica I’d ever laid eyes on. Not just titles, either—there were notes about specific scenes, even specific paragraphs I’d paid special attention to. And you know, it was bullshit, what he was implying, but with all of it thrown together on one big list like that, I could see how someone with an overly suspicious mind might get the wrong idea.

What else was on the list?

Well, De Sade, of course. Assorted Victorian gentlemen—in college, I must have gone through the entire Grove Press library, I mean, who the hell didn’t? Henry Miller. William Burroughs. Anne Rice.

At first I was kind of mortified, you know? But as I got further into it—it was a long list—I started to hit stuff that was harder to be embarrassed about, books and stories that weren’t technically smut at all, even if they did have sex in them. Towards the end the list-maker really seemed to be reaching—there were even a couple of Shakespeare plays, I think. And then on the last page, I found the weirdest entry of all…

“The Bible?”

“November 13th, 1977,” Dixon said. “One of the few times you were actually in church. Eyes Only caught you lingering over a passage in Genesis—the one where Lot offers his virgin daughters to the mob in Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Uh-huh…And because I lingered over this Bible verse, you think I might want to sacrifice a real virgin to an evil mob?”

“If you’d lingered over it nineteen times, I’d certainly have cause to wonder. Just the once, we can probably write off to prurient interest…Although I do find it curious you were laughing as you read it.”

“Right.” I shoved the printout back into his hands. “I get it.”

“You get it?”

“Yeah. You can tell True to get bent.”

“Ah…You think Mr. True told me to give you a hard time about this.”

“I questioned his call on Tyler, didn’t I? But this isn’t even close to being the same thing…”

“You are laboring under at least two misimpressions right now,” Dixon said. “The first is that I care whether you’re comfortable with Mr. True’s policy decisions. Trust me when I tell you, putting low-level operatives’ minds at ease isn’t one of my concerns in this life.”

“What’s the other misimpression?”

“That I disagree with you about Dr. Tyler. If it were up to me, the organization would deal much more aggressively with him—and all others like him. Unfortunately, like you, I have to defer to Cost-Benefits. And even if the decision was mine to make, my dream solution wouldn’t be feasible.”

“Why not? Because everyone has sick fantasies?”

“No. That’s just something people who have sick fantasies tell themselves, so they can feel normal. But there are enough of you to make a clean sweep logistically impractical…” He waited a beat before adding: “People who act on their sick fantasies, though—that’s a more manageable number.”

And just like that, I finally got it, what this was really all about: he knew about the pet boys.

“I know about the pet boys,” Dixon said.

The pet boys?

Yeah, OK, how do I explain this…You remember how, when I was talking about my twenties, I said there were times when I had a little too much fun? This was like one of those times.

It was a couple summers after I got kicked out of Berkeley. Weekdays I was working this roach-infested burger joint in the Tenderloin. On Friday and Saturday nights I had a different gig, at a liquor store across from the Golden Gate Panhandle. There were a lot of street kids in the Panhandle, and every night I’d get a bunch of them coming into the store, trying to buy booze.

Now the legal drinking age was twenty-one, which would be ridiculous in any jurisdiction, but what made it especially silly in California’s case is that we also had the death penalty, and you know what the minimum age for that was? Eighteen. So think about that, you’re old enough to get a lethal injection, but you’ve got to wait three more years before you can buy a beer. Does that sound logical?

It sounds like a novel justification for violating state liquor laws. I assume you sold alcohol to these street kids?

Well, not all of them. I used my discretion. If the kid carried himself like an adult, and didn’t come off like someone who was going to get blitzed and go leaping in front of a trolley—and if his phony I.D. wasn’t too bad—then yeah, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.

And when you say “give,” was that a free gift, or did it come at a premium?

You’re asking whether I took bribes?

That’s what I’m asking.

I might have had a tip jar…Hey, I was poor. And besides, it was part of the maturity test: if you don’t understand you’ve got to pay in order to play, maybe you’re not grown up enough to drink yet…You know, if you’re going to look at me like that, I may as well stop right now, because I’m not even at the bad part yet.

I’m sorry. Please continue.

Yeah, OK, so one night this kid came in, six foot, husky, but baby-faced, and right away I pegged him as underage: old enough for the needle, maybe, but not for the bottle. I watched him while he circled the store, to make sure he didn’t steal anything, and also because, you know, it wasn’t exactly a chore to look at him. Eventually he picked out a liter of Stoli and brought it to the counter.

“I.D.?” I said, and waited for his pitch. A lot of them had a spiel they’d go through, you know, “I was sick the day this photo was taken, that’s why it doesn’t look like me.” But this kid didn’t say a word, just handed me a driver’s license with the name Miles Davis on it. I checked the picture, and it’s this black guy with a trumpet.

Miles Davis. The jazz musician.

Yeah. So I looked at the kid, and there was maybe a hint of a smile on his lips, but other than that he was completely straight-faced. And I’m like, “Miles Davis, huh?” And he just looked back at me, cool as can be, like, yep, that’s me. So then I’m like, “You’re looking awfully pale tonight, Miles.” And he said: “I have a skin condition.”

Well, that was good enough as far as I was concerned. If you can come up with a line like that and deliver it deadpan, you deserve a drink. So I went to give the tip jar a shake, but he was already there, slipping in a dollar. “You’re the man, Miles,” I said, and rang him up.

Fast forward a couple of hours: after I locked up the store for the night, I went into the Panhandle to score some dope, and found Miles sitting at the base of a statue, smoking a joint. I went over to him: “Can I get a hit off that?” He gave me a toke and made room for me to sit.

“So Miles,” I said, taking a pull off the Stoli bottle, “do you live around here?”

“Actually,” he said, all Mr. Casual, “I’m looking for a place. What about you?”

“I’m thinking of becoming a landlady.” Which came out lamer than I intended, but it was OK—we were already rubbing shoulders, so it’s not like I needed a great line.

I took him home with me. In the morning I woke up alone in the futon, which wasn’t a huge surprise, but then I smelled smoke, and I was like, shit, did he set the place on fire on his way out?

Before I could jump out of bed, though, Miles came in, carrying this cutting board like a serving tray, loaded with goodies: an omelet, cinnamon toast, coffee, juice, even a little sprig of grapes. I’m like, “What’s this?” and he said, “Full service.” He got me all propped up on a nest of pillows like the Queen of Sheba, and put the cutting board in my lap.

I was blown away. No one had ever made me breakfast in bed before, and frankly, at that point, the food could have tasted like crap and I wouldn’t have cared. But when I took a bite of the omelet it was actually really good.

So I ate, and meanwhile Miles went over to my dresser and opened up the box where I kept my drug stash. I watched him roll himself a joint, sunshine streaming through the window while he did it, and all at once it struck me, full light of day, he was even more baby-faced than I’d thought. So I put my fork down, and I said, “How old are you really, Miles? Nineteen?” He didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at me, just went on rolling that joint, but he smiled in a way that told me the answer was no. And I’m like, “Eighteen?” Still no. So I’m like, oh boy…“Seventeen?” Still no. “Sixteen?” Finally, his smile changed a little. “Oh great,” I said. “The cops are going to love this.” And Miles reached back into the drug box and pulled out this big bag of pills I had in there, and said, “I can tell you’re really worried about the cops.”

So now that you knew he was only sixteen, what did you do?

What do you think I did? I kept him.

Kept him?

Duh, breakfast in bed, of course I kept him. Gave him a key and told him he could stay as long as he liked. We worked out a deal: he kept the place clean, cooked for me when I was home, and, you know…

And how long did this arrangement last?

A few weeks. Until one morning he took off for real, along with my stereo and half my dope. I should’ve been pissed about that, but I couldn’t get too worked up; he’d earned it, and anyway I’d have probably done the same thing in his shoes.

And after he left, there were others?

Yeah, but I don’t want you to think I was a total slut about it. I did wait a while, to see if he’d come back. But eventually, yeah. It became like a regular thing for me, all that summer and fall. Picking up strays.

Were they all underage?

They were all old enough. As far as specific ages, after Miles, I didn’t even ask.

But you referred to them as pet boys.

It wasn’t me who started that, it was Phil. He showed up one morning uninvited, and before I could get rid of him, my latest houseguest came walking through the kitchen without a shirt on. So Phil’s like: “The cat wasn’t enough? You’re keeping pet boys now?”

He didn’t approve.

Yeah, well, no surprise there. Phil always was kind of a prude…And look, I’m not defending it, OK? I know it was wrong, but you’ve got to understand, it was a different time. It wasn’t like today, where whenever you turn on the news some high-school teacher is being dragged off in handcuffs. San Francisco, 1990, picking up teenage boys in the park wasn’t this huge perversion, it was just…decadent.

But of course it’s one thing to be comfortable with that in your own mind, and a whole other thing to sell it to a cop or a judge, let alone some four-eyed freak who spends his days cataloging sin. So when Dixon said, “I know about the pet boys,” my first thought was, Jane, you’ve got some explaining to do.

Little did I know. I still hadn’t really grasped the whole Eyes Only thing, how pervasive it was. I figured Dixon must have heard stories about the pet boys, like maybe his people had tracked down one of the neighbors from my old apartment building. I wasn’t expecting video.

But then somebody hit a dimmer switch on the overhead light, and suddenly this little back room became an amphitheater. You know that Sony Jumbotron screen they’ve got in Times Square, the one that’s like forty feet wide? Imagine that popping up on a wall in this space that you thought was maybe fifteen by twenty.

The wall lit up and started filling with this photo array of pet boys. All of them, even the one-night stands that I didn’t really consider part of the official count. The pictures were practically life-size, at least it seemed that way, and each one had a caption: MILES DAVIS MONROE, AGE 16—the 16 was flashing in red—JORDAN GRAHAM, AGE 17, VICTOR TODD, AGE 17, NICHOLAS MARTINESCU, AGE 16, et cetera, et cetera.

How many “et ceteras”?

Let’s just stipulate that it was a big frigging wall and leave it at that, OK? It took a long time to fill up, and meanwhile I was sucking down Coke, and my wristband, which was obviously some sort of lie detector, was tingling like mad, and I just knew that whatever I said next was going to be judged really severely. So I thought, and I thought, and I was still thinking when the last picture appeared, and finally I opened my mouth and said the exact wrong thing:

“How much trouble am I in?”

“Well, let’s see,” said Dixon. The overhead light came up again, and he was holding a big red book with the words CALIFORNIA PENAL CODE on the cover. “Unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, age sixteen or seventeen, a misdemeanor, three months to a year per count, 189 counts…Providing alcohol to a minor, age sixteen or seventeen, for immoral purposes, a misdemeanor, three months to a year per count, 131 counts…Providing illegal narcotics to a minor, age sixteen or seventeen, for immoral purposes, a felony…”

I started to do the math in my head, but then I was like, wait, he knows how many times I did it? And so I took another look at the picture array and saw that all the shots were framed the same way, with the pet boy sitting at the foot of my futon and the image angled like the person holding the camera was standing on the futon’s headboard, which you think I might have noticed at the time. Then the flashback ray hit me again, and I remembered that very first night with Miles, me handing him a fresh joint and then looking up at the wall above the headboard and winking, conspiratorially, at—

“My Marlene Dietrich poster.”

“Eyes Only,” Dixon said.

I was screwed. I was so screwed. I’d had that Marlene Dietrich poster since freshman year at Berkeley, it had hung on the wall over every bed I’d ever owned, and if Marlene was a narc for Panopticon—

“I’m screwed.” The Coke can was empty now; my head felt three sizes too big, and totally detached from my body. I said to Dixon: “So when are the cops coming?”

“Why would the police be coming?”

“Because…I’m a criminal.”

“Yes, you are,” Dixon said. “And if I were an agent of law enforcement, I’d be all too happy to see you locked away in a cell. But I work for the organization, and the organization doesn’t fight crime, it fights evil.”

“So you’re saying…this wasn’t evil?”

“It was reckless. And appallingly selfish. You were certainly old enough to know better. But you appear to have acted without malice, and inasmuch as it’s possible to judge such things objectively, most of these young men were unharmed by their association with you.”

I didn’t miss the qualifier: “Most of them?”

“Why don’t you tell me who I’m thinking of?”

I didn’t have to guess. I turned back to the photo array, to the picture in the bottom right-hand corner, my very last pet boy: Owen Farley.

“Age nineteen,” Dixon observed. “A little old for you, wasn’t he?”

“No,” I said. “He was the youngest one of all, in the way that mattered. He was like…”—and I hesitated, realizing I was about to bury myself, but there was no choice really, so I went on—“…he was like the boy in the Anaïs Nin story. Innocent. Or no, not innocent. Delicate. Fragile.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me what happened.”

“You already know what happened.”

“I want to hear how you tell it.”

Well, I really didn’t want to do that, but Dixon just kept staring me down, and then the tingling in the wristband started to get painful, so finally I gave in and told the story:

By the middle of fall, the pet-boy thing had started to get old. I guess the novelty wore off. The thing about teenage boys, you know, they’re actually not all that interesting as company. I mean even Miles, with all that he had going on upstairs, he wasn’t much to talk to.

So I started to get bored. And there were other things going on, too. My boss at the liquor store finally got wise to the fact that I’d been risking his license with my tip-jar scheme; he not only fired me, he kept my last paycheck and said he’d turn me in if I made any trouble about it. So because of that I got behind on my rent, and then also, I was doing a few too many drugs, which hurt my finances even more and made it hard to get out of bed in the morning, which started causing problems at my other job…

So all of this was sort of snowballing, right? And then one day out of the blue I got a call from Carlotta Diaz saying she’d just bought a house in Bodega Bay, and would I like to come visit her? And I was like, that’s great, I’ll get out of the city for a while, get straight, get my head together, and make a fresh start. So I told Carlotta yes, and we set a date.

And not long before I was due to leave, I was coming back from working a last shift at the burger joint, and that’s when I saw him.

He was a street preacher. I never found out where he came from, but it must have been some little church town out in the boonies where they raise kids under glass. What brought him to S.F. I don’t know, but he couldn’t have been off the bus more than five minutes.

He was standing on the sidewalk in the heart of the Tenderloin, testifying about Jesus to a pack of transvestite hookers. The hookers were having a grand old time cracking on him, but he was impervious to catcalls—not thick-skinned, you understand, just clueless. He called the hookers “ladies,” and from the way he said it you could tell he wasn’t being sarcastic or politically correct. He didn’t get the whole cross-dressing thing; he thought these really were women.

So I stopped to watch this travesty, right? And seeing how green this kid was, how totally out of his depth, the thought came to me: If I wanted to, I could take him home and really blow his mind.

Now you can believe this or not, but this was a departure for me. I mean, with the other pet boys it had all been about fun, and free housekeeping. This was the first time I ever consciously considered messing with some kid’s head, leaving marks… And some part of me knew that was a bad idea, that I’d be crossing a line I didn’t want to cross. Normally, I wouldn’t have. But I was leaving for Carlotta’s in less than a week, and that changed the calculus a little. It’s like, if you’re a sane person, ordinarily you’d never touch heroin. But if it’s the night before you’re going to give up all drugs, and somebody offers you a line to snort…

So I was actually contemplating this, seducing this little preacher boy. And still I probably wouldn’t have gone through with it, except that as I was standing there, the kid suddenly noticed me, and said: “Ma’am, can I share some good news with you?” And it must have been pretty obvious what was going through my head just then, because one of the hookers called out: “Honey, I think she’s going to give you some good news!”

And me, I just smiled, and stepped over the line: “I’d be happy to hear your good news, but you’re going to have to come with me.”

“Come with you, ma’am?” he said. “Where?”

“To my apartment. I need to get off my feet. Are you hungry?”

As easy as that. He fell in beside me and we started for home.

Now here’s another weird thing: I was telling Dixon about this, right? And the whole time, he’s goggling at me from behind those glasses of his, but even so, and even knowing what ultimately happened, I started to get into it. I mean, I remembered what it was like that day, bopping down the street, the kid next to me jabbering about the love of Christ, and me feeling like the lioness leading the lamb back to her den…

So I got to the part where we were in my apartment, and I literally, God help me, offered the kid milk and cookies, and ducked into the bedroom to “change into something more comfortable.” And then the Jumbotron came alive again, and suddenly I was looking at a video of what actually happened in my kitchen that day.

It was a two-shot, a close-up and a wide-angle. For the close-up, they must have had Eyes Only on one of the Keebler elves on the cookie box, and the wide-angle, I guess that was from the Quaker Oats canister over the sink. The video picked up right at the point where I came out of the bedroom, wearing this semi-see-through kimono. And like I said before, I know I’m not God’s gift, but if you’re doing a Mrs. Robinson routine, you don’t need to be a knockout, just, you know, presentable. But on-screen, I looked really bad, scary bad…All those drugs I’d been doing, I guess they’d taken more of a toll than I’d realized. There were these dark bags under my eyes, and my skin was blotchy, and my hair was a freak show, and, you know, I do not have a mustache problem, but I swear I could see a shadow on my upper lip. I was a hag, basically.

And the kid, he was sitting there with a mouth full of cookies, terrified, and not in a good way…

Is there a good way to be terrified?

Well, you know, there’s virgin panic, that feeling you get when it’s your first time, and you weren’t expecting it, but all of a sudden here it is…But this wasn’t like that. It’s like I said to Dixon, this kid wasn’t an innocent. The fear on his face, you could see it in the close-up, it wasn’t like, Oh my God, I’m about to get laid, or even, Oh my God, what’s going on here? It was, Oh my God, not again…

Like he’d been seduced before?

Like he was damaged. Like it was too late for me to mess with his head, because somebody else had already been there, and all I was doing was plugging into this old nightmare. Only I couldn’t see that, because I was a fucking stoned-out hag.

You can imagine, watching the replay on this was complete torture. Seeing just how oblivious I’d been to the way this kid was feeling. And the things coming out of my mouth…Thank God, after I finally took him by the hand and started leading him into the bedroom, the screen went dark.

But it wasn’t over. “What happened next?” Dixon said.

“Just kill me now,” I begged him.

“If you’d prefer, we could watch it…”

In case you’re wondering, there are worse fates than death.

So I got the kid into the bedroom and I started undressing him, and even at the time, I knew there was something wrong. He was too passive—not nervous passive, more like catatonic. And then after I got his pants off, got him onto the futon, suddenly he wasn’t passive, suddenly I was the one who was scared, because this kid, he might have been younger than me, but he was bigger than me too, and all at once he was on top of me, with his face like an inch from mine and this fever in his eyes, and now he was the one running it, right, and it wasn’t fun, it was starting to hurt…

And then…Ah, man, this is bad…

What?

He called me “sister.”

Sister as in a nun, or…?

What, like one is less fucked up than the other? I don’t know, but at that point I just flipped out. I started hitting him—maybe I asked him to stop first, but probably I just started whaling on him. I hit him, punched him, four or five times, in the face, and finally he rolled off me, and I sat up, and he was just lying there on his back, shaking and crying.

And I was like, I can’t deal with this, I can not deal with this, so I went and locked myself in the bathroom and waited for him to leave. And a little while later I heard this thump and I thought, front door, thank God, even though the sound wasn’t right for that. So I gave it another ten minutes and came out, holding this toilet plunger like a club.

I did a sweep of the apartment. Kitchen: empty. Good. Living room: empty. Good. Bedroom: empty? The futon was empty, but the bedclothes were heaped in a pile on the floor on the far side, and then I saw this foot sticking out. “Oh, shit.”

Some instinct made me look over at the dresser. My drug-stash box was open. Marijuana was scattered all over the dresser top, and the pill bag had been turned inside out. “Oh, shit.”

I ran to him and dug him out from under the sheets and blankets. He was facedown, unconscious, and he’d thrown up at least once, but thank God he hadn’t choked on it—he was breathing, he still had a pulse. As I slapped his face to try to revive him, I ran a mental inventory of what had been in that pill bag: uppers and downers mostly—hopefully they’d counteract each other—but also some mescaline tabs I’d been saving for my last day in town. Not the healthiest mix.

The kid’s cheeks were raw from the slapping but he wasn’t waking up. His breathing was getting sketchy, and I realized I was going to have to call an ambulance. I dithered, trying to come up with an alternative.

How long?

Three, four minutes, tops—I swear—but this kid, he wasn’t growing any new brain cells in the meantime, you know what I’m saying? At least I didn’t try to put him under the shower—I knew from experience that doesn’t work—but still…

Anyway, I finally called 911. The dispatcher came on: “What’s your emergency?” And I’m like, “Accidental drug overdose…” She went through the standard Q&A—“What kind of drugs?” “Is he conscious?” “Have you checked his airway?”—and then she asked me where I was located. This was back before they had caller I.D., right? So I was about to tell her, but then I took another look at my dresser, at all that dope scattered around.

And the dispatcher said, “Miss? Are you there?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m here,” and gave her the address of the building across the street. And she’s like, “Is that an apartment building?” and I said, “Yeah, I think so,” and she said, “You think so?” and I said, “I mean it is—just hurry up and get here, OK?” And she said, sounding skeptical now, “What’s the apartment number?” and I told her, “Don’t worry about it. Tell the paramedics I’ll meet them on the sidewalk.” I hung up before she could argue.

The hospital was six blocks away, so I had like zero time. The one small blessing was that the kid had put his clothes back on before he took the pills, so I thought, At least it won’t be obvious what we were up to. I forgot that I wasn’t dressed…I wrapped him in a blanket and used it to drag him—no way could I carry him—and on the way out of the bedroom I bumped into the dresser. A bunch of stuff fell off, including a Valium that he’d missed. I popped that right away, thinking I was definitely going to need it.

I dragged him out the door and down three flights of stairs. I must’ve banged up his legs and his tailbone pretty bad, but there was nothing I could do about that—I was busy making sure he didn’t hit his head, and at every landing I had to stop and check that he hadn’t swallowed his tongue. Then one landing from the bottom I heard this click, an apartment door opened up, and this old Ukrainian lady who was always giving me dirty looks came out to see what the racket was about. And I, I was beyond reason at this point, I just smiled at her and said something like: “Allergy attack…Doctor’s on his way…Nothing to worry about!” She made this little, like, warding gesture with her hands, and shut the door again.

So I got the kid down to the lobby—my back was killing me by now—and of course the ambulance was already outside, and the paramedics were talking to the super of the building across the street. I dragged the kid out onto the stoop and started shouting, “Hey, over here!” and as everybody turned to look, I felt this breeze, and that’s when I realized, I was still wearing nothing but my kimono, and it was flapping open in front, and I’m like, Oh great.

The paramedics came running. They got the kid unwrapped, started checking him over, and we did another Q&A: “What did he take? What did he take?” One of the paramedics, he was all about saving the kid, and I liked that, that he barely even looked at me. The other one though, he was older, beard stubble, he did look at me, and he was pissed. He said: “Why did you give the dispatcher the wrong address? Are you too high to remember where you live, or are you just scared?” And I’m like, “I don’t live here,” and he’s like, “Yeah, right.”

Then the other paramedic—he’d been listening to the kid’s heart with a stethoscope—said, “We’ve got to go, now.” So they put the kid on a stretcher, and I knew I should just shut up, be invisible, but as they were bundling him into the back of the ambulance, I said, “Is he going to be OK?” And the angry paramedic looked at me again, and said, “You want to come to the hospital with us? Or do you want to hide?” And I pinched the front of my kimono closed, and said, “I’ve got to get some clothes on…” And he’s like: “Yeah, right.”

They got into the ambulance, and as they were driving away, I saw the angry paramedic on the radio, talking to somebody, and I was like, if the Ukrainian lady hasn’t called the police already…

I ran back upstairs and got dressed. I took a plastic bag and swept as much of the marijuana as I could into it, and hid it in the back of a closet along with my drug-stash box. Then I got out—I thought I heard a siren outside, so I left by the fire escape—and stayed out.

I called Carlotta and asked if it was OK if I came a few days early. She said sure, so I got a car, some boxes, and a little extra Valium, and after midnight I went back to my apartment to pack. I just took the essentials—I had to leave the furniture behind, but that was OK, most of it wasn’t paid for anyway.

As I was packing, Phil showed up.

In the middle of the night?

Yeah, I told you, he had a knack for knowing when I needed him. “Phil,” I said, “I think I really fucked up here.” And he was like, “Yeah, I tried to warn you…” And then he just sat there, looking sad, which got me packing even faster. By sunup I was done, and by early that morning I was in Bodega Bay. End of story.

You never called the hospital to find out what happened to the boy?

It’s not malfeasance if you behave like a decent human being. The way I thought about it was like this: aside from the Officer Friendly types, cops are generally lazy, and tracking me to Carlotta’s would be difficult enough that they probably wouldn’t go to the trouble unless the kid died. So it followed that if I didn’t hear from the cops, he must be OK…And I never did hear from them. Even after I came back to S.F. — you know, I had other scrapes with the police after that, but the thing with the street preacher never came up. So I told myself I’d dodged a bullet, and swore I’d learned my lesson.

And had you?

Hey, after that day? It was a year and a half before I had sex with anyone again, and when I did, the guy was like thirty-five—a mature thirty-five.

So like I said, I counted myself lucky, and moved on. I tried to forget it had ever happened, you know? But Panopticon never forgets. They miss stuff, or misfile it, but if they know about it at all, they never really forget…And when the truth finally comes back around, all those excuses you thought were so clever end up sounding like the bullshit that they are.

So I finished my story and stood there staring at the video wall—it was all just Owen Farley’s picture, now—while I waited for Dixon to pass final judgment. But Dixon was waiting too, looking my way but focused on a point a half inch in front of his right eye. The little computer screen flickered like mad, and my wrist was tingling so much my hand had gone numb.

And so finally I just blurted it out: “Did I kill him?”

“Kill him?” Dixon said. “That’s an interesting choice of words.”

“It’s the right choice. You said it yourself, I was reckless. I knew better. So if he’s dead, it’s on me. If he’s in a coma somewhere, or locked up in a psycho ward, that’s on me too. I accept responsibility, OK? No excuses…Whatever you’re going to do to me, just do it.”

Seconds ticked by, and I felt another tingling, at the back of my head. I thought: that’s where he’s going to shoot me, the other Bad Monkeys operative who’s sneaking up behind me even now, waiting for Dixon to give the nod. I tried to brace myself.

And then a cell phone rang, breaking the spell. Dixon pursed his lips in annoyance and slipped the phone from his pocket. “Yes?” he said. “Oh, it’s you…I didn’t realize you were monitoring the session…Yes, I’m looking at the results now. I’d have to call them inconclusive, but I was going to…Really…Really…Is there some factor here that I’m not aware of?…Really…Well, it would have been helpful to know that before…Yes, I understand…Of course it’s your call, but for the record, I still don’t think it’s wise to…Yes…Yes…As you wish…”

He snapped the phone closed, and then, turning, pressed a single key on the laptop. The computer screen went dark. The video wall went dark, too.

“You’re free to go,” Dixon said.

“What? But what about…You never answered my question.”

“Owen Farley is alive. No thanks to you.”

“Is he OK, though? What happened to him? Is he—”

“Don’t push your luck,” Dixon said sharply.

“OK…But when you say I’m free to go, does that mean…Am I in the clear on this? Am I still in Bad Monkeys?”

“For now,” Dixon said. “Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless you have something else you’d like to confess.”

“No.” I hooked a finger under the wristband and popped it loose, then started massaging the feeling back into my hand. “No, that’s OK. I’m done confessing for now.”

“Then get out. And Jane?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll be seeing you…”