Work Done for Hire

1.

I picked up the phone and didn’t say anything. “Are you done wasting gasoline?” the female voice said. I turned on the recorder in my shirt pocket.

“Who are you?”

“You asked that before. I can’t tell you.”

“Then I can’t do anything for you.”

“Not to wax philosophical, but for whom were you working when you killed all those people in the desert?”

“I’m not going to go there.”

“You were killing people in order to stabilize the price of a barrel of oil. To use your own words.”

“I was drafted.”

“Yes, and as you’ve said, you could have gone to jail instead. You don’t have that option now.”

“Why don’t you just do the job yourself? You threaten me and Kit with murder. Why not just kill this poor schlub yourself?”

“That may be clear later.”

Kit had written a note: PLAY ALONG SEE WHAT THEY WANT.

I nodded, but could feel a slippery slope under my feet. “Maybe if you told me something about who the target is.”

“That’s progress. But not yet.”

“So at least tell me why you’re using me. There must be a thousand guys who would do it for pocket change.”

“You already know part of the reason. The rest will become clear.”

“Maybe if I knew who you were…”

“You will never know that.”

I took a deep breath. “So okay. Tell me what to do.” Kit’s eyes widened but she nodded, lips pursed.

“The first thing is to take that recorder out of your pocket and leave it on the end table. Second, put the rifle in the trunk of Ms. Majors’s car. Third, get a good night’s sleep. Finally, in the morning, keep driving south, toward the Gulf of Mexico.” She hung up.

“What is it?”

“Keep going south, she said. First get a good night’s sleep.”

“Sure. Lots of luck on that.”

I put the recorder on the end table. “And leave this, she said. I guess we should assume they can hear everything we say.”

She nodded. “I hope you all eat shit and die,” I said to the recorder. “I mean that sincerely. I want to watch.”

“I don’t know if we should provoke them,” she said quietly. “These people are crazy.”

“And I’m fucking getting there.”

We hadn’t slept two hours when the sun started to show through the blinds. I set up the coffeemaker and we squeezed into the shower together, unsexily. One small bar of soap and no shampoo.

Over a breakfast of acid coffee and stale chocolate-chip cookies, she said it before I could: WE CAN’T HANDLE THIS BY OURSELVES, she wrote down. COPS OR FBI OR WHAT?

I nodded and wrote, HOMELAND SECURITY? ASSASSINATION? She thumbed a query on her iPak and showed me the screen: a map of Springfield, Illinois, with an arrow pointing to the Homeland Security office.

We didn’t say anything about it; just got in the car and headed east. It might have been an excess of caution, but we didn’t even use the car’s route guide; she’d drawn out a map on a piece of paper.

About two hours of secondary roads through farmland and small towns, then a half hour on high-speed cruise, and we parked below an oblong grey building with extrusions like upside-down ells, which managed to look both heavy and arachnid.

“Imposing,” she said.

“Haunted by the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover. I don’t suppose we want to take the gun in with us.”

The reception area was arctic cold and government-grey. The room listing by the elevator didn’t have a Department of Mysterious Weapons Left in Cars, so we opted for Domestic Terrorism.

A matronly clerk listened to our story and settled us in a waiting room with a curious selection of magazines, a mixture of well-thumbed hunting and fishing journals with three pristine copies of Harvard Law Review, not the swimsuit edition. After more than an hour, she asked for my driver’s license and escorted us into the office of agent James “Pepper” Blackstone.

Blackstone was a slightly plump pale white man with aquiline features. He seriously studied us as we came in and sat down, and then glanced at the screen inlaid on his desktop. There was nothing else on the desk, and nothing on the walls but a standard picture of the president and a calendar.

“This rifle,” he said with no preamble, “we knew it was in your trunk, of course, before you got out of the car. If you’d tried to take it out of the trunk, you would have been stopped.”

“Good to know you guys are on the ball,” I said, and he didn’t react. “Of course the rifle is why we’re here.”

He looked at his screen.

“You found it in your car… twice?”

“Once outside my door,” I said. “I left it in Iowa City, in the trunk of a parked car, but someone evidently retrieved it and put it in our motel, while we went out for dinner last night. They also broke into my apartment and took the mailing carton it had been in.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know! To scare me.”

He considered that for a long moment. “A preliminary investigation shows three sets of fingerprints.”

“You took it out of my car?” Kit said.

“It’s a weapon associated with a crime, Ms. Majors. We’re allowed to.” He didn’t look at her. “Your fingerprints, Mr. Daley, and those of the two Iowa state troopers. There are no other fingerprints at all, which is interesting. What is more interesting is that the surface of the rifle is completely sterile, outside of those points of contact. There’s not one nanogram of organic substance. It’s as if the weapon had been autoclaved and then put in the car’s trunk by someone wearing sterile gloves.”

“Not just wiped clean?” I said.

“No; that might obliterate the fingerprints, but there would still be traces of organic material, or perhaps of a solvent used to remove it. This was a very careful job.”

“Well, I’m glad it’s not just a bunch of amateurs.”

“I wouldn’t rule that out. Amateurs can be compulsive.” He took off his glasses and leaned back in his chair, which squeaked, and began a long soliloquy. “Being a writer, Mr. Daley, perhaps you can appreciate this: the tropes of terrorism and the mechanical aspects of spy business are so deeply imbedded in our culture that private citizens have used them to harass other private citizens; make them think they’re being followed by someone—us or the FBI, the CIA, the KGB… or some mysterious organization whose three initials are known only to a few. Ask yourself this: If you had the desire to do to someone else exactly what is being done to you… would it be impossible? Would it even be difficult? If you did have the desire and the money to spare.”

I thought for a second. “The rifle is common enough, though I’m not sure how I could buy one without leaving a paper trail. Hire somebody to do it; a mule, I guess. The phone calls could be made with throwaway cells. But these people know exactly what I’m doing, all the time, as if they were in the same room! How could I do that?”

There was a single knock at the door and a bland young man in a coat and tie strode in, put a manila folder on the desk, and left.

Blackstone spent a few seconds looking at each of three sheets of paper. “On June eleventh of last year, someone who looks like you and had your driver’s license bought that rifle at a sporting goods store in Des Moines.” He slid over one sheet, a grainy photograph apparently from a store’s security camera. A person who looked something like me was buying an M2010-AW9.

“That’s not me,” I said. “I mean, I know it’s not me because I wasn’t there; I’ve never been in that store. But it doesn’t really look like me, anyhow.”

He took the picture back and examined it. Shook his head and got a jeweler’s loupe from a drawer and looked again. “Maybe, maybe not. Can you explain the driver’s license?”

“Well, no. Not if they had the neutron-counting thing.” I’d been sent a new license a couple of years ago with the ID dot: traces of two radioactive elements, the proportions different for each person’s license, impossible to forge. Some small stores didn’t have the neutron counters, but probably all gun retailers did.

He handed me my license. “This checks out. It is the one that was used to buy the gun.” He looked at Kit. “Ms. Majors, you are a mathematician. You know Occam’s razor.”

I knew that one; the simplest explanation is probably the right one. But she knew the whole thing: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

“Exactly. So for your story to be true, Mr. Daley, these are the entities: a miscreant had to steal your driver’s license before June eleventh, use it to buy a weapon, and return it undetected to your wallet before today. That is not impossible. But a simpler explanation is that the picture is you. And you had some arcane reason for setting this up.”

I looked at Kit. “That’s what I said you people would say. That it was just a publicity stunt.”

“Can you prove you were somewhere else on June eleventh?”

“June tenth is my birthday,” Kit said. “He took me out to dinner in Iowa City—did you use a credit card?”

“Probably.”

“That’s less than compelling. You could still be in Des Moines the next day.” He slid the picture an inch toward me. “I think the burden of proof is on you.”

“We slept together,” she said, her voice strained. “I was with him the next day, and he didn’t buy any gun.”

“Were you with him all day? Do you remember?”

“No, I wasn’t. That was a Wednesday and I taught at 10:00.”

He tapped the picture. “And you? Do you know where you were on that Wednesday?” He leaned forward and read the date stamp. “At 12:30 in the afternoon?”

“Hell, I probably slept in.” I took the picture and studied it. The guy was wearing clothes that could have come out of my closet, which proved nothing: jean jacket and blue jeans, white shirt.

“I don’t have boots like that,” I said, not expecting him to be impressed. “Wait, though… I looked it up, and a gun like this costs $2,600 new. I don’t have that kind of money to spend on anything. You can check my bank and credit card records.”

“We have, of course.” He slid over another sheet, with a scanned copy of a receipt. “You paid cash. There’s no record of your having withdrawn that amount, but…” He shrugged.

“Absence of proof is not proof of absence,” I supplied. “But if this were a publicity stunt, why didn’t I try to get some publicity?”

“I never used that word,” he said. “Many of the people who come through this office have done things for reasons I don’t understand—reasons they don’t understand.”

“So now I’m crazy.”

“That’s a layman’s term, Mr. Daley. Not very useful to us.”

“Who is ‘us’? Are you a shrink as well as an agent?”

He almost smiled. “In fact, I am an ‘analyst,’ but not a psychoanalyst. And all I meant was that perfectly reasonable people do things that are not reasonable—literally not for reason.

“In the absence of further evidence…” He took a business card out of a tray and handed it to me. “I’m afraid Mr. Occam has raised his razor. Do contact us if you have evidence of a law being broken.”

“It’s a sniper weapon, for Christ’s sake! You’re not concerned about a sniper weapon appearing and disappearing?”

“It’s a hunting rifle, a very popular model.” He leaned forward and put the card in my shirt pocket. “It has been returned to your trunk.”

“Along with a bug of some kind, I trust?”

“That’s not my department, Mr. Daley, but I sincerely doubt it. We have a lot of work to do without making more.” He peered into the desk screen. “Do let us know if you have a change of address or phone number. Good day?”

“You think this is some kind of a gag I set up?”

“Your words, Mr. Daley. Do you need help finding your way out?”

“You can’t…” A big black guy in a tight dark suit was walking toward us. “No. We’re outta here.”

“One thing, please,” Kit said in a strained voice. “How can you say for sure that this photo isn’t a fake? Please?”

He picked it up and scowled at it. “Any electronic image could be manufactured from the ground up, Ms. Majors, pixel by pixel.” He tapped the date stamp in the corner, with its bar code. “This part would be almost impossible, though. You would have to know the security protocols of the company that made the camera, just to start.”

“You could do it.”

“Homeland Security? No, we don’t have any facilities for that—or none that I know of. I suppose some other agency might—but the cost, to make a counterfeit security image that we couldn’t detect? Unless you’re a closet millionaire, or indeed some kind of super spy, no.” The black guy loomed next to him. “Thank you for your concern. You have been good citizens, bringing this to our attention. We’ll keep our eyes open.” His own eyes looked back down into the screen. The black guy’s eyes gestured toward the elevator.

The shimmering oven of the parking lot was momentarily a relief, after that huge tax-funded refrigerator. The asphalt was so hot it felt spongy.

“Do you think that’s it?” Kit said.

“I hope not. I mean, the guys who’re after us must know we’ve been here. That might up the ante.”

“Or they might decide to give up,” she said. “Rather than risk the wrath of James ‘Pepper’ Blackstone.”

“Whatever. I guess we want to drive slowly and leave a trail of bread crumbs.”

We paused in the shade of a tree, incongruously planted in the middle of the lot, and stood on its grass. “Suppose we’re wrong,” I said, “in assuming that your car is bugged.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, how could they have bugged it in Iowa City? They might have followed me to the Hamburger Haven. But there’s no way they could’ve known you’d stop there and drive off with me a few minutes later. Mess with your car in broad daylight. So it’s me they’re following, my body.”

“Or they were at the time,” she said. “They’ve had plenty of time to work on the car since.”

“Yeah. They probably buy bugs by the six-pack.” I suddenly felt nauseated. “What if it is my body? Like they put it in my food and it attached itself to my stomach.”

“Could they do that?”

“I don’t know. They can make them really small.”

“I mean, it would pass on through. Really. If something attached itself to your stomach or intestines, it would make you sick, wouldn’t it?”

I was dangerously close to demonstrating it. “The idea does. But hold it.” An idea was crystallizing. “You wouldn’t do that. You’d hide it in a muscle mass.”

“How could they do that without your knowledge?”

“In the hospital. Not here, but in fucking Germany!” She shook her head slightly, not following me. “When I was in the army—when I was wounded!”

“But that was years ago.”

“See, that’s the mistake I’ve been making. This shit didn’t start a couple of weeks ago—it was set up while I was still in the army. They just didn’t activate it until they needed me.”

“‘They’? You think the army’s behind all this?”

I actually went cold in all the rippling heat. Some ductless gland that had evolved in order to deal with agencies that had three initials. “No. Huh-uh.” I pointed toward the car.

While we walked I asked about her aunt, who was dying of cancer. She made up a sob story that would melt the ice-cold heart of whoever was listening to parking-lot conversations.

As we approached the car I asked her to pop the trunk. “I want to take a look at the rifle,” I whispered.

“They’ll be watching.”

“Probably.” The trunk sprang open and I reached past the rifle box to a tackle box that I knew was full of tools. I selected a pair of pliers and slipped them into my front pocket while I was lifting the clumsy rifle box and struggling to open it.

I set the rifle on top of the box, still hidden to outside eyes. While running my left hand over the stock, I used my right to gently press the magazine release button. I slipped the top round off and then slid the magazine partway back, and returned the rifle to the box. But one round was in my shirt pocket now, and the magazine was loose, not pushed in. Kit looked mystified; she knew I had done something fishy but hadn’t followed it.

I scribbled a note, GUN WON’T WORK, though I was still a step away from that.

When we were up to speed on the highway I took out the cartridge and used the pliers to wiggle the bullet and separate it from the brass casing. While Kit chattered about music I emptied the powder out of the cartridge and rolled the window down and let the breeze blow the grey powder away. Then I reassembled the bullet, tapping it home firmly with the pliers, and put it back in my pocket.

It was an old saboteur’s trick. With the cartridge back in place, the emptied top round in the magazine, the rifle was a passive booby trap. If someone pulled the trigger, the hammer would fall on the empty cartridge’s primer, which would make a small explosion—just enough force to drive the bullet partway up the barrel and be stuck. When the next bullet was fired, full power, it would strike the first one, and the gun would blow up in the shooter’s face.

I could fire the weapon safely, because I knew to eject the first round before pulling the trigger. For anyone else it would be a nasty and perhaps fatal surprise.

I scrolled the map down and left and enlarged it. She looked over and held her finger over a small town, Carlinville, not tapping it. I nodded and we studied it for a second, and then turned off the map, and resumed talking about Steven Spielberg.

Interstate 55 had the cruise lane, so we took less than half an hour to get down to the Carlinville exit. Meanwhile I fiddled with her iPak and found out that Carlinville once had more houses ordered from the Sears catalog than anyplace else in the country, and was once the home of the woman H. G. Wells called “the most intelligent woman in America.” I passed that morsel on to Kit, and she said, “We just have to stop there and pay our respects.”

We passed by a small park in the middle of town; she looked at me and I nodded. Parked a block away and walked back, picking up a couple of ice cream cones on the way. We could watch the car from the park, in case somebody tried to put a dead body or an H-bomb in the trunk.

There was a bench in the shade of a tree next to a playground area. The kids were raising all kinds of hell. I spoke quietly.

“None of this makes any difference if they have a microphone up my ass.”

“I would have felt it.” She smiled. “Here’s my logic: I think they do have a device in or on your body, which they can track for location. But not listening.”

“Which ‘they’ are we talking about?”

“Does it make any difference now? Them versus us. But I don’t think it’s a listening device or a video bug, if we’re talking about Agent Blackstone and his gang. If they’d been listening to us, they’d know you’re innocent.”

I nodded. “Unless they think we think we’re being listened to all the time. Saying things to avert suspicion.”

“Yeah, but how far down that rabbit hole do you want to go? Blackstone being manipulated to feed us lines?”

I took his card out of my shirt pocket. Nothing fancy: plain picture, not a holo; James “Pepper” Blackstone, Analyst, Domestic Terrorism, Department of Homeland Security.

I held it up to my mouth. “Hello? Jimmy boy?”

“He probably likes to be called ‘Pepper.’”

I studied the card. “You know, you’re right. This has to stop somewhere. Blackstone didn’t know where the gun had come from. They didn’t have time to set up some damned phony scene in a gun shop in Des Moines.”

“Okay.”

“So that means someone who wasn’t working for them set me up. Nobody who buys a weapon in a gun shop doesn’t know he’s on Candid Camera. They got somebody who looks kind of like me.”

“What about the driver’s license?”

“That is a problem. The feds can’t get past that because they lack one crucial piece of evidence that I have: I do know I wasn’t there. Nobody did some voodoo crap and made me drive to Des Moines and buy a fucking gun!

“It’s simple. Someone hacked the god-damned system. If someone can program it, someone else can program around it. The ID dot on your license really boils down to a string of ones and zeros. Somebody got ahold of my string and put it in the system.”

“How?”

I had to laugh. “I don’t know! I’m not a fucking criminal!”

She put a finger on my arm. A woman on the other side of the play area was staring at me with a cross expression. No doubt a prissy G-man in drag.

I lowered my voice again. “Let’s just assume as a starting point that Blackstone is what he says he is. Tonight when we stop, we’ll write him a long e-mail with chapter and verse, everything that’s happened. ‘Here it is, take it or leave it.’ Even if they think I’m lying, at least it’ll go into my dossier. In case.”

“In case you die, you mean.”

“Well, yeah.” I started to frame something sarcastic to say but it evaporated on my lips. In that dappled noisy playground she was trembling, and looked like she was about to burst into tears.

“Sometimes I forget,” she said. “People trying to kill you is not a new thing.”

“Yeah. Me, too. I forget.”

But not really. Not ever.

2.

I printed out a copy on the library’s printer and Kit proofread it. “Looks okay.”

“Good.” I folded the paper up and put it in my back pocket. “Go get the car. When I see you pull up in front, I’ll click on SEND and come get in the car, and we’re off for the highway.”

She breathed out heavily. “Whatever you say, boss.” She wasn’t 100 percent with me on this, but couldn’t come up with a better plan. I wanted Homeland Security to feel we were cooperating, but we couldn’t know whether the bad guys might intercept a message, or might even be hiding there, safe in some corner of the bureaucratic web.

Even if they, the menacing “they,” were hooked up with the government, they didn’t necessarily know that we’d gone to see Blackstone. But it would be prudent to assume that they did know, as soon as the agent filed a report. They might have known as soon as his secretary typed in my name—or maybe even as soon as we rolled into the parking lot. Where some scanner evidently noted that we had a gun in the trunk. That might ring a few alarm bells even if I were just a forgetful hunter.

Her bronze car rolled up and I pushed SEND. Anybody who really wanted to know could find out that I was in the public library in Litchfield, Illinois, at 12:39 on May eighteenth. Just passing through, though. Leaving behind some cybernetic spoor.

She had the radio playing loud. Taped on the dash over it, where we both could see it, our complex route to Baton Rouge, which we’d researched and printed out in the library. It was “blue highways” all the way, a slow crawl but one that ought to avoid stoplight cameras and toll booths. Getting off the grid by burrowing under it.

We were plainly in no hurry. No real destination. Baton Rouge was big enough to hide in, and dodgy enough that we wouldn’t have any trouble finding odd jobs that wouldn’t require ID.

But we weren’t really going there. It was a feint.

Without saying a word about it, we drove straight into St. Louis and left the car in a low-rent long-term parking lot outside the airport. Took the airport shuttle to the East Terminal and transferred to one of the hotel shuttles headed into downtown St. Louis. Ninety minutes after we ditched the car, we were in the Greyhound station with tickets south, bought from a machine with cash, no IDs.

We had about $9,000 in cash, split evenly. We were taking different busses—hers direct to New Orleans and mine via Joplin. We would meet in two days in the line waiting for breakfast at Brennan’s—and then go someplace more reasonable for a meal and planning session.

If they managed to follow us through that maze, it was hopeless. Maybe learn Chinese and go join their space program. No way Homeland Security, or the nameless “they,” could follow us to the moon.

Of course they might already be there, hiding behind some fucking crater.

I hoped the clue we left in the Litchfield library was subtle enough not to look planted. I’d noticed that the connection between the computer and printer was wireless, so any cloak-and-dagger types who’d followed us there could pick it up from the parking lot. We talked about going to California while Kit typed up unrelated directions to Baton Rouge.

Of course they would eventually find the car in the long-term parking lot outside of the airport, the gun still in the trunk. Whether they were the government or some more sinister “they,” we knew the car was bugged. We would probably be caught on camera outside the airport if they were the government, but even so, we might lose them between the airport and the bus station. When did a self-respecting spy or terrorist ever go Greyhound?

Before her bus left, she downloaded her e-mail and mine. Blackstone had sent a pro forma “thank you for cooperating with Homeland Security” message, and there was a note from my father asking why I wasn’t picking up the phone.

And Hollywood raised its ugly head. A note from Ronald Duquest’s office reminded me that the next chapter was due yesterday. Golly, slipped my mind.

I would normally e-mail the manuscript to myself, as I always do at the end of the writing day. Kit was taking the iPak with her, of course. I could write the next chapter out by hand and type it in later, but there was a Woolworth’s down the street. So I went in and bought a kids’ laptop for $99, bright red with big rubbery keys. An economy-sized twelve-pack of batteries, enough to get me to New Orleans.

The first thing I wrote on it was an e-mail to Dad, copied to Mother, explaining that I’d been accepted to a special writers’ retreat at a Trappist monastery. Total silence for a month, no street mail or e-mail, complete isolation from the modern world. By the time I’d written out a description of it, I wanted to sign up. Just write for a month, no guns or spies. Not sure about “plain food cooked by nuns.” Kit was confident I could find the one nun who was a gourmet cook, and maybe a closet nymphomaniac, besides.

Anybody who was really interested would be able to figure out that the message came from St. Louis, but in a couple of minutes I’d be headed south in anonymity. I clicked on SEND and kissed Kit and got on the bus. Waved to her as it pulled out, and then opened up the file with Duquest’s story line and my minim opus.

CHAPTER TEN

Hunter slept for ten hours, woke up famished, and microwaved the heart and kidneys. They were not tender but juicy and tangy. He drank a pint of whiskey and a gallon of water and slept again.

When he awoke, he hacked the remaining leg into two pieces, and put the foot half into a big pan with onions and a handful of wild rosemary. He stabbed it a dozen times and pushed garlic cloves deep into the muscle. He opened a can of camper’s bacon and draped it all over the leg and put it in a slow oven.

He sat on the trailer stairs for exactly one hour, listening intently. Two cars and a motorcycle went by, and as he was rising to go back in, he heard the whir and labored breathing of a bicyclist slowly climbing the slight grade.

It would not be smart to hunt so close to home. But just for practice he slipped quietly through the underbrush and crouched down behind a dense thicket of bramble. He nibbled on some berries and watched.

He would be a beautiful catch, young and plump. He must be local, since he couldn’t have pedaled very far on the old Schwinn, fat patched tires and faded blue paint held together with skeins of rust.

Hunter’s stomach made a noise and the boy heard it. He stopped and looked around wildly, and Hunter tensed to attack. But then he turned the bike around and fled downhill.

Some ancient instinct urged him to bound after the quarry and bring it down, and something like saliva squirted into his mouth in anticipation. His long muscles tensed to spring, but the brain interfered and he relaxed.

There would be another day.

He would be cautious, as usual. He sat unmoving long after the sound of the bike receded into nothing. The clock in his brain ticked off an hour, and then another hour.

No villagers with torches and pitchforks. No steady-eyed deputy adjusting his Stetson and saying, “Maybe the boy did hear somethin’, Sheriff.” No rumble of tanks and scream of jets converging on the invader from another world.

But he was not an invader, he thought; he belonged here as surely as a shark belongs in the sea.

A rabbit advanced slowly, almost invisible against the dun mat of humus, and sniffed Hunter’s bare foot. He snatched it and crushed out its life before it could even squeak, and nibbled at its twitching body as he watched the sun set.

Not a bad planet at all.

3.

When I turned eighteen, my mother took me down to New Orleans to celebrate my birthday with Aunt Helen. Eighteen was the legal drinking age in New Orleans, and I was ready. Aunt Helen lived there, and knew all the watering holes, and the three of us had walked up and down Bourbon Street and Decatur and St. Charles, comparing the quality of mint juleps in various places. I probably lost track after three or four.

Brennan’s is the place where I learned about treating a hangover with booze, their traditional champagne breakfast. It was a strange medicinal compound of champagne and Pernod, with orange juice on the side, and it worked so well we kept drinking champagne for a while, even after the hangovers were buried.

Aunt Helen—“Hell,” she liked to be called—had by then turned this cycle into a way of life. The hangover would start to gather about the time the coffee was perking, so she’d spike it with a gin Bloody Mary and get on with life. I sincerely hope she outlives us all.

That breakfast had started out airy and French, a soufflé made with berries, and then anchored with hot Andouille sausage and fried potatoes, washed down with imported beer. I don’t think I had eaten better in my life at that time, and have only a few times since.

Of course this visit to the Big Easy was going to be less festive. Not easy.

After eighteen hours on the bus, sleeping fitfully after I finished the short Hunter chapter, I was ready for a little walk. The ticketmeister drew me a map on a three-by-five card and said it was a little more than a mile. It was not quite eleven, and I’d told Kit “about noon,” so I set out into the gathering heat.

Quite a bit of foot traffic, but it wasn’t unpleasant, tourists happy to be where they were, not yet sweltering and cross. I resisted the automatic reflex to take out the cell and check for calls, or call Kit to reassure her. They’re probably listening; why make it easy for them?

Of course there was a chance we had lost them now. In my mind’s eye I could visualize them crawling over Kit’s car, looking for clues. There wasn’t one molecule of evidence that we were going to New Orleans. They would find the directions to Baton Rouge, crumpled up and kicked under the seat, but otherwise I hoped our trail stopped there, in the long-term lot outside the St. Louis airport.

They would get the rifle. That gave me a little chill. Would they bench test it without first checking—lock and load and fire the second round into the blocked barrel? If it killed or injured some DHS or FBI agent, they would probably up the ante. If it was the people who’d supplied the rifle in the first place, who knows? They wouldn’t have any reason to test-fire it. Maybe it would show up in our motel room in Key West, still fatally booby trapped.

The line for Brennan’s was half a block long. After a minute or two, long enough for me to fall into a reverie, Kit tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, sailor—new in town?”

We kissed and she steered me across the street to a place with tables in the front garden. She’d already gotten us a table and a carafe of coffee.

The coffee was strong and bitter with chicory. Thick real cream and honey to take the edge off. A waiter came over immediately and I ordered a beer and a pile of sausage and bacon.

“Breakfast of champignons?”

“Living on candy and carbs, on the bus,” I said. “Dreaming of that sausage.”

“And coming up with a master plan, I hope.”

“I have some ideas. You?”

“One you won’t like.”

In other words, one I’d better accept. “What?”

“We should both change our appearance radically. Look like we belong in the Quarter. Chop my hair short and dye it, go butch.”

“I love your hair.”

“It’ll grow back. Likewise you: off with the beard and moustache, and shave your head.”

“Shave my head? I’d look fucking gay.”

She nodded, expressionless. “Look around. Black jeans and tight black T-shirt, little earring. You get hit on, just say no. I do it all the time.”

I couldn’t argue with the logic. If your appearance gives off a specific sexual signal, most people won’t see anything else. “And then we get fake IDs?”

“You said this would be the place.”

“Yeah. True.” Maybe I could go home for just one minute and grab the file of notes I had on the subject, for the novel. “Smoke shop, head shop, is the place if you don’t need anything heavy-duty. Out-of-state driver’s license.” I looked at her critically and stroked my beard. “Think you could pass for twenty-one? Little girl?”

“In your dreams. Wet dreams.” She could pass, actually—even for a teenager if she dressed the part.

A pile of pig protein and lots of muscular chicory-flavored coffee, and I was ready to face a bunch of spies, or at least a barber.

He didn’t speak much English, but he got “Take it all off.” The feeling of a straight razor sliding along your skull was a new kind of discomfort for me, which I hope never to repeat. He also did an expert job on my beard. In the mirror I looked like one of those children with progeria, a baby’s face with age lines and basset eyes.

Kit’s haircut cost three times as much, and looked like the result of an industrial accident. You shouldn’t lean so close to the lathe, babe. But I hardly recognized her, which was the idea: bleached blond riff brushed out stiff with a purple accent.

She looked in the mirror and started to cry. But then she laughed brightly and wiped her eyes. She put on some lipstick that I didn’t know she had, and a little mascara. Stuck out her tongue at the reflection.

We split a pair of earrings, black pearl studs that she had in the bottom of her purse. I hadn’t worn one since I was an undergraduate, so it hurt and bled.

As a mutual disguise, though, it worked pretty well. We did look like a couple of thirty-ish tourists trying to look younger. On the Bourbon Street sidewalk, we blended in like cows in a herd.

A restaurant on St. Charles, Korn Dogs ’n’ More, needed a dishwasher and a waitress. The manager looked like he had just stepped out of a Yale faculty meeting, but he didn’t blink at our appearance or at Kit’s story that we’d been robbed and had no IDs.

The dishwashing wasn’t hard. Piled up after lunch and then was quiet until about five. Pretty busy till the place closed at ten. The pots and pans took another hour after that, Kit helping.

I probably would have hated it if I’d had to do it for a living, up to my elbows in greasy water. Doing it as protective coloration was kind of fun.

The Italian owner, Mario, cooked nonstop but had lots of stories, and was obviously happy to have a new audience. He’d also been in the desert, so we bonded over that.

Once I didn’t respond when he called me “Jim,” my temporary name, and he gave me a big wink.

He had a friend who rented rooms by the week a few blocks away, and gave Kit an hour off to get us a place. We finally crashed there a little after midnight.

The computer beeped at ten. Kit was already in the shower down the hall.

The room had a coffee machine. By the time I had it charged up and dripping, she came back, rubbing her hair with a towel. She shrugged out of her robe and handed it to me, then giggled when I put it on. “We’ll have to get you something without lace and flowers.”

I looked in the mirror and almost didn’t go down the hall. Baby-blue posies clashed with my skinhead asshole look. I showered quick.

We got to work one minute early, and Mario seemed vaguely surprised to see us. But we were going to hang in there at least six days, until the first paycheck. Or until somebody caught up with us.

4.

We got our first week’s pay and the phone call the same day, no coincidence, I suppose. Even paid by cash, there would be a record. My “James Kinney” ID probably went straight into a federal database of false IDs, and a face recognition program linked it with the person I used to be.

The phone rang at Korn Dogs and someone asked for me. Mario put it on hold and asked whether I was here.

“Someone want Jim Kinney?”

“Well… ‘the person who calls himself James Kinney.’ Want me to say you haven’t come in yet?”

No, they might be watching. I shrugged and held out my hand. A woman’s voice asked if I was Jack Daley.

“Or Jim Kinney, yes. Who is this?”

She was agent Sara Underwood, who had been “partnered with” James Blackstone. She asked me whether I had any information about him.

I was tempted to say that if the federal government couldn’t keep track of its own people, how are they going to track down the bad guys? “No, not since our interview last week. I called his office once, but he wasn’t in.”

“What business did you have with him?”

“He asked me to call in if I had a change of address. He wasn’t there, though.”

There was a long pause. “Agent Blackstone has died, under odd circumstances.”

“Oh, my god. I’m sorry.”

“Yes. We’re calling everyone who had contact with him recently. You were not a person of interest in any of his ongoing investigations, but you did speak with him the afternoon of the seventeenth. About a sniper rifle?”

“Yeah, we called on Tuesday last week, I think. Someone left a weapon in my car, the sniper rifle that I thought I’d gotten rid of, with a suggestive note.”

“Yes, we know that from his desk report. I’m afraid we have to confiscate the rifle now.”

I tried to respond but my throat had closed up.

“Mr. Daley? We need that rifle. You don’t have to ship it to us. We can pick it up now.”

Sirens outside. A black-and-white screeched to a stop in the side street. I signaled Kit and she stepped into the ladies’ room.

“I—I don’t have it.”

“Where is it, Mr. Daley?”

Two uniformed cops banged into the store. The black one had his hand on his gun, the Hispanic on a Taser. I raised my free hand. “The police are here.”

“Where is the gun? Mr. Daley.”

“In the trunk of a car in St. Louis. Airport parking lot! That’s what I told—” The cops towered over me. I covered the phone. “I’ll be right with you,” I said. “Talking to the FBI.”

“Put down the phone,” the black one said. “Right now.”

“I mean Homeland Security,” I said.

“We’ve recovered that car,” Sara Underwood’s voice said, and then she said something else, but I couldn’t hear it because the Hispanic officer had snatched the phone away.

“Are you going to cooperate?” he said.

“I’m already cooperating! Talk to the lady on that phone!”

He opened the phone and looked at it. “Says ‘call blocked.’”

“Yeah, of course.” I stuck out my wrists. “Let’s go.”

“We don’t do it that way,” the Hispanic one said. He grabbed my arm and hauled me out of the chair and had my hands cuffed behind my back in about one second.

“Take it easy, for Christ’s sake!” One held me while the other patted me down roughly.

“Homicide,” the black one said, in explanation, as he goosed me. “Up in Indiana or someplace.” I almost said “Illinois,” but decided to leave him uncorrected.

At least they didn’t get both of us, I thought, and didn’t look at the door to the ladies’ room.

They stuffed me in the back of the patrol car and managed to belt me into the shoulder harness with both hands behind my back. Maybe my one phone call would be to a chiropractor.

It didn’t last long. We went a couple of blocks with the siren going, the black officer driving slowly while the other said incomprehensible things into the radio. Then they pulled over and helped me out of the car, took off the cuffs and gave me back my cell phone.

“Be careful now,” the black one said by way of apology, and they drove away.

If something like that happened in Iowa City, I’d go down to the station and get on their case. False arrest, harassment, intimidation. Not in the Big Easy, I think.

I walked back down St. Charles for a few blocks and then sat down at a sidewalk café to think.

Was I being watched? Not obviously. Wouldn’t make any difference anyway, if it was just Homeland Security and the FBI and the New Orleans cops. But how far behind are the ones who gave me the rifle, twice?

A pretty black waitress came out, looking bone tired. End of the night shift. I ordered white coffee and a beignet, playing knowledgeable tourist. After I ordered it I chastised myself. Black coffee and a doughnut would have saved me three bucks.

I talked to an operator and then a secretary in the Springfield Homeland Security office, and got a call back from Sara Underwood. “What on earth is going on down there? You’re in trouble with the New Orleans police?”

“You tell me, Ms. Underwood. My girlfriend and I are getting jacked around six ways from Sunday, and all we’ve done is try to cooperate with the authorities. I was just now handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police car, and then released, all without a word of explanation. You tell me what’s going on!”

There was a long silence, with some clicks. “I don’t know what kind of trouble you might be in, down south. You’re in some trouble here in Springfield.”

“What do you mean, trouble? I haven’t done a damned thing illegal.”

“That may be, Mr. Daley. But this is a homicide investigation now, and you are more than a ‘person of interest.’ You were interviewed by Agent Blackstone, with negative results. Agent Blackstone was found dead this morning.”

It was a sunny clear morning, but I could feel walls closing in on me. “I didn’t do it. I couldn’t have done it. How could I? I’ve been in New Orleans for a week!”

“Well, you were in New Orleans a week ago and you’re there now. You could have gone to Singapore and back in between.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you guys wouldn’t notice. But you said you got the car?”

“The car?”

“Before New Orleans’s finest picked me up. You said you’d retrieved the car from the airport in St. Louis.”

“We did, yes.”

“Then? You were about to say something else.”

There was a sound like papers being shuffled. “I was going to ask you… about firing the rifle. You did do some shooting with it.”

“Just a few rounds. As I told Blackstone. Just to zero it in.”

“Why?”

“To zero it in.”

She sighed. “I mean why would you want to zero it in if you never planned to use it?” That blocked me for a moment. “Hello? Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

“The note… there was a note!”

“We found a note, crumpled up on the floor of the car.” She paused. “It says, basically, you’ll be paid $100,000 to kill someone, and there’s a down payment in the rifle stock. Nothing about zeroing the weapon.”

“No, I’m wrong. I’m sorry! It wasn’t the note; it was a phone call right afterwards—a woman told me to take the rifle down to the Coralville dump and zero it in. Then police up the brass and targets.”

“What about the police?”

God, was this happening? “Police. It’s a verb. It means to clean stuff up. I was supposed to pick up the brass from shooting it. The spent cartridges.”

“So was it a phone call or a note? Or was it both?”

“Both. It was both.” I took a deep breath. “Someone put the rifle on my doormat back in Iowa City. Put it there while I was asleep, and rang the bell and drove away.”

“And you didn’t call the police then because?”

“We told all this to Agent Blackstone.”

“And he’s dead now. You didn’t call the police?”

“There wasn’t time! I opened the box and while I was looking at the rifle, the god-damned phone rang. A woman warned me not to call the cops, and then said to take the rifle out to the Coralville dump and zero it.”

“She actually said ‘Don’t call the cops’?”

“I don’t remember her exact words. But she threatened to kill Kit if I didn’t cooperate.”

“In so many words? ‘We will kill Catherine Majors’?”

“No… I don’t know. She said they’d done it before, and she had me Google some kid’s name. Who had died of mylo something. Mylo-thrombosis? It was pretty convincing.”

“And on the strength of that?”

“What do you mean? They threaten to kill my girlfriend and ‘on the strength of that’ I go zero their fucking rifle? Yes! You wouldn’t?”

“What were you supposed to do after that? Did they say who you were going to shoot with the rifle?”

“I don’t think they ever did… no, never. Just that he was someone bad.”

Paper rustled. “‘You will agree that the World is a better place without him.’ The word ‘World’ is capitalized.”

“I noticed that. And a couple of other grammar things. So he’s not too literate?”

“You never know, Mr. Kinney—Mr. Daley. ‘He’ might be a female, and more literate than you or me, faking it. Though you’re right; on the surface it appears to have been written by a person with little education, probably male.

“Of course that generates the question of how and why some semiliterate person could and would set up and execute this complex stunt.”

Her use of the word “stunt” was interesting. “Wait. Do you still think that I might have done this ‘stunt’ myself?”

“Nothing is off the table, Mr. Daley. My personal opinion is that you didn’t do it. People who haven’t seen the recording of your interview, who don’t know anything about you, might think otherwise.”

“But it’s ridiculous! Why would I go to all that trouble just to get into more trouble?”

“You’re an educated man, and a writer. You know that people do things for odd reasons, or no reason. That you or someone else would set this up is ‘odd,’ but odd things happen.”

That was almost exactly what Blackstone had said. Maybe it’s a mantra you have to learn for Homeland Security. “And I suppose my fingerprints are all over the note.”

“In fact, no. That piece of paper has been folded and unfolded and crumpled up, but as far as we can tell no one has ever touched it without gloves. You do admit to reading it?”

Shit. I loved where this was going. “Of course. I told Blackstone—”

“Why would you put on gloves to read a note? Why would an innocent person avoid leaving fingerprints on anything?”

I had to admit that was a pretty good question. “I… I guess I was in a suspicious frame of mind. Cautious frame of mind. I started to take the rifle out of the box but then I thought, hell, I’m taking this straight to the cops; don’t want to mess up any prints that might be on it.”

Long pause. “But in the event… you actually didn’t take it to the police.”

“No! Like I said! That’s when the woman called.”

I heard her exhale in exasperation. “I’m trying to make a list here. First your doorbell rang, late at night.”

“Morning. About four in the morning.”

“What were you doing up at that hour?”

“I wasn’t up! The phone woke me up.”

“Calm down, Mr. Daley. I’m trying to decipher the notes from your conversation with Mr. Blackstone. You went to the door and there was no one there.”

“I heard a car leaving, peeled out. Before I opened the door.”

“There was no sign of them when you opened the door?”

“Nothing but the box. I heard tires squealing while I was getting dressed.”

“What did you think it was? Four in the morning.”

“I don’t know. Kids, I guess.”

“Why did you go to the door when the phone rang?”

“Not the phone! The doorbell.”

“Okay. Kids rang the doorbell and left behind an expensive sniper rifle.”

A really bad feeling was growing in my head. Could I open my mouth without screaming? It would feel so good to throw the phone into the traffic.

“Are you there, Mr. Daley?”

What would it sound like on her end, when a car ran over it? Would it be loud enough to be worth the cost?

“Mr. Daley?”

I took a deep breath. “Add this to your list. I’ve had enough abuse for the day. My shoulders and wrists hurt from being manhandled by jackbooted fucking storm troopers. On your list I want you to write down the time of day. Call me exactly twenty-four hours from now and I’ll answer. If the phone rings before that I will throw it in the fucking Mississippi.” I snapped it shut with a sound like a rifle shot.

An elderly couple sitting down at the next table smiled and applauded softly. “Whoever they are,” the old lady said, “fuck them.”

I gave her a V-sign. My grandfather’s generation. God bless the sixties.

The phone rang again. I opened it. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

It was a familiar woman’s voice, but not Sara Underwood’s: it was the mystery woman who first talked to me in Iowa City, and threatened me with the story about the boy who died of myelofibrosis.

“Jack? We know where you are now. Are you ready to talk?”

I threw the phone into the street and got up to rush to Korn Dogs.