Bad Monkeys (15 page)

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…”

“INTERESTING,” THE DOCTOR SAYS.

“What is?”

“In addition to my duties here, I sometimes conduct interviews at a facility called Red Springs, out in the desert. It’s—”

“A jail for sex predators,” she says, her cheeks coloring. “I know. I saw a sign for it on my way into Vegas.”

“
Violent
sex predators,” he says, but the correction does nothing to soothe her indignation. “I’ve spoken to over a hundred of them now, and they break down into two main categories: sociopaths, and a second group I like to think of as
malefactors.
”

Still flushed, she says: “Sociopaths are the ones who don’t feel guilty.”

“Very good. Most people think that sociopaths are the ones who can’t tell right from wrong, but of course that’s not true. They know the difference—enough to understand they have to hide what they do—they just don’t care about it.”

“Bad monkeys.”

“Oh, the malefactors are bad monkeys, too—and in some ways, they’re harder to take. Sociopaths are like Martians: their moral indifference is very strange, but at least their behavior is consistent with it. Malefactors,
on the other hand, possess a normal sense of conscience. They experience guilt, and are capable of remorse. But they don’t let any of that stop them.

“Which brings me to my point,” the doctor says. “Another way of distinguishing sociopaths from malefactors is through the types of lies they tell. Sociopaths lie to other people. Malefactors do that too, but first they lie to themselves. In order to justify their actions, they often construct very elaborate fantasy scenarios…”

Her ire finally dissipates. She snorts. “So this is your new theory? I dreamed up the organization to help cope with my repressed guilt about the pet boys?”

“You think it’s a silly idea?”

“That Dixon was some kind of enabler? Yeah, I do think it’s silly. If you’d met him, you’d know why.”

“He did clear you.”

“No, he didn’t.” She starts to get angry again. “Did you not get the point about the phone call? Dixon didn’t clear me. Dixon wanted to burn me. At the very least he wanted me kicked out of Bad Monkeys, and if he could have sent me someplace like Red Springs, that would have made his day.”

“But that isn’t what happened.”

“Because Cost-Benefits overruled him.”

“So you were cleared. By very smart, well-informed people.”

“But why would I do it that way? If I were just imagining the whole thing to ease my guilt, why would I put myself through the wringer? Why not just have Dixon say, ‘Hey, so you crossed a line, it’s no big deal.’”

“Because you don’t believe that,” the doctor says. “You think it is a big deal. And before you could accept absolution, you wanted—needed—to be taken to task for what you’d done.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, huh?”

“Not all. By your own account, your involvement with the organization goes back long before your in
volvement with the pet boys. And while you may have been carrying a significant amount of guilt over what happened to Owen Farley, I doubt that incident alone was enough to give rise to such an elaborate coping mechanism. It’s too little, too late. So that leaves me with the same question Dixon had: Is there something else you’d like to confess?”

“No,”
she says firmly, and then again: “No.” She leans back in her chair and looks away; her lips move as if to shape the word “no” a third time.

But what actually comes out—after a long pause, and in tones so low as to be barely audible—is: “Not yet.”

AFTER MY RUN-IN WITH DIXON,
I didn’t get another Bad Monkeys assignment for almost three months. I knew from what Annie had told me during training that that kind of downtime wasn’t necessarily unusual, but under the circumstances I couldn’t help worrying about it.

Did you think you’d been fired after all?

No, I knew it wasn’t that—I could still get Catering on the phone anytime I wanted, they just didn’t have anything for me. Then when I asked to speak to True, they kept telling me he was unavailable, and so from that I got the idea that maybe he was upset.

About what? The pet boys?

More likely this other thing I’d done. Back at that rooftop buffet meeting, right before he left, True had warned me not to take Dr. Tyler’s case into my own hands: “I know you’ll be tempted, especially once your Malfeasance interview is out of the way, but don’t do it. Julius Deeds was strike one; Annie Charles was strike two; I trust I don’t need to tell you what happens after strike three.”

Of course this meant I had to quit my job at the nursing home. Maybe I’m the biggest hypocrite in the universe, but I just didn’t trust myself to rub shoulders with
that sicko every night and
not
do something. So I quit, but then during my last shift I broke into Tyler’s office again and found that Catholic school-uniform catalogue he kept hidden in his filing cabinet, and left it on his desk. It wasn’t anything that’d get him into trouble if someone else saw it, but I knew that he’d know that somebody was on to him.

And what did you hope to accomplish by doing that?

Christ, talk about a Bob True question. I don’t
know
what I hoped to accomplish; I just
did
it, OK? But because of Eyes Only, Panopticon knew I’d done it, and I’m sure they told True, and if it wasn’t bad enough to count as strike three, still, I’d disobeyed a direct order. So I figured the lack of assignments might be True’s way of punishing me: unofficial suspension.

Meanwhile, Dixon kept dropping hints that he was still on my case. I got another floor-sweeping gig at this office building on the waterfront. It was a lot quieter than the nursing home, just me and a security guard, which should have been great: no boss, whole place practically to myself, plus the vending machine on the top floor had this glitch where if you hit the buttons just right, you’d get two sodas for the price of one. But I started getting creeped out. The company that owned the building imported bobblehead dolls from Taiwan, and those freaking things were everywhere, not just watching me but
nodding
at me. It got so I couldn’t go more than half an hour without running down to the security station to calm my nerves.

One night I went in there and the guard had his TV on.
The Graduate
was playing. Not just any part of
The Graduate,
either—the first thing I saw coming in the room was Anne Bancroft putting her stockings on for Dustin Hoffman. So I’m like, “Can I change this?”, and the guard shrugged and said sure, so I flipped channels, into the middle of another bedroom scene: Bud Cort lying next to Ruth Gordon in
Harold and Maude.
So I flipped channels
again,
and it was a commercial, and I was like, OK, but then the announcer’s voice said, “Coming up next on A&E,
The Mary Kay Letourneau Story
…”

And you thought this was Dixon’s way of taunting you? By manipulating the TV schedule?

If it had just been the once, I might have put it down to coincidence. But after that, whenever I got near a television…I mean, I know they like to repeat stuff on cable, but how many times can they cycle through the same handful of shows?

And it wasn’t just TV. I started noticing little digs in the radio playlist, too. I’d be in the shower, singing along with KFOG, and all at once I’d be like, oh, “The Kids Are All Right,” are they? And if it wasn’t the song itself, it was the band…The Pet Shop Boys. Remember the Pet Shop Boys? They dropped off the charts, what, a decade ago? But suddenly they were in heavy rotation again.

Michael Jackson too, I suppose.

Don’t even get me started on Michael Jackson. If I never hear “Billie Jean” again in this life…

So what did you do about this…harassment?

At first I tried to ignore it; when that didn’t work, I went back to popping Valium. That helped for a while, but then Dixon started to play nasty. One day in the grocery checkout I realized I’d forgotten to get butter, and when I ran back to the dairy case, someone had turned all the milk cartons so that the missing-kid photos were face-out. They were all boys, and all looking at me with these disappointed expressions.

That was just too much. I mean,
Harold and Maude,
OK, that was funny in a demented sort of way, but this, to me, this was no joke.

So next I got this idea that I should leave town again. It didn’t really make sense, because Dixon’s jurisdiction wasn’t limited the way the SFPD’s is—Malfeasance is
everywhere. But it was all I could think to do at that point.

What made you choose Las Vegas as a destination?

It wasn’t my choice. Where I
wanted
to go was the Pacific Northwest, Seattle or maybe Portland. I figured it’d be a nice change of climate, plus that part of the country is Mecca for serial killers, so I knew I’d have lots of work once True let me out of the doghouse. But it turned out True had other plans for me.

I went to this travel agency that specialized in helping people plan moves, and asked for some info on Washington and Oregon. The woman behind the desk looked at me like I was nuts. “The economy up there is terrible right now. Have you thought about Nevada?”

“Nevada?”

“Las Vegas is booming. It’s one of the only cities in the country that hasn’t been hurt by the recession. They’re building thousands of new homes a month.”

“Sorry, I’m not interested.”

“No, really, you should think about it. Just wait here, Jane, let me get you some literature…” She went into a back room, and I got the hell out of there. I hadn’t told her my name.

Back at my apartment, I gulped down three Valium and turned on the TV. I’d programmed it to skip over stations that showed movies or sex-offender trials, which didn’t leave a whole lot. Can you guess what the theme on the Travel Channel was that night?

Las Vegas?

Three shows in a row. You’d almost think the L.V. chamber of commerce was paying the network to advertise. And then when I clicked over to ESPN, they were covering a poker tournament at Binion’s Casino.

I switched off the TV and picked up the phone.

“Jane Charlotte.”

“Yeah, I’m calling for Bob True again. Tell him I got the message.”

“Look behind you.”

I turned around to see True coming out of my kitchen. “What’s in Las Vegas?” I asked him.

“An operation we believe you’d be perfect for.”

“You don’t have anything perfect someplace nicer?” True just arched an eyebrow, as if to say,
You want me to cut you off for
another
three months?
“Yeah, OK,” I said. “So what is it?”

“The details will be given to you by your handler after you arrive.”

“You’re not supervising me on this one?”

“I’ll be along later, but during the initial phase of the operation, you’ll be working with a colleague of mine named Robert Wise.”

“Is everyone in Cost-Benefits named Bob?”

“Wise isn’t with Cost-Benefits,” True said. “He’s a Scary Clown.”

“You’re teaming me with a Clown? What kind of op is this?”

“It’s not the nature of the operation so much as its location. The Scary Clowns consider Las Vegas to be their fiefdom, and they are extremely territorial. It’s not really possible for us to run an operation there without including them. But don’t worry, Wise is a good man. He’s…much less random than some of the others.”

“Great. So when do I leave?”

“We need you ready to go by Thursday. Catering will handle the travel arrangements.”

“OK. I’m going to need some money, though. The bobblehead people aren’t going to give me a paid vacation, and I’m already way behind on my rent.”

“Yes, I know. I was just coming to that.” He handed me a Jungle Cash ticket that had already been scratched off.

“Um, True,” I said, looking at the prize amount. “This is too little.”

“It’s enough for a long-term storage locker. A small one. You don’t have that many possessions.”

“You want me to give up the apartment?”

“Weren’t you planning to do that anyway?”

“Well yeah, but…How long is this Vegas operation supposed to last? I mean, does it make sense for me to burn all my bridges here?”

True held up the crumpled eviction notice that he’d fished out of my kitchen garbage can. “I’d say this bridge is already blazing, wouldn’t you?”

I put my stuff in storage. I stopped by the bobblehead company, intending to give my notice, and instead managed to talk this guy in payroll into giving me two weeks’ pay in advance. Then I called Black Helicopters, the subdivision of Catering in charge of transport. Even though I should have known better, I was honestly expecting them to fly me to Vegas. Hah.

“At five p.m. this evening,” the voice on the phone said, “go stand in the parking lot outside the Safeway supermarket in Pacific Heights. Someone will park within sight of you and leave their keys in the ignition.”

“What kind of car will it be?”

“At five p.m. this evening, go stand in the parking lot outside the Safeway supermarket in Pacific—”

“Yeah, yeah, I got that. But how will I know it’s the right car?”

“The license plate will have an even number.”

It was almost six by the time a black SUV pulled into the Safeway lot, driven by a mother with two kids; the kids were screaming at each other, which gave their mom a perfect pretext to forget her car keys. The SUV’s license number ended in an 8, and it was a Nevada plate, which I thought pretty much clinched it—but just in case, I waited until Mom had dragged the kids into the store before making my move.

I found a Mobil credit card in the glove compartment
and used it to top off the tank. Then I blew town. As I drove south, I thought about the Scary Clowns.

The Clowns are the remnant of another secret society that got taken over by the organization way back in the day. They specialize in psychological ops: mind-fucking for the greater good. Like everybody else, they’re supposed to answer to Cost-Benefits, but because of their special history they’re actually semiautonomous, and their insistence on playing by their own rules creates a lot of headaches for the bureaucracy.

What sort of headaches?

Well, one of the things that distinguishes the Clowns is that they’re a lot less publicity-shy than the other divisions. They consider urban legends a form of tradecraft. It’s how they got their nickname.

I don’t recall an urban legend about scary clowns.

It was a variation on the old Men in Black gag. Used to be, when the organization got wind of a predator operating in a small town or a suburb, they’d send in a bunch of guys in freaky clown makeup to drive around and menace the locals. The idea was to raise awareness, get people to lock their doors and stop trusting strangers, until Bad Monkeys could eliminate the threat. It was a pretty effective gimmick, but they had to stop doing it after this one clown actor named Gacy got a little too into his role.

John Wayne Gacy was an organization operative?

Not one of the better ones, but yeah. He’d worked in Panopticon before switching to psy-ops, so he knew how to spoof Eyes Only surveillance; that’s how he managed to rack up so many bodies without getting caught. And then when the cops nailed him, before the organization could? You can bet heads rolled in Malfeasance over
that
screwup.

Anyway, after that, they quit using the Scary Clown gimmick—mostly—but the name stuck.

So this was the group I was going to be working with. You can see why I felt kind of ambivalent about it. The job wasn’t likely to be boring, but if I drew the wrong psycho for a partner, I might find myself wishing I was back with the bobbleheads.

I stopped in Bakersfield for a late dinner. Not long after I got back on the highway, the gas gauge, which had been telling me I still had almost a third of a tank left, suddenly dipped into the red zone. Fortunately there was a Mobil sign at the next exit.

The Mobil station was in a one-stoplight mountain town that had rolled up its sidewalks hours earlier. Coming down the main drag, I got a weird vibe. The street was deserted, but the kind of deserted you see in a horror movie, right before the zombies start coming out in droves. I’d been planning on pumping my own gas, but when I got to the station I pulled up to the full-service island instead.

The gas-station attendant wore a hooded sweatshirt that hid his face in shadow. “Chilly night,” he said, when I cracked the window. “Would you like to come inside for some coffee?”

“No thanks. Just fill it up with unleaded.”

I kept an eye on him while he pumped the gas. As he was putting the gas cap back on, he did this funny ten-second freeze with his head cocked, like he’d just heard a branch breaking out in the dark somewhere.

Then he was back at my window: “You sure you don’t want that coffee?”

“Positive.”

“It’s
really
good.” He tilted his head, and his right arm started twitching. “
Trust
me, you’ll be
very glad
you tried it.”

“Sorry, I’m a Mormon. Caffeine even touches these lips, I go straight to hell.” I made my own twitching motion with the credit card, and reluctantly he took it from
me. He went into his office and stood just inside the door, tapping his feet. Then he came back out again.

My NC gun was stuffed in a brown paper bag next to my seat. I reached for it as the attendant came around to my window for the third time.

“This card’s no good,” he told me.