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

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

“What about Arlo?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you tell him what the job was?

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

“Was it just the one time?”

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

“How do you know?”

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

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

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

“I don’t know. Could be.”

“Could be? Are you fucking serious?”

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

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

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

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

“So is that his shop?”

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

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

“Yes. She’s not evil, just lonely.”

“What about employees?”

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

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

“That’s about the size of it.”

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

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

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

“Do you have any ideas?”

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

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

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

“We went every Saturday.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What kind of trains?”

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

“What scale?”

“Scale?”

“HO? O? N? Z?”

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