“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.

“Oh yeah?” I said, slipping the gun off safe. “I hear it works a lot better if you actually run it through the machine.”

“It’s no good.” His whole body was jerking violently to one side now.

“OK, give it back to me then. I’ll pay cash.”

“It’s against the rules for me to give it back. I’m going to need you to come inside with me.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Miss—”

“You want to keep the card, go ahead and keep it. But I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Miss, please…”

I came this close to shooting him. But as he leaned in to plead with me, I finally got a glimpse of his face, and saw that he was scared silly. And then—probably because I was already in a horror-movie frame of mind—it occurred to me that I’d heard this story before somewhere.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Are you acting weird because there’s a guy with an ax crouched behind my back seat?”

The gas-station attendant blinked. “You know him?”

“Well, we haven’t been formally introduced, but I’m pretty sure his name is Bob.”

“Oh,” the attendant said. “OK. I’ll just go run your card, then…”

He went back into the office; I looked in my rearview mirror. “Robert Wise, I presume?”

“If I weren’t,” Wise said, “you’d be dead. Or wishing you were.” He got up, and despite the tough talk and the double-bitter in his hands, my first impression was that he wasn’t all that scary. He didn’t look like an ax murderer; he looked like an army ranger who’d gotten lost on his way to chop some firewood.

“How long have you been back there?” I asked him. “Since Bakersfield?”

“Does it matter?”

“I just want to know how cranky you are. If you’ve been sitting on the floor all the way from S.F., your butt must be pretty sore by now.”

“You’re funny,” said Wise. “True mentioned you were funny.” Then he said, “Wait here,” and got out.

I watched him walk towards the gas-station office, ax swinging at his side. As Wise came in the door, the attendant looked up from the credit-card machine and started to raise his hands. Then the office lights went out.

Two minutes passed. Wise reappeared, minus his ax. He trotted back to the SUV and got into the front passenger seat. “Here,” he said, handing me the credit card.

“Uh…What did you just do?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“What did you do, Wise?”

“I’ll tell you later. Right now, we need to get away from here.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Sometime in the next forty-two seconds would be good.”

The wristwatch glance stopped me from arguing. I put the SUV in gear and drove, counting “one one thousand, two one thousand,” under my breath. When I got to “forty-two one thousand,” bright light flared in the rearview.

I took a hand off the wheel and reached for my NC gun. The paper bag was empty.

“That’s all right, Jane,” Wise said. “I’ll hang on to the weapon for now. You just concentrate on driving. And don’t worry about that guy back there—he had it coming, I promise.”

“What the hell—”

“Just drive.”

I drove. Wise didn’t speak again until we were in Nevada. A few miles past the state line, he had me leave the highway for an unpaved road that snaked north into the desert.

“We’re not going to Vegas tonight?”

“No. My place.”

The road ended at a fenced compound whose gate opened automatically for us. Wise directed me inside, to a long, low, warehouse-style building with a sign that read LAWFUL GOOD PRESS. As soon as I’d parked, he took the keys.