He was going to look into it. And he was going to talk to the Mexican girl this week, and tell her he was going to chopper pilot school. He finished the cigarette and stubbed it into an ashtray, which was overflowing.

He could feel some weird psychic energy flowing up from somewhere, a rush of enthusiasm for a life he knew he should be having, and his brain began to whir, exploring his options. The restaurant had a program for employees who had been there over two years, in which they paid 50 percent of tuition. He could apply that to chopper pilot school. This was going to work out great. This was it. Things were about to change.

Chopper pilot. Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

BOB SUTHERLAND WAS walking around the Accu-mart at midnight, checking the displays, adjusting the vacuum cleaners on the top shelf so they faced sideways, not straight out. People wanted to know what a vacuum cleaner’s silhouette looked like, not what it looked like when it was coming at you. They bought vacuum cleaners for their clean, sleek look, not because they vacuumed floors. Why couldn’t the housewares staff recognize that? Why did he always have to walk around at midnight and shift things so they looked more… buyable?

It exasperated Bob Sutherland that his staff always seemed to lack that sense of what made a customer want to buy. They would come in unshaven or with their hair everywhere and stand around talking in groups until they saw him coming, and then they’d scatter like mice, off to perform some menial task, which they would halt the minute he was out of sight. They liked to complain about their wages, he knew, because he could eavesdrop on them with the surveillance cameras. They didn’t know that some of the cameras had audio. Rather than try to get better wages by showing some enthusiasm, they’d sit around and bitch about their hernia operations or having to work two jobs and how tired they were all the time, and they’d just shelve the vacuum cleaners any which way. If it wasn’t for him always walking around, checking, adjusting, fixing, the whole place would just go to hell in a few hours.

Sighing heavily, he retired to his office and slumped in his Healthy-Back office chair, watching the laser printer quietly pump out the daily sales reports. He flipped back through his caller ID and noticed a call from Washington, D.C. His brow wrinkled. Who could that be? He picked up the receiver and checked his messages.

“Mr. Sutherland, this is Ken Spargenbergerluger, the Webmaster General, here in Washington, D.C. We just wanted to let you know that if you have any problems with your Web site, you should contact your own Web administrator, not us. Please tell that to your employees. OK, dork?”

Click.

Sutherland’s heart was pounding. Had a government official just called him a dork? His hand shaking, he hung up the phone. Then he picked it up again, then put it back down. He took a few deep breaths. Think, he told himself. This might not be as serious as it first seemed. He listened to the message again, and he noticed that the voice sounded distantly familiar. He couldn’t place it, but he had the distinct feeling that perhaps, just maybe, one of his typical miserable employees might have had something to do with this.

He took the employee phone list out of the drawer and studied it. When he got to the bottom of this, he told himself, there was going to be hell to pay.

CHAPTER 3

VERY CAREFULLY, KEVIN filled the eyedropper with bleach and slipped it into his right front pocket so that the nozzle pointed out through a tiny hole he had cut. Now, with a little bit of pressure applied on his thigh, he could spray bleach out with his urine stream, right into the cup he was expected to piss into. A few drops of bleach would ruin any chance of a positive result on the drug test, but you had to be careful not to spray in too much or the urine would reek of bleach. To insure against that, he had eaten asparagus for the last two days, so the urine would definitely have some kind of weird odor, and the addition of bleach would just make the smell even odder. The more factors you could throw in, the better. Hopefully, the lab people wouldn’t know what to make of it. There goes Kevin, the guy with the weirdest smelling piss you ever encountered. Does he smoke pot? Hard to say.

For the first six months after he had been released from jail, Kevin had actually been pot-free, but then resentment rather than craving had taken over. Who were these people to tell him what he could and couldn’t do when he was alone and off of work? They had taken nearly all his money and locked him up for the whole summer, for indoor gardening. Why wasn’t that enough? Five grand for the lawyer, $2,500 for fines, $600 for court counseling. He’d even had to pay administrative fees for getting released from prison. The discharge paperwork had cost him $120, which must have meant it was either typed up by someone with a doctorate in office work, or it had been printed with solid-gold toner. But who would say no to that expense if it was all that stood between you and freedom? While paying his debt to society, he had managed to accumulate a significant debt to his credit card company.

It was, he figured, all about money. The counseling for which he paid the $600 was group therapy, in which he had been made to sit in a room with three junkies and a bored psychologist, listening to the junkies’ tales of child abuse. Whenever it was his turn to speak, Kevin would offer, “I just got busted for growing pot in my basement. I’ve never been abused.” Until, of course, the local police got their hands on him, but a mention of that would have resulted in more counseling-and more fees.

Kevin had realized fairly quickly that a game needed to be played. He didn’t just need to pay fines and serve time; he needed to be grateful for their help. At the end of each session, he would thank the psychologist profusely, perhaps even ask him for advice that he didn’t want. Sure enough, the psychologist pronounced him cured after only five sessions, instead of the ten the judge had assigned, though, of course, half the money was not returned.

Kevin screwed the cap back on the bleach bottle and got out of his car, dropped some quarters into the parking meter, and went into the municipal court building. Through the metal detector, past the row of young black men in orange jumpsuits chained to a bench, up the cinder block- motif stairwell, through the heavy steel door marked PAROLE AND PROBATION. The office staff was behind a window lined with chicken wire, in case any of the parolees got rowdy, though the atmosphere was never one of typical government chaos. It was subdued, polite, and quiet. These were people who had gotten out and weren’t going to jeopardize their freedom with unsightly displays of emotion before a court clerk.

Aware of the intimidation factor, the clerks were brutal. They never made eye contact with the parolees and barked orders at them through the wired glass. A heavyset, middle-aged woman with glasses and stiff black hair didn’t even look up at Kevin as she snapped, “Name?”

“Kevin Gurdy. I’m here to see-”

“Have a seat.”

Kevin sat down on the black vinyl bench with two young black men, who were staring straight ahead. After a moment, the woman lifted her head and said, “ Jackson.”

Kevin and the two men looked at each other.

“ Jackson,” she repeated, her voice rising with irritation at this delay. “Who’s Jackson?”

“I think he went out to go look for a water fountain,” one of the men said.

“Well, go get him. If he isn’t here in thirty seconds, I’m marking him down as absent.”