“There you are, Tom,” Patton said with a relieved smile. The smile faded when he saw Tom’s expression. His face was a mixture of anger and dejection, resembling a sad child.
“What’s wrong Tom?” Frank asked, who walked past them without a hello. Tom dug into his pockets for his keys and finally found the right set.
“Sorry guys,” Tom said morosely. “I’m not opening. I just need to come out and get something at the shop.” He brushed a lock of white hair out of his eyes and unlocked the door.
Patton and Frank looked at each other in dismay.
“You’re not closing for good are you?” Frank asked, partially joking, knowing it was a preposterous idea. Tom looked at them and then looked away off into space. “Tom. What’s going on?” Frank asked, serious now. Tom snapped out of his trance. He turned and entered the store, greeted by a ringing bell.
“Come in boys. I got somethin’ to show you,” he said, walking towards a workbench that was strewn with tie-flying equipment. He walked over to his cash register and picked up an envelope that had been roughly torn open. He handed it to Patton and said, “Take a look at this and see what our good buddy Governor Asher is up to now.”
The mention of that name alone caused Patton’s hackles to rise. He snapped the envelope out of Tom’s hand and pulled out a two-page letter. He opened it to find the “City of Blue Creek” logo on the top. It was a professionally printed letter. It read:
Dear Dr. Perry,
According to our records, before your arrival at Blue Creek you were an oncologist. Our records also show that you are not currently working in that field or any other health-related field.
A law, recently passed by our City Council, and signed by our Governor, states that any profession that has a shortage must be filled by the most experienced person who is not currently working in that field. Any person that is selected to fill a vacancy must cease operating an alternative business or employment (if applicable) as soon as they begin in their new profession. Another part of this law states that any economic enterprise that continues after the selected person has begun in their new career, said economic enterprise will incur a 25% tax penalty.
We apologize for any inconvenience that this may bring to you, but there is a drastic shortage in your field and we need your services for this community. Please report to City Hall no later than ten days past the date of this letter. Any delay will incur fines and penalties, and possibly arrest, for failure to abide by this city statute.
Thank You.
It was signed by some bureaucrat that none of them knew. Patton desperately wanted crumple the letter, but it didn’t belong to him. He fought the urge and handed it back to Tom.
“You got a copy machine?” Patton asked.
“In the back. You want a copy of this?” he asked, puzzled.
Patton nodded.
The older man walked out of the room into the office. After a few minutes he returned with the original document and a copy for Patton.
“Here you go,” Tom said, handing him the papers and looking around his shop. Two small tears ran down his cheeks and he embarrassedly wiped them away. “Gettin’ old,” he said, turning away from them, continuing to wipe at his face.
Frank went to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. The older man didn’t shy away from the affectionate gesture. “There’s gotta be something we can do about this,” Frank said, first to Tom and then looked at Patton with hopeful eyes.
Patton wasn’t feeling very hopeful at that moment. He’d done all he could for this city, but this move felt like checkmate. He’d engineered a recall election, helped his candidate win, and then nearly won himself. Now, after all that, it seemed like they were deeper in the hole. Patton nodded absent-mindedly, not really believing it himself. He couldn’t see any way out of this one.
“I’m retired,” Tom said, his head hung low. “Man, I retired ‘cause I couldn’t hack it anymore. Nothing but problems and people not paying their bills and crabby nurses and secretaries …” he cut himself off and threw up his hands. He ran his thick-knuckled fingers through his hair, mussing it as he did so.
“I’m mentally checked out of being a doctor,” he continued. “Once that happens, you can’t go back. You can’t ever get that fire back and that’s what it takes. Sure you get paid pretty well, but is it worth it? Hell, that’s got to be the most stressful job in the world. Even the best of us mess up. Even when we don’t mess up, things just sometimes go wrong you know? And whose fault is it?” he asked rhetorically.
Patton and Frank just stood there dumbly. Neither of them had anything useful to say so they said nothing.
“You know Patton, I really admire you,” Tom said. “I know you wouldn’t put up with this. You’d tell them to all go to hell. But guess what. I’ll be going down there and doing what they tell me to. And I’ll close up this shop, I reckon.”
Patton looked at him, a new courage surging through him. He was about to speak but stopped himself, obviously deep in thought. He paced away a few steps and then paced back. After a few more moments he looked back up at Tom.
“Tom, howbout I buy the place from you and let you run it for me?”
The older man’s first impulse was to reject the offer, but he stopped himself and thought about it for a moment.
“Would they let you do that?” he asked hopefully.
“I don’t see why not,” Patton said, his voice regaining his confidence. “You won’t have to close up and you won’t get taxed for it.”
“But what if you get called to do something for them?”
Patton looked at Frank and Frank looked at Patton and they both laughed.
“What?” Tom said, smiling for the first time since he’d arrived here.
“Tom, these bastards are stupid and greedy, but I don’t think even they have the need for a retired plastics manufacturer,” Patton said.
Tom smiled then chuckled. He extended his hand to Patton who took it and shook it warmly.
“Name your price,” Tom said. “I’ll have the paperwork drawn up by the end of the week.”
The drive home from the lake seemed long. Patton dropped Frank off at home and then made his way to Jennifer’s house, where they were staying that week. When he walked into the house, he saw a familiar object in his wife’s hand—a two page letter from the City of Blue Creek.
“You’re kidding me,” he said to her, wide eyed.
She looked at him, confused.
“You haven’t even read it yet.”
Patton grabbed it and shook his head and began pacing around the kitchen.
“Tom got one just like this,” he said, holding the letter towards her. “They’re making him close his shop and he has to go work at the hospital in a couple weeks.”
He pulled the pages out of the envelope and unfolded them. He read for a minute and then looked up at her.
“How the hell do they know this is what you did before you came here?” he asked her, throwing the letter onto their kitchen island.
She shrugged and walked to him, grabbed him, and pulled him in tight. Her fingers were laced behind his neck and she buried her face into his chest.
“I don’t know,” she said with a groan. “The last thing I want to do is work as a government lawyer again. That’s half the reason I signed up for this damn thing in the first place.”
She sometimes got into moods like this. Not angry or sad, just kind of … “blah,” as she would put it. He knew she just needed him to hold her and she would eventually come out of it. He stroked the back of her head and began to rock with her side to side as if they were dancing.
“Well, at least you didn’t start your own business. I mean, there’s your private firm, but you’ve hardly done anything with it,” he said, trying to console her. Inside though, he was seething with rage.
The bastards had do
ne it again. And it obviously wasn’t Charlie Henry’s idea this time. Asher must be doing everything on his own now. No, Patton thought, that was why Asher had the other two killed—so that he could have the power to push his own ideas.
“Yeah,” she said, pulling away from him. She had her girlish pouty face now and he couldn’t resist kissing it. He kissed her and the small, soft kiss he’d planned turned into a long and passionate one that let him know what he would be doing later that evening. She pulled away again, a little breathless.
“I just like working for you,” she said, a little whine in her voice. He thought she was cute when she was like this.
“I like it too baby. But these guys aren’t letting up. I tried to stop them, but they just outfoxed me.”
She pressed her cheek to his chest and said “Yeah, but the game isn’t over yet.”
He smiled. She knew him a lot better than what he gave her credit for sometimes.
Everything about Bao’s current situation was bad, but nothing was worse than the fact that no one had talked to him for two days. At least he thought it was two days. He didn’t have anything to serve as a time reference. He remembered going to his friend Lindsay’s house, then leaving. But after that, everything was a blank. The only thing he knew was that he was very sore. When he woke up in a dark, unfamiliar room, he knew that he was in trouble. He was on a painfully hard bed and the blanket he was lying on was coarse, almost like an Army blanket. At first he yelled for help, but he gave this up after a half hour. Instead, Bao felt around the room. The floor was concrete. The walls were either concrete or cinder block. The only light in the room emanated from cracks around the heavy door, which, he realized, had no knob on his side.
Most people in his situation would have climbed up the walls out of fear, but Bao was different—at least, he’d been trained to be different. As a child, Bao was terrified of the dark. Instead of giving into Bao’s desire to sleep in his parents’ bed, Bao’s father walked him back into his own room and taught him how to meditate and to pray for calm like a good Buddhist. Eventually, Bao stopped waking in the middle of the night to seek comfort from his mother. Now, as he sat in this dark room, those lessons flooded back into his mind.
“Breathe in slowly, now … let it out even more slowly,” his father told him so many times, so gently and patiently. “And don’t just let it out of your mouth and nose. Let the breath out of your whole body.”
“That isn’t possible,” Bao would say, giggling.
But now Bao didn’t feel like laughing. Thankfully, though, he wasn’t afraid either. Two times he had been led out of the … the what … a cell? No one talked to him either time. They placed a bag over his head before leading him out of the room. Bao figured that whoever had him now were the same people who’d taken the other spies. His thoughts returned to his father, but just then, he heard the door opening. Not knowing what else to do, Bao sat at attention on the edge of his bed. Two hooded figures walked in and the light in the hallway blasted Baos’ sensitive eyes.
“Stand up and turn around,” one of the figures said gruffly.
Bao followed his orders immediately. He felt a plastic zip tie being tied onto one wrist, and then another onto the other wrist. Effectively handcuffed, one of the figures places a cloth bag over Bao’s head and then marched him forward. They pushed him down the hallway, then to the right, then to the left. He heard a door being unlocked and opened. Through his hood he sensed that the room was well lit. One of the people pushed him down onto a hard chair. Although he could sense someone’s presence, including those who’d brought him into the room, no one said a word to him for what seemed to be five minutes. Suddenly, somebody removed the bag. He was blinded again. Once his eyes adjusted, he found himself in a stark white room, sitting at a stainless steel table.
“Mr. Hahn,” came a surprisingly high-pitched male voice. The thin-faced man was balding and wore thick-framed glasses. “Sorry for this little inconvenience, but it’s come to our attention that you’re a member of a group of people who were hired to spy on Blue Creek.”
“We—,” Bao started to say, but was smacked in the head by someone that had been standing behind him. Someone straightened him and stepped away, but he could tell that they were still very close to him in case he spoke out of turn again.
“No need for explanations,” the voice said again. “We’re not asking for an admission or anything. We already know who you are and what you’re doing at Blue Creek. We’re just here to tell you that you will no longer be sending any falsified reports—.”
“I—,” Bao tried to say again, but was slugged in the stomach.
“Mr. Hahn, like I said, there’s no need for you to speak right now. I’m simply telling you,” the man said, impatience creeping into his voice, “you will not be filing any more reports that are negative towards the government. We have access to the entire network and we will know if you try to inform anyone. If you go against what we’re telling you now you’ll disappear.”
The matter-of-fact tone gave Bao chills. He considered speaking again but thought better of it. Instead, he sat there and nodded. Internally, though, he was weighing his options. What could he do? How was he going to let Patton know about this? There was no doubt that he was going to try, come hell or high water.
Governor Asher was in the hills west of town, sitting on a large boulder, overlooking the city—his city. Charlie Henry and Anna Radinski were now gone. No longer would he have to deal with the brooding old man or the controlling, manipulative little vixen. It was his time to shine. His ideas would finally be heard and implemented. His new level of power and influence felt right, like a custom-made saddle. At times like this, however, power felt like an itch that he couldn’t scratch. David Asher had reached the pinnacle of power, but he often found himself asking the same question of “What now?”
He hadn’t even been able to share in his latest triumph—the elimination of his former comrades. He regretted that and thought that he probably always would. He hated leaving important things up to other people, but he was learning on the job. As Anna told him time and time again, the person in charge couldn’t get their hands dirty. His only consolation was that he’d chosen the modes of their deaths. They’d treated him like a child, not giving him any say in what they were doing. And then the two bunglers had almost pissed it all away. He’d gotten recalled, for crying out loud. It was bad enough to lose in a reelection campaign, but to be recalled was worse.
But here he was—the king of the mountain. It was like the game that he and his friends used to play on a big dirt mound in their schoolyard. The competitors would start at different points at the bottom and then try to claw their way to the top. It didn’t matter who got their first. The winner was whoever could get there and then stay there. Young David often won because he was willing to play a little dirty. Sometimes he would throw dirt in the other boys’ eyes. Sometimes he would pull hair and bite ankles. Asher chuckled to himself at the memories, but then the painful ones inevitably crept their way into his mind.
His mother, if she was worth calling that, gave birth to him but that was about all she did for him. His father, a surf bum, merely donated the sperm. As David grew up and saw more of the world, he realized that his mother was just a skanky girl that used to hang around with the local surf bums. By the time she was twenty years old, she’d given up on trying to be a mother and dropped David off at her parents’ house. She would come around once in a while, but David was glad when she finally stopped trying to be a mother.
Not that his grandparents were much better. Losers beget losers, he thought. His grandfather was a retired member of a pipefitter’s union. His grandmother just smoked and drank and bitched at him and his grandpa all day. To escape, David spent nights with friends or slept out on the beach, and when he returned home no one ever asked him where he’d been. He’d always gotten the impression that his grandparents wished h
e would just go away for good and stop bothering them.
During the last semester of his senior year in high school he obliged them, finally leaving their house to live with a friend. He scraped enough credits together to graduate from high school, and after a couple of years in a community college, he had good enough grades to get into UC Santa Barbara. He studied philosophy and political science, but like most people with those degrees, he couldn’t figure out what to do for a job. He worked his way up to assistant manager of a Starbuck’s, but that quickly became boring. What he craved was action.
That was around the time that the Occupy Movement emerged. He attended some events in Los Angeles, but it was too tame for his taste. When he and his friends heard about the Occupy rallies in Oakland, they went immediately. David got a taste of what real protest was like. There was just something about continuing to fight with tear gas going off all around you.
His thoughts suddenly turned to Charlie Henry. The old man had regaled him and Anna with stories of the Vietnam protest—the “real” protests, as he called them. It was really the only time he admired Charlie, because, it was during those times he reminded Asher of his grandfather.
It was all moot now. Charlie was gone. Anna was gone. David Asher had come out on top. Once the dust had settled, Brian White told him about the others’ plans. Charlie wanted Brian to kidnap Asher, drive him out to the desert, shoot him, and bury his body. Anna would then eventually take his place. Anna wanted Brian to threaten Asher if he ran for reelection. Tyler Redding would then become governor with Charlie and Anna pulling the strings. White based his decision to back Asher on the fact that he hated Charlie and wasn’t taken with Anna’s manipulative ways. More important, Asher had offered him the best deal. He would be the head of security for Blue Creek City. Essentially, it was the top non-political position in the entire city. Asher assured him that Brian would only answer to him.
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