James Penney's New Identity/Guy Walks Into a Bar

by Lee Child

  These stories were first published in the STORYCUTS series by Transworld Digital 2011

  Copyright © Lee Child 2011

  Lee Child has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  James Penney's New Identity/Guy Walks Into a Bar

  James Penney's New Identity

  Guy Walks Into a Bar

  Backmatter

  Lee Child

  James Penney's New Identity/Guy

  Walks Into a Bar

  James Penney’s New Identity

  THE PROCESS THAT turned James Penney into a completely different person began ten years ago, at one in the afternoon on a Monday in the middle of June, in Laney, California. A hot time of day, at a hot time of year, in a hot part of the country. The town sits comfortably on the east shoulder of the road that winds from Mojave to LA, fifty miles south of the one and fifty miles north of the other. Due west, the southern rump of the Coastal Range Mountains is visible. Due east, the Mojave Desert disappears into the haze. Very little happens in Laney. After that Monday in the middle of June ten years ago, even less ever did.

  There was one industry in Laney. One factory. A big spread of a place. A long low assembly shed, weathered metal siding, built in the sixties. Office accommodations at the north end, in the shade, two stories of them. The first floor was low grade. Clerical functions took place there. Billing and accounting and telephone calling. The second story was high grade. Managers and designers occupied the space. The corner office at the right hand end used to be the Personnel Manager’s place. Now it was the Human Resources Manager’s place. Same guy, new title on his door.

  Outside that door in the long second floor corridor was a line of chairs. The Human Resources Manager’s secretary had rustled them up and placed them there that Monday morning. The line of chairs was occupied by a line of men and women. They were silent. Every five minutes the person at the head of the line would be called into the office. The rest of them would shuffle up one place. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. They knew what was happening.

  Just before one o’clock, James Penney shuffled up one space to the head of the line. He waited a long five minutes and stood up when he was called. Stepped into the office. Closed the door behind him. Sat down again in front of the desk. The Human Resources Manager was a guy called Odell. Odell hadn’t been long out of diapers when James Penney started work at the Laney plant.

  “Mr. Penney,” Odell said.

  Penney said nothing, but he nodded in a guarded way.

  “We need to share some information with you,” Odell said.

  Then he stopped like he needed a response out of Penney before he could continue. Penney shrugged at him. He knew what was coming. He heard things, same as anybody else.

  “Just give me the short version, OK?” he said.

  Odell nodded. “We’re laying you off.”

  “For the summer?” Penney asked him.

  Odell shook his head.

  “For good,” he said.

  Penney took a second to get over the sound of the words. He’d known they were coming, but they hit him like they were the last words he ever expected Odell to say.

  “Why?” he asked.

  Odell shrugged. He didn’t look like he was enjoying this. But on the other hand, he didn’t look like it was upsetting him much, either.

  “Downsizing,” he said. “No option. Only way we can go.”

  “Why?” Penney said again.

  Odell leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. Started the speech he’d already made many times that day.

  “We need to cut costs,” he said. “This is an expensive operation. Small margin. Shrinking market. You know that.”

  Penney stared into space and listened to the silence breaking through from the factory floor. “So you’re closing the plant?”

  Odell shook his head again. “We’re downsizing, is all. The plant will stay open. There’ll be some maintenance business. Some repairs, overhauls. But not like it used to be.”

  “The plant will stay open?” Penney said. “So how come you’re letting me go?”

  Odell shifted in his chair. Pulled his hands from behind his head and folded his arms across his chest, defensively. He had reached the tricky part of the interview.

  “It’s a question of the skills mix,” he said. “We had to pick a team with the correct blend of skills. We put a lot of work into the decision. And I’m afraid you didn’t make the cut.”

  “What’s wrong with my skills?” Penney asked. “I got skills. I’ve worked here seventeen years. What’s wrong with my damn skills?”

  “Nothing at all,” Odell said. “But other people are better. We have to look at the broad picture. It’s going to be a skeleton crew, so we need the best skills, the fastest learners, good attendance records, you know how it is.”

  “Attendance records?” Penney said. “What’s wrong with my attendance records? I’ve worked here seventeen years. You saying I’m not a reliable worker?”

  Odell touched the brown file folder in front of him.

  “You’ve had a lot of time out sick,” he said. “Absentee rate just above eight percent.”

  Penney looked at him incredulously.

  “Sick?” he said. “I wasn’t sick. I was post-traumatic. From Vietnam.”

  Odell shook his head again. He was too young.

  “Whatever,” he said. “It’s still a big absentee rate.”

  James Penney just sat there, stunned. He felt like he’d been hit by a train.

  “So who stays on?” he asked.

  “We looked for the correct blend,” Odell said again. “Generally, the younger end of the workforce. We put a lot of management time into the process. We’re confident we made the right decisions. You’re not being singled out. We’re losing eighty percent of our people.”

  Penney stared across at him. “You staying?”

  Odell nodded and tried to hide a smile, but couldn’t.

  “There’s still a business to run,” he said. “We still need management.”

  There was silence in the big corner office. Outside, the hot breeze stirred off the desert and blew a listless eddy over the metal building. Odell opened the brown folder and pulled out a blue envelope. Handed it across the desk.

  “You’re paid up to the end of July,” he said. “Money went in the bank this morning. Good luck, Mr. Penney.”

  The five-minute interview was over. Odell’s secretary appeared and opened the door to the corridor. Penney walked out. The secretary called the next man in. Penney walked past the long quiet row of people and made it to the parking lot. Slid into his car. It was a red Firebird, a year and a half old, and it wasn’t paid for yet. He started it up and drove the mile to his house. Eased to a stop in his driveway and sat there, thinking, in a daze, with the motor running. Then he heard the faint bell of his phone in his house. He made it inside before it stopped. It was a friend from the plant.

  “They can you too?” the friend asked him.

  Penney
mumbled his answer so he didn’t have to say the exact words, but the tone of his voice told his friend what he needed to know.

  “There’s a problem,” the guy said. “Company informed the bank. I just got a call asking what I was going to do about the payments I got. The bank holding paper on you?”

  Penney went cold. Gripped the phone.

  “Paper?” he said. “You bet they’re holding paper on me. Just about every damn thing I got. House, car, furniture. They got paper on everything. What they say to you?”

  “What the hell do you think?” the guy said. “They’re a bank, right? I stop making the payments, I’m out on the street. The repo man is coming for the car right now.”

  Penney went quiet. He was thinking. He was thinking about his car. He didn’t care about the house. Or the furniture. His wife had chosen all that stuff. She’d saddled him up with big payments on all that stuff, just before she walked out. She’d called it the chance for a new start. It hadn’t worked. She’d gone and he was still paying for her damn house and furniture. But the car was his. The red Firebird. That automobile was the only thing he’d ever bought that he’d really wanted. He didn’t feel like losing it. But he sure as hell couldn’t keep on paying for it.

  “James?” the guy on the phone said. “You still there?”

  Penney was imagining the repo man coming for his car.

  “James?” his friend said again. “You there?”

  Penney closed his eyes tight.

  “Not for long,” he said. “I’m out of here.”

  “Where to?” the guy said. “Where the hell to?”

  Penney felt a desperate fury building inside him. He smashed the phone back into the cradle and moved away, and then turned back and tore the wire out of the wall. He stood in the middle of the room and decided he wouldn’t take anything with him. And he wouldn’t leave anything behind, either. He ran to the garage and grabbed his spare can of gasoline. Ran back to the house. Emptied the can over his ex-wife’s sofa. He couldn’t find a match, so he lit the gas stove in the kitchen and unwound a roll of paper towels. Put one end on the stove top and ran the rest through to the living room. When his makeshift fuse was well alight, he skipped out to his car and started it up. Turned north towards Mojave and settled in for the drive.

  His neighbor noticed the fire when the flames started coming through the roof. She called the Laney fire department. The firemen didn’t respond. It was a volunteer department, and all the volunteers were in line inside the factory, upstairs in the narrow corridor.

  Then the warm air moving off the Mojave Desert freshened up into a hot breeze, and by the time James Penney was thirty miles away the flames from his house had set fire to the dried scrub that had been his lawn. By the time he was in the town of Mojave itself, cashing his last pay check at the bank, the flames had spread across his lawn and his neighbor’s and were licking at the base of her back porch.

  Like any California boom town, Laney had grown in a hurry. The factory had been thrown up around the start of Nixon’s first term. A hundred acres of orange groves had been bulldozed and five hundred frame houses had quadrupled the population in a year. There was nothing really wrong with the houses, but they’d seen rain less than a dozen times in the thirty-one years they’d been standing, and they were about as dry as houses can get. Their timbers had sat and baked in the sun and been scoured by the dry desert winds. There were no hydrants built into the streets. The houses were close together, and there were no windbreaks. But there had never been a serious fire in Laney. Not until that Monday in June.

  James Penney’s neighbor called the fire department for the second time after her back porch was well alight. The fire department was in disarray. The dispatcher advised her to get out of her house and just wait for their arrival. By the time the fire truck got there, her house was destroyed. And the next house in line was destroyed, too. The desert breeze had blown the fire on across the second narrow gap and sent the old couple living there scuttling into the street for safety. Then Laney called in the fire departments from Lancaster and Glendale and Bakersfield, and they arrived with proper equipment and saved the day. They hosed the scrub between the houses and the blaze went no farther. Just three houses destroyed, Penney’s and his two downwind neighbors. Within two hours the panic was over, and by the time Penney himself was fifty miles north of Mojave, Laney’s sheriff was working with the fire investigators to piece together what had happened.

  They started with Penney’s place, which was the upwind house, and the first to burn, and therefore the coolest. It had just about burned down to the floor slab, but the layout was still clear. And the evidence was there to see. There was tremendous scorching on one side of where the living room had been. The Glendale investigator recognized it as something he’d seen many times before. It was what is left when a foam-filled sofa or armchair is doused with gasoline and set alight. He explained to the sheriff how the flames would have spread up and out, setting fire to the walls and ceiling, and how, once into the roof space, the flames would have consumed the rafters and dropped the whole burning structure downwards into the rest of the building. As clear a case of arson as he had ever seen. The unfortunate wild cards had been the stiffening desert breeze and the close proximity of the other houses.

  Then the sheriff had gone looking for James Penney, to tell him somebody had burned his house down, and his neighbors’. He drove his black-and-white to the factory and walked upstairs and past the long line of people and into Odell’s corner office. Odell told him what had happened in the five-minute interview just after one o’clock. Then the sheriff had driven back to the Laney station house, steering with one hand and rubbing his chin with the other.

  And by the time James Penney was driving along the towering eastern flank of Mount Whitney, a hundred and fifty miles from home, there was an all-points-bulletin out on him, suspicion of deliberate arson, which in the dry desert heat of southern California was a big, big deal.

  The California Highway Patrol is one of the world’s great law enforcement agencies. Famous throughout America and the world, romantic, idealized. The image of the West Coast motorcycle cop astride his powerful machine is one of the nation’s great icons. Smart tan shirt, white T underneath, white helmet, mirrored aviator glasses, tight jodhpurs, gleaming black boots. Cruising the endless sunny highways, marshaling that great state’s huge transient population toward a safe destination.

  That’s the image. That’s why Joey Gunston had lined up to join. But Joey Gunston soon found out the reality is different. Any organization has a glamour side and a dull side. Gunston was stuck on the dull side. He wasn’t cruising the sunny coastal highways on a big bike. He was on his own in a standard police spec Dodge, grinding back and forward through the Mojave Desert on U.S. 91. He had no jodhpurs, no boots, his white T was a limp gray rag, and his mirrored shades were cheap Rayban copies he’d paid for himself in L.A., which he couldn’t wear anyway because he was working the graveyard shift, nine at night until six in the morning.

  So Joey Gunston was a disillusioned man. But he wasn’t bitter. He wasn’t that type of a guy. The way it worked with Joey, hand him a disappointment and he wouldn’t fold up. He would work harder. He would work so damn hard that he would escape the dull side and get the transfer over to the glamour side. He figured it was like paying his dues. He figured he’d work U.S. 91 in a factory-beige Dodge with plastic CHP badging stuck on the doors as long as it took to prove himself. So far it had taken thirty-one months. No news about a transfer to U.S. 101 and a motorcycle. Not even a hint. But he wasn’t going to let his standards drop.

  So he carried on working hard. That involved looking out for the break he knew had to be coming. Problem was, the scope for a break on U.S. 91 was pretty limited. It’s the direct route between LA and Vegas, which gives it some decent traffic, and there’s some pretty scenery. Gunston’s patch stretched a hundred and twenty miles from Barstow in the west over to the state line on the slope of Clark Mo
untain. His problem was the hours he worked. At night, the traffic slackened and the pretty scenery was invisible. For thirty-one months he’d done nothing much except stop speeders and about twice a week radio in for ambulances when some tanked guy ran off the road and smashed himself up.

  But he carried on hoping. That Monday night at nine o’clock he’d read through the bulletins pinned up in the dispatcher’s office. He’d copied the details into a leatherette notebook his sister had bought for him. One of those details concerned an APB on a Laney guy, James Penney, arson and criminal damage, believed to be on the loose in a red Firebird. Gunston copied the plate number in large writing so he’d be able to read it in the gloom of his car. Then he’d cruised sixty miles east and holed up on the shoulder near Soda Lake.

  A lot of guys would have gone right to sleep. Gunston knew his colleagues were working day jobs, maybe security in L.A. or gumshoeing in the valleys, and sleeping the night away in their Dodges on the shoulder. But Gunston never did that. He played ball and stayed awake, ready for his break.

  It arrived within an hour. Ten o’clock that Monday evening. The red Firebird streaked past him, heading east, maybe eighty-five miles an hour, maybe ninety. Gunston didn’t need to check his leatherette notebook. The plate jumped right out of the dark at him. He fired up the Dodge and floored it. Hit the button for the lights and the siren. Jammed his foot down and steered with one hand. Used the other to thumb the mike.

  “In pursuit of a red Firebird,” he radioed. “Plate matches APB.”

  There was a crackle on the speaker and the dispatcher’s voice came back.

  “Position?” he asked.

  “Soda Lake,” Gunston said. “Heading east, fast.”

  “OK, Joey,” the dispatcher said. “Stick with him. Nail him before the line. Don’t be letting the Nevada guys get in on this, right?”

  “You got it, chief,” Gunston said. He eased the Dodge up to a hundred and wailed on into the night. He figured the Firebird might be a mile ahead. Conceivable that Penney might slew off and head down into the town of Baker, but if he didn’t, then Penney was his. The break had maybe arrived.