This didn’t please Hazel as it ought to have done. She said to me, “Honey, are you all right?”
I took a deep breath of diner air scented with fried onions and the sizzling beef on the griddle. “I don’t know yet.”
“This here is a good boy,” Hazel told my dining companions.
“If you say so,” Leftie said.
Rightie added, “We have his best interests at heart.”
A waitress, Pinkie Krankauer, leaned past Rightie to tell Phil she needed two draft beers for booth four. After giving me a worried look, Phil went to draw the brews, leaving the griddle work to his sister.
When Hazel retreated reluctantly, the man with golden eyes said, “So you don’t remember what happened in Peptoe?”
“I was sent to a Catholic orphanage here when I was three days old. Anyway, not much happens in a town of nine hundred and six.”
“They’ve had a growth spurt since then,” Leftie said. “There’s now nine hundred and twelve.”
“Though it’s become a metropolis,” Rightie said, “a little baby abandoned in the middle of a highway would be a big deal even in the new and improved Peptoe.”
“Well, I guess it would be. Listen, what agency are you with? I have a right to know who I’m talking to.”
The handsome one on my left produced an ID wallet. He was with the Internal Security Agency. I’d heard of it, but I didn’t know how it was different from the FBI, NSA, DSA, ATF, Homeland Security, or any other law-enforcement agency. These days, America is a lot more policed at the federal level than it was only a decade earlier.
Putting away the ID wallet, Leftie spoke softly, as if everyone in the diner was trying to eavesdrop, and maybe they were. “See, we could’ve been waiting for you in your apartment when you came home, but we didn’t know what surprises you might have up your sleeve.”
“Surprises?” I said, puzzled.
Rightie whispered, “If you try anything tricky here—”
“Tricky?” I said.
“Try anything unique, with all these witnesses, it’ll be a big story. We don’t think you want a big story.”
“Unique?” I said, having been reduced to one-word responses.
Neither of them said anything for half a minute, merely stared at me in a way that at first I thought was meant to be intimidating. But as I turned my head from side to side, I realized that the hard-ass manner they’d affected was not just who they were as agents but was also intended to mask their fear. They were afraid of me.
In my nineteen years, no one in the world had been afraid of me, not even once. I had been beaten up by angry spelling-bee losers, for heaven’s sake.
The brute with the mashed-in face swallowed hard, as if for a moment something had been stuck in his throat. He said softly, “The first one we knew like you, this guy named Ollie, we tried to sit him down for a talk in a nice private place.”
The one on my left, who had slipped a hand under his suit coat, murmured, “Two of our people are in the booth behind us. They’ve drawn their guns and are holding them under the table.”
Rightie said, “With Ollie, we quietly explained our intentions, laid out why it was in his best interest to cooperate—”
“—but it was downhill from there,” said Leftie.
Rightie said, “He did some really mean shit to some of our people.”
Their back-and-forth patter seemed as well rehearsed as an Abbott and Costello routine, though not as funny.
“I’m not mean,” I said lamely.
“What we want you to do,” the brutish one said, “is let us cuff your hands behind your back and take you outside to our van. We just need to have a talk, need to understand. We don’t want to hurt you.”
“But we will,” said Leftie, “if you go unique on us. So don’t get tricky.”
Rightie grunted agreement. He was so hushed that I could hardly hear the voce in his sotto voce. “We’ll shoot you in the head. All four of us. That’s what worked well before.”
The GQ model with golden eyes hissed, “Yes, yes, very well.”
As you might imagine, I was by now so terrified that I worried about the retentive strength of my bladder. “Listen, guys, you’re making a big mistake. Whoever you think I am, I’m not.”
No one watching our little lunch-counter drama could have been sure who these men were and might well have thought they were mob thugs to whom I owed money. Later I learned the ISA is widely despised, so it might not have mattered if anyone had heard Leftie identify his agency.