CHAPTER ONE

The target wore a determined scowl as he pulled into traffic in his shiny dark Lexus.

I talked into the grimy microphone, "Here he comes. You ready, Drifter?"

Drifter’s voice came right back over the scratchy speaker, "Sure am. Send him on." Drifter’s always gung-ho, even getting near the end of a long day. Drifter’s also the best damn three-lane-drifter I’ve ever known. He can start in the curb lane, move to the center so slowly that he blocks both lanes for what seems like an hour if you’re stuck behind him, then continue on over to the left lane. Never uses signals, of course. His real name is Bob, and he’s the closest friend I have from the team.

We never once saw a cop even driving like we did, because the company had juice. Safely juiced, we let Drifter have the first crack at the target. The poor fool yanked the Lexus leftward to pass Drifter. Too bad for him that Zak, in a beater that defied description, pulled into the left lane just as Drifter had the center and right lanes completely blocked. Zak’s left rear fender flapped as his car moseyed along. The target’s mouth fell open when Zak tapped his brakes, and the Lexus dipped its front bumper in a reluctant salute to my team. It’s a wonderful thing to watch coordinated driving like that. It’s the one part of my old job I truly miss.

Zak was driving a car that I’m sure never passed a smog test, maybe even when it was new, and was drenching the target in a cloud of oily black smoke while Drifter, driving his small SUV, lazed back and forth between the two right-hand lanes. I pulled out of my spot and fell in line in front of the target, ready to do my part. That was to pull in the right turn lane directly in front of the target in order to prevent him from making the light. I did it with seconds to spare!

Then I talked into the microphone again, "Barb," I said while absently flicking a bit of gunk off of the instrument I held for several hours every day, "we’re about to make the turn onto Decatur. You ready over there?"

"Let’s put this turkey out of his misery," she answered. When I first became team lead I’d worried when she talked like that, but it’s just her way. She’s never killed anyone, not on my shift anyway.

Decatur is a busy street during the afternoon rush hour so there was no turning on the red light, not that I would have anyway with a target behind me. Funny thing about the lights in Vegas: you’ll swear they’re never going to change. By the time I slowly turned the corner the target was grinding his jaws so hard I expected to see him spit out a tooth. The Lexus swerved into the left lane, I imagine intending to pass me, but Barb in her white Chevy coupe pulled out of a driveway just ahead of me. The target had to slam on his brakes and the Lexus gave us another salute. She hesitated just long enough, then took up all three lanes while she turned her car into the traffic. I knew what she was doing, but even I got antsy waiting for her to situate herself. Then the Lexus swerved to the left again, but Zak, using a route known only to him and his smoking beater, pulled into the left lane just as Barb dropped back into the center lane beside me. I could see the target now behind me by looking in my side mirror. His face looked purple and his mouth was working. Once again we were saving the people of Las Vegas from a dangerously aggressive driver, and I was proud of what we were doing.

To wrap up this typical service for a target, Drifter made a quick turn around a long block and managed to jam up the left turn lane just as the target was about to pull his Lexus into it. Barb pulled in behind the Lexus. Since the street they were turning into was only two lanes wide I knew that they’d keep him frustrated all the way home. My team was the best: they were professionals, and all of them, even Zak, who generally looked like an unredeemable slob, were proud of their work. It was the easiest team to supervise in the history of work teams, I’m sure. I’m still proud of them for that spirit they had: get the job done, have a good time, and after work go have a beer with your team.

Sometimes we’d stop at a bar we passed just because it looked like the food was good or something. Most Vegas bars have video poker screens built into the top of the bar, but we’d ignore them and take a table and get waited on. On this particular night we stopped at a real dumpy looking place near where we dropped the last target. It was the sort of place that proves that everything in Vegas isn’t shiny glitter. The stucco exterior looked worn down but friendly. It was called Howard’s. I don’t know who Howard was, but it turned out that the food was good, and cheap, and they had beer. I was the last one in, after Zak told me the location over the radio. As I walked in the lone neon sign over the door was flashing "ards Bar ood Liqu" over and over. Opening the door I saw a long mahogany bar with no video screens in it inside the front door and running back into the place. In a room behind the end of bar were a bunch of tables made of dark wood. My team was sitting at one that, like most of them, looked like it had come out on the short end of a long fight. Drifter sat limply, as usual. Barb was next to him, also as usual, but she looked alert and amused. Zak was by himself on one side of the table blending in with the furniture. I expected this place to smell like stale cigarettes and staler beer but all I could smell was frying food and suddenly I was starving. There was a waitress hovering around the table so I hurried to the back and sat down next to Drifter, on his right since Barb was on his left. That put Zak to my right. I was in time to order a burger, fries, and a beer. Life was good. The waitress narrowed her eyes as she looked at me while taking my order. Then she turned away to take our orders to the kitchen.

"What was that about?" I asked the table.

"She’s probably just tired, same as us," Zak said. "Well," I said, still watching the waitress walk away, "Screw her, then. How’d you like that last guy, huh? I thought he was gonna explode there for a bit."

Zak actually sat up a bit straighter and joined the conversation for real. "I was surprised he was still breathing. I couldn’t make that car any stinkier if I had to."

"Yes, I know," said Barb, "I was behind you too, you know."

"And guess what came up to help after you pulled off," Drifter was grinning and looking at me.

I had no idea, so I said, "I have no idea."

"UPS truck!" he laughed.

"No shit? UPS? Man, I love those guys!"

"You’d swear we were paying them," said Barb.

And so on it went for an hour, hour and a half, just like it did at least two or three nights each week.

The beginning of the end of our fun came when the company made what we thought were a series of mistakes about a particular target. The thing with targets was that we knew their names. We also always knew where the target lived, where the target worked, where the target liked to eat lunch, in fact whatever details we needed to know to decide how best to service them. If you ever worry about someone stealing your identity, don’t bother, because it’s already been done. For instance, we knew this target’s name was Rachel Goodbody, that she was an advocate for indigent clients suing insurance companies, that she worked for some low-paying agency in a dingy office downtown, and that she ate her lunch in the office and drove home at the same time every afternoon to a small house she bought back before the housing market exploded. We didn’t have any trouble with doing our job that evening and we left her at home looking angry as hell, which is how we normally left a target. Then the next day we were told to service her again.

Barb shook her long hair and shouted, "The same target, twice in two days?"

"Don’t they know that there’s only five of us, and that’s counting me?" said Sal with a violent head shake. Sal was a tall blonde woman, six feet two at least. She also was the dispatch person who almost never went out driving any more.

We talked about it for about an hour and finally decided to leave Zak behind to answer the phone and have Sal take his place. Zak’s old car was the most easily recognized of any of our vehicles anyway, and since Sal was almost never out any more we figured that this was the arrangement that would give us the best chance of not being noticed. It worked, too, and that night we all congratulated each other on being clever enough to pull it off.

Then the next day there it was again: Target: Rachel Goodbody. "What?" Sal shouted, her face getting red. Then she called and yelled at headquarters, then she yelled at them some more. Her yelling at them didn’t do a bit of good: headquarters kept insisting that we just ‘do our jobs.’ In the end Sal just slammed the phone down. Being, so to speak, stuck with it, we put Zak back in and took Drifter out. I was sure the target would notice who we were on the third day in a row, but we got her home as usual and I was thinking that somehow we’d pulled it off. Then instead of pulling into her driveway she did a fast U-turn and started chasing after us. After us!

I grabbed the microphone, "Guys," I said, "We gotta separate and quick!"

"Okay," said Zak, and peeled off down a side street trailing smoke. In spite of his apparent apathy Zak always seemed to be the quickest on the uptake. The target ignored him and kept chasing the rest of us.

"Barb, Sal," I said, "Let’s do a three-way split at the next intersection. Barb, you go left, Sal, you go right. I’ll go straight on."

"Okay," said Sal.

"Yo!" said Barb, so that’s just what we did. Barb’s Chevy snapped right, Sal’s Honda went left, and I kept my sedan headed straight ahead. The target, as I suspected she would, stayed after me. I took the center way because it seemed to me that it would be easier on an amateur driver not to make a fast turn. Besides, I was sure she’d follow my car anyway. I thought that nobody would really want to find out who’s driving a junker like Zak’s. In my sober sedan I looked the safest, so it stood to reason that I’d be the one that a target, a female target in particular, would chase. I let her keep chasing me for half a mile or so while I decided what my story was. When I had something figured out I pulled into a Seven-Eleven and ran inside. She pulled up at the curb out front and watched me go in. She was still watching the door when I came out. I pretended to notice her sitting there in her silver Prius for the first time, smiled and waved and shouted,

"Hey, hi! How about those guys, huh?" This seemed to confuse her a bit, because she hesitated and furrowed her brows at me.

"What guys?" she asked. I walked toward her car. I was trying to look really friendly.

"You know, in the traffic back there. I think they were out to get us both." She looked at me narrowly for a few seconds, then her shoulders slumped a bit.

"Oh, them. Figures," she said, "they wouldn’t be after just me, would they?"

"Can’t see why," I said with what I hoped was a dismissive toss of my head. "They’re probably garden variety assholes who just like to mess with other people, don’t you think?"

Her shoulders slumped some more. "Probably so," she said, nodding a bit.

Amazed that my little game had apparently worked, I relaxed enough to think that Goodbody was an appropriate enough name. Her voice was nice, too. She had dark hair cut sort of short above a face I wanted to look at more closely. I’d bought a couple of popsicles inside. I hoped that popsicles would buy a degree of friendship. "Want a Popsicle?" I asked trying to sound helpful and friendly, holding one out to her.

"A Popsicle?" she said.

"You should always keep up on your childish indulgences," I said. "It keeps you young."

She said, "You always talk like that?" I was too busy wondering what she was thinking to answer. Just about when I thought I’d lost my chance, she said, "What the hell? I haven’t had one of those in years." She grabbed the frozen treat and smiled.

I liked her smile. I held out a hand, "Tom," I said.

"Rayche," she said, and took my hand. I knew that, of course. Actually I knew her as Rachel, but who calls themselves Rachel these days? Rayche seemed like a nice name to me.

I thought I’d better say something. Invite her to something. For god’s sake, say something. So I said, "Hey, you like Italian food?" It was a stupid question, I know. Who could grow up in Las Vegas and not like Italian food?

Then I thought, maybe she didn’t grow up here. That would make it a smart question because in that case, as she was living in Vegas, home of tons of great Italian food most of which she’d never tasted, what else could she say but, "Italian? Is there good Italian around here?"

Now I was shocked. "In Las Vegas?" I said.

"Oh, yeah," she said, nodding, "the Mob were all Italians, weren’t they?"

I thought about the Jewish mob guys I knew about, but I didn’t say anything.

While I was thinking about Jewish mobsters she must have been thinking some more about my question, because she finally nodded and said, "Sure!"

"Sure?" I said. I’d almost forgotten what I’d asked. I racked my brain at warp speed trying to decide where to take her.

I must have been thinking for a while, because she interrupted my thinking by tapping me on the shoulder and saying, "Well, it’s your turn to say something now."

Her touch actually startled me. Luckily I’d just made a decision. "You know Carmine’s?" I asked.

"No, but I have heard it’s good," she said.

"Want to go try it out?" I asked.

"What? Right now?" she asked.

"Well, it’ll take a bit to get there. It’s out in Henderson near Sunset Station. But if you want, I’ll drive us." Her forehead wrinkled, which seemed sort of odd so I quickly added, "And bring you back here after, of course."

Then she smiled and said, "Sure, why not? I’ve been doing lots of dumb stuff today." Then she got out of her car, carefully made sure her doors were locked, and started walking toward the passenger door of my sedan.

"This will be my first ever ride in a Mazda," she said. She walked up to me with a fluid grace that I couldn’t help but watch.

I think my mouth was open as I grabbed the right-hand door and held it open for her. She sat down without any excess motion, and I closed the door after her and ran around to the driver’s door, opened it and sat down. My grimy microphone was on the console between us. She saw it and looked at me with raised eyebrows. Lucky for me, I’d had an explanation rehearsed for several years.

"It’s for my work in market research," I said. "I watch outdoor advertisements and report to my company about how many other people are doing the same thing."

"Really?" she said, frowning. "What if everyone who’s watching the billboard is just another marketing research person?"

I laughed and said, "Then I guess the ad will be reported as hugely successful by a whole lot of observers."

Rayche laughed then and said, "Good recovery. Better than I expected." Then she said, "I am starting to get hungry, now that I think about it. How about we head over to Carmine’s?"

I can take a hint so I started the car, put it in gear, and drove to Carmine’s without any trouble. The trip only took twenty minutes because of the light traffic. On the way I asked her if riding in a Mazda met with her approval. She smiled and said, "As long as I’m not driving it’s terrific." As would become a pattern, I didn’t know what to make of her answer.

Carmine’s wasn’t busy when we arrived so we were inside and seated in nothing flat. We ordered drinks and got menus right away. While she studied the menu I studied her. She was wearing a light pantsuit in honor of the fierce Las Vegas summer heat. I didn’t notice a lot of makeup, but her eyebrows looked like maybe she worked on them from time to time. Her slender fingers ran lightly over the plastic laminate of the menu while she studied the choices. Her nails were painted, but it was with a pink color that made it less than obvious that they’d been painted at all.

As she studied the menu she asked me, "So, what’s good here?"

I looked right at her brown eyes now, and said, "What isn’t? Everything’s good. The Pizza, all the pastas, the lasagna, the meatball sandwiches, all of it."

She flipped the menu over and studied the story printed on the back "Oh, they’re the same as Villa Pizza, like in the casinos?"

"There’s a Villa Pizza restaurant down on Boulder Highway. You should try it some time."

"Well, maybe I will if somebody ever invites me," she said, and smiled. This was almost the first thing she’d said that didn’t seem vaguely like she was judging my performance and finding it wanting. I thought that I really would have to invite her, and soon. A waitress wearing a black apron arrived. Rayche insisted that I order first. My heart fluttered as I ordered fettuccine Alfredo.

Then Rayche ordered lasagna. It turned out she really liked lasagna; she ate the whole order and a loaf and a half of bread besides. Our conversation seemed odd to me, because Rayche seemed to waver between liking me and tolerating me, so I wasn’t sure how things were going.

At one point she said, "Sorry about chasing you like that."

Of course I’d actually forgotten about that being an issue, since I was enjoying her company so much. Now that she’d reminded me, I just laughed, and said, "Oh, that’s okay. I was surprised that you were after me, I have to admit."

"I thought you were one of them, remember?"

"Oh, yeah. But, why were you chasing them? What would you do if you caught them?"

She paled and slid down in her chair, "Oh, my God, I never even thought of that! They could be dangerous!"

"Well, lucky you caught me instead, then, huh?"
She sat up straight, smiled slightly and said, "Maybe, but the jury’s still out on that one."

That set me back to worrying how things were going all through dinner, but I guess they were going okay because when I dropped her back at her car next to the Seven Eleven she said,

"I had a really nice time this evening after all. Here," she handed me a card with a phone number on it, "call me tomorrow and maybe we can do something else?"

Maybe we can do something else? Oh, great source of all that is good and wonderful, yes, yes, I was pretty sure that we could do something else.

I said, "I will. I promise. Good-night, Rayche."

She said, "Good night then," got into her car and drove off. I watched her go. If I hadn’t already known where she lived I might have followed her home like a lost puppy to see where it was. Instead I just watched her until she turned the corner, then drove home to my empty apartment.