Anyway, after that, they quit using the Scary Clown gimmick—mostly—but the name stuck.
So this was the group I was going to be working with. You can see why I felt kind of ambivalent about it. The job wasn’t likely to be boring, but if I drew the wrong psycho for a partner, I might find myself wishing I was back with the bobbleheads.
I stopped in Bakersfield for a late dinner. Not long after I got back on the highway, the gas gauge, which had been telling me I still had almost a third of a tank left, suddenly dipped into the red zone. Fortunately there was a Mobil sign at the next exit.
The Mobil station was in a one-stoplight mountain town that had rolled up its sidewalks hours earlier. Coming down the main drag, I got a weird vibe. The street was deserted, but the kind of deserted you see in a horror movie, right before the zombies start coming out in droves. I’d been planning on pumping my own gas, but when I got to the station I pulled up to the full-service island instead.
The gas-station attendant wore a hooded sweatshirt that hid his face in shadow. “Chilly night,” he said, when I cracked the window. “Would you like to come inside for some coffee?”
“No thanks. Just fill it up with unleaded.”
I kept an eye on him while he pumped the gas. As he was putting the gas cap back on, he did this funny ten-second freeze with his head cocked, like he’d just heard a branch breaking out in the dark somewhere.
Then he was back at my window: “You sure you don’t want that coffee?”
“Positive.”
“It’s really good.” He tilted his head, and his right arm started twitching. “Trust me, you’ll be very glad you tried it.”
“Sorry, I’m a Mormon. Caffeine even touches these lips, I go straight to hell.” I made my own twitching motion with the credit card, and reluctantly he took it from me. He went into his office and stood just inside the door, tapping his feet. Then he came back out again.
My NC gun was stuffed in a brown paper bag next to my seat. I reached for it as the attendant came around to my window for the third time.
“This card’s no good,” he told me.
“Oh yeah?” I said, slipping the gun off safe. “I hear it works a lot better if you actually run it through the machine.”
“It’s no good.” His whole body was jerking violently to one side now.
“OK, give it back to me then. I’ll pay cash.”
“It’s against the rules for me to give it back. I’m going to need you to come inside with me.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Miss—”
“You want to keep the card, go ahead and keep it. But I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Miss, please…”
I came this close to shooting him. But as he leaned in to plead with me, I finally got a glimpse of his face, and saw that he was scared silly. And then—probably because I was already in a horror-movie frame of mind—it occurred to me that I’d heard this story before somewhere.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Are you acting weird because there’s a guy with an ax crouched behind my back seat?”
The gas-station attendant blinked. “You know him?”
“Well, we haven’t been formally introduced, but I’m pretty sure his name is Bob.”
“Oh,” the attendant said. “OK. I’ll just go run your card, then…”
He went back into the office; I looked in my rearview mirror. “Robert Wise, I presume?”
“If I weren’t,” Wise said, “you’d be dead. Or wishing you were.” He got up, and despite the tough talk and the double-bitter in his hands, my first impression was that he wasn’t all that scary. He didn’t look like an ax murderer; he looked like an army ranger who’d gotten lost on his way to chop some firewood.
“How long have you been back there?” I asked him. “Since Bakersfield?”
“Does it matter?”
“I just want to know how cranky you are. If you’ve been sitting on the floor all the way from S.F., your butt must be pretty sore by now.”