“You’re funny,” said Wise. “True mentioned you were funny.” Then he said, “Wait here,” and got out.
I watched him walk towards the gas-station office, ax swinging at his side. As Wise came in the door, the attendant looked up from the credit-card machine and started to raise his hands. Then the office lights went out.
Two minutes passed. Wise reappeared, minus his ax. He trotted back to the SUV and got into the front passenger seat. “Here,” he said, handing me the credit card.
“Uh…What did you just do?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“What did you do, Wise?”
“I’ll tell you later. Right now, we need to get away from here.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Sometime in the next forty-two seconds would be good.”
The wristwatch glance stopped me from arguing. I put the SUV in gear and drove, counting “one one thousand, two one thousand,” under my breath. When I got to “forty-two one thousand,” bright light flared in the rearview.
I took a hand off the wheel and reached for my NC gun. The paper bag was empty.
“That’s all right, Jane,” Wise said. “I’ll hang on to the weapon for now. You just concentrate on driving. And don’t worry about that guy back there—he had it coming, I promise.”
“What the hell—”
“Just drive.”
I drove. Wise didn’t speak again until we were in Nevada. A few miles past the state line, he had me leave the highway for an unpaved road that snaked north into the desert.
“We’re not going to Vegas tonight?”
“No. My place.”
The road ended at a fenced compound whose gate opened automatically for us. Wise directed me inside, to a long, low, warehouse-style building with a sign that read LAWFUL GOOD PRESS. As soon as I’d parked, he took the keys.
“It’s OK,” I told him. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m too tired.”
“Yeah, well, this way I don’t have to worry about you driving off in your sleep.”
“What if I walk off in my sleep?”
“There are coyotes,” said Wise. “So don’t.”
I followed him into the warehouse, to a musty room where a cot had already been set up for me. “Bathroom’s straight back if you need it,” he said. “Other than that, if you get an urge to snoop around—”
“I know. Coyotes.”
I woke up in the morning to a vision of swastikas. To the left of my cot was a bookcase labeled ARYAN LITERATURE, filled with display copies of books with titles like A Hoax Called Auschwitz and The Illustrated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I got up, rubbing sleep from my eyes, and checked out the other bookcases lining the room, each with its own subject: White Supremacy; Black Supremacy; Religion; Firearms and Silencers; Knife-Fighting and Martial Arts; Bomb-Making; Biological Warfare; Torture Techniques; Confidence Games; Phony I.D. and Identity Theft; Computer Hacking; Money-Laundering and Tax Evasion; Stalking; Revenge.
I’d wandered over to Bomb-Making and was leafing through The Patriot’s Cookbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Brewing Explosives and Chemical Weapons at Home when Wise came into the room. He was showered and shaved, and in a much mellower mood than the night before. “Found something you like?”
“Lawful Good Press,” I said. “Is that a joke?”
“I don’t know. Are you laughing?”
I held up The Patriot’s Cookbook. “Is this a joke?”
“It’s no substitute for a college chemistry degree, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“The recipes don’t work?”
Wise made a seesawing motion with his hand. “The quality of the information varies. The smoke-and stink-bomb recipes are pretty solid; the ones for TNT and plastique, not so much.”
“What about this one?” I pointed to a line in the table of contents that read, “Sarin Gas.”
“Look at the equipment list.”
I did. “What’s a Gallinago flask?”
“A very specialized piece of hardware—so specialized, it doesn’t actually exist. But if you ask for it at a chemical-supply house, or try to search for it on the Internet, bells go off in Panopticon.”