chapter thirty-four

Of course, with our new understanding of Sussudio’s motives, the first place to start was Dr. Gallo. Paul went back to his programming, Emma Jan went back to researching other suicide help groups, and I, well aware of George’s predatory interest in what may or may not have transpired between Dr. Gallo and me last night, could show no hesitation: “I shall contact Dr. Gallo at once.”

“I’ll bet,” he leered.

“Stop that.” I would not rise to his childish antics. “Of course you must come with me.”

“Perv!”

“To interview him again.” I turned and gave him a look, and he clutched both ears and backed away.

“Just calling it the way I see it, ma’am, and keep your fingernails to yourself, you horrible bitch. You’re not fooling anybody.”

“No?”

He snorted, an unlovely sound. “You want him so bad you’re practically vibrating.”

True. Yet irrelevant. “And regardless of what people think they see, George Pinkman, I am a petite Asian-American woman. I am the part of a tall blond midwesterner who thinks she is Asian-American and not gangly.”

“You spend waaaay too much time listening in on my and Cadence’s private conversations.”

I snorted, another unlovely sound, but some absurdities can only be met with a snort. Even those who know better, as George did, as I did, often forgot that whatever our thoughts to the contrary, Adrienne and Cadence and I were the same person. We were personality quirks, not people, and no more a separate individual than Paul’s synesthesia was a separate person from him.

(It has taken years of therapy for me to admit this, for Cadence to admit this. Adrienne admits nothing, though she did set our doctor’s desk on fire. Now he sees us with no fewer than three extinguishers in the office, one within hand’s reach at all times.)

All this ruminating about something it had taken me years to acknowledge to avoid a simple truth: George and I had to go through all that nonsense to hide how delighted and uneasy I was at the opportunity to see Dr. Gallo less than sixteen hours after I nearly raped him in his own backseat.

(Pathetic.)

Yes.

On our way to the doctor’s place of business, we stopped in to see Michaela, who was, for a wonder, not slicing phallic-shaped vegetable matter but working quietly at her laptop in her office. She was bent forward and typing so intently her silver hair had swung into her face. Her hair was normally kept under stern control with clips, headbands, and/or the force of her will.

“We have some excellent insight into Sussudio,” I told her without preamble after her distracted “Come” in response to my knock. “And are going to see Dr. Gallo to follow up new leads. Also, Cadence discussed the funding issue with Paul Torn.”

“Coward,” she said, not unkindly.

“Yes indeed.” I would take a bullet (and, in fact, had) before choosing to comfort someone deeply upset. I never knew what to do with my hands (pat, pat) or what to say (“There, there”). Cadence had a gift, in that she did not especially enjoy upsetting people, either, but did not shy away from comforting them. “He took it well.”

“You mean she told him in some clumsy transparent way, and then he—what’s the saying? lost his shit?—but she broke it down for him and so he decided not to blow up the building on a trial basis, leaving you and your worthless partner shivering with relief.”

“Why, it’s like you saw the whole thing on closed-circuit television.”

She smiled, a rare and lovely thing. “Well done, all of you. Well, some of you. And now off you go.”

“Off we go,” George said once we were on the way to my car. (I flatly refused to be devoured by his Smart Pure coupe twice in two days.) “You know, I wonder if this funding thing was maybe inevitable.”

“What does that mean?”

“You mean, like, literally? What do those words I just said literally mean, or where am I going with this? Because if it’s the latter, you should have said the latter.”

“George…” How could he make my head hurt without ever touching me?

“Maybe there’s no BOFFO at all.”

“Shush.” There were too many paranoids about, Saturday or no. And schizophrenics. And—“Just shush.”

Sensible when his safety was on the line, he changed the subject. “I get why you’re in denial about Gallo. Hey, he’s a compelling guy, if you like tall lean doctors with strong hands and flashing eyes, a good heart, and a mysterious past.”

I swallowed a giggle at his accurate summation.

“But if you’ve just got an itch, for the zillionth time—”

“You are having a terrible idea and it is coming straight out of your mouth.”

“—then come to your old pal, Georgie! I’ve got the ram for your ramrod, whatever that means. One hop in the sack with moi and it’s itch-be-gone!”

“I could kill you with a grain of sand,” I reminded him.

“I know! And I bet you’d look super hot while graining me to death. Sanding me to death? Either/or, don’t care. I’ll go quietly if you promise to have sex with my corpse. I’ll need that in writing, by the way. And notarized.”

George Pinkman was a walking talking migraine. There were times I actually felt my temples throb when he spoke. That really happens. Blood vessels dilate under stress and your body can sense the change in pressure if you pay attention.

He went back to his odd earlier subject once he was belting himself into my passenger seat. “Come on. An elite branch of the FBI staffed purely by nutjobs? Armed nutjobs, often heavily medicated?”

“So, what?” I started the car, a used Ford Fusion hybrid. Normally I would disapprove of buying another car owner’s pile of problems on wheels, but in this case I was buying our friend Cathie’s problems, and her problems with the car had more to do with her OCD than with the products built and maintained by the Ford Motor Company. “BOFFO does not exist? We only dream we work here? It is an illusion, a hologram?”

“Of course not, dumbass. But what if it’s not BOFFO? What if it’s another agency, maybe even for-profit. Not the government at all. Ooh, what if BOFFO pulled an Alias and we only think we’re working for the CIA and we’re really working for SD-6?”

“I do not understand what you just said.”

“Holy shit!” George was clearly thinking out loud. “Does that make you Sydney? You’re self-righteous and annoying enough.… So does that make me Michael Vaughn or Marcus Dixon? I vote for Dixon, because of his sheer bad-assery. And Michaela is definitely Arvin Sloane.”

“George, you are not speaking words I understand.”

“Then listen hard! What if BOFFO’s not only lost funding, what if it was never part of the FBI?”

“But we were all recruited. We all went through the training.”

“But not at Quantico.”

“No, of course not. Most agents don’t even know about BOFFO.” At George’s triumphant silence, I added, “As they don’t know about the black ops agencies. We all know they are unconstitutional as of 1972 and we all know they still exist. Of course your average field agent would know nothing about them. We are the same.”

George shook his head. “I dunno, Shiro. I’ve been thinking about it even before Michaela sprung her little ‘You’re maybe all fired but maybe not either way shut up about it’ surprise. I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of years.” He paused. “Okay, since she recruited me.”

“But if you had concerns all this time, why not say anything earlier?”

He shrugged. “Why would I? I don’t care if we’re real or not. I get to do stuff like arrest Jesus and trick Emma Jan into looking into mirrors. Why would I fuck with that?”

“You are a simple creature, George.” I said that not without admiration. He was a wretch, but he also spent little time on self-examination-induced fretting. It freed him up to do whatever nasty things he did by himself. To himself, most likely …

“If you think about it, it makes sense.”

“I have, and it does not.”

“Look, I know you collect mom figures and think she can do no wrong—”

Shocked, I cried, “I do not!” Right? Correct.

“It’s no secret Michaela has money. She didn’t get that Lexus on a government salary.”

I nodded as we drove across town to Regions—Dr. Gallo ran one of the local blood banks. (That was how we met, in fact—Cadence makes us all donate platelets.) Even the AiC could not expect to make more than $95,000 a year, and that was with at least a decade of experience.

“Well, what if BOFFO was always a lie? The good-enough-for-a-five-star-restaurant kitchen? All that amazing equipment, just for the boss? All the shrinks in-house, the meds, the hours of therapy, our get-out-of-jail-free cards—tell me that doesn’t cost a mint and a half.”

“But there are several unprofitable government agencies.”

“Yeah, like, all of them. But we’re allowed to be super expensive with no real return?”

“There is a return. We catch killers no one else can.”

“Sure. But for who?”

“Whom.”

“Sure, focus on my grammar, not my words. That’s not typical or anything.” He covered his earlobes again and added, “I’m just saying, it’s weird. Not BOFFO-weird. Weird-weird.”

I shook my head. “I believe in Michaela. She would not lie.”

“Why?”

“What?” I was so rattled I nearly drove through a red light. It was only four miles to the hospital, and it was taking entirely too long. Why couldn’t George focus on the dreadful things he would wish to do to, say, the attractive brunette jogger waiting for the light?

“Why wouldn’t Michaela lie? She’s killed people, but— Whoa, look at that hot bitch in the jogging bra waiting for a— Hey, baby, I got your green light right here! Anyway, Michaela’s shot more people than I have, but lying’s a no-no? Even if she thought, in her twisted Arvin Sloane-y mind, it was for the greater good?”

I shook my head so hard I was momentarily dizzy. “She wouldn’t. She would not.”

“All right, take a pill. No, literally. I can see this is upsetting you, which normally would be awesome for me in sooo many ways. But I hate the taste of air bags and that’s twice you’ve almost rear-ended someone.” He mimed zipping his lips closed, then ruined it by talking. “Subject closed. At least until we can talk about it without me dying in a horrific car crash.”

He was half right, at least.

I thought about how I had been recruited, and knew in my heart that George was wrong about all of it. BOFFO was not a lie. It was the finest thing we had ever done.

How, then, could it not be real?