Noddfa Imaginings - Fiction : July 2019

Whoever said trade wars are easy to win never operated a bookstore in Osceola that specialized in translated science fiction. After the initial boost from my run-in with the Patriot Police, even traffic at the coffee and wine bar had grown thin. To drum up business, I’d been forced to advertise in that throwaway coupon pack everyone moved straight to recycling when it showed up in the mail. Group discounts on the internet were my next step toward bankruptcy.

Eisteddfod's International sounded too much like an Old-World ally, not one of the profitable dictatorships that were currently popular. The latest round of tariffs had shattered my supply chain. My wholesaler now ran his business out of the Ecuadorian embassy where he’d claimed asylum just to avoid transnational charges. I was overstocked with all the Russian translations I could handle but serving French or Italian roast was almost out of the question. Now our Great Leader was threatening a domestic import duty on Napa Valley wines. Like California was a whole other country.

Plus, the DEA had set a forensic accountant digging through my books after their raid on Cache for Trash. To keep my wife in blissful ignorance, I’d registered the storage unit with the company contact info. Fortunately, last week I’d received a letter saying they’d punted the matter over to the IRS. Which I took to mean a lifetime reprieve given their latest round of layoffs. My accountant, Jennifer, didn’t exactly agree. She said if they ever linked up the case to my voter registration data, all of my remaining profit margin would go to paying off her boat.

Between that and the unrecouped front money I’d spent on bulk feminine hygiene and baby care products that my wife had so cavalierly given away, I felt more than a bit pinched. At my current credit card interest rate, it would only take 327 years to pay off what I owed. Jennifer had been amazed I’d been able to whittle it down far enough to offload it that fast.

When I returned home from that particular financial consultation, I was depressed. Not quite grow an Al Gore beard despondent again, just borderline Prince of Denmark melancholy. My wife insisted what I needed was a little retail therapy. So, she handed me the grocery list and a worn coupon envelope, and told me to buy something nice for myself with all the money I saved. Like a dozen of those little orange peel chocolate chip cookies I liked from the bakery, or some of that blueberry Wensleydale cheese I always raved about, or a four-pack of imported beer.

How long had she been clipping coupons? I thought that was an old lady’s game, one my depression-era grandmother might have played. Like cribbage. Were we really in such desperate straits? She laughed when I asked her. I was standing right next to her when she handed them over to the cashier every week. Really? I didn’t remember this. So, she showed me the printouts from the budget she updated annually as proof. One year, she’d saved us over six hundred dollars on groceries alone. Last year we were down to about two-fifty. In the 1% economy, even coupons had gotten thin. Unless you were shopping at Tiffany’s.

I glared at her over my shoulder as she patted me on the butt and sent me out the door. In the garage I slapped on my dingy yellow NRA hat just to annoy her even though I knew I’d hear about it if any of her friends spotted me at the grocery store. It had come with the gift membership I’d received from Hobbes in our post-Patriot Police detente. Ugly as sin but at least it kept me from being spot searched for compliance with our mayor’s recently crafted mandatory concealed-carry ordinance.

Once I hit the Public’s Market, I entered seek-and-destroy mode. I was no stranger to grocery shopping. Most Saturdays my wife and I went together, or at least we had until keeping Eisteddfod's above water had consumed my weekends. She was the tactician who ruthlessly operated from the list and only the list. I was the grunt who pushed the cart and did the heavy lifting. But I knew where everything was and what brands we bought if only by color and location, and occasionally things we had run out of that hadn’t found their way onto the list, which usually earned me a glare.

But our cooperation was legendary. Various baggers, butchers and stock boys all commented on us as being the only couple who didn’t fight over things like which flavor of toothpaste was most effective, or whether the light or dark kidney beans were the proper pairing with kielbasa. I suspected most of those couples waged elaborate, passive-aggressive, guerrilla wars complete with Geneva Convention violating reprisals over whether the toilet paper got mounted over or under. In our house, that existential debate had been long ago settled by the cat.

Today, I cruised through the aisles with a minimum of interference. I could almost get used to this Tuesday morning thing. On a normal Saturday, I was convinced Public’s should implement a red card system like they used in the Champion’s League soccer for people who hogged the aisles while scrutinizing organic low-fat fair-trade frosting labels. It was either that or expand grocery shopping into a full-contact NHL franchise by legalizing shoulder charges and hip checks with the carts. Not that a few old ladies didn’t operate under those rules already when the managers weren’t looking.

Of course, my blitzkrieg ground to a halt as soon as I was standing in line at the checkout. When I walked up, there was only one register open. Which gave me a chance to sort through my wife’s coupons after I unloaded the cart. Thankfully, she had starred the items on the list which had corresponding coupons in the envelope so it was only linking up the two. It took me a moment to figure out she had them all organized by month of expiration.

At least my favorite bagger was on duty. Even for being legally blind, Cassie was still the best bagger we’d ever had. Unlike the normal after-school teenagers, she never tried to slip the pears beneath the canned goods or used the hamburger buns as padding between bottles of wine. She never crushed the chips in with the frozen vegetables, and never dumped the toothpaste and personal hygiene products in the cooler bag while dropping the ice cream into canvas. And she never slid the egg carton down longways on its end. Every time we got home after her bagging, unloading took fifteen minutes less because everything was so intuitively organized. Even though she’d only been there a few months, I didn’t know how we’d managed without her.

As I waited, canvas bags in one hand, four coupons fanned out in the other, an assistant manager opened the next register over for a burly guy in jeans, a plain grey t-shirt and a smudged, yellow Pittsburg Pirates hat. Looking back, that should have been my first clue because no one was a fan. I wondering what he had done to deserve special treatment as I watched him unload a full cart full of pretty unusual items for someone whose mere presence in a grocery store otherwise screamed of lifelong bachelor.

Things like bottled water, batteries, spices, boxes of cereal, brand-named allergy medications, and cat food. The stocks of canned goods were the only ones that made any sense. Ravioli, vegetables, anchovies, beans. Where it got weird was the stockpiles of cosmetics, shampoos and nutritional supplements. Not men’s multivitamins, women’s probiotics. Six to eight of everything, the exact same flavor. And wine. Four identical bottles. All stacked and organized with OCD precision.

For a big guy, he wasted no motion, moving simply and easily. It was like watching Kwai Chang Caine unload a grocery cart if David Carradine had been built like Genghis Khan and dressed like a long-haul trucker. Then as I watched, he carefully laid out coupons atop each group of items. As the assistant manager scanned the repetitious items, an animated discussion ensued over some fine point of one of the coupons and store policy which the big guy looked poised to win.

“I guess some people want everything,” I mumbled absently as I turned back to my own meager savings now that the woman before me had cleared out.

“Ah, but if you had everything, where would you put it?” Cassie asked lightly.

“I wouldn’t move it,” I bantered back. “I'd leave it right where it is.” Something a friend of mine from college used to say.

She cocked her head, turning her dark glasses toward me. “Are you a friend of Harry's?”

I wasn’t sure who Harry was, but on impulse I replied, “More like a distant acquaintance. Friend of a friend.”

Sideways, the cashier murmured “Yellow hat” in a voice I think I wasn’t meant to hear. I didn’t know if she was referring to me or the guy in the next aisle. Cassie nodded sagely as she accepted the canvas bags I pressed into her hand.

Then the steady beep, beep, beep of my items backing up in the metal chute by the bagging station along with Cassie’s light hand loading my bags covered the need for further conversation. Occasionally, the cashier would ask how the sea salt dark chocolate was or where I’d found the cranberry jalapeño jelly. Right next to the mocha almond butter. We’ve been buying it for years. Did you know Key lime salsa is fifty cents off this week? She scanned in a coupon from a store flyer that I don’t think I’d ever seen before.

By the time I looked up from the display after checking my savings and inputting my credit card, the guy in the next aisle was gone.

“Let me help you to your car,” Cassie said in a tone that sounded more like an order than a question. Before I could say that I thought I could manage, she’d already latched onto my arm. I figured she needed an impromptu smoke break so I guided her toward the door. When I stopped the cart at the back of the Jeep and swung open the tailgate, she started fishing in the pocket of her uniform apron. I thought she was looking for a pack of cigarettes but she came out with a folded piece of paper. She thrust it at me.

Unfolding it, I saw the official Public’s Market corporate logo in black and white instead of their standard green atop a skewed, offset, slightly blocky copy of a list indented with paragraphs, subparagraphs and line items, each with an alphanumeric designation that made the IRS tax code look straightforward by comparison. It was something you might find in the official employee handbook hanging outside the break room right next to the cheery worker’s comp propaganda poster.

“What’s this?” I asked, uncertain if she’d given it to me by mistake.

“The list of our official coupon policy, both the corporate rules and store manager’s optionals. Memorize it. Don’t tell anyone where you got it. If someone argues, ask for Denny, the assistant manager. Not a cashier supervisor. Not the store manager. Denny. Mondays and Fridays are his days off, so don’t come those days. It’s best to avoid Saturdays on principle. Draws too much attention. Tuesdays or Wednesdays work best.”

“Denny,” I repeated, playing along to see where this led. “And you’ll tell him who I am?”

“He’ll know by the yellow hat,” she said, nodding toward the vicinity of my voice. Then she rummaged in another pocket and come up with a small, thick pad. She initialed the top sheet, tore it off and held it out to me.

“That’s a generic store coupon like we used to send in the mail. I only get a limited number and can only give out one a month to any given customer. They crosscheck it worse than a prescription pad, so don’t even ask. Usually, they give me some double-secret promotional coupons but those expire at the end of month so wouldn’t do you any good. I’ll slip you a few when I can.”

I stared down at the new slip of paper. $5 off any purchase of $35 or more. That was more than my four little coupons combined. Five if you counted the one the cashier rang in.

“If you’re going to make this work,” Cassie continued, “you’ll need more leverage. Check the flyers in the kiosk by the door. Both of them. Always buy the gas card. Check the dispensers scattered around the store. Sign up for the electronic coupons but avoid any loyalty clubs. They do too much data mining. And don’t overlook the circulars that come in the papers and the mail, ours and our competitors.”

“You take other store’s coupons?” I asked, wondering how they could afford to. If I tried that, the last remaining big box bookstore would drive me out of business.

“Including BOGOs,” Cassie replied “As long there’s a store within five miles, you clip it, we zip it.”

“BOGOs,” I reiterated tentatively. Like I was back in middle school on the Humanities Wheel learning my first and only words in French.

“It’s all on the list. Read it, learn it, live it,” she said. “And remind Harry that I’m working off my karma next time you see him.”

“Sure,” I said distractedly. “Will do,” I glanced at the list of store regulations which would require a three times magnifier just to read, feeling more than a bit confused.

Cassie left me in the bright spring sun to load the Jeep and then return the cart to the corral myself.

---

When I got home, I rushed to my office with my treasure map, eager to unravel its mystery. I immediately dug out a credit card sized magnifier I had stashed in my desk. I circled, underlined and highlighted various rules, jotting notes in the margins like I hadn’t since reading Das Kapital for Western Civ in college. When I ran out of room, I fired up the computer and began typing out a synopsis and quick reference sheet, complete with cross-references, caveats and exceptions.

“Honey?” My wife stood in the doorway to the office looking mildly perplexed. “Why are there three bags of groceries sitting on the dryer?”

“Oh, sorry,” I apologized distractedly. “Hey, where is last week’s Osceola Observer?”

“Probably out in the recycling where you put it. Why?” When she saw I wasn’t jumping up, she turned to salvage the groceries I hadn’t put away. Had I bought ice cream? I couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter anyway. The rules sheet had unlocked whole new levels of potential savings. Like a secret site complex in my favorite first-person shooter.

After double-checking and printing my cheat sheet, I wandered out to the garage with it, catching a death glare from my wife as I strode through the kitchen while she unloaded the groceries she’d retrieved from the laundry room. After a quarter century of marriage, it rolled off me like water off a duck. I was working on something big. For us.

In the garage, I lifted the yellow lid to the fifty-gallon recycling bin and began dumpster diving. Beneath half a dozen empty wine bottles and a dead mayonnaise jar, I struck gold. Three flyers that came in the mail. Plus, a couple of previous editions of the Osceola Observer, minimally stained.

I laid out my treasures on the workbench and hit the switch on the fluorescent tucked beneath the overhead cabinets. When it flickered to life, I began slowly paging through my bounty starting with the flyers, my cheat sheet laid beside. Two pages in, I dodged over to my wife’s craft bench to steal her scissors.

“Put those back when you’re done with them,” my wife called from the doorway. “You know I already went through those, right?”

“Then why didn’t you cut this mayonnaise coupon?” I stabbed an accusatory finger at it.

She glanced at the circular spread out before me. “Because that’s not the brand we buy.”

“Why not?” I persisted like a prosecutor.

“Because when we tried it last year you said you wouldn’t eat it,” she answered like an unflappable witness.

“But combined with the in-store coupon we could save almost half,” I pointed out in my best Sam Waterston cross-examination surprise.

“Which doesn’t matter if it goes rancid in the fridge,” she replied, her patience seemingly inexhaustible. “It’s only for the family-size jar which we’ll never go through.”

I waved her concerns away. I set down the first Osceola Observer. The frontpage headline saying donations to a local food pantry were up 197% for the year in the last four months alone. The tag line mentioned anonymous donors. But there was no coupon section inside. The same with the second.

“What did you do with all the coupons?” I demanded.

“There weren’t any,” she said still watching from the doorway with an expression that had settled somewhere between bemused and annoyed. “That one’s hit or miss. More miss than hit these days.”

I made a mental note to talk to someone about that. It seemed unlikely the Observer had a contract with a circular supplier and then didn’t distribute them. But I fanned the slightly damp coupons I’d cut under my wife’s nose, as much to show them off as to dry the wine they’d picked up in the bin. “I’ve found eight more coupons so far, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. We could save, and save big.”

“If you want to take over the grocery shopping, knock yourself out, Ms. Stewart.” She turned to head back inside with that knowing smile that said, “You shall learn, Grasshopper.”

“Hey,” I called before she shut the door, “what happened to all the Sunday copies of the Piney Point Press?”

Now she turned back with an expression of true astonishment. “We haven’t gotten the paper in three years. Remember, you said it wasn’t worth it.”

“Well, we need to get it back,” I stated unequivocally.

This time she just rolled her eyes and went inside, calling over her shoulder before she shut the door, “Make sure you wash my good scissors when you’re done there, Mr. Trump.”

---

Back in my office, I riffled through my collected prizes. There had to be over twenty dollars in newfound savings here. I collated them by expiration date just like my wife had, but added a different color paperclip for each month as an easy reference. I arranged the months in the order of the rainbow, adding light blue, pink, grey, black and white to round out the spectrum.

I scrounged up a fresh envelope from the desk to seal away my cent-hoard. What I really needed was one of those plastic mini-file folder envelopes like I’d see the guy in the yellow hat at the Public’s break out. That guy was organized. I dug around online for a deluxe model and added it to my wish list.

When I sat back, I felt that rush of accomplishment for a moment before a niggling curiosity overcame it. I snatched up the calculator from the desk. I added up all our potential savings. $25.27, including the $5 off Cassie had given me. Not a bad morning’s work.

But I knew there was more to be done. Public’s had an online version of their flyers, as did most of the other stores, so I started checking those, too. Unfortunately, most of them consisted of more store sales than actual coupons, but the buy-one-get-ones allowed me to start mapping out a strategy for my next trip. What I really needed was a diagram of the aisles with what items I bought where so I could streamline the process. I started jotting bullet points on a to-do list.

Before I tackled that, I had some unfinished business with the Osceola Observer. I knew I should go back out to the garage for a copy of the front page to find their official contact information. Or that I should look up the advertising department online. But I had their editor’s number stored in my cell from an interview she’d tried to setup after my encounter with Mayor Rivers and her Patriot Police, and again for some background on the DEA raid at Cache for Trash. She liked to hang out at Eisteddfod's after city council meetings, more for the wine than the coffee. She called it The International because she could never quite sort out the pronunciation of Eisteddfod's.

I rang her up. It went straight to voicemail.

“Hi, Holly.” I introduced myself as the owner of the International. “Hey, I know it’s probably not your department, but I wanted to let you know that someone’s ripping off the coupon flyers from your paper each week. I know it’s a free paper and all, but I figure you guys have a contract and the company would get upset if they knew they weren’t getting delivered. I know I would if I had something in there. Anyway, thought you guys should know. See you after the next council meeting. I’ll be showcasing a new Luxembourgian-Michigander collaborative pinot blend called Grosse Pointe Blanc.”

As I hung up the phone, I felt a stir of satisfaction at having done my civic duty by blowing in a potential thief. Now to build on that by working through the rest of my to-do list.

---

I got up early on Sunday morning. I’d slept fitfully since four, my thoughts racing each time I woke up as I plotted out the shopping trip I planned that morning. I was eager to test out my new strategies. Eventually, I gave up pretending to sleep and snuck out to Public’s with my envelope and the list. I grabbed my lucky NRA hat so that Denny or whoever would recognize me.

I arrived so early the Piney Point Press vendors hadn’t staked out their positions in the medians at the entrance yet. I’d timed it so the doors would just be opening, like it was some kind of black Friday super-saver sales event with doorbuster deals rather than the weekly grocery shopping.

This time I was organized and prepared. I moved through the store like Tamerlane on a conquest. Filling the cart took less than half an hour. I was the first and only one in line at the single open checkout register.

When I asked if Denny was working, the twentysomething cashier gave a slow, deliberate nod to my hat. She helped me sort through my coupons, including a couple stackables I’d missed in the store flyers. When she finished ringing everything up and scanning in my scraps of savings, she bagged everything herself then asked if I needed help out to my car. As tempting as it was, I thought better of attracting any more attention. By then a woman about my wife’s age had fallen into line behind me and begun glaring disapprovingly at our interaction. She looked vaguely familiar, like maybe she was from the new science fiction book club my wife had started on Tuesdays to replace my poker night.

In the parking lot I wedged my trove of bags into the Jeep then headed for a back way out. As I glanced over my shoulder at the end of the row to make sure no other early bird was coming, I noticed an adult paper seller, a big guy in a bright yellow CAT hat getting into a beef over territory with a husky kid who appeared to be a Columbian futbol fan from his golden ballcap. Welcome to capitalism, son.

I thought about cruising by just to make sure everything was ok, but I didn’t want the double-coupon, BOGO Kumquat Haagen-Dazs I had in the back to melt before I got it home. Besides, it looked like the kid was holding his own. And I really needed to unload all this stuff and get to Eisteddfods before the church crowd showed up. They could get surly if they missed their Sunday sermon wakeup.

I tried to forgot what I’d seen but something about the image of that burly guy and the kid getting into it gnawed at me all morning. At least until my distributer thought he could sneak in a wine delivery on a Sunday in violation of our contract and in defiance of Mayor Rivers’ freshly reminted Blue Laws. Just carrying a crate of wine before noon was enough to get my license pulled. Never mind the box of Serbo-Crimean Black Sea Blend, aka Putin’s Pinot, he tried to slip in. The fines for violating the import sanctions, despite Belgrade’s three-card Monte label shuffle, were enough to see my great grandchildren housed in long-term care in a Cuban debtor’s prison. The driver assured me it was all ok because this was a favorite wine at National Security Council Meetings in the White House basement. I told him he must have meant to deliver it there, or maybe to Will O. Really. Or better yet, to city hall.

Eventually, he conceded to the invoice, and yet still managed to dump all the boxes on the ground outside the stockroom door while I was manning the register after my counter help called out with a family emergency that sounded suspiciously like a hangover. By then, I was working on a three-day migraine and was too tired to care.

Tuesday saw me with my feet up in the office at the house trying to detox, my lucky NRA hat shading the morning sun streaming through the front windows, my lucky matching yellow and black tartan socks peeking between the cuffs of my jeans and my sneakers. I’d slept in and hadn’t even bothered to shave.

I’d spent Monday rearranging the stockroom to check all the inventory after finding the driver had still managed to swap out my only untariffed case of Kiwi chardonnay, which had been held up in a San Diego inspection cooler since two days before the trade war erupted, for an Americana Heartland winery tour known in the trades as the Route 666 sampler. As if they were interchangeable. Which meant I probably should start looking for a new bookseller/barista to replace the sub I’d called who’d signed for the shipment without checking it on her way to clock in. But that was next week’s crisis.

I was staring out the front window, daydreaming lottery dreams, when I saw an old, beat-up, sky blue Cadillac slow-rolling through the neighborhood, a short driver in a yellow cap tossing blue bagged papers out the passenger window. The weekly Osceola Observer. The thought of sorting more coupons to add to my tiny stash jolted me awake. I jumped up and jogged out the front door to snatch the paper before one of my neighbors could pillage it.

When I hit the street, the Cadillac was three houses down, still running at drive-by speed. As I bent over to pick up the paper, it slammed on its brakes with a chirp. Before I could stand fully upright, it had thrown on its reverse lights and was speeding backwards up the street, sliding to a halt with a screech just opposite me, its motor rumbling a rough base note like a lion with indigestion.

Paper in hand, I peered in the open window and saw the husky kid from the Public’s two days ago behind the wheel, the same low-slung Columbian National Team futbol hat now accessorized with a pair of cheap, barely tinted, mini-mart sunglasses. He was sitting on a phone book so he could see over the steering wheel. He had two blocks of wood duct taped to the pedals. Was this kid even old enough to drive?

“What the hell did you think you were doing calling my boss and accusing me of stealing?” He nearly had to shout over the engine. “I thought we were friends.”

Wait, I knew that voice. “Carl?”

“Don’t call me that.” He looked around furtively. “Get in the car.”

“What?” I had no desire to spend the rest of my day off playing paperboy. It flashed back too many memories of cold, rainy mornings standing in for my sister as a kid.

“I said get in the car.” He slid a hand behind his back menacingly as if he were reaching for something tucked into his waistband. “We need to talk before you cause me anymore existential pain.”

The last time I’d seen Carl this serious and seriously annoyed he’d slapped a live grenade onto a strip club poker table. I knew better than to provoke him so I climbed in. There was barely room with all the papers stacked on the seat and in the footwell. A roll of silver duct tape rolled between them.

“Watch the merchandise,” he admonished as he slapped the column shifter back into drive. “When I slow down at this gray house, start tossing. We’ll be done before you know it.”

I found I still had my paper in hand so I flicked it out the window. It slid off the driveway straight into a hedge. I guess I’d lost a little touch. I grabbed another one.

“Pay attention,” Carl snapped. “One per customer. And for gods sake don’t miss one. Your neighbors get pissy and start making phone calls.” He lowered his shades and glared over them at me.

“Where’d you get that shiner?” I asked, trying to remember to save a paper for myself.

He slid his sunglasses back up on his nose. “From a Tibetan knuckledragger, if you must know. And thanks to you, I’ve probably got worse coming.”

I tossed another paper. Straight off a mailbox into a confederate jasmine.

“You really suck at this, you know?” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Get in back. I’ll finish up myself.”

I paused just long enough for the next paper to graze my nose. Then I quickly did my best impression of my teenaged self and clamored over the bench seat. I tried to ignore the toxic hazard I’d landed in. The back was littered with empty fast food containers and coffee cups with plastic lids. The mound of abandoned coffee stirs alone would have sent any self-respecting Greenpeacer into ecological shock.

“What happened to you after the Cache for Trash raid?” I asked as I settled beside a stack of greasy fried chicken buckets perched on the back seat. “I thought you went on walkabout with Hobbes.”

“I did.” Carl didn’t look back at me, just kept winging papers out the window. “We parted ways after he got caught up in some shady Thai sex sting. I warned him that hotel was hot. You can just smell that teenaged shit, you know?”

He made eye contact in the rearview. I didn’t know. So I gave a noncommittal shrug. “That’s how you ended up back here?”

“Don’t I wish.” He turned down a side street and kept up the rhythmic thump, thump of papers on concrete without pause. “That Neanderthal tried to throw me under the bus for his idiotic mistakes. Somehow, I managed to stay a hop, skip and a jump ahead of Interpol all the way back to base camp in Nepal. That’s where the DWARVENALE code red finally caught up with me. Seems like my association with an international sex criminal and suspected human trafficker violated my deal with the DEA. I seriously needed to disappear. So, I cashed out my passport for a new one and signed on with this sketchy Himalayan trekking company. The next thing I know, I find myself in Bhutan.”

“You mean like the Buddhist kingdom?” I wondered if he’d run across any of their science fiction but thought it might not be the best time to ask.

“Gold star, professor.” Carl turned around at the dead-end then started back along the other side of the street. “I end up in this ancient monastery way up some goat trail where none of the locals speak English or any other language I understand. Thank Odin that one of the hippie trekking guides from the company was looking for his grandfather, an expat refugee from the Winter War. Anyway, his Swedish was worse than my Finnish but we got along. Mostly because we both knew his backstory was an outrageous lie, but a pretty clever one. I still don’t know exactly what he was doing there. Probably the same thing I was. Or maybe he’d heard about the old man and was looking to setup a Scandinavian franchise.”

“Franchise?” I found the only way I could follow along was by parroting the last word Carl said as a question. He wasn’t usually this talkative. Which meant he was nervous. More likely scared to death. He swung the Cadillac back onto the main road into the neighborhood without a glance for oncoming traffic.

It took me a second to notice he hadn’t started refilling in the silence. I looked up to find him scrutinizing me in the rearview again. “How much do you about Soviet history?”

“I took a course in college,” I offered.

“Of course, you did, comrade. So, nothing.” He turned down the next finger street and resumed pancake-spinning papers out the open window. “The old dude who runs this joint keeps insisting I am some sort of nature spirit, something to do with ground and roots. Strikes me as pretty racist but it’s either hang out with him or cool my heels in an Assam prison waiting for an Interpol pickup if this guy or his buddies blow me in. So, I play along.

“We get talking over some mare’s milk one night, at least as much as we can from Swedish to Finnish to whatever language he’s speaking and back. He claims he’s a member of the International Brotherhood of Buddhists and second cousin to some lama who disappeared at the Asian Buddhist Conference for Peace sponsored by the Soviets back in ’69. Says the Central Spiritual Board of Buddhists in the USSR kidnapped his cousin to set him up as this secret 5^th Khambo Lama in some obscure republic right after.”

“You mean like the Chinese did in Tibet?” I’d read they’d kidnapped the Dalai Lama’s second and installed a political appointee in his place. And we thought our Supreme Court confirmation fights were brutal.

“Yeah, but this is strictly low-rent. Brezhnev was never as devious as Uncle Mao or Papa Joe. Gorby was as dumb as a sack of hammers and couldn’t stomach exploiting religious minorities. But as a contingency, some sketchy KGB types kept them in their fill of prayer flags through a rerouted Afghan slush fund. A bunch of Putin wannabes. Then the wall falls and suddenly everybody’s out of job. Nobody knows these guys even exist. So, what to do?”

He was looking at me in the mirror again to see if I was awake. I guess it wasn’t a rhetorical question. I shrugged again noncommittally.

“Adopt capitalism like everyone else,” he answered, “only with a Central Asian slant. So, my boy’s cousin styles himself as some sort of Old Man of the Mountain. Calls himself the Buddha Father. Anyway, long story short, he sets himself up a shadow empire and my boy in Bhutan wants a piece of it.”

“Like Buddhist Mafia?” I can’t help but crack a smile at the ridiculousness of Carl’s story. It made his Finn’s backstory sound downright plausible.

“Don’t laugh, Cyclops,” Carl warned. “These guys set up a multimillion-dollar enterprise in Piney Point alone.”

He paused for dramatic emphasis, but then kept going when I didn’t look impressed. “Anyway, turns out this ancient dude’s cousin owes him money from way back in the day. Something about a girl, a goat and a well. I didn’t really follow that part. But he really wants his money back. With interest. And he thinks I’m just the guy to get it for him, or at least some old-fashioned karmic payback. So here I am, back in the good ole US of A.”

By now we were done trolling the cul-de-sacs at the front of the neighborhood. The passenger seat was empty. Great, now I’d have to appropriate a sprinkler-soaked Observer from a neighbor on a midnight raid. Instead of heading back to the house, Carl spun the wheel the other way.

“Where are we going?” I tried to keep the question innocent, not really wanting the answer but needing to ask.

“Road trip,” he answered succinctly. “There’s some people I need you to meet.”

A premonition struck me as a handful of puzzle pieces slipped together. “Friends of Harry?”

“What the hell do you know about Hari?” Carl craned his neck over a shoulder to glare at me directly before barking his next order. “Get back up here. I’m not your damned chauffeur.”

I rolled back over the seat again, though not looking nearly as cool as I imagined I would have twenty years ago.

“You really should think about cleaning out your car once in a while,” I said as I resettled into the passenger seat, my knees resting against the dash.

“Who says this is my car?” Carl replied without a hint of humor.

I dropped the conversation, not really wanting to think about it.

Carl floored it out of the neighborhood, blowing past the stop sign and cutting off an oncoming minivan before inserting himself between a pickup and a high-end sportscar where there definitely wasn’t room. Good thing Audis came standard with antilock brakes. We were lucky. Out in the wilds of Osceola, any random mom-mobile or confederate flag emblazoned truck likely had a semiauto stashed in the glovebox in compliance with the mayor’s new ordinance and an owner just itching to stand their ground, even if it was moving beneath their feet.

I fumbled for my seatbelt then slid as far down as I could, pulling my NRA cap almost all the way over my eyes. As much because I’d rather not be seen as I really didn’t want the full panoramic HD experience of Carl’s driving.

After we turned at the next light, Carl began rolling a cigarette while steering with his knees. I reached to steady the wheel, which was proper etiquette last I remembered.

“Don’t be such a pussy.” He slapped my hand away, then licked the edge of the cigarette paper to seal it. “How’s the wrist anyway?”

“The cast came off a few weeks ago but it still itches,” I said, rubbing it.

“That will teach you to be careful what you do with it. That temper’s going to get you in real trouble one day.”

“My wife says I should stick to pounding tables with my shoe.” I smiled ruefully.

“Smart woman.” Carl used the Cadillac’s lighter for its intended purpose, then blew smoke at me. “I like her.”

Yeah, but I’m not sure the feeling is requited. She’d be less than amused if she found out who I’d been with when I got home. I opted to keep those thoughts to myself. I had enough to worry about without burning a bridge that far ahead. One crisis at a time.

At the next light, Carl spun the wheel with a palm, his other elbow resting on the open window, the cigarette perched between his fingers. He took another long drag then swung the oversized sedan into the Osceola Rec Center parking lot, pulling into a handicapped spot right by the front door even though the legal slot right next to it sat empty.

“I’ve got to make a pickup,” he said when I shot an inquisitive look at him. “You’ve got a rec card, right?”

“Uh, yeah.” I fumbled through my wallet to make sure I had it with me.

“Good.” He slammed the driver’s door behind him and started toward the entrance. “Sign me in as your guest.”

I had to jog to catch up. For a Nibelungen dwarf, he was pretty quick. “They’re going to want ID.”

Carl tossed a driver’s license over his shoulder which I had to retrieve from the pavement. “Tell them I had to hit the head.”

“You can’t smoke in there, you know.” I stopped while I stared at the license in my hand. “Who in the hell is Yaksha Wicklund?”

He didn’t answer, just dropped his lit cigarette on the concrete outside the door and strode inside. I ground it out under the toe of my sneaker as I walked by.

Carl beelined for the bathroom while I diverted to the office. I scanned in my city services card then reached for the sign-in sheet. The guy behind the counter protested. “The kid has to sign in himself.”

I played it cool. “He has kind of a bathroom emergency. Here’s his ID.”

The guy, Gerald by his nametag, scrutinized the license but looked dubious.

“Come on, man,” I said. “How many thirtysomething Swedes under four feet can there be in Osceola. He’s a friend. I’ll vouch for him. He could be in there a while.”

That logic seemed to placate Gerald. He passed me back Carl’s ID. I turned to leave.

“Whoa, there Hos. That’ll be $5 for your friend.” He pointed to the sign on the wall behind him. “Guest membership.”

“Since when?” I protested. I hadn’t remembered this before.

“Since the last council meeting,” Gerald informed me. “Sponsorship fee to support the Mayor’s new immigration initiative.”

So that’s what Carl was up to. I scrounged a bill from my wallet and laid it on counter. “We good?”

“You want a receipt?” Gerald asked helpfully.

“Skip it,” I called over my shoulder, already on my way out the door. Leaving Carl unattended for long seemed like a profoundly bad idea.

Thankfully, he was peeking out from the bathroom, waiting for me.

“Come here you little troll.”

“Hey, no reason to get personal.” He threw up his hands in mock surrender. “I could have just let you slip me in through the back, but you wanted to go all official with that ID shit. That’ll learn you.”

I shook my head in exasperation. Bad idea. The migraine from two days ago had re-blossomed. I tried to find my Zen. “Why exactly are we here?”

Carl strode down the back hall toward the staircase to the second floor. “Homemakers Co-op. Room 206. They should just be breaking up.”

Sure enough, a gaggle of laughing young women poured out from the stairwell just as we got there. They looked like the stay-at-home mom in training crowd dressed for afternoon yoga. That observation wasn’t lost on Carl.

“Man, what I wouldn’t give for a little downward chasing dog,” he whispered sotto voce. He looked like he was about to throw back his head and howl.

“Cool it, Carl,” I elbowed him in the shoulder. I thought I recognized one of the women from my wife’s science fiction book club. “I have to live around here, you know.”

“It’s Yaksha or Yak from here on out. Didn’t you even read the ID?” Carl bolted up the staircase once the women had cleared out. “Come on before Prim takes off with my hoard.”

We paused outside room 206. I heard a couple women talking inside. After a minute, another young woman walked out, this one is a mid-length skirt rather than the standard-issue sports bra and leggings uniform. She smiled shyly when Carl tipped his hat as she walked by. He craned his neck to watch her retreat toward the staircase until I elbowed him again.

“Stay quiet and follow my lead.” He ushered me inside. Another woman in a colorful peasant skirt and white blouse with a yellow bandana tied over her hair, heavily tanned but neither old nor particularly young, stood by a foldup table draped with small paper prayer flags, stuffing coupons into a sectioned envelope.

“How’s this week’s haul, Prim?” Carl asked.

Prim turned, eyeing him and me uncertainly. “Where’s Tuva?”

“Meeting with the boss,” Carl replied. “He wants me to break in the new guy.”

She narrowed her eyes at me, her crow’s-feet suddenly becoming prominent. “Since when do we accept outsiders?”

“Hari says we need a fresh face on the business,” Carl answered casually, examining the multicolored prayer flags, completely nonchalant. “I’ve known him for years. A true believer.”

His assurances didn’t seem to appease her. She studied me a moment. “Ok, then answer me this, believer,” she asked pointedly, ““When many are reduced to one, what is one reduced to?”

I looked at Carl somewhat confused. He just looked back at me expectantly. So, I let my reviving migraine do the talking and said the first thing that sprang to mind. “Poverty.”

She considered that another moment. As she turned back to the table, she might have cracked a Mona Lisa smile.

“I’m not sure how useful these are.” She handed the envelope to Carl. “I encourage them to donate their best ones, but they keep giving me the worst. I think I may have taught them too much but it’s the only way to keep them coming back.”

“Try this,” Carl said as he flipped through the compartments. “Instead of a straight donation, set it up as a trading game. Bring in some high value coupons we have in overstock as seeds, things you know they want. Then exchange them for what we’re short on. Don’t bring enough for everyone, just enough to create an artificial shortage. People love feeling like they’re getting ahead when they make a deal.”

I thought that was brilliant. Prim looked dubious. “You think the boss will go for that?”

“I’ll talk to Hari.” Carl turned back to me, stuffing the envelope into his back pocket. “Let’s roll, Sasquatch. Miles to go before we sleep.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

We left through a side exit, avoiding Gerald. Out in the parking lot, Carl tossed me the envelope. “I need you to do some sorting.”

I stared at the envelope without getting into the car.

Through the open driver’s side door, he pointed to the wooden blocks duct-taped to the pedals. “It’s not like you can drive, Bigfoot.”

He had a point.

I slid in and examined the envelope. An elastic band looped around a button held the plastic flap closed, just like the one I’d picked out to hold my coupons. It felt distinctly full, fuller than the one I’d seen with the guy at Public’s, who could have been Prim’s brother. When I opened it, I found the dividers were marked with categories.

Carl chirped the tires as he accelerated toward the exit.

I stared into the overstuffed compartments. “What am I looking for here?”

“Just go through each category and pull out the highest dollar amounts.” At the light, he wheeled back the way we’d come and sped north. “Ignore anything for multiple items. Put them all into the last empty compartment. I need at least $100. More’s better. But no more than a dozen from any slot.”

I started sorting. A hundred dollars was a lot of coupons. The highest dollar values always seemed to come off multiples. It was like trying to do a Sudoku in my head. I became so engrossed on rearranging the numbers to get the highest total that I only noticed we’d gotten where we were going after we’d stopped moving.

“Let’s see if you passed the audition.” Carl snatched back the envelope. He flipped through the slot with the coupons I’d sectioned off, mumbling numbers to himself. He thought for a moment, ticked off numbers on his fingers, pulled in a few new coupons from other slots, put a couple others back, and finally nodded. “$119.74. Not bad. You might a future in this business after all.”

Only then did I look up to see where we were. I recognized the parking lot behind my regular Public’s, the small one by the loading docks.

Carl got out and headed for the breezeway between the market and the other shops. He looked wistfully at an empty suite as he passed. A former cigar shop where any number of husbands had once waited out their wives each Saturday while watching whatever game was on the big screen in back. A smoke-shrouded throwback man-cave my grandfather might have appreciated. Maybe even my father. I remembered wandering by with my wife wondering how these guys got away with it. Now they sat in their air-conditioned cars idling in the parking lot, waiting to swoop into the loading zone as soon as the missus emerged with their weekly provender. A different world. Much like Carl’s, one I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in even if it might be fun to visit every now and then.

As we turned up the ramp toward the front entrance to the Public’s, Carl issued instructions as he handed me a sheaf of coupons and a crumpled receipt he pulled from his pocket. He laid out a strategy, complete with feints, diversions, screens, objectives and a rendezvous, with the precision of a clandestine operation. Clearly, he’d done this before.

I pulled down the brim of my NRA cap. I didn’t want anyone to recognize me and report back to my wife. I entered through the first set of automatic doors. Carl continued to the second. Inside, I ignored the carts and baskets and went straight to the customer service desk. While I waited for the guy in front of me to finish sorting out his lottery tickets, I spotted Cassie at the end of one of the cashier aisles. I started to wave then caught myself. From the corner of my eye, I saw Carl grab a handbasket and break toward the deli.

“Can I help you?” the perky girl in green behind the counter asked, drawing me back to my mission.

I recited the lines Carl had fed me. “The cashier didn’t ring these coupons before she totaled my order.” I laid the coupons on top of the smudged receipt. “She said to come to customer service.”

The girl examined the receipt and the coupons. “Uh, this receipt is from three days ago.”

Carl had prepared me for this, too. “I was in a hurry and didn’t have time right then. Surprise party.”

She smoothed the receipt and sifted through more of its arcana, squinting to read it. “Do you remember your cashier?”

“I don’t. But Cassie was my bagger.” I improvised.

Her expression said that piece of information wasn’t particularly helpful.

“I’ll need to get a manager,” she finally said. She picked up the phone behind the counter and spoke low into the mouthpiece, gazing up at the office windows behind me that overlooked the inside of the store.

A moment later, a man in a white shirt emerged from a door marked “Staff only” wedged between the automatic change counting machine and the big green scale. The assistant manager I’d seen with the big, yellow hatted guy the other day. Denny was the name on his tag. Bingo.

The girl at the counter explained my situation in low tones, nodding toward Cassie as she finished. He nodded toward Cassie as well. The girl retreated from the counter and headed down the row of cashiers.

Denny double-checked my receipt and the coupons but was obviously stalling. Down the way, the girl touched Cassie on the shoulder and whispered something in her ear. Cassie looked thoughtful, then slowly nodded. The other woman mirrored that nod more distinctly to Denny, then added a thumbs up.

“We don’t normally do this,” he said apologetically.

“Carl said it would be alright,” I replied, resting my hands on the counter like I owned it. “He would have come himself but he said he had some urgent shopping to catch up on. He hopes to see you soon.”

Denny snapped a glance at my hat then quickly rang in the coupons for a refund. He carefully counted out the bills and change but held them back. “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a noise?”

Another riddle. What was it with these people? I slipped into another fugue of free association. “Depends on whether it hits the chicken in the road,” I answered.

That seemed to satisfy him.

“Tell the little prick I’ll be at the loading dock in fifteen.” Denny whispered as he slid over my refund. “And he better not be raiding the dispensers. My boss is getting suspicious.”

I smiled as I stuffed the cash into my pocket. Denny squeezed past the returning girl and disappeared toward the back of the store. I tipped my hat at her and headed for the coffee aisle where Carl had said to meet.

I found him standing balanced on the rack of a very full shopping cart trying to grasp coupons in a dispenser that was just beyond his reach. When had he had time to fill the cart? And what had happened to the handbasket?

“A little help here, Jolly Green,” he said as he hopped off his perch.

I pulled out a half a dozen premium coffee coupons and handed them over.

Carl stared at them in his hand as if expecting more to magically appear. “Keep going with the rest.”

“Denny said not to empty it.” I glanced down the aisle, which thankfully ended in the gift card rack behind the customer service desk rather than one of the banks of cashiers. “People are beginning to notice.”

Carl harrumphed but turned away. “He puts them up there on purpose.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to protect you,” I replied. “I hear caffeine’s bad for children. Stunts their growth.”

Carl glared. “Did Denny impart any other wisdom on you?”

“Just something about the forest and the trees that you could have warned me about,” I responded, still a bit annoyed.

Carl waved my complaint away. “I have full faith in your ability to improv. I’ve seen you in action, Khrushchev. Anything else? Like my money?”

I pulled the cash from my pocket and handed it over. “Loading dock. Fifteen minutes. He sounded a bit peeved you sent me. Said you were late.”

Carl counted the refund to the penny then made it disappear. “Nothing a little something extra in his envelope won’t smooth over.”

He pulled the handbasket I’d seen him grab at the front of the store from the rack under the cart he’d just been using as a stepstool. He then began rummaging through the contents of the cart, pulling items one by one and examining them. Most he grunted at and threw back in like undersized fish. A few he nodded at approvingly or hummed with surprise and added to the handbasket. Things like a tin of steel-cut Irish oats, a pair of prepackaged filet mignons already pre-baconed, a domestic Nutella knockoff, a wedge of Danish blue, a pack of unsweetened pear-and-applesauce, a non-vegetarian sushi sampler, and a four-pack of extra-dry blackberry English cider.

I kept a furtive watch. I had no idea what he was doing, but I suspected it would be bad if someone came along.

As if the universe could read my mind, Nicci, my wife’s BFF, girls-night-out confidant and another of her book club compatriots, turned down the aisle in her signature black and pink running spandex accessorized with Public’s handbasket, staring at her phone. She stopped abruptly as she took in the scene blocking her way then scurried back around the corner as if she’d mistaken exactly what she’d been after on her list. I slid the cap further down on my forehead, trying to channel my inner unshaved construction worker. I couldn’t tell if she recognized me, but I assumed she had. My wife had a standing GNO network APB out on Carl since that Tuesday night at Shocking Blue.

“Do we really have time for this?” I asked him. I needed to get out of here before Nicci received her marching orders. If one of the girls in the neighborhood or the woman at the rec center hadn’t blown me in, she would.

Carl looked up as if he was surprised that I was still standing there, then glanced at his watch. “I guess it’s been long enough. Let’s do this.”

He abandoned the cart and the half-filled handbasket in the aisle, and headed toward the front of the store, then down the ramp and back to the parking lot, never breaking stride. A man on a mission. Thankfully, I didn’t see Nicci anywhere on our hasty retreat.

At the loading dock, Carl jumped up on the ledge and began rolling a cigarette. The sun was bright but not quite a summer arc welder. The concrete was already radiating mirage heat.

“I don’t think you can smoke that here.” I pointed to the sign over his head warning employees.

Carl tongued the edge of the rolling paper to seal it. “What’s Denny going to do, fire me?”

As if summoned by his name, the assistant manager appeared at the door. “If you don’t quit stealing random customer’s shopping carts, I just might.”

Carl shrugged. “Like when do I have time to restock my pantry since you cut off free delivery. Besides, they’re not random. I like your female customers. I treat their picks like recommendations. I’ve discovered some great products that way, stuff you normally hide on the top shelf out of spite. Besides,” he lit his freshly rolled cigarette with a red disposable and blew smoke up at Denny before rising to his feet, “I think you forget who works for who. To quote our enigmatic leader, ‘When you can do nothing, what else can you do?’”

Carl looked expectantly at Denny. Denny just glared down, dripping with contempt. Carl turned to me. My mind blanked.

“’Exactly as your told,’” Carl finally answered, turning his suddenly intense gaze upon Denny. He pulled a plain, white envelope from his back pocket and handed it over. “Now what do you have for me?”

Denny thumbed through the coupons in the envelope then folded it in half and stuffed it in a pocket. He reached inside the door and brought out two small stacks of store flyers tied with butcher’s twine, one with green banners, one with purple. He dropped them on the ledge. “I could only skim off a stack of each this week. She’s beginning to notice we’re running short.”

“And just when I put a little something extra in your envelope already.” Carl nudged the bundles with a foot. “Hari won’t be pleased. But I’ll say you promised to make it up next week. With interest. Like a deck of those specialty coffee coupons I ran across inside.” Carl held his thumb and forefinger apart by half an inch to show how many he wanted.

“I told you, those are stocked by an independent vendor,” Denny protested. “I have no control over them. They don’t tell me what’s coming.”

“But you do get a heads up on sales. You didn’t warn me coffee would be this week. Now we have to send someone to make a special trip. Naughty, naughty.” Carl smiled maliciously, blowing more smoke up at him. “So, work it out, Denny. Or you’ll find you have a lot less envelope to cash in the future.”

“What about the refund?” Denny demanded. “That’s part of the deal.”

Carl examined the cigarette in his hand with sudden interest. “Do you know where the nearest tobacco shop is since that specialty cigar store around the corner closed?”

Denny didn’t venture a guess.

“Downtown,” Carl continued, studying the trail of smoke that went from a smooth column to a turbulent cloud in less than a centimeter. “All the way by the bay. And that place is sketchy as hell.” Carl ground out his half-finished cigarette on the yellow bumper that guarded the loading dock ledge. An acrid smell trailed up with the smoke as he finally met Denny’s eye. “Consider it gas money.”

Turning to me, Carl pointed to bundles, “Grab those, Andre.”

I hooked a couple fingers beneath each loop of twine, wondering exactly what he had gotten me into. This was beyond any peak Carl I’d ever seen.

Back at the car, he popped the trunk. Inside were three stacks of the coupon flyers that should have been inside the Osceola Observer, also bundled with twine. So, it was him that had stolen them. No wonder he was so mad I’d called Holly. Taking up the other side of the three-body trunk were six boxes filled with a variety of grocery goods, a mix of food items, sundries and cosmetics, multiples of each neatly arranged. A number looked like to the ones I’d seen the Tibetan truck driver buying last week.

I stood wondering if Carl was reviving the black-market humanitarian aid scam from Cache for Trash. It seemed profoundly dangerous with all the Feds still sniffing around.

“Chop-chop, Sigfried.” Carl slammed the driver’s door to recapture my attention, and then called out the open window. “We’re on a schedule and you’re burning daylight gawking. Eventually this bucket’s owner will come looking.”

I closed the trunk and climbed back in, not liking the sound of that either. But my choice was ride with him or a long walk home. I took the path of least effort.

Carl peeled away like an angsty high-schooler, another cigarette already poised between his fingers. As he weaved in and out of traffic, he seemed distracted. He was less talkative than before, unless you counted him mumbling to himself. I couldn’t catch the drift of the conversation, so I tuned out and checked my phone.

No missed calls. No texts. Nothing. I didn’t take that as a good sign. Maybe Nicci hadn’t seen through my unplanned disguise. By the way her eyes had widened, I doubted it. I considered texting my wife to diffuse the situation but then thought better of it. I was probably in enough trouble as it was without trying to explain about Carl. Not that I had an explanation. Maybe she hadn’t discovered I was AWOL yet. Maybe I could still beat her home and conjure up a convincing lie.

The land-ark’s tires squealed again as we pulled into a new parking lot. An evil-looking convenience store slouched beneath an equally evil-looking, ancient oak. Like Neil Gaiman had rewritten a scene from Lord of the Rings Americana-style under the franchise banner of Trippy Mart. I’m not sure someone had thought that name through.

Carl narrowly missed a steel stanchion protecting a line of gas pumps as he whipped the car toward an alley that led to the back of the store. Behind a barricade of multi-colored cookie boxes beside the front entrance, a bevy of green uniformed pre-pubescent girls conducted a synchronized eye-roll at his driving.

Around back, tucked between the store’s cinderblock and a fetid dumpster obscured by the county’s last standing Brazilian pepper, Carl chirped the Cadillac to a stop. His door squealed open as he hopped out. He pounded on a red, steel security door with a fist. When no one answered, he motioned me out of the car.

“Lock it up and follow me,” he said as he headed toward the front.

As we rounded the corner, Carl spotted the chattering girls and their den mother camped out behind crenellations of cookie boxes surrounding a card table they’d brickworked like a fortress just back from the doors. He started talking again, ostensibly to me but just loud enough to be overhead.

"Man, I would be more inclined to buy Girl Scout cookies from a troop that set up by the liquor store entrance of Public’s. You know, the girls with cigarettes in their mouths and knives in their sock garters. The girls who can tell you which cookie goes best with beer, wine or Fireball whiskey. Those are the girls who truly need and deserve my support."

By the time he finished, we were right in front of the table, turning toward the door.

“You buying, little man, or what,” one of the little green girls with expressionless eyes shot back at him before another deadpan soprano chimed in, “Probably just practicing his pickup lines for when he comes around at school.”

Carl turned and snarled at them like a rabid trash panda. The den mother fumbled in her purse. She finally came up with a pink cylinder with a gold ring that I was pretty sure was lipstick which she brandished at us menacingly. Even through her panicked, shocked expression, she looked familiar. Another of my wife’s book club confederates. I grabbed Carl by the collar and forcibly dragged him inside, mumbling an apology before she realized her mistake.

Carl fought his way free as soon as we cleared the door. “Get off me, Yeti.”

I stepped back in case he turned on me, though I remained poised to grab his collar again if he bolted for the door. “What the hell was that?” I demanded. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

Carl didn’t answer, just glared through the narrow strips of window between fluorescent beer-wine-food promotional ads. The young woman behind the counter stared at us openmouthed. Before I could ad-lib an explanation, we were greeted loudly by a man with a Central Asian accent somewhere further back in the store.

“Yaksha! Buddy! So good to see you!”

I looked up to find a wiry man who was likely the salesclerk’s father striding toward us in a neon yellow Pikachu baseball cap, his arms spread wide like he was ready to hug us both.

Reluctantly, Carl turned away from the front windows. His eyes fell on the man’s hat. “What is that monstrosity on your head, Zaba?”

“You like it?” Zaba modeled the ballcap by tilting his head from side to side, looking in different directions with a hand behind his non-existent hair. “Now I’m one of you.”

Carl closed his eyes and shook his head. “I said discreet. That thing’s a dead giveaway.”

“But it was on sale.” Zaba’s face fell as he pulled off the cap and stared at it forlornly. “They had a whole big bin of them, so they must be popular like you said.”

“I said something that blends in,” Carl corrected, “like maybe a sports team.”

“But my son, Amur, says they play professional Pokémon now on ESPN,” Zaba explained. The girl behind the counter covered her mouth with both hands and turned away to keep from laughing out loud.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling sorry for the guy. I squinted to tone down the end-of-road warning color. “It’s not that bad. Just needs a little breaking in.”

Carl turned on me as if I’d slapped him. I took another step backward.

“Who’s your friend?” Zaba asked cheerfully, proudly sliding the cap back onto his head slightly sideways, gangsta-style, as if my approval had settled everything.

Carl spun back to him with the what-did-we-say-about-talking-to-strangers expression that my wife’s sister always seemed to adopt whenever I tried to start a conversation with her kids.

Zaba dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “Oh, that’s right, I’m supposed to question him to make sure he’s ok, right?” Shifting his gaze back to me, he asked in a suddenly serious voice, “What color is the wind?”

Before I got even an inkling of an idea for a response to that non sequitur, he answered for me,

“Seven bean soup,” he proclaimed like it was the punchline to his favorite joke. “I love that one.”

He smiled broadly like a somewhat dim yet energetic Labrador retriever that you couldn’t help but love despite the fact its wagging tail had just knocked your full glass of cabernet onto your brand-new cream-colored carpet.

I smiled back.

“Like a pair of Make Amnesia Great Again bobbleheads on the closeout rack at the dollar store.” Carl mumbled, closing his eyes and pressing his middle finger to the center of his forehead. “Look, we don’t have time for this. I’ve got your weekly restock out back, Zaba. Just get me last week’s no-sales and Hari’s cut, and we’re outta here.”

“I boxed them up in back, just like you asked.” Zaba waved us to follow him as he led us to the back of the store.

Near the entryway to the bathrooms, we passed a large shelf marked Clearance Specials loaded with what looked suspiciously similar to the goods I’d seen in the trunk of Carl’s car. Toiletries, cosmetics, batteries, canned goods, cat food, medications, all in different flavors, different colors and different brands, orange instead of purple, floral instead of herbal, copper-topped instead of silver, pink instead of dusky rose, but essentially the same. Another second, empty clearance shelf stood beside it.

My retail experience told me Zaba was running a rotation scheme to keep the specials fresh and encourage limited-time buying. Having poured through the coupon flyers trying to max out our personal savings, I knew that even with the deep discounts compared to the regular convenience store markup, Zaba must be netting at least fifty percent, minus Hari’s cut. And he probably had volume traffic given his clientele, which made for an enviable profit margin. Clearly, I was running the wrong Osceola business.

I began to wonder if, somehow, I could get a piece of this. Like maybe some of that discount wine.

I caught up with Carl and Zaba in a small stockroom, just across from the door into the walk-in beer and soda fridge. Three cardboard boxes lay on the floor filled with a menagerie of products like the ones still out on the clearance rack.

When Zaba ducked into the office, Carl pulled out a jumbo condiment jar and hefted it.

“No surprise here,” he said, showing me the label. “This mayonnaise tasted like ass. Maybe it’ll be a hit with the bargain basement crowd at the flea market. Otherwise, it’s a write-off at the food pantry.”

It was the exact brand I’d just bought with a double-coupon BOGO for next to nothing, the one my wife warned me about. I wondered if the jars would keep until the postal service advertised its next food drive.

Zaba came back with a beige Kevlar cash pouch zip-tied shut. He passed it to Carl without a word.

Carl pointed toward the boxes while he held onto the pay envelope. “You two better haul these out the back door in case the Girl Sprout Mafia plans a hit. But first,” he motioned me with a hand, “give me your phone.”

“My phone?” Reflexively, I pulled it from my pocket and cradled it possessively. I wasn’t keen on handing it over to him even in the best of circumstances. I had no idea if the Feds were still monitoring it. “What’s wrong with yours?”

“You have games,” he said in a tone that indicated his tolerance for question time was waning. “I need to hit the head. Now, give.”

Reluctantly, I passed it over, trying not to think too much about it. I hoped he remembered to wash his hands.

Carl disappeared toward the men’s room while Zaba and I piled the boxes out to the waiting Cadillac. I loaded them into the trunk while Zaba shuttled the replacements inside. Just as we finished up, Carl reappeared and tossed me back my phone. I wiped it down with my shirt.

Once the red steel door clanged shut behind Zaba, Carl drew out a pocket knife and thumbed open the blade. Flicking the point deftly through the zip-tie sealing the canvas-textured pay pouch, he refolded the knife one-handed and slipped it back into his pocket. He pulled out a stack of bills wrapped in what looked like an itemized receipt, all rubber-banded together. He ripped off the elastic, crumbled the paper and tossed them both over his shoulder, scoring a three-point shot into the empty cone of chicken buckets. The pay pouch followed as soon as he made the uncounted bills disappear into the same pocket as the knife.

I sat in the passenger seat with the car door open and my feet firmly on the ground. Even in the shade, late spring bordered on summer. The dumpster had clearly come into bloom. I checked my phone again. Still an ominous silence on the home front. My head started throbbing again. My stomach began to ache. I still had no handy excuse for the day’s events if I was confronted with them by my wife. The best I could hope to do now was limit the collateral damage.

“You know, we’re not far from the house,” I said hopefully. “You could just drop me off on your way to… wherever you’re headed next.”

Carl just sneered at me as he turned the key and the Detroit behemoth roared to life. “No time for that, Sigmund. We’re going to the flea market.”

I stepped out of the car before he could slap it in drive. “Really, I can walk from here. As fun as this outing’s been, I need to get home. It’s book club night, and the wife insists that I at least shave so I don’t reflect poorly on Eisteddfod's with her newfound clientele.” Which mostly consisted of all the women I’d seen today who I’d have to face with nothing resembling explanation. I suppressed a shiver despite the heat.

Carl leaned across the passenger seat. Lowering his sunglasses again, he looked up at me beseechingly. “Man, I really need you on this one. Just one more quick stop. You’ve gotta trust me.” He hesitated a moment before adding in a voice that nearly cracked, “Please.”

I held onto the door, ready to swing it shut should the car so much as twitch. I stared down at him, trying but failing to harden my heart against his suddenly melting ice blue eyes. Since the day Carl and the Fenris Brothers had first carjacked me during their war on Christmas, I’d never once seen even a hint of vulnerability. Coercion and threats, yes, but never begging.

“And you’ll explain what’s actually going on here?” I asked. Then I thought about the incident at Shocking Blue. “No, scratch that. Do I really want to know?”

“If you do, I promise to fill you in by the end of the day.” Carl held up three fingers, which was usually his hand signal for read between the lines. “Scout’s honor.”

I’m not sure which scared me more, Carl pleading or the thought of him having once been a Boy Scout. Either was more terrifying than anything awaiting me at home. Reluctantly, I got back in the car and closed the door.

Carl pushed his sunglasses back onto his nose. He eased the blue whale out onto a dirt road that was no more than parallel tire ruts running behind the Trippy Mart, then past a cinderblock, cracker box neighborhood guarded by a sagging chain-link fence that finally dumped us into the back of a surprisingly well landscaped, middle-income townhome complex hidden beside a former cattle waterhole. After a quick tour of the parking lot and the pool, we were back out on the road.

Carl beelined for the flea market at the center of the county, just under five miles away. Not quite truly massive like the one a county over but still a hundred acres with a smaller covered section that was popular enough since the trade war shortages to be open on a weekday. True to his word, Carl made record time.

He circled in through back streets rather than approaching from the front. The parking lot was surprisingly full. Not quite a weekend crowd but more than I expected on a Tuesday afternoon. I began to wonder if anyone in Osceola was actually employed. Carl pulled the Caddy into a space along the fence in the far corner where the tree line met a drainage canal, away from all the other cars.

Once Carl loaded me up with the boxes from the Trippy Mart, we hiked down the ditch side of the dusty, weed-strewn lot toward the buildings in the front corner. He led me into a narrow entryway I wouldn’t have known was there. Most people seemed to avoid it thinking it was for vendors only but it appeared to be more like an unadvertised back entrance to a mall. No one questioned me or my triple-decker boxes.

We wended our way through the midafternoon press of browsers, Carl mostly directing me from behind, his head swiveling like an owl anytime he came into view. I wasn’t sure exactly who Carl was avoiding here but I knew he was.

Inside, the open-air enclosure reminded me of a cross between an impromptu New York street vendor market and the name-your-price Tangiers bazaar I visited on vacation as a kid. The items for sale captured a diorama of the trade war.

On one side, an itinerant Iowa and Wisconsin Farmer’s Market was filled with pork rinds (fried in genuine American lard), soy sauce, and more tofu than you could eat interspersed with soy oil-based printer ink refills, plus cheese in every conceivable flavor but Velveeta. The By Local booth next to it was strewn with jars of expensive palmetto honey that was still cheaper by the pound than imported sugar, and slow roasted, hand-ground Arcadia Robusta heavily laced with chicory. Bottles of Florida wine, as anemic as the coffee, saw steady sales now that the left coast labels dealt with more demand than supply since the major European wineries were under a virtual blockade. They also carried Grolsch bottles of homemade ale preserved with yarrow and mugwort that replaced the prohibitively expensive imported German and low country hops. I’d heard that gave it a pick-me-up quality even if its bitterness tasted of the tears of a thousand medieval monks.

On the other side, a roaring generator powered a swarm of angry sewing machines at the Bitchin’ Stitch where arrayed young seamstresses zipped out women’s apparel from simple patterns using a massive bin of salvage-edge fabrics while you waited. At Old and Crotchet-y next door, an assembly line of needle-clicking grandmothers directing a small army of grandchildren dipped into boxes overflowing with balls of tail-end yarn to craft a steady stream of sweaters, shawls, scarves, afghans and accessories. A booth called Sneaker Pete’s featured “reconditioned, second-foot shoes” along with upcycled, steel-belted radial Bridge-stock sandals with molded, synthetic cork beds.

Where the back-entrance passage met the main thoroughfare, a huge 3D printing operation called Parting Ways supplied temporary replacements from recycled plastics for anything you or they could upload detailed plans for from the net, from appliance and auto parts to limited-life valves and taps. Between runs, one machine cranked out an armory of pink Hello Kitten toy handguns while another filled a huge bin with bright green bra strap adjuster rings. To its right, the Canadian Shield Pharmacy and Chihuahua Remedies stocked bright orange pill bottles filled with reimported prescription and FDA-exempt experimental drugs beside a red phone next to a fax machine beneath a sign that indicated “Doctors are standing by.” To its left, Star Tech Prev Gen advertised the “final frontier of pre-tariff open box computers, smartphones and accessories with guaranteed Q Continuous performance and security upgrades.”

Near the intersection of the two main covered hallways, just outside the airconditioned entrance to the Blood of Patriots Top-Dollar Plasma Fractionation Center (Phlebotomists Wanted) housed in what looked like a surplus Iraq War medical tent, Carl pulled me to a stop. He motioned me to set down the boxes. Which was good because those bulk school cafeteria mayonnaise jars weren’t exactly light.

“Check around the corner,” he instructed. “Three stalls down you should see a booth with a banner that says Shangri-La Savings. Right between Xanadu Discounts and Zen Zone Closeouts.”

I poked my head around the temporary wall like I’d gotten completely turned around in the maze of booths, trying not to look too conspicuous. “Got it.”

“You see a huge guy in a yellow John Deere hat manning any of the three?” Carl asked from behind my hip.

“No, two guys, yellow hats.” I peered through the crowd around their tables. “One in a Pittsburg Pirates cap, the other in CAT hat.”

“Oh, crap, Buryat and Tuva.” Carl pulled me back. He motioned to the boxes on the ground. “Grab those. We’ve gotta go.”

As I bent to snatch up the boxes, Carl turned to encounter a Himalayan mountain of a man in a yellow Deere hat, who asked him, “What is right before your eyes but you rarely see?”

Carl didn’t answer, just turned to bolt in the other way only to find the man in the CAT hat had cut him off quicker than I thought physically possible. CAT hat answered the riddle through a toothy grin, “The nose about to spite your face.”

John Deere lifted Carl from behind by the collar. Tuva, I assumed, locked his spindly but surprisingly strong fingers around my bicep. “You two have an appointment with the Buddha Father. Let’s take a walk”

“You can’t do this to me, Kalmy,” Carl protested as he tried to look up at the big man who held his collar. “This time I’ll put an earth spirit curse on you.”

“Shut up, gnome,” Tuva said, raising the back of his free hand without striking. “You’re not a yaksha. You’re a tomte. And I’m not even sure you’re that. Don’t test me Swedish meatball.”

Kalmy held him up off the ground and turned him to examine him. “Maybe we should pop him open like a dumpling to see what’s inside.”

“Save it until we’re at the car,” Tuva said. He motioned me to retrieve the boxes, never letting go.

They frog-marched us out to the parking lot in silence, past a line of vendors and patrons who studiously ignored us and would claim to have seen nothing even if questioned under oath. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Piney Point Park could give Osceola a run for its money in imitating those three wise monkeys when they chose. Where were my wife’s friends when I need them?

The four of us kicked up dust along the fence in the parking lot. The car was shrouded in shade by the time we got back to it.

Without a word, Kalmy tossed Carl effortlessly against the trunk and started patting him down. He stopped when he came to his back.

“Looks like we’ve got a singing bowl,” he said. Tuva just nodded.

Kalmy pulled up Carl’s shirt then tore away an iPod-sized unit taped to his back with a loud rip. He yanked on a wire still secured somewhere inside Carl’s shirt until it finally broke free. He popped batteries and handed it to Tuva, who examined it thoroughly inside and out before handing it back. Kalmy then crushed it beneath his massive weight with a sickening crunch, grinding it under his Bridge-stock sandals on the hardpacked dirt until nothing remained unbroken. Then he tossed everything over the fence into the ditch.

Holy seven hells, what exactly had Carl gotten me into?

Kalmy turned his attention to me. After motioning me to set down the boxes, he ran his hands over every surface of my body with a rough, intimate urgency I hadn’t felt since my girlfriend on Prom Night. He probed places even my doctor hadn’t visited, never mind my wife. But just like that first girlfriend, when he finished, he merely shrugged.

Tuva, who had watched the proceedings with the expression of a bored voyeur as he leaned against the land-ark, finally spoke again as he motioned Kalmy toward the car.

“You didn’t drop-off the samplers and the flyers,” he said to Carl. “And you didn’t pick up the stock for the mini-marts. Which makes me wonder where this stuff came from.” He kicked the boxes at my feet. “When Prim called, I thought you’d bolted. But then you have the audacity to show up here in MY car with this outsider. Who are you,” he turned to me, “FBI?”

I thought silence was my best shield, so I didn’t say anything. Tuva didn’t pursue it. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

While Tuva spoke, Kalmy searched the car. He came up with the slit open deposit bag and its accounting slip plus the morning’s Public’s receipt.

Tuva glanced at them both then turned back to Carl shaking his head. “What was the plan, here, gnome? Rip off a Jackson from Denny? A couple Benjamins from the Trippy Mart, maybe third from here? Add in the donation receipts from the food pantry if you dropped off the overstock and, what, your life’s worth less than five hundred? I would have thought at least a full G for a notorious gnome like you. I guess at your size even the Yogurt Festival Banquet is reduced to a Happy Meal.”

As Carl fixed him with a hateful glare, Tuva smiled and he patted the trunk. “Get them ready, Kalmy. It’s time we take a ride.”

In anticipation, Kalmy produced the duct tape I’d seen rolling around the floorboards earlier. Before I could even blink, Carl and I had our mouths taped and were hogtied like a pair of wild water buffalo at a Mongolian rodeo then stuffed into the three-body trunk, wedged between the bundled of coupons and the trio of grocery boxes that Kalmy inserted around us. Once the engine roared to life and the sun hit the car as we pulled away, the trunk heated up. Before long, I felt like I was being slow broasted like the worst Manifold Destiny meal kit ever.

After a long ride on pavement with plenty of pauses and turns followed by a brief crunch of gravel, the car jolted to a s stop. When the trunk lid popped allowing in a rush of cool air, I squinted up into near blinding sunlight to find we were parked behind a small Quonset hut. I recognized it as having once been a janitorial supply warehouse deep in the wilds of Osceola, tucked between former ranchland and orange groves that had been reimagined into an animal shelter, an EMS dispatch and a botanical garden. Before I could think of any benefit of knowing where we were, Kalmy extracted Carl and me from the trunk like sacks of dirty laundry. Slinging each of us over a shoulder, he hauled us through a metal door that Tuva held open for him.

Inside, he deposited us in an old supervisor’s office with two large observation windows that looked out into separate areas inside the building. One was a stockroom about a quarter of the size of the Public’s we’d been in this morning, tightly packed with shelves stocked with an array of groceries, sundries and cosmetics just like the ones in the trunk and the Trippy Mart. It was organized with the efficiency of an Amazon warehouse only manned by human workers in yellow hats instead of robotic forklifts. The second, smaller room had a raised floor stacked with rack-mounted servers connected to computer terminals manned by a battalion of yellow capped IT personnel, along with a host of scanners and professional quality printers spewing out reams of coupons, all lit only by a blue glow like a military command center.

When Kalmy ripped the duct tape from my mouth, it felt like someone had just given my face a Brazilian. I knew I should have shaved this morning. He closed the office door behind him. After a minute, I saw him and Tuva through the windows dropping the bounty from Carl’s morning errands in each of their respective rooms, the boxes of unsold goods in the warehouse, the samples and flyers in the boiler room. Watching the Golden Horde working in either room was like playing the license plate game on a driving trip, only no two logos were the same. None would have gathered much attention in working-class Osceola. I spotted a Jayhawks, a Jiffy Lube, an Adidas, a Bruins, a Masonic Temple, a Teamsters, a Steelers, a pair of plumbing and electrical unions, even a Don’t Tread on Me serpent before I turned away.

When I glanced back at Carl, he wore a half-smirk like he had everything under control and all of this was going to plan. Just another day in the life of a covert agent of DWARVENALE. I’d seen that expression before. He had an angle. Even more he wasn’t telling me. Frantically, I started thinking about it. Something to occupy my mind before whatever unpleasant end I knew had to be coming soon.

Suddenly, through the fog of the migraine that had reasserted itself in the trunk, it dawned on me. From my brief interaction with the Norwegian syndicate, I knew they were more meticulous in their planning, even if they were about this ambitious and crazy.

“You’re freelancing this, aren’t you,” I stated as much as asked.

Carl shrugged back at me. “The Fenris Brothers are unforgiving. When our poker game folded, we pissed off some real players. A lot of very important people lost a lot of money in the Cache for Trash raid. It left a power vacuum in the humanitarian aid arena. These yellow hat Soviet wannabes thought they could just slip in undetected like one of Uncle Vlad’s submarines into Kanholmsfjarden. Not on my watch, comrade.”

I thought about it a bit more. My involvement didn’t make sense. I brought nothing to the table. But it wasn’t wrong place, wrong time like the war on Christmas. Carl had sought me out. He could have just kept driving when he saw me. The final piece clicked into place.

“And I’m your insurance policy, right?” I shook my head. Bad idea. That made the pain worse.

Carl pointed to his black eye with a shrugged shoulder. He’d lost his sunglasses somewhere in the trunk. “Payback’s a bitch.”

“So, what’s the plan?” I asked, feeling a little more confident he had one.

Carl glared at me, before his eyes roamed around the room as if looking for something. A bug. They would be listening. Then he adopted that curious half-smile again before asking, “How can you escape the inescapable net?”

Another riddle. My head ached incessantly. Between the throbbing heartbeat pounding behind my eyes, an answer popped into my head.

“Become the fisherman,” I whispered so that only he could hear. He just smiled back like I’d caught him bluffing an inside straight. That proud you-are-learning-grasshopper look.

Before I could digest what that might mean, Kalmy and Tuva returned, holding the door for a raven-haired beauty in a yellow silk, butterfly embroidered half-dress over black slacks. She stared at me with dark, almost black, eyes that evaluated all the accumulated karma from my life before dismissing me and turning her gaze on Carl.

“So, our good luck Yaksha turns out to be a Bhutanese bowl gong despite all his references. I hope the stain on your karma is worth whatever you’ve been paid for this betrayal. But who are you really?” She looked deep into his eyes. “What was your original face before you were born?”

The half-smirk re-emerged as Carl answered, “The mask that hides your secret identity, Khambo Lama. Or should I just call you Hari until it becomes official the Old Man’s dead.”

“Oh, you think you’re clever in the koans,” Hari shot back, her finely plucked eyebrows arching up. “Then answer me this, DWARVENALE: What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

In the silence the air began to tingle. I think the duct tape had cut off the circulation in my wrists. Carl stared back without so much as a grunt.

“The last sound you’ll ever hear,” she finally answered. Turning to Kalmy, she added. “Take them to meet Baby in the park.”

Somehow, her crystalline soprano voice managed to make that casual imperative sound more ominous than anything I’d ever heard.

As Tuva opened the door for her to leave, the Quonset hut erupted in pyrotechnics that rivaled the Blue Oyster Cult concert I’d seen in college. Explosions, smoke, laser lights cut through a sudden fog. All that was missing was Godzilla storming into the server farm, or laying waste to the warehouse, though I could have sworn I heard his roar. There was shouting and confusion. Yellow hats ran back and forth while dark uniformed officers in helmets, gasmasks and flak vests with USComPol printed in bright, blocky yellow letters streamed through the kicked-open doors as if from a nest of angry fire ants.

In slow-motion, Kalmy drew an evil looking, bare-barreled pistol that looked like a compact version of a German Luger recast to a Japanese noir anime. Before he could decide which one of us to point it at, someone tossed a blue beer can through the doorway. It consumed the room with a hallucinogenic flash and an equally mind-altering bang.

The next moments came in strobe-flash snapshots of purple-spotted, overexposed sights and ear-ringing sounds. Suddenly, I was living an early-era Pink Floyd album, something psychedelic. My eyes no longer cooperated with each other; each focused independently from their perspective along the floor. I hadn’t taken enough drugs in my life for anything like this to make sense.

I saw Cassie, my favorite bagger from the Public’s, in black, patent leather jackboots and a midnight blue windbreaker labeled BIS, striding through the burst-open office door. Through at least an extra atmosphere of water clogging my ears, I could have sworn I heard her say, “Under the authority of Presidential Proclamation 9844 and the National Emergency concerning the Southern Border, I am placing you all under arrest.”

As she leaned over the unconscious Hari, with her words almost syncing up with her lips, she added, “If you meet the Buddha Father on the road, kill her. Her cover’s blown.”

Just before my world faded completely to black, I wondered what the women in my wife’s Tuesday night book club would have to say about this.

---

When I came to again, I found myself in a Bogart interrogation room. My eyes, in the interim having signed something akin to a détente, grudgingly worked together once again, though the images of the bare steel table, the empty gunmetal chair from it and mirrored window opposite me pulsated around the edges in the overheard fluorescent light. My head was aflame with a fire so white-hot cold it threatened to give me frostbite. My migraine had developed a migraine of its own.

Behind me a door opened. I started to turn my head, but it protested with a wave of nausea that sloshed from my sinuses to my navel. So, I waited patiently for whomever it was to enter my field of view. Eventually Cassie, still in her jackboots and windbreaker from the nightmare before, along with a very real gun strapped to her belt, sat down across the table from me. She laid open an official badge so I could read it. Special Agent Cassandra Troy, US Department of Commerce Police, Bureau of Industry and Security.

Great, another set of Federal cops I never knew existed. After my run-in with the Patriot Police and my entanglement with the DEA, I immediately demanded a lawyer.

Cassie laughed. “I’ve already backdated the files to list you as a confidential informant but I can shred that paperwork if you want. You’re lucky I recognized you when I did. Otherwise, you’d share Wicklund’s fate. He’s been a busy little boy since he first appeared on our radar.” She ticked through the charges. “International sanctions violations, money laundering, wire fraud, forging tax-deductible charitable contribution documents, grand theft auto, and driving on a Federal installation without a valid license.”

I kept listening knowing that anything I said would eventually turn against me. I didn’t know if Wicklund was really Carl’s last name, or if he even had one. But since I’d only seen it paired with Yaksha on his obviously fake ID, it didn’t seem prudent to enlighten her. Despite everything he’d done, Carl was still a friend.

“I had to separate you after the raid, for your own protection,” she continued as if I’d consented to her terms. “We moved in as soon as the audio stream went dead and we spotted the APB on Tuva’s car. You would think from the anonymous call reporting it stolen that someone knew we had a GPS tracker on it.”

Cassie gave me a long, hard look, which was more than a little disconcerting after so long thinking she was blind. Deep cover, I guess.

“Between that and the details from Wicklund’s wire,” she continued, “you shouldn’t have to testify. Not that these guys really want to go to court anyway. Once we’re done with them, we’ll kick them over to ICE. So, you won’t ever see them again unless you like to travel. Personally, I’d avoid countries that favor 7mm Nambu ammunition for a while.”

“The IRS still has my passport,” I said by way of acknowledgment. “As well as all my vacation club money.”

She chuckled again. “I’ll put in a good word with them as long as you stay on your best behavior. You seem to find your way to the center of these things. We might need your help again.”

Only if you can re-animate the body once my wife is done with it, I thought. I didn’t figure I could keep this from her, not without a professional cover story anyway. I knew my one phone call to the Fenris Brothers would go straight to voicemail.

“At the center of what exactly?” I finally asked.

“Wicklund really never tell you?” She raised an eyebrow and laughed at me again.

I said nothing. She already knew the answer if she’d listened to the wire.

“Let’s just say a certain world leader wanted a horse in the race to replace the Dalai Lama and financing for his next annexation scheme.” Cassie shook her head absently. “I’ll never understand Russian politics. Things were simpler when they were the Soviets. Though I have to admit, the food bank charity angle was novel.”

Someone rapped the other side of the mirror.

“Looks like your ride’s here.” She rose, stepping over the back of the chair and headed for the door. “Those guys should be through processing by now. But we’ll take you out the back just in case. Oh, and sorry about the belt. And the shoes. We had to make it look official. Someone will get you a voucher if they don’t turn up.”

As I pushed back my chair, I surveyed below my waist. Sure enough, my belt had gone MIA along with my shoelaces. I was glad I was wearing my skinny jeans today. But when I walked toward the door, my sneakers flailed on my feet worse than a pair of flip-flops on hot sand at the beach. I let them slip off. Slowly, carefully, I bent down to retrieve them. Which left me only in my bumblebee argyle socks for the impending walk of shame.

By the time I righted myself again, listing slightly to port, Cassie was holding open the door. Freedom beckoned, at least what passed for it until I saw my wife. Only then did I think to ask about Carl, though I remembered to call him Wicklund.

Back on public display to the room beyond, Cassie’s face descended into cold, professional disdain. “He’s got some high friends in low places. He’s being deported to Columbia.”

For his hat, I presumed. That’s when I noticed mine was also gone.

Cassie led me through an open office stocked with more WWII surplus desks and the soon to be surplus G-men who manned them, past an equally ancient snack machine that looked like it had been converted from dispensing cigarettes, then down a concrete stairwell. We emerged in a back hall with a bullet-proof service window on one side where I signed away my last remaining dignity in the form of a liability waiver and received a voucher for $8.50 for my belt and shoelaces in exchange. There was no mention of my NRA cap. That was fine with me. Good riddance.

Cassie motioned to a security door at the end of the hall without further explanation and turned back the way she’d come. Oddly, I would find myself missing her when I finally felt safe enough to return to my usual Public’s Market after I heard Denny had skipped bail for embezzlement.

By then, the bottom had fallen out of extreme couponing. Everyone had gone to specialized apps or loyalty rewards programs. Or just offered discounts through the stores. Mayor Rivers, always needing something new to promote her book on governing, crowbarred the council into requiring photo ID to buy groceries, an idea she’d picked up from one of our Great Leader’s political rallies a couple years before. As long as the millage rates didn’t go up, Osceola didn’t much care what other socio-political adventures Auntie Lisa embarked on.

The guy behind the window buzzed me through the security door. I found my wife waiting patiently behind a double-yellow line, a pair of my sandals dangling from a hand. I guess that answered how much she knew. Everything.

“Hurry up, Coupon King,” she said, “or we’ll be late for book club.”

Oh, my gods. It was still Tuesday, and she wanted me to face those women. She couldn’t be serious. But after twenty-five years of marital bliss, I gauged from her expression that it was best not to voice my objection.

Without a word, I exchanged my laceless sneakers for the sandals she held out. Through the disorienting migraine, I stared down in confusion at my black and yellow argyle socks, not sure I could negotiate removing them propped against a wall.

My wife seemed to sense my dilemma. With an impish smile, she opined, “The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath your feet. Wear socks with your Birkenstocks.”

And so, I did.

Friday, July 12, 2019

Almost

Sister

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Coupon King

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