“Not all of them. Just the ones Cost-Benefits decides will do a lot more harm than good if they go on breathing.”
“Does it bother you to kill people?”
“Not usually. It’s not like being a police officer. I mean cops, they have to deal with all kinds of people, and sometimes, upholding the law, they’ve got to come down on folks who really aren’t all that bad. I can see where that would give you a crisis of conscience. But the guys we go after in Bad Monkeys aren’t the sort you have mixed feelings about.”
“And the man you were arrested for killing, Mr.—”
“Dixon,” she says. “He wasn’t a bad monkey.”
“No?”
“He was a prick. I didn’t like him. But he wasn’t evil.”
“Then why did you kill him?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t just tell you that. Even if I thought you’d believe me, it wouldn’t make sense unless I told you everything else first. But that’s too long a story.”
“I don’t have anywhere else I have to be this morning.”
“No, I mean it’s a long story. This morning I could maybe give you the prologue; to get through the whole thing would take days.”
“You do understand you’re going to be in here for a while.”
“Of course,” she says. “I’m a murderer. But that’s no reason why you should have to waste your time.”
“Do you want to tell the story?”
“I suppose there’s a part of me that does. I mean, I didn’t have to mention Bad Monkeys to the cops.”
“Well if you’re willing to talk, I’m willing to listen.”
“You’re just going to think I’m crazy. You probably already do.”
“I’ll try to keep an open mind.”
“That won’t help.”
“Why don’t we just start, and see how it goes?” the doctor suggests. “Tell me how you first got involved with the organization. How long have you worked for them?”
“About eight months. I was recruited last year after the World Trade towers went down. But that’s not really the beginning. The first time I crossed paths with them was back when I was a teenager.”
“What happened?”
“I stumbled into a Bad Monkeys op. That’s how a lot of people get recruited: they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, they get caught up in an operation, and even though they don’t really understand what’s happening, they show enough potential that the organization takes notice. Then later—maybe days, maybe decades—there’s a job opening, and New Blood pays them a visit.”
“So tell me about this operation you stumbled into.”
“Well, it all started when I figured out that the janitor at my high school was the Angel of Death…”
Nancy Drew, Reconsidered as a Bad Seed
IT WAS THE FALL OF 1979. I WAS fourteen years old, and I’d been sent away from home to live with my aunt and uncle.
Where was home?
San Francisco. The Haight-Ashbury. Charlie Manson’s old stomping grounds.
Why were you sent away?
Mostly to keep my mom from killing me. We’d been fighting pretty much nonstop all that year, but towards the end of the summer things got especially bad. You know, physical.
What did you fight about?
The usual. Boys. Drugs. Me staying out all night with my friends. Plus there was my brother. My dad had taken off a few years before, and to support us my mom was working twelve-hour days, which she hated, and so I was supposed to watch Phil, which I hated.