Book 2: Operation Detour
Episode 2
They’re Out to Get Me
Have you ever felt like someone was out to get you? I’m not talking about baseless paranoia. I’m saying there is a real live person or group deliberately trying to ruin your life. Fully justified paranoia.
Dobie Pokorny here. Sorry we’re not meeting under better circumstances. I could get philosophical, but don’t see the point. I’ll get through this. Attitude is everything.
I’m usually pretty good at keeping things light, keeping it positive. Okay, maybe not usually, but often enough. Not today.
I was fired this afternoon. But wait, there’s more!
Coming home early, I caught my girlfriend Cheryl and her former boyfriend – and my now-former best friend – Christian cheating on me. And filming it. In my bed. Turns out, they’ve been doing this for a while. Yeah.
I almost missed my doctor’s appointment because of it. I wish I had missed that appointment. Then, I never would have known about this incurable disease they say I have: expialadosis, or something. No, that’s from Mary Poppins. I don’t know.
How is it even possible for so many things to go wrong in one day? At first I thought it was just a series of unfortunate events. A healthy person doesn’t go around assuming there’s a conspiracy against them.
Turns out, in my case, there is. If I seem flippant, that’s just how I cope. You either laugh or you cry. You start referring to yourself in the second person, too.
Anyway, no, I don’t know what disease I have. Whatever it is, there aren’t any symptoms. I have to take my doctor’s word for it. Yeah, I should probably get a second opinion.
I do know it’s not sexually-transmitted. I asked that much, but was still reeling from seeing Cheryl and Christian together, filming themselves. It is now seared forevermore into my consciousness.
I couldn’t take any more bad news by the time I saw the doctor, but did grab the prescription slip out of his hand on my way out. He probably said something. I wasn’t listening.
Sorry if I’m depressing you. Things can only improve from here, right? I’ll make another appointment with another doctor next chance I get.
I’m at the drugstore now, trying to get that prescription filled. It’s just before noon, and I haven’t made it to the unemployment office yet... if I ever do.
The pharmacist appears to be a transvestite. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. I try to be cool.
She’s shaking her head, having trouble reading the doctor’s scribbled prescription. “What is this?” she says. “I can’t read it.”
I had unconsciously crumpled the paper into a little ball. I give the “no idea” gesture: elbows bent, palms up and out.
How does anyone ever get the right prescription? I can never read them even when I know what it says.
“I don’t know, dude...” I begin.
“What do you mean, ‘dude’?”
“Oh... no, no,” I try to recover. “Sorry. I call everyone ‘dude.’ Friends, girlfriends, male, female. I mean my girlfriends are always female, but... not that there’s anything... I’ve been calling everyone ‘dude’ my entire life.”
It’s not true, and I don’t think she believes me, but she has stopped caring and returned her attention to the prescription. “What is the prescription for?” she sighs deeply. “What is it supposed to do?”
I shrug. “I was hoping you could tell me. The doctor just handed it to me. Never said what it was.”
He probably said what it was.
Again, shaking her head, she says, “Wait here while I find out.”
But I don’t wait there. That’s not my style. I’m a rebel. I begin perusing the aisles.
Before I know it, I’m talking to this forty-something gentleman, a complete stranger. Hereinafter referred to as Forty-Something Guy.
This guy is about my height and build: 6 feet, 190 pounds. Same skin tone: not lily white, not quite tan, either. Nicely dressed. Professional.
I’m wearing jeans, sneakers, and a short-sleeve collard shirt. Around the house, I’d be in shorts and a t-shirt but try to up my game when out in public. It’s something my parents drilled into me, and they’d be glad to know it stuck.
“Nice suit,” I say to the man.
He tilts his head back, flares his nostrils, narrows his eyes, but says nothing. Not the talkative type.
“Am I in the middle of a bad dream or something?” I persist.
“Probably,” he looks me up and down before walking away.
Smart-ass. I follow him, talking to his backside now. “I mean, life could not possibly get this screwed up, this fast. Could it?”
I don’t normally harass and pour my heart out to complete strangers. Yes, he is a smart-ass, but so am I and usually let that slide.
I think I was dosed earlier at work. I was a computer programmer at Barefoot Shopper, one of those shop-from-home TV channels. Yeah, I quit the temp secretary gigs. Anyway, I guess their name is meant to imply that you can sit on your couch in your bare feet, eating bon-bons, and shop until you fall off the couch. I don’t know.
After I was called into HR that day, told I was being “let go,” and escorted out of the building, I passed Marisa Delaney — their most beautiful and popular show host — in the hallway.
I smiled. She smiled back, as usual. She was always so nice, but I assumed she was just being polite. Smiling at everyone is what a show host does.
In that moment, I thought “what the hell” and was about to ask her out when a wall-mounted air freshener I’ve never noticed before sprayed me in the face. This prompted a completely different sort of “what the hell?”
The spray must have contained mind-altering chemicals. It’s all I can figure. I mean, I’ve always been a little weird, but not like this.
Now in the drugstore, I start rubbing my eyes. Forty-Something Guy takes the opportunity to escape. I find him again in the refrigerated aisle. Smiling at him, I yank a root beer out of the display case and take a swig.
“Yesterday, I would have grabbed a real beer,” I explain. “But, I quit drinking today.” Laughing, I add, “I sound like that guy in Airplane! ‘I picked a bad day to quit drinking. I picked a bad day to quit sniffing glue.’”
I laugh again. He does not.
“Good for you,” he is clearly annoyed.
A man in his 20s, smaller, darker hair – I’m guessing store clerk, based on the blue vest and nametag and over-all perkiness – comes around the corner. I think I’ll have better luck with him. Younger people are not so jaded and bitter.
I’m wrong. He sees me drinking the soda and barks out, “You gonna pay for that?”
“Yes, I am,” I say calmly. “Do I look like a shoplifter?”
“Kinda. Yeah.”
I take another gulp while looking directly at him, daring him to stop me. He does nothing and I go in search of Forty-Something Guy.
Spotting him, I sneak up and lean on the display case right behind him. Mere inches away, I continue my sob story. “I’m still trying to process it all.”
The guy lurches forward, startled, crying out, “Do you mind?!” Apparently, being mere inches from a stranger’s ear is too close?
A man’s voice is now booming through the overhead speakers. “Mr. Pokorny? Dobromir Pokorny!”
In a flash of inspiration – psychotic break, temporary dissociative identity disorder, whatever – I say to Forty-Something Guy, “I should change my name. From now on, call me... Axel. I always liked that name. Yeah, Axel McLean. Axel Winchester McLean. Ooh, good one.”
“You sound like a car wash for heavy machinery,” he quips.
I’m looking up at the ceiling now, trying to find a good comeback, when he disappears. Like a shapeshifter.
Switching back to her feminine voice as I approach the counter, the pharmacist says, “Your prescription is ready, Mr. Pokorny.”
“Please, call me McLean. Axel McLean.”
Luckily, she doesn’t care that I used one name to have my prescription filled, and now a different one to pick it up. “Whatever,” she snaps. “That’ll be $87.44.”
“How much?!”
“Eighty-seven dollars and forty-four cents.”
“Damn!”
“Your health insurance is expired,” she explains. “It would have been $3.50. But without insurance, it’s eighty...”
“...seven forty-four, yeah.”
The young clerk from earlier skulks up from behind and asks, “Did you include the root beer?”
“Oops. That’ll be $88.91.”
On my way out, I spot Forty-Something Guy checking out at the other register. I wave goodbye. He flips me off. I nod and smile. It’s good to make friends, meet new people.
With my root beer and expensive new mystery prescription in hand, I leave the drugstore.
Operation Underway
Riva has returned to her own car in the parking lot by the time Dobie returns to his. She is close enough to watch him reading his new prescription bottle label, shaking his head. The listening device she planted while he was in the store allows her to hear everything.
“Whatever,” he says and washes down a couple pills with a swig of root beer. “These better be good.”
Squealing his tires out of the parking space, he barely misses another car just entering the lot.
“They call me Axel,” he says to himself. “Axel McLean!” In his best James Bond voice, he says, “McLean. Axel Winchester McLean at Your Majesty’s service.”
She is not familiar with the Bond films, not sure what to make of Dobie’s monologue. Multiple personality syndrome? Harmless role playing? All she knows is that five minutes later, she is following him down the LA freeway system, with his radio blaring gangsta rap. She never would have pegged him as a fan. Maybe this particular personality has always been a fan of rap?
She never cared for it but catches herself nodding to the beat as it comes through her own speakers. She is not tuned to the same station that he is. She is hearing it through her own listening device now broadcasting everything from Dobie’s vehicle into a receiver on her end tuned to that device’s signal. Pirate radio for an audience of one.
She notices a small pickup truck up ahead in traffic, loaded down with lumber, crawling at 45 miles per hour. Dobie swerves to avoid it, cutting off several other cars in the process.
“Target reflexes... OK,” Riva dictates into a lapel pin. “Judgment... questionable.”
He is now traveling 55 mph in the fast lane. Fifty-five is the speed limit, but almost no one in California – anywhere – obeys the speed limit, especially in the fast lane, unless they’ve got a cop behind them.
If Dobie notices the two men standing outside of their cars along the right shoulder, he gives no indication. Riva does notice. How can she not? They are between their cars, with one of them pointing a gun at the other raising his hands over his head. She keeps a close eye until safely out of range.
She has rigged not just Dobie’s vehicle but her own car with cameras and microphones to record everything for this, her first solo operation. She makes a mental note to save for the local police whatever footage she might have just captured of that highway robbery.
She knows Serge would use that footage for himself, hunt down the gunman, show him the video, and blackmail him. “Always take advantage of opportunities!” was one of his never-ending bits of advice. “That’s how it’s done!” It didn’t matter what was extorted, so long as something was.
As suddenly as that thought appeared, it disappeared. Who cares what Serge would do? This is her operation. Her baby. And, like any baby, it needs a name. All the great military operations had memorable names: Charge of the Light Brigade; Operation Barbarossa; Operation Overlord; Tet Offensive; and who could forget Operation Flash by the Croats against the Serbs?
Hers would be “Operation Make Him Your Bitch,” she says with a laugh. “Or, maybe Operation Stupid Git? No, Operation Dimwit. Ha!” Funny, but no.
She passes by an off-ramp to her right. It is blocked with barriers, signs, and flashing lights. A slowly-evolving smile crosses her lips as she says, “Operation Detour!” It is the perfect metaphor for what’s about to happen to this Dobie or Axel or whatever he’s calling himself.