Upgunned by David J. Schow

director?”
    â€œYeah,” I said. “Gooood eeeeev -ning.”
    â€œQuite. Hitchcock told a famous anecdote about the MacGuffin, which was essentially a way of telling someone to mind their own business. Today it has evolved to mean a plot element that incites interest or action, but which itself remains unexplained. It’s the bag of money everyone is after. The stolen jewels. The microfilm. The missing documents. The Big Secret. As Pearl White used to say during the great old days of the silents, the weenie. Film executives picked it up to abuse writers and directors. They’d look at a story and say ‘Where’s the weenie?’ meaning ‘Why should I care?’”
    Mal always took his time getting to the point. I don’t think he had much social discourse with the taciturn gunmen and social miscreants he also employed. I made a mental note not only to mark his words—I liked the concept—but to grab some Hitchcock DVDs.
    â€œDominic Sharps is the weenie,” Mal went on. “As to the motivations, I’m guessing that in our current moral climate of false outrage and crocodile patriotism, discrediting the man in charge of the president’s motorcade, before it happens, could have profound repercussions. It throws cherished institutions into doubt, you see.”
    I nodded and helped myself to some M&M’s. There should never have been blue ones. “Don’t bother hijacking a jet and flying it into a skyscraper when you can accomplish similar damage with a blow job.”
    â€œYes. I think that is the limit to which you and I should concern ourselves with the why . Our job is the how. ”
    â€œSo—something sexual?” I grabbed for my smokes; a cigarette’s worth of think time. “Do you mind?”
    â€œNot at all, dear boy, puff away. Yes, I think you could use Cognac for this one.” Cognac was a thousand-dollar hooker who worked the Beverly Hills Hotel. She was reliable and discreet, insofar as those conditions applied to the subterranean uses to which we occasionally put her.
    â€œOur backers specified a sex scandal, in fact. Wrongly, I think.”
    â€œReally?” I was not used to Mal being this opinionated about practical matters.
    â€œWell, wrong in the sense that I think Sharps should be indicted by using a young boy, not a prostitute, but there you are. The more depraved profile is the more potent. But our backers shied from it, mostly because a charge of child molestation invites too many similarities to the abundant sins of most churches, and they don’t want their political statement defused by the pollution of a religious angle.”
    It was a valid condition. If Sharps’s manufactured misbehavior could be excused by one religious mania or another, its fangs might be prematurely pulled before the op could do any lasting damage. Too many criminals fell back on some god’s misguidance, and they got away with it, too, in a country where nearly half the population believed in the existence of angels. Of course, another big segment believed in alien kidnappers, so if you inverted the argument you could see how frangible the deception might become if religion was tempted to cloud the issue.
    â€œIt doesn’t matter if they want a more garden-variety outrage,” I said. “They’re paying for it.”
    â€œExactly put. Can you arrange it?”
    â€œHow much security does he have?”
    â€œThere’s a full dossier on the table,” Mal said, eyeing a beaker of pomegranate juice.
    â€œBudget?”
    â€œHow does a hundred and fifty thousand sound to you?”
    â€œI’ll have to get some warm bodies. Say, two. Plus Cognac will have to disappear for a while; public eye and all that. Is an incriminating video the sort of thing you’re after?”
    â€œThat should do, if it is explicit enough.”
    â€œHet sex, fairly lurid?”
    â€œYes—never