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Please.”
    Rick stopped and clutched them to his chest. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
    “What am I doing here?” Simon asked.
    “I need to prepare you,” he said. “That’s what I do.” He brought the scissors up once again and once again Simon pulled away. There were a hundred ways to kill someone with those scissors, and he wasn’t about to give the man the opportunity to test them out.
    “I don’t have a lot of time,” Rick pleaded, “please.”
    “What happens,” Simon asked, “if you don’t finish?”
    Rick’s eyes quickly darted down to his chest and then back up. “Please put your head up.”
    Simon sat still. A test. One snip and they’d be back on even ground.
    “Do you work for them?”
    “Well,” he said, “I suppose I do but not by choice. Not like that thug out there. They bring in poor souls like you and make me fix you up so don’t look like you’ve had the world beaten out of you.”
    “How long have you been here?” Simon asked.
    “I suppose it’s been just about a year, now. I’m not entirely sure. Do you know what day it is today?”
    “I don’t know. It was October last I remember.”
    Rick breathed a regretful sigh. “Little over a year and a half then. They got me on Valentine’s Day. Terrible day to miss, eh?”
    Simon shrugged. “I guess so.” He spun around and saw Rick with a razor in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. “Did they give you...” he gestured towards his chest and at the device they’d implanted there.
    He grabbed the scissors and positioned Simon’s head forward. “Yes,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper, “they did.”
     
    It took just under twenty minutes for Rick to turn his captive client into a man worthy of seducing American royalty. Simon looked in the mirror at someone that he had only seen in magazines. His hair was spiked up, his stubble was gone and Rick had given him a suit that fit him almost perfectly. It was disconcerting to look at his face in the mirror and see a man that he’d never seen before.
    “My work is done,” Rick said. He went to the wall to press the buzzer next to the door.
    “Wait,” Simon said.
    “What?” Rick’s hand hovered over the button. “Something wrong?”
    Simon stuffed his shaking hands into the shallow pockets of the suit. “Do people ever come back? I mean, do you ever see them again?”
    Rick shook his head. “A few. Not many.”
    “How many?” He didn’t want to hear the answer but the question still came out.
    “Not many. Please, just do what they ask. There are too many heroes that come through here.”
    He looked at himself in the mirror one last time and tried to separate the cashier and obedient son from the man with the expensive tie and dress shoes. A different man was about to walk out that door. The old Simon was dead. He nodded at Rick, and the buzzer went off.
     
    “Why are you doing this?” Simon asked.
    They passed another series of cars on the freeway. All the windows in the car were blacked-out to the point that he could hardly see outside. Eduardo had played his iPod the whole time and varied between hip hop and metal; but played at an oddly quiet volume. That is, except when Simon began to bother him, then it got cranked up to 11.
    The whites of Eduardo’s knuckles showed through his clenched hands. He pushed on the gas, and they sailed through a small patch of traffic. “I said, shut up.”
    “You don’t have to do this,” Simon said. “Just let me out. I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
    For an instant, he felt like he’d made a connection. The music stayed low and Eduardo’s eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking.
    “Please? I promise. I’ll just go back home, and no one will know about any of this.”
    Simon’s heart sank as his driver’s hands went down to the volume control. Without a word, the metal music was as loud as the speakers could handle.
    All he could do, was wait.
     
    Eduardo brought him to the back entrance of