Tony's Seafood

**"Tony's Seafood Never Sleeps"**

No one in Westfield much noticed Ron Travers—except that they all kind of did. He looked like the kind of guy who used to be someone, then quietly got tired of it. He drove a rust-colored Impala, parked it under the same tree across from Nellie’s Donut House every morning, and sat with a black coffee for precisely 48 minutes. He never ordered donuts.

But somewhere—deep in the decaying files of a long-defunded federal task force—a bureaucratic error labeled Ron as "possibly significant." No one knew why. No one ever corrected it. So when Ron moved to Westfield, a half-forgotten node in the system blinked awake.

To handle it quietly, the Department initiated Operation Cruller Net. The concept was simple: make it *look* like Ron was under deep surveillance, without spending the budget actually doing any surveillance. This led to the next logical step: **delegate the illusion** to local actors.

Enter Gus, the bearded man in flannel who occupied the corner stool at Nellie’s. The Department decided Gus, a retired long-haul driver with nothing better to do, would become the "epicenter" of covert coordination. Secret police in Des Moines, Phoenix, and Scranton would all *pretend* to send field updates back to Gus—who, of course, knew none of this.

When Ron took a trip to New York, the show followed. He noticed the trucks first. They’d appear in odd places—idling two blocks away, following three car lengths behind on I-87, or parked suspiciously outside his hotel. Always the same logo: **Tony’s Seafood**.

Ron didn’t remember ever seeing a Tony’s Seafood in Westfield. But the name kept showing up. Once, while walking through Times Square, he saw a man in a leather jacket shout into a walkie-talkie, “Copy that. Returning to Gus.” The man locked eyes with Ron for a split second, then disappeared into the crowd.

It got weirder. In Detroit, a street performer made a puppet say “Nellie’s got the drop,” and winked at him. In Atlanta, a teenager with braces offered him a donut and said, “From the HQ.” He started seeing vans with mismatched license plates. Sometimes the same person would appear in a different disguise two cities apart.

Back in Westfield, Gus went on sipping coffee and playing crossword puzzles. He had no idea his presence served as the nerve center of an imaginary surveillance ring.

The agency never updated its files. New agents cycled in and out, inheriting the job of pretending there was something real happening. No one wanted to be the one to admit the whole thing was nonsense.

Ron, for his part, never figured it out. He just stopped asking questions. Wherever he went, someone was watching—but not watching anything in particular. Just maintaining the illusion that they were.

And always, *always*, there was Tony’s Seafood. Watching. Not watching. Haunting the corners of America’s absurd, bureaucratic imagination.