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***

Bobby Earl Macklin was proud of his little ten-thousand-square-foot ranch-style house in the Catalina foothills. North of Skyline, of course, with the back of the property butting up against the Coronado National Forest and far enough from the new La Encantada shopping center for privacy. It sat on twenty acres of prime foothills real estate, fenced, posted with warnings, and equipped with better security than the new fence along the nearby Mexican border. He had a little private army for just in case, and a number of sound-proofed rooms—office, bedroom, his wife's bedroom, and, of course, the hobby room.

When he admitted it, Bobby Earl was on the back side of sixty, While he had lost most of his interest in Mrs. Bobby Earl, despite all the nipping and tucking those ridiculously expensive cosmetic surgeons had done, he still lusted in his heart after the young ladies. The very young ladies, actually. Considering his lofty position in Tucson's society, and state and national politics, that lusting was best kept out of the public eye. He'd made some special arrangements with his security folks. Didn't hurt that his wife wasn't even aware of the underground hobby room, either, or its very private entrances and exits.

Bobby Earl had spent the night in that hobby room. Took him longer, these days, to indulge his hobby. Even when a spectacular Lolita dropped by after he rose from a healthy post-dinner nap. With some designer erectile “function” drugs, as he preferred to call them, and a high-dollar contract with the young lady's manager guaranteed to make her eager to please, it had still taken four and a half hours of sweaty effort before he satisfied his needs. Only then did he notice how exhausted and unsatisfied his young companion actually was. He would have thought she could manage a bit of pretense for what he was paying, and maintain it long enough to be escorted out. He was mentally lowering the tip he'd planned to reward her with as he buzzed for his social secretary. Time to get the real girl out of here so he could concentrate on the memories—her perfect little body, her truly amazing flexibility—and forget her clear disappointment in his performance.

“Bobby Earl Macklin, I presume?”

The voice was not his social secretary's. Nor any of his security team members.

“And your granddaughter?”

The wise-ass comment made it clear the man didn't work for him, or wouldn't after tonight.

The girl giggled, shimmied back into her pleated jumper, and pulled on her Mary Janes. Bobby Earl decided she wasn't getting any gratuity whatsoever. He sat up in the satin sheets of his mirror-surrounded bed and found the reflection of half a dozen small, trim, and generally uninteresting men standing over in the room's main entrance. Of course, no one who'd entered this room uninvited or unescorted could be truly uninteresting.

Bobby Earl sucked in his gut, rearranged the sheets, and scooted to the edge of the bed as he turned to face the man. Bobby Earl kept a Taurus .454 five-shot pistol in a secret compartment on this side of the bed, just in case a Cape Buffalo happened to get in here, or some human he didn't care for. This guy was so small the Taurus would probably cut him in half.

“You her pimp?” Bobby Earl saw no reason to be polite. Under other circumstances, he would have used the term manager. But he didn't deal with managers. His social secretary took care of those details. Where the hell was that man, anyway?

Bobby Earl couldn't imagine how any stranger other than the girl's manager could be on his property. The girl had come with an escort of course—her manager, or what Bobby Earl had just called him. Bobby Earl supposed his security people must have relaxed a little and let the bastard slip in. Heads would roll. He pushed a button under the edge of the mattress that would bring them running, then felt for the hidden spot where the .454 resided.

“No. I'm not her pimp. I'm your fix it man.”

That didn't clear anything up for Bobby Earl. The girl, dressed now, sat on the edge of the bed and sucked a thumb while she waited for whatever might happen next.

“Fick's Internet Technologies,” the man explained. “You and they arranged for me to fix it. And I did. I paid a visit on your elections man. And I took care of that item at Pascua Yaqui Village.”

If this man was who he claimed, well, Bobby Earl wanted that Taurus in his hand in the worst way. He grabbed for it and suddenly found himself bent over backward across a stack of pillows beside an assortment of velvet whips. The girl had looked much better in the reflections his mirrors showed when she was in a similar position an hour or so earlier. And when Bobby Earl appreciated those reflections, there had been no small trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth.

“You 'bout to regret that,” Bobby Earl said. The small man's reflection didn't seem concerned. In fact, he wasn't paying attention. He was speaking to the girl.

“Hi,” he asked her. “What's your name?”

Bobby Earl would take special pleasure in what his security force did to this guy. He had a couple of former special ops people, one with experience in interrogations in Afghanistan. He'd let them get creative with the intruder. They'd know how to make the guy suffer…. Only, where the hell were they? Two armed men should have come busting in here less than sixty seconds after he punched that button. Surely it had been longer than that already.

“My name's Taylor,” the girl said.

Taylor? Where the hell did she come up with a name like that? Bobby Earl wondered if maybe he should have asked her name himself. Not that it mattered now.

“Taylor,” the stranger told her, “you're a very pretty girl. And you're likely to stay that way and live a long and healthy life.”

Bobby Earl sat up. The trim man never even turned to look at him.

“That's especially true if you don't know what happens in this room in the next few minutes.”

“I could leave,” the girl offered.

“I'd like to let you go,” the man said. “But there's a man sitting in a chair in front of a ruined security console upstairs and I've got it fixed so, if he moves, he'll ground a live wire and electrocute himself. I'd rather you didn't go through that room and disturb him.”

“What about…?”

“Your friend? The one who brought you here? I'm afraid he and the rest of Mr. Macklin's security people are in similarly awkward situations. I'd let you leave, but I'm sure you understand I can't have you wandering around in the desert when I don't have time to keep an eye on you.”

The girl stared at him with a puzzled, dull look. The kind that wasn't unexpected on a pre-teen you kept up until just before dawn. “You want me to hide under the bed or shut my eyes or something?”

“Shutting your eyes would be good. And duck your head under the covers. Put your fingers in your ears. Maybe hum your favorite song so you can honestly tell people you don't know what's about to happen between Mr. Macklin and me. Do that until I come get you or you count to ten thousand, whichever comes first. All right?”

“Okay,” she said. She crawled under the down comforter at the foot of the bed and began humming something Bobby Earl thought was probably rap. He hated rap.

“So, what is this?” Bobby Earl asked. “Billy and his Kansas kiddy corps turn on me, decide they want a bigger piece of the pie?”

The plain man turned toward Bobby Earl, reached under his jacket, and pulled out a serrated knife that gleamed in the room's soft, indirect light. He leaned over and looked straight into Billy Earl's eyes

“I want to know every single thing you can tell me about Fick's I.T. And, if it relates, Billy and that Kansas kiddy corps. Show me that courtesy, Mr. Macklin, and I'll keep quiet about the election you rigged. You'll have the option to do the same, or not, your choice, because I won't have cut your tongue out.”

Bobby Earl Macklin had been buying and selling for decades. Property, food, cars, homes, people. He knew a bottom-line offer when he heard one. He spilled his guts, including every detail about Billy and Fick's this stone-cold killer could possibly want to know.

***

“So this is the guy who led us on such a merry chase,” Dempsey said, coming around the desk and standing over the bald Kansan. “Doesn't look so tough now, kneeling there, drooling on the floor.”

One of his uniforms laughed, but up close, Dempsey had to admit the guy was big and muscular enough to be trouble. But not right now. That wasn't really drool, though, it was blood leaking from the man's nose. And the guy was making progress at trying to stand. Getting his legs under him, little by little.

“How many times you stun him?”

“Lost count,” the officer admitted.

“More'n they recommend,” the other uniform suggested.

No question about that, Dempsey thought. You had to hit a guy a lot of times to leave him this fucked up twenty or thirty minutes later. And with all that, the guy might be about to make it to his feet. Dempsey put a shoe on the man's shoulder, pushed, and toppled him easily.

“Let's get this over with.” Dempsey's plain-clothes detective didn't like what they were doing. He'd gotten involved because his kid was turned into a paraplegic in a traffic accident that had been his own fault. Even the city's generous insurance had proved insufficient long ago. The detective might be ashamed of himself, but he'd do whatever it took to care for his son.

“This thing's already too fucked up,” the detective said. “What were the chances that hit man would take down one of our enforcers at Pascua? Or that we'd spend the whole night chasing this hick around town? Let's just get him out on the tracks and put one between his eyes.”

Dempsey thought the Sewa officer who died at Pascua had been about to rat them out. That he'd been thinking about turning state's evidence, along with the elections guy. Not that Dempsey knew for sure. So he avoided that part of the question. “No, we're going to wait and include Parker and Matus. And we won't do it too close to here. I don't want word about our private ‘substation' getting out.”

“Fourth Avenue?” the detective suggested. “Where the hippies hang out?”

The problem with the hippies was some of them might still be hanging out, or starting their day early.

“No. The three of you, take him to the parking garage at Pennington and Scott. Third level, central staircase. I'll get my car and wait for Parker and Matus. I'll send them up. Be ready. Take them from behind with one gun. Turn another on this guy. Make it look good.”

The detective nodded, all business. The uniformed officers high-fived each other, like they were about to take the field for the annual interdepartmental softball tournament.

“Need a throw down?” Dempsey asked.

“Got a spare .45,” the detective said. “Good one, so we'll be sure of Parker and Matus.”

“Then go. Set it up. I'll be right behind you with this cop-killer's last victims.”

The uniforms took the bald guy by the shoulders and jerked him to his feet. He tried to walk, but he wasn't ready for it yet.

“You'll clean up here?” the detective asked from the door.

Dempsey hadn't planned on it, but the man was right. There were a few other officers who knew about this place, but not this situation. Before long, all of them would have heard about Parker and Matus and Mad Dog. There shouldn't be any fresh blood stains on the floor in here.

“Yeah. I got it.”

The detective disappeared down the hall in the wake of the uniforms and their prisoner. Dempsey went to the utility closet. He grabbed a mop, ran some water in a bucket, and mixed in cleaning solution. He did a half-assed job, but it wasn't like no one had ever bled on this floor before.

He put the cleaning stuff away and was about to leave the building when his cell rang. Were Parker and Matus already here? He snatched the phone off his belt and checked to see who was calling, then answered real quick. You didn't keep Bobby Earl Macklin waiting.

“Mr. Macklin. What can I do for you?”

“Where are you? What's going on?” Tucson's biggest wheeler dealer's voice sounded harsher than usual.

“The office in the warehouse by the tracks. We've got that Mad Dog. We're setting up another incident to establish him as a psycho.”

“Right.” Macklin paused. “Where's it going down?”

Dempsey told him.

“Wait for me.”

It wasn't like Macklin. Usually, he didn't want to know any details when they had to get their hands dirty, let alone turn himself into a witness.

“Hey, you sure you want this?”

“Wait!”

“Okay, sir. But this could get messy. We got targets coming for him. Gonna be hard to keep them occupied for long.”

“Won't be long. But, by damn, Dempsey, you better wait for me.”

“Sure, sure, no problem,” Dempsey said, but by then, no one was on the other end to hear him.

***

Only a game?” English said. He was tempted to slap the kid upside the head a few times—with a two-by-four, maybe.

“Yeah. Another one, like War of Worldcraft, only better,” the Peirce kid said from where he sat in front of a monitor. Isaac Miller was by the door, attached to the roto-tiller.

“Killing a cop is a game?”

“Kill a cop, kill a dragon,” the Miller boy said, “what's the difference? They just respawn if we want them back. Then they're right back in the game.”

The sheriff shook his head. Did these kids really believe that? Frank Ball had seemed to start with a similar opinion.

“Listen to me,” English said. “A policeman died in Tucson tonight. Mad Dog is on the run down there, accused of the murder. And my daughter….”

“Oh sure. We know. It's because of our assassin.”

“Your assassin?”

“In our game, Sheriff. It's a computer game we've been developing. It'll be out there, competing with Syms and Halo and WOW one of these days. But while we're refining it, it's more fun to throw in characters we know from real life. That's why we decided to put Mad Dog and Heather at risk tonight. We probably wouldn't kill them off, even in a game, but it's just their avatars that are at risk.” His shrug was obscenely casual. “Just a bunch of ones and zeros in the electronic ether.”