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“No,” the sheriff said. “I'm telling you, a real policeman died a real death. Not make believe. My daughter was actually attacked by some kind of maniac, and my brother truly is being chased by officers who think he's a cop killer. Not in those computers of yours. Not avatars. Not electronic ether. Real people! In Tucson!! Right now!!!”

“No way,” Isaac Miller said.

“That can't be,” Kevin Peirce echoed.

“Yes. That cop is irreversibly dead. And don't you know about the bomb at the courthouse?”

“Well, sure,” Peirce said, though he didn't sound as certain of himself anymore. “It's more fun when we make some of the stuff happen in the real world, but that was just an M-80 and….”

An M-80 was a super firecracker, though big and dangerous enough to be illegal in Kansas.

“It wasn't an M-80,” the sheriff said. “It was a Bouncing Betty, Vietnam War ordnance like that M79 grenade that blew my brother's house off the face of the earth earlier this morning. Really destroyed it, just like thousands of others killed real people in real wars.”

“You're not serious,” Peirce said, though his eyes had begun to take on the fearful look of someone afraid the opposite was true.

“And Ed Miller,” the sheriff continued, “is every bit as dead as that cop in Tucson, burned to a crisp when the thing bounced off the courthouse wall and exploded in his face. Doc Jones is opening his chest and skull, or what's left of them—doing an autopsy, even as we speak.”

“But Billy said…” Peirce muttered.

“No,” Miller said. “That's wrong. It can't be because that'd mean….”

“You're responsible for two deaths,” the sheriff said.

Kevin Peirce shook his head. “Way more'n two. We've been running assassins for a year.”

“Oh Jesus,” Isaac Miller moaned. “Did we fix real elections? Did Uncle Ed truly die?”

The sheriff nodded.

“Wow!” Peirce said. “Does that mean I moved real millions into those offshore accounts?”

***

Turn left,” Heather said, indicating the parking lot near the hospital's emergency room entrance. “I've got a faster car here.”

“Sure,” Ms. Jardine said. “But where are we going that we've got to hurry?”

Heather wished she had a good answer. She'd almost gotten Parker the last time she tried. She dialed again as Ms. Jardine pulled the VW in an empty slot. Nothing. The battery symbol indicated no charge at all.

“Shit,” she said, and stuffed the phone back in her fanny pack.

“Look at Hailey,” Ms. Jardine said. “She's not worried so you needn't be.”

Hailey didn't seem upset. Impatient, maybe, but she sat on the back seat and waited without complaint.

“Funny,” Heather said. “I really thought she might lead us to Mad Dog.”

“Still could.”

Heather got out of the bus and trotted to Matus' 4Runner, three slots down. Hailey was right behind her, but as Heather fumbled with the key, Hailey passed her and kept going.

“Hailey!” Heather called. The wolf didn't look back or slow down.

Ms. Jardine joined her, basketball shoes slapping the asphalt. “Like now, maybe,” she said.

“Get in.” Heather yanked her door open and jumped behind the wheel.

Ms. Jardine ran around the SUV and did as she was told. “You know what to do now?” she said, climbing into the passenger's seat.

Heather twisted the key and the engine roared. “Damn right I do. Follow that wolf.”

***

Mad Dog was on the floor in the back of another police car. Not a marked one, this time. But big. A solid dark-blue sedan with four doors that screamed official-government-vehicle for all its lack of insignia.

He didn't know where they were going. Not far, if he'd understood what was happening back in that warehouse. Not that he was sure he had. His mind was as confused and unresponsive as the rest of his body. He thought they were going to a parking lot. For his execution. And someone else's. Parker's he thought. And…? He tried to concentrate. To remember. To decide how to get out of this.

One of the uniformed officers was in the back with him. The man sat, keeping him pressed to the floor by planting big feet in the middle of Mad Dog's back. Not that he would have been doing push ups back here, anyway. He ached. Every single muscle felt like it had just been through the most vicious workout of his life. Even his eyebrows hurt.

At least he wasn't confined by cuffs anymore. They'd taken those off before they hauled him into the office. But he wasn't sure they hadn't replaced them with plastic before putting him in the car. Streetlights went by, alternating moments of light and dark. He couldn't see anything with his face pressed to the floor between the front and rear seats. He made sure about the cuffs by stretching his hands farther apart than he could have if a binding were there. Then he folded one leg up toward his butt while keeping the other against a back door. The cop kicked it down. Mad Dog's muscles threatened to cramp, but it was their pain that confined him now, not steel or plastic ties.

The car never got up much speed. And it turned a couple of times before its tires began squealing the way tires often did on concrete surfaces. Like parking garages, for instance. Like they might in the place where these bastards planned to kill him for reasons he didn't begin to understand.

The car stopped. Doors opened. Mad Dog tried to lift his head to see where they were, but he couldn't. The only weapon he had left was surprise. He had to take them off guard. Slug somebody, push somebody, run like hell. If he could. He tried to get his legs under him as they pulled him out of the car and didn't quite manage it. It was going to be hard to run if your body wouldn't obey you any better than that.

No real point in trying, though. Not yet. Not until the right moment. So, he didn't try again. He let them drag him across the oil-stained concrete toward a stairwell near the center of the building.

“Yeah,” one of the men said. The one in the suit, not one of the uniforms. Mad Dog realized the man had answered a cell phone. The buzzing he'd thought was just inside his head must have been the phone.

“No shit?” the guy said. Then, “Okay. Whatever.”

“What?” one of the uniforms asked.

“We got to wait,” the suit told them. “The big man himself wants to come watch us do this one.”

“Macklin?”

Mad Dog thought the name sounded familiar. But it had nothing to do with Tucson.

“What I said, wasn't it?”

“That'll be a first.”

More time, Mad Dog thought. More time to recover. He could use that because he couldn't stop himself from impacting the concrete with his face when the uniforms dropped him, even though he tried. Mad Dog's nose started bleeding again, and there was blood in his mouth where his teeth had bit into his lip.

“How long?” one of the uniforms wondered.

“Long as it takes. Man's paying the bills.”

Longer would be better, Mad Dog thought. Much longer. He rolled his head to one side so he could watch them out of slitted eyes. The uniforms went over and leaned against a concrete wall. The detective stood at the top of the stairs. He held a Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol in his right hand. It was aimed in Mad Dog's direction.

Long enough for that .45 to get really heavy, Mad Dog thought as he spit a little blood and maybe a piece of tooth onto the pavement.

***

The moon sliced its way down the Kansas sky behind the sheriff as he approached the Macklin place. It was only a mile and a half southeast of Buffalo Springs and lay near the center of a rich quarter section, ready for a heavily irrigated crop of corn that would feed the ethanol plant. There were only two ways to get there other than cross-country. The long way, going around the section, or the short, direct route. The sheriff chose the latter. But he would have preferred making the trip with some deputies, the full use of his legs, and a better understanding of what he was getting into.

Kevin Peirce and Isaac Miller hadn't been much help. The Peirce kid never quite got it—never fully accepted the idea that what they were doing could be dangerous. And Isaac Miller…. The boy was too shaken by learning what had happened to his uncle. He didn't know where his sister Dana was. He'd believed it was real by the time the sheriff left, but the shock knocked him for a loop. Isaac hadn't been able to calm down and explain things to the sheriff. And the two claimed they hadn't even been on the internet tonight until after the explosion at the courthouse.

It was hard enough for English to grasp the possibility that local teenagers had fixed elections, arranged cover-ups, and run a top-of-the-line hit man to keep their activities from becoming known. Harder still, when, it seemed, the bulk of them hadn't realized they were doing it—at least that it was real. If the sheriff had it straight, only Cole and Billy Macklin might have known. And Dana Miller, maybe. Even Cole might not have fully realized the implications of the things they were doing. Cole was the best hacker among them, but he may have been working on the instructions of his family and the investors behind the ethanol plant.

Times had changed. In the sheriff's memory, the occasional criminals who roamed central Kansas had been forced to do their killing up close and personal, not electronically and without ever encountering their victims or the pawns they used to do the job. Sheriffs who pursued those old-time villains hadn't needed to care about things being played out half a country away.

How would Wyatt Earp or one of his contemporaries have dealt with this? The sheriff shook his head. Same way as usual, he supposed. By buffaloing the opposition—slamming the bad guy over the head with a revolver, disarming him, tossing him in jail, and then leaving a judge to sort it out. Sheriff English hadn't slammed any heads yet, but he'd left Peirce and Miller cuffed to a rototiller and a chair so it'd be difficult for either to make a run for it, or get help without doing some serious explaining. The Ball kid was still out here somewhere, maybe trying to repair the things he'd done. And Dana Miller, Cole and Billy Macklin, and their father the county supervisor…? Well, that was what the sheriff was about to find out.

The patrol car rumbled over a little bridge that crossed one of the many streams feeding nearby Bull Creek. He slowed, and pulled into the drive on the far side of the neatly trimmed evergreens that guarded the south side of the yard. The sheriff's headlights swept across a lawn, thick and neat enough for any fairway even if it was still winter brown. A cluster of stately hardwoods that would soon begin budding out was also illuminated. So was the great porch that circled the sparkling-white Edwardian house at the center of the lot. The sheriff hit the brakes when he realized someone was sitting on that porch. He backed up and centered his headlights on that lonely figure.

There were no lights on in the house. The sheriff thought that was peculiar, since Supervisor Macklin had been awake and over at the courthouse a couple of hours ago. Even if he hadn't come back, the man would have left lights on. Instead, there was no sign of life at all…except for the person in the Adirondack chair, watching him from the porch.

The sheriff popped his door and stood, bringing his shotgun and his walker out behind him. The figure on the porch didn't move. It might have been a mannequin but for the light that reflected from its eyes.

Small figure, short-haired, and wearing some kind of running shoes with stripes that reflected light. Cole, he thought.

The sheriff closed his door and walked up to the edge of his front bumper. He paused there, behind the glare of the headlights, took a flashlight out of his pocket and examined the evergreens behind him, the row of rose bushes at the foot of the porch, and the thatch of some bare-for-the-winter lilacs and forsythia. Nothing.

“That you, Cole?”

Both hands came up and waved, ever so slightly from side to side—a motion that served to confuse more than answer. The boy didn't say anything.

“Raise your hands, son, and come on down off that porch.”

The boy didn't comply and didn't speak. Just waved his hands in that strange manner once again.

“You can come down and cooperate. Help me get this thing stopped and under control right now. Or I can come up there and give you reasons to help.” There it was, the Wyatt Earp threat, even if the sheriff really couldn't imagine beating on the kid, no matter what the circumstances. Well, no serious blows, anyway.

Didn't matter. The kid stayed where he was and waved again.

“Damn!” the sheriff said. He balanced his walker and the shotgun and started across the yard. It was a long walk, clumsy for a man whose legs didn't work right and who had to manipulate a walker while he held onto a shotgun as well. He was beginning to wish he'd left the weapon on the seat of his cruiser. After all, there was no indication he'd need it to arrest a teen who was just sitting on a porch.

That teen was madly waving his hands, though, back and forth, but just from the wrists as if the rest of his arms were attached to the chair. The sheriff paused and squinted and finally saw the strip of duct tape across the boy's mouth. And more duct tape that firmly held Cole's legs to those of the chair. Probably, his arms, at the wrist, to the arms of the chair, as well.

Maybe his daughters were right. Maybe he really did need to get some eyeglasses.

“Don't move, sheriff.”

The voice wasn't Cole's. It came from near the house, over by a corner that wasn't lit by the beams of the cruiser's headlights. It was a familiar voice, though. Frank Ball's.

The sheriff slowly swung the barrels of his gun in Ball's direction.

“You threatening me, Frank?”

“No, sir. I'm not.”

“You tape Cole Macklin to that chair?”

“No, sir.” The boy's voice was surprisingly small to come from such a large body. “I just discovered him a little bit ago, before I cut the power to this place. Cut the cable, too, and ruined their satellite dish, just in case. They're off line for sure, Sheriff. That part's safe.”