Then-in my childhood, in the dawn

Of a most stormy life-was drawn

From every depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still:

From the torrent, or the fountain,

From the red cliff of the mountain,

From the sun that round me rolled

In its autumn tint of gold,

From the lightning in the sky

As it passed me flying by,

From the thunder and the storm,

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view.

-Edgar Allan Poe Thanks for keeping me not alone, Ben She folded the paper and looked over her shoulder to the window of his place. Silly, really, that a poem could make her feel better. But it did.

She took the paper inside her apartment and carefully set it out on the kitchen table. A few hours under a frying pan would take the worst of the wrinkles out, and after that she planned on pinning it to the wall.

She was just getting ready for a few hours of sleep when the phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Well, I kind of expected a phone call from you today." Tom's voice crawled through the receiver. He was sounding like he was ready for a fight.

"Really? Why?" He wasn't the only one who could do innocent.

There was complete silence on the other end for a few seconds. Monkey Boy had to think. It was seldom a pretty thing to watch and almost always took longer than should be necessary.

"Well, just because I haven't heard from you lately." He was puzzled. She didn't much care.

"Hey, school keeps me busy and the client list isn't getting any smaller."

"So, Jason Soulis called me. He wants to get together with you tonight."

"Okay. He can give me a ring to set up the particulars. Anything else?"

"Uhh. No, I guess that about does it."

"Well, there it is. Talk to you soon, Tom." She hung up before he could say anything else. She didn't want to hear his voice, didn't want to think about him. She wanted free of him, once and for all.

It was time to move on. She had enough money to handle it, but it would take time to work out the details: time or a gun big enough to erase Monkey Boy off the face of the earth. Maggie liked the second idea better, but wasn't stupid enough to do anything about it.

III.

Ben watched Maggie go inside her apartment and breathed a sigh of relief. With all of the people who had vanished of late, he didn't exactly love the idea of her being out all night.

She cast her eyes in his direction and he studied her as he always did. Every detail of her face fascinated him. He wondered, as he did from time to time when he was feeling a bit self-conscious, whether or not he qualified as a stalker. There was something wrong with watching her as often as he did, and he knew that, but couldn't stop it.

Didn't want to stop it.

It still wasn't any of his business what she did with her life, but that didn't change how he felt. He was in love with the girl next door. The only reason she lived across the courtyard from him was because, once he decided he liked to see her, he found out where she lived and moved in. Elegant, beautiful, quiet, studious; she was all of those things and that, more than anything else, had caught his attention. She could have been a truck driver and he would have felt the same way. She was a prostitute and he knew he could deal with it. All sins were forgivable when faced with love.

Once she went inside her apartment, he sighed and let himself breathe again. Then he turned on one of the cell phones he'd purchased to deal with Brian Freemont and plugged it into the modem of his laptop. He was done with Freemont. The sick bastard would be suffering plenty in the near future.

His hand ran along his ribs and he winced. He was not done with Thomas Alexander Pardue. The long list of research notes he'd written down earlier was on his left and the computer was on his right.

"Fuck with me, Tom? Trust me; you don't know what being fucked is."

It was just possible that Pardue would figure out who was behind it when the time came, but long before then, Ben would be done with him. His fingers tapped keys with the skill of a surgeon and he started his own symphony; a song just for Tom, a special song of desperation and financial ruin.

He blinked away a few tears as he worked. They were not tears of sorrow, he was beyond that and had been for a long time. They were tears of rage. Ben had been a victim plenty of times in his life. Pardue was hardly the first man he'd ever run across who felt the need to kick his face in and he likely wouldn't be the last.

He was just the first one Ben decided to play dirty with. Oh, he'd certainly hacked a few accounts in the past, that was true enough, but he'd always done it for what he considered a good reason. When his uncle Dominick had run into troubles paying his house notes, Ben had fixed the problem long enough for the man to recover and go about his life. When the insurance companies had refused to pay a few claims that were due to his father, he'd fixed that too. It was easy when you had the right equipment and the proper tools.

Ben had both and knew how to use them. Danni had been the latest trick he turned. He'd even promised himself he'd stop after that, because sooner or later even the best hackers got themselves busted and he wasn't dumb enough to think it wouldn't happen to him if he kept it up.

But this was different. He could deal with an occasional beating; they happened every day to people just like him. He could even deal with the threats of more beatings, because he never intended to announce what Maggie did; if she'd thrown rocks at him and called him the worst names she could come up with when she found him on the sidewalk the night before, she still would never have had to worry about that.

So she was a prostitute. It was a job. He could deal with that and he would pretend the knowledge didn't bother him in the least, because he never wanted to hurt her.

But Tom? The very thought that Pardue would ever strike her in anger, would ever touch her or know her body . . . that was exactly enough to make him want the man to suffer.

He started with the bank accounts. After that he moved on to land deeds and credit cards. When he was done there, he moved into the police databases in the area and added a few minor, niggling warrants to the list of outstanding orders; nothing that would get Tom on "America's Most Wanted"; just the sort that would cause him to be pulled over. He also cancelled Tom's car insurance and revoked his driver's license.

When he was done, Pardue had twelve thousand dollars to his name. It was enough to let a few days or even weeks pass before the man discovered he was broke.

All of Pardue's money went into a series of legitimate trust funds. They'd been established a long time ago, under several different names.

When he was finished, Ben set aside his laptop and disconnected the cell phone. He stared out the window and squinted against the glaring reflection of the sun on Maggie's side of the building.

"Fuck with me again, Tom. Fuck with me again, and you'll see how nasty I can get."

Ben closed his eyes and went to sleep on his couch. It had been a long night and he was tired. In his dreams Maggie was with him as she had been the previous afternoon: she was sleeping and he watched her while she dreamed.

IV.

The International House of Pancakes was paradise: The food was plentiful and fattening and the coffee flowed in great rivers of caffeinated pleasure.

Boyd needed the caffeine and so did Holdstedter. Old Danny was looking about as white as toothpaste from lack of sleep. Real toothpaste, not that gel shit everyone thought was so cool.

"This shit ever gonna stop?"

"What? The disappearances?" There was already a backlog of cases to investigate and seven more people had vanished and been reported since midnight.

"No, Richie, the unclean love you have for Whalen. Of course the disappearances."

"Sooner or later the town's gonna run out of people to have disappear. But don't worry, Danny. Our asses will be long fired before then." He poured more syrup over his pancakes. Sugar and caffeine, those were the secrets to keeping him happy. "And Danny?"

"Yeah?"

"You go ahead and keep it up about Whalen and me. You just do that. It gets funnier every time you say it."

Danny grinned. "Doesn't it though?"

"Not as funny as the look on Freemont's face last night."

Danny nodded and broke into a bright, sunny smile. "Does my heart good to know he shit himself."

"Boy has a bad case of the stupids going. Gonna be fun to see what O'Neill does to his sorry ass."

"Did you want to shoot him as bad as I wanted to shoot him?"

"You kidding?" He held his index finger and his thumb a quarter inch apart. "This close to popping an eye out the back of his fucken head."

The man in the booth behind Danny was looking green. Boyd savored the expression. It was never wise to eavesdrop on cops.

"See? That's the problem with you. You always gotta take the hard shots. I was gonna go for the gut. I like to see pricks like him squirm."

The excitement was getting to Danny. He had color coming back into his cheeks. "What hard shot? His eyes were bugging out." He shrugged and cut another wedge out of his remaining pancakes. "I was waiting to see if they'd just fall out on their own, but they didn't. I gotta tell you, I was disappointed."

"You think he did the Lister woman?"

"Nah. He's too sweaty right now. I bet he was figuring out whether to offer his mouth or his ass to O'Neill."

"So I guess he'll be using both today. Captain's luck just got better."