"Open up," he demanded.

"Not sure that's a good idea," I said. "You seem a little edgy right now."

"Want edgy? I'll give you edgy." He snaked his hand under his suit coat and whipped out a coal-black service automatic, which he leveled at the peephole. Oh, this just gets better and better Oh, this just gets better and better, I thought. I pondered whether a bullet fired at that range would blast through the grill or bounce off, but decided not to push the experiment to the testing stage. I opened the door and let Hines in. Good news: He put his gun away.

"I need a drink," he said, exactly like a man who, well, needed a drink.

"So do I," I replied, "but this is a dry house."

He looked at me like I had syphilis. "Jesus f.u.c.king Christ," he said, "you don't even drink?"

"I drink," I said. "Just not at home." Flashing back to my recent one-man tequila fiesta, I mentally added, at least not when I can help it at least not when I can help it.

Hines paced anxiously back and forth, his eyes darting everywhere as if looking for lurking monsters. What could have turned him upside down so fast?

"You met Yuan," he said suddenly.

"Yep."

"How'd that go?"

"I eased him in. He thinks I'm a trust-fund baby with more money than common sense." Hines eyed me suspiciously. I suppose he was measuring my expression for some sign of a lie, but the day has not yet dawned that a fibbie, bent or straight, can read me that well. All the same, he didn't seem satisfied with my report.

"So he makes you for a mark," Hines said. "How's that gonna help?"

"See it from his point of view," I vamped. "A free fish jumps into your boat. No matter what else you've got going on, you don't throw it back. Never leave money lying on the table, right? Besides, he's lonely. Far from home. Might want someone to talk to. I'll take an interest in his investment strategies. People like it when you let them teach." This last comment was a none-too-veiled reference to Hines's playacting back in the pigeon-drop phase of all this. I half wanted him to take it as a compliment, like I'd borrowed a page from his playbook.

If he was flattered, he didn't let on. "Any way he's onto you?"

"Nope."

"Mirplo says he looks like a smart cookie."

"Mirplo's about as good a judge of character as Eva Braun. You want to take his word for it, you put him in charge. Otherwise, man, back off. I've got to have room to move."

"You should've reported in as soon as your meeting was done."

"I should've gone into sports medicine," I answered. "But we all make mistakes. Don't dwell, that's what I say."

"You've got a smart mouth, kid."

"I know," I said. "It gets me into trouble. But also out. It's about a wash."

"I don't think you appreciate how much trouble you're in right now."

"What do you want from me?" I asked. "My career's on the line. My freedom." I waved vaguely toward his hidden shoulder holster. "Maybe more. Like I said, I should've gone into sports medicine. What's done is done. I'm not going to have a bad day just because you say so. To an a.s.shole, the whole world looks dark."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. It's just a saying."

"Are you calling me an a.s.shole?"

"Never to your face, uhm ... detective? Commander? I don't know your rank."

"Don't worry about my f.u.c.king rank," said Hines.

"Fine," I shrugged. "Then what should I worry about?"

"Cracking Yuan like an egg, and fast." There it was. The source of his urgency. Hines was putting the pressure of a deadline on me. I wondered who was putting the pressure of a deadline on him, and what would transpire if he didn't meet it. Not, I suspected, a party with cake. Then, from out of nowhere, he hit me with, "The Merlin Game, is it still set to go?"

"c.o.c.ked and locked," I said. "Unless you screwed it up."

"I haven't touched it."

"Well, a.s.suming your list of leads was good ..."

"It is," he snapped.

Now that I knew Hines wasn't an investment counselor, I wondered how he got his hands on such a list, but as he seemed in no mood to play twenty questions, I let it go for now. "Then I'm saying there's probably around three hundred grand worth of candy apples just waiting to drop off the tree."

"Shake it," he said.

"What?"

"Shake the tree. Get the money. Launch the f.u.c.king game."

"You know that's illegal," I said.

"I'll worry about the law. You worry about your a.s.s." He didn't have to spell it out for me-I was reasonably confident I'd received my second coy death threat of the day, a personal best. Hines dug around in his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. "Ship the money here," he said. "All of it." I looked at the paper. It was a bank routing slip. Destination Liechtenstein, as far as I could tell.

"That wasn't what we agreed," I said.

"New agreement," he said. "I get the money. You get your life." Okay, well, there wasn't even anything coy about that.

"What about Allie?"

For some reason he punched me. I really don't know why. He decked me good, though. Spun me around like a pinata and laid me out on the floor.

Where I figured, You know what? As long as I'm already down here and all, I might as well just sleep You know what? As long as I'm already down here and all, I might as well just sleep.

Then I pa.s.sed out a little.

When I awoke, Hines was gone and the phone was ringing. I answered with a groggy, "h.e.l.lo?"

It was Hines. "You still alive?"

"I guess."

"Do you want to stay that way?" Dumb question. I didn't even answer. "Then three things: Burn down the f.u.c.king house; flip Yuan; and if that c.u.n.t Scovil asks, we never talked." Great Great, I thought, another sub rosa alliance another sub rosa alliance. "And by the way," added Hines, "you will."

"Will what?"

"Have a bad day if I say so. Think about that next time you call someone an a.s.shole." He hung up.

I got up, rocky on my feet. Went into the bathroom and checked myself out. I hadn't showered since coming back from my run, and I stank. Plus my jaw was swollen. I touched it, then wished I hadn't.

After a shower I felt better, or at least clean. I chunked back some ibuprofens, then fixed myself something to eat. Every few seconds, I caught myself glancing at the front door as if I next expected, I don't know, a SWAT team, maybe. Hines was right about one thing: I was definitely having a bad day.

Could it get worse? Sure it could ... for I suddenly realized that I'd practically handed Billy Yuan my ident.i.ty on a covered silver serving tray. Would he be smart enough to lift the lid? I had to think, yeah yeah.

See, back when the internet was everyone's new toy, I'd taken it into my head to found my own online religion and launch it at www.namethatreligion.com. It was more of a lark than anything else, an experiment to see if I could cook up a belief system that welcomed all ideas with equal equanimity, and made room for every notion of a supreme being, all the way from the Alpha and the Omega no doubt to just an idea some people have the Alpha and the Omega no doubt to just an idea some people have. The site was a moneymaker of sorts, thanks to a fee-based ordination service, but it never really caught fire. Turns out that people who have a deep interest in religion rarely have deep pockets, and I soon turned my attention elsewhere-to the Jovian Flywheel, if memory serves, a perpetual-motion machine that allegedly harvested energy from the differential between the Earth's and Jupiter's gravitational fields. Like all perpetual-motion machines, it was gogglebox nonsense, and only worked so long as the mark didn't notice the plug. You'd think after all this time-here's another scam with centuries of pedigree-n.o.body would fall for it, but I made some decent coin. I did.

Now here was the problem. Name That Religion had had a banner with the exact quote I'd given Yuan: "The universe loves us. All we have to do is love it back." More gogglebox nonsense, if you ask me, but people seemed to respond to it. It struck a chord. Of course I erased all the page files in the end; if you're running a medicine show, you always cover your tracks when you blow town. But the site had its fans, a small, rabid claque that spread NTR far and wide through copy/pasted progeny. Could there be a paperless paper trail leading back to a clone of the original site, buried on some server like an archaeological ruin? If so, my fingerprints would be all over it. Say Yuan followed the trail. Would he conclude that philosophy student Chad Thurston had cribbed his core belief from some fringe ism, or would he see a grifter's early attempt to use the internet for ill-gotten whatever?

I went online to see how bad the damage was.

Bad.

The banner phrase got Google hits from all over the place. The religious commentary sites weren't bad. Some people called me a "closet Unitarian," but I could live with that. The real problem was the antifraud sites. Apparently someone had long ago declared Name That Religion a scam. Well, in fairness, it was. But that sort of label haunts you. Worse, they mentioned me by name. What the h.e.l.l had I been thinking, using my own name? I should've called myself Moses McCultycult or something. And while I like to think that over the years I'd grown in the grift, I had to rate my current play as no less sloppy. You don't recycle material, ever. That was just lazy of me. I kicked myself for not taking the time to make up something new for Yuan. Instead, I'd practically walked in wearing a nametag, which sucked; and now both Scovil and Hines had Damoclean hardware hanging over me, which sucked worse. And all because I met Allie Quinn and saw in her a reflection of myself, the sort of flirty, tarty, smarty grifter that only a grifter could love. The worst sort of narcissism, it had literally rendered me blind.

Well, c.r.a.p.

I had to be done with it, that's all. I had to be in the wind, and I had to be there now. This was not the best of exit strategies, not the kind where everyone smiles and shakes hands when they part, but I knew we were way past that point. So let's call it my "emergency exit" strategy: the one where I throw the kitchen sink in the car and get the h.e.l.l gone. Now, tonight. Before any other of my manifold miscues could catch up with me and punish me more. I wasn't worried about anything I had to leave behind. It's called cutting your losses, and the first thing you do in cutting them is admit they are are losses. It's not heroic and it's not fun, but sometimes you just have to shade and fade. losses. It's not heroic and it's not fun, but sometimes you just have to shade and fade.

I went outside to open my garage. It was cool out now, with the night deepening toward dawn. The darkness put a monochrome cast on everything in sight: the palm trees and jacarandas; mailboxes and trashcans; Mirplo.

Mirplo?

He stepped out of the shadows wearing his signature goofy smile and carrying something steel and compact in the palm of his hand. "Hey look, Radar," he said brightly. "Hines gave me a gun." Then his voice turned cold. "He told me to use it if you went rabbit."

Like I said: well, c.r.a.p.

the prisoner's whaddyacallit.

I have to tell you, when I saw Mirplo with a gun, inside me a switch flipped. Maybe my sense of outrage overcame reason, or maybe I just started to see weakness in the other players. After all, if they thought that arming a Mirplo was a good idea, they couldn't be thinking completely exactly clearly. Anyway, at that moment, all thought of bailing left my mind. This was a snuke, after all, a deep and complex one, the sort of game I'm supposedly particularly good at. There had to be moves I could make. have to tell you, when I saw Mirplo with a gun, inside me a switch flipped. Maybe my sense of outrage overcame reason, or maybe I just started to see weakness in the other players. After all, if they thought that arming a Mirplo was a good idea, they couldn't be thinking completely exactly clearly. Anyway, at that moment, all thought of bailing left my mind. This was a snuke, after all, a deep and complex one, the sort of game I'm supposedly particularly good at. There had to be moves I could make.

Not that I could make moves of any sort until I got this gun s.h.i.t sorted out. Betraying no particular sense of purpose, I started shuffling in a lazy circle toward the far side of the street, where a narrow concrete stairway ascended beside a stucco garage to a hillside home whose owner, I knew, had lately gone on a security jag. "A gun, Vic?" I said. "Seriously?"

"What, you don't think I can handle a gun?"

I shrugged. "I think you can handle whatever you want to handle. I just don't think it's necessary, that's all. Do I look like I'm going anywhere?"

"Well, what are you doing out here, then?"

"Looking for the cat."

"Bulls.h.i.t. You don't have a cat."

"It's not mine, nimrod. It belongs to the ovarians downstairs. They're in Guatemala, adopting a baby."

"And you're taking care of their cat? I gotta say that doesn't sound like you."

"I owe 'em. They take my trashcans up to the street. They're stronger than I am."

"Well, whatever. Let's go inside. I'm your babysitter now."

"I have to find the cat, man. Coyotes get 'er, those ovarians'll kick my a.s.s." I turned and called into a random quadrant of night. "Pickle! Come here, girl!"

The night didn't answer. Mirplo said, "Screw the cat, man. Get in the house." He waved the gun in what I suppose he thought was a menacing fashion, but betrayed an understanding of firearms so flawed that probably local windows (or nonexistent cats) had a better shot at getting shot than I did. Still, a Mirplo with a gun. That offended my sensibilities. I continued to call for the cat, all the while edging closer to the stairway.

"Pickle! Come to Uncle Radar right now!"

"Radar-"

I looked past Mirplo. "There you are, you rascal!" Vic turned. I knew he would. It was the oldest trick in the book, of course, a variation on Mirplo's own "Look, Halley's Comet!" Still, it worked. In the second it took Vic to swivel his glance away, I darted within range of the neighbor's prophylactic motion sensor at the base of his stairs, triggering the world's brightest halogen spotlights. As they popped on, I launched myself at Mirplo, who momentarily lost me in the glare. I'm c.r.a.p at violence, I know I am, but I can throw a head b.u.t.t to the stomach when the situation demands, and that's what the situation demanded here. Next thing Vic knew, he was on his back, with my knees on his chest and the gun probing his nose like an otoscope.

"s.h.i.t, Radar," said Vic, his voice falling. "No cat?"

"No cat."

I took Mirplo inside and sat him down on the couch. I didn't quite know what to do with the gun. As I've said, I'm no fan of firearms. In my world, if you can't do the job through talking and planning, you're just not very good at the game. So I told Vic, "I'm gonna go put this away. You stay here." I knew he would. I could see that shock had rubberized his legs. He was probably trying to figure out how much s.h.i.t he'd be in with Hines for letting me flip him. Enough, I hoped, that he might be in a mood to stay flipped.

I stashed the gun in my bedroom, amid the junk in the closet, and came back out to find Vic where I'd left him: sitting on the couch, staring into nothing with a glazed gaze. "I'm f.u.c.ked," he said. "I'm so totally f.u.c.king f.u.c.ked."

"Why is that?"

He looked at me and allowed a sour grin to pa.s.s across his face. "You know why," he said. "Hines is gonna kill me."

"Vic, I would hate to see that happen."

"Like h.e.l.l you would. Dude, I totally betrayed you."

"Well, betrayed. The jury's still out on that. Why don't you fill in some blanks for me, let's see where we really stand."

"No, I can't."

"Okay," I said brightly. "Then go see Hines and tell him he can have his gun back anytime he wants to come get it."

"Radar, I can't."

"Well, you're kind of stuck between can'ts."

Mirplo buried his head in his hands.