P Tracy - Play To Kill aka Shoot To Thrill

'Are you talking about John Smith?' Roadrunner ducked through one of the kitchen doorways in his perpetual uniform of bicyclist Lycra. Even though the entire house was built on a grand scale, at six-foot-seven his head nearly brushed the lintel. 'Hi, Grace, Annie. Sounds like you're getting the four-hundred-years-in-prison lecture.'

Harley scowled at him. 'Very funny, dipshit. And that damn well better not be the same suit you were wearing when you got here, because I just got the chairs reupholstered to match the koi.'

'I'm not an animal. I put the sweaty one under your bed. And all your koi are dead, anyhow.'

Annie's bow lips turned down in a troubled pout as she focused on the disturbing possibility of wearing a prison- orange jumpsuit for any length of time. 'They wouldn't do that, would they, Grace?'

'Do what?'

'Throw us in jail for a teeny-weeny bit of computer mischief.'

'No, of course not. Harley's just being paranoid. The Feds know all about us working under the table every now and then…'

'Right,' Harley grumbled. 'They just haven't been able to prove it.'

Grace rolled her eyes. 'They asked for our help, and they're going to cut us some slack. Besides, Smith is the new FBI, not the Hoover archetypes we were dealing with back in Atlanta.'

'Are you kidding me? Did we meet the same guy? He had the suit, he looked like a Feeb, he talked that stupid Feeb talk, shit. The only thing that wasn't Hoover archetype about Smith was that he wasn't wearing a dress.'

Grace shook her head. 'They're desperate, Harley. They tried tracing this network and they can't do it. Not legally, anyway. So they bring in us and a bunch of hackers so we can do what the law keeps the Feds from doing themselves. You can't stick religiously to every letter of the law when lives are at stake, and maybe they're starting to get that. Sometimes you have to bend some rules. Hack into private phone records and save a life, or respect privacy laws and let somebody die. There's no choice if you're a human being.'

Harley nodded. 'Exactly my point. Who ever said the Feds were human beings?'

Grace shrugged. 'We had a choice. An office of our own in D.C., or D.C. came to us.'

Yeah, well, I agreed to that before they told us they were sending a full-time spy.'

'Liaison,' Grace corrected him. 'He's here to help us.'

Harley snorted. 'That's what they say to the mental patients when the guy comes in to give them electric-shock therapy. Christ, Grace, you're talking about the same agency that set you up to bait a serial killer, and now all of a sudden you think they've got scruples?'

'Harley.' Grace took in a breath and exhaled noisily; one of those secret signals that told people who knew her they should pay attention. 'There are creeps out there filming fake murders to get their fifteen minutes on the Web; but there are other creeps filming real murders for the same kind of celebrity. The FBI wants them all shut down, and the first warrant step is a software program that can tell the difference between something staged and something real. They're doing the right thing, Harley, trying to nail the real killers fast, and scaring the creep idiots straight. And it's simple for us. Software 101.'

Harley snorted. 'I'm glad you're so optimistic. Even if we use one of our existing software platforms, we're talking a week, minimum, just to get an idea if this is doable. It's going to be a ton of extra work, and my point is, we've got a lot on our plate right now. We're staring down deadlines on security software for three of the biggest corporations in the world, which, incidentally, is going to make us filthy, stinking rich…'

Annie cocked a brow at him. 'We're already filthy, stinking rich. Half the computers in the world run at least one of our software apps or games.'

'Besides, the security software is already in beta version,' Grace reminded him. 'We'll be finished by the end of the month, easy.'

'Okay, but we still have to finish the updates for all the educational software…'

Roadrunner lifted his hand and waved. 'I finished those this morning.'

Harley folded his big arms across his chest and grunted. 'All right, all right, so maybe we can squeeze this in. Big whoop. The bottom line is, I do not trust the guy, I do not want to work with him looking over my shoulder, I do not want him in my house.'

Roadrunner shrugged. 'I kind of liked him.'

Yeah, but you're a dipshit.'

'Besides, we've got more bad-guy radar in this room than all of MPD, and if he is one, we'll know it after the first hour.'

Harley blew a raspberry. 'Oh yeah? It took us ten years to figure out who was trying to kill us. Our record for reading people isn't exactly sterling.'

Grace didn't exactly make a face. The one she already had just went very still and stayed that way. For a woman who had spent her entire life anticipating and preparing for danger, she didn't like reminders that she had locked out the world and locked in the most dangerous people of all. It had almost cost all of them their lives, and it was her fault, no one else's. 'When's he coming?'

'In an hour.' Harley grabbed a manila folder off the counter by the stove and slid it over to Annie. 'In the meantime, Roadrunner and I did a little surfing on some of the websites the Feebs red-flagged for us at the seminar. This came off one of them this morning'

Annie opened the folder and pulled out a photo. 'Oh Lord, is this a real dead person?'

Roadrunner shrugged. 'No way to tell. We scanned it for Photoshop-type alterations and couldn't find any, but that doesn't mean it wasn't staged and posed. Heck, we did that for the Serial Killer Detective game and even the cops thought it was the real thing. We called Smith to have the thing pulled and passed to Cyber Crimes and the recruited geeks, but it doesn't look good. The ISPs are shifting too fast to trace.'

'Just like the posts of the five city murders,' Roadrunner said.

Grace shrugged. 'That doesn't make this one real. The fetish and porn sites get better at hiding every day. Some of those networks are so sophisticated they make the military's system look bad.'

Annie passed the photo to Grace as if it were a poison mushroom. 'Real or not, this is sick. Somebody has to stop this.'

Grace nodded. 'That would be us.'

When the doorbell rang at 9:05 a.m., Harley Davidson was out of his chair like an ICBM, cruising fast to intercept the Federal bogeyman at his front door.

'For God's sake, Harley, settle down,' Annie sniped behind him. 'You're as jittery as a long-tailed cat under a rocking chair. He's going to think you're on meth.'

Harley shot her a nasty look over his shoulder. 'Don't mention drugs,' he whispered.

'You have unequivocally lost your mind. There isn't even a bottle of aspirin in your medicine cabinet, you idiot, and, last time I checked, possessing multivitamins wasn't a felony.'

Harley made a face, then pulled open the big double doors. John Smith was wearing the standard-issue blue suit and an all-business countenance. He had a craggy face that hadn't aged well, making him look a little scary and a lot older than the mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven. 'Good morning, Mr. Davidson.' His eyes drifted down to the empty beer bottle in Harley's hand, but he didn't comment. Harley hated that about cops and Feds – their eyes were always too damn busy.

Harley jerked his thumb down the broad hall. 'We're in the breakfast room, looking at some of the crap we pulled off those red-flagged sites you turned us on to.'

Smith stepped inside and followed what looked like a mountain of leather to a room where the others waited around a table. 'Good morning, Ms. MacBride, Ms. Belinsky, Mr. Roadrunner.'

The two women nodded from their chairs, but the man in the body stocking jumped up, smiled, and actually shook Smith's hand. It was like stepping into a circle of reserved adults who just happened to own a cocker spaniel puppy. 'Just Roadrunner,' he said, grinning. ' Mr.: Roadrunner. Jeez, that's funny. You want some coffee?'