text: Federal Agent Lisa Breyer rolled over on the bed in her hotel suite outside Everglades City and thumped a fist on the mattress. If I can't get rid of these nightmares soon, I'm gonna have serious issues. It's been two weeks already.
  
  She glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand and groaned. No one should have to lie awake in bed for two hours.
  
  After pushing herself up, she paused and turned her head slowly toward the bedroom door, which she'd closed despite being in the hotel suite alone, simply because the air conditioning was triggered by movement. Fortunately for her in the early August heat in the Everglades, she'd moved a fair amount during the last two hours.
  
  With a sigh, she whipped off the covers, slipped out of bed, and stepped into the small living room. She went to the desk where her laptop had been plugged in for an overnight charge. Once seated in the desk chair, she turned the device on and wrinkled her nose as it powered up. "Fine. If nightmares from that dark witch's overactive potion insist on keeping me up, I insist on tackling the other half of that trip."
  
  The other case was Johnny Walker's fifteen-year-old murder case. Or his daughter's, to be more precise. Which included the drug kingpin the bounty hunter couldn't get out of his mind long enough to focus on only one case at a time.
  
  "And now I can't get the bastard out of my mind either. He's back, his drugs are stretching across the country, and—" Lisa uttered a wry, weary chuckle. "Look at me. Talking to myself in the middle of the night and I don't even have two dogs with magical collars as an excuse."
  
  Tabling the issue of her full sanity for another time, Agent Breyer signed into her laptop and pulled the Wi-Fi hotspot device she'd received from the Department toward her. Tapping into the dark web just after midnight on a hotel's internet signal wasn't exactly the best choice, even for a federal agent. Fortunately, she didn't have to.
  
  After setting up the hotspot and running the virtual personal network to keep her IP address and her system as safe as she knew how from whatever lurked on the dark web, she hopped onto a directory service to start her search. "We found Lemonhead on the dark web the first time. I can't imagine I won't be able to find him again."
  
  But twenty minutes of searching for their elusive quarry gleaned only what she'd already seen—a connection between that username and the despicable auction bidding gearing up before the Monsters Ball two and a half months earlier. Beyond that were brief mentions of Lemonhead from years before. The real Lemonhead was murdered by the Red Boar without anyone knowing it and used for his black-market reputation as a "purveyor of magical commodities."
  
  Those won't help. It's not the same guy.
  
  With a slight frown of concentration, she tried searching for "Red Boar" but that was even less successful. She obtained the same results she'd pulled up on a public Google search in Portland and from sniffing through federal records—or at least the ones she had access to. But Johnny already had everything the Bureau had gathered on the Red Boar in his cabin somewhere with the cases labeled D Walker and Operation Deadroot.
  
  "Great." She stood quickly from the desk chair and headed into the suite's kitchen. Only one beer remained from the six-pack she'd bought four days before, and the sight of it sitting there by itself between the leftover salad from dinner that night and the half-empty carton of eggs made her frown. I think I'm starting to understand why Johnny drinks so much. And I should stop.
  
  She closed the fridge and went to the sink instead and took a glass from the overhead cabinet to fill it. He's convinced the Red Boar was in the comic shop that night. Off-camera. Vilguard practically gave up that much all on his own. And Dawn tried to threaten the drug-dealers by dropping Johnny's name.
  
  The agent paused with the glass of water raised halfway to her lips. "That's why Prentiss shot her. Isn't it? The Red Boar heard a little girl's threat and didn't want to take any chances. Seriously, what are the chances of there being more than one high-level bounty hunter dwarf with a twelve-year-old daughter? Especially fifteen years earlier when the Department was only a decade old?"
  
  A door opened in another hotel suite out in the hall, and Lisa glanced at her entrance door. She chuckled at herself. Jumpy much? Stop talking to yourself, Lisa. Someone's bound to think the half-Light Elf agent's finally lost her mind.
  
  She took her water to the desk, swallowed half of it, and set the glass down and stared at the laptop screen. The Red Boar wouldn't have ordered that shot if he didn't know who Johnny was. And we all met face-to-face in New York.
  
  After typing two new words into the search, she took a deep breath and scrunched her face up. "It's not very likely, but I guess it's worth the attempt."
  
  Her finger came down on the Enter key, and her eyes widened as hit after hit pulled up on her screen. "Holy shit."
  
  The decision to search the dark web for Johnny Walker had been a whim based on nothing but a hunch she and the bounty hunter now shared. If she hadn't been so exhausted from all the hours of lost sleep over the last two weeks, she probably would have written the idea off as a desperate attempt to be more useful or more productive. Why the hell would Johnny Walker have anything on him floating around on the dark web?
  
  Lisa laughed and scrolled through the search hits. "Okay. I've now found one good thing to say about the nightmares. Jesus."
  
  There were five pages of search results, all with Johnny's name in the title. Most of them were snippets of articles or posts painting the bounty hunter in a seriously unflattering light. And they were very old.
  
  Bounty Hunter Had It Coming.
  
  Retirement, or Did He Kill Himself?
  
  Guess Who's Throwing in the Towel.
  
  Best Bounty Hunter My Ass. Look at This.
  
  Lisa stopped on the last one and saw a blurry image of Johnny, his finger smudging the upper-righthand corner of the frame as he scowled at whoever snagged the shot. Red-rimmed eyes, unwashed hair, and either crumbled food or lint caught in his beard created an unflattering picture.
  
  The post was dated December 2005.
  
  She grimaced. Assholes. Leave it to criminals to kick a guy while he's down and mourning the murder of his daughter.
  
  Beneath the post title was a snippet of the post itself:
  
  …shoved in our faces for years that the asshole dwarf bagging and tagging alleged criminals and calling it all in good fun was 'one of the best damn bounty hunters in the business.' Well, guess what? Johnny Walker's done. You'd think the best would have been able to save his daughter from catching a bullet in the back of the head. You'd think he'd take down the guy who put that bullet there in the first place. But no. We all need to take a good, long look at this dwarf right here and ask ourselves why any of us give a fuck about what he does next. Because it looks to me like Johnny Walker's all washed up. He looks like he's about to…
  
  The preview ended there, and she clicked on the title link to keep reading. A new webpage loaded, then a popup box appeared in the center of her screen and prompted her for a password or a second option to create an account.
  
  Ungovernedunderground.onion, huh? She went back to scroll through the search results and found that many of the same flavor of Johnny Walker posts and articles were from the same site. Yeah, I won't try to get a password to join a Shit on Johnny Walker forum, even if it isn't full of criminals.
  
  She continued to scroll and stopped when she saw an image of the dwarf in his usual all-black and dark sunglasses, one thumb stuck through his belt loop and the other hand raised to flip the middle finger at the camera. It was a surprisingly professional-looking shot, edited with impressive attention to lighting and detail. It took Lisa a few seconds to realize the photo was the thumbnail cover for a TV show.
  
  "What the fuck?" She leaned back quickly in the chair, took another sip of water, and closed her eyes. I'm hallucinating—not enough sleep. That's it.
  
  But when she opened her eyes again and peered at the image, nothing had changed.
  
  "Dwarf the Bounty Hunter Season 7? Are you shitting me right now?" She laughed again and slapped the desk. "That's what everyone was talking about. Oh. My. God."
  
  The title of the forum made the hilarity of it even that much more cringe-worthy—Dwarf the Bounty Hunter: The Official Site—Your One-Stop Shop for All Things Johnny Walker, Bounty Hunting, and the Best Oriceran-Hosted Show on Earth.
  
  "No way." Lisa grimaced and turned her head slightly away from her laptop. He would kill me if he knew I'd found this.
  
  She returned her focus to her screen and clicked on the site.
  
  The forum was one of those loud, busy websites with ads littering the sides and tops in every color imaginable—most of them ads for boxed sets of the show's seven seasons, clothes and sunglasses that mirrored Johnny's, vacation packages to Florida and specifically the Everglades, and one ad running in multiple places boasted a black leather jacket the private seller insisted was left behind during one of the dwarf's more intense fights and ensuing getaways.
  
  Five thousand dollars for a so-called authentic Johnny Walker jacket. What the hell is wrong with these people?
  
  Trying to navigate the site's multiple tabs and various forums for at least twelve different aspects of the show—not including each episode of all seven years—took more brainpower and focus than she had at twelve-thirty in the morning. She clicked onto the Fansite Forum tab instead and scrolled through the comments.
  
  Wow. Fifteen years later and people are still picking this apart like they just binge-watched it on Netflix.
  
  The topic threads were a random mash of show-related drivel.
  
  S3 Episode 4: Bone to Pick. This is the best episode of the entire season. Fight me.
  
  The real reason behind Johnny Walker's unexplained trip to Las Vegas in Season 5.
  
  Long-time fan since childhood looking for a way to become a bounty hunter. Anyone have any tips?
  
  She had to look away from her laptop for a moment to give her eyes a rest. "There's so much to sort through."
  
  After a deep breath, she decided she might as well start at the top and browse methodically. The first three threads were less related to the show and more about "how profoundly Johnny Walker played a role-model role in his viewers' lives." The others were simply more hearsay, personal opinion, and a few arguments over the "deeper meanings" behind Johnny Walker phrases like, "Watch me," and "If it ain't the truth, it ain't worth tellin'."
  
  One fan had uploaded several pictures of herself with a badly photoshopped Johnny Walker at the beach with her, at the shopping mall, and lying naked in bed.
  
  "Oh, hell no." Lisa clicked out and shook her head. "How is this such a huge deal and I've never heard about it?"
  
  A flashing ad on the right side of her screen screamed at her in bright neon. Click Here for Episode Recaps and Discussions.
  
  She laughed, too tired to keep scrolling through thread after thread from people who wrote these posts like they'd known Johnny all their lives. It looks like I'm getting a pop-culture review of Johnny Walker's career before retirement.
  
  When she clicked on the ad, it took her to a different page that didn't have its own tab on the main menu but was far more organized. The site broke discussion topics down by season and then by episode, and she opened the first review of Season 1, Episode 1: Who is Johnny Walker?
  
  The discussion started intelligently enough, then very quickly took a turn toward fans bashing each other for differing opinions. Of course, a comment written in all-caps caught her attention almost immediately.
  
  User5507: I don't see why everyone makes such a big deal about this guy. You're obviously biased against wizards if you think Hammond Farth is the real criminal in this episode. That wizard's an entrepreneur. All he was trying to do was make life a little easier for the people in his city, and what did he get for it? Tossed over the hood of his car and cuffed like he was merely another one of the dwarf's hunting trophies. Johnny Walker's the real criminal here. Who gave him the right to butt into anyone's life?
  
  User1302: I'm very sure local authorities gave him the right, man. No one's denying the fact that Farth was experimenting with how to improve the water filtration system. But when he almost blows up a nuclear plant trying to get "ingredients," then yeah. That essentially makes him a criminal.
  
  NoApologies42: Plus the fact that he didn't even try to sit down and have a conversation about what he was doing. The minute he saw Johnny pull up on his property, he ran. Anyone who runs is automatically guilty. Duh.
  
  Lisa raised her eyebrows and moved on to the next few episodes. In each one, at least one "fan" left a comment trying to defend the criminal bagged and tagged during Johnny's show. They were regular people—or magicals—and were minding their own business until Dwarf the Damn Bounty Hunter arrived. No one deserved seven years in a max-security prison for trying to gather eggs from giant Oriceran slimetoads, and forget the fact that the slimetoads were under Earth's various new environmental protection acts.
  
  Episode after episode showed some disgruntled fan unsatisfied by the treatment and sentencing of whatever bounty Johnny had taken into custody. Lisa counted at least six different usernames for these unhappy Johnny-haters, although they were all numbered generically according to the forum's system.
  
  Yeah, no one wants to stir the pot like that without hiding behind even more anonymity.
  
  She filtered the comments to show the most recent additions, then froze. "What? There's no way this is real."
  
  Lemonhead: Right there with you on the unethical treatment of the disenfranchised. I wonder if anyone pays attention to the kind of physical, emotional, and mental damage incurred by being treated in this way by an icon as admired as Johnny Walker. And trust me. We're not the only ones. PM me for more details.
  
  Her jaw dropped. Lemonhead's comment— it had to be the Red Boar's comment—was dated three weeks earlier. She scrolled through the comments and switched to a different episode chat when she didn't find anything else from the exact criminal she'd hoped to find.
  
  Half an hour later in Season 3, Episode 9: Shift This, she found another comment from Lemonhead buried among the replies to a disgruntled fan's dismantling of the television idol that had been Dwarf the Bounty Hunter. It was the identical message dated six weeks before and aimed at a completely different generically numbered username.
  
  Dammit. This will take forever.
  
  Fortunately, after scrolling up and down and moving the bottom scroll bar left and right, she found a tiny search bar at the bottom beside the barely visible copyright information and link to the privacy policy. Lisa typed in Lemonhead and clicked on the search icon.
  
  She was rewarded with the comments from Lemonhead in one nice, neat collection—fourteen in total—all of them replying to the same kind of agitated comments either trying to defend the captured criminal in each episode or downright bashing Johnny for apparently no reason. Each one said the same thing as Lemonhead posed a shared dissatisfaction with the show in general and the bounty hunter in particular. The most recent was dated only five days earlier. The first was dated the end of May, two days after Lisa and Johnny had crashed the Monsters Ball in New York.
  
  "This is insane," she whispered and skimmed the comments to which Lemonhead had posted his replies. He knew exactly who Johnny was in that penthouse. And he's been reaching out to a number of seriously pissed-off criminals. How many of these guys were actual bounties Johnny brought in?
  
  That was impossible to tell with the information she had and so many numbered usernames generated specifically for this site alone. But she could still try to get in on the action.
  
  She retrieved her phone from beside the laptop and snapped a quick series of pictures, then scrolled down to capture every single comment with the dates and times. That done, she clicked on Lemonhead's most recent comment and was prompted with an option to create her username or use a randomly generated number. She went with the second option and created a basic account under the name Rex Coon. It made her grimace but it was the first thing that came to mind. Better than Light Elf.
  
  Once she'd tagged both him and the original commenter in her reply, she typed her message.
  
  User7495: There has to be a better way to spend our time than going through a host of old episodes and hate-posting at our desks. Right? What about doing something?
  
  Her palms were sweaty when she posted the reply, so she wiped them on the thin cotton of her pajama shorts and downed the rest of her water. Don't blow this, Breyer. There's no way anyone knows who you are. Imagine hating his guts so much that you'd troll a fan site.
  
  That made her laugh but the sound cut off abruptly when her laptop screen flashed with a horizontal line of white. A small black box appeared in the center of the screen and it looked way too much like a command prompt.
  
  "Uh-oh."
  
  White letters scrolled across the box after the blinking cursor and paused, waiting for her reply.
  
  8/14 11:00 p.m. Baltimore, MD. If you want in on this, you'll have to prove your vision aligns with the rest of us. Background check. The kind you wouldn't want your mama to see. Full-color photo. Any possibly useful skills. Send it all to this link in the next five days or you can fuck off. Write it down. This isn't a chat.
  
  Below that was a hyperlink of incomprehensible numbers and letters that didn't say what the hell it was for. Lisa fumbled with her phone and managed to take a picture of the command prompt box a second before the screen flashed again and the box disappeared.
  
  She checked to make sure she'd obtained a clear image and breathed a sigh of relief. Something tells me asking nicely for a do-over isn't an option.
  
  In the next moment, the pieces of the puzzle all clicked together in her head.
  
  "Wait a minute—" She leapt up and practically ran into the bedroom to retrieve her tablet. It took her two attempts to unlock it and she pulled up the digital file for the next case Agent Nelson had sent her the day before with a request to pass it on to Johnny. She swiped through the first page detailing all the various internal accounts to which the file itself had been sent, then stopped at the front of the case report. "Baltimore. Ha!"
  
  Lisa scratched the back of her head absently and mussed her sleepless bedhead even more as she stared at the case file. She returned to the desk in the living room for her phone. Tommy doesn't want him to lose his shit over this. No one does. And no one cares how Johnny's handled with these cases as long as he's handled. It's not like Tommy's completely in the dark.
  
  "Screw it." She pulled up Agent Nelson's personal cell number and made the call. When the line rang four times, she almost hung up but fortunately stopped when a loud click and rustle came through from the other end.
  
  "Fuck," the man grumbled.
  
  "Oh, hi, Tommy." She lowered herself slowly onto the hard cushions of her hotel couch and rolled her eyes. "I'm good. Thanks for asking."
  
  "What the hell, Breyer." Tommy inhaled deeply and grumbled a little more, accompanied by the rustling of bedsheets. "It's almost two in the morning."
  
  "Shit. Right."
  
  "If this isn't an emergency—"
  
  "Well, it might be—but the good kind."
  
  "Dammit. Give me a sec."
  
  It sounded like he dropped the phone onto the bed, but instead of the sound of lights clicking on or footsteps across the floor, she heard three swift, sharp smacks of flesh on flesh. She pulled the phone away from her ear and glanced wearily at it.
  
  "All right. Shit." He groaned. "I'm up. What's the…good emergency?"
  
  "I found Lemonhead."
  
  "What?"
  
  "I mean the Red Boar. He took over all Lemonhead's—you know what? It's not important." Lisa shook her head and took a deep breath. Keep it together and stick to the facts. "Did you know there was a Dwarf the Bounty Hunter fan site on the dark web?"
  
  "What the fuck?" Tommy cleared his throat. "First, I have to deal with Johnny slipping back into his old drinking habits and now, you're…what? Tweaking in the middle of the damn night and calling me about that stupid fucking show?"
  
  "Huh. Well, first of all, I'm not on drugs, Tommy, but you might be if you'd seen what I saw in Portland—"
  
  "Yeah, I heard it sucked. Are you okay?"
  
  "I'm fine, merely putting in overtime because I haven't quite caught up on lost sleep. Please hear me out and pretend like everything I tell you makes sense, all right?"
  
  "Lisa…"
  
  "I was looking for the Red Boar. If the guy was there the night Dawn was murdered, he would have guessed she was Johnny's daughter and he would've confirmed that again when we crossed paths in New York." She glanced at the tablet in her lap and tried to gather her thoughts. "But what I found, Tommy, was a fan site of people freaking out over Johnny's old show."
  
  "It's been off the air for fifteen years."
  
  "I know. But the site's still active and Lemonhead's posting on it."
  
  "Who the hell is—"
  
  "The Red Boar. Deadroot. Whatever the hell his name is. I think he's recruiting some of Johnny's old bounties to form some kind of…team. Most likely to target Johnny."
  
  Tommy groaned. "Payback's a bitch. Look, if those idiots want to slog through the muck to find that dwarf and get their heads blown off for their troubles, that's their choice."
  
  "Not if we find them first. They're meeting in Baltimore on Thursday."
  
  "Wait. That's where—"
  
  "Yeah. The Hugh case." Lisa sat up straight on the couch and scanned the walls of her hotel suite. Come on, Tommy. Wake up and use your brain.
  
  "And you want to crash this meeting and go after the Red Boar instead?"
  
  "Not exactly. But I do want to run something by you right now before I take it all to Johnny tomorrow. And if this works, we might bring back a hell of a lot more than one Kilomea with a blackmailing problem."
  
  "Huh." He sniffed. "What exactly did you have in mind?"
  
  She grinned and leaned back against the couch cushions.