text: They reached Johnny's huge hotel suite without being badgered by the film crew again. He slumped in the high-backed armchair built for a giant and stared at the area rug beneath the coffee table.
  
  Lisa looked at him from her place on the couch and raised an eyebrow. "Will you be pissed off about one filmed dinner all night?"
  
  "If it suits me, sure."
  
  "Hey, Johnny." Luther stared at his master from the edge of the kitchen and took slow, cautious steps toward the counter beside the fridge. "Johnny…"
  
  "I don't think he can hear us, bro."
  
  "Well, make sure."
  
  "Johnny!" Rex barked. "Anyone home?"
  
  The dwarf rubbed his mouth and continued to stare at the rug.
  
  "He's totally gone. Hurry."
  
  Luther leapt up and put his front paws onto the counter beside the to-go boxes Johnny had neglected to put in the fridge. He darted a wary glance over his shoulder at his master, then buffeted both boxes onto the floor with his snout.
  
  "Yes," Rex whispered.
  
  "Victory! We—ow. Quit nipping me."
  
  "Then quit shouting or you'll break him out of his pissed-off concentration."
  
  Luther sniggered. "Probably thinking of all the ways he could blow up that guy with the crazy hair."
  
  "Howie?"
  
  "No, the other one. Hey, look. Shrimp!"
  
  "Shh!"
  
  Lisa turned to look into the kitchen, but the corner of the hallway blocked the conniving hounds from view. If Johnny's not stopping them, I won't say anything. She took her laptop from the couch cushion beside her and opened it on her thighs. "Well, how about something else to take your mind off it, huh?"
  
  "I ain't watchin' more IdiotTube videos."
  
  She snorted. "No, I was talking about next steps with this dark-web Johnny-hater meeting. But feel free to sit there and sulk."
  
  He looked at her with wide eyes and finally heard the barely contained snuffling and chewing coming from the kitchen. "Boys?"
  
  "Uh…yeah, Johnny."
  
  "Shit. Stop for a sec. What're y'all up to?"
  
  Rex trotted into view and his claws clicked on the kitchen's tiled floors. When he met Johnny's gaze, he licked his muzzle and stared. "Hanging out. Grabbing a drink. You know, the usual."
  
  Luther's head-butted the cabinet as he licked the destroyed pieces of to-go boxes across the floor. "Ow."
  
  "That don't sound like water," Johnny muttered.
  
  Rex sniggered. "Does it surprise you that he can't find the water bowl, Johnny?"
  
  Luther smacked his head against the cabinet again when he looked up to stare at his brother. "Hey—"
  
  Rex whipped his head toward the far end of the kitchen. "Wait. Luther. Did you hear that?"
  
  "What?"
  
  "I think it's a mouse. In the cabinet." The larger hound darted out of his master's view to pounce on the to-go boxes.
  
  "Ha-ha. Who's dumb now? I already checked that one, Rex. There's no mouse—"
  
  "The other cabinet," Rex snarled.
  
  "Oh, right… Yeah, get it."
  
  "Johnny?" Lisa leaned sideways to try to catch his attention. "I'm about to make another big move, so if you want to see what's happening here—"
  
  "Yeah." He pushed out of the armchair with a grunt and stepped slowly across the living area and frowned at the entrance to the kitchen. "Did you see those hounds get up to somethin'?"
  
  She logged into her laptop and shook her head. "I've been watching you the whole time."
  
  "I like her, Johnny."
  
  "Shh. Focus."
  
  With a shrug, Johnny sank onto the couch beside her and glanced at the laptop screen. "Next big move, huh?"
  
  "For us, at least. Honestly, this is my first time interacting on the dark web instead of…you know. Poking around."
  
  He looked curiously at her. "For what?"
  
  "Well, we can start with the time I entered a dark-web auction and bid for a twelve-year-old girl with your money."
  
  "But that wasn't the first time."
  
  "No. I did some digging for the Department a time or two before they assigned me to Amanda's case with you." She stopped typing and looked up at him staring at her. "Okay, fine. Twenty-one cases where dark-web scouring was a priority."
  
  "I didn't say a thing."
  
  "Yeah well, you didn't have to. Stop looking at me like that." Lisa pursed her lips to hide a smirk as she pulled up her VPN and dove into the dark web. Then she retrieved her phone and brought up the picture of the anonymous Johnny-haters private invitation.
  
  The dwarf grumbled and shook his head. "You can't simply do all that with one damn piece of equipment?"
  
  "What?"
  
  "What's your phone gonna do?"
  
  She turned the device to show him. "This is the link to upload some perfectly legit fake documents."
  
  "Huh."
  
  Lisa typed the hyperlink into the URL bar that displayed .onion domains and pressed the Enter key. Another horizontal flash of white light darted across her screen a second before the link's direct page came up.
  
  "Is that somethin' you should worry about?" Johnny asked and wagged his finger across the screen. "That little flash?"
  
  "Honestly, I have no idea." She shrugged. "But I don't keep my laptop synced to my tablet or phone. So if someone thinks it'll be fun to hack into my system, they'll find nothing but my bookmarked websites and a few random poems."
  
  "Say what now?"
  
  She waved him off. "It's only me playing around. It's nothing."
  
  "Stuff hypothetical hackers would see and run away from?"
  
  "Very funny."
  
  "I thought you had a handle on keepin' folks outta your…systems anyhow." Johnny glanced at the photo of the private message on her phone. "Don'tcha?"
  
  "Well, I know enough to be fairly certain I'm about eighty-five percent safe. I think." Lisa paused to look at him. "But I'm not a pro, Johnny. Yeah, technically I've done this and gotten paid for it, but it's not—"
  
  "Slow down, darlin'." He chuckled. "I get the gist."
  
  "Right."
  
  "Now, how come you're only doin' this now?" He nodded at the screen. "I thought you had the whole thing set up and ready to go."
  
  "Yeah, I could have. But I didn't want to seem desperate by putting all this up immediately."
  
  "Uh-huh. Tryin' to fit in with the cool thugs, huh?"
  
  "Yes, Johnny. My greatest ambition in life is to make criminals you put behind bars like me." With a chuckle, she read through the list of information the private criminal-screening invitation wanted from her and sighed. "Here we go."
  
  Name: Stephanie Wyndom
  
  Age: 47
  
  Height: 5'11"
  
  Weight: 127 lbs
  
  Gender: Female
  
  Race: Half-Light Elf
  
  Hair Color: Strawberry-blonde
  
  "Naw, darlin', don't put that in there."
  
  "What? Why?"
  
  "Come on? Who says that about their own damn hair, huh? That'd be like writing your age in as, 'I'm forty-seven a half, but all my friends tell me I don't look a day over thirty-five.'"
  
  She elbowed him in the ribs. "I do not sound like that."
  
  "Sure. I was imitatin' Stephanie." He gave her a crooked smile. "There ain't no way you're forty-seven."
  
  "I'll overlook that potentially unintended insult and tell you that none of the things I'm putting in here are real. How's that?"
  
  "Not all of it…"
  
  She laughed. "Wow. I made a mistake in asking you to come watch."
  
  "All right, all right. I'll shut it." Johnny stood and went to the round side table beside the huge armchair for the whiskey he'd poured as soon as they got back to the hotel.
  
  Squinting at him, Lisa changed her last entry and moved on.
  
  Hair Color: Red
  
  Eye Color: Green
  
  Identifying Marks: None
  
  Birthplace:
  
  "Huh." She picked her phone up and signed into the secure server for the Department's shared files to open the case documents with her fake identity detailed in one place.
  
  "What's wrong?"
  
  "Nothing. I had to remember where Stephanie was born."
  
  He moved closer to her again and snorted. "That's one of those things most folks don't forget. Are you sure you're ready to head out and meet these bastards tomorrow night?"
  
  "Johnny, it's one detail. One. Now I know I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I won't forget it."
  
  "No wonder you turned to a life of booze and crime."
  
  Lisa rolled her eyes and kept going.
  
  Birthplace: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
  
  Most Recent Arrest: 2015
  
  Reason for Requesting Access:
  
  She paused at the last one. "I need to make this good."
  
  "You already know what they wanna hear, darlin'. Go ahead."
  
  "Well, give me a minute, okay? It has to look real."
  
  The dwarf nudged her shoulder lightly with the back of his hand. "Why don't you answer it with a poem?"
  
  "Stop."
  
  Reason for Requesting Access: I want to see that fucking dwarf draw his last breath.
  
  "Well, shit." He rumbled a deep laugh that drew a smile from her. "Tell ʼem how you truly feel."
  
  "No, I'm telling them how they feel. Is it too much?"
  
  "I ain't gonna make you change it.'
  
  "Great. That's everything but the picture. So…" Lisa picked up her phone again and dove into the FBI-manufactured documents of Stephanie's nonexistent life to pull up the doctored mugshot. "That'll work."
  
  "You're gonna send ʼem your mugshot from the day I never took you in?"
  
  "Well, it's not like we had the time for a photo shoot." She paused to study the fake image of Stephanie in an orange felon uniform, her light-red hair mussed and sticking out in all directions. "It looks like the real deal to me."
  
  "Sure. But the picture's on your damn phone."
  
  Lisa turned toward him with wide eyes. "Honestly? Oh, you're serious about that."
  
  "What?"
  
  "Johnny, how do you stay in touch with the rest of the world on a regular basis?"
  
  "I don't." The dwarf shrugged and took another sip. "No TV and no FacePage or Tweetie or whatever the hell."
  
  "Oh, jeez." She closed her eyes and forced back a laugh. "Please tell me you at least know what email is."
  
  "'Course I do. But why the hell would anyone email me?"
  
  "Oh, I don't know. Maybe to send an image file from their phone to your computer, for instance." Which was exactly what she did with Stephanie Wyndom's mugshot. "If you don't know how any of this stuff works, why do you have a smartphone?"
  
  "My last phone went overboard durin' a hunt. The guy at the phone store pulled one over on me when he said he could put all my saved numbers into the new one."
  
  "It's called the—you know what? Never mind."
  
  "Sure." He frowned at her and kept drinking.
  
  Lisa dragged the photo from her email and dropped it into the upload box on the private chat. "And that's the end of it. Let's see if good ol' Stephanie stands up to the test."
  
  She clicked the send link, and the web page went completely blank.
  
  "Is that it?"
  
  "I guess so. I have no idea what comes next, so we'll simply roll with it." Lisa clicked around through the pathways she'd taken four days before and made her way easily to the site she wanted: 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!
  
  "Aw, not this again." Johnny leaned back on the couch with a grunt. "No one even knew about Oriceran when that damn show was runnin'."
  
  "But it seems it became a cult classic sometime between the reveal of magic and…now. I'm checking to see what the official fans have to say about the show."
  
  "Ain't my idea of a fun night, darlin'."
  
  "Well, you don't have to look with me."
  
  "I won't." He stood and made his way out of the living area toward the kitchen across the hall.
  
  At the sound of his approaching boots, Rex and Luther skittered out of the kitchen.
  
  "Hey, Johnny." Rex licked his muzzle and darted under the dining table before he curled in a ball on the floor.
  
  "Don't mind us," Luther added as he ran toward the bedroom. "We're only—aw, man. Johnny, do you have to keep this door closed all the time?"
  
  "Y'all got no business in there unless we're all passed out for the night."
  
  "What?" Lisa called.
  
  "Only the hounds." He refilled his whiskey glass and frowned at the empty counter beside the fridge. "Lisa?"
  
  "Yeah?"
  
  He opened the fridge door, peered inside briefly, then closed it again and turned. "Did you do somethin' with those leftovers?"
  
  "Nope."
  
  "Huh." He took another sip, thoroughly confused, and turned slowly to scan the kitchen. I'd say the hounds got into my supper, but they ain't neat about stolen food.
  
  "You sure you brought it in, Johnny?" Luther asked and stretched out on his side in front of the closed bedroom door.
  
  "Yeah, maybe you left it at the restaurant."
  
  "You were mad as hell, Johnny. Makes sense if you forgot. Happens to the best of us."
  
  "Y'all mind your own, ya hear?"
  
  "Sure, Johnny." Rex licked his forepaw.
  
  "We'll hang out," Luther added as he rolled onto his back. "Chill. Keep you company."
  
  "Oh, whoa." Lisa laughed and then clamped a hand over her mouth to suppress the rest of it. "This is insane."
  
  "I think we already settled that when you said there's a damn website with my mug all over it."
  
  "If it wasn't crazy before, Johnny, it is now." Grinning, she scrolled through the newest posts on the page that had been recently created specifically for Dwarf the Bounty Hunter Season 8, Episode 1: Back in Black. "Did you know they'd already named the first episode?"
  
  "Nope and I don't care."
  
  "But you like AC/DC, right?"
  
  "What're you on about, darlin'?"
  
  "Back in Black, Johnny."
  
  "Huh." He sat beside her on the couch again and couldn't bring himself to look at the laptop. "Nelson's PR team did somethin' right, at least."
  
  "And people are freaking out. There's a whole page dedicated to the episode that hasn't even come out yet. Look at this."
  
  "Nope."
  
  "There are almost ten thousand comments simply speculating about what you're doing in Baltimore. Everyone knows. And they're all talking about—oh."
  
  Johnny leaning his head back against the couch cushion. "Well, don't that sound promisin'. What is it?"
  
  "Some…uh, rather choice descriptions of Stephanie."
  
  He chuckled.
  
  "Oh, look. Someone wrote a piece of fan fiction."
  
  "Get outta here."
  
  "No, I'm serious. It's… Whoa. Erotic fan-fiction. Again, with Stephanie."
  
  "Darlin', you oughtta close outta that before you start losin' your mind."
  
  "Okay, well, I'm not reading that. But I'm enjoying this. Sure, no one knows it's me, but all this means our plan's working."
  
  "Your plan." Johnny raised his head to drink more whiskey. "I gotta give credit where it's due. You thought all this up on your own."
  
  "Yeah, in the middle of the night after being awake for twenty-two hours straight."
  
  He frowned at her. "Seriously?"
  
  "I suppose I found a way to be productive on an insomniac's schedule. Don't worry about it. I've been getting six hours for the last few nights, so I think it's getting better."
  
  "Whoever told you six hours was enough needs to have their head checked. I get eight. Nine if I bagged some prize-winning game the day before."
  
  Luther sniggered. "Eleven if you brought a lady over the night before."
  
  "Ooh, yeah. Johnny, remember that one time when we went to that party and you got shitfaced? And we had to walk you home? I'm very sure you slept a whole day after that."
  
  "And you did way more than whiskey that night, didn't you?"
  
  The dwarf snapped his fingers and took a huge sip. And that's why no one else hears the hounds but me.
  
  "Well, either way," Lisa continued, oblivious to the hounds heckling their master, "it's getting better. So I'm not too worried about it."
  
  "Sure. Have you tried any—"
  
  "Oh, hello…" She nudged his shoulder and pointed at the screen. "Incoming message."
  
  "From the same guy?"
  
  "There is no way to tell. But probably."
  
  Your face is all over the internet. Explain.
  
  Below that came a screenshot of the Johnny Walker fan site with a frozen video frame capturing Stephanie Wyndom grinning at the bounty hunter. A text box for her to send an immediate reply opened at the bottom of the message.
  
  "Shit. Do you have an answer for that?" he asked.
  
  "Sure." Lisa started typing.
  
  "You don't sound all that reassurin', darlin'. It might be we oughtta—"
  
  "Shh. Let me think."
  
  He snorted and leaned slightly toward her to read her on-the-fly explanation over her shoulder.
  
  You saw my face in other places too. Twenty-four years is a long time to remember what that asshole did to me. The opportunity came my way, and I took it. They wanted a pretty face on the show this time around, so that's all they see, but I'll be here as long as it takes to find everything he loves and cares about. I thought meeting up with some like-minded ex-bounties would help me connect the dots in the end.
  
  Johnny whistled. "Are you sure you didn't already have that floatin' around in the back of your mind?"
  
  "No, my lies are much better when I don't plan them." She grinned at him. "Otherwise, I forget half of it."
  
  "Like where your alias was born?"
  
  "Johnny, they won't ask me to confirm everything I sent them directly. Especially not when they can double-check for themselves. It's fine."
  
  The text both she and the anonymous messenger had sent to each other disappeared, then whoever was on the other side of the chat started typing again.
  
  Come alone. No human weapons.
  
  Below that was an address. Lisa used her phone to snap a photo before the message box disappeared with another flash of white light across her screen. "Got it. We're in."
  
  "All right, darlin'. I'm impressed."
  
  "Good. You should be." She left the dark web, closed the VPN down, and signed out of everything before she turned her laptop off. "Now, we're one step closer."
  
  "Well, you can spin a story by the skin of your teeth, I'll give you that. Do you reckon you can hold your own tomorrow night in a room full of vengeful pricks?"
  
  The laptop clicked shut, and she turned to raise an eyebrow at him. "Why wouldn't I be?"
  
  "If you ain't been sleepin'—"
  
  "I'm fine." Lisa stood and tucked her laptop under her arm. "But speaking of sleep, yeah. I should probably go do that. You too."
  
  "Uh-huh."
  
  "Goodnight, Johnny."
  
  "'Night, darlin'." He raised his glass toward her, then paused. "Hey, when those idiots start filmin' us again tomorrow, you should throw a few nasty looks my way."
  
  She looked at him over her shoulder with a confused smile. "What?"
  
  "You know. Like you can't wait to kick my ass so everyone gets a good look at it."
  
  "Ha! I'll see what I can do. It shouldn't be that hard."