“Not me. He overdosed on cocaine in a ten-grand-per-night suite in the Bahamas while having sex with four hookers on top of a pile of my money. Which is how I’ve always wanted to die. So he not only screwed me, he stole my suicide plan.” Harry’s eyes got even glassier. “Look, Jack, I’m not going to bring up all the times I’ve helped you out to try to convince you to do this. And there have been a lot. I know this because I’ve made a list of them. Want to see it?”

  “No.”

  “All those times I selflessly saved your ass…”

  “We’re not doing this, McGlade.”

  “I can promise we won’t show your face, and I’ll tell Heckle and Jeckle to keep your screen time to a minimum. Please. Do me this small favor. It would mean a lot to me.”

  I felt myself start to give in, and folded my arms over my chest and kept my mouth closed.

  “C’mon, Jack. Be a friend. The IRS is threatening jail time. I’m too pretty for prison, Jack. The lifers would pass me around like a jar of salsa. Everyone with a corn chip would dig in.”

  As amusing as that image was, I stayed strong.

  “If you won’t do it for me, do it for Herb. He needs us, Jack. I need us.”

  “You need an accountant and someone to slap you whenever you do anything stupid.”

  “True. But I can’t afford either unless I do this live stream.”

  McGlade would continue to try and manipulate me until I gave in, or walked away. The thing to do, the best thing for me and my family, was to walk.

  But it would be easier and quicker to find Herb with Harry than without him. McGlade had resources that I didn’t have.

  Don’t try to justify this, Jack. Stay firm. Don’t crack. Do. Not. Crack.

  A tear rolled down his cheek.

  I cracked.

  “I don’t want to be shown live. Even pixilated.”

  “We should be able to keep your screen time to a minimum.”

  “I want… what’s it called when the director is allowed to release the version she wants to?”

  “Final cut.”

  “I want final cut. Nothing goes on YouTube without my approval.”

  “We can do that. No problem.”

  Wincing, knowing I’d regret it later, I mumbled, “Okay.”

  Harry beamed. “Great!” He reached into his pocket and tugged out paper and a pen. “I need you to sign this release form.”

  There were only three paragraphs, and Harry had already written he wouldn’t show my face or reveal my name. He also stated my IMDB.com credit would be listed as B. Chalda Thyme.

  Bitch all the time.

  I didn’t do that, did I?

  I’d signed enough releases for McGlade to know this one was fairly standard, scribbled on the bottom in a scrawl that couldn’t be recognized as my actual name, and handed the papers back, already regretting the action.

  McGlade, for his part, had gone from weepy and desperate to looking pleased pretty damn quick.

  “Don’t look so gloom and doom, J-Dawg. It won’t be as bad as you think. We’ll probably find Herb fast, no one will get hurt, and you’ll be back to your mundane, anonymous life in short order.”

  Knowing McGlade, he’d be wrong about everything.

  YEARS AGO

  TOM AND JERRY

  I think of MotherBitch a lot,” Tom said to Jerry. “Do you?”

  “Truedoo,” Jerry answered. One of their made-up words. It meant yes. “Miss her?”

  “Notno.”

  “You remember her burning. Burnhurt and screamloud and begging for help.”

  A nod.

  “I wish we could have seen it.”

  The twins had fled from the room and barricaded the door immediately after pouring the nail polish remover on her bed and throwing the match. Often they talked of what it must have looked like. How amazing it must have been to watch MotherBitch burn.

  “You know what I want?” Tom said.

  Jerry knew. He wanted the same thing. “You want to try it with someone else.”

  “Truedoo. Mega funfun. But who should we funfun?”

  “FatherAss,” Jerry said.

  They despised their father as much, if not more, than they hated their mother.

  “We can’t. Not yet.”

  “Truedoo. We don’t want to go into foster care. We have to wait until we’re old enough.”

  Tom nodded. “Winheritance. We have to be eighteenadult to get the moneycash.”

  “Sadface. I’d love to watch the old fuckerfucker burn.”

  “Sadface times a million. But we can try funfun with someone else.”

  “A peopleperson?”

  “Sure. More funfun than doggos and catnips.”

  “Whodoo?” He considered their choices. “Our assmates would draw attention.”

  “Truedoo. No one in our assclass. Or our cruelschool. Gotta be a peopleperson with no connections to us.”

  “Strangerdanger,” Jerry said.

  “Yeah. Strangerdanger. Remember when we drove past the bus station in FatherAss’s limocar? He pointed the strangersdangers out. Said they had no homes. Called them worthless.”

  “Homeworthless,” Jerry said. “No one will miss the homeworthless. The bus station is next to the library.”

  “Wedoo funfun?” Tom asked.

  “Wedoo funfun.”

  “Heart cross?”

  “Heart cross.”

  The twins bumped their left fists, then crossed their hearts. Then they went to ask FatherAss for a ride to the library.

  Naturally, FatherAss said no. He was wussycrying about MotherBitch being all burnhurt. But he called for the limocar.

  Driveyday, driveyday, off to mega funfun.

  Jerry put a squirt bottle of lighter fluid in his bookbag.

  Tom brought the matches.

  They discussed taking photopics, and decided not to. They learned their lesson from Fluffy. Don’t leave evidence. If there was no evidence, then it didn’t happen.

  The driver waited in the limocar, and Tom and Jerry went into the library and straight out the back entrance. After an arguefight about which direction the bus station was, they realized they could follow the street signs and ten minutes later were standing in front of a homeworthless man propped up alongside the brick wall of the depot. He wore a stained shirt, ripped pants, had a scraggly facebeard and smelled like pisspee.

  “You… you kids got any money? I want to get some food.”

  His voice was warbly, like MotherBitch when she was pilldrunk.

  The twins didn’t respond.

  Jerry squirted him with the lighter fluid.

  Tom lit the match.

  They had to back up, because the homeworthless man started thrashing and kicking and rolling around, but they took turns squirting him and stayed and watched until he stopped moving.

  Murderdead.

  Megamega funfun.

  The twins threw the matches, and the empty can, onto the burning body, and then walked away, holding hands when they crossed the street, like they’d been told to do.

  After all, FatherAss often repeatsaid; the world was a dangerous place.

  SOMEWHERE, ONE WEEK AGO

  HERB

  Tequila’s leg was still healing when the guards came for Herb.

  Herb awoke with two men standing over his bed. Thick, middle aged, mestizo, dressed in beige fatigues. He pegged them as mercs, former military, and hadn’t ever seen them before.

  Neither carried a sidearm, squashing Herb’s first instinct to reach for their guns. But they did wield weapons. The shorter of the two carried an asp, and the taller a cattle prod with a forked electrode on the end.

  While the man with the prod hovered it over Herb’s face, the other quickly unlocked his ankle shackle.

  Relief temporarily overrode all fear. He was being taken out of that hellhole. Maybe to a worse hellhole, but Herb had nearly given up hope of ever seeing the outside again. Even if they were taking him out to shoot him, at least he’d be out.

  “Que tal mi amigo?” Herb asked, indicating Tequila.

  They yanked Herb to his feet, placed a wire loop around his neck, and began to lead him away.

  “Llévame también,” Tequila said. He was sitting up.

  “Mala pierna, pendejo.” The taller merc said, pointing the prod at Tequila’s leg.

  Tequila pounded a fist against his chest. “Soy fuerte.”

  The man touched Tequila with the prod, and there was a flash and a zapping sound. Herb had no idea how much it must have hurt, but it couldn’t have been pleasant.

  Tequila didn’t even flinch.

  “Estas loco!” the merc said, giggling and apparently delighted. But he walked past Tequila and instead went to the cot directly behind him. A young, skinny Mexican kid, who’d been brought in a few weeks ago. They uncuffed him, put a wire loop around his head, and led him past Tequila.

  Tequila kicked out his good leg, fast as a snake—

  —and snapped the boy’s knee in a direction it wasn’t supposed to go.

  The teenager fell, screaming.

  The merc reached out to zap Tequila with the prod again, and Tequila grabbed it by the electrodes, taking the shock.

  “Llévame,” Tequila grunted in his throat, teeth clenched and arm shaking. “Take me.”

  The man pulled away his cattle prod, then had a rapid-fire discussion with the guy holding Herb’s noose, speaking too quickly to understand. They reached some sort of decision, dragged the kid back to his bed, then slipped the wire noose around Tequila’s neck.

  Herb offered Tequila a small grin. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you had a crush on me.”

  Then the cattle prod was thrust into Herb’s belly, and he doubled over with a pain that was otherworldly. Herb dropped to his knees, tears squeezing out of his eyes, and then he was dragged out of the hospital/dungeon, up a flight of crumbling stone steps, and outside into the night.

  The stars were bright enough to blind him.

  The air was fresher than he’d ever smelled.

  The desert seemed to stretch on forever in all directions.

  The sand under his feet felt like walking on clouds.

  Herb’s tears of pain were hijacked by tears of joy. He wasn’t free, and at the same time he’d never felt freer.

  Then he was roughly shoved into the back of a windowless cargo van. Tequila was pushed in on top of him, and the door slammed to darkness.

  “You okay?” Herb asked his friend.

  “Gotta say, I’m not a fan of cattle prods.”

  “That little thing? It was like being tickled.”

  “Do you always cry like a baby when you’re tickled?”

  “Absolutely.”

  The vehicle started up, and when it lurched into gear Herb was jostled against the side of the van.

  “Might as well check out our new accommodations,” Herb said.

  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he began to feel around. The floor and panels of the van were lined with sheet metal. The rear doors had no handle.

  “I found a jug,” Tequila said. “Water.”

  “I found a bucket.” Herb took a tentative sniff. “It’s our new commode.”

  Tequila grunted. “We may be in here a while.”

  “At least we aren’t chained up. Hey, when we were outside, wasn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

  “I can’t recognize beauty.”

  Herb knew Tequila was somewhere on the autism spectrum, so he didn’t pursue it. He took a deep breath, hoping to smell the outdoors again. All he could detect was the stench of his own body odor, and the toilet bucket.

  Herb stretched out, his head against the metal floor.

  “For whatever it’s worth,” Herb said, “thanks for coming along.”

  “I couldn’t let you go alone. Who would help if I needed my leg broken again?”

  For some reason, Herb found that hysterical, and he began to laugh.

  Tequila didn’t join in. That spectrum thing again.

  “They said I had a bad leg,” Tequila mused. “That’s why they didn’t want to take me.”

  “They wanted two healthy men.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “For what? Something we already discussed? Slave labor? Snuff movies? Gladiator games?”

  “They might want us healthy because we’re being sold as boy toys to rich female celebrities to be used for sex.”

  “You think?”

  “No,” Tequila said. “My money is still on snuff films.”

  Herb frowned in the darkness.

  NEBRASKA, PRESENT

  THE COWBOY

  As the Tor browser loads through the virtual private network, the Cowboy plugs the memory stick into the USB slot of the laptop and uses a different window to check current bitcoin exchange rates. After a quick and anonymous search on Tor, the Cowboy logs onto https://w9sioi30982ls9089dpv2p.onion and checks the number of preview hits.

  Six thousand nine hundred and thirty-five. Of those, two hundred and sixty-one people downloaded the full video, for a total of 1.189 bitcoin.

  Which is about eight thousand dollars in the Cowboy’s wallet. Cha-ching.

  But this isn’t about the money.

  It has never been about the money.

  Darknet and the Wild West have much in common. Each is a lawless, untamed land, where the strong survive and profit off the weak, and the legends are equally revered and feared.

  The Cowboy is among the most popular uploaders on Snuff-X, a hidden service that was one of the premiere dark websites.

  Thank you, Uncle Sam.

  Tor—an acronym of The Onion Router—was invented by US military to communicate anonymously. Normal browsers can’t open Darknet domains. They’re created using random characters by an Onion server, which uses so many nodes that it is impossible to trace the data.

  Or something like that. The Cowboy didn’t really understand how it worked. Only that you can buy and sell anything, especially things that are illegal. Stolen merchandise, user and system passwords, credit card numbers, firearms, drugs…

  People.

  The slave trade is alive and well on darknet. You can bid on humans, much like eBay. It’s where Yuri gets many of his volunteers. Children, and attractive women, command the most money. The Belarusian always bids low on damaged or defective people, or buys them outright without bidding, and constantly rotates his workforce as they die out.

  The Cowboy understands Yuri’s ambition. He needs to make enough money to launch, and that singular obsession drives the man like a Russian Ahab. But Yuri is missing the forest for the trees. Making thirty million dollars selling shit, just to get into orbit, is a limited mindset. Even if the ultimate goal is mass murder. Say what you will about vision, or scope, or changing the course of history, life is about more than simple revenge.

  It has to be. Lest you be consumed by it.

  That’s why the Cowboy had goals that were diversified. There is beauty in nuance. Value in hobbies. Being the best of the best, the most popular, is a pleasure more fulfilling than overthrowing a country.

  It’s not like Yuri can become king once he executes his plan. After he’s extracted his pound of flesh, the man will no longer have a purpose.

  Such a shame. Purpose is essential.

  The Cowboy intimately knows the allure of revenge. Knows how it consumes. And also knows how it disappoints.

  There needs to be more than that.

  Yuri holds the power of life and death over his slaves. But it holds no appeal for him. It’s a means to justify the ends.

  Life isn’t about reaching your destination. It’s about enjoying the journey.

  Brute force, wars, political and military bullshit; it’s all so 1990s.

  Power in 2017 has morphed into something else. These days, it’s about followers. About likes and retweets and upvotes and rank. The world is more than the insignificant ten million people living in Belarus. It’s about the three billion people online.

  That’s why the Cowboy uploads videos of his teeth extractions, his fish-hooks, his tortures, his kills, to darknet.

  Once Yuri reaches his quota, he’ll sell the Cowboy the LeTourneau. And the Cowboy won’t fill it with poppies.

  The Cowboy will fill it with something a lot more interesting.

  JACK

  Heckle and Jeckle busied themselves on their laptops. Occasionally they would nudge each other, glance at me, then smirk. I guessed they were either texting one another, or communicating telepathically.

  I had a bad feeling about these guys.

  I’m no psychologist, and it has been my experience that those who spend a lot of time trying to figure out human nature are usually doing it in an attempt to understand themselves. Putting people into groups, labeling them, and deciding that some traits are normal and some aren’t, always felt like a way to intellectualize bigotry.

  I’ve met a lot of criminals in my line of work, and many had things in common. Being able to spot those things gave me an edge when it came to solving crimes and trying to predict the behavior of those who would harm others. But most aren’t that easy to categorize, and stereotyping leads to cops shooting innocent civilians.

  I’m not interested in law and order to the point where people get charged with thought crimes. So I try to reserve judgement for actual criminal behavior, rather than hunches that someone is up to no good.

  Some of the biggest sociopaths I’d ever met—I’m talking about those who lack the ability to empathize with other people and instead learn to mimic social cues and behavior—weren’t killers. The majority of them were leaders of some sort. CEOs of companies. Politicians. Managers. Coaches. Ministers.

  I’m not saying that every mayor or priest is a sociopath. I’m also not saying that sociopathology is even a negative trait. Some kid who steals a bike might grow up to be a reputable stockbroker or a banker, instead of a bank robber. Along with genetics, it depends on their environment and circumstance.

  So as I watched the twins Harry had hired, I gleaned a lot about them, but it didn’t offer me any more insight into their future actions than the color of their eyes, their height, or their muscle mass.