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***

Water boarding.” The detective laughed. “Not likely from Captain Matus, here. The Sewa live on a desert reservation. They know water is too rare to waste torturing prisoners. I figure he's more likely to peel off your fingernails and, if that doesn't work, skin you alive.”

From the way Matus glared at Heather, she wasn't sure the man was kidding. “Either way,” she said, “I've got nothing to confess. Not for myself or on behalf of my uncle. And what's Matus' authority here? Why Sewa tribal police instead of Yaqui?”

“Yaquis have a real small force they use mostly at their casino,” the detective said. “Guess they farmed this out.”

“Enough of this bull,” Matus interrupted. “That was my officer who took a knife in the chest. Our cousins, the Yaqui Nation, hired us to provide security for this ceremony and I've got a right to question these witnesses.”

The detective shook his head. “You got no legal jurisdiction here, Matus. This isn't your Rez. This may be a Yaqui community, but it's inside the City of Tucson.”

The second detective held his hands up, palms open, like he was using sign language to indicate peaceful intent. “I don't see why Captain Matus can't join us for any questioning to be done.”

Matus smirked in Heather's direction, like maybe he was getting more than he'd expected. “I can live with that,” he said.

“So can I,” Heather said, after glancing Ms. Jardine's way and getting a nod that indicated her dad was in the loop. “I don't mean any insult to the Captain or his police force, but he was coming on pretty strong. I didn't want to take a chance that we might disappear into some legal limbo. With the Tucson Police Department involved, and with the Sheriff of Benteen County, Kansas having been informed, that's no longer a concern for me.”

Matus pounced on that. “That's your father she has on the phone? Let me talk to him.”

Heather couldn't think of why not. She waved Ms. Jardine over and the woman gave the captain Heather's cell.

“This is Captain Matus of the Sewa Tribal Police. Who're you?”

He paused while Englishman answered.

“I assume you're aware of what's happened here tonight. Have you been told about the description witnesses gave of the killer? Is your brother in Kansas, Sheriff English?”

“Is he?” Heather asked. Jardine shook her head.

“His house, you say? Tonight? That's remarkable. So, if I call your office they can confirm all this?”

“What about Mad Dog's house?” Heather whispered.

“Someone blew it up.”

Matus nearly blew up, too. “You're kidding me. You're telling me your office isn't staffed? All right, I'll give you fifteen minutes to get there. Then expect an official call on the number listed for your agency. And expect us to call some other Kansas agencies to find out if you're for real. And why your office isn't open twenty-four hours a day. Until we can confirm who you are, Ms. English and Ms. Jardine will remain in custody.”

“Ours,” the Tucson detective said. “Not his. And just so we can ask you a few more questions. We need help from you ladies to get us up to speed on this.”

The women nodded.

“I see,” Matus concluded. He folded the phone shut and turned to the Tucson detectives. “I'd like to introduce you gentlemen to Deputy Heather English. She works for her daddy. As, I suspect, all of her brothers do, if she has any, and they're probably all named Daryll.”

Heather blushed. Matus had hit too close with his insult. Her adopted sister was also named Heather. That had caused lots of confusion and a few laughs over the years. Tonight, it didn't seem even faintly amusing.

***

As far as Mad Dog could tell, the search hadn't spread to the east side of Oracle Road yet. So far, following Hailey had kept him out of custody, if not out of trouble. Not that the stabbing had been her fault.

They were in a little motor court on a dark street a couple of blocks northeast of the sex shop. Or what had been a motor court half a century ago. Now it was just a cluster of concrete block apartments with rusty evaporative coolers in the windows. The yard down the middle of the complex didn't grow grass anymore, just sand, dirt, weeds, and the occasional rock. The whole place was badly in need of fix-up and fresh paint, except where taggers had recently marked it with graffiti. Mad Dog couldn't figure out why Hailey had brought him to these apartments, even if he needed a place to hole up and the sign out front said they had units for rent. Then he noticed a pay phone at the rear of the complex on a wall beside a door labeled LAUNDRY/STORAGE. With his cell phone still in the Mini Cooper, the pay phone would come in handy. He turned to look at Hailey and shake his head in wonder. Once again, she was gone. He shook his head anyway, and didn't worry about her. She'd come back when she was ready.

As he headed for the phone, someone backed out of the laundry room. It was a tall, bulked up man with thick shoulders and long hair and tattoos crawling out from under ragged shirt sleeves. Not someone Mad Dog wanted to meet in a dark alley. Or here, even if the guy was toting a basket of clean clothes. The man turned and noticed Mad Dog and his eyes got wide. He dropped his laundry and sprinted to the third apartment down, frantically grabbing for keys. He ducked inside and slammed the door behind him. Mad Dog heard him throw the bolt. Apparently, one resident of the apartment complex didn't want to meet someone slathered in licorice body paint in the dark either.

The guy didn't re-emerge with a gun or start calling for help, so Mad Dog went to the phone and dug some change out of his pocket. As usual, there was nothing but a handful of pennies. Damn, he thought, and then noticed the shiny spots atop the big guy's spilled laundry. He bent and checked and, sure enough, they were quarters. Mad Dog collected all of them he could find. He picked up the laundry and put it back in the basket, too, though after contacting bare earth, it would need to be washed again. He placed a twenty dollar bill on top of the stack and weighted it down with a convenient rock.

There wasn't much doubt about who he should call. What could either of the Heathers do for him? What could anyone do for him? Except….

“Sheriff English,” his brother answered, surprisingly alert for this godforsaken hour.

“Hey, bro,” Mad Dog said. “You'll never guess what's happened to me tonight.”

“Wanna bet? My daughter and Ms. Jardine are being held as witnesses right now, and I'm on my way to the courthouse to be there to answer a call from a very angry policeman so I can prove I'm the sheriff. All because you're supposed to have stabbed another policeman to death less than an hour ago.”

“Oh,” Mad Dog said. Since his brother already knew, it would save a lot of time. Still, he felt a little let down that he couldn't be the first to pass along the news. “Well, I didn't do it.”

“Never thought you did,” Englishman said. “But why'd you run? My advice is to give yourself up. Right now!”

“I know I should do that, Englishman, but it doesn't feel real safe. And I wouldn't have run in the first place if Hailey wasn't leading the way.”

That caused Englishman to pause. Mad Dog knew his brother didn't buy into the whole Cheyenne Shamanism thing the way Mad Dog had, even if they shared the same bloodline. But Englishman didn't completely discount it, either, and no one who knew her doubted Hailey had an amazing knack for being in the right place at the right time. Back in Benteen County, even folks who were scared she might kill their sheep and calves tended to call her the Wonder Wolf.

“Can I get back to you at this number?” Englishman asked. “I know somebody in Tucson who might help, but I'm going to have to do some searching to find a phone number. And, I'll be talking to law enforcement down there. Maybe I can arrange a safe way for you to surrender.”

“I'll feel a lot better about doing that after they've got the real killer. I know who that is, by the way.”

“You do? Why didn't you say so?”

“He's going to be real easy to find,” Mad Dog continued. “Just go to my house and….”

“You don't have a house anymore, Mad Dog,” Englishman interrupted. “Somebody put a rocket-propelled grenade through your window tonight. There's not much left.”

Mad Dog's jaw dropped. His house? Their mother's mementos, his books, irreplaceable letters, his Cheyenne paraphernalia—all gone?

“But your buffalo herd is all right. And the outbuildings are still there, though some are a little singed.”

“Damn!” Mad Dog said. “Then maybe he's won.”

“Who? The killer? Who are you talking about?”

“Yeah, the killer—Fig Zit.”

“Who?”

“Fig, like the fruit. And Zit like a pimple,” Mad Dog said.

“That's a stupid name,” Englishman said.

Mad Dog found that a bit unkind, considering his own name. “It's not stupid,” he said, “not if you're a level seventy Coalition vampire wizard.”

***

A level thirty-one Coalition bloodknight warrior was killing Mrs. Kraus for the fourth time in a row when the phone rang. If that damn Coalition bastard had let her finish even one quest in the last half hour, she might not have answered it. She wasn't supposed to be in the office. Her shift didn't start until eight and the current board of supervisors didn't want her putting in any overtime. She glanced at the clock. It was getting toward three in the morning. She couldn't imagine who might call at this time.

It was those damn night sweats, again. And the fact that she didn't seem to need hardly any sleep anymore. She was always tired, but the only time she felt sleepy these days was when it wasn't bed time. So, she'd gotten up and gone to the bathroom and debated going back to bed and lying there and willing herself to sleep. But that never worked. She turned on the TV and couldn't find anything remotely interesting. And that settled it. She'd raised her League human warrior to level twenty-three last night, playing War of Worldcraft on the office computer after the courthouse cleared out. So, here she was, being chased around Drylands by the bloodknight who was probably just some pubescent computer geek who lived in a time zone like Alaska or Hawaii.

“Well damn,” she said, as the bloodknight stole all but the last of her health with a sweep of his double-bladed ax. She felt like pulling out her Glock and blowing up both bloodknight and the computer monitor, but she grabbed the phone instead, just before its fourth ring. It could be a real emergency.

“Benteen County Sheriff's Office,” she said.

“I didn't think this office was supposed to be open,” a male voice said.

“Then why'd you call?” Mrs. Kraus had one of those voices that had gone beyond whiskey and cigarettes to pure white lightning and locoweed. Her tones were about as mellow as barbed wire scraped across a blackboard.

“Is Sheriff English there?”

Mrs. Kraus turned back to her computer screen. Sure enough, her warrior was dead and the bloodknight was dancing on her corpse. “Screw you,” she muttered to the bloodknight.

“What's that? What did you say?” The guy on the phone had gone from testy to belligerent.

“I wasn't speaking to you,” Mrs. Kraus said. “I'm a little busy here. You want Sheriff English? He don't stay in this office around the clock. It's damn near three a.m.”

“The sheriff guaranteed me he'd be in his office to answer this phone by…well, less than five minutes from now.”

She didn't believe him. Englishman would be home in bed, or dealing with his own insomnia in his own way. He shared her problem, what with the pain he was in from that gunshot wound and the loss he still felt over watching his wife's losing battle with cancer. And, since his daughters had gone off to college, it had to be damn lonely in the sheriff's house these days.

“Then maybe you should call back,” Mrs. Kraus said. “Until you do, you have yourself a real nice morning, you hear?”

“This is Captain….” She didn't catch the rest. She wasn't much interested in dealing with some wacko with an attitude when she wasn't getting paid for it. Besides, surely that bloodknight would tire of killing her over and over before long. And she knew where she could maybe get at a treasure chest over the other side of that camp of life-sucking dust bunnies. She reached for the mouse to begin the process of resurrecting her corpse when the door flew open and Englishman came gimping in on his walker.

“Mrs. Kraus,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

She was in a foul mood, and embarrassed at getting caught. “I'm playing a computer game,” she said, “if it's any of your business. Which, since this is the sheriff's department's computer in your office, I suppose it is.”

“I thought you….” That's all he managed when the phone rang again. She had a pretty good idea what he would have said, though. She mostly refused to do computers. Didn't have one of her own, nor a cell phone. Hell, she still changed the channels on her TV by hand. People thought of her as a technophobe, and she supposed she was. But boredom and curiosity had lured her into this massive-multiplayer-online-role-playing game Mad Dog had gotten so involved with. And, while it drove her nuts lots of the time, she had to admit she was hooked. Hard to claim otherwise when she'd come down to the office to play it at this ungodly hour.

“Sheriff English,” he said into the phone. And after a moment, “That would be my office manager, Mrs. Kraus. And if she was rude to you, I don't doubt you deserved it.”

Mrs. Kraus smiled and her mood improved. Especially when it occurred to her she might be able to lure that bloodknight into getting ambushed by a host of dust bunnies.

***

Captain Matus was exasperated. “What do you mean you won't hold these women?”

They were an hour into Saturday morning and he'd been up since before the previous dawn. Worse, this was the first time he'd lost an officer in the line of duty. Matus wanted this Mad Dog guy now.