Oh no.

…dolls. An entire fucking row of white faces—the flesh a variety of porcelain, wood, and plastic—with wide eyes, chipped red lips, frayed dresses. Blood rushes to my head and I feel faint. My hands are trembling, so I put the gun away, lean against the shelves and breathe in deep.

That’s when I hear the voice—squeaky and teasing—in my left ear.

“You again.”

I turn my head toward the shadows of the rear wall. Sitting on a shelf at eye-level, slumped into the corner like he’s having a smoke, is my nightmare.

Charlie.

Well, probably not my Charlie, because this dummy’s wearing a different suit. Blue, I think, with ruffles at the chest. This bowtie is bright red and real. The eyes are wide and angry, bright green irises glaring daggers.

It could be him, sure. Different clothes, new paintjob to bring out the rose in his cheeks, the white of those chunky teeth.

My heart picks up the pace and terror plucks at my nerves like a six-fingered banjo player at a Friday night barn dance. I want to turn and run, to get away, to get out of this room, but I can’t move. Can’t even imagine such a thing.

The dummy’s eyelids do an up-and-down and I feel my bladder swell. Sweat breaks out on my forehead and neck and I can’t tell if I’m still breathing. That wooden jaw stays still but I hear it speak to me nonetheless, like it’s throwing its voice directly into my head. I can almost feel the tickle of its wooden breath on my ear.

“I knew I’d see you again. I knew I’d get you sooner or later.”

I open my mouth and squeak out a reply. Somehow, I manage to turn my body and stagger, knees buckled, feet cement, toward the door. I fall into it and bang my fists against the wood, not caring if bullets start flying, not caring about sounding like a coward, like a terrified child. Just wanting out. Needing to get away from this horror.

There’s giggling from behind me, like a gaggle of tin-throated children laughing it up, and I know it’s the dolls entering the show. Wanting a little playtime with old Dixie. I twist my head back and see the shelf where the dummy was sitting is now empty. My eyes leap from shadow-to-shadow, breath hitching in my chest. I listen for the sound of feet scraping against concrete.

I spin and pound double-time, yelling now, screaming for help.

Something tugs at the back of my pant leg, and I kick away, moaning. More laughter and I throw my shoulder into the door so hard I skid and fall on the rebound, banging my head on the floor hard enough to bring stars.

A wooden stare fills my vision and hard little hands grip my neck and squeeze with the strength of a gorilla. I gag and swipe my arm but catch nothing but air.

There’s a pounding in my head. A sky-splitting scream fills the room but it’s not me, it can’t be me because I can’t even breathe—my burning throat tied like a shoelace into a tight, painful knot. My eyes bulge wide as I choke and gag; there’s a crash and a burst of white light and I figure it’s my brain saying goodbye as I slip away into the abyssal dark with the horrible knowledge that the little bastard got me after all.

“IT WAS HIM ALL RIGHT.”

I nod as the impish, bespectacled man behind the large desk stares at his private screen, soft fingers gliding over the activity glass at a mesmerizing speed.

“To be honest, Harris was already under scrutiny, and while we knew he was doing things he shouldn’t be doing, we never expected murder. If we had, well hell, we would’ve involved the police from the start. We just thought, I don’t know, that he was stealing code, maybe theft of intellectual property, but we had to nail him cold. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

He looks at me and smiles, like catching murderers and rapists and kidnappers is somehow the same as catching a programmer stealing a line of data for some extra cash. But I nod back, happy to oblige his fantasy. And besides, I’m wiped from the drama at the toy store.

I hadn’t even known what happened until I opened my eyes to dazzling sunlight and the worried faces of Rose and some guy I’d never seen before. Rose was holding my hand while the guy pressed plastic to my face and pinched my wrist for a pulse.

Apparently, he found one, because a dirty sidewalk is no substitute for heaven, or hell for that matter.

Turns out I’d passed out in that storage room. Firemen had chopped into the door just enough to watch my limbs noodle and switched from axes to an electric chainsaw, splitting the heavy door in two, worried I’d had a heart attack. Lucky for me it was just a good old fashioned, brain-squeezing, chest-crushing anxiety attack, severe enough that my consciousness took five while it rebooted a few popped breakers.

They dragged me outside, put the oxygen mask on me and hoped for the best. I was feeling almost normal until Rose asked about the red marks on my neck, and I had to relive a few colorful childhood emotions before settling back into the easy gray dusk of adulthood, where the supernatural is kept to storybooks and dolls don’t come alive.

Even worse than my short-circuit gag was the bad news that our perp got away. Rose had grabbed the old man with the beret all right, but when she heard shots she ran for the store, catching a hard shoulder of Gemini Harris as he barreled out the front, knocking her clean into the street.

By the time she got her bearings, he’d done his Houdini bit and was on the run once more.

After catching my breath and giving my memory of that storage room a good mental bleaching, I’d staggered back to the Maytime offices. This time getting to see the inside of the elevator and the plush carpet of the fourth floor, where Jim Hernandez, Vice President of Operations of the whole shebang, brought me into his office to discuss the electronic warrant he’d been served only minutes prior to my arrival.

Turns out Gemini Harris isn’t such a great guy, and in even better news he’s been vaulted to the top of my suspect list. As a matter of fact, he’s got the whole damn page to himself. Lucky guy.

“So, you didn’t know he’d manipulated this particular video, the one of the deceased, a mister Jonathan Lee.”

Hernandez gives his head a shake. I can see raw data flowing in the reflection of his specs, and even that glimpse gives me a headache. “No, sir. All we know was he’d been accessing the backend of Beximo’s A.I. platform. He had enough clearance that we couldn’t monitor what he was doing, we just knew he didn’t need to be in there and couldn’t figure out what he was up to. But with enough time and surveillance….” He shrugs. “Anyway, now we know. He was….”

“Killing people,” I say. “Allegedly.”

Hernandez shrugs again, turns his attention away from the info dump and back to me. “On the bright side, we’ve frozen all his Maytime accounts, which means he has no access to the corporate servers, nor the A.I. Not even his finance account. He’s in the cold.”

I nod again, rub my eyes.

“Any way what he was doing to this galactic brain you’ve built here could be tied to what happened to Mr. Lee? Forensics say he was microwaved, that his organs were melted by some sort of external blast of energy, or sound? We think it was some sort of frequency that scrambled up Mr. Lee’s insides and popped him like a blister.”

Hernandez frowns. “Detective Merriweather, the only things our Beximo devices are capable of is relaying information, playing music, and controlling any digital applications or appliances tied into the unique network of their residence.”

“Play music, huh?”

To his credit, Hernandez gives this some thought. “Tell you what, leave me your card and I’ll have my techs look into it. Fair?”

“As Scarborough. Look, you’ve been a fourth ace, and I appreciate it. I have one more question. Any idea where this fella might be hiding out? His home is under surveillance, as are the residences of his known associates. You’ve seen that list. Anything we’re missing?”

He taps his glass a few times, brings up a new screen. I assume he’s taking another look at our little list, mainly relatives, an ex-wife, and a couple drinking buddies Harris had been recorded out on the town with a few times. I wait for him to shake his head again, already thinking about next moves, when his eyes brighten and his mouth curls into a sinister smile.

“Actually, there is a place I don’t see here. Not sure why. He possibly owns it under an alias. I have no clue. But it’s definitely not on your list.”

I sit up, not ashamed to feel a surge of adrenaline. I wanted this guy. I wanted him bad. “I’m listening.”

“He was always bragging about his fishing cabin out on Sabbath Lake. He’d go there, hell I don’t know, at least once a month.” Hernandez looks at me evenly, and for a second, I almost buy the bit about us being in this together. “He said it was his home away from home.”

I TELL THE CAPTAIN ABOUT my new lead, and she agrees to send three squad cars with me as backup. We find the cabin easy enough using satellite and cross-referencing ‘Gemini Harris’ with any known aliases. Turns out the guy isn’t that fancy, he just used his mother’s maiden name to purchase the lakefront property, along with several other properties scattered around the country. He even has a small villa in France. All under the name Gemini Yu. The mother’s dead so my hunch is she doesn’t mind the unapproved usage. The father’s in a hospice outside Jersey and suffers from Alzheimer’s. Most of the time he doesn’t even know his son exists, much less the status of his land holdings.

There’s only one main road we must secure in case Gemini makes another of his famous getaways. I position two of the squad cars about half a mile either way. If he somehow gets by me again, he won’t have much room to roam. Yeah, he could jump in a boat and head into the lake, but I’m not as dumb as I look and took the precaution of requisitioning two patrol boats from the local Sabbath P.D., a radio squawk away if needed.

Now that I’m ready to approach our perp, I bring the third car with me to park on a dirt shoulder about a block from the residence, tell them the suspect is armed and quite fond of making holes in things, so we all agree to go in cautious.

The cabin itself is more of a summer home. I was expecting log walls and an outdoor well but, after bumbling through trees and heavy brush for a half-hour, come upon a two-story house with dark wood siding, a deck the size of my entire apartment, and a shiny car in the driveway. I glance toward the lake where a path cuts through a dense row of trees. Rippling blue water and the white flash of a boat are just visible through the heavy green.

I turn to one of the blue suits, a kid who looks fresh from the academy, but there’s steel in his eyes so I’m satisfied he’ll do the gig. “I want you keeping on that outlet to the lake. If he heads for that boat, you get him. If he gets by you, don’t sweat it, but call Sabbath P.D., they got two ducks in the pond, kapeesh?”