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criminal side is occupied mostly by those aspiring to blackmail straying husbands. Rumors of organ harvesters abound, but I’ve never uncovered a credible case. Though as illustrated by my most recent debacle, I have run across plenty of more traditional thieves.
    Last night, I’d found someone calling herself 1Ton_1—which I read as “wanton one” rather than “one-ton Juan”—posting about her desire to “party with an open-minded stud.” A possible sneeze hooker, but since she didn’t actually demand “skiing” (cocaine), I thought I’d take a chance with the pic4pic exchange. She emailed me an authentic-looking shot from her phone that showed a slender Mediterranean girl who could well have been the nursing student she claimed to be. I traced her IP and ran the name and address on her account through the NICS and KnowX crime databases just to make sure. She came up clean, so I invited her over.
    In my foyer, she seemed a little nervous, but that’s not unusual. Some guys like to play up the erotic tension of walking into a complete stranger’s home for sex with dangerous looks and chilly silence, but I try to put people at ease with church-social friendliness.
    I made drinks while she took off her shoes and got cozy on the couch. She savored the first sip of her rum and Coke and then asked slyly if perhaps I might have a lime. Something breathy in her voice implied she had perverse intentions toward the fruit, so I eagerly brought her drink back to the kitchen and sliced up a garnish.
    A rookie mistake.
    When I got back, she’d shed a layer of clothing and had draped herselfwith a blanket, which helped prevent me from thinking clearly. We clinked glasses, and she downed her entire cocktail, a gesture meant to impatiently dispense with the preliminaries. I slammed mine too, liking this girl more by the moment.
    I registered the faintest hint of an acrid taste to my bourbon, like an evil spirit had crawled into the barrel while it aged. But she started kissing me with an ardor that emptied my head of petty cares. My last impressions were that her mouth didn’t feel quite right, and for that matter, neither did mine. And why was I drooling down my chin?
     
    I woke up bound, choking on an inexpertly applied gag. 1Ton_1 was a honey trap after all. I assume her boyfriend had been waiting in a car downstairs.
    The appalling thing is that this has happened before. I’ve been prowling the no-strings world relentlessly in the past months. The incessant probing of my day job now leeching into my nightlife. Always searching, always trying to connect. In the past six months, I’ve been left tied up three times, robbed four times, and assaulted twice. Yet none of it has been enough to make me stop. The compulsion is strong, the risk outweighed by what I’m seeking.
    But what exactly am I looking for? Solace? Pleasure? Action?
    This last incident makes me fear the real answer is a darker word.
    In penance for my behavior, I make it a point to flag or otherwise warn the community about the more egregious scams, blackmailers, and crooks I happen upon, alerting the police when it feels warranted. As though I fancy myself some kind of prurient superhero. Of course, the lonely and lustful are ever willing to make themselves victims. The police are correspondingly unsympathetic.
    Despite this, my nighttime search goes on. And it had appeared I’d keep collecting rope burns until one day, not unlike this morning, the devil would take his due, and I’d miss my next meeting with Mercer.
    But now I’ve felt the earth shift, and a new passageway has opened. This morning, Blythe’s delicate smile made me remember a time when I felt almost normal. And she’s asking me to take on an undercover assignment that offers a brand-new artificial world to inhabit. Just the thing for someone who insists on making a shambles of his real one.

6

     
     
    E ven if I wanted to ponder the merits of their cause, the Randall twins don’t