"You're sure, Wes?"

He turned and smiled. "As sure as I have ever been about any of this, sweetheart."

She drew a deep sigh. "Well, then I guess that I had better get packing, too." She glanced at the second suitcase lying on the bed. "Is that for me or is it...?"

Wes clicked open the metal locks on the side of the old suitcase and flipped open the top. Nestled amongst a trenchcoat and various gadgets, an old familiar face stared back at Diane. She thought she could almost see life in its eyes.

"Here we go again," she said.

"Yes," Wes beamed. "One last time...."

___

Casey walked down Fifth, hands shoved deep into her tattered blue jeans pockets. It was turning into a really nice afternoon: the sky a deep azure and clouds that reminded her of huge balls of fluffy cotton.

She grinned as she remembered Marty's mad dash out the door to work. He was a great guy, if a bit scatter-brained. He was probably the best friend she had.

She stopped at the intersection of Fifth and Melhouse, waiting for the light to change. Her fellow pedestrians chatted among themselves about their trials and tribulations, but Casey just kept on grinning. There was a certain freedom in being attached to nobody and being accountable only to herself. She was young, she had a shitty job, yeah, but it paid the bills. At least she didn't come home smelling like food.

*Ok, low blow, Case,* she thought as the light changed and she hustled forward. Left on Jennings, left again on Richardson, and voila! Work sweet Work. "Idle hands are the Devil's playground," she muttered as she pushed open the smoky glass door. She always said that as she entered the place. It just felt right.

Or maybe she was just a weirdo.

Brenda wasn't up front -- again; probably doing her nails in the bathroom -- so Casey plunked herself down behind the receptionist's area. She noticed the phone was off the hook, and felt a surge of irritation.

"C'mon girl. It's not like you're asked to do brain surgery..." she muttered as she placed the receiver back in its cradle. Her foot hit something under the desk and she kicked it out where she could see it.

It was a woman's shoe. Black, high heel. Brenda's.

"Huh?" she said as she looked at it lying on the carpet.

Casey peered down the hallway, noting that all the tanning rooms were closed up. None of the "occupied" lights were on, either.

"What, we don't have to wear shoes anymore?" she asked aloud, heading down the hallway towards the bathroom. She knocked at the door.

"Brenda? You in there? You know you left your shoe out here and the phone off the hook? If Carlo finds out he's gonna scream bloody...."

"Murder?" she heard from behind her, the voice masculine and unfamiliar.

She whirled and dropped low, left foot lashing out as she did so, and thanked God that she'd taken all those Judo classes at the "Y". The man made no sound as he fell, his left hand swinging down to break his fall, his right rising up and --

*Oh my God!*

--the gun swinging in her direction. It was black, ugly, and the biggest damn thing she'd ever seen in her life. The barrel was extremely long, and Casey realized it had a silencer.

*Oh my God!*

Casey took off like a scared rabbit, running low and zig-zagging as much as she could down the narrow hallway.

*Oh my God! He saw me! He wants to kill me! Where's Brenda and Carlo? I have to get out!*

Her thoughts ran around her head like greyhounds. She heard a whining noise over her left shoulder. A roughly one foot section of the wall directly to her left disintegrated in a puff of plaster and she leapt forward, rolling towards the front door and praying to whoever might be listening that she got out before he --

*kills me. Oh God oh God oh God*

-- could catch her.

Sunlight nearly blinded her as she pushed through the front door and ran out into the street, narrowly missing getting run over by a blue Hyundai. She sprinted across the street and down the sidewalk, fear lending her strength and endurance that would have had Olympic scouts raising their eyebrows.

*Marty! I have to get to Marty! He'll know what to do!*

___

"Martin..."

The sound seemed to come from a long distance away.

"Maaaaaartin..."

The fog was lifting from Martin's mind. He started to smell.... smoke.

"MARTIN!"

Martin sat bolt upright and for the first few moments he thought that he was still caught in the fog of his dream. The air around him was as thick as the air in the dream, but it was not fog that obscured his vision. It was smoke.

From behind him Martin heard two sounds. One was the blare of the smoke alarm which had just caught on to the fact that the whole kitchen was filled with thick, streaming smoke. The other was the voice of his manager bellowing his name from somewhere inside the depths of the miasma.

"MARTIN! Where the hell are you?"

"Oh, man," Martin whispered. Suddenly another image had thrust itself into his mind: he had put a whole vat of curly fries into the fryer before inexplicably falling asleep. "Manomanomanoooooman," he intoned like a mantra as he felt his way slowly through the smoky kitchen.

He knew he really couldn't afford to lose this job. It had been his third in as many months and Martin knew from experience that an employment record like that didn't look good to anybody. Maybe he could find some way to explain things to Mr. Gruely. Maybe he could say that he had fallen and hit his head... or had gotten his zipper stuck in the bathroom... or maybe he had gone temporarily insane?

With these thoughts, Martin came to a clearing in the middle of the smoke; there, standing with a basket of something that looked like deep-fried earthworms, was Ed Gruely, his characteristic cigar clenched between his jaws and a look of fire in his eyes that flared up when he saw Martin.

"Martin!" Gruely exclaimed. "So glad you could join us. Now," he said, brandishing the basket of burned potatoes at Martin. "What is this?"

Martin shuffled his feet. "It's...ah, it's fried. Sir."

Gruely smiled. Martin hated it when Gruely smiled. "Riiiiight," he drawled. "And do you know what it means?"

"It...ah, it probably means that I'm --"

"RIGHT!" Gruely interrupted. "You're --"

"MARTY!" The scream startled both men. Martin whirled to see Casey bursting through the front door of the diner. All thoughts of Gruely fled as Martin ran around the counter to intercept Casey. She looked as frightened as he had ever seen her look, and that fact rattled him. Casey wasn't the kind of person who usually panicked, even when the situation more than warranted it.

Martin caught her by an arm. "Casey, what's wrong?"

She had obviously run quite a distance because she was flushed and out of breath. When she spoke, her words came in bursts and gasps. "The Hands.." she said. "Man with a gun... Killed..."

Casey doubled over and huffed to catch her breath. Marty kneeled in front of her to see her face. "Killed? Gun? What are you talking about, Case? Who got killed?"

"Would you two please stop making a scene?" Gruely's voice droned from behind Marty. "You're scaring off the customers." Marty didn't need to look around to see that there weren't any customers in the diner. The bell on the front door announced the arrival of the only other person in the place.

"Brenda killed..." Casey gasped. "Maybe others..."

"Oh, most certainly there are others," a honey-sweet voice said. Marty looked up and saw a man dressed in a business suit with a long ponytail, holding a leather briefcase, and standing just inside the diner's door, but it wasn't this incongruity that caught his attention. His eyes were riveted by the business end of a very nasty-looking revolver pointed in his direction. "And when I am done here," the man said slowly, each word crisp and clean, "there will be nobody who knows why."