***DREAM***

“What the hell is a key fob?” Tom demanded, grinding the muzzle of the gun into Chris’s bleeding face.

Tom was currently holed up in the interrogation room, with the door forced shut by the detective’s girth. Tom made sure to hide from the one-way mirror in case they decided to shoot him through the glass.

“It’s a digital key we use to get into restricted areas and our computers. Most people carry it on their keychain.”

“What’s it look like?”

Chris pulled out his keys with shaking fingers and flipped to a featureless black card.

Most people, Tom assumed, comply with a gun in their face immediately. Of the ones who don’t, most change their tune after you shoot them in the leg.

Chris was in this category.

Tom was confident there was an even smaller fraction of people who would continue to refuse to obey even when you’d demonstrated a willingness to put bullets in them. He’d just never come across any.

This was mostly supposition, since Chris Campbell was only the second person he’d ever threatened with a gun, and they both fell in the ‘needs persuasion’ category, likely because they were cops.

“You made a really bad decision here, kid,” Chris moaned. “You gotta put that gun down and surrender before they fucking blow your head off.”

“No thanks. What was the keycode to the holding cell again?”

“One two seven nine four six.”

“You sure about that?” Tom asked.

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Okay, I’ll make you a deal,” Tom said, using all of his strength to lever the overweight detective to his feet.

The leg wound started oozing at a precipitous rate.

“Oh god,” Chris muttered, looking a little woozy.

“Don’t be a baby.”

“Tom Graves, step away from the door, put the gun down and lie face down with your hands on your head,” a loud voice called over the PA system.

“Here’s the deal,” Tom said, edging the two of them far enough away from the door to open it. “I’m gonna walk us toward the holding cells, and if the holding cell doesn’t open when I enter the code, I’m going to start shooting things. And you know I’m serious.”

“It’s one three eight three five nine.”

“Let’s go test it out. Open the door.”

The door swung open, revealing a hallway filled with cops bristling with weapons.

“Hey Chris,” Tom asked as he started edging forward, glued to the old detective’s fat ass.

“What?”

“We should establish a rapport. Do you believe in psychics?” Tom asked over the shouting police officers.

“No.”

“You got any family?”

“Wife and daughter,” the grey-haired man growled.

“Oh, is she my age?”

“Suck my cock.”

“You know, I have a daughter, too. Dad club.” Tom nudged Chris’s hand up with his left hand and fist-bumped him.

“Then why the hell are you doing this?”

“Well, it all started when I used my magic powers to try to solve a perceived problem and it made everything worse, forcing me into a spiral of ever-deepening shit.”

God, it feels good to get that off my chest.

“Oh my god, I just realized: I could have been using my magic powers to screen candidates and find a great mom for Ellie, and instead I’ve been stuck here playing cat and mouse with psycho cops.”

Tom heaved a sigh, itching his head with the barrel of the gun. Looks like Grampa was wrong about me not getting into too much trouble. Old enough to have a lick of sense, my ass.

To be fair, the cop really was the primary factor that blew everything out of control. You just robbed a grave. Which you got away with. In response, he tried to kill you, twice.

“You’re crazy,” Chris said, watching Tom out of the corner of his terror-widened eyes.

“No, I’m psychic…ish. Now… BACK THE FUCK UP!” Tom shouted, pointing the gun at the dozens of cops edging toward him with a malicious gleam in their eyes.

“All you rosy-cheeked motherfuckers get on the ground or I blow Chris’s head off and then take his daughter out on a nice romantic date at a fancy restaurant and then skip out on the bill! I’m serious!”

The cops glanced at each other before cautiously parting ways.

“No, you can stand, your cheeks are fine,” Tom said, motioning to one of the cops. “Oh, and get this baby something to stop the bleeding because he’s getting hard to steer.”

“That reminds me.” Tom ground the muzzle into Chris’s temple. “Where’s my shit?”

“Evidence room!”

“Is that one of the ones that takes a keyfob?” Tom asked.

Chris nodded faintly.

“Excellent. Now I need Ken to take off his shirt and dance while reciting his social security number. It’s the only thing that will appease me.”

The other officers frowned, glancing at Ken.

“Username and passwords for your email and bank accounts too, please.”

Ken’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think so, you little bastard.”

“You can just change them after this is over.” Tom shrugged. “You’d rather let your fellow officer die?”

“Jesus Ken, you can just change ‘em!” a frizzy-haired woman with a freckly face and a strained blouse shouted, her gun pointing at the ground.

“What’s it gonna be, Ken? You gonna kill another cop?”

The cop turned pale and off-color, trembling like he was possessed.

Did I just hit a nerve?

Ken doubled over and puked his guts out.

“Ooh, did I hit a sore spot, Ken? Do you actually regret killing Stan and Carlos, or are you freaked out because it made you feel more alive than anything you’ve ever felt and you’re already craving another shot?”

A few minutes of interrogation later, a hand shook him out of his dream.

***AWAKE***

“We’ve got company,” Jacob said, glancing out of Tom’s field of view.

Tom tilted his head and spotted Ken looming over them menacingly.

“Fuckshitass!” Tom shouted, scrambling backwards.

“Indeed,” Ken said, glancing at the other people in the holding cell.

“All you other fuckwads stand with your face pressed against the wall, hands on your ears.”

The civilians hopped to it, forming a humiliating line of people against the wall. Tom spotted a glint of satisfaction in the cop’s eyes. One he probably wasn’t even aware of.

“Oh, I thought you were gonna take me out back and shoot me,” Tom said, standing. Ken’s eye twitched as he was forced to look up at him.

“I considered it.” Ken shrugged. “But I think I found us a way out of this.” He met Tom’s eyes. “I’m gonna take the plastic tote full of weird shit, and you’re gonna let it go.”

“Oh?”

“The only stuff you managed to save from the fire, am I right? Must be important,” Ken continued. “And without it, you’re just a kid.”

“That’s a pretty good guess.”

“If you’re just a kid, you’re not giving me any reason to put you down.”

Tom was tempted to hit the ‘puke’ button by viscerally describing the murder of Ken’s two co-workers, but decided against it. He wanted to save it for a point in time he could capitalize on it.

Ken had attacked Tom repeatedly without provocation, with intent to kill, and now he was blaming Tom for ‘giving him reason’ to ‘put him down’? Like a rabid dog?

What the fuck is going on in this guy’s head?

This guy took asshole to a new level.

There was no way on God’s green earth that Tom would ever allow this man to do whatever the hell he wanted and trust him not to swing by and kill Tom when he had what he wanted. He seemed to invent justifications in his mind to suit the occasion. Give his twisted brain another couple weeks to chew on it, and the cops he killed would be the bad guys.

Nope, Tom wouldn’t ever give this man what he wanted. He needed to be put down. Like a rabid dog.

“Alright,” Tom said, holding up his hands. “You’re not wrong. I won’t come after them. I’m sick of getting shot at and I can’t afford to let my family get hurt. Take it. We’ll ove to Alaska or something. I just want you to leave one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“The cash. It’s not magic, it belongs to my family, and you kinda burnt our house down, so we’re gonna need it.”

Tom saw the request running through Ken’s twisted cogs, seeing if there was any way he could take the money too and still be the ‘good guy’. Thankfully, Ken suffered from a lack of imagination.

He never imagined Tom was lying his ass off.

“All right, kid, you’ve got a deal,” he said, reaching through the bars.

“Deal.” Tom clasped the officer’s hand. A moment later, he was yanked forward, slammed up against the bars.

“And if you do come after it,” Ken whispered, “everything that follows is your fault. Understood?”

Tom yanked his hand away, heart beating loud in his ears. He wanted to mock the sneering bastard in front of him. He wanted to recite the man’s username and password, which was the same for everything.

He wanted to make him throw up with his words, like he had in his dream.

But, unlike the last couple times Tom had run his mouth, this time it was for keeps. This was life or death.

“Is that understood?” Ken asked again, playing the power game. He was sporting the same self-satisfied gleam in his eyes that he’d had when he’d lined everyone else up against the wall.

“I understand,” Tom said, meeting the cop’s gaze as he plotted his demise.

“Then I’ll see you in the morning,” Ken said, walking back out of the holding room, pausing to chat amiably with the older detective on the way in.

“I see you met my new partner,” Chris said, and Tom struggled not to roll his eyes.

“Let me break down what you’re being charged with,” Chris said, flipping through a stack of papers. “Then we can start working on getting you telling the truth.”

I gotta get the fuck outta here, Tom thought. This time he didn’t bother to suppress the eye-roll.

***Chris Campbell, Next Morning***

“Play the tape again,” the captain said, his coffee cup trembling in his hand, spilling tiny droplets on the lacquered desk.

They ran the grainy footage back and watched again as the blood-covered cougar reared up on its hind legs and carefully extended a single claw, daintily entering the six-digit code for the holding cell door, unleashing a flood of reprobates from containment.

“Play it again.”

“I don’t think it’s gonna change—”

“Play it again!” Paul Stevens boomed.

The egghead flinched and rolled the tape back.

“How did they change the footage?”

“Um… We didn’t find any—”

“Then fucking figure it out!” the captain shouted. “I am not putting out an APB on a fucking cat! I’d lose my fucking job!”

“The officers on duty were attacked by a cougar.”

“A cougar who attacked and disarmed them, took their keyfobs, used them to enter the evidence room, pulled out a plastic tote full of voodoo bullshit, then opened the holding cells!? Do you realize how crazy you sound right now!?” The captain’s eyes bulged as he glared at the hapless IT specialist.

“The people who stayed said—”

“I don’t care! Find me something I can use! LSD in their blood! An artifact in the video programming! Anything! We did not get our asses handed to us by a cat, and we are not releasing these videos to ANYONE. Do you understand?”

“…Yessir.”

“Chris,” the captain said, pointing at Chris. “You were working the cougar angle. What the fuck?”

“I’m just as stumped as you are, Captain,” Chris said. He was mostly being honest, because what he thought didn’t make any sense.

That was obviously a real cougar.

It was also obviously not a real cougar.

A real cougar is not smart enough to do all those things, no matter how long you trained it. And the idea of someone training a cougar to break into a realistic facsimile of a police station was a joke.

So there was obviously a cougar involved. Everyone who’d been mauled by it said so. But the cougar couldn’t have been a real one.

My brain hurts. The weird loose ends of the Tom Graves situation were starting to unravel Chris’s understanding of the entire situation.

He glanced over at his new partner.

Ken’s jaw was clenched tight, making the muscle on the side of his head stick out. His knuckles were white around the chair’s armrest.

That is a disproportionate amount of anger, Chris calmly noted, adding it to his growing list of concerns about the young ‘hero’.