Chapter 2

The sun was just coming up over the mountains. It wasn’t supposed to stay out for long. Muggy as hell for St. Patrick’s Day week, the weatherman was calling for “strong to severe spring storms” by midday. It was the kind of weather—sultry, humid, and uncomfortable—that would have taken Frank back over there, to when he and Robin were kids, kids with rifles at war.

“Enough of that.” Robin raked his hand over the hair he still kept military shorn. “The repair guy was supposed to be here ‘first thing in the morning,’” he complained to Magnus Renegade. “In my opinion, that makes him late.” Robin had gotten a little ornery with age and detested anything out of the ordinary, which certainly included strangers—or anyone, actually—entering his home. No one had been inside the cabin since the Cablevision guy back in ‘89, when service finally became available that far out of town. Robin had installed his Internet setup himself, years later, with a modem and cables sent by the telephone company through the mail. Surfing the web was a lot faster since, way better than when he’d had dial-up and had to unplug the phone to go online. Not that anyone called, so that part didn’t matter. Videos were so slow back then, though. Robin had pretty much been stuck looking at naked men in pictures. Streaming pornography, so readily available, so clear and fast without impossibly long buffering and download times, that was very new as well in 2001, and also highly addictive to a rather lonely man.

The upgrade had been quite simple. All it required was screwing in one wire, clicking in a few others, and then putting a plug in an outlet. Anything more complex and Robin would have been lost. He had tried for days to get to the root of his current problem, and then decided, Fuck it! I’ll just live without porn, when he couldn’t. After only twelve more hours, however, he’d given in and made the call to Speedy Internet Repair.

“Hardly speedy at all,” Robin said to the imaginary IT guy. “Let’s get this over with. Get here and get gone.”

With his knees too wobbly to pace, while at the same time too wired to sit, Robin was somewhat relieved when, two hours later, a little orange compact finally sputtered up the dirt road. The disheveled driver looked barely out of high school, with a mop of messy dark auburn waves sticking out from under an orange cap. He was rather squat—that was the word Robin chose—and a bit of roundness with a line of fur showed when his shirt hiked up, as he set a bottle of Sprite on the roof of his car. Black-framed glasses had slid partway down the kid’s nose by the time he got to the door, and the satchel he had slung over his shoulder—with the not-at-all-accurate name of his alleged business written in magic marker—looked as if it was stuffed so full its seams could burst at any moment.

“Man,” he said, scraping his feet on the rather ironic “Welcome” mat, “you really are up in there.”

Even after seventy-some hours without pornography, Robin’s mind went to something unrelated.

“When you said ‘Keep going. You’ll think you missed the place, but you haven’t,’ that ain’t no line, dude. I almost turned around five or six t—” Mr. Speedy suddenly stopped—stopped talking and stopped fidgeting, which he’d been doing with his bag, his belt buckle, his glasses, and his fly since getting out of the car.

“Come in,” Robin offered, knowing full well his tone was not terribly inviting. “I’m sorry I forgot your name.”

“Hendrix,” the kid supplied. “And I…uh…” His eyes hadn’t left the dog.

“Oh,” Robin said. “Renny won’t hurt you—Magnus Renegade, formally.”

Mags had barked, just once, sharp and high-pitched, midway through young Hendrix’s sentence, but his tail still wagged, creating a rhythm against the wall akin to a bass drum keeping time for a marching band.

“I call him a lot of different things, and he hates being left out of the conversation.” Robin smiled—sort of. He felt almost charming, once again, only sort of. He reminded himself in-person conversation could be just like the kind in chat rooms, only without all the questions about dick size, preferred sexual positions, and kink tolerance. Whatever colon/close parentheses smiley face he might add, Robin figured he could imitate. Though typing one was quite a bit easier than making one with his face.

“I don’t do…dogs…” The PC tech swallowed hard. “Dogs scare me.”

Robin’s forced smile flipped. He was afraid of a lot of things; dogs were not one of them. “You’ll be fine.” People could be so annoying. “Magnus Renegade, sit!” The dog, on the other hand, immediately obeyed. “See,” Robin said to Hendrix.