Jerry Markham pulled into the same parking space that had, eight hours earlier, played host to Larry Croft's battered black van. He was right outside the auto detailing shop, and he was just in time, too, he saw. It was getting dark. In the warehouse district, the streetlights would be slow to come on, but there was one on the Gamesmen side of the street, and not one on his side. He could see everything from his vantage point, but it would be very difficult to see him.

What a fool I've been, he thought.

He put his hand on the lid of the cooler that sat on the passenger seat and drummed a little victory beat. It was too early to break out the food and coffee he'd packed, but he was still hungry all the same. It's your nerves, he told himself. He always got like this before a test or a big role-playing game tournament. He forced himself to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth. He should've taken a nap. But, he reasoned, that's what Morgan, Russell, and Steve were for. They would keep him awake.

A boxy, tan colored car drove slowly past and turned into the Gamesmen parking lot. Markham watched as the man driving the car looked this way and that before nodding with satisfaction and backing out onto the road. The driver spared a glance at the auto detailing shop, but didn't seem to notice Markham. Then he crept slowly by the next block of warehouses and disappeared from view.

Markham smiled. A security guard. That must be what the backhoe was for, he reasoned. It's a smokescreen to get them by the man with the badge, no questions asked. They would fill, or pretend to fill, those two trucks that were parked over in front of the warehouse, and then they would ransack the offices for the module.

Markham wondered how many of them survived being destroyed. A handful? A whole box? One? Moreover, he wondered how Larry had found out about it. Well, obviously, he had talked to someone on the inside. Perhaps the very man who had squirreled the module away. Markham imagined the inside of the Gamesmen warehouse, piled high with wooden crates, each holding products from the earliest days of the gaming industry They were stacked, lonely and forgotten, as the newer, flashier product was piled in front of it, burying it from sight. And somewhere in the jumble was a single box of modules...maybe two. That was it, Markham decided. Larry had talked to someone from the warehouse who either stumbled across or stashed the original modules, and now Larry and his three loser friends were going to spirit them away in the confusion of the move to Spokane, Washington.

It was too funny, thought Markham. Let's see, there's breaking and entering, theft, criminal mischief, impersonating a forklift guy...he was sure that local law enforcement would throw the book at them all. Crime is no laughing matter in Tempe. Even Geek-Crime.

Still, he had to hand it to Larry. This was a lot of trouble to go to for a module. Well, not any module, he amended. But the unkindest cut of all was that Larry Croft no doubt intended to publish his exploits, along with the module in its entirety, on the web, along with notes as to how he did it. Or, rather, Stercutus did it. God, he hated that name. Everyone who knew them both would know that this all took place in Markham's backyard. And that would be that. He would be the laughing stock of his peer group. Forget writing for LegendMaster. Forget forming a chain of high-dollar role-playing game salons and retiring to the Pacific Northwest. He would be washed up. And that was why he was waiting for Larry.

Nobody swipes gamer-porn in his town, not if he had anything to say about it. Jerry would wait until they showed up and were in the midst of their activities. He would surprise them, confront Larry, and make sure that he walked away with a copy of the module (if not the original altogether). Then he would call the cops anyway. They would take Larry to jail, and he would have the prize instead. It was just like Belloq, in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Markham grimaced, when he realized that put him in the same league as the Nazis, but, he reasoned, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Dale Booth, the security guard, loved the weekend shift, because it was like getting paid for nothing. Ordinarily, he was the weekday guy, but Tim called in sick, so he was now getting sixteen hours of overtime. And all for doing nothing.

Come the weekend, the warehouse district got as quiet as a church. No one drove out here unless they had to, and only if it was an emergency, like the alarms were suddenly going off or something. No, it was super quiet in this corner of the world. That was how Dale liked his weekends. Quiet.

He popped in his favorite Scorpions CD, Blackout, and cranked his archaic stereo up as loud as it could safely go. He stared in fascination at the painting of the mental patient with forks in his eyes as the first strains of the Scorps two-axe attack washed over him. "Ah ree-ah-lized, ah meesed a dey, but ah'm too wreaked to care ahn-e-way..." he sang for the millionth time. Klause, you wacky little German, he thought. Your phonetic English was the only thing that kept you from total American domination.

Dale first heard the Scorpions when he was fourteen, roughly three days before he smoked his first joint. The song he heard was "Rock You Like a Hurricane," and Dale promptly decided there was no reason to listen to any other music ever again. He became known as the Scorpions guy in high school. He took world geography just so he could find out about Germany, the home of the Scorpions, and he took German I and II when it was offered. His parents actually got called when he wore his denim jacket with the back patch of the flag of Germany on it.

In college, he expanded his tastes somewhat, but he never strayed far from the Scorps. His current second favorite, The Hellacopters, were pretty good, but they were no Scorpions. No one was.

His circuit of the warehouses finished, Dale drove back up the street and parked by the warehouses at the end, right next to the Gamesmen warehouse. He let the hard rocking sounds of the Scorpions wash over him as he drowsed, head lolled back against the seat like he'd been shot in the neck.