"You think you're likely to get away with that, kid?"

"Yeah."

"Then you listen to this and tell me whether you still think that at the end."

"Shoot."

"Peter Carver was more or less tolerated, so long as he didn't stick his neck out."

"Who?"

"Peter Carver. The dealer you flambeed*. He dealt clean stuff, so we weren't getting too many deaths, and he gave us the inside dope on his competition."

(*Last Issue - Title-checkin' Tom)

"So essentially, you're involved in this too. Or Narco is, anyway. Screw that."

"Nevertheless. I had to give them the info. Now it's not just Homicide looking for you."

"The more the merrier. Detective Slee, I can handle myself if it comes to police brutality. And you've got prior claim or whatever it's called on me. If Narco catch me, I put myself in your hands and give you a full confession."

"And if we catch you?... Hello? Kid?"

A WEEK LATER

The shadow in the booth rippled, and Lazarus Jones was sitting in the darkness. Peter wasn't there.

Lazarus stared disbelievingly at the absence of dealer for a moment before he noticed that the lights were out, too. He poked a cautious head out of the booth and looked at the bar's interior properly for the first time.

Nothing. No one there; nothing happening. Yellow and black striped hazard tape across the door said he was in a police scene.

Oh, good. Just what he needed. But no one was actively poking around, so he decided to check out what had gone on in a little more detail.

The first thing that really caught his eye was the charred and blackened bar area. Looked like a real doozy of a fire had broken out. But it hadn't spread.

Someone had caught it pretty fast. Looked like they must have been on their way with some pretty good flame-retardent - because the fire extinguishers in the bar were full and the safety tabs were still on. Looking over the bar... Two bodies. No wonder Peter was lying low - or was he one of the bodies? This needed investigating, and someone had to stop torching places he could get to easily.

He melted through the shadows onto the street, and went in search of alcohol. He was going to need his powers working to trace whoever did this and give him what he deserved. And with no H to rely on, that meant he'd have to get roaring drunk.

"So we have no idea where Desert Fire is going to be?" Detective Slee demanded.

"Nuthin', boss. Unless you can keep him on the phone long enough for us to get a location...?"

Slee shook his head. "He's wise to that now. I think he did some checking up, found out how long it takes us to get a lock on a signal within a cell. And he stays under that limit. Half the time he won't even answer the phone." The harassed detective ran a hand through his brown hair. "Right... Well, let's see what we can do. He's got to show himself sometime. In the meantime we're playing the chasing game. I want a regular check on every burns unit in the area Desert Fire seems to stick to. Every time a case who might be a criminal goes in, I want a patrolman checking up on it. He still phones in his strikes afterward, but he's always long gone by the time we can get there. And unless we get lucky and there's a patrol car in the immediate vicinity, he'll always be able to do that. At the moment..." Slee let his breath out slowly in exasperation. "At the moment, all we've got is the hope we'll get lucky. So we've got to get some other handle on him."

At that point, Gersen was declaring a minor war on the blue-haired gang he kept running across. They were really starting to irritate him. He was surrounded by a group of ten, who had closed in on him at once.

Gersen was a damn good fighter, and he was strong and quick. But still, his flames were going to be needed if he was ever going to get out of this...

One of the group grabbed his ponytail. His head was jerked back as they pulled, but a thought flashed across his mind. Worth a try, perhaps?

Flame burst forth from his scalp and raced back, charring the hand closed around his hair. It immediately released him and he whirled around, striking it's owner hard in the gut. Slight snag; by the feel of things, his hair had caught fire. Looked like it wasn't as flame-retardent as the rest of him.

He closed one hand around his hair himself and ran it along, absorbing the flame into him. He couldn't contain such extra heat for long, though, so he opened his mouth and spat a fireball into the face of the nearest blue.

Two down in ten seconds; he took a baseball bat to the shoulder without complaining too much, kicked it's holder in the face, and snatched it up before setting it alight with a hand.

He flexed his injured shoulder, trying to determine whether the injury would slow him down or not. He couldn't deny it; he was starting to enjoy himself.

At the other end of the alleyway, Jessica Sorenson sat hunched behind a Dumpster and called the police on her phone. The gang had been bad enough, but now there was this mutie too-

"Who did it?"

Simon Barnaby felt his back crash into the wall and let out his breath in a rush, eyes screwed up tight. When he opened them, the situation hadn't got any better. The guy who'd spoken was still in front of him, and whoever was helping him, still in the shadows, pinning him to the wall. His feet were a good six inches off the ground and he had no leverage, but still he aimed a kick at this unknown assailant. His feet didn't connect with anything, so he tried the other foot in the other direction. Still nothing. The guy holding him was seriously lucky - shadow fell everywhere, even on Simon's chest. He couldn't see the arm holding him - in fact, he couldn't even see himself below the ribcage.

Simon began to worry that there might not be anyone holding him. This was starting to weird him out, and he hadn't even had the chance to shoot up before it happened.

A strand of his blue hair fell in front of one eye. He was too worried to think of flicking it away.

Lazarus Jones bent down and picked up the junkie's syringe. He removed the needle and replaced it with his own. Then he went through his shooting-up ritual. The result left him pretty off-kilter, and he felt his powers get stronger.

Simon winced again as the pressure around his gut tightened. "Hey, that's my-"

His sentence cut off as a wave of fear slammed into his mind.

Lazarus concentrated on the emotions washing into his mind from Simon and smiled. The growing irritation had disappeared entirely, drowned under the fear Lazarus had switched on. "Well?" he asked, impatiently.

"W-well w-what?"

"Well put. Who burned the place down?"

"I dunno!"

The blackness tightened again. "Guess."

Simon gave up. His resignation appeared in Lazarus' mind, and the mutant smiled.

"Well - there's this guy the guys keep talking about-"

"OK," Detective Slee said quietly. "Thanks." He put the phone down. "Right, boys and girls... Let's go bag us a pyromaniac, shall we?"

"We've got a lead?"

"He's currently fighting a bunch of thugs about five minute's drive away, apparently. Someone called it in. One guy against a mob, flames very much in evidence... sound familiar?"

Seconds later, they were on their way.

Lazarus kept moving. Only sensible thing under the circumstances. Looked like whoever had torched the bar had got Pete, too, and that meant no more stuff until he could find a new dealer.

Although it'd be nice to have that confirmed... He'd have to ask the next junkie he came across; the first one wasn't good for anything much any more.

But it was definitely a new guy. Local, too; the blue-haired guy's gang (Lazarus made a mental note to pay more attention to underworld power in the area in future) had some major hurt in line for the guy. Lazarus wanted to get there first.

Slee and his partner took the corners at a frightening pace, especially at that time of night - which was the stage where some people say it's stopped being dawn and started being early morning; about four-thirty to five a.m. For them, the major drawback to this case was that it was likely to keep them, as officers with prior on the case, on effective graveyard until they caught him - there was no way a night would go by without at last one call to them, if this guy kept going at the rate he was so far.

"Oh... Ah, damn it," Slee muttered.

"What?"

"Thought just popped into my mind," Slee said. He looked across momentarily at his partner and grinned weakly. "Is it really a good idea trying to take a pyromaniac in a car full of gas?"

They'd progressed from baseball bats to lead pipes, Gersen noted. And now blue hair was mingling with blue uniform; the cops had finally arrived at the firefight. And they had guns.

He ducked under the arc of the pipe, reached up, twisted his body, and shoved, pushing the gangster's pipe into the face of one of his comrades pretty damn fast. The impact dropped one guy with a fractured nose and jarred the original blue's hand off the pipe. Desert Fire spun the pipe and caught another guy a crushing downward blow to the collarbone, and continued the motion with a fluid stoop and slash that took the legs of yet another out from underneath him, before straightening up to deliver a blazing fist into the face of the pipe's original owner.

As the blaze caught on the gangster and extinguished itself on his hand, Gersen found himself suddenly with some much-needed personal space.

"Police! Freeze!" one of the uniforms called. Gersen didn't care much, and would continue not to until they moved in with the riot gas and actually stood a chance of hitting him through the thicket of blue-haired youths.

A number of the blue-hairs opened fire on the police. Gersen frowned. They weren't anything like as good as they could or should be - but still, the police were at least trying. They deserved to survive.

A flung lead pipe cleared a path toward the area where the bulk of the gunmen stood. Gersen belched flame, then twisted just in time to meet a blue-hair's fist with his face. He rocked back a couple of steps, then dodged back in, foot rising wickedly. As the blue-hair doubled over, Gersen finished him off with a scything kick to the head.

Lit from behind by the firelight, he grinned. A moment's respite, a second's pause to collect himself and gather breath - and then he was lashing out to the left, catching a thug pretty much unprepared and breaking his nose with one clinical punch before a judo twist flipped the screaming punk over his head and into three of his buddies.

He reviewed the situation. Suddenly, most of the blue-hairs had bottled out, whether because of the way he wouldn't go down, his flame power, or the arrival of the cops - or just the gradual defeat of their best fighters - he didn't know. The police were more or less containing the rest in the gunfight, and if he stuck around they might contain him, too. That would be a bit premature, whatever he'd said to Slee. Plus, he couldn't really afford another late arrival at the pool this week. So he left.

"Damn it!" Slee couldn't believe the kid had got away - again. Eleven nights, he'd been out there. They'd have noticed if he'd been out longer for sure. The kid drew attention to himself.

Eleven nights. It's an odd equation, really, but there's something in people's minds that suggests, sure, a guy ought to be able to avoid capture for a couple of days, but after that he should be under arrest, no problem. Up until two or three months have passed, that is, and he's getting away with it on a pretty regular basis - at which point, the mind says: well, of course he's getting away with it. I mean, if they were going to catch him they'd have caught him before now... It's this very human, common sense, illogical way of looking at statistics that made Slee feel so frustrated, despite this falling into pattern with what he'd said earlier. Something inside him - something with no real logic to back him up - said, tonight should have been the night. He's living on borrowed time. His partner, likewise angry with himself, sat beside him in the car. The patrolman who'd delivered the bad news edged away worriedly, and the two men sat and watched the remaining blue-hairs be loaded into police vans or ambulances, chiefly according to whether Gersen or the police had stopped them. They continued to sit there in silence for a few minutes more. Finally Slee pulled out his cellphone, and dialled Desert Fire's number.

At the other end, the phone rang and rang. Gersen looked at it for a few moments, then turned away. "Screw that." He showered, brushed the burned strands out of his hair, and crashed into bed.

In theory, the club was closed now that it was virtually morning. Lazarus melted through the wall, vanishing into shadow outside and materialising from shadow once inside. He stood in darkness for a moment, examining the contents of the club.

Limp Bizkit was being played at volume, and he nodded approvingly. The only people visible in the room were the blue-hairs and the barman, who was spending most of his time looking around nervously like he was responsible for avoiding breakages. The blue-hairs were surprisingly careful of club fittings, actually, suggesting they knew they'd be in trouble if they did damage the place. Lazarus wondered how they'd managed to occupy the place if that was true, then shook his head. It didn't matter; they were here. Time to put his offer to them.

He stepped out of the shadow. Raising his voice, just a little, and making them calmer - just a little; a little was all he could do to so many minds - he spoke. "Gentlemen."

Three shotguns, twelve pistols and an automatic rifle were centred on him. He concentrated on maintaining the calm; to agitate them in any way now increased the odds that there'd be at least one whose response to that emotion was to pull the trigger.

Keeping his own facade calm, he walked further into the room, heading for the bar. The barrels turned to follow him.

"I've heard that you might be having trouble with a man who likes to torch his enemies," Lazarus said, still calm and businesslike. "I've got my own reasons for wanting to take him out. For the information you've got on him, and a courtesy fee, I'll do so."

There was a pause. He eased off on the calmness and slid everyone's mind that little bit closer to thinking this was a good deal.