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allowed to comment on their involvement in ongoing investigations.”
    That was stretching the truth a bit. We’re allowed to comment—if we want to put our careers on the line. My career is iffy at best, but there was no way in hell I wanted to hear my role in this bizarre incident dissected on the evening news. Or, more important, Snoopy’s role. Somehow I suspected the viewing public wasn’t ready for a rat-devouring robot.
    “You’ll have to go through the Public Affairs office at Fort Bliss,” I told the crestfallen DeWayne.
    He turned to Sergeant Cassidy. “I guess that includes you, too.”
    Given Noel’s run-in with an undercover vice cop and ongoing sessions with his shrink, I wasn’t surprised when he evinced even less eagerness to appear in front of a TV camera than I had.
    “Yeah, it does.”
    “What about you?” the now-desperate reporter asked Pancho. “The sheriff wouldn’t confirm who shot the pickup driver, but several of the people I talked to said you pulled the trigger. Will you comment for the record?”
    Pancho twisted up one corner of his mustache and gave the kid a blank look. “No hablo Inglés.”
    Junior Reporter’s face fell. “I could, um, find a translator.”
    The suggestion met with another blank look.
    I could tell DeWayne’s dreams of making it out of high school track-and-field were disintegrating before his eyes. I felt sorry for him, but not sorry enough to put myself or Snoop Dog in front of a camera.
    Dejected, he mumbled an insincere thank-you and left. Pen went back to her tea, the rest of us to our beer, tequila, and/or soft drinks.
    I knew it wasn’t over. This head business was too sensational for the media to pass up. Still, I was in no way, shape, or form prepared for the firestorm that proceeded to engulf me.

CHAPTER THREE
    THE first sinister rumblings of the storm hit not long after my team and I returned to our test site.
    Don’t let the grandiose designation fool you. The site consists of five Containerized Housing Units—aka CHUs—plunked down on a remote corner of the Fort Bliss missile range. There they sat when we drove up a little past seven p.m., five aluminum-sided boxcars surrounded by shadowy cacti and spiny creosote. Our home away from home.
    Two of the CHUs serve as sleeping quarters—one for the guys, one for Pen and me. Two more are linked together to form our test lab and administrative center. The fifth is our D-FAC. Officially the acronym stands for dining facility. Unofficially it . . . Well, I’d better not go there.
    The D-FAC contains a kitchen of sorts, a handkerchief-sized dining table, a flat-screen TV hooked up to a satellite dish, a DVD player, various board games, wireless routers for our laptops, and taking up twice its fair share of floor space, Sergeant Cassidy’s Universal Gym.
    Noel’s gunshot wound produced one unexpected benefit. Slight though it was, the injury kept him from clanking away on his weights all evening long. Thus we were able to both watch and hear the ten p.m. news coverage of the shooting.
    As I’d anticipated, the local networks glommed on to the heads. But Channel Nine had scored a coup by diverting DeWayne Wilson out to Dry Springs. His was the only report with actual on-scene footage, such as it was.
    Junior Reporter got shots of the pickup being towed away and the coroner’s wagon as it drove off. He also had his cameraman pan the facade of Pancho’s. The place looked considerably more decrepit on screen than it did when you drove up, hot and dusty and thirsting for something cold.
    “Although all persons involved in the shooting declined to be interviewed on-camera,” DeWayne intoned solemnly, “this reporter can confirm one of them is Air Force Lieutenant Samantha Spade. Viewers might remember her from another shooting incident last year.”
    I grimaced as my picture filled the screen. It was a stock photo dredged from the news coverage of the incident DeWayne cited. To my disgust, I