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him a hard kiss, pressing her body into his.
    Then she was up and gone, moving around the little car and sliding into the driver’s seat with the speed and grace of a feline. “Where are we going?” Earl asked, more out of a desire to make conversation than because he really gave a shit.
    Raven smiled but didn’t immediately respond. She pressed a finger to his lips. “You’ll see soon enough, lover-boy. And I promise, this will be a night you will never forget.”
    She turned the key and the engine started with a purr and the young woman gunned the Porsche out of the lot, spraying gravel, peppering the vehicles—mostly pickup trucks—clustered outside the bar. Earl Manning’s last thought before he fell asleep was that this whole bizarre episode was like some teenager’s wet dream.
     

 
    2
    “Help me with him, for crying out loud,” Raven grumbled. “He might look like a bag of bones but he’s still heavy!”
    Max Acton ignored the petulance in her tone and strolled out the front door of the crumbling, two-story Victorian home. He had watched from the living room window as she leapt from the driver’s seat of the Porsche with her peculiar, cat-like grace and crossed in front of the car to the passenger’s side. Now he smiled in amusement at the sight of the tiny young woman grabbing their sleeping target by both shoulders and shaking him awake, tugging on his arms insistently, trying to pull him out of the vehicle.
    It had taken exhaustive research followed by months of surveillance to narrow the list of potential subjects down to Earl Manning. Paskagankee was a small and isolated community, but even in a town this small, dozens of men fit the profile Acton was looking for, and selecting the proper target was not a decision to be rushed into or taken lightly.
    In the end, though, it had come down to Manning. The loser in this particular sweepstake was relatively young and in apparently decent physical condition, despite years of heavy drinking. He was single, a loner with no wife or girlfriend, no steady job, and only a broken-down alcoholic mother to raise the alarm when he suddenly vanished. Max knew the cops would pay little attention to her.
    The only real cause for concern regarding Earl Manning’s suitability as a test subject was his past relationship with a female Paskagankee police officer, a beautiful young woman named Sharon Dupont. The last thing Max Acton needed was some ex-lover cop digging into Manning’s disappearance, unearthing—Max smiled to himself at the pun—things that were best left undisturbed.
    The more research Max conducted, though, the clearer it became that this Dupont bitch would be a non-factor. The relationship—such as it was—between the cop and Max’s chosen test subject had taken place years before, while the girl was still in high school, and had been based more upon a shared passion for alcohol and getting high than on any kind of mutual love or respect. Dupont had gone on to straighten her life out, eventually attending the FBI Academy before eventually returning to Paskagankee to care for her terminally ill father.
    Now, all indications were that Officer Sharon Dupont had become involved with the Paskagankee Chief of Police, Mike McMahon, leaving little doubt she had left her tenuous connection with Earl Manning behind forever. Of course, Max knew that if he was wrong, he would be inviting trouble of the worst sort, but the fact of the matter was that eventual police involvement was inevitable. There was no way around it. Even if they avoided arousing suspicion with Manning’s disappearance, when Max began putting his plan in motion an investigation would definitely be launched.
    The goal was simply to avoid the appearance that anything was amiss for as long as possible, and to leave nothing tying Max Acton to the fallout when the authorities did become involved. Earl Manning seemed to be the subject who would best allow him to accomplish this goal, so Earl