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ever doubted that Charlie was a brilliant dog, all they had to do was watch the great restraint he always exercised when greeting Annie. His emotions wiggled all over him as he went within two inches of her and then stopped,
    Grace smiled at her. ‘Very Gatsby. I like it.’
    ‘You know me, Fat Annie was just born for croquet and champagne, although you’re not about to get me out on a lawn in this heat. Come on, let’s get ourselves inside before I start to render.’
    Annie had always thought Gothic to be a particularly uncivilized and slightly distasteful architecture, which therefore suited Harley perfectly. The baroque furnishings he favored were as massive as his frame and his personality, but as far as she was concerned, they were just plain Frankenstein.
    They found Harley at the eight-burner stove in the kitchen, dumping canned chili in a pot with one hand, holding a beer with the other. Charlie was already next to him, nose up to a skillet of warming breakfast sausage. ‘Just for you, buddy.’ He tossed a link into the air and Charlie rose on his hind legs to catch it.
    Grace leaned an elbow on a counter, chin in her hand, and watched the pair of them. The really amazing thing about this vagabond dog was what he taught you about the people he interacted with. Harley, for instance, oblivious to his own great value, bought affection shamelessly. Charlie was the easiest mark. One sausage, and he was yours for life. ‘Where’s Roadrunner?’ she asked.
    ‘In the shower. He made a new land speed record biking over here this morning, and I had to wring him out before I’d let him in the house.’

    ‘Technically, since I didn’t sleep last night, it isn’t really morning. It’s just a continuation of the dark time, only with light.’
    Grace smiled at him. ‘You’re really shook up about this, aren’t you?’
    ‘You’re goddamned right I’m shook up about it. We’re going to have a Fed in this house for God knows how long, watching over our shoulders, looking at every move we make.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So?
So?
Are you kidding me? We break about a hundred Federal laws every day when we work. We bust into secured sites – hell, we hack into the FBI like it was our own e-mail. They’re going to wait until they get the software program they want from us, then they’re going to throw us in the pen for about four hundred years. Christ. We beat these guys black and blue for ten years. They hate our guts, so what do they do? They ask permission to send this Trojan horse asshole right into our office and we open the door.’
    ‘Are you talking about John Smith?’ Roadrunner ducked through one of the kitchen doorways in his perpetual uniform of bicyclist Lycra. Even though the entire house was built on a grand scale, at six-foot-seven his head nearly brushed the lintel. ‘Hi, Grace, Annie. Sounds like you’re getting the four-hundred-years-in-prison lecture.’
    Harley scowled at him. ‘Very funny, dipshit. And that damn well better not be the same suit you were wearing when you
    ‘I’m not an animal. I put the sweaty one under your bed. And all your koi are dead, anyhow.’
    Annie’s bow lips turned down in a troubled pout as she focused on the disturbing possibility of wearing a prison-orange jumpsuit for any length of time. ‘They wouldn’t do that, would they, Grace?’
    ‘Do what?’
    ‘Throw us in jail for a teeny-weeny bit of computer mischief.’
    ‘No, of course not. Harley’s just being paranoid. The Feds know all about us working under the table every now and then …’
    ‘Right,’ Harley grumbled. ‘They just haven’t been able to prove it.’
    Grace rolled her eyes. ‘They asked for our help, and they’re going to cut us some slack. Besides, Smith is the new FBI, not the Hoover archetypes we were dealing with back in Atlanta.’
    ‘Are you kidding me? Did we meet the same guy? He had the suit, he looked like a Feeb, he talked that stupid Feeb talk, shit. The only thing that