Cut to my car. Willow and I are having a polite disagreement. For the moment, since getting almost anywhere in Sunnydale doesn't take more than about a 15-minute drive, we're driving around until we finish.

'But I know my computer better," Willow said. "You know, if we need any hacking done. Or anything."

"Special tools?" I asked.

"Yuppers." After a second. "You don't have any obligations to local law enforcement, do you?"

"Remember who the local sheriff is and my general opinion of law enforcement in Sunnydale," I said. "Even if I did have any obligations beyond those of anyone else, I wouldn't turn you in to Deputy Lamb if I had ironclad proof that you were going to murder someone. I might as well just dump the evidence directly down the sewers."

"Ah. Right. They're really not very good, are they?"

"Not since the Mayor fired my dad, they're not." After a second, "Anyway, I have my own tools available at the office." Dad's PI-related software. Not quite as sophisticated as it would be in about ten years, but still, stuff not available to the average citizen. I explained this to Willow.

"So, who says we need to choose?" Willow said. "We'll go to your dad's office first, and then we'll head back to my place, which has the extra added bonus of not being accessible to vampires."

"You've never let Angel in?" She had during Lie to Me, of course, but this time around Angel had come to me instead of Willow, and I don't think she'd gotten around to extending a formal invitation in the interim.

She hadn't. "Nope. And at the moment with the thing where he might get happy and be evil again hanging over us I don't really think I'm going to either. I did a little reading on Angelus, when Giles wasn't looking. He doesn't sound very nice."

You don't know the half of it, Willow, though I can't exactly tell you that even now. "I can't imagine most vampires would," I said.

"Yes, but he sounds worse."

"I'll take your word for it," I said, having to do no such thing. "I get enough human depravity, so, wanting to hear about the depravity of the undead? Not on my to-do list. Anyway, you're right. Let's do both."

X X X X X

Dad was still there at the office; he had given strict orders to me not to be there by myself, and with Drusilla, aka my friendly neighborhood psychotic murdering stalker who thinks she's the Sephrenia to my Sparhawk, this was one time I wasn't going to be circumventing Dad's orders in either letter or spirit.

"So whatever you have to do," Dad said, "You have about a half hour."

"That should be enough for a good start," I said.

It was. Working together in that half hour, Willow and I were able to print out a list of abandoned buildings – and lists of technically non-abandoned buildings with absentee owners. This was assuming that they weren't holing up in a cave somewhere, but caves weren't really Spike or Drusilla's style. It was still a long list, far too long for any town of this size not named Sunnydale – if there had been this many abandoned places in Neptune the townsfolk would have had Woody Goodman's head on a stick outside the township borders (before they ever found he was a pedophile, even) – but it was still a lot shorter than "every building in town."

We'd just managed to remove residences from the latter list – absentee owners were still owners, and therefore by vampire law the buildings were still "occupied" – when Dad came out and said, "Okay, sweetie, and you too, Willow – time to go."

As I shut down the computer he asked a little too casually – and with Keith Mars never doubt that if you notice it's a little too casual? Not unintentional – "So, what were you girls looking up?"

"Oh," I said. "We're tracking down international jewel thieves. They'll never stand up to our pluckiness and derring-do."

"Veronica -" he said reproachfully.

"Okay, but you'll be sorry when we get the reward and don't cut you in," I said. "No, actually we're looking for a couple of homeless people." Which was stretching the truth only slightly. Dru and Spike were technically homeless, and they at least looked like people.

He frowned, though it didn't seem to be out of irritation at me or Willow, who'd kept quiet throughout the whole thing. Of course, this was still when, in continuity, authority figures tended to intimidate her.

Made my job easier.

Of course, this was when Dad turned to Willow and said, "Is this true?"

"Oh!" Willow said. "Yes! Very true. They don't have homes and we need to find them, so Buffy can give them something!" Pretty good spontaneous misdirection, even if she said it as though she were desperately trying to convince a firing squad not to shoot her.

Dad looked from Willow to me and back again, but was apparently satisfied that we weren't trying to pull a fast one on him. "I don't need to tell you to be careful, Veronica; you know there aren't a lot of homeless people in Sunnydale." Yes, Dad, and I know the reason why, too, even if you're almost certainly being forcibly mentally blocked from doing so.

"Beyond careful. Willow and I are just doing research. Buffy and her boyfriend are doing the legwork." And how.

Exeunt omnes, in various directions, Dad home, where he expected to see me within an hour and a half. "Tonight's the night for my famous tuna salad, sweetheart," he said.

"Famous?" Willow asked me as we headed to chez Rosenberg.

"His secret is pickles. Oops, now it's out and I have to kill you."

"But, if you did, Buffy would take her revenge!"

"Naaah, I can make it look like an accident."

"Then I'd better stay on your good side."

"You're just learning this now?"

X X X X X

I was just about to step through Willow's front door – through which she carefully did not invite me – when I got a phone call. I told Willow to go on and get things started and answered the phone with a "Hello?"

"Manhunter," Sheila said. "We got all the ingredients for the spell ready."

"Already?"

"I did do this before, remember. Little different focus this time but 'spretty much the same spell."

"Where are you?"

"Magic shop. Rae helped me with the ingredients."

"Good. That;s one way taken care of."

"One way?" Sheila said.

"Yeah. I think maybe the best thing to do is use all three. This isn't something we really want to get wrong."

"'Worked last time."

"We didn't have time to double and triple check. Here. I doubt Spike or Drusilla is going anywhere." After a few seconds during which I swear I could hear her exasperation, even though she didn't say anything, I said, "You really want to get this taken care of, don't you?"

"'sof yesterday, manhunter," she said. "But time travel's a spell I haven't gotten to yet." The words were light, but the tone most definitely was not.

"You will wait, right?"

"I will," she said. "I'm not happy about it, but I will."

"Good. I still don't want you dead."

"That's one of the sweetest things anyone's ever said to me."

"I can't tell if you're serious or not, and with you? Not so sure I want to know. Thanks, Sheila."

"Anytime. Mean it."

She hung up without saying anything else, but, you know, I was reasonably sure she did.

"Veronica?" Willow said.

"That was Sheila," I said. "First batter got a hit."

"Huh?" she said.

"She's got the tracking spell ready. But we're not doing this just for the exercise, because while we need this done soon, we don;t need it done in the next half hour. So let's get upstairs and spend the next hour or so narrowing down this list using those tools Mr. Giles would neither understand nor condone."

"Right," she said, leading the way.

"First thing we're going to check is the SCE grid," I said. "Because Spike and Drusilla? Don't really seem like the type to be holing up in a place without power."

She nodded. "Good start," as she pushed what I took for her bedroom door all the way open. "And I can definitely do that . . ."

X X X X X

An hour later, I was walking downstairs, with Willow still working on narrowing down the field. So far, we'd managed to eliminate another hundred or so properties. Too decrepit; not getting power; or, in a couple of cases, too close to Buffy's house, such as the one Norman Pfister from Blush Beautiful cosmetics had taken over, which was actually still unoccupied. Buffy might not have noticed him, but Spike and Drusilla? Them, she would have noticed.

I looked outside, realizing as I did that it was almost pointless to do so; crazy as Drusilla was, she wasn't stupid enough to be standing there waiting for me in plain view – and that there were a dozen places she could be hiding where she could jump me before I got to my car, were she so inclined.

She wasn't, though that I'm even in the mindset to think to check? Stinks beyond the ability of words to express. I made it home without issue, though along the way I did call Mr. Giles, who was momentarily startled that I knew his home number until I reminded him that he was actually in the phone book, and updated him on what Willow and I and Sheila had done that evening.

"Buffy has not yet called in," Giles said when I was done. "Of course, it is only 7:15 PM. She may not have even have left her house yet."

"Nothing to worry about there," I said. "Meet tomorrow, usual spot?"

He agreed, and by the time I hung up I was more or less home.

X X X X X

I won't bore you with the details of the rest of my evening, unless you have a fanatical desire to hear about Dad's tuna salad, my nightly ablutions, or the homework I did in an even more distracted fashion than I have been for the rest of the two and a half months. (And if you really want to hear the details of my nightly ablutions, check yourself into the nearest mental hospital, because you're sicker than Drusilla.)

That night, though . . .

"I know the game's not over yet," I told the Adversary as we stood on top of a building – I couldn't tell what building, but it was in the middle of a generic city circa the 1970s, if the Pepsi Free he was drinking was any indication.

"It isn't," he said.

"Let me guess. The end is growing ever closer." A bit more high-faluting than I usually get, but my conversations with the Adversary? Tend to put me in that kind of mood. Not that, I really think, you can blame me. "Tell me something I don't know."

"Fidel Castro was actually a mediocre baseball player who never had a chance to make the major leagues, no matter what anyone else might tell you."

"Well, I can't say I knew that," I said. "So, what's the message this time? I'm a busy woman, you know."

"You're asleep, Miss Mars."

"And I'm still busy. Maybe if I wasn't dealing with you I might be able to dream up a solution to where Spike and Drusilla are. Or possibly world peace."

He laughed. "Probably not the latter."

"Once again, tell me something I don't know."

"There's something big coming tomorrow," he said.

That got my attention. "Last batter third strike big?"

"Not quite," he said. "It's more like – a fight in the stands. A big one, as though you were at a soccer riot and not a Padres game."

When he didn't say anything else, I said, "That's it?"

"That's all you'll need."

"Well, then would you mind passing me some of that Pepsi Free? A girl does get parched while trying to decipher cryptic warnings."

He laughed, and a second later I woke up.

To the sound of the alarm, though, so at least this time he wasn't costing me any sleep.

A small mercy, but when you're dealing with entities on the scale of the Adversary? You take whatever you can get.

X X X X X

Buffy was waiting outside, again, though this time she said, "Got some sleep tonight, I promise."

"Well, you do have fewer circles under your eyes . . ."

"You know, I can hurt you."

"Yes, but you're not going to."

"And why not?" she said as we got into the LeBaron.

"Because it's wrong." Even as I said it, with as light a tone as I said it in, I realized that I was quoting from the episode "Who Are You?"

"Well, yeah, and?" Her tone was equally light.

"And my father would track you down and make you pay."

"He couldn't take me."

"You vs. Keith Mars? Maybe not so easy a fight as you think." True, Buffy would kick his ass in a fistfight, but Dad's smart enough to not let her get close enough. I put the odds at 50-50.

Buffy laughed, then said, "Just to be serious for a second, I didn't see Drusilla last night, and I didn't see her this morning either."

"Good," I said. "Incidentally, did you find a place where I can do my -" almost said Jack Bauer, bad idea, very bad idea – "Um, best imitation of a sadistic cop?"

"Several," Buffy said. "Angel's working on setting up one of them now."

"Tell Willow where."

"Huh?"

I said, "We're trying to eliminate as many places as we can, logically, from being where Drusilla and Spike are hiding out. Wherever the two of you looked, that's more places we can scratch off."

"Gotcha. Hey, do you mind if I flip on the radio?"

"Go ahead."

A song ended – by Aimee Mann, ironically enough, though I doubted I'd ever get to hear her explanation of why she hated playing vampire towns.

"Good morning, this is Dave Maleski; it's 7:00, time for the news. You may remember him from his roles in The Long Haul or Road to Dead, or more recently for the troubles he's been having with his wife. But now, Aaron Echolls has a new concern: Us. Late last night, speaking with Jay Leno, Echolls made a shocking announcement."

Next came Aaron Echolls' voice, saying, "No, Jay. I've been doing some thinking since – since Lynn walked out. And you know what the last thing she said to me was? She told me she wished I was more like the characters I played."

Jay Leno's voice said, "She wants you to go around shooting bad guys and blowing up cars?" to the mild laughter of his audience.

"Not quite," Aaron said. "It took me a few days but I figured it out, and she was right. I need to be that kind of man. I need to do what's right, no matter the sins of my past. And you know the town I live in? Sunnydale? You know it has one of the highest murder rates in the country?"

"Really?"

"Really. And that's what she meant. I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to clean up Sunnydale. No matter who or what gets in my way."

Oh, look. A riot.