12We check Chuck’s recent call history, but the most recent on the log is Jason’s from our motel room. “Not surprised,” Jason confesses. “Chuck may have been an IT idiot, but I doubt the Marching Tides would be stupid enough to be contacting each other over normal channels.”A quick scan of the apps on the phone and we find a suspicious-looking unnamed app nestled away with just a plain black square for an icon. It requires a username and password to login. Luckily, Chuck being the brain-waffle that he was had his login stats saved in his keychain. Idiot.Sure enough, the app appears to be a Dark Web access point for killers-for-hire. There does appear to be a voice chat feature, which we guess is how Chuck called his contact from the diner, but there isn’t a record of calls made through it, so that doesn’t help us too much.The private messages tab, however, proves much more fruitful. We find a series of correspondences between Chuck and a contact named ‘Gale’.“There was

14Don’t give me that judgmental look. Yes, I am fully aware that sex with my ex will undoubtedly complicate things in an already fucking complicated situation. But—actually, you know what, no. I don’t have to justify my sex life to you or anyone. Fuck that patriarchal bullshit. If I want to hump my ex’s brains out over the corpse of the doofus I just killed—I’m speaking figuratively here . . . even I’m not that morbid—I will fucking do just that and I don’t give a flying rat’s ass what you or anyone else thinks about it. Take that, Patriarchy. Anyway, once the frenzy of the moment has subsided and we both come to a bit of our senses, we realize we’ve probably taken up too much valuable time. I wouldn’t say it was time wasted, though. We decide we had better skip the pillow talk and get a move on before the Marching Tides track us down.We quickly wash off Doofus’s blood in the motel room shower—our urgency to get out squanders any thought in either of our

16Not that Zeke has ever particularly looked good by my standards, but he is looking particularly miserable now. Aside from several bruises and scrapes on his face, he’s even paler than normal and is particularly bedraggled. If I didn’t know for sure it was him, I’d have thought he was a homeless bum off the streets. “How did you find us?” I ask.“How did you escape H.Q.?” Jason asks, simultaneously.“What in the titty-fucking hell?” we ask, together.“I’ll answer what I can, but not here,” Zeke says, looking over his shoulder with paranoid conspiracy. “There’s a diner around the corner.”I honestly don’t know why diners are considered the American hotspot to have secret conversations in public, but there you have it. It must be something about the mediocre food.Zeke looks as if he’s about to fall over, so we drive to the diner.Once the waitress has taken our orders, I turn to Zeke and say, “All right. Spill. What the fuck are you doing here in Colorado?”Ze

18The next morning we agree that since we’ve decided to cut ourselves off from Zeke we should probably get the hell out of Colorado before he catches on and tracks us down himself. Unfortunately, we realize that if Zeke is somehow tied up with the Marching Tides, we’ve compromised our current mode of transportation by giving him a ride from the dispensary to the diner. But unless we’re going to steal a car or backtrack to L.A. or Vegas, none of which seem like particularly good ways of staying under the radar, we’ll just have to take that risk. Agreeing we should get out of Grand Junction sooner rather than later, we grab a couple of bagels from the motel’s continental breakfast station and hit the road. We figure as we’ve been more or less going northeast thus far we should probably switch it up a tad and instead head south toward Albuquerque, New Mexico.Between stopping for food, gas, and pit stops, the drive takes most of the day so we pass the time discussing our ne

20We find a restaurant—a real restaurant, not just a diner, for once!—to have some dinner, then seek out a motel to spend the night. We agree we shouldn’t check the Dark Web app until we’re ready to leave Phoenix, or whatever location we are currently at whenever we check in, just in case we do set off any silent alarms. After checking into our motel room, we decide it’s a good time to switch up our appearances and identities again. I adopt a chin-length blonde wig accompanied by brown-tinted contact lenses and a new prosthetic nose. This time Jason decides to be the one to go ginger with hair dye and a fake beard.Our new disguises donned, Jason asks, “So, what do we do now? We’ve got the whole night ahead of us since we can’t check the Dark Web app until the morning.”“Well, we could . . . you know . . . ” I smile.“I don’t think we should repay Frank’s hospitality by killing some random Phoenician immediately after Frank risked his career to help