Sorry about the hiatus. Back now. Hope everything on the stream's been going swimmingly.

I walked across the dead-looking living room, kicked shoes out of the way, and answered the knock. No one's knock-knock fool, I asked the timeless question:

"Who's there?"

"Police," the voice said. This was a puzzle. We were the police.

"We're the police," I told the voice.

"Well, we're the police too," the voice answered.

I opened the front door. A half-dozen DEA agents, all of whom I knew, were standing on the porch.

"What are you doing here?" asked Jamison, a reptilian agent -in-charge I'd never liked very well.

"We're busy," I said. "Come back later. Carlo isn't home right now."

"Knock it off," he said. "Where's Carlo Quinn?"

"Jail. So what are you doing here?" I asked. It was a legitimate question.

"We're here to question Carlo Quinn about his involvement with Arno Desmond."

Something about that was screwed up. Arno Desmond was sixty percent owner of Kabarton Land Development Company, the farming/mining consortium that constructed the grow operation at Stanky Flats.

"What involvement? We just finished putting Carlo in the Graybar Hotel for red-lining a Nissan out on Highway 88 with a trunkload of illegal chemicals. Your guys were there at the finish."

"That was Carlo Quinn?"

I nodded.

"No offense, but you guys screwed the pooch on that one. Can we come in? I think we need to straighten some things out," he said.

Pretty reasonable behavior for a fed, even if he couldn't resist a dig at us. I looked at Ashe, and he inclined his head in assent. It was time for a sit-down.

"You first," said Ashe, ever-polite.

Jamison blew out a breath and sat down.

"Okay. First of all, we followed up on the Kabarton Land Development Company, and found two other grow operations--one in Washington state, and one in California."

"You didn't tell us about them," Ashe pointed out.

"You didn't need to know," said Jamison. This was more like it. More like the lovable feds we were familiar with.

"So tell."

"We rounded up most of the principals, and finally caught up with Arno Desmond at the airport in Bend, Oregon. He was enroute to Lima, Peru. A business trip, you understand. Very huffy that we'd boxed him, couldn't understand what this could possibly be about, yadda, yadda.

"We only leaned on him a little, and he rolled over like a piddling puppy. Started naming everybody he could think of. Carlo Quinn's name came up."

"As what?"

"Their principal investor. A silent partner. Carlo was getting thirty-three percent of the net from the grow operations."

"How'd they pay him?" Sasquatch, that suave fellow, asked disingenuously.

"Why?"

"Just curious."

"That was the weird part," said Jamision, suspiciously. "Quinn wanted to be paid in gold."

"Hey, tell your guys to quit fooling around with stuff. Tell them to stay in the living room and not to touch anything. They're not named in the search warrant," said Ashe.

It wouldn't do to let the DEA know we'd turned up pots of gold in Carlo's house. The DEA would want to horn in the gold on the basis of asset forfeiture, as proceeds of an ongoing criminal enterprise. They were probably going to find out about the gold at some point, but the later that happened, the better.

Jamison reluctantly told his henchmen to assemble in the living room. Ashe was right, even if Jamison didn't like it--but Jamison's eyes continued to examine the room and its peculiarities--the swords, the clocks, the smoke alarms, the hundreds of shoes and the cobbler's bench. I wondered what he would conclude. I didn't think I'd help him out.

"So what was Quinn up to?" asked Jamison.

"We haven't been able to determine that precisely," said Ashe. "We're going to have to examine all the evidence we collect and try to figure that out. Any speculation at this point would be premature."

"Bullshit," said Jamison. It was, of course, but knowing Ashe, I didn't think Jamison would be getting much more out of us for a while.

Sasquatch's cell phone chimed. The Merry Widow Waltz. Dee-dah-dee--dah, Dee-dah--dee--dah, dee, dee, dee. I'd tried to get him to change the ringtone, but Sasquatch told me it appealed to his feminine side.

"What are you wearing?"

This was Sasquatch's accustomed greeting on the phone. He said he liked the responses he got from the other side of the call.

"Yeah, this is him," Sasquatch shouted.

"Yeah. Your connection sucks. I can't hear you..."

"What do you mean? Gone?"

"Gone? Just what the hell does that mean, gone?"

"We'll be right there."

Sasquatch slapped the phone shut, and gestured to me.

"We gotta go."

"Where?"

"The jail. Carlo Quinn's turned up missing on their evening headcount."

"Escaped?" I asked, hurrying to catch up with Sasquatch.

"They're not using that word," said Sasquatch. "Just--gone."

"Come on into the back yard."

Everyone else in the house had heard Ashe's "eureka" exclamation. They followed us outside. Ashe patted the side of the brick barbecue grill.

"This is an athenor. Can you believe it?"

Sasquatch stroked his long beard.

"I thought it was a barbecue grill. Athenor, athenor." He tasted the unfamiliar word. "Is that some kind of medieval hot tub?"

"No. It's medieval, all right, but it's a furnace. A furnace of creation. The 'torment of the metals'. The birthplace of the philosopher's elixir, and the philosopher's stone."

"Sounds like Harry Potter."

"Harry Potter, all right. Magic. Early chemistry is more like it. Clueless chemistry...." Ashe's antiquarian enthusiasms were getting the best of him. He was getting more and more agitated. "The philosopher's elixir was supposed to impart the user with eternal life. And the philosopher's stone was..."

"Oh, hell," said Susan. "Alchemy."

"Yes."

"The Marshmallow Man is trying to turn lead into gold."

"Basically." Ashe sighed heavily. "Now what do we do?"

"Well...he still had fifty pounds of weed in the refrigerator."

"Yeah, but that's not what we were looking for in the search warrant."

"And it's not as if we're going to give the weed back to him," said Juba.

"No, that's true."

"'Your warrant was bad, so now you have to give me my dope back.'"

"Not going to happen."

"And...he did buy illegal chemicals that could be used to manufacture crystal meth."

"True. Did anyone find any meth in the house?"

Everyone shook heads.

"Well, we're not done yet. Maybe some will turn up."

Long silence. None of us were counting on it.

"Maybe he wasn't doing alchemy at all," offered Juan, "Maybe this is just a big home-made distillation apparatus for cooking meth. Maybe all the other stuff is just coincidental."

"You really think so?"

"No."

"And what's with the radioactive stuff he bought--thorium oxide--and what about the old clocks and the smoke detectors?" I asked. And what's with the shoes?"

"I don't know about the shoes, but smoke detectors contain a tiny chunk of americium, and old luminescent clock hands were coated with radium paint. I think Carlo was trying to accumulate radioactive material," said Ashe. "The alchemy of the medieval masters never did produce gold from mercury and sulfur and lead--just some nasty toxic messes. Maybe he was trying another way. The only proven way to produce gold from another metal, copper, is to use a linear accelerator. Or a nuclear reactor."

"You think this setup would have worked?"

"I'm not a nuclear scientist, but I don't think so."

"What about the swords?" asked Juba. Juba collected knives.

"Forget about the swords. Who cares? And the shoes, too. Just random nuttiness. Maybe he smoked too much of his own killer weed."

I thought a minute. "If he was going to make gold, why'd he have all the gold around in the first place?"

Ashe draped himself in virtual professor's robes, and declaimed. He was good at it. He probably made an insufferable docent at the museum.

"The masters of The Work were creating the philosopher's stone, not gold. If you place real gold and base metals together with the philosopher's stone, the stone is supposed to convert the base metals into more gold. You need gold in the first place. The King--which is gold--will transform lead--the Servants--into the King. The alchemists were very secretive--they wrote everything in code, using euphemisms for the chemicals, and for all the steps in the process."

"Yeah, there was a lot of that stuff about the King and the Servant and the Green Lion and the Red Lion and the Angel and Putrefaction in those notebooks I was reading," I said.

"Coded euphemisms for chemicals and processes," said Ashe.

"I don't like any of this," said Sasquatch. "This sucks. I don't know if alchemy is even illegal. I don't halfway know what it is, even. I still don't know how we're going to spin this. I have to go give a disposition to the judge within forty-eight hours, showing that the search was justifiable based on the evidence we had."

We considered this.

"We've got Carlo for something, at least," said Juba, who always preferred to look on the bright side. "It's not so bad. It could be worse."

Everybody glared, and told him to shut up. Blurting something like that was bad juju. Anyone with any sense knows that.

At that moment, there was a loud knock at the front door.

It wasn't difficult to get a search warrant for Carlo Quinn's house that afternoon.

Sasquatch and I drove to the courthouse after feeding the piglet who lived now in the back room at Sky High Chemical Supply. We'd constructed a little pen for him. He was naturally fastidious, and didn't make much of a mess at all. Sasquatch called him our faithful watch pig. We'd decided he couldn't be all bad, because he hated Carlo so much.

Sasquatch and I met with a judge who found our arguments convincing. She liked our videos of Carlo buying chemicals. We were able to show that Carlo had purchased at least two illegal chemical components for manufacturing methamphetamine, that he knew the chemicals were illegal when he purchased them, and that it was probable that other chemical components used in the manufacture of methamphetamine were in the house. Running away when we tried to arrest him didn't hurt either, and showed guilty knowledge.

"Carlo Quinn?"

"Yes, your honor."

"Carlo Quinn, Carlo Quinn, CarloQuinn..." she said, quickly. She shook her head. "Reminds me of something else, but I can't think what."

"I don't know, Judge."

"Any idea what he wants the other stuff for? It's not for meth, that's for sure. Is he trying to assemble some sort of terrorist bomb?"

"No idea, your honor. But we'll let you know if we find out."

"Please do. I'll be waiting for your disposition."

Sasquatch and I met Ashe, Susan, Juba, and Juan at the driveway in front of Carlo's house. The green Lincoln was parked at the curb.

I enjoy search warrants. Maybe search warrants appeal to my inner voyeur. How often in real life--burglary aside--is one privileged to riffle through someone else's possessions at leisure, recognizing some as embarrassingly illuminating relics of that person's perverted mind, holding up others for public ridicule? It's immensely satisfying.

Ashe read the warrant, and nodded. "Let's open it up."

We took it slowly. There was no reason to think anyone else was in the house, and Carlo was in jail. Juba picked the lock on the front door, and we walked inside.

The living room wasn't for living.

One corner was heaped with dozens of disassembled smoke detectors. In another corner was a pile of old luminous-dial clocks. And mounted on all the walls--swords. Dozens of swords--crossed, single, arrayed like wheels, lined in rows. In another corner, a cobbler's bench, strips of leather, and hundreds of shoes.

We walked farther into the house.

In what would usually be called the family room were shelves built of particle board and cinder blocks, filled to the ceiling on all four walls with rotting leather books. Ashe's eyes widened at the sight of them. I knew where he'd be throughout the long hours of the search warrant.

I pulled one of the books off the shelf, brushed off the dust, and opened it. The smelly leather binding cracked.

"Viridarium chymicum", the title page read. "Anno Domine MCCCCMXXIV." The rest was in Latin too. There were illustrations with strange things going on in them--a pair of snuggling angels planting stuff in a field, a king being put in a coffin, two lions spitting something up. I put it back. Let Ashe worry about it--he was the rare book enthusiast.

There were no beds in the bedrooms.

"Where's he sleep?" asked Susan.

"Don't know," said Sasquatch. "Maybe he curls up in the corner like a centipede."

The refrigerator was filled with black trash bags, yielding a familiar odor.

"Bingo," said Juba. He opened one. Nothing but the finest sensimilla buds. Maybe fifty pounds.

The flour, sugar, coffee and tea jars in the kitchen were filled with gold coins--Kruggerands, old US double eagles, and many others we didn't recognize. On the countertop was a set of brass knuckles, four switchblades, seven handguns, six more swords, and a spiked mace.

"A little paranoid," said Juan.

Yep, a little.

The garage was stacked high with chemicals--sulfur, mercury, silver nitrate, silver iodide, hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid, lead compounds, iron filings, sheets of copper, pigs of aluminum, powdered zinc, and much more.

I went back to the bookshelves to check in with Ashe. We set up a plan for the search and evidence handling. As I was leaving the room, I noticed a set of notebooks crammed into one corner.

"Mind if I start with these?" I asked. He shook his head, immersing himself in another book.

The first notebook was written in a wide, looping hand.

"The Arm of the Moon reaches forth to support the Harlequin in his endeavors, gifting him with the King so that the Harlequin may bring forth the King's children from his servants."

Eh?

I flipped through a few pages. More of the same.

"This is the philosopher's pot, with which they deal so secretly in their books and parables, so that nobody can understand them. I advise all those who wish to fry, poach, or boil the philosopher's egg, to be careful that the shell does not break, for then all the poison would come out, and would kill everyone nearby, for within it is the most evil poison in the whole world."

That didn't sound good.

"Thus are the toad and the eagle enchained, so they might marry and bring forth the King."

I read the notebooks for more than an hour. It seemed like longer.

"Opus Magnum," said Ashe. "That's what he's doing."

"What?"

"It's the work." He pointed out the window at Carlo's weird home-built barbecue grill in the back yard.

"Come again?"

"Opus Magnum. The Work."

Sasquatch clawed past the motor home. He grazed the guardrail. A long, screeching plume of sparks trailed behind us. The red Nissan ran far ahead, the distance lengthening as we watched.

"Do it," I said.

Sasquatch stamped on the accelerator. The engine's roar rose in pitch, and we hurtled west like a low-flying plane. The van began to shudder. I radioed our location to the cars behind, switched frequencies, and radioed any state patrol ahead that we were in pursuit of a red Nissan traveling westbound, location milepost 67--no, 66--no, 65, at speeds in excess of a hundred. At the next onramp, two eavesdropping locals screamed onto the highway, joining the chase. Who can resist?

In most cases, the desk monkeys in the administrative offices forbade pursuits--they endangered the lawsuit-giddy public, and delighted attorneys. Right now, though, we had a fleeing suspect in a speeding vehicle loaded with hazardous chemicals. Carlo was already endangering the public. I radioed Ashe. He cleared the continued pursuit. It was on his neck now, not mine. That's why supervisors get the big bucks, isn't it?

Now that the locals and the state patrol were in on it, we probably couldn't stop it anyway. These things take on a life of their own.

At times of stress, one's concentration narrows to a pinpoint ahead. For some reason, though, it occurred to me that the weather had been pretty dry for a while, and that we'd thrown up an awful lot of sparks when we nicked the guardrail....

I turned and looked behind. A column of black smoke billowed in the fast-disappearing median. I pulled out my cell phone and called the fire department.

"Hey, there's a grass fire at milepost 71 westbound on highway 88. Maybe you better come take a look at it. I think it's getting bigger, fast.....Sorry, no time to talk. Bye."

Sometimes I'm disinclined to provide long explanations. They only confuse people. If my cell showed up on the fire department's caller i.d., I'd just blame it on somebody's random cigarette or blame it on Carlo, maybe. What could one more charge against Carlo matter? In the midst of peril, always cover your butt, I say.

Carlo's Nissan, trailed by a half-dozen sets of flashing lights, rocketed out of the city, westbound towards the Klinkhammer Mountains--wild, wooded country with a thousand places, legal and illegal, to get off the highway, and a thousand places for a fugitive to hole up. We hadn't gained much ground, but we were holding our own.

If we lost him and he reached the Klinkhammers, he would be gone. If he rolled the Nissan--now a very fast dirty bomb....

No, I didn't like the way this was going.

"Maybe we should just go home and pretend we weren't here," I told Sasquatch.

He nodded. He knew what I was talking about. He and I, and perhaps thirty other cops, had done the mysterious disappearing thing at the debacle of the Great Tomato Marijuana Farm. (Mistaken identity. Bad intelligence. Don't ask. We weren't there.)

"I don't think it would do any good, now," he shouted over the engine.

Probably not.

Fortunately, it was mid-afternoon and traffic was thin. The only cars we had to dodge were the ones who hadn't seen the approaching lights. Sirens don't do any good to warn moving cars ahead at speeds like this--while you don't actually outrun the speed of sound, cars ahead can't hear the sirens coming from behind.

We sped into the foothills that rose beyond into the Klinkhammer Mountains. The road narrowed in the canyon, and the shoulders sported "No Stopping" signs.

Ashe's voice rose from the radio.

"I got ahold of the state patrol. They have four cars stationed ahead. We should be able to stop this thing."

"Roger that, and about time."

A large orange sign appeared: "Police Checkpoint Ahead".

A moment later, a second orange sign: "Drug Interdiction in Progress".

The Nissan wavered, slowed, swung into the median...and we were on it, blocking it in front and behind. Carlo sat behind the wheel. He looked grumpy and impatient.

Camouflage-clad figures bounded down from the hillside--the DEA. It was their turn to help out the Highway Interdiction Team. Just the people we'd want to be witness to one of life's little embarrassing moments.

Sasquatch and I jumped out of the van and hid behind its armored doors.

"Keep your hands in sight. Keep your hands in sight. Open the door with your left hand, and put your hands behind your head. Back toward us. Back toward us. Lie down on your stomach. Spread your arms wide. Spread them wide."

I ran up to Carlo, snapped out my handcuffs and snatched his right arm. It felt just like I'd grabbed a bag of marshmallows.

Ashe called the hazmat team to remove the chemicals from the Nissan. We were pretty sure things had gotten jostled around, and we didn't want to touch them.

We stuffed Carlo hastily into the back of a patrol car. Next stop, jail. We'd interview him later in the jug.

Now, though, a long afternoon and night lay ahead of us. It wasn't finished. Not by a long shot. It was just beginning.

As we rolled into town, we noticed a half-dozen fire trucks battling a grass fire on the highway. Half the city lay under a thick pall of smoke.

Who knew what that was about? Geez. The things that happen when you're out of town.