Zero Dwarfs Given (Dwarf Bounty Hunter Book 4) Read online

  Zero Dwarfs Given

  Dwarf Bounty Hunter™ Book Four

  Martha Carr

  Michael Anderle

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design

  http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First Version, January 2021

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-64971-398-8

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64971-399-5

  The Oriceran Universe (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright (c) 2017-2021 by Martha Carr and LMBPN Publishing.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Free Books

  Author Notes - Martha Carr

  Author Notes - Michael Anderle

  Connect with The Authors

  Also by Martha Carr

  Other LMBPN Publishing Books

  The Zero Dwarfs Given Team

  Thanks to our JIT Team:

  Deb Mader

  Dave Hicks

  Diane L. Smith

  James Caplan

  Debi Sateren

  Dorothy Lloyd

  Paul Westman

  Kelly O’Donnell

  Peter Manis

  Jackey Hankard-Brodie

  Jeff Goode

  Thomas Ogden

  If We’ve missed anyone, please let us know!

  Editor

  SkyHunter Editing Team

  Chapter One

  Federal Agent Lisa Breyer rolled over on the bed in her hotel suite outside Everglades City and thumped a fist on the mattress. If I can’t get rid of these nightmares soon, I’m gonna have serious issues. It’s been two weeks already.

  She glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand and groaned. No one should have to lie awake in bed for two hours.

  After pushing herself up, she paused and turned her head slowly toward the bedroom door, which she’d closed despite being in the hotel suite alone, simply because the air conditioning was triggered by movement. Fortunately for her in the early August heat in the Everglades, she’d moved a fair amount during the last two hours.

  With a sigh, she whipped off the covers, slipped out of bed, and stepped into the small living room. She went to the desk where her laptop had been plugged in for an overnight charge. Once seated in the desk chair, she turned the device on and wrinkled her nose as it powered up. “Fine. If nightmares from that dark witch’s overactive potion insist on keeping me up, I insist on tackling the other half of that trip.”

  The other case was Johnny Walker’s fifteen-year-old murder case. Or his daughter’s, to be more precise. Which included the drug kingpin the bounty hunter couldn’t get out of his mind long enough to focus on only one case at a time.

  “And now I can’t get the bastard out of my mind either. He’s back, his drugs are stretching across the country, and—” Lisa uttered a wry, weary chuckle. “Look at me. Talking to myself in the middle of the night and I don’t even have two dogs with magical collars as an excuse.”

  Tabling the issue of her full sanity for another time, Agent Breyer signed into her laptop and pulled the Wi-Fi hotspot device she’d received from the Department toward her. Tapping into the dark web just after midnight on a hotel’s internet signal wasn’t exactly the best choice, even for a federal agent. Fortunately, she didn’t have to.

  After setting up the hotspot and running the virtual personal network to keep her IP address and her system as safe as she knew how from whatever lurked on the dark web, she hopped onto a directory service to start her search. “We found Lemonhead on the dark web the first time. I can’t imagine I won’t be able to find him again.”

  But twenty minutes of searching for their elusive quarry gleaned only what she’d already seen—a connection between that username and the despicable auction bidding gearing up before the Monsters Ball two and a half months earlier. Beyond that were brief mentions of Lemonhead from years before. The real Lemonhead was murdered by the Red Boar without anyone knowing it and used for his black-market reputation as a “purveyor of magical commodities.”

  Those won’t help. It’s not the same guy.

  With a slight frown of concentration, she tried searching for “Red Boar” but that was even less successful. She obtained the same results she’d pulled up on a public Google search in Portland and from sniffing through federal records—or at least the ones she had access to. But Johnny already had everything the Bureau had gathered on the Red Boar in his cabin somewhere with the cases labeled D Walker and Operation Deadroot.

  “Great.” She stood quickly from the desk chair and headed into the suite’s kitchen. Only one beer remained from the six-pack she’d bought four days before, and the sight of it sitting there by itself between the leftover salad from dinner that night and the half-empty carton of eggs made her frown. I think I’m starting to understand why Johnny drinks so much. And I should stop.

  She closed the fridge and went to the sink instead and took a glass from the overhead cabinet to fill it. He’s convinced the Red Boar was in the comic shop that night. Off-camera. Vilguard practically gave up that much all on his own. And Dawn tried to threaten the drug-dealers by dropping Johnny’s name.

  The agent paused with the glass of water raised halfway to her lips. “That’s why Prentiss shot her. Isn’t it? The Red Boar heard a little girl’s threat and didn’t want to take any chances. Seriously, what are the chances of there being more than one high-level bounty hunter dwarf with a twelve-year-old daughter? Especially fifteen years earlier when the Department was only a decade old?”

  A door opened in another hotel suite out in the hall, and Lisa glanced at her entrance door. She chuckled at herself. Jumpy much? Stop talking to yourself, Lisa. Someone’s bound to think the half-Light Elf agent’s finally lost her mind.

  She took her water to the desk, swallowed half of it, and set the glass down and stared at the laptop screen. The Red Boar wouldn’t have ordered that shot if he didn’t know who Johnny was. And we all met face-to-face in New York.

  After ty
ping two new words into the search, she took a deep breath and scrunched her face up. “It’s not very likely, but I guess it’s worth the attempt.”

  Her finger came down on the Enter key, and her eyes widened as hit after hit pulled up on her screen. “Holy shit.”

  The decision to search the dark web for Johnny Walker had been a whim based on nothing but a hunch she and the bounty hunter now shared. If she hadn’t been so exhausted from all the hours of lost sleep over the last two weeks, she probably would have written the idea off as a desperate attempt to be more useful or more productive. Why the hell would Johnny Walker have anything on him floating around on the dark web?

  Lisa laughed and scrolled through the search hits. “Okay. I’ve now found one good thing to say about the nightmares. Jesus.”

  There were five pages of search results, all with Johnny’s name in the title. Most of them were snippets of articles or posts painting the bounty hunter in a seriously unflattering light. And they were very old.

  Bounty Hunter Had It Coming.

  Retirement, or Did He Kill Himself?

  Guess Who’s Throwing in the Towel.

  Best Bounty Hunter My Ass. Look at This.

  Lisa stopped on the last one and saw a blurry image of Johnny, his finger smudging the upper-righthand corner of the frame as he scowled at whoever snagged the shot. Red-rimmed eyes, unwashed hair, and either crumbled food or lint caught in his beard created an unflattering picture.

  The post was dated December 2005.

  She grimaced. Assholes. Leave it to criminals to kick a guy while he’s down and mourning the murder of his daughter.

  Beneath the post title was a snippet of the post itself:

  …shoved in our faces for years that the asshole dwarf bagging and tagging alleged criminals and calling it all in good fun was ‘one of the best damn bounty hunters in the business.’ Well, guess what? Johnny Walker’s done. You’d think the best would have been able to save his daughter from catching a bullet in the back of the head. You’d think he’d take down the guy who put that bullet there in the first place. But no. We all need to take a good, long look at this dwarf right here and ask ourselves why any of us give a fuck about what he does next. Because it looks to me like Johnny Walker’s all washed up. He looks like he’s about to…

  The preview ended there, and she clicked on the title link to keep reading. A new webpage loaded, then a popup box appeared in the center of her screen and prompted her for a password or a second option to create an account.

  Ungovernedunderground.onion, huh? She went back to scroll through the search results and found that many of the same flavor of Johnny Walker posts and articles were from the same site. Yeah, I won’t try to get a password to join a Shit on Johnny Walker forum, even if it isn’t full of criminals.

  She continued to scroll and stopped when she saw an image of the dwarf in his usual all-black and dark sunglasses, one thumb stuck through his belt loop and the other hand raised to flip the middle finger at the camera. It was a surprisingly professional-looking shot, edited with impressive attention to lighting and detail. It took Lisa a few seconds to realize the photo was the thumbnail cover for a TV show.

  “What the fuck?” She leaned back quickly in the chair, took another sip of water, and closed her eyes. I’m hallucinating—not enough sleep. That’s it.

  But when she opened her eyes again and peered at the image, nothing had changed.

  “Dwarf the Bounty Hunter Season 7? Are you shitting me right now?” She laughed again and slapped the desk. “That’s what everyone was talking about. Oh. My. God.”

  The title of the forum made the hilarity of it even that much more cringe-worthy—Dwarf the Bounty Hunter: The Official Site—Your One-Stop Shop for All Things Johnny Walker, Bounty Hunting, and the Best Oriceran-Hosted Show on Earth.

  “No way.” Lisa grimaced and turned her head slightly away from her laptop. He would kill me if he knew I’d found this.

  She returned her focus to her screen and clicked on the site.

  The forum was one of those loud, busy websites with ads littering the sides and tops in every color imaginable—most of them ads for boxed sets of the show’s seven seasons, clothes and sunglasses that mirrored Johnny’s, vacation packages to Florida and specifically the Everglades, and one ad running in multiple places boasted a black leather jacket the private seller insisted was left behind during one of the dwarf’s more intense fights and ensuing getaways.

  Five thousand dollars for a so-called authentic Johnny Walker jacket. What the hell is wrong with these people?

  Trying to navigate the site’s multiple tabs and various forums for at least twelve different aspects of the show—not including each episode of all seven years—took more brainpower and focus than she had at twelve-thirty in the morning. She clicked onto the Fansite Forum tab instead and scrolled through the comments.

  Wow. Fifteen years later and people are still picking this apart like they just binge-watched it on Netflix.

  The topic threads were a random mash of show-related drivel.

  S3 Episode 4: Bone to Pick. This is the best episode of the entire season. Fight me.

  The real reason behind Johnny Walker’s unexplained trip to Las Vegas in Season 5.

  Long-time fan since childhood looking for a way to become a bounty hunter. Anyone have any tips?

  She had to look away from her laptop for a moment to give her eyes a rest. “There’s so much to sort through.”

  After a deep breath, she decided she might as well start at the top and browse methodically. The first three threads were less related to the show and more about “how profoundly Johnny Walker played a role-model role in his viewers' lives.” The others were simply more hearsay, personal opinion, and a few arguments over the “deeper meanings” behind Johnny Walker phrases like, “Watch me,” and “If it ain’t the truth, it ain’t worth tellin’.”

  One fan had uploaded several pictures of herself with a badly photoshopped Johnny Walker at the beach with her, at the shopping mall, and lying naked in bed.

  “Oh, hell no.” Lisa clicked out and shook her head. “How is this such a huge deal and I’ve never heard about it?”

  A flashing ad on the right side of her screen screamed at her in bright neon. Click Here for Episode Recaps and Discussions.

  She laughed, too tired to keep scrolling through thread after thread from people who wrote these posts like they’d known Johnny all their lives. It looks like I’m getting a pop-culture review of Johnny Walker’s career before retirement.

  When she clicked on the ad, it took her to a different page that didn’t have its own tab on the main menu but was far more organized. The site broke discussion topics down by season and then by episode, and she opened the first review of Season 1, Episode 1: Who is Johnny Walker?

  The discussion started intelligently enough, then very quickly took a turn toward fans bashing each other for differing opinions. Of course, a comment written in all-caps caught her attention almost immediately.

  User5507: I don’t see why everyone makes such a big deal about this guy. You’re obviously biased against wizards if you think Hammond Farth is the real criminal in this episode. That wizard’s an entrepreneur. All he was trying to do was make life a little easier for the people in his city, and what did he get for it? Tossed over the hood of his car and cuffed like he was merely another one of the dwarf’s hunting trophies. Johnny Walker’s the real criminal here. Who gave him the right to butt into anyone’s life?

  User1302: I’m very sure local authorities gave him the right, man. No one’s denying the fact that Farth was experimenting with how to improve the water filtration system. But when he almost blows up a nuclear plant trying to get “ingredients,” then yeah. That essentially makes him a criminal.

  NoApologies42: Plus the fact that he didn’t even try to sit down and have a conversation about what he was doing. The minute he saw Johnny pull up on his property, he ran. Anyone who runs is automatically g
uilty. Duh.

  Lisa raised her eyebrows and moved on to the next few episodes. In each one, at least one “fan” left a comment trying to defend the criminal bagged and tagged during Johnny’s show. They were regular people—or magicals—and were minding their own business until Dwarf the Damn Bounty Hunter arrived. No one deserved seven years in a max-security prison for trying to gather eggs from giant Oriceran slimetoads, and forget the fact that the slimetoads were under Earth’s various new environmental protection acts.

  Episode after episode showed some disgruntled fan unsatisfied by the treatment and sentencing of whatever bounty Johnny had taken into custody. Lisa counted at least six different usernames for these unhappy Johnny-haters, although they were all numbered generically according to the forum’s system.

  Yeah, no one wants to stir the pot like that without hiding behind even more anonymity.

  She filtered the comments to show the most recent additions, then froze. “What? There’s no way this is real.”

  Lemonhead: Right there with you on the unethical treatment of the disenfranchised. I wonder if anyone pays attention to the kind of physical, emotional, and mental damage incurred by being treated in this way by an icon as admired as Johnny Walker. And trust me. We’re not the only ones. PM me for more details.