The first time Willie Tee tried to kill me I was sitting on a bus-stop bench right outside the Scottsdale mall, eating a Billy Club sandwich and washing it down with an orange-flavored Super Slurp. I watched the mortals walk in haphazard patterns across the parking lot, marveling at how their materialistic urges guided them to the mall like rats in a Skinner box.

When Willie neared, he had the intensity of a mad scientist about to throw the big electric switch. “Goodbye, Dr. Hamlin,” he said. “There’s no place in this world for both of us.” That stupid neophyte even pulled out his laser gun out and started firing at me in a series of rapid bursts, causing the surrounding mall rats to scurry away like roaches.

I took one blast in the shoulder, another grazed my head. The sixty-year-old grandmother and the boy sitting next to me weren’t so lucky. They were both pronounced dead as soon as the ambulance arrived, and it wasn’t the first time Willie took out innocent bystanders. It certainly wouldn’t be the last.