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“When is enough ever really enough for a man like you?” I asked.

He stopped looking at Wisper and turned his lizard eyes back to me. They moved and blinked not at all; as each stared into me, unsmiling, dark and fearsome, straight through my flesh and into my meager soul. I was saved from shriveling into a little ball of blackened goo when his attention was thankfully diverted by Morgan, Sophie, and Wendy being ushered into the room at the urging of some muscle-bound types who rent themselves out by the hour to break heads, shatter bones, and open peanut butter jars.

“Hey, Corky,” Morgan said. “What’s going on? These guys said you were in trouble.”

“Yeah,” Wendy said. “’Cause if you’re not, I’m missing valuable selling time.” She indicated the suitcase she still pulled behind her.

I turned back to Boone. “What do you want? Money?”

“Money?” he scoffed, as though I’d offered him poop-on-a-stick. “What does a man like yourself imagine he knows about wealth?” he asked me.

I nearly laughed. “What are you talking about? I’m one of the richest men…”

“You are nothing,” he said, so flatly and so positively that it chilled me to my marrow. “You’re a second. No…” he studied more intently. “No, more likely a third heir. An inheritor.” He said the word ‘inheritor’ as if it had slithered over his tongue and left a slime trail.

He stood again, walked over, and took one of the DVDs from my hands, chuckling at the imagery on both sides.

“I heard you down there, screaming about this video,” he said, obviously amused. “Leaving behind your collection of rare and expensive comics…” again he glanced at Wisper, and she withdrew from the touch of his eyes, “…and something of even greater value.”

He handed the video back to me, placing it atop the pile.

“A real man of wealth is a man with the strength of certitude in his own rightness,” he continued, “with the power, and the courage of his own, considered convictions, who will stand naked before anyone upon the center of the world’s stage, and say ‘I am right, to hell with you all.’”

I said nothing, though my mind was scampering about like a ferret searching for whatever ferrets eat, trying to remember all the good one-liners and put-downs I’d ever heard in my lifetime. Instead, all the ferret found was Opus, and even he didn’t like Opus.

“You are a pseudo-man who wilts at the first sign of conflict,” Boone told me. “Ends any personal endeavor the moment someone criticizes.”

“Hey!” Morgan said. “Like your fan-fic!”

I turned and glared at my old friend, and felt, once again, the pain of not having brain-melting powers.

“You are the kind of man,” Boone continued, “who holds only the convictions others will allow him. Who freely gives one and all complete power over himself.”

“Wow,” Morgan said, unhelpfully. “Has he got you down.”

Boone simply smiled. He didn’t need Morgan’s reassurance. He already knew. “You do not understand wealth,” he said, stepping closer until he was scarcely inches from my nose, “nor could you ever begin to earn it for yourself. To someone like you, it must be given. Handed out. Doled.”

I seethed but said nothing. Behind him, Washburne finally opened his can of nuts, with more force than necessary, and sent them flying about the room. Mayor Boone closed his eyes momentarily, sighed, then reopened them, staring back into me.

“I know your type all too well,” he told me, a tinge of sadness in his voice. “Even now, you have not the strength of will to stand against ridicule, to fight for what you believe to be right, to raise yourself and crush those who would call you out for exactly what you are. A wimp. A taker. A sponge. Instead you prefer to allow me to define you, rather than take the risk of confrontation and define yourself. On the world stage, you are incapable of being a player. You are merely an extra.”

Apparently done deriding me, he turned on his heel, walked away from me, and began gathering his things. Some of them were what used to be my things.

“I’ll take these comics,” he