“I’m in Chicago. Where else would I be?”

“You need to lay low for a while, John. Seriously.”

“Why? What’s up?” I moved over to the sink outside of the bathroom and turned on the courtesy coffee brewer with one pack of instant coffee and one pack of decaf. I figured if I played my cards right I could brew up something that was sort of like real coffee before I had to head out into the world again.

“What’s up?” His voice broke and jumped a couple of octaves. “What’s up? Are you crazy?”

“Rio. I’m in Chicago and I just got out of bed. I don’t know anything. Tell me without the drama, okay?”

I expected to hear him tell me that Blevins was dead. I expected, maybe, to even hear that Blevins’ dad was dead. Instead he surprised me. “Chow Liu is what’s happening. Your green monster killed Chow Liu.”

I could tell by the urgency in his voice that I was supposed to be surprised and maybe even worried, but the name meant nothing to me. “Dude, who the fuck is Chow Liu?”

“Seriously, John, do you ever pay attention when we’re working?”

To be fair, the answer is no. I don’t need to know who is who; I just need to know who to collect from. The job is kind of a no-brainer for me.

“No, Rio. You know that. I’m normally thinking about other things.” Okay, to be fair I’m normally thinking about women. I’ve had a ridiculous libido ever since I changed.

“Chow Liu is the big shit of Chicago’s Chinatown, dude. Or he was. Your green monster just killed him. They’re already saying you did it. Even though it did to him what it did to the others.”

My ears started ringing and I managed to get to the bed before I would have landed on my ass. “Oh. That Chow Liu.”

“You work for Kang, man. And you’re known. And you’ve been spotted in Chicago. I don’t know who or how, but you got spotted, John. Liu’s guys are looking for payback and what Kang said is that they’re looking for you.”

Screw the coffee. I was wide-awake just that fast. Like I said before, I’m not bulletproof. You know who has more guns than the entire Chicago Police Department? Chow Liu’s people.

And they wanted me, dead or alive.

— 8 —

I spent about ten minutes showering and getting dressed and then I got the hell out of that hotel, because I’d been dumb enough to register under my real name and that meant I was probably going to get visitors sooner or later. I didn’t want visitors. I wanted to find my sister and get her home. Only now there were complications. Bad complications. And I didn’t have a whole lot of allies here. I needed to get out of Chicago and I needed to get back home and there was no way to do that without making arrangements.

First thing I had to do after I left the hotel was call Kang. I had no desire to do that, but I also needed to make sure we were straight, because if there’s one thing worse than pissing off the leader of a rival triad it’s pissing if the leader of your own triad.

Kang was, well, Kang was interested to hear from me.

“You left town without telling me.” His voice was cold, strictly business. Then again, his voice is always that way.

“Did Rio explain?” I was really, really hoping that Rio explained.

“Yeah. He did. You find your sister?”

“Not yet.” I looked around the area and climbed into the junker I’d picked up in Colorado. It was a piece of crap, but it was cheap and so far it hadn’t broken down. I live in San Francisco. I don’t normally drive and when I do I’m driving my folks’ car and they’d taken that with them when they went to L.A. So, you know, I had to improvise.

“You’re in deep shit, John. Not with me, but you’re in deep shit.”

“I swear, I didn’t do anything to anyone, man. I’m just tracking the green thing that took my sister.”

He muttered something in Chinese. I couldn’t make it out because it was too soft and I realized he was talking to himself, which he normally reserved for when he was very agitated. “I can’t send anyone to help you, John. I do, it looks like I’m involved in this. I don’t like it, but I can’t help you.”

“I’m cool with that, Kang.” Actually, I kind of wanted to cry. I wasn’t at all cool with it, but what can you do? I wasn’t going to cry in front of the man who paid my bills, or even over the phone in front of him. “I just needed to make sure you and me are okay before things get bad.” I corrected myself. “I mean if they get bad.”

“They’re going to get bad. I already got three calls from Liu’s boys. They want blood.”

“Why mine?”

“You’ve got a reputation, John. You’re a known name.”

“What? Since when?” What the hell was he talking about? I asked him as much.

“Around the same time you got white hair and fangs, man. The only reason I’m not sweating this a lot more is because they’re worried. They don’t know what you can do, and I’m not volunteering anything.” I wish I could say that comforted me.

“Listen. I have to go. I have to work out some plans.”

“You didn’t do this. I know that.” Him saying those words? That actually made me breathe a little easier. “Find your sister and come home.”

I had to find the green ogre. I had to find it and I had to get rid of it. I might even have to kill the damned thing and I didn’t want that. But if I needed to hand over a head to the Chicago triad to make sure that I got out of this in one piece, it wasn’t going to do me much good to hand them mine. I still needed it. I’d never killed anyone in my life, and when it came to my feedings, I only killed when I had to. I’d taught myself tricks for feeding off a lot of people at once, so they got a little tired and I got fed without killing anyone or anything. I mean, seriously, most times I just go to one of the local pet stores and when I leave the only problem is the dogs and cats are a little less noisy than when I came in.

I had to find the green ogre. I had to find my sister. I had to stop the green thing from killing anyone else. I had to stop the local triad from killing me. I had to clear my name. I had to maybe stop the ogre from killing a politician with too much of an opinion about vampires, before somebody else made the connections that I’d made and the press decided to declare a war on vampires. Listen I wasn’t alive when the whole country was going bugshit over Communism and wanting to crush the Red Scourge, but I had heard stories about the troubles back in the day and I wanted no part of that stuff. I just wanted to go to school and make a little money on the side.

I just wanted the same thing everyone else wants, really. I wanted to have an ordinary life.

Not a chance in hell.

"THE BALLAD OF BIG CHARLIE" PT.2

Keith R.A. DeCandido

— 8 —

Mia Fitzsimons sat in the press area for the debate between Mickey Solano and Hugues Charles. Normally, this sort of event would have a press section of about a dozen seats, and Mia would have had her choice of them, as maybe half would be filled.

But thanks to the Reverend Mann and his sermon — which Mia had now heard exactly two hundred times, she’d been counting for no good reason except perhaps so she could have a proper measurement for her suffering — the size of the press area was tripled and it was packed. She was squeezed between Josh, an overweight reporter from an Iowa paper (“Our readers want to know who the reverend was talking about — and hey, I’ll take the free trip to the Big Apple”), and an overweight blogger whose name she never got who’d been writing about I1V1. She had no idea how the latter managed to score press credentials.

And that was just journalists — camera operators were all over the place, with lights blinding anyone who looked anywhere near an aisle.

To her annoyance, Jack Napolitano — now working for RSN — had been chosen to moderate. To her surprise, they didn’t provide an extra chair for his ego.

The debate had been going well, and the Iowa reporter was getting cranky at the lack of a mention of Reverend Mann.

“The next question,” Jack read off an index card (this was still the Bronx, and a teleprompter wasn’t in the budget), “is about the death penalty. Mr. Solano, you’re in favor of reinstating it in New York State, and Mr. Charles, you’ve been very much set against it. Mr. Solano, can you explain your position?”

Solano smiled. He was dressed in a dark maroon suit. “Be happy to. When the Court of Appeals declared the death penalty law unconstitutional, they took a bullet out of every prosecutor’s gun. The death penalty is absolutely a last resort, one that should be reserved for the most heinous of crimes — but it needs to be available for those. Now, Mr. Charles has never called for the death penalty, even though he had opportunities to do so while the law was still on the books. And you know what? I agree with him. There weren’t any cases that came up in the Bronx during that time that called for the death penalty.”

Points for Solano on that one. Mia jotted down a few notes.

“But I maintain,” he continued, “that to rob prosecutors of that as a possible sentence robs them of the ability to do their job, and I have continued to lobby the Court of Appeals to reverse its decision. Having said that, if I am elected, I will, of course, abide by the law.”

Mia snorted. Stuck the landing, there, Mick…

Jack looked over at Big Charlie, wearing a tailored charcoal pinstriped suit. “Mr. Charles?”

“There are no cases where the death penalty is called for.”

And there’s the sound bite. Mia jotted down the line in her notebook.

“Yes, you may provide historic examples like Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, but these are not people who would ever be prosecuted at the Bronx County courthouse. But of all the arguments to be made against the death penalty, none are more compelling than the simple fact that innocent people have been found guilty of capital crimes. It is bad enough when the state condemns one of its citizens to death, but it is unconscionable that the state would do so to an innocent person. As for Mr. Solano’s argument — prosecutors have dozens of options of punishments that fit the crime. The idea that the death penalty would cripple prosecutors in their jobs when Mr. Solano himself admits that it would not be used very often if at all, is ludicrous.”