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Click.

                  I turned off the television and stared blankly at my open investigation notebook.

                  "Where to even begin," I whispered to myself.

                   There had definitely been another killing, but it wasn't singular. It was plural. Very plural. Ten people had been absolutely slaughtered at Crave the night before. All vampires. Some of them beheaded, others stabbed viciously and carved into so deeply that their identities were currently unknown.

                  I could have stopped him.

                  I gripped the sides of my skull and willed the television images to leave my thoughts. The body bags. The caution tape. The pale, drunken expressions of stumbling party goers taking in the brutal murders. Some of them laughed they were so wasted, others were sobbing on the ground and couldn't get back up. A hand-carved smiley face stake was left in each and every vampire. The reporters said that the club was so dark and the murders were so discrete and quick that people hadn't discovered the dead bodies for a good thirty minutes.

                  What I really couldn't get out of my head was the note that had apparently been stuffed down one of the victims throats.

                  Too late.

                  :)

                  It was all my fault. That message had to be directed towards me. If I had just shut my mouth to Gary, if I had just kept what I had known about Smiley from him, I would have been able to go to Crave and intercept his massacre. He wouldn't have prevented me from going. I would have...

                  I dove for a garbage can and puked my guts out. This town was sick. This was all so sick. Back home, the most tragic thing that had ever occurred was the local McDonalds running out of honey mustard. Now every television channel, every online article, and every newspaper had Smiley's bright yellow and black mask on it with a growing list of dead bodies. I felt helpless. Pepper Ballard, Master of Kicking Ass, was entirely stumped on what to do next. Call the police on Gary? No. That had to be exactly what he wanted because he had never told me not to. But why? Why would a serial killer not threaten someone's life who found out about their evil doings?

                   Most importantly, why had Smiley coincidently killed a girl that resembled me the day after we had first met, yet Gary never murdered me when he saw me a handful of hours later?

                  I wrote down a few questions in my Investigation Notebook.

·         Are there two different Smiley's?

·         Are they Gary and Ronny?

·         How do I stop them?

·         Why the hell haven't they killed me?

                  I stuffed my notebook under my mattress and held my head in my hands.

                  I was done playing the hero. I had failed Orange Gate County and failed myself. I had let Smiley continue to get away with the murders when I could have done something to stop him. Pepper Ballard, Kicker of Ass, was officially no more.

                  * * *

                  The doorbell rang in the middle of the afternoon while I was eating a large bag of potato chips on the couch and sobbing helplessly into Salt's fur about my failures. It was a cheery package man holding a large box.

                  He reached into his pocket and threw Salt a biscuit.

                  I wiped at snot under my nose, stunned by the large box in his hands. How could I have forgotten about the package?

                  I quickly broke into a grin. "Oh boy! My new radio!" I screeched, signing off the package and slamming the door in Package Dude's face. Radio? Bitch, who the hell buys a radio these days?

                  Alright, so it was a box of illegal and elite weapons. I did some digging, you could say, and had carefully selected more essentials for my heroic acts of kindness to find Smiley. One custom made bullet proof vest, twenty throwing knives, and two katana swords, which I had ordered over the sea at some illicit weaponry factory days before. I would have only bought one sword, but they came with a sparkly case and traveling backpack, not to mention, it was a buy one katana sword get the other one half off and a Mickey Mouse canteen.

                  I grabbed a butcher knife off of the kitchen counter, hurried up my steps to the room, and viciously cut open the package, laying each item onto my bed.

                  By contacting a super lanky, super nerd I had stumbled into weeks before at Mortimer High School named Stanley McGee, or The Lady Hacker on the streets, I was able to rid of any federal suspicion. Let's just say when my mother checked her credit card, she was cheerful in finding out that I had bought many boxes of condoms and cleavage enlarging bras.

                   Stanley eagerly picked out the bras himself. His payment for helping me out was unspeakable and humiliating, but thankfully, it would be carried out much later in the future.          

                  Once my items were carefully unpackaged and placed in a large black duffel bag, I pulled away a rack of shoes at the far end of my walk in closet and carefully placed the duffel bag behind it, moving around my clothes around it so that it was impossible to spot.

                  All of the evidence of my new essentials was hidden except for one small hunting knife that I had stuffed in my sports bra. I had slipped on a sweatshirt, running shoes, and yoga pants, I shut my closet door and pressed my back against it, staring down at my phone. My thumb swept between Gary and Ronny's number, trembling.

                  We need to talk ASAP or I'm going to the police. I mean it, I finally texted them both, stuffing my phone back into my pocket with a sigh.

                  I descended the grand staircase of the empty mansion slowly. My mother and father were gone again, probably doing some secretive hunting act that they thought I wasn't aware of. A run was definitely something that I needed to relieve all of my stress. I was probably the only idiot in town that was unafraid to go outside after what had happened the night before.

                  I was twenty feet from the front door when the doorbell rang. Salt went insane, throwing himself at the front door and scratching his tiny paws at the bottom of the door.

                  I froze and checked my wrist watch. It was late, too late for packages. The wrist watch was another gadget that I had gotten online that told time, unarmed alarms, mimicked and morphed voices, and screwed with surveillance cameras. Too bad I hadn't read the manual yet and could only tell time and play a mean game of Pacman.

                  The doorbell rang twice more and there was a loud bang that almost splintered the door in half. Someone was impatient.

                  I pushed aside a curtain by the front door and peered outside. Four men in suits stood outside on my porch with wraparound sunglasses, standing in a formation around one man with beautiful young man with white hair, dressed in a dark red sweater and a plaid undershirt.

                  "Great," I muttered, as the man's dark eyes caught mine and he smiled at me with only his lips.

                  I took my hunter knife out of my sports bra and I peeled open the door, hiding the blade easily behind the door.

                  "What are you doing here, Vladimir? How did you find my address?" I demanded, eying the bulky, expressionless body guards around him. Vladimir was the owner of Crave, the club that was currently all over the news as the center of Smiley's newest massacre.

                  "Ve have something very important to talk about, Pepper Ballard," he said.

                  I smiled fleetingly at him. "Not interested."

                  One of the suited men caught the door before I slammed it, then handed Vladimir a wooden basket of goodies. With a lip-tight smile, Vladimir smoothly handed to me, his cool hand brushing against mine. "Von't you let in your neighbor? I live right across the street, my family graciously gave you this house."

                  My jaw went slack. "Your family gave us this house?"

                  Vladimir nodded. "My mother vanted me to formally invite you and your family to an upcoming party. I must discuss the dress code and such... inside. Plus, there are many items in this basket that you vill not recognize that are from my homeland."

                  Vladimir then turned the wooden basket around in my hands around, revealing a large note in cursive handwriting inside of the basket that read:

                 I want to help you but he is watching.      

 ******

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