I limped away, feigning an injury so no one would think my sudden recovery too strange, and then headed for the nearest subway station to lose myself in the crowd. I'd been videoed and had been driving a stolen vehicle. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

My plans were in disarray, and those people who had helped me likely had forfeited their lives. No, I lie.

Things went south not because of anything Corey or Frisby had done. Whitefarrow had pushed his drivers and the police had shown up. Unless the man happened to see a video of me on the Internet being dragged from a car near his headquarters, there was no reason for him to blame anyone but himself for things going badly.

On the true downside, my enemy now knew I was in the city. And he would redouble his efforts to find me and to eliminate me. If he was careful and ruthless before, now he would positively be flying off the hinges. What would he not do to eliminate me?

I lost myself in the crowd, and then I lost myself in the city for a time before steering back toward my current hotel room. A short text from Corey told me that my enemy had made it back to his building and immediately had lawyered up. That was no surprise. There would be some legal troubles for a time, but .... Wait.

There would have to be a court date at some point. Even Whitefarrow would have to leave his bunker for something like that, if only for a short time. It was something I'd have to keep in mind.

But I'd lost Corey's assistance. He was smart enough and sufficiently disciplined to keep what had transpired under his hat, but he decided that he could no longer risk working for a person like Whitefarrow and resigned that same day. According to the short text he sent me, a number of his fellows went with him. I doubt any of them new Whitefarrow drank blood. To them, he was just a peculiar fellow who creeped people out.

It crossed my mind to apply for a security job there, but Whitefarrow and a few of his crowd knew me by sight. It would have been a good way to get close to the man.

Or I could burn his building down.

I was hoping to avoid that option. Not that I was terribly ethical, but enormous conflagrations do tend to draw unwanted attention from the authorities. Alas, I could think of no other way to force the man from hiding. Destroy his bunker, and he very soon would scamper out.

I already was making plans, trying to figure out how to approach the issue, when an app on my phone pinged. It was a short text from Rohan, who I had told how to contact me in case of emergency.

Whitefarrow wanted to talk.

I jumped at the opportunity. ... No, of course I didn't. My enemy didn't want to talk to me. He wanted me dead. Of that fact there was no doubt. Any attempts to reach out to me through Rohan were just feints to buy time in order for him to find me, or to lure me into some sort of trap.

Of course, Isolde was still alive. Perhaps, just perhaps, a deluded Whitefarrow thought he could leverage my old friendship with Rohan to buy his life in the same way? It seemed farfetched, but stranger things had happened.

I couldn't decide, and by that time I approached my hotel. As was my usual, I stopped and had a look around, then circled the block to see if I was being watched. It was a good time to be paranoid, and it wouldn't hurt to make sure no one had discovered my resting place.

On second thought, I collected my meager belongings, checked out, and sought other accommodations. Caution was my watchword, and I soon was established in new lodgings. My first act was to send Frisby a text telling him to go back to business as usual and that I'd have more instructions for him later. The chap probably was still at the café where I'd left him.

Then I texted Rohan and told him I agreed to meet with Whitefarrow. I would name a time and a place later. That reply wasn't something I did on an impulse. I probably wouldn't meet with him. But if my enemy thought that I would, he might focus all of his energies on killing me at our potential meeting. That left me free to operate until then—or so I hoped.

And if push came to shove, a meeting might get the man out of his bunker long enough for me to send him to his final reward. Gregory Whitefarrow, you've had a long run. It's time for you to rest.

In the meantime, I continued to plot.

How would one go about renting, or otherwise obtaining, a gasoline tanker? And how would such a thing be ignited? No doubt there were safety systems on tankers, but if a few thousand gallons of gasoline couldn't get the building to burning, then nothing would. I'd need to get measurements for the underground parking area of Whitefarrow's building.

I made a few discreet inquiries and spent some time on the Internet. Those things were not my strong suit, but I did manage to learn a little about tankers and how they worked. It came to me that it didn't need to be that complicated.

In fact, the whole thing could be done in a low-tech manner. I'd learned to drive an automobile during the technology's infancy, and I'd driven every manner of vehicle since.

I certainly could drive a fuel tanker. Then it would be just a matter of puncturing the tank and igniting the fuel. A shotgun or rifle could do the puncturing, and a road flare or two certainly would set the thing ablaze. With five or six thousand gallons of fuel to burn, the thing would go up like a roman candle.

And getting the tanker? No need to go to the trouble of fabricating documents or signing rental agreements. Fuel was delivered to fuel stations throughout the city on a regular basis, often late at night. I need only familiarize myself with the schedules at which those deliveries were made and then liberate the tanker that I needed on a date of my choosing. That simple.

I checked the Internet to determine the service stations closest to Whitefarrow's headquarters and then went to have a careful look at each. I might even grab something to drink on the way.

___

I opted not to drink that night after all.

Drinking evened me out, but only as long as I kept drinking. I already had fed five nights that week, so the hunger was especially bad. For an hour or so, until I got it under control, it was all I could do to think straight. Time to dry out.

After pulling myself together, I got a good look at the gas stations near Whitefarrow's place. I even chatted up the attendants and managed to finagle the gas delivery schedules for each.

Apparently all were owned by the same company and used the same wholesaler. Deliveries were made on the same night, four nights a week. I'd drop by tomorrow night, when the next deliveries were scheduled, and have a look at the process.

There was an all-night café a few blocks over that would be ideal to think things over. It wasn't terribly late by that time, and I noticed that I had a message from Fallon. She'd seen a video online of someone that looked very much like me who'd been in a car accident and wanted to know that I was okay.

Great.

I didn't like lying to her. But I made up a gauzy story about the accident being not nearly as bad as it looked and told her I walked away without a scratch. I merely had been shaken up when the airbag deployed. It seemed plausible, and she appeared to believe me if her next note was any indication.

But damn. A video of me was out there. Happily, my friend had a policy against posting on any social media that was not her own, and I asked her not to mention the video to anyone, to which she assented.

Fallon knew me only as Bess Porter, a name I made up on the fly, half as a joke, when she and I first had met. But it might put her in danger if someone who recognized me in the video somehow used Fallon to get at me. Lord, I did not want her in that position.

I needed to end this war, to do away with Whitefarrow and be done with it. The passion of that need, combined with my intense hunger, made me angrier and less rational than I'd been in many ages, angrier even than I'd been in Chicago.

It took me most of the night to again regain my calm, and as often was the case in such circumstances, I did something in the interim that I ought not have done.

There was a very good chance Whitefarrow would keep his people close to him over the next days, and all in his orbit would be on high alert. But I got it into my head that I wanted to hurt someone, so I began pacing off a path between my enemy's headquarters building and 84th Street.

Whitefarrow's right-hand man Cedric was an idiot. I already had cut the fool once, and I'd made an attempt on his boss's life that would have been successful but for the arrival of the police.

And there he was, a few hours later, walking home from the office on his own, a cocky hitch in his gait. I carefully scrutinized the area, looked out for security agents who might be shadowing the man, and then slipped ahead to lie in wait.

It was the easiest kill I'd made in years. The swaggering prick hardly paid the least attention to his surroundings, and I had the piano wire around his neck and had him on the ground before he knew I was there. A few brutal tugs later, and I was kicking his head down the road like a football, laughing like the happy little girl that I was, all before his body had even stopped twitching.

And why shouldn't I do so? Until that point, I'd refrained from striking the man dead because I wasn't certain whether Whitefarrow knew I was in the city. Now he knew.

It was totally unplanned and thoroughly irresponsible, but lopping off that idiot's head filled me with more joy than a hundred birthday surprises. I still felt like I needed a drink, but the urge wasn't quite so bad. Thank you, Cedric Wayne, wherever you are.

Now I just needed to murder his boss.