Chapter 4 — The Alliance on Chicago Chronicles

The Report — Monday, 2 July 1990, 9:30 PM

Mon, 02 Jul 1990 21:30:00 +0000

Gary, Indiana — multiple locations

The letter had no name on it. Cream paper, old cursive, slid under the studio door like a knife between ribs. Your mother called the salon on Cottage Grove looking for you. She’s been calling every week. Someone told her you moved to Indiana. She has the Gary area code now.

Sable read it twice and put it face-down on the counter and drove to Miller Beach with a dead woman’s handwriting following her all the way east.

Friday Court — Friday, 29 June 1990, 9:00 PM

Fri, 29 Jun 1990 21:00:00 +0000

Modius’s Mansion, Miller Beach Gary, Indiana

She fed in a parking lot behind a strip club at eight o’clock on a Friday, which was not the worst place Sable had ever fed and not the best, and the man in the pickup truck came to believing he’d fainted and she left him in the passenger seat with the door open and the taste of cement dust on her tongue and drove east toward the mansion where a prince was waiting to ask her questions she couldn’t answer honestly.

The Alliance — Wednesday, 27 June 1990, 10:00 PM

Wed, 27 Jun 1990 22:00:00 +0000

Modius’s Mansion, Miller Beach Gary, Indiana

Victor called on Tuesday. The formal voice. The one he used when the words weren’t his.

“Allicia would like to see you. Tomorrow evening. The mansion. Come to the side entrance.”

The side entrance. Not the front door with the drawing room and the piano and the prince behind the lid. The other door — the one that led to the private wing, the lake-facing rooms, the part of the house where Modius kept the things he considered his.

Scorched Earth — Saturday, 23 June 1990, 9:00 PM

Sat, 23 Jun 1990 21:00:00 +0000

The Torch / Modius’s Mansion, Miller Beach Gary, Indiana

Victor wrote the name on a cocktail napkin the way men write names they know are dangerous: small letters, steady hand, the pen pressed hard enough to dent the cardboard underneath. Lakeside Holdings LLC. Gerald Fisk. Morris and Peck, attorneys, Hammond, Indiana.

Darius folded the napkin and put it in his coat pocket next to Modius’s note and drove south on Broadway to the mansion on Miller Beach with the numbers already assembling themselves in his head. The mortgage. The shell company. The attorneys in Hammond, which was Lucian’s territory, which meant the money was Lucian’s money, which meant the elder Gangrel who’d sat in a moth-eaten armchair at Elysium and told Darius that the docks didn’t need a king was now buying the only bar in Gary and every Kindred in the city was about to find out what it felt like when the food supply changed hands.