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arrest, risking death. Ted chewed on that for a moment. Eventually he talked himself into thinking it would be no big deal. Boston Police didn't have the resources to have every Queequeg's in Boston under surveillance, and anyway he looked completely different, and Rhiannon and Half-caf were probably the only people alive who could positively ID him, and Half-caf might well be dead. Besides, he wasn't going to cower in here all day. Goddammit, he was Ted, the scourge of vampires, Ted, who had faced down a gunslinging killer while armed only with a pitcher of steamed milk.
    He was also Ted whose clothes were still bloodstained, and that would certainly draw unwanted attention to him if he left the house. Well, Laura's ex, Kendra, had been a rather beefy 5'10''; maybe she'd left some clothes here he could use. She almost certainly had. What was that joke Laura always told about lesbian second dates involving a U-Haul? It must have been based in something, because at the back of the closet, Ted found a pair of sweatpants that would reach up to Laura's head, and an extra-large Boston Breakers-replica jersey.
    He tucked Laura's laptop under his arm and walked down the stairs from her third-floor apartment. He turned onto the tree-lined street and his courage took a nose dive. A tattooed couple walked by hand-in-hand. The guy was wearing a Cannibal Corpse shirt—surely they were into blood and gore and had probably studied Ted's composite picture so they could have it tattooed on themselves somewhere. A woman jogged by pushing a stroller. Ted had never seen anybody actually jogging with a jogging stroller. Was she a cop? Was that a real baby? He knew it was stupid. But it felt real anyway.
    Laura lived as far from a Queequeg's as probably anyone in Boston. It took Ted ten agonizing minutes before he saw the familiar, if no longer comforting, blue sign at the end of the street. He was glad that this particular Queequeg's was on the corner of Centre and St. John—this saved him having to walk on Centre Street, with its stores and restaurants and nosy pedestrians. He approached from the St. John Street side and saw a large American car, the kind that only cops and old people drive, parked across Centre Street from Queequeg's. The two guys sitting in it were wearing sunglasses and appeared to be under forty. Undercover cops? It couldn't be. Could it? Even if it was, they wouldn't be able to ID him. But for all Ted knew, they might be taking pictures of everyone who walked in, and that was too big of a chance to take.
    Ted ducked into the alley behind Queequeg's, hoping he could still tap into the wireless signal back here. He saw nothing but the metal fire doors of the businesses and the dumpsters that held their trash. There weren't even any windows back here. Ted opened the plastic flap on the Queequeg's dumpster, tossed Laura's computer inside, climbed in and shut the lid.
    He tried not to think about what he was sitting on, and reminded himself that stale coffee gave off this ammonia smell that was a lot like piss, so it was probably just old coffee, though there was a sour note that was almost surely some milk that had gone off. And there couldn't be any rats in here, could there? He powered up the computer and looked around in the blue light emitted by the screen. He saw nothing but black garbage bags that looked kind of cool with blue light reflecting unevenly on their folds and creases.
    He popped the CD in and logged on to the internet using the Queequeg's wireless connection. Once at the Virtuality site, he double-clicked on the file on the CD. "Uploading settings" the screen told him, and two full minutes later, just as Ted was about to give up on this whole adventure and devote the rest of the afternoon to trying to get the piss and puke smell off of himself and, more importantly, Laura's computer, the screen changed. "Welcome back, Nyarlathotep," the screen said. Ted thought that Half-caf's user ID seemed familiar.
    "Play