Dead Over Heels

by MaryJanice Davidson

  No.

  “They’re the king and queen of the vampires,” she was telling Nick, who had turned as cheesy-pale as the beer he wasn’t drinking. “None of them will touch us without their say-so. Although you’re acting like such a prick, they just might sic one or two of them on us for the hell of it.”

  I stifled the impulse to cheer. Also, to rip Sinclair a new one for not mentioning that little factoid. “So when you planned our honeymoon, you picked Vampire Central?”

  “Of course.” He had the audacity to look surprised. “Where else would I choose? The staff can accommodate anything we wish. The Grange was a natural choice. Of course”—he gave Nick a heavy-lidded look—“I wasn’t expecting company.”

  “How many of the staff?” Nick asked in a voice that sounded like he was being strangled. “And which ones?”

  “That,” my husband replied, “I will not tell you.”

  Jessica and I looked at the men, then at each other. It was never much fun to watch a pissing contest, especially when the odds were so firmly stacked in one person’s corner.

  After a long, awful moment I said, “Jessica’s right, Nick. We’d never let them hurt you.”

  “You didn’t even know about them, you stupid bitch!”

  “Nick!” Jessica gasped.

  Sinclair’s fist slammed on the table, which obligingly cracked. “Do not speak to my wife like that ever again.”

  “It’s okay, don’t fight, I’ve been called worse, please don’t fight,” I begged. “Let’s just get the check and get out of here, okay? Oh, and, um, pay for the table.”

  “Go back to Vampire Central?” Nick cried, aghast.

  “Well, there’s a Hilton down the block.”

  “Hilton,” Sinclair sneered. “Enjoy.”

  “What’ve you got against the Hilton corporation?” I cried. “Besides them, you know, spawning Paris and all.”

  “Isn’t that more than enough?”

  “I’ve had more than enough,” Jessica snapped.

  “Check, please!”

  Chapter 7

  We’d barely gotten down the block when we saw the flashing lights and crowd. “Uh-oh,” Nick said. “Crime scene.”

  “The perfect end to a perfect evening,” Sinclair muttered.

  “You guys stay here. I’m gonna check it out.”

  “You’re a little out of your jurisdiction!” I called after him. “Like, by two thousand miles!”

  “Fifteen hundred,” Sinclair and Jessica said in unison.

  “You know, now that he’s gone, how much longer are you going to let him torture us?”

  “I’m sorry,” Jessica said at once. “I guess this is turning out to be a pretty crummy idea. I just thought—I don’t know what I thought.” She cleared her throat. “You, uh, will mention to the staff not to snack on us, right?”

  “There’s an old vampire saying,” I told her. “Don’t shit where you eat.”

  “Ah, yes, that old vampire saying,” Sinclair said, smiling for the first time since the waiter took our order.

  We chitchatted for another minute or two, and then Nick came trotting back. “There’s a dead kid in that alley,” he said, almost snarling. “And if he’s more than thirteen I’ll eat the candles on his last birthday cake. So which one of you two dead assholes just couldn’t wait for a little snack? Huh? Or did you team up on the poor kid? Did you—”

  I slapped him. The sound was almost inaudible with all the background noise. One thing about New York I’d never get used to. All the noise. “That is enough, Nicholas J. Berry! You know Goddamned well I wouldn’t do that and neither would Sinclair. I know you’re pissed at us and I understand that, but there’s pissed and there’s ugly, and I’ve had enough of your ugliness. You don’t want to be here? Get the fuck lost. If you are going to be here, watch your fucking mouth.”

  He didn’t say another word all night.

  Chapter 8

  He couldn’t,” Jessica said the next night. “His jaw was numb for hours afterward. No feeling at all. I tried to talk him into going to the E.R. but he wouldn’t do it. I was afraid you’d broken his jaw. But you just bruised the hell out of it.”

  “Oh my God,” I said, appalled. I’d only been awake for about twenty minutes and she dropped this on me. “I didn’t mean to hurt him! That much.”

  She shrugged. “He didn’t exactly not have it coming. It’s so hard to defend your boyfriend when he’s being an unreasonable dick.”

  Tell me about it, I almost said, but managed to bite my tongue in time. Instead I yawned and jumped out of the bed.

  “I don’t know why you bothered to pack clothes at all,” my friend snarked, eyeing my naked form.

  “Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but it is my honeymoon.”

  “Where’s Sinclair?”

  “Dunno. But I’m betting he’s conducting a private investigation about the dead kid. You know we’d never, and I know we’d never, but victims like that make us all look bad. Although I love how Nick gets all high and mighty, pretending ordinary humans don’t pull this shit every damn d—” I closed my mouth with a snap; I’d almost broken Rule Number One: Do Not Shit On Your Best Friend’s Honey.

  She was nice enough to ignore my blunder. “And what’s this shoe doing sticking out of the wall?”

  I ignored that. “How’d you get in here, anyway?”

  “Huh? Oh. Sinclair let me have his spare key. Said he didn’t need one.”

  “He did?” Of course he did. He didn’t have a problem with Jessica. “You’ll, uh, keep that tidbit to yourself, right?”

  She gave me a look of such scorn, my eyebrows nearly scorched.

  “O-kay, don’t look at me like that.” I yawned and scratched. “I guess I better get dressed.”

  “Please,” Jessica begged. “And leave your armpit alone; you look like an ape when you do that. A tall, blond, vampiric ape.”

  “I cannot believe the shit I’ve had to eat, and I’ve only been awake for five minutes! Leave that alone,” I added, because Jessica was tugging at the shoe in the wall.

  “It won’t budge,” she gasped. “What did you do?”

  “Some things will never be told.” I opened the door, put a firm hand in the middle of her back, and pushed. “Later, gator.”

  The door had no sooner shut when it opened, and my husband (would I ever get tired of that phrase? prob’ly not) stood in the doorway.

  “Ready for our big day?” I asked.

  “I’d rather,” he replied, eyeing me up and down, “stay in tonight and discuss world politics while chewing on your labia.”

  “That’s . . . sweet. But you promised.”

  He sighed, which was unnecessary for a vampire. I guess his old habits died hard, too. “Let me see the list again.”

  This was a stall technique, since I knew full well he remembered all the stuff I wanted to do. Still, I obligingly dug in my purse and extracted an index card, on which I’d scrawled all the tourist-type things I wanted to do today: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty . . . like that.

  Sinclair never changed expression, but the farther down the list he went, the farther the left corner of his mouth turned down. Meanwhile, I was rapidly dressing in a bra, panties, linen walking shorts, a cherry red sweater, and a pair of René Caovilla walking sandals.

  “You look like a gladiator in those,” was his only comment as he handed my list back.

  “I am a gladiator. Now let’s go!”

  “Must we take the subway?” he whined. “We have a private car at our disposal, thanks to Jessica’s finely honed sense of guilt.”

  “It’s all part of the definitive New York experience,” I said, “so yes.”

  “So is getting mugged,” he muttered, courteously holding the door open for me.

  “Don’t tease. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Something cool to tell my mom.”

  “Awesome,” he replied tonelessly, and followed me out.

  Chapter 9

&n
bsp; Wow! It’s a good thing I’m dead, or I’d be exhausted.” “As opposed to simply bored out of your charming little mind.”

  “Oh, shut up. How could we not go up in the building King Kong climbed with Naomi Watts?”

  “But darling, he didn’t actually climb—”

  “Stop it, you’re ruining the whole thing!”

  “The remake, the original, or the evening?”

  “You’re so talented, you’re wrecking all three. Now, what’s next?”

  “Thankfully, we have completed your interminable list of chores—”

  “Five things!”

  “—and can now return to the hotel where we will be insulted and threatened by Detective Berry.”

  We walked on in silence for a moment while I thought about that.

  “You can’t really blame him for being scared, can you?” I asked quietly.

  There was another long pause, and finally Sinclair forced out a reluctant, “No.”

  “We essentially raped his brain, you know.”

  No comment from the king of the vampires.

  “Just sayin’.”

  Still no comment. I decided to drop the subject. For the time being.

  We were walking hand in hand down Broadway and I still couldn’t get over the noise. It sounded like noon, and it was nearly midnight! But on the flip side, the cool thing about NYC is that everything was open, practically all the time. We’d had no trouble knocking off my list, even though back in Minnesota, everything would have been closed by nine at the latest. Seven, in winter.

  “Spare change?” the zillionth homeless guy asked us, and I smiled at him and gave him a dollar. Sinclair disapproved of this, being a self-made man, but what the hell. I was a rich woman now; legally half of his was mine, and I could do what I liked with my one dollar bills.

  But—this was weird—I could hear the homeless guy fall into step behind us. Did he want more? Because that was just being greedy. It was one thing to be out of work and ask people for money, but to—

  I felt something sharp and pointy against the back of my neck.

  “Alley, now, fuckers!”

  “Which one?” I asked, which I thought was a pretty reasonable question, but he just dug the knife in a little more, pissing me off, and nudged me to the right.

  “Rings, wallet, purse,” he chanted, once we were off busy Broadway. Obviously a professional.

  “I can’t believe it!” I gasped.

  “I can,” Sinclair said with his usual air of morbid disdain. “And if he keeps jabbing you with that pin, I’ll be forced to make him eat it.”

  “We’re being mugged! We saw the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Met, Ellis Island, and the Central Park Zoo, and now we’re finishing the day like real tourists!”

  “I hate zoos.”

  “What kind of a communist psycho hates zoos?”

  “I’ll never get the smell of monkey out of my trousers.”

  “Rings, wallet, purse, now, fuckers!”

  “I can’t wait to tell my mom!”

  “About my trousers?”

  “Are you people fucking deaf?” Another jab. Sinclair snarled, but so quietly only I could hear him. “This is a robbery and you gotta give me your shit!”

  “Oh, I know what this is,” I assured him. I whipped around, faster than he could track, and snatched the knife out of his hand. I bent the blade with my thumb until it was useless as a weapon, then handed it back to him. This was really for his own safety, as God knew what Sinclair would have done to him.

  He stared at it, then stared at me, then turned to run. I thrust my ankle between his and he hit the street.

  “You know, I haven’t had a bite since we got here,” I said. “I mean, besides you.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  We fell on him.

  Chapter 10

  You’ve got an alibi,” Nick grumped at dinner the next night. It was early—about seven thirty—which was good, because I had places to be, and couldn’t suck down my drinks fast enough.

  “Besides our word?” Sinclair asked mildly. He’d given up any semblance of politeness and had brought the paper to dinner, which he was carefully reading. Although we’d been talking for ten minutes, this was the first time Sinclair had spoken up.

  “Yeah. Coroner placed the kid’s time of death between ten and eleven that night—”

  “While the four of us were having dinner,” I finished.

  “Well, duh, Nick,” Jessica said kindly. “You must have known it was a fresh crime scene. Betsy and Sinclair didn’t have time to ditch us, kill a child, and return to the table to argue over dessert.”

  “Mmmff,” Nick grunted.

  “Yes, an intelligent, unbiased professional would have known that,” Sinclair said to the paper.

  Astonishingly, Nick didn’t rise to the bait. A crisis of conscience, maybe?

  “Do you think it was someone here at the hotel?” I asked, almost whispering.

  Nick sent me a look of sizzling scorn; I almost wanted to duck. “Of course.”

  “I doubt it,” Sinclair replied absently.

  “Come on! If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it’s a fucking duck.”

  “I have no idea what ducks have to do with your crime scene.”

  Nick leaned forward, his blonde hair flopping into his eyes. He pushed it back impatiently and said, “I mean, right around the corner from a hotel run by vampires, with vampire guests, a kid gets killed—by a vampire—and you’re saying it’s got nothing to do with this place?”

  “I would be surprised. As Betsy said, vampires don’t shit where they eat.”

  “The smart ones, anyway.”

  “I’d actually agree with her”—he nearly gagged as he said it—“but what if it’s a message?”

  “You mean like a note? Except left on the body of a kid?” I felt my gorge rise.

  “Yeah. A message for the king and queen. They knew you were coming, right?”

  “Of course,” Sinclair said carefully. He’d actually laid the paper down.

  “So, maybe someone in here is trying to impress you. Pay tribute. Whatever.”

  “They pay tribute with blood oranges, not ritual sacrifice.”

  “And they oughta know killing a kid is the last thing that will impress us,” I snapped.

  “Will they?” Nick asked quietly. “Your predecessors were pretty bloodthirsty, right? And aren’t you having some trouble being taken seriously by the teeming hordes of the undead?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t put it like that,” I grumbled, downing my Cosmo (hey, we were in New York) in a hurry.

  “All they know is that there’s a new sheriff in town. My bet is that they’re trying to impress you or freak you out. Either way, he—or she—or they—killed that kid to get to you two.”

  “So what do you suggest we do, Detective Berry?”

  He ticked our options off on his fingers. “One: leave town. Now. Tonight. Two: interview every vampire in this building. Thr—”

  “Pardon me, Your Majesty.” We all looked up and saw the bellboy (bellman) who’d tried to help unpack my shoes when we got here. “The rest of the staff has arrived and await your convenience.”

  “Thank you, O’Neill. I’ll meet with them when we’ve finished here.”

  “As you wish, Majesty.” He bowed in my direction. “My queen.” He ignored Jessica and Nick, but Sinclair must have said they were okay, because otherwise he wouldn’t have come up to the table in the first place.

  And then he trotted off. I was relieved that he hadn’t drowned himself or jumped off a high building after I’d snapped at him our first night, though I’d had no idea he was a vampire.

  “You dog!” Jessica exclaimed. “That’s why you weren’t in the room earlier . . . you were out interviewing suspects.”

  “Of course. I am not unaware of my responsibilities, though it is always refreshing to have someone less than h
alf my age point them out to me.”

  Score! I thought it, but didn’t say it. Nick had the grace to look abashed. Or was it annoyed? Then he went back into jerk mode and said, “I want to be there for the interviews.”

  “No,” Sinclair said coolly.

  “Sinclair, you’re not a cop. There’s stuff you might miss.”

  My husband laughed politely.

  “Maybe you should—” Jessica began tentatively.

  Doing an eerie impersonation of Nick, Sinclair started ticking points off his long fingers. “One: he’s out of his jurisdiction. Two: even if he wasn’t, this is a vampire matter. Three: with his prejudice, he will be more a hindrance than a help, and four: although there is a killer in the city—perhaps more than one—I owe my people protection. Which does not include letting a human policeman find out they’re undead.”

  “Besides,” I said, “you have to help me do something instead. Now that Sinclair’s going to be tied up.”

  Nick managed to look mollified and pissed at the same time.

  Chapter 11

  I knew I looked like a dork, twirling around like Maria in The Sound of Music, but I couldn’t help it. “Oh, it’s all sooooo beautiful!” I cried. “This is a shoe store,” Nick informed me.

  “This is the Beverly Feldman shoe store,” Jessica said. “It’s Betsy’s Graceland.”

  I rushed from one gorgeous shoe to the next. Pumps, flats, sandals! Lace, leather, sequins! Ballet flats! I tried to talk but gurgled instead.

  Nick picked up a gorgeous pump with white lace and a brown bow. “This one is called ‘Calm.’ So maybe you should buy it.”

  “Oh, I’ll buy it. I’ll—miss?”

  The saleswoman, an attractive brunette in her thirties, glided over to me. Unobtrusive, yet helpful: just the way I liked ’em. “May I help you?”

  I whipped out one of my wedding presents . . . a Black American Express card. I hadn’t even known they made them in black. Turns out if you spend more than—I forget exactly, but I think it was two hundred grand—if you spend more than that with Amex in a year, you get a black card. Sinclair had given me mine the day after we got married.