Blood Oranges (9781101594858)

by Tierney, Kathleen; Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  He took a deep, hitching breath and turned back onto Park. I told him when we reached the intersection with Haven, to take a right. He was a good boy, and did as he was instructed.

  “So, who’s after me?”

  “Well, given you’ve pissed off just about every preternatural son of a bitch in Rhode Island . . . and sizable chunks of Massachusetts and Connecticut, might be hard to narrow the list down.”

  I don’t think he said anything else until after we’d crossed the Pocasset and turned north onto Dyer Avenue. I think you could probably see the stagnant green water of the pond by then. Both the windows were down—because, of course, the AC didn’t work, but also because the window handles didn’t work and there was no way to roll them up. I didn’t bother to ask what he did when it rained. The breeze through the window did nothing much to cool the stifling air inside the Gremlin.

  “Didn’t know vamps sweated,” he said.

  “Well, learn something new every day, don’t you?”

  “Though, if I ever had stopped to think maybe they did sweat, I’d have guessed maybe they sweated blood, like—”

  “Hey, Bobby. You got any idea just who that nasty’s mama bear was?”

  “No, not really. I mean, I didn’t ask. But the way she changed, the wings and all, made sense had to be something wicked big.”

  “Ever heard of a vamp calls herself the Bride of Quiet?” I took that whiter shade of pale he turned as a yes.

  “She’s the one wants me dead?”

  “I’m just guessing here, but that’s where I’d put my money. Offhand, can you think of anyone with a better fucking reason? Inconvenienced any archdukes of Hades lately?”

  “Oh holy God,” Bobby Ng said, and the way he said it, probably the way someone on death row might say the same thing first look he or she gets at the gas chamber or the electric chair. Well, not that Rhode Island has the death penalty, but you know what I mean.

  “God? When has he ever bothered to lend half a helping hand?” And he told me I shouldn’t blaspheme and pointed at the five rosaries and various other religious doodads dangling from his rearview mirror. That’s something I haven’t mentioned. I’ve seen altars less decked out with Catholic tchotchkes than the inside of Bobby Ng’s Gremlin. There was a plastic Virgin Mary glued to the dashboard, along with a pair of those disembodied praying hands that have always given me the willies.

  “I’m a vampire, Bobby. Even if I believed in all this Jesus shit—and I don’t—wouldn’t you think the big guy in the sky has already written me off his holy guest list?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Turn here,” I told him, jabbing a thumb at a bridge leading into the cemetery. The bridge was shaded by a grove of trees, and I almost told Bobby to stop right there. I had that tingling on the back of my neck, and maybe vamps don’t combust by light of day, but they sure as fuck get hot. I looked down at the river and imagined how cool the water would feel flowing over me.

  “You made me drive to a cemetery, Quinn?”

  “Come on now,” I said, my throat suddenly gone so dry it was getting hard to talk. “Don’t tell me the great and infamous Bobby Ng, Demon Slayer, is afraid of a graveyard. After all, I only thought about shooting you in the balls that night at Swan Point. With a bolt. So, you gotta be packing something in your tighty whities.”

  “I only wear boxers,” he said.

  “Of course you do, Bobby. Of course you do,” and I told him to shut up and drive. A few seconds rushed by, and we’d left the shady trees behind.

  I had Bobby drive his junk heap all the way to the western edge of the cemetery, and then park on a low weedy bluff overlooking the river. The cemetery occupies a sharp kink in the Pocasset, so there’s water on three sides: east, north, and west. Oh, and I forgot to mention, back where we crossed the bridge, there’s another myth you can wrap in yesterday’s news and leave out with the recycling; vamps have no trouble whatsoever crossing running water. Not sure where that one came from. Anyway, I told him to cut the engine, and he did. I told him to get out of the car, and that he’d better not even think twice about running (suspecting the notion had already crossed his mind at least once). He complied, and I climbed out and stood there by the open passenger door a moment, gazing up at the summer sun. Blinding bright bastard, like the goddamn eye of Polyphemus, or the eye of that sadistic, fickle God I have no intention of ever granting admission to my view of this shit-ugly world.

  “What now?” Bobby asked, and I blinked a few times, rubbed at my eyes, then stared at him across the hood. Orange afterimages danced in front of my eyes.

  “What now is you answer a few questions, and if I like what I hear, you get to go back to delivering pizzas and dope for Uncle Paulie.”

  “How’d you know about the . . .” he started, but then trailed off.

  “What sort of questions?” he asked instead.

  “The sort I need answers to,” I replied, and stepped around to his side of the Gremlin.

  He opened his mouth, then shut it again. Wise fucking move, Mr. Ng.

  There was dandruff on his shoulders, a scatter of flakes that stood out like snow against his black T-shirt (which, by the way—and, as always, constant reader, I shit you not), featured Count Chocula and a cocoa-flavored bowl of cereal. I brushed the dandruff away, then gently placed a hand against the base of his skull, slipping my fingers beneath his lank black hair. He flinched. I had no intention of hurting him, but how the hell could he know that, right?

  “You gonna get me fired, Quinn, if you don’t let me get back to work soon.”

  “Then I suggest you tell me what I want to hear, and we’ll be on the road again in no time at all. Now, first question, that night at Swan Point, you said ‘they’ promised you the Alice Cregan kill. I need to know who promised you, Bobby. Who hired you for that hit?”

  “I wasn’t hired,” he said. “I was glad to have the chance to do her for free.”

  “Well, aren’t you a charitable soul. But that doesn’t answer my question, does it?”

  “Quinn, I tell you that, I’m a dead man.”

  “Didn’t I already inform you I heard there’s a price on your head?”

  “Yeah, you did,” and right here he made the mistake of smiling, of believing maybe he had me over a barrel. “But if that’s true, what do I have to lose by not telling you shit about who it was?”

  “Wrong answer,” I said, and gripped the back of his skull, slamming his face smartly into the scalding hood of the car. I gotta admit, he bled a lot more than I’d expected, and Jesus but that blood smelled sweet. I held Bobby’s face against the hood until he’d stopped calling me names, then I let him stand up straight again, but I didn’t release my hold on him.

  “Damn, Bobby. That hurt? That looked like it hurt. Now, you want to try again?”

  “I think you broke my fucking nose,” he sputtered through the blood streaming out of his nostrils and into his mouth.

  “Not yet I haven’t. But you can be sure I will, you keep that crap up. Was it B? Was it Mr. B hired . . . I mean, was it him granted you the honor of taking out Cregan?”

  “No,” he said very, very quickly, still sputtering. He wiped at his mouth and spat on the asphalt. “It wasn’t him. I never talk to that asshole.” I’m not sure if what I felt was relief at hearing that, or if it was a sudden knot in my stomach, considering everyone else who might be behind this clusterfuck.

  “Fine. So, it wasn’t B,” I said. “Tell me who it was.”

  “What, you think he’s your friend? You think just because it—”

  I smacked his head against the hood again, and this time there was a faint, but nonetheless audible, crack as his nose did, in fact, break. And suddenly, it seemed to me there was blood spraying just about everywhere. A veritable rain of blood. Bobby Ng howled, and I pushed my k
nees into the back of his, so that he lost his footing and dropped fast and hard, smacking his chin on the edge of the car as he fell. More blood. And a tooth popped out from between his lips and lay glinting on the ground like an oddly shaped pearl.

  This scene was getting a whole lot uglier a whole lot faster than I’d ever intended, and I looked about to be sure there were no witnesses but the dead and their headstones. There weren’t. But still, I quickly pulled my hand away from Bobby’s head and took a step or two back from him. I drew a deep, deep breath, wishing I could stop smelling all that goddamn blood. Sure, I’d come to suss out whatever Bobby knew, right? But I honestly hadn’t gone to Cranston that day to murder the guy in a graveyard.

  “Fuh you!” he grunted and spat again, leaving another incisor on the tar and gravel. “Uh duhn’t knuh ’oo highed muh, ’kay?”

  With the broken nose, Bobby’s voice was coming out in breathless puffs, like some weird, aspirant version of a Cockney accent. To my credit, I managed not to laugh. But that might only have been the hunger having its way with me, all the world suddenly shrinking down to a pinprick of smell and taste, the promise of the pungent and the piquant.

  “Fuh yuh,” he said again. “Ah was gunnah tell yuh—”

  “Tell me what, Bobby?” I asked, my own voice all at once sounding small and very, very fucking far away. “What were you going to tell me?”

  “—uf yuh’d gibbed meh uh chunce.”

  “I’m giving you the chunce now. Might be the last time. You might not want to waste it.”

  I saw there was a small dent in the hood of the Gremlin that hadn’t been there before, and I wondered if I’d given the creep a concussion. And I heard Mean Mr. B inside my head then, his purling, slick intonation where my own thought voice should be.

  Real clever move, Siobhan. Real shrewd. Keep on beating him, he’ll tell you anything you want to hear. Kill him, he won’t tell you a thing, now will he?

  “Fuck off,” I muttered.

  “Fahk yuh, batch!” Bobby squawked loud as he was able through the pain and the blood and what I’d done to his nose and mouth.

  “I wasn’t talking to you, Bobby,” I told him. “Will you just tell me what I need to know. You might think I’m full of shit, but I’d really prefer not to hurt you any more.”

  “Ah cunt hahly eben tahk,” he said and coughed.

  “I’m sort of almost sorry for that, okay? But you’re gonna have to try. Hell, answer the question and I’ll even drive you to the ER.”

  Bobby leaned forward so his forehead was resting against the left front wheel well. Blood ran down the side of the car, dripped onto the balding tires, and spattered the asphalt and the knees of his jeans. I was never before in my life so aware of anything as I was, in that instant, aware of every drop of Bobby Ng’s spilled blood.

  “Duhn’t knah, uhkay? Duh’nt knah huh. Jahst ah phun cull. Nuhber wuhs bocked. Duh’nt knah huh.”

  “Jesus, Bobby, I can hardly understand a word you’re saying.” Which was true, but not so much because of his broken nose. More because my heart was starting to sound (and feel) like a kettledrum.

  “Huhz faht id dat?”

  “Mine,” I admitted. “So, it was a blocked number, and you have no idea who called you. Man or woman?”

  “Mahn,” he murmured. “Huh suhnt meh tuh Bahstun Hahey fuht duh guhn.”

  “Gun?” I asked, but right then I remembered the ridiculous blunderbuss Bobby was carrying that night at Swan Point, like a movie prop or something maybe he’d stolen from a museum somewhere. The sort of gun John Paul Jones and George Washington and all those other Revolutionary War motherfuckers must have carried.

  “You mean Boston Harry?” I asked, leaning closer again, trying to make out the mangled words.

  “Whut ah jut sat. Bahstun fuckin’ Hahey.”

  Everyone who’s anyone wicked, they all know who Boston Harry is, and it was a name you didn’t use in polite company, as some are wont to say. A name you don’t just toss about willy-nilly, not unless you want to wind up lots worse off than that dumb jerk kneeling there by his car.

  “Fuck me,” I said, and that’s about the time I realized Bobby was crying. “Christ,” I sighed. “Will you please not do that?”

  “Uht huts.”

  “It wasn’t just any gun was it? There was something special about it, something that would have stopped Alice Cregan.”

  If he weren’t such an incompetent cocksucker, Mr. B said inside my head.

  Bobby nodded, but didn’t try to say anything else, and I was sort of grateful for that. Besides, I was too busy trying to ignore the smell of blood, and come up with a plan for finding Boston Harry that wasn’t suicidal to make sense of Bobby’s muttering. That’s exactly what I was doing when I felt a sort of pain I’d never felt before. Imagine your ribcage being turned inside out after having been doused with gasoline and set on fire . . . and you’re halfway there. I saw my fingernails darken and start to curl, and then I didn’t see anything else at all until I came to in the stinking marshes at the edge of Dyer Pond. I like to think Bobby Ng never knew what hit him.

  * * *

  So, yeah. I came to in the mud and the cattails, sometime after midnight. I’d figure that out later, the time. I lay there for a moment, listening to the frogs and the sounds of cars in the distance, smelling the ever-present odor of decay one smells in a marsh. It seemed fitting, given my situation. Lying there, my mind, at first only confused and unable to take in more than those smells and sounds, began to puzzle out just what my situation was. I was naked, shivering, and the moon was watching me as surely as the sun had. I thought—and I recall this quite distinctly—So, the God I don’t believe in has two eyes.

  I rolled over onto my back (I’d come awake on my left side). My mouth tasted like mud and blood and bile. Mostly mud. I had mosquito bites; lots of mosquito bites. I wondered if maybe there was now a swarm of hairy vampire mosquitoes. My stomach hurt like hell. There was something crawling across my belly. I never did figure out what it was, but I brushed it away into the darkness between the reeds, and stared back at the ogling moon, the nighttime voyeur eye of Jehovah, if it suits your fancy. I lifted my arm to give it the middle finger, a good “fuck off,” and that’s when I realized just how much every single muscle in my fucking body ached. I turned my head to one side, pressing my cheek deeply into the muck again, and there, only a few feet from me, was a sizable pile of puke, explaining the throw-up taste in my mouth. There were sizable chunks of bone.

  I’d turned loup, and I’d killed, and then eaten, Bobby Ng.

  I said something appropriate, like “Fucking, fucking fuck all,” and tried to get to my feet. It took me several tries. My legs were weak and the mud was deep. The first few steps, I sank in up to my knees. By the time I reached more solid ground, I was out of breath and had to lie down in the grass and rest awhile before going any farther. By the light of that waning last quarter moon (I’ve learned a lot about the phases of the moon since that night; you live this life, the moon takes on all sorts of importance), I saw that hardly an inch of me wasn’t smeared with mud and gore. There were various unrecognizable bits of plant matter plastered to my sticky skin. When I was strong enough to walk again, I did the best I could to get my bearings. I stumbled along eastward until I came to a narrow stream, where I did the best I could to wash. Considering the stream was pretty mucky its own self, the results were so-so. I washed out my mouth, which seemed more important than getting my body clean. There was a cemetery just across the stream, and, if I hadn’t gone far during my time as a loup, I guessed it was either Pocasset or Saint Anne’s. Turned out it was, in fact, the latter. Saint Anne’s is newer and the rows of dead more neatly laid out, like those dominoes from my dream. Anyway, I was walking a little better by then, and it wasn’t far north to Pocasset. With any luck, no one had found whatever I’d
left of Bobby—assuming I’d left anything—or his car. His car was the most important part. I wasn’t about to go waltzing out into the bright streetlights of Cranston bare as the day I was born. If I were lucky, the car would be there, and I’d only have to worry about someone—hopefully not a cop—noticing a naked, muddy woman behind the wheel.

  I was lucky. And how often does that happen?

  And yeah, there was some of Bobby Ng left beside the car. Mostly bones, and mostly bones from the waist down. His jeans and those fabled boxer shorts were gone, too. Only his tennis shoes and tube socks remained. Staring at what remained of the corpse, I decided I must have torn the poor bastard in two. Maybe I’d dragged the upper half away into the marshes. Maybe it was tucked not-so-neatly behind one of the nearby tombstones. More likely, I’d eaten most of it, which would explain the vomit and the cramps. I’d soon learn what sits perfectly well in the belly of a loup in loup form rarely ever agrees with a loup in human form. But I wasn’t craving blood any longer, so at least Bobby had multitasked in death, which I sort of doubt he’d ever managed to do in life. Unless being an idiot and an asshole at the same time counts.

  The Gremlin’s doors were still open, and I wondered about security. But maybe Pocasset Cemetery didn’t have any. I stepped over the half corpse—legs and intestines and spine and whatever—and slipped in behind the steering wheel. I reached over and pulled the passenger door shut. The keys were still in the ignition. I’d have been screwed if Bobby had taken them out and put them in his jeans pocket. I started the car, then waited to see if the noise would attract the attention of any rent-a-cops who might not have noticed the messily bisected dead guy and his abandoned car, but whose attention might be drawn to the noise of the sputtering engine.

  I swore to the ghost of Bobby Ng that I was not driving that rust-bucket all the way home. I put the Gremlin into reverse . . .