“What about what you did to me today at the restaurant? What kind of a signal was that?”
“Don’t blame me,” she replied. “That was a reaction to you. When you showed your claws and I saw the look on your face, my thoughts lashed out.”
“I promise to behave myself,” I said, knowing this was one promise I would always have trouble keeping. “You said your mother has passed on. Where’s your dad?”
Phaedra gave a chuckle that said, Him? Like he matters in my life. “My father’s doing life in Trenton, New Jersey. For murder. He doesn’t speak to me, and I don’t speak to him. I’m sure he preferred being locked up to dealing with me and my mom. You know, the Huntington’s.”
“Who are you living with?”
“Right now? My uncle Sal.”
“Gino’s father?”
“No. Uncle. He’s Sal Cavagnolo. For years I was passed among the relatives. Try being the crazy orphan girl going through puberty.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I gave my first blow job when I was eleven. I got laid when I was thirteen.”
Eleven? Thirteen? Disturbing to the point of revulsion.
I didn’t kiss a girl until I was fifteen. By that age, Phaedra was well acquainted with men and their dirty cocks.
She rattled the pills in her pocket. “Another side effect of these is increased sex drive. Not that I needed an excuse. I was dying anyway, so fucking was a good way to pass the time and make money. What was I waiting for? Usually it was better than watching television. Even with a scumbag like Barrett.”
“You slept with him?”
Phaedra gave a devilish laugh. “I never slept with anyone. But if you want to know, I didn’t have sex with Barrett. He paid me twenty dollars to look at my titties.”
“And that’s it?”
“No. I had to watch him jack off.” Phaedra put a charge in her voice like she took pleasure shocking me.
Which she didn’t. Instead I pitied her. Her story explained the “allowance” money that had fallen out of her pocket. She was dying and traded her youthful innocence for fast, cheap thrills.
“Don’t look so sad,” she taunted. “I learned lots about sex and even more about the way the world works.”
“And your uncle Sal?” I hadn’t met the guy but I had already pegged him as a rat. If he abused Phaedra, this was another reason to hang him by his tail.
“Uncle Sal’s been good to me. Around him, I can pretend I’m not the family’s dirty secret. But my aunt Lorena, Sal’s wife, hates me. She sees the effect I have on men. She calls me the strega, witch.” Phaedra gave a grin that was both ironic and condescending. “I don’t know what makes my relatives more uncomfortable. That I’m dying of Huntington’s or that I know who among them is a child molester.”
“And Gino?”
“He’s been okay. Nothing happened between him and me. Besides Uncle Sal, Gino’s the only friend I’ve had in the family.”
“Does Gino know about your reputation as a strega?”
“He says I’m the nicest of the witches in our family.”
“Any idea where I could find him?”
“I know where he lives.” Her side of the Toyota was completely fogged up. She adjusted the heater vents to clear the windows.
I drove from the restaurant parking lot. Phaedra gave directions west. “Go half a mile and get ready for a left.”
My sixth sense gave an electric pulse, though I suspected it was from my own misgivings rather than from an actual threat. Phaedra knew a lot about me. Too much. The scary part was that she learned it by going straight to my psyche.
I had to learn everything I could about her and confirm how much of the Huntington’s was true.
We approached the spur of the mountain where it crowded against the highway.
Phaedra pointed. “Here.”
I made the left turn and stopped in front of the county hospital. I fished a street map from between my seat and the center console. The county road went south along Pinos Creek. To the right, the vista remained open farmland; to the left, the ground rose into steep, rocky hills that lead to Horseshoe Mountain. The rainy fog turned the mountain into a jagged gray hump.
I put the map away and continued. We drove past a few houses.
Another county road branched from the right. We kept on the original road, passing a power relay station behind a tall wire fence, and proceeded south on the incline up the narrowing valley. No one but us fools would be out in this rain and gloom. I was sure we’d be alone for a long time.
I pulled onto a wide muddy shoulder and halted.
“What’s the matter?” Phaedra scanned the instrument panel.
“I need answers.” I removed the contacts from my eyes and looked at her.
Phaedra’s aura burned red, a typical human psychic shroud. Not vampire orange. Nor alien yellow. Just plain human red.
The penumbra broke into sharp points like it was covered in finger-sized thorns. I kept my hypnosis power in check, as I wanted to read her raw emotions.
Phaedra’s expression held an awed, fearful look like she’d put her face close to an open furnace.
I gave a leer and exposed the long fangs jutting from my upper lip.
Her aura flashed neon-bright with terror.
Good. She wanted a vampire, here I was.
Now for my questions. I blasted her with hypnosis. Her expression softened and her aura took the form of translucent gel.
I focused my gaze deep into the psychic conduit of those brown eyes. “Tell me your story. What do you know about the psychic world and what do you want from me?”
Under the power of my hypnosis, she had no choice but to tell me what I wanted to hear.
The truth.
CHAPTER 20
The tendrils withdrew into the sheath of Phaedra’s aura. Her lips parted and her eyes looked into the faraway.
To deepen the hypnosis, I grasped both of her hands and massaged the webs of flesh between the thumbs and index fingers. I could’ve fanged her but I didn’t want my mouth close to her skin. Enough creeps had taken advantage of her and I didn’t want to be on that list.
Her hands had smooth, unblemished adolescent skin. Her fingernails were ragged from where she’d been chewing on them.
To verify what Phaedra had told me, I went through the items she’d mentioned. Her name. The Huntington’s. The details between Gino and herself. How much she knew of her family’s criminal pursuits. What about the source of her psychic powers?
It was all as she’d originally told me.
And the zombies? She had no knowledge of zombies except to call them “the others.” Those between the living and the dead. Like me. But different. Good, I didn’t want to be confused with zombies.
It’s a crapshoot with hypnosis. When you go deep into the subconscious there’s all kinds of junk cluttering the mind. Sometimes you get right to the “truth,” like with Phaedra. Other times, sifting for answers was like dredging through mud, and there were the instances where you got a subject who gushed like a broken faucet.
I ordered Phaedra to sleep while I kept kneading her hands. Her head tipped forward and her breathing became heavy.
I let go of her hands and replaced my contacts.
“On three, wake up,” I said. “One.” I brushed back a wet curl that fell across her face. “Two.” I settled into my seat. “Three.”
Phaedra’s right eye twitched. She blinked and looked around the interior of the 4Runner.
“You okay?” I asked.
Phaedra checked the front of her jacket. Her expression turned cross. “What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“You think you know about vampires? Then if you’re with a vampire, you gotta expect all kinds of weird shit. But I didn’t touch you if that’s what you want to know.”
Phaedra fumed, angry and perplexed.
I put the shift lever into drive. “Do you want
to help me find Gino or should I take you back into town?”
She slugged from her bottle. “I’m no chickenshit. Let’s go to Gino’s.”
I angled from the shoulder and onto the asphalt. “How close are we?”
“Keep going. Past the wooden fences. I’ll tell you when.”
The mountain pressed against us from the right. To the left, the bottom of the valley widened and narrowed as the stream meandered through aspen thickets. Dense clusters of yellow leaves clumped around the pale, straight trunks. In the flat areas along the stream sat houses, ranging from Airstreams on blocks, to log cabins with porches and garages, to expensive ranchettes with horses and corrals.
White wooden fences bounded the more imposing properties. The white fences became ordinary wood, then simple straight posts holding up wire. After a while, the posts turned crooked and the tangled wire fencing appeared as if it had been scrounged from a salvage yard.
Phaedra sat up and brought her face closer to the windshield. Her breath fogged the glass for an instant before evaporating. “Go past the barn, then take a left at the first dirt road past the fence.”
Clouds sank between the mountains like big wet blankets and drenched the air with a steady drizzle.
A red barn loomed out of the mist. Muddy tracks veered off the asphalt. I slowed down.
“Wrong road,” Phaedra said. “Keep going past the fence.”
I gave the Toyota a little pedal but kept the speed low. I didn’t want to lose the fence as scrub bushes hid the posts and thick mist camouflaged the barbed wire.
Phaedra gave a heads-up about the fence line. The strands of barbed wire became slack and disappeared into the weeds.
The ground on the left dropped abruptly and an arrangement of rocks marked the entrance of a dirt road down the incline.
“This is it,” Phaedra said. She drew even closer to the windshield to peer over the left fender.
I halted for a moment. The asphalt here was clean, indicating no one had recently come onto the county road. I didn’t see any fresh tire tracks in the mud going the other way. No one, it seemed, had been at or left Gino’s lately, by car anyway. I put the Toyota into four-wheel drive, just in case the ruts got deep.
Electric lines on tall poles ran parallel to the dirt road. We circled the northern border of the property with the red barn. The road cut through a grove of junipers to a flat stretch of mud and grass. Yellow aspen peeked from behind the dark green junipers.
Phaedra pointed ahead. “That’s it.”
A long one-story house sat on the right side with Gino’s silver Titan pickup parked next to it.
Overlapping siding painted pastel yellow covered the building. A gray satellite dish pointed up from the corner of the roof closest to us. Water dripped over the tops of the rusted gutters. The place reminded me of government housing on an Indian reservation.
I slowed to a crawl and thought about putting Phaedra under again so I could scope the area sans contacts. But if I kept hypnotizing her, she’d wonder about the gaps in her memory and lose trust in me.
The house looked deserted. I halted the Toyota and paused. I put my sixth sense on maximum gain and detected nada.
Phaedra chewed on a fingernail. “Gino should be here.”
“Does he live alone?”
“Yeah, mostly. Sometimes his friends crash and he’s got girls spending the night.”
“Maybe he’s at their houses?”
Phaedra shrugged.
I couldn’t be as complacent. This started because of a zombie. Gino contacted me to investigate the details behind the mutilations and deaths of his riffraff comrades. Now I was here and Gino was missing.
I eased alongside the Titan. Phaedra didn’t wait for me to stop before popping the door. As soon as the Toyota quit rolling, she sprang out and circled for the front of the house.
I palmed my H&K.45 and got out. This time, I see a zombie, I’m going to pump him so full of lead he could be used as ballast on a freighter.
I stood for a moment and absorbed the ambience. The fog muffled noise and added a melancholy texture to the afternoon. I sniffed damp earth and the faint scent of a cedar fire from a distant chimney. I focused my sixth sense like a ray and scanned the building, the road, the surrounding tree line, the open grassy area to my right, the wall of mountain behind us. Everything seemed normal.
Phaedra cupped her hands against the front window and peered inside. Her breath fogged the glass. She wiped the spot clean and peered again. She backed away and shook her head. No Gino.
I tried the aluminum screen door at the entrance. Locked. I gave the knob an extra twist and broke the deadbolt. The main door was also locked.
Phaedra dragged a plastic milk crate under the window. She stood on the crate and jimmied open the sliding glass window. Moving quick as a squirrel, she levered one leg over the windowsill and tumbled inside.
Me and my vampire superpowers remained outside, still screwing with the door.
Phaedra screamed.
CHAPTER 21
I charged the door and kicked it off the hinges.
The odor of human gore filled my nose. Dried blood, lots of it.
I entered the room, pistol held at the ready, fangs extended, my nerves tingling. My kundalini noir tightened into a protective coil.
Phaedra was doubled over against the wall, between a couch and an upright lamp. She gasped in the effort to speak.
I made a shush motion.
Phaedra covered her mouth and withered, sliding down the wall to the baseboard.
The front room had an ugly plaid couch, coffee table and end tables covered in vinyl woodprint, and mismatched lamps. A bong, a lighter, and a bag of pot sat on the coffee table.
Blood on the carpet trailed from the hall on my left and to the kitchen in front of us.
The kitchen table was on its side, two legs broken off, and the chairs scattered like they’d been thrown aside.
I crept along the wall, my eyes peering down the sights of my.45, and turned the corner into the bedroom.
Blood-soaked bedcovers lay twisted from the mattress and across the floor to the hall. A heap of clothes covered a chair in the corner. The butt of a pistol stuck out from under the only pillow along the headboard. A cell phone was plugged into a charger on the nightstand.
Tough guy Gino must have been asleep, taken by surprise, and dragged out. I didn’t see evidence-women’s clothing, for example-that indicated he hadn’t been alone.
Congealed drops of blood clung to the headboard. If he had been clubbed on the head, there would be a fine spray of blood spatter across the headboard and walls. From the looks of the blood pattern, I guessed that he had been stabbed and the drops on the headboard were what had flown off the blade.
Phaedra appeared in the doorway. One hand still covered her mouth and she looked liked she was about to throw up.
I backtracked from the bedroom and examined a ruffled trail on the carpet nap. Phaedra put her free hand on my shoulder and stayed close.
Our boots left dirty tread marks. There was a series of faint shoe prints across the middle of the carpet; one had heels like a men’s shoe, the other a continuous sole like the bottom of a cross-trainer. Not much mud in these prints. The zombie attack happened before today’s rain had started.
Another detail. These prints didn’t match those of yesterday’s zombies. Meaning, at least two more zombies for a total of four.
When I stopped for a closer look, Phaedra bumped against me and recoiled, startled.
A wide shallow mark showed where a heavy object had been dragged, probably Gino’s body. Considering all the blood spilled in the bedroom, there were only scattered drops on the hall carpet. Whoever took Gino must’ve wrapped him in a blanket or bedsheet. Either that or he didn’t have much blood left when they carried him out.
The table and chairs in the kitchen had been pushed aside to clear a path to the back door. Cornflakes littered the floor. Maybe I’d luck out and find a
bloody handprint on the door. No, the doorknob and frame were clean.
The back door was shut but didn’t look right. I adjusted my grip on the pistol. I hooked the edge of the door with my shoe toe and pulled. The door swung open. The knob clattered to the floor. The back screen door lay twisted in a puddle of rainwater on a concrete patio slab.
I paused at the threshold. A weedy yard gave way to junipers and Ponderosa pines climbing up the hill behind the house. A metal tube snaked to a white propane tank in the yard. I studied the muddy ground beside the tank and saw no tracks or evidence that someone hid behind it. Convinced that no surprises waited, I stepped out and examined the patio slab.
Rain splashed into a line of pink puddles between the door and the far end of the slab. They had carried Gino this way. I crossed the slab and looked for prints in the mud or a path broken through the weeds. The few remaining footprints had been obscured by the rain.
The weeds and grass were bowed in two trails leading east, toward the creek. They had left several hours ago. I didn’t see any point in following. The rain would’ve obliterated their prints and I couldn’t leave Phaedra behind.
They had gone east. What was there?
Gino was a big guy, how had they trucked him off? In a litter carry, or was he chopped into convenient, easy-to-carry pieces?
Back inside, I found Phaedra leaning against the refrigerator, hugging herself and trembling. She mumbled, “At least they didn’t cut him to pieces like they did Stanley.”
I wouldn’t be too sure. “You mean Stanley Novick?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you know him?”
“Through Gino. He told me what happened.”
Why had they taken Gino instead of leaving his mutilated corpse?
Phaedra’s right eye blinked so fast I thought her eyelids would spring loose. She pressed it with the palm of her hand.
We had broken into Gino’s house and tracked mud and left our marks over everything. I wasn’t interested in preserving the crime scene. This wasn’t CSI, I was after zombies.
I took her free hand. She wouldn’t move.
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