Repeat until you’ve got blisters. When I was finally finished with the .45s, I did the .38s in a separate hollow pointing tool. Felt like forever.
Today I wasn’t creating hollowpoints, just making them wider and deeper. From another drawer, I took a pair of latex gloves and put them on, necessary because the next thing I took from the drawer was a beat-up plastic baggie—it was so old and worn you almost couldn’t see through it—full of hollow silver beads, each about three sixteenths of an inch in diameter, perfect for the hollow points I’d reshaped.
Why not use silver bullets? Because I didn’t have the equipment to make them and I didn’t have time. You can’t just heat it up and pour it into a mold—when you see that in the movies, it’s lead, not silver—you have to use a tiny centrifuge to drive it in at several gees. Also, silver shrinks a lot when it cools. A .45 mold produces .40s.
I didn’t remember where I’d gotten those damned beads, maybe it was a thrift shop. Whatever they’d been strung on was long gone. Maybe wire, maybe string. There were at least a hundred of them, and I knew that they were pure silver—purish, anyway—because I’d burned the hell out of my fingers, accidentally establishing that. In 90 years, you collect lots and lots of oddities. I hated to think what my basement would look like in another 90 years. Love and marriage, horse and carriage, vampires and—pronounce it the English way, “gerridge”—sales.
I poured the beads into my case cleaner, a machine descended from a rock collector’s tumbler, meant to remove tarnish, burned powder, and other things from the empty cartridge cases you’re about to reload. Mine is old-fashioned; it’s a small drum that really tumbles. The newer ones vibrate. They all use pulverized nutshells as a polishing medium.
While all that was happening on a shelf under the bench, I gave each hollow point a degreasing with alcohol and a Q-tip, and set the modified cartridges up in special wooden blocks meant to hold fifty at a time in nice neat rows of holes, and keep them that way. Then, on a plastic coffee-can lid, I extruded both halves of the components from a pair of epoxy tubes, and started mixing them with a toothpick. It was fairly cool in the basement and the stuff would take some time to set.
I put a single sticky drop in each hollowpoint.
I stopped the case tumbler, separated the now-shiny beads from the medium by pouring it all through a screen, and, being sure to use the gloves, carefully inserted a bead into each bullet, where it sank halfway into the epoxy. It was still liquid enough that some of the stuff would flow into the hollow beads, anchoring them firmly in place.
I now had a hundred vampire-killing cartridges, at least in theory.
I went upstairs to see what the enemy looked like.
26: FACIAL RECOGNITION
“It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom
a mistake.”—H. L. Mencken
“Robert Downy Jr.” Sandwich in hand, Quyen looked down over the shoulders of Surica and Jess at the portrait taking form on Jess’s tablet. “Oh, hello, J. We brought a big box of gyros over if you’re interested.”
I was. Gyros, she’d said, famously known elsewhere as doner kebab, sometimes spelled donair or donar, kebap, or kebabi. Also known as yeeros or yiros, shawarma or souvlaki. Some folks call them “donner kebab”, but only in the Sierra Nevadas. Call ‘em lamb-lathe sandwiches, I don’t care. I love the stuff. I tossed a look of greeting at Surica. She looked up and smiled back at me—pretty bravely, I thought, given the memories being raked up. Silly as it may seem, my day was made.
“He looks more to me like Charles Bronson,” Quinn argued. “The young Charles Bronson.” The sandwiches had arrived with French fries and plastic-paper containers of soft drinks. I didn’t know which soft drinks, because the cups were all printed with colorful and lavish praises for the Deschanes Brothers, “Finest Greek Food Since 2500 B.C.”
Both Quyen and Quinn were completely correct, though. Jess’s portrait of the fiend who haunted my lover’s nightmares could have been morphed from photos of the two movie stars. The guy didn’t look all that fiendish to me, but I suppose you probably had to have been there.
For forty-five years.
I said something about the morphing idea, over my shoulder, and grabbed a sandwich of my own from the box on the kitchen counter: pita stuffed with spicy lamb, tomato, onion, cucumber, and lettuce—you can keep my share of the olives—slathered in lovely yogurt sauce, and sprinkled with mild feta. I took a chance on one of the mystery drinks. Coke, the real thing. I have never been able to finish a Pepsi and I don’t know why. The French fries were good: thin, crisp, still hot.
***
It would be corny to say that, in my job, I don’t have to go out looking for trouble to get into, trouble comes looking for me. But in this case—I mean in this case—it was quite literally true. The epoxy in my bullets hadn’t quite been set a full twenty-four hours when the doorbell rang. Raised lettering on the linen business card read:
Richard Francis Xopher
I turned the card over and read it out loud, pronouncing the X like a Z. There was nothing else printed or written on either side, just the name and a lot of expensive, empty space. Nodding to the man—closer, I thought, to Charles Bronson than Robert Downey—who had handed it to me, I let him in and we went back to the office together. My heart was pounding away like a machinegun, although I tried my best not to show it, but I that knew he could hear it as well as I could, myself.
“You have quite a beautiful home, Mr. Gifford,” he told me as I indicated a chair for him to sit in. To my ear, he didn’t have any kind of accent I could detect, just literate midwestern American. I went around my desk and sat, as well. “Lots of glass—ultraviolet filtering, I assume—this place must be spectacularly cheerful in daylight.”
“Too much darkness is depressing, even for one of us,” I said.
“’One of us,’” he echoed my words. “I wonder what you think that means. Perhaps you’d prefer to be called by the name you were born with.” He pronounced it. It was the first time I’d heard it in over sixty years, the first time I’d even thought of it in at least ten. Whoever that person had been, he wasn’t me any more—or I wasn’t him. Gifford, Illinois seemed like a long, long way away at the moment.
Without missing a beat, Xopher continued. “The school of ‘Arts and Crafts’—sometimes referred to as ‘American Craftsman’. You know, I was personally acquainted with both William Morris and John Ruskin. Their political ideals were fully as infantile as any other form of socialism, yet in the end, their followers brought to the world a new aesthetic.”
Until the next trendy new designer came along, I thought.
He patted the chair arm. “I knew Gustav Stickley and his four brothers, as well. That items like this one, of furniture they made, would eventually sell in the market for hundreds of thousands of dollars is perfectly obscene; they themselves would have found it repulsive.”
“You may be right, Mr. Xopher. I read somewhere that Barbra Streisand paid $363,000 for a Stickley sideboard, and I find her repulsive.” Surica had said this was his first trip to America, as far as she knew. The Stickley brothers were from Wisconsin. I shrugged the contradiction off. “That’s not a real Stickley, Mr. Xopher, but a good reproduction, handmade by a colleague of mine in Los Angeles named Mike Church. I did a little research for him in Denver a few years ago.”
“And as such, a far better expression of Stickley’s values than any overpriced original.” He ran an appreciative hand over the plain cherry woodwork. “Clean designs. Quality homes and furnishings selling for what ordinary individuals could afford. ‘Honest goods at honest prices’, as Iver Johnson once put it. I knew him, as well, and Martin Bye.”
“The arms and cycles guy,” I told him, wondering who the hell Martin Bye was. I’d often had the same thought, myself, about Stickley. Surica was listening from my study. Quinn and Qyuen were in the kitchen with Priscilla, using their little laptop to look our visitor up, which is why I’d spoken his name a
loud. Lacking our sense of hearing, they were listening electronically. I didn’t know where Anton was. Prowling around outside somewhere like a big cat. “So what brings you here now, Mr. Xopher. Maybe something special I can do for you?”
He shook his head. He’d removed his hat and gloves, laying them on the broad chair arm. For some peculiar reason, this broke the spell, somehow, and it became easier to remember the bloody trail of mangled corpses this murderer had left sprawling across the country. “Indeed no, Mr. Gifford. Quite the contrary. I’ve come to do something for you.”
I’d calmed down enough by now to give the man a good looking over. Richard Francis Xopher appeared young—in his early thirties, I’d have guessed—just as Surica and I did, for exactly the same reason. He was dressed extremely well in what I thought must have been Armani. What he’d paid for his shoes alone could have purchased every board foot of furniture—Stickley or not—and most of the artwork in my house.
Surica was terribly afraid of the man. I didn’t need to hear her heart beating—although I could, and so could he—to appreciate that. I knew that right now she’d be clutching her little pistol, her palms sweaty on the hard rubber grip panels. I couldn’t blame her. At his command, she’d suffered half a century in a cold, dark hole in the ground.
She’d warned me that the man was an intelligent, sophisticated being of almost irresistible charm—valuable survival adaptations for a vampire—and unmitigated evil. He’d surprised me, speaking my real name. I wondered how he’d react if I called him “Warden”. Or Deabru.
Instead, I said, “You’re going to do something for me?”
Xopher rose, took off his topcoat—we dressed amazingly alike: long coat, wide-brimmed hat. Only what he wore had come from Milan, Paris, New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai and Dubai; mine was strictly from Wal-Mart—draped it over the other chair arm, and sat down again.
“Please permit me to speak plainly,” he said. “There is a great deal I could do for you, Mr. Gifford. Of course it’s difficult to know absolutely, but I am very likely the wealthiest individual person in existence. I am remarkably powerful, in more manners of speaking than just one. And I am most certainly the oldest. I am very, very old, indeed.”
Xopher had miscalculated. I knew that he wanted Surica, but if I accepted a bribe to give her to him, then who would I spend the money with? Anton and Quinn would have understood in an instant. Why didn’t Xopher?
“And how old would that be, exactly?” I asked, knowing that whatever he was about to tell me was almost certainly going to be true. But it was still like talking to some spiritualist hootie who thought that he was the reincarnation of Cleopatra or Alexander the Great.
Xopher shrugged. “I cannot say how old, exactly, Mr. Gifford, for I was born long before men began to count the years. This much I can tell you: I don’t merely know what happened to the Neanderthals,” his voice fell to a throaty whisper. “I am what happened to the Neanderthals.”
I heard a slight scuffing noise to my right. Surica was standing a bit stiffly in the doorway, the expression on her face impossible to read. The lady stood there quietly, not looking at me or at anything else in the room. Her attention was focused entirely on her former captor.
27: HIGH NOON AT DUSK
“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”—Joseph Conrad
Surica didn’t speak a word.
“Ah, there you are, my dear,” Xopher told her in a patronizing tone. “I was wondering whether I might get to see you this evening or if you would spend it lurking there in the other room. I would say that you look lovely, but I’m afraid I can’t, in all truth. You appear wild, unkempt, undisciplined. Freedom isn’t everything it’s supposed to be, is it? It’s fairly obvious it doesn’t suit you particularly well.”
He turned to me, his charm beginning to devolve into smarm. “I confess I’m unaccountably fond of the girl, as I gather you are, too, for all that she is flighty, unreliable, unfaithful—as you will eventually discover to your chagrin and regret—and simply not very bright.”
I felt my fist tighten on the grip of my .45 under the desk. I turned to see Surica still motionless, as if her mind was lost in some other space or time. Something was very wrong. My Surica would have killed this asshole outright by now and left his carcass for the coyotes.
“But you have asked me why I’m here, and I rudely allowed myself to become distracted, in part, by this vision of pulchritude, and neglected to answer you. I am hunting, Mr. Gifford. I am on the hunt. I have for several centuries preyed upon other vampires. As many as I could ferret out. For perhaps a thousand years, I have been in process of deliberately rendering each and every one of them quite thoroughly extinct.”
“Right,” I answered, keeping a grip on my .45. “You’re a real humanitarian.”
“I see no need to be insulting, Mr. Gifford. In any case, you misunderstand me. What do I care for your precious Homo sapiens? What am I saying—sapiens? Your species haven’t even begun to think yet. They may, in fact, prove incapable of it, in the end. And with each and every passing year, their little lives flicker by me faster and faster, like those of mayflies, or the sparks rising and winking out over a campfire. Eventually, I will remember this dialogue—and you—only as one single fleeting moment among a billion others.”
“Okay,” I nodded as if it all made sense. “I always wondered why I’d never met another vampire. You’re saying it’s because you ate them all?”
He spread his hands. “Oh, no, I didn’t eat them, Mr. Gifford. The mere idea of doing so makes me feel nauseated. Even you should know by now that a vampire cannot be nourished by another vampire’s blood. For the purpose of nutrition, I prey on humans, just as you do.”
“Even me?” I blinked. Not telling tales out of school, mind you, what Surica and I did in private often involved bloodletting, and it always seemed nourishing to me, in some sense of the word. “Well I hate to break it to you old pal, but we’re humans, too, you, me, Surica. We just happen to be carrying around a symbiotic virus in our blood.”
He snorted. “I have heard this theory. Mere Pasteurist propaganda, and I choose not to believe it. At the least, old pal, we are a new species. Spiritually, I believe us to be elevated beings. I hunt own and kill my fellow vampires for one solitary simple reason: self- preservation.”
“How’s that?” I’d heard murderers try to justify themselves before, a dozen or more of them on the radio or TV from the White House.
“Consider Vlad Tepes as a chief example, the most notorious of our kind. I detested the little dragon—Dracula, as he styled himself—for his cheap, flashy theatricality, which always threatened to expose others.”
“Including you.” I offered.
“Especially me,” he agreed. “It was at a dinner party, in a room with curtained windows that opened out upon his famous killing field. Ten thousand died that night as we dined upon his other guests. Then I greatly enjoyed killing him, as well, by impaling him on one of his own wooden posts. That, alone, wouldn’t have killed him, of course. So I watched and listened to his cowardly screaming, as the sunrise took him.”
I shook my head. “There really was a Dracula, and you killed the guy.”
“One of your own United States Presidents was a vampire, you know. I had planned to kill him, too, but someone else got to him before I did.”
“Which president was that?”
“Think it through, Mr. Gifford, it’s obvious enough. Think it through.”
The trouble was there were too many likely candidates.
“In the last few years, I have pursued your inamorata slowly as she searched, so that she would lead me to you. It is possible, Mr. Gifford, that you are the last vampire in North America. When I am through with you—and with her—my work on this continent will be done.”
“But first...” I said.
“But first you must tell me what I want to know. What you know I wan
t to know. It will be greatly to your benefit if you choose to cooperate.”
“What if I told you I have no idea what you’re talking about?”
“Then obviously, you would not benefit. I won’t try to fool you: the information you have is very important. One way or another, it will figure in the lives or deaths of millions, perhaps tens of millions. Please don’t insult both of us, denying what we both know is true.”
The trouble was, I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Here,” he said. “I will begin the process, showing you something that I know. And then you will tell me all the rest of it.” He arose from the chair. I shoved my autopistol into my waistband and rose with him.
He approached Surica where she still stood beside the desk, almost like a statue, and extended his right hand, palm up. She gave him her left hand and he took it gently. Then he reached into a pants pocket, pulled out a large folding knife, and opened it with the touch of a button.
Instinctively, my hand started for my gun.
“Do not be alarmed, Mr. Gifford, it is only a demonstration of a scientific nature. I mean her no harm.” He pricked her index finger with the tip of the blade, turned her hand over, and let a drop fall on the polished hardwood floor at their feet. “Now is your turn,” he said.
Curious, I stepped around the desk, and when he gestured for it, offered him my own hand. He pricked my finger, too, and let the drop of blood fall into Surica’s there on the floor. I had no idea what to expect.
Suddenly, the surface of the tiny two-drop pool became agitated, as if it were just about to boil. Within the space of mere seconds, something began to grow, a tiny form, from zygote to the miniature form of an adult human being, twisted and writhing with agony, in only a few horrible seconds. I thought I heard a tiny scream before Xopher stopped the process by stamping it into a messy stain on the hardwood floor.
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