by P. N. Elrod
Tarrant returned to Deep Ellum, but there was no sign of Kyle, the bruisers, or the SUV. The loft doors were wide open, the interior even more of a wreck than before, which he’d thought impossible. He departed, not touching anything.
He felt a little gut-sick on the long drive back to his condo, but it was only reaction to the lengthy adrenalin high and the chloroform. It was good to have cleared the job away in such short order, but Kyle had been of great help there; he’d done everything but paint a target on his chest.
For the luckless Kyle Tarrant had no pity. Some people were fish and others were sharks; that’s just the way it was in the big food chain. Bad luck when you’re born a minnow and don’t know it.
Every job was different, he had told Caitlin. Especially so for this one. For once he’d completed a hit and not had to pull the trigger himself. It made a nice change. They should all be so easy.
But that would take the fun out of the game.
Challenge versus achievement.
Tarrant knew what he liked best.
* * * * * * *
__________
SLAUGHTER
Author’s Note: Again, editor Martin H. Greenberg sold the collection THE REPENTANT to DAW and asked me to trib a story. And again, given the opportunity, I tweaked the original to present this expanded version of Gordy and Jack teaming up for fresh mayhem.
Chicago, 1937
“He calls himself Slaughter. None of the guys knows his real name,” said Gordy.
The self-named Slaughter had a booth to himself a few yards from where Gordy and I were seated in the dimly lighted nightclub. More than half in shadows, Slaughter had his back to a wall, but in Chicago that was just a healthy habit for certain guys. He’d popped up out of nowhere, and had apparently, without any fuss, taken over the running of one of the more active businesses under Gordy’s protective eye. Well, it had something to do with protection. I rarely asked for details about his work. If he wanted me to know something, he’d say.
“What’s the story?” I asked, pretending to sip coffee. It was only coffee, too; Prohibition being a not-so fond memory meant you could now order the best from Brazil without getting something routinely added in the cup. Coffee and booze were the same for me: undrinkable. Thrift and principle dictated I not waste booze. The bonus with plain coffee was that it still smelled good to me.
Gordy was slow to reply, being a man careful with words, never using many and often given to understatement. He frowned slightly over his drink, which was also free of alcohol. When on a business call he never had so much as a short beer. “Sent some boys here last night to collect the usual cut. They came back empty. None of ’em’s talking much, and it’s what they don’t say makes me think he’s like you.”
He had my full attention. Another vampire?
We’re a rare breed. It takes a deliberate conscious effort to pass the potential on to another person, and the effort doesn’t always work.
The buzz from a dozen conversations surrounding us faded to nothing as I studied Slaughter, trying to detect any sign of kinship. That would be impossible, not until I got close enough to discern the absence of a heartbeat or unless he chanced to walk in front of a mirror.
“Can’t tell from here,” I said, anticipating the question.
“Time for a word. I’ll lead, you watch him,” Gordy wore caution like his tailored suit, which was why he’d lasted so long in his ruthless line of work, and tonight I was his insurance. If Slaughter was like me, no ordinary human bodyguard would be enough.
We left our table; Gordy’s broad back blocked my view of a sizable portion of the club for a few moments. He was taller than me and a lot wider, all of it muscle. Through restless clouds of cigarette smoke people stared and some whispered recognition. No one noticed me, which was exactly how I preferred it.
Slaughter watched our approach. He was young, reasonably handsome, on the good side of his twenties, dark eyes, tight mouth, and pale skin, but lots of guys were like that. His suit was sharp, expensive, and so painfully new it looked like it was wearing him. I tried to pick up his heartbeat, but the general noise prevented anything so subtle.
“Slaughter,” said Gordy from his height. “You know who I am.” It was not a question. “We need to talk.”
Slaughter gave a half-smile to show he was amused, not intimidated. Wise men were respectful to Gordy; the rest tended to disappear. “Do we?”
“Find a place.”
More smile. Slaughter’s gaze flicked my way. He’d see a tall, lean man in a flashy double-breasted dark suit and silk shirt, fedora pulled low: probably the boss’s pilot fish, errand-runner, bodyguard, or all three. No one important, easily dismissed. When his attention returned to Gordy, I could tell I’d conned another one. “Okay, come to the back.”
We threaded past the tables, drawing a share of attention from the dance music and couples drifting around the floor in front of the band. The ripples we made subsided along with the hubbub as Slaughter preceded us into the manager’s office behind the stage.
Gordy paused at the door. “Where’s Herm?” Until last week Herm Foster had been running things here.
“He left,” Slaughter answered with a straight face. “Greener pastures.”
We went in. The room had the usual office stuff, plus a long couch. A large-busted blonde girl was sprawled on it, fast asleep, one arm thrown across her eyes against the glaring overhead light. She wore a shiny red evening dress, cut low, and it looked like she’d been wearing it for at least three days without a break. Slaughter went over and tapped the back of his hand against her hip. She woke slow, pitifully hung over.
“Out,” he ordered. “Go clean up. Come back tomorrow.” Then he sat behind the desk, flopping back in the chair and putting his feet up, making it clear that she was of no further concern to him.
She blinked, her sunken eyes smudged and disoriented. It took her a moment to stand, and then she tottered like a drunk. I put a hand out to steady her. Her eyes blank, she stumbled, arms falling heavily over my shoulders, half-turning us around. She sighed, pressed the length of her body against mine, and tilted her head back, smiling. I sniffed and got a whiff of stale sleep-sodden breath. She wasn’t drunk.
Gordy caught my glance over her shoulder. Yeah, he’d also spotted the clumsy bruising and red marks on her throat. Under her ghost-pale skin, her heart raced too fast, trying to pump blood that she didn’t have.
Proof enough. It told me all I needed to know about Slaughter.
I focused hard on her but the effort was unnecessary; she was still under his influence and shifted loyalties easily enough. “Take it easy, you’re going home, now.” I could have said she was going for a swim in Lake Michigan in January and gotten the same lack of comprehension.
I gently peeled her off and made her sit.
Gordy and I looked at Slaughter.
He put on that half-smile and twitched some fingers in a self-deprecating gesture. “You know how it is, boys. They like me to tire ’em out.”
Gordy had the most poker of poker faces, but I could tell he was pissed as hell. That wasn’t even close to how I felt, but tempting as it was to take two steps and punch Slaughter’s nose out the other side of his head, I held off. This wasn’t my show for the present.
While I kept the girl from falling over, Gordy left and returned with the club’s hostess in tow. He could move and talk fast when necessary.
“You know her?” he asked the hostess, indicating the lady in red.
“That’s Penny. Is she drunk?”
“She’s sick. I want you to look after her. You know a doctor?”
“Uh. . .yeah. . .”
“Give him a call. You know who I am?”
“Uh-huh, Northside Gordy, you run the Nightcrawler Club—unless you want me to forget all that.”
“Have the doctor call my club after he sees Penny.” He gave her a C-note. “That’s for expenses.”
“Golly!” Her eyes popped.
/> “You get another if you take care of her good.”
“Just call me Florence Nightiebird,” she said, quickly stuffing the money down the front of her dress.
I looked hard at Penny again, trying to reach whatever lay dozing behind her glazed eyes. “You rest up, get yourself well again. Don’t come back.” I handed her over to the hostess, who guided Penny out the door. The poor girl chose her steps slowly, one at a time, an old woman’s walk.
Slaughter had a narrow eye on us during the exchange, but I didn’t think I’d tipped my hand. If he saw us as mugs with a soft spot for dames, all the better. He seemed to be at ease with himself and what should have been dangerous company. Gordy took a chair, and I shut the door so we wouldn’t be disturbed. I remained on my feet, still playing bodyguard.
Slaughter shot me another dismissive once-over and beamed a smirk at Gordy. “You wanna talk? What about?”
“This club is run by Herm. I picked him. Who picked you?”
“I did. It was a sweet setup, so I moved in. Herm decided he should leave. He told me to expect you to notice.”
“He was right.”
“You got nothing to worry about. I run it the same, maybe better. No fights, no problems with the cops. Everything’s copasetic.”
“Except for the weekly payment.”
Slaughter flashed teeth. They were very white, but otherwise normal appearing, as were mine. “Yeah, I decided I don’t need your kind of insurance after all. I’m glad you came by so we could straighten this out.”
Gordy studied him a long time. He could take the spine out of most men when he gave them the cold eye, but this one seemed immune. “You are not being wise.”
“Maybe, but I’m getting rich.”
He really wants to die, I thought. Of course it’s easy to take risks when you know you’re damned-near impossible to kill. In the brief silence to follow I heard one heart beating, one set of lungs pumping: Gordy’s. Given the situation he was almost relaxed. It seemed to be a good example to follow.
“If you want to keep the club, you have to pay for the privilege. That’s how things run in this town.”
I worked to not show surprise. Gordy was open to leaving things as is? I’d expected he’d want this gatecrasher pitched out on his ear. Maybe he was considering the advantages of having another vampire as an ally. I couldn’t blame him. I’d turned out to be damned useful when occasion demanded.
Slaughter shrugged. “Those rules don’t apply to me.”
“To you more than most.”
“Uh-uh. You’re gonna listen to me from now on.” Slaughter took his feet off the desk and leaned forward, fixing Gordy with a good hard stare. He had emotional strength behind it, had worked himself into a little anger, which was dangerous. Though it helped to hammer a point home, too much rage can shatter minds. I should know.
Gordy’s expression had gone as blank as the girl’s.
I stepped in before things went over the edge, slipping a .38 revolver from my coat pocket and standing between them. “Lay off,” I ordered, my voice calm.
The unwelcome reminder of my presence startled Slaughter. He rocked back, eyes blazing. “Hey!”
“Fleming?” began Gordy, puzzled. I spared him a glance. He made a vague movement toward the gun he packed under his left arm, then stopped.
“It’s all right,” I said. “He’s covered. He was working a persuasion move on you. Might be better if you let me take it from here.”
He bit off further questions, trusting my judgment. That’s why he’d asked me along. He quit his chair and got out of my way.
Slowly standing to bring us even, Slaughter turned his persuasive stare full on me. “You’re gonna to listen to me, punk. You have to listen, understand? From now on I’m the only voice you can hear.”
I felt pressure inside my skull, like the air gets when there’s a sudden weather change. Nothing I couldn’t ignore.
“You are gonna listen and do everything I say. . .”
Familiar words. I’d used the same ones countless times. It’s a great way to get out of speeding tickets.
“You must listen—”
And it doesn’t work on another vampire.
“The hell I will. Sit down and shut up.” I pushed him hard enough to knock him back into his chair, then cocked the gun and brought the muzzle level with his left eye.
That broke his concentration. His mouth dropped open with shock. I wondered how experienced he was, if he knew he could survive a bullet. I had, but getting shot hurts. Slaughter’s hands went palm-out in sudden placation. The keystone of his confidence was quite gone.
An intake of breath from him, a sniff. He was checking me for booze. He knew how that could interfere with hypnosis. What else had he figured out?
“You can’t do this,” he said, dumbfounded, maybe a little hurt. It’s a tough moment, that awful one when you realize you’re not all-powerful. Usually it happens on the first day of school when the teacher isn’t looking. Slaughter must have forgotten that lesson.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Your age. I won’t ask again.”
“Uh. Twenty-five.”
“You got this dumb in just twenty-five years? Amazing.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“To you, kid, I am Mr. Fleming.”
“Don’t call me kid!”
“How old do you think I am?”
“Who the hell cares?”
“This dumb with bad manners. What a world.”
“You—”
But he didn’t get a chance to finish. I vanished first, cocked gun and all. Though invisible to Gordy, Slaughter would be able to see me in this state—as an amorphous gray shadow—and if this was his first experience, it would startle the hell out of him. I wasted no time sweeping through the bulk of the desk. When I reappeared, I was behind him, leaning over his shoulder, my mouth close to his ear and the revolver’s cold muzzle pressed to his temple hard enough to leave a bruise.
“You will be quiet now, new boy,” I whispered, trying to be as scary as possible. It didn’t take much; I was in the mood and had seen enough movies to know how it was done.
Though he no longer used his lungs regularly, Slaughter caught his breath. “Oh, shit, you’re—”
“Yeah, I’m in the same club, and you screwed up on the secret handshake.”
His lips moved, but nothing came out. He looked a lot younger without the self-importance.
“You’ve been putting your foot wrong ever since you crawled out of the woodwork. You’re making certain people unhappy.” A pause to let it sink in. I straightened enough to check on Gordy. His slab of a face was impassive, but I got that he was highly amused by my act.
Slaughter tried to twist toward me. “Jeeze, I didn’t mean anything—”
“Shuddup, kid. This piece has a hair-trigger and lead hurts just as much as a wooden stake. You can’t vanish faster than I can shoot.”
He made like a statue. Maybe he did not know about our relative immunity to bullets.
I eased back, giving him an opening to jump me. He didn’t take it. Going around the desk in the normal way, I hitched a hip on the front, taking the gun off cock, but keeping it aimed at him. Used to be I didn’t bother carrying, but Chicago’s a tough place, even for a vampire, as Slaughter was beginning to learn. I looked him over, the same as he had for me, only I didn’t make the mistake of underestimation. He was inexperienced, but every bit as physically dangerous as I when it came to supernatural abilities like strength, speed, and vanishing. What he’d done to the collection boys and the blonde girl indicated he knew how to cloud minds better than Lamont Cranston.
If Slaughter was smart—I had no confidence in that—he would listen to sense before he went too far and really hurt anyone.
“You made a messy start, kid, nothing that can’t be fixed, but only if you decide to get wise. You begin by apologizing to Gordy. Tell him you’re sorry for be
ing such a rude son-of-a-bitch.”
Too off-balance to argue, Slaughter made a handsome, word-for-word apology. He didn’t mean it, but was obeying orders. Just what I wanted. “That’s good. So—how long since you died?”
Wall-eyed, he glanced at Gordy.
“He’s wise about this stuff,” I added. “Answer.”
“About a month.”
“How’d it happen?”
“I don’t wanna say. It was in a fight, that’s all.”
One’s death is a very personal experience. For me, it was singularly unpleasant and violent, and even after a year I could still get a case of lockjaw when the topic came up. “Okay, never mind. Who made you?”
“Nobody made me, it just happened.”
I gave a short laugh. “And the stork finds babies under cabbage leaves. Come on and spill, we’re all grown-ups here. Who was she?”
“No one.”
“Was it a he, then?”
That made him sputter. “You son-of-a—”
He saw my expression and a twitch of my hand reminded him about the revolver. He thought better about finishing and settled back. “It was some girl.”
“Where?”
“Here in town, the south side. Saw her in an alley, thought she was whoring a drunk. Looked like she was kissing him, then she—there was blood on her mouth. It was sick. I tried to chase her off, but that didn’t happen.”
“What did?”
“She came after me instead. When she looked at me. . .I wanted her to, so she did. We did. I don’t wanna say any more.” He’d gone beet red.
“No need. But sometime during this enchanting encounter you exchanged blood, right?”
He nodded.
That was disturbing. What kind of vampire runs around doing a blood exchange with a stranger? Was she ignorant or just reckless?
“And then you got killed sometime after. And then you woke up.”
“Yeah. That’s how it was.”
If his story was true, I had to find this careless girl. Vampires are damned rare, and the few that I knew were levelheaded and conscientious about their second chance at living, particularly when it came to bestowing the possibility on others. They didn’t just leap out of alleys and attack people for blood, nor casually exchange it. Stupid behavior like that can get you permanently killed. Even in these days of electricity and skepticism you might run into a would-be Van Helsing who’s more than happy to rid the world of a medieval kind of bloodsucker. It had nearly happened to me once.