by Matt Kincade
“Job’s done?”
“Yessir. Found ’im right where you said.”
“That was quick.”
Alex shrugged. He set the box down on the low stone wall. “Yeah, had to change the timetable. Shoulda given it a few more days.”
“What happened?”
“Civilian got involved.”
Cooper took a drag. The wind pulled the smoke in a horizontal line as he exhaled. “Let me guess,” he said. “A pretty girl.”
Alex grinned sheepishly. “Damn pretty.”
Cooper frowned. “That was dumb. This is bigger than one girl’s life.”
Alex leaned against the stone wall. “Yeah, I know. Don’t gimme the goddamn speech.”
Cooper paused as if considering, but decided to drop it. “So”—he looked down the road—“did you get any intel from the subject?”
Alex shook his head. The wind gusted, and he held his hat with one hand. “Didn’t have no time. Girl was bleedin’ out. Couldn’t help her with a live vamp at my back.” Alex paused then cut Cooper off. “Yeah, I know, damn it. Dumb. You don’t gotta tell me. Shoulda let the girl die and interrogated the subject.”
“Well…” Cooper finished the sentence with a wave of his cigarette hand. “How many more girls are going to die because of the intel you didn’t get from this vampire?” He took a drag.
“Yeah, well, we make our choices, and we gotta live with ’em, don’t we?”
Cooper snorted, an almost laugh. “That’s the truth.” They both looked out at the canyon for a moment. “So did you find anything at all?”
“Got some paper work, a laptop, and a phone.” Alex handed the cardboard box to Cooper. “It’s all in here. Along with your finders fee, of course. The phone got a couple calls last night. I’m all kinds of curious about who was callin’.”
Cooper took a last drag and flicked his cigarette over the ledge. He took the box and peered inside. “Well, that’s something. I’ll have my boys look this over.”
“Thanks, Coop.”
“I’m going to be in South America on business for the next week or so. If you need anything, Mack will be in the area.”
Alex grinned. “I’ll have to drop the old bastard a line.”
“Oh, by the way,” said Cooper, just as he climbed into his car. “The girl. Did she live?”
“Yeah. She lived.”
Cooper nodded thoughtfully. After a pause he said, “Happy hunting, Alex.” He started the engine and drove off.
Alex watched the clouds slide across the sky for a moment then followed suit.
***
Jen and Carmen sat in the warm morning sun, side by side on the top step of the deck. Carmen winced and tried to hold still as Jen used bandage scissors to cut through the gauze around Carmen’s neck. With a sponge and warm water, she gently teased the blood-soaked bandage from the wound.
Jen grimaced. “Yeah, you got bit, all right. Let’s see…” The wound was an ugly black-purple. “It’s definitely infected, but at least it still looks localized.” She gingerly rinsed off the layers of dried blood. Whistling low, she said, “Carmen, you’re a lucky lady. He only nicked an artery, but even so, if Alex had dawdled for another few minutes, you would have bled out.” She disinfected the bite with iodine. Carmen made a face, but held still. “Okay, I’m going to give you a couple of stitches. This bite is pretty dainty by vampire standards, so hopefully the scarring won’t be too bad.”
She closed the wound with four deft sutures. “I’m going to give you some blood intravenously,” she continued, “and some antibiotics to fight your standard infections, but the thing that’s going to knock down the vampirellae is sunlight. I want you to get at least an hour of direct sunlight on the wound today. And again tomorrow. Don’t worry about sunburn. A sunburn will kill you slower than this will.”
Carmen watched as Jen inserted the IV into her forearm. “So is this what you do?” she asked. “Just drive around and sew people up? Like a traveling nurse?”
Jen shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much. I’m basically field support for the vampire hunters in the area.”
“Is…” Carmen hesitated.
Jen looked up at her. “Is it what?”
“I mean, is this real? You seem pretty sane. But Jesus, vampires? Vampire hunters? Really?”
“Believe me, honey. It’s real.” Jen gathered up her tools, putting the used bandages and utensils into an orange plastic biohazard bag. She closed the lid of the bright orange tackle box. “You want more coffee?”
“Not yet, thank you.”
Jen stood up, stretched, and crossed the porch to the door. She disappeared inside for a moment, returning with a steaming coffee mug in her hand. She sat back down next to Carmen.
Carmen rubbed the red line where the handcuff had dug into her wrist. “So what makes a vampire a vampire? Is this some kind of psychological thing? Was he just a guy with a blood obsession? Like, if you really believe you’re Dracula, then—”
Jen shook her head. “No, it’s not a mental illness. It’s an actual thing. He wasn’t a crazy. He was a vampire.”
“But what…what is it? I mean—”
“Really depends on how you want to look at it. From a purely medical perspective, it’s a virus. Extervirus vampirellaea. Probably the closest thing we know to it is rabies. The experts put it in the same family, but it’s really its own animal. It basically takes over the host body and rewires everything. Muscle fiber, optical nerves, ears, skin, teeth, everything. Creates a whole new metabolic system. In a lot of ways, it’s a more efficient system than our own, except for a few little things. One, it can only run on fresh blood. Two, it has no resistance to UV light.”
“Hence the whole thing about vampires and sunlight.”
“Exactly. It’s fascinating stuff. I could go on all day about modified cellular respiration pathways and so forth, but you probably don’t care about all that. And anyway, a lot of it is still kind of a mystery, since no reputable researcher will touch it with a pole. A lot of what little we do know is fifty or sixty years old.”
Neither one of them said anything for a while. A soft breeze whispered through the stand of birch and cottonwood in the back yard. Somewhere far away, a hawk screamed.
Jen sipped her coffee for a moment and then continued, “But like I said, it all depends on how you want to look at it. Some people think it’s a purely biological phenomenon. Some people think it’s a virus from outer space. Some people think it escaped from another dimension. And, of course, some people think vampires are demons from hell. The really messed up thing is, they all have a valid argument.”
Carmen leaned back on her hands. “And what do you believe?”
“Me?” Jen said. “I’m a medical professional. I tend to take a rational, evidence-based approach to things. So I’ll just go on thinking of it as a virus. It’s easier that way. It raises an interesting question, though.”
“What’s that?”
“If there were demons and devils, creatures of pure evil walking the earth, and you could catch one and take a sample and put it under a microscope, what would it look like? Would it be that different from you and me? Could we even tell the difference?”
“Vampires.” Carmen shuddered. “Christ, like the world wasn’t a scary enough place before.”
“You said it, hon.”
Carmen suddenly bit back angry tears. “Oh God, that…motherfucker. I couldn’t even…I mean, I shot him, for Christ’s sake. He was so strong…He just…” She closed her eyes. The tears came, despite her best effort, rolling down her high, angular cheeks.
“Hey, it’s all right. It’s gonna be okay.” Jen put an arm around Carmen’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault. You had no way of knowing what you were up against. And you’re going to get through this.”
“Look at me,” said Carmen, “crying like a little girl. I’m sorry for putting all this on you.”
“Nothing to apologize for. That’s why I’m here. To help out a
ny way I can. There aren’t many things in life worse than a vampire attack. You have every right to be shook up.” Jen rubbed Carmen’s shoulder. “You’re lucky Alex came along. It could have been worse.”
“Funny, I don’t feel that way.”
Jen pulled down the bandanna around her neck. Her throat was a nightmare of twisted scar tissue. She raised an eyebrow. “Hon, it can always be worse.”
***
After Alex returned, they all gathered around the cheap white plastic patio table. Alex brought out more coffee for everyone. They sat quietly, not saying much.
Carmen wore a fresh black T-shirt and clean jeans. Her hair was still wet from the shower. Jen insisted that she sit with her wound facing the sun. “How does that feel?” she asked.
“It burns,” Carmen answered.
“Good. That’s good. Burn it right out.” She took a pack of Camels from her pants pocket and lit up, leaning back on the chair’s back legs.
“So…” said Carmen. “What now?”
Alex leaned back in his chair as well. He tilted his head forward so his hat brim kept the morning sun out of his eyes. “Up to you, I guess. S’pose we get you back to your life. You can just go on home and forget all about vampires.”
“Aren’t you worried I’ll go to the police about what I’ve seen? That I’ll lead them here?”
Alex took a sip from his coffee. “You wanna tell me exactly where here is?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Carmen said, “Okay, good point.” She was silent for a while. She swirled her coffee, watching the milk mix. “But I can’t go back home. Not yet.”
Alex cocked his head. “Why’s that?”
“I still need to find my sister.”
Chapter Four
No one said anything for a while.
Finally Jen broke the silence. “Do you want to tell us about it?”
Carmen took another sip from her coffee and avoided everyone’s eyes. She sighed. “My little sister. Mia. She’s…missing. I… okay, here’s the story. I was born on this side of the border. I’m a US citizen. But my parents got deported when I was little. They thought I’d have a better life living here, so they let me stay with my Tío Hector in Santa Fe. Years later, my parents had another daughter, Mia. So she grew up in Juarez with them. We’d visit each other a lot, and we kept in touch online. We were always close.” Carmen paused and sipped her coffee. “But then our parents disappeared. You know how it is in some places in Mexico, right? The cartel violence. It’s bad. Juarez is one of the worst. My parents just vanished. No bodies, no ransom. Nobody knows what happened.”
“That’s awful,” said Jen, “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you,” said Carmen.
Alex stood up and walked to the deck railing. He leaned on the railing and looked out towards the mountains while Carmen continued her story.
“It was a bad time,” said Carmen, “but we got through it. Mia tried making it on her own. She was working at a hotel for a while, but the hotel closed…anyway, it’s a long story, but eventually we decided she should to come to America. I exhausted every legal option, but I got nowhere. So she decided to come anyway. I told her not to—I told her to at least wait until I could work out something safer, but I never could tell her anything. She was coming whether I wanted her to or not. What could I do, you know? Familia.
“I took two weeks off work to come down to the border and meet her. I wired her some money and she hired a coyote—you know, a smuggler—to take her across the border. But then she never showed up at the rendezvous.”
Carmen held her coffee mug tightly with both hands, staring down into it as she spoke, her dark eyes downcast. “So that’s the story. I’ve spent the last three days turning the county upside down, looking for her. That’s finally how I wound up at…that place. I called in every favor I had to get that address. I was told the driver was that guy—the vampire, I guess. It was his job to meet with the coyote from Mexico and take them to the safe house where I was supposed to meet Mia.”
“I’m so sorry.” Jen repeated. She squeezed Carmen’s shoulder.
Another moment of silence. This time Alex spoke. “I’m sorry, but in all likelihood, your sister’s already dead.”
Carmen nodded, clutching the coffee mug, but didn’t respond.
“Vampires tend to show up anyplace where people can go missing without anyone noticing too much,” Jen said. “There have been a few cases like this. Coyote outfits that round up immigrants then turn around and sell them to the vampires.”
Carmen nodded again. “I…I know, logically, that she must be dead. I’ve been cop for long enough to know how these things go. I’m not that naive. I just…I can’t accept it yet. I have to know. And if Mia is dead, I have to find the people who did it, and I have to make them pay.” She let out something halfway between a sigh and a sob. “But I’m not sure where to go from here.”
After a moment’s silence, Alex said, “Well, go on.”
“What?”
He leaned casually against the deck railing. “I can see you chewin’ on it. Just go ahead and ask.”
Carmen blinked away tears and managed a half smile. “Can you help me?” she asked. “Can you help me find my sister?”
The easygoing, jocular Alex she had known up until now suddenly seemed a thin, transparent facade. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed before. Behind it lurked something cold and deadly, like a rattlesnake peering out from beneath a rock.
“Darlin’,” he said, “it’s what I live for.”
***
They walked Jen back to her van. As she tossed her equipment into the passenger seat, Alex said, “You sure you don’t want to come along on a vampire hunt?”
“No, thanks,” Jen said, “that’s your job. When you get shot—again—give me a call, and I’ll do my job.”
“Shit, you don’t know what you’re missing.”
Jen smiled. “I know exactly what I’m missing. You’re going to go to Mexico, drink a beer, spout some one-liners, and then probably beat the shit out of somebody.”
Alex nodded sheepishly, “Guess you know me pretty well.”
“Thank you. Again,” said Carmen.
Jen turned to face her. “Don’t mention it. Just remember what I said. And if you need anything—to talk, anything—give me a call. Alex can give you my number.” She climbed into her van.
Carmen and Alex watched the van disappear down the driveway. “Well, okay,” said Alex, “Let’s get down to brass tacks.” As he spoke, he walked toward the front door, and Carmen followed. “When was the last time you talked to Mia?”
“Monday. Three days ago. She said she’d found a coyote in Juarez, and she was going to cross that night. And then I never heard from her again.”
They passed through the living room to the kitchen. Alex sat down at the kitchen table, and Carmen pulled up a chair opposite him. “Did she say who she talked to on that end?” he asked.
“She said his name was Lupe. No last name.”
“Well, that ain’t much of a start, but it’s a start. Is she the girl you got a picture of in your wallet?”
Carmen hesitated. “Yeah.” She took out her wallet and pulled out a dog-eared photo. She handed it to Alex. “This is her. She’s sixteen now. Almost seventeen. This picture is a little more than a year old.”
The girl in the picture smiled earnestly at the camera, a school photo posed in front of a generic blue background. She was gawky and coltish, not a woman but barely a girl anymore. She had straight black hair like her sister, a delicate nose, and dark almond-shaped eyes that almost seemed too big for her face. “Cute kid,” said Alex.
“Like I say, that was a year and a half ago,” said Carmen. “Now, she’s just gorgeous. It’s ridiculous.”
Alex held the picture. “Tell you what. I’ll head on down to Juarez, show this around, ask a few questions, and see what I can find out.” He paused, and then snapped his fingers. “Hey, I got a question for you. Our frie
nd from yesterday, the one I…” Alex made a cutting motion across his throat. “I got his cell phone. And he got a call at sundown last night. I picked it up and listened. Somebody on the other end was speakin’ Spanish.”
“That isn’t surprising, considering.”
“But it wasn’t Mexican Spanish. It was Spanish Spanish. Like from Spain.”
Carmen snorted. “How would you know the difference?”
Alex grinned. “No debes de juzgarme chica tonta.”
Carmen grudgingly cracked a smile. “Okay, that’s not bad.”
Alex flashed a lopsided grin. “Anyway, man was from Spain. I’d bet anything on it. Accent was faint, but it was there. He said, ‘Expect sixteen packages tonight.’ then when I didn’t say anything, he said, ‘Rafael? Hello?’ Then he hung up. That mean anything to you?”
Carmen shook her head. “Not a thing. Did you get a phone number?”
“Number was blocked. I got some people working on that.”
“Just how many people do you have?”
“Look at it this way. A vampire’s gotta feed, at the very least, about once a week. That’s fifty-two murders a year per vampire. Every one of those victims has a father, a mother, a sister. Those victims’ loved ones might be cops; they might be judges; they might work at the DMV. But they’ll do anything they can to help. That’s a vamp’s big problem. They can’t help makin’ enemies.”
Alex’s phone vibrated. He held it to his ear. “Yeah. Oh, yeah?” He straightened up and reached for a notepad. “All right, that’s good stuff. Real good stuff. Thanks a million, Coop.” He hung up.
“What was that?”
“One of them friends I was talkin’ about. The phone that belonged to our buddy from yesterday? The call came from a guy by the name of Guadalupe Vargas.”
Carmen’s eyes lit up. “Lupe.”
“Bingo. Apparently this boy Lupe’s got ties to the cartels, and according to the GPS on his phone, he spends a whole lot of time in a little dive bar in Juarez, place called El Ojo Negro.”
Carmen leaned back in her chair. “Well, what are we waiting for?”