Chapter
8
I hefted the manuscript. Finally, The Undead Kama Sutra? “Is it true what I’ve read about this?”
“What’s true?”
“The psychic-healing part.”
Carmen opened her mouth in an exaggerated “ah,” and nodded. She put on a sly smile. “I’m convinced that it is but I’m not sure how it works. I’m still doing field studies. The original work is centuries old. The last complete manuscript, in the Western world anyway, was destroyed when the library in Alexandria, Egypt, was burned. There’s rumor of a partial manuscript in the Vatican’s collection of forbidden texts.”
I removed the rubber band from the manuscript. I flipped through pages of 12-pt. Courier marked with sticky notes, pencil scribblings, and yellow highlighter. Obviously, a work in progress. I stopped on page 26. A paragraph described a drawing of a vampire and chalice tangled together in a pose named “Monkey Laughs at Moon.”
I didn’t know if I’d laugh having sex this way, but I would at least give a big smile.
I flipped to another page and a pose of a vampire standing with two chalices intertwined tightly against her torso. The title: “Jade Tree Ecstasy.”
I turned to another pose. This one startled me. “Feeding the Melon.”
Carmen read over my shoulder. “Whadda ya think?”
I rotated the page left and right. “Looks uncomfortable.”
“It’s an advanced pose, for sure. You got to work into it.”
“Who did your drawings?”
“I did.” Carmen displayed her hands. “These digits can do more than spank naughty bottoms.”
“Why are you writing this?”
Carmen took the manuscript from me. “I’m convinced there is a supernatural component to lovemaking. Good sex can cure a lot of ills.”
I nodded. “Of course. I’ve used that line lots of times.”
“I’m serious. Sex in the correct sequence of these poses,” Carmen tapped the manuscript, “can realign your chakras.”
“Do you know what that means? You’ve found a way for us vampires to play in the sun,” I held out my tanned arms, “and now with this Kama Sutra, it’ll be like we’re almost alive again.”
“We’re not in the Garden of Eden yet,” she replied.
“Where did your manuscript come from?”
“I pieced together fragments of ancient writings. Tibetan. Sanskrit. What’s left of the Aztec codices. Sumerian monographs. I had problems with that particular dialect.”
“How old are you?”
Carmen’s aura flashed a touch of indignation. “Since when is it okay to ask a lady her age?”
“My bad,” I said. “Are you sure you’re not using this as an excuse for marathon sex?”
“I don’t need an excuse for marathon sex. But this is beyond that. Correcting the energy flow through your chakras will reverse psychic damage and heal your mental and emotional wounds.” Carmen set the manuscript on top of the briefcase. “That’s the theory. I haven’t yet found out if and how it works.”
She turned around and leaned against the table. Her eyes gleamed seductively. “We could practice a few of the poses. As research.” She loosened her ponytail. With a shake of her head, wild, curly locks of black hair splashed over her shoulders. She heaved and the T-shirt pulled taut across her nipples. “Anything special you’d like to try?”
I matched her seductive gaze. “Oh yeah,” I drawled.
She gave an expectant nod.
I said, “Coffee, if you got any.”
“Coffee?” Carmen’s grin faded. The glare from her eyes could’ve melted iron. She swiped at me with her open hand.
I caught her wrist.
Her lips pursed, then curved into a puzzled smile. “Goddamn you, Felix.” She tore free.
“We’re immortal. What’s the rush?” Females, human or vampire, didn’t come any lustier than Carmen. Truth was, I hadn’t had sex with a vampire yet, and I wanted my first to be someone who wouldn’t make me limp for the rest of the week.
“One day I’m not ever going to offer again,” she said. “Then you’ll have no choice but to kill yourself out of regret.”
“Carmen, are you begging?”
“Ha, don’t flatter yourself.”
“Must be nice being the center of the universe.”
“I love it just fine.” Carmen went to the next room. Bags and cartons of foodstuffs sat on a shelf beside a water cooler. She brewed coffee over a small propane stove.
I thumbed through the manuscript and counted over two hundred ways of getting it on. What a scholarly triumph. “Who came up with the names for these poses? ‘Tiger and the Wheelbarrow.’ ‘Painting the Lily.’ ‘Feast of Mangoes.’”
Carmen yelled her answer so I’d hear her from the next room. “Those are my translations. Colorful, huh?”
She came back with a couple of plastic to-go cups. “It’s a fair-trade Cuban blend. Sierra Maestra with goat’s blood.”
The coffee smelled great. I put the manuscript down.
“Hope you learned something.” She gave me one of the cups. “I would call you stud but we wouldn’t know that, would we?”
“I appreciate the compliment. What are you going to do with this manuscript?”
“Get it published, what else? The general public will get off on the New Age woo-woo angle and we vampires will have yet something else that we passed under the noses of the blunt tooths. In the meantime, I’ve got more research to do.” She grinned. “The fun stuff.”
We walked to the pier, sat on the edge, and dangled our bare feet over the water. The resort’s Bayliner was docked next to us.
“You guys only have one boat?” I asked. “Seems you’d have more.”
“Antoine’s got one.”
“Where is it?”
Carmen pointed to the water fifty feet from the pier. A white oblong object rested on the bottom of the lagoon.
I asked, “More winnings from one of his poker games?”
“Of course.”
We sipped the blood-coffee blend and meditated on the beauty around us. Fish flashed like knife blades through the water. Crabs crept up the wharf pilings and, when they caught us looking at them, skittered back down to the rocky bottom.
The sun felt great against my skin. In the few minutes I’d been outdoors, my complexion had darkened but I needed to cook awhile more before I matched Carmen’s toasted patina.
The rhythmic grunt of an engine announced the approach of a motorboat. A white boat appeared around the northern spit of land at our right, about a twenty-footer, with a fabric canopy over the cockpit.
“Expecting company?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “It’s probably a fishing boat and the captain forgot how to read a chart. Happens now and then. Especially when we have naked chalices sunning themselves on the beach.”
The boat turned and chugged toward us. Sunlight glittered off the gold metallic letters on the hull, which read: SHERIFF. Under that, in dark green letters, it said, MONROE COUNTY.
A man in uniform—white short-sleeved shirt, yellow chevrons on his sleeve, dark green trousers, gun belt, sunglasses—occupied the helm. I guessed him to be well over six foot. Some of that height came from a pompadour so pointy and stiff it belonged on the nose of a rhinoceros.
Carmen and I got to our feet, our tapetum lucidum hidden by our sunglasses.
I don’t like cops. Any cops. Federal marshals, city police, and especially a deputy sheriff, like this guy. A visit by a cop was always a cure for a good mood.
The boat glided to within inches of the dock and stopped. The tall deputy with the pompadour hailed us.
“Know where I could find Antoine Speight?”
“He’s not here,” Carmen answered. “What’s this about?”
The deputy moved to the front of the boat and tossed the bowline. It landed between Carmen and me.
“A little help,” the deputy said.
Carmen
didn’t move. “You didn’t answer me. What’s this about?”
The deputy grimaced in annoyance. He hopped onto the pier and bent over to hitch the rope to the closest piling. He stood and his pompadour towered above us. When he looked at Carmen, his expression became all big-bad-wolf-and-I’m-happy-to-see-you. “Deputy Sheriff Toller Johnson.”
He removed his sunglasses and forced them through the crust of gel holding his steeple of hair in place. His gray eyes went from Carmen to me and then back to Carmen. He addressed her breasts. “You work here?”
“I have a face, if you don’t mind, Deputy.”
Johnson’s gaze rose to her face, and that hungry smile of his widened. I wanted to sew it shut with wire.
He pulled a memo pad from his hip pocket. “And you are?”
“Carmen Arellano. I’m business partners with Antoine, so yes, I work here.”
Johnson pointed the memo pad at me. “And you?”
“I’m a guest.”
“Your name?”
Johnson needed that memo pad shoved up his rectum. I answered curtly. “Felix Gomez.”
Johnson’s stare didn’t move from Carmen. “Are you missing someone from your resort?”
Carmen didn’t say anything. I’m sure she and I shared the same thought. Why was the deputy asking?
True, one of the women guests was missing. That the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office was on to it meant bad news.
The deputy made a point of resting his elbow on the pistol holstered to his waist. The gesture signified that he had the authority to carry a gun and pry answers out of us. “Well, is anyone missing? Female?”
“A woman. Yes.”
“And her name?”
Carmen looked irritated at having to answer to this over-coiffed blunt tooth. “Marissa Albert.”
“How well do you know her?”
“As well as anyone else here.”
“Really?” Johnson gave a smug nod. “Then I need you to come with me.”
“Where to?”
Johnson flipped the memo pad closed and tucked it into his pocket. “To the morgue on Big Pine Key, Miz Arellano.” He worked the sunglasses back out of the pompadour and set them over the square bridge of his nose. “We have the body of a dead woman that needs identifying.”
Chapter
9
Carmen’s brisk, angry steps churned the sand as we returned to her cabin.
“Fuck,” she kept repeating.
“You mean about the missing chalice or the deputy?” Deputy Johnson had told Carmen that she had to ride to Big Pine Key in his boat. We were on the way to her cabin to change clothes before we left.
“Both,” answered Carmen. “I was hoping to find her alive. She was a doll. Christ, now we got the goddamn authorities involved. What the hell happened to Marissa anyway?”
“Maybe it’s not her in the morgue.”
“Keep believing that, Felix. She’s been missing for three days and poof, this peckerwood comes around asking me to identify a body.”
We entered the cabin. Carmen plucked a sundress from a peg on the wall. “Naw.” She put the dress back on the peg and bent over to shift through a basket of laundry. She pulled out a tiny red tank top, whipped off her T-shirt, and stretched the tank over her head and torso. The tank looked as thin as a coat of paint. “How’s this?”
“I thought you didn’t want Johnson to stare.”
“The more he stares, the more that lech stays distracted.”
We put on our contacts. No telling how long we’d have to be among humans and we’d better take care to remain disguised. I got a T-shirt and boating mocs.
Carmen gathered her hair into a ponytail and pulled it through a scrunchie to hold it in place. She pushed her feet into a pair of flip-flops.
We rounded up her chalice Thorne. Poor guy had an ice pack on his crotch. Strapping or not, sex with Carmen had put his connecting unit through the wringer. The three of us returned to the dock. Johnson sat on a wharf piling. When he saw Carmen, he immediately stood at attention. His mouth gaped and his eyebrows arced over the top of his sunglasses. I expected his eyeballs would come flying through the lenses.
Carmen climbed aboard Johnson’s boat and Thorne and I got in the Bayliner. The two boats motored out of the bay and turned northeast from Snipe Keys. The sun hovered above us.
I went to the front of the Bayliner and stretched out on the deck. As a vampire, I never thought that I’d get a chance to work on my tan.
I watched Carmen and Johnson in his boat. They talked and he wrote on his memo pad, but I couldn’t hear what they said. I slipped off my contacts and read their auras. Carmen’s orange glow bristled with annoyance. Johnson’s red aura bubbled with lust, even though the conversation should have been about a dead body.
While I baked like a ham, I thought about what was happening around me. I came to Florida in search of the author of The Undead Kama Sutra. Then Odin’s mortally wounded alien impersonator hired me to find his killer and, in his dying breath, offered the name Goodman. And he added that little gem of needing to save the Earth women. Then the Araneum warned me about aliens and made a puzzling reference to a crashed charter airplane.
Next I found Carmen, leader of the Denver nidus, who turned out to be recreating this Kama Sutra. She’s also found the secret that keeps vampires from withering in the sun and she’s co-owner of a resort for vampires and their groupies. One of her chalices was missing. And now, Deputy Johnson asked us to identify a body.
I’m after the one who murdered Odin and within days a second corpse turns up. Suspicious? Definitely.
Because of my experience with psychic powers and the supernatural, I am aware of a grand cosmic design that binds our actions with what we call coincidences. In this case, what connected the many, many dots?
We continued east, parallel to the Keys. Dozens of boats cruised around us and we rocked over their wakes. Small airplanes droned overhead.
Our two boats approached a concrete pier, beyond which stood a jumble of nondescript, rectangular buildings on Big Pine Key. An American flag snapped from a pole erected on a lawn between the pier and the buildings. The Bayliner’s engine slowed to a putter.
We berthed alongside an assortment of boats representing the agencies working the Keys: Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, DEA, Department of Fisheries, and the Coast Guard.
We docked next to Johnson’s boat and, after I tossed the bowline to an attendant, Carmen and I disembarked and left the Bayliner in the care of her chalice.
Johnson saw that I followed him and he halted. “It won’t take two of you to make an ID.”
“I want Felix to keep me company,” Carmen said. “Or do the corpses complain about too many visitors?”
Johnson relented with a brisk wave of his hand. He led us around the largest building, past a parking lot, and through the entrance of the Medical Examiner’s Office.
Government buildings always gave me the willies. Everything seemed stamped with “official business” as the worker cogs turned on their petty duties and counted the days to retirement. It was like a treadmill in a mausoleum.
Johnson had us wait at a counter while he went ahead. The clerk behind the counter was a sad-faced, middle-aged woman. She did a double take at Carmen.
The clerk’s pale scalp showed from under wispy strands dyed henna-red, with silver roots. Ignoring us, she perked up and clicked a remote toward a television sitting beside a water cooler.
She increased the volume for a commercial of a product called NuGrumatex. Photos showed a man with a monk’s crown surrounding a bald pate smooth as a balloon. More photos and a video clip had the same man running and playing tennis—activities that demonstrated how his youthful vigor had been restored by the growth of new, thick hair. The next photos showed a woman suffering with bald patches where her head had been gnawed at by alopecia areata. She looked as miserable as a cold, wet dog, and wore a school-marmish blouse cinched tight against her throat. In her “after
” photos, she had the luxurious curls of a forties cheesecake pinup with bare shoulders, inviting cleavage, and come-do-me-now smile.
The clerk nodded self-consciously and touched her thinning hair. The commercial segued into the usual rapid-fire disclaimers, which I tuned out, except for increased salivation and heightened libido. How wonderful. Thanks to modern pharmaceuticals, America could now be a nation of hairy, drooling, horny nimrods.
As the ad faded, it mentioned the Swiss conglomerate Rizè-Blu Pharmaceutique, Making Your Life Better Than Ever™. I’d seen a rash of Rizè-Blu’s ads lately, as if their marketing department had gotten the hives.
Deputy Johnson returned. Maybe that pompadour of his was courtesy of NuGrumatex. But the only thing that made him drool now was Carmen.
Johnson had the desk clerk sign us in and issue visitors’ badges. He led us past one door, a turn, then to a steel door, where we stopped beside a cart piled with paper face masks and disposable booties.
“Put these on,” he said. “For your protection.”
Carmen turned her back to Johnson and rolled her eyes.
Once we all put on masks and booties, Johnson swiped his ID badge through a reader on the wall. The lock on the steel door retracted with a snap.
We entered a morgue. The chilled air smelled of antibacterial cleaner and decaying human flesh. The door made another snap when it closed behind us.
At our end, with its collection of bottles and jars and the white decor, the room looked like a science lab.
Johnson introduced us to the medical examiner, a woman in her thirties, dressed in green scrubs, matching head cover, and a paper face mask. Because of the silver piercings in her ears and her trendy glasses, I would have expected to find her serving lattes instead of sawing through cadavers.
The morgue extended into an open examination area with a steel table in the center of a linoleum floor. A white sheet covered a corpse on a table. The examiner went to a computer monitor and tapped on the screen to bring up her files.
Johnson walked to the table and grasped a corner of the sheet. “We found Jane Doe this morning. Hopefully you can give us her real name.”
The Undead Kama Sutra Page 5