I reached for the lip of the steel pipe and hoisted myself up. The inside of the culvert was layered with smelly muck. I crawled through the mess for a hundred meters and emerged in a sewer, where I could stand up. Rats clung to my shoulders. Narrow shafts of sunlight beamed through the holes in a manhole cover above. I shooed the rats and hiked through the sewer to get more distance from the river.
My overnight bag was still in the Monte Carlo. I had packed light, a few extra clothes and toiletries. My other luggage and the bulk of the cash remained in my Cadillac back at the airport in Savannah. When I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and opened it, gritty water dribbled out. The screen remained dark.
My watch was gone, lost in the river along with my contacts. After what seemed like hours of spelunking through the sewer, I stopped in a chamber at the intersection of two tunnels. A steel ladder led to a manhole cover. Circles of light marked the holes around its inner circumference. Traffic rumbled on the street and the sunlight blinked as vehicles passed overhead. I’d wait here for darkness and pass the time in a cold, miserable, and disgusting funk.
I couldn’t believe the ordeal I put myself through. Other vampires lived in penthouses and were attended by a coterie of rich, beautiful women. The low point of the day was when the martini glass ran dry.
So what the hell was I trying to prove? Why was it my lot in eternity to champion the wronged and find justice? I was no superhero; I didn’t even own a pair of tights.
About the time in my youth when I gained my identity as a man, I’d always chosen the path that set me as a bulwark between the privileged and the underdog. I helped my mother and her sisters deal with unscrupulous salesmen and landlords. Later, when I joined the army, I might have talked about benefits, security, and opportunity, but deep in my heart, I saw myself as a patriot, the enemy of tyrants. Ironically, it was in service during a war we had no business starting that I murdered the innocent in the name of freedom, and it had taken my conversion to the undead to wipe the cosmic slate clean.
Maybe the slate wasn’t clean enough and I needed to atone a little bit longer, perhaps for another century.
The rays shining through the manhole cover slanted as the time passed. The lights dimmed and disappeared as night settled. I climbed the ladder, put my hands against the bottom of the cover, and pushed.
I had to rotate the cover until it lifted and allowed me to look out over an intersection. People loitered on the sidewalks of a seedy part of town. Good. There were plenty of smelly, dirty citizens I could hide among.
I tilted the cover up and scrambled onto the street. The cover dropped into place behind me.
I walked across the street toward an alley. An illuminated billboard for Rizè-Blu beamed its cheery message of chemical self-improvement onto the homeless and drunks.
Damp, filthy clothes and black slime covered my body. Before I did anything or went anywhere, I needed to wash up and change clothes. I smelled, well, like I’d been swimming with rats and turds.
Dumpsters covered with graffiti and piles of trash were set against the walls of the alley.
The skin on the back of my hands tingled. Danger.
Chapter
25
The warning barely registered when something hard whacked against my back. I staggered forward from the blow. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a broomstick swinging to hit me again. I caught my balance, reached for the broomstick, and wrenched it free.
An obese homeless man stumbled from a doorway. “Hey, leave my stuff alone.” He grabbed the handle of a shopping cart to steady himself. A tarp covered a lumpy pile in the cart.
In the moonlight, the homeless man’s head looked as dark and wrinkled as an overripe fig. His clouded eyes were a pair of burnished nickels. The aura surrounding him pulsed with defiance.
I gave him the scariest stare I could manage, to snag him with hypnosis. Nothing. Great, I had let a blind man get the drop on me.
The homeless man stared vacantly at me. A sweatshirt rode over the enormous swell of his belly, exposing a hairy navel big enough to screw in a hundred-watt bulb. He yanked the shirt to cover his gut.
I tossed the stick and sent it clattering down the center of the alley. The homeless man’s aura blazed with alarm. He jerked his head toward the noise.
“I’m not after your stuff,” I said.
His head jerked back to me.
I stepped toward him.
He raised his arms and stumbled backward against his shopping cart. “I can see good enough. Come close and I’ll give you a whipping.”
I addressed him in a soothing tone. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
He circled his fists. “Folks say that before they hit me and take my things.”
“I need your help,” I said. “I need clothes and a place to wash up.”
He put his arms down and leaned toward me. He sniffed, then grimaced. “Damn right you need to wash up. I thought the sewer had backed up again.”
“I can pay.” I peeled a damp bill from my roll of hundreds.
The homeless man did nothing.
“Here.” I took his hand.
He tried to jerk it away but I held firm. I jammed the money into his palm.
He brought the bill an inch from his face. He wrinkled his nose and waved the bill as if to shake away the smell. He brought the bill close to his face again. His right eye bulged like the lens of a microscope as he examined the bill.
“You got a name?” I asked.
“You must not be from around here. If you were, you’d know who I was.”
“You’re right, I’m not from around here.”
“Then where are you from? Stink-alvania?” He laughed. The shirt rode over his belly again and he pulled it down. “Name’s Earl.” He handed the money back to me. “This is a hundred-dollar bill. No way anyone around here is going to accept that from me. Got any twenties?” He stood with his hand out.
I smoothed a twenty and swapped it with the hundred.
Earl fingered the bill. “Just the one?” He brought the bill to his eye. “You owe me eighty.”
“How do you figure?”
“You offered a hundred to begin with, didn’t you? That’s how I figure. You don’t want my help, then stay dirty and stinking. Move along then, ’cause you’re ruining my dinner.”
A bag stenciled with the name DARRYL’S BAR-B-Q rested in the doorway behind him, along with an upright paper bag big enough for a bottle of wine or a fifth of liquor. I would’ve preferred the aroma of barbecue over my own disgusting smell. I’d pay a hundred bucks for a bath.
“Okay, help me and you get the extra eighty. Where could I wash up?” I asked.
“The rescue mission. But you got to put up with all that preaching and holy-roller shit.”
“I can handle that.” I looked up and then down the alley. “Which way is the mission?”
Earl pointed to his right. “That way.”
“Well, let’s go.”
“Don’t bother. It’s done closed for the evening.”
I wanted to shake a straight answer out of Earl. “Where then?”
“The gas station up the block.” Earl turned around and groped for the bag of barbecue and the bottle. He slipped them under the tarp covering his shopping cart.
“Is the gas station open?” I asked.
“Nope.” Earl pulled the cart away from the wall and guided it up the alley. He pushed the cart in a shambling gait. His heels flattened the backs of a pair of dirty white cross-trainers.
“Then where are you going?”
“The gas station. The folks who own it won’t let you wash there when it’s open.” Earl said this like every idiot in Kansas City knew it as a fact.
I walked behind Earl.
He mumbled over his shoulder. “Don’t get too close and for God’s sake, stay downwind.”
I put a couple of extra steps between us.
We turned on Holmes Street and continued to the next road. Traffic emptied
from the interstate and whooshed past us into a spaghetti maze of on-ramps, off-ramps, and intersections.
Earl pushed his cart off the sidewalk. The wheels clattered onto the pavement. As if blind—gee, after all, he was—he trundled across the street. A Lincoln Continental with green lights in the wheel wells and a bass stereo loud enough to drown out an exploding volcano rounded the corner and, not bothering to slow down, zoomed around Earl.
He kept shuffling, rammed his cart against the opposite curb, and levered it onto the sidewalk.
At the end of the next block, Earl veered into the lot of a dark and deserted Gas-U-Mart. Electric wires jutted from the posts where the security lamps would have been. Scarred and chipped plywood sheets covered the vending machines. Behind the mart, a Dodge Caravan rested on flat tires beside a Dumpster and barrels filled with oily water.
Earl pushed his cart until it collided with the wall. It was an inside corner, where the building made an L by the rear entrance. A heavy chain and two hasps, all fastened with padlocks the size of fists, secured the door.
“Now what?” I asked.
Earl folded back the tarp on his cart. He wrestled with a stuffed nylon duffel bag and pulled it free. He hefted the bag and tossed it to land by my feet. “You can’t believe the nice things folks throw out. Find you something that fits.”
I bent over and unzipped the bag. Clothes and shoes popped out like meat from a split sausage casing. I sorted through the first garments: a turquoise prom dress, some kind of blue dress pants with silver stripes, a yellow blazer, and assorted sweats. I picked out a Lilith Fair T-shirt, black sweatpants with cargo pockets, and a pair of sneakers a size too big. Lucky for me, there was a pair of Foster Grant sunglasses in a pocket of the sweats.
“Got any underwear or socks?”
“That’s one thing nobody tosses out. Least anything you’d want to wear.” Earl cradled a box of broken electric appliances that he set on the ground. Someday he might need a waffle iron with a frayed power cord.
Earl pulled a length of garden hose from his cart. He waved to the ground around the door. “There’s a spigot around there someplace.”
I saw it. “There’s no faucet handle.”
Earl rummaged in his cart through yet another box. He fished out a pair of locking pliers.
Earl reached for the wall and stepped close until his shin knocked against the spigot. He grunted and sank to one knee. He screwed the brass coupling of the hose over the spigot.
Sludge caked my skin and hair. “What about soap? Shampoo?”
Earl cocked a thumb to the cart.
I found tubes and bottles of body wash, shampoo, and conditioner stacked next to spray cans of Raid and Velveeta cheese.
Earl locked the pliers over the stub of the valve stem. As he twisted the valve open, the spigot squeaked. Water rumbled through the hose, and its length snaked across the grass.
Earl grasped the end of the hose. He braced one hand against the wall and levered himself upright. “Should be a grate in the corner that you can stand on.”
I unbuttoned my shirt. “Any chance someone can come by? I’d hate to be busted for public indecency.”
Earl chuckled. “Cops come by all the time. But would I care? It won’t be me buck-naked.”
I carried the body wash, shampoo, and a bundle of clothes across the weeds and broken glass to the corner. I stepped on the grate and set the items on the ledge of a boarded-up window. As I stripped, I tossed my dirty clothes into a pile on the grass.
Earl squirted the hose. He missed.
“I’m over here, Earl.”
“Sing something and I’ll find you.”
I hummed “Chances Are.”
The cold spray jolted me. I lathered up and scrubbed at the funk with a rag. I wiped dry with a couple of T-shirts and slipped into the clean clothes. The sweatpants bunched around my ankles and I rolled them up to my shins. I collected things from my old clothes and pushed them into the pockets of the sweatpants.
Earl turned off the water and unscrewed the hose. He grunted the entire time. He dropped the pliers into their box and coiled the hose in his shopping cart.
Being clean refreshed me almost as much as fanging a virgin and drinking her unsullied blood—the Godiva chocolate of hemoglobin.
“Say, Earl.”
He stopped for a moment.
“Thanks.”
He packed his boxes. “I didn’t do it for thanks. I did it for the hundred dollars.”
“I haven’t forgotten. How’d you wind up like this?”
“You asking how is it I’m a homeless bum?” Earl reached into the cart and grasped the bottle in the bag. “Bad luck and bad decisions.” He uncapped the bottle and sipped from it. “Doesn’t help that I stay a little off balance.”
I pulled out my money. “I don’t have any more twenties. How about a hundred?”
“That all you got, then I better get creative about breaking it.” He held out the bottle. It smelled of Night Train wine.
“No thanks. Do you need anything else?”
“My life starting at age fourteen,” Earl deadpanned. “Don’t suppose you can do that?”
“Sorry.”
“Didn’t think so.” He took another sip. “Since you’re being so generous, then four hundred bucks outta do it. I’ve got a daughter in Cincinnati I’d like to visit.”
I counted the bills. “Here’s four. That’s five hundred and twenty you’ve gotten from me.” I touched Earl’s hand and he turned it palm-up to clasp the money.
“Earl, you never asked me my name.”
“Figured a guy who crawled out of the sewer and didn’t ask for the police wasn’t interested in spreading his identity around.” Earl brought the money close to his eye and scrutinized every bill. “How about I call you Cash Machine?”
“Fair enough.” I put the sunglasses on. “Time to go. Thanks again, Earl. Say hello to your daughter.”
“My daughter?” Earl’s eyebrows worked up and down. “Oh right. My daughter.” He folded the bills into his front trouser pocket and groped for the handle of the shopping cart. “Yeah, we’ll see you later, Cash Machine. Try staying out of the sewers. Might not find another Earl to help you.”
I turned about and started north. A few blocks later I walked up to a mini-mart and approached a man gassing a Ford F-150 pickup. His back was to me as he watched the gas pump.
“Excuse me,” I asked. “You wouldn’t happen to be going east?”
He glanced over his shoulder and gave me a dismissive glare. “Can’t help you, buddy.”
I removed the sunglasses. “Guess again. You and I are going on a road trip.”
Chapter
26
Once we got to Savannah, Georgia, I left the F-150 and its driver in the parking lot of a crowded McDonald’s and proceeded on foot to a bus stop. A mile down the road, I got off the bus and flagged a taxi that took me to the Savannah airport, where I’d left my Cadillac.
The taxi dropped me off near the west end of the airport parking lot. I scanned the cars and searched for the telltale glow of an aura belonging to someone on a stakeout.
The area looked safe. The few people I saw were encapsulated in auras swirling with petty worries. No one cared about me. But I had to assume that my cover was blown and that Goodman knew who I was and what I was up to.
I walked around my Cadillac. A film of dust covered the body and windows. I stood still for a moment and cleared my mind. I held my hands up, fingers raised, at mid-chest level. A faint breeze brushed against my skin, but nothing tingled. My sixth sense didn’t detect any threat.
Didn’t mean I wasn’t in danger. In a previous case, I had an electronic bug planted on me that I had had no idea was there. My car could now have a listening device or a GPS transmitter stuck on it. I got on my hands and knees and inspected the undercarriage. I ran my hand inside the fender wells and the bumpers. Plenty of dead, crusty bugs, but no electronic ones.
As I stood and brus
hed myself off, I felt disappointed. All this time I’d been looking over my shoulder and priming my muscles for a desperate fight. I could’ve flown back here from Kansas City first-class and spared myself the long drive and a numb butt.
Maybe Goodman and his cronies had no clue about me. Maybe they were so fixed on their plan—whatever it was—that they didn’t bother to notice I was sneaking up on them.
I was done with that. I knew where Goodman should be, and I would go straight to him. No more hide-and-seek. I started my Cadillac, tuned to a satellite radio channel, and cruised directly to the Sapphire Grand Atlantic Resort.
Goodman’s image loomed foremost in my mind. I was sure he had killed Karen Beck and was responsible for me taking a swim in the Missouri River and hiking through the sewers of Kansas City. I rehearsed scenarios, how I would corner him and punish his body.
I passed the first guardhouse entrance. Down the road, orange cones funneled traffic to a security guard beside the second guardhouse. More guards and a phalanx of the Gator utility vehicles waited on the shoulder. Why all this security?
The guard waved me to a halt. He asked if I had a reservation, which I didn’t. He said the hotel was booked up and closed to the public for the weekend. He wouldn’t elaborate and asked that I clear the entrance.
A convoy of white Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows lined up behind me. I couldn’t hypnotize the guard in front of so many witnesses, so I turned around and left.
I stopped up the road and examined the convoy with my naked vampire eyes. Everybody had a red aura with the typical range of emotions. Curiosity. Anticipation. Anxiety. Boredom. Nothing that threatened me.
Why was I turned away and the others let in? What was going on? Feeling not so much frustrated as puzzled, I checked into a multistoried motel off South Forest Beach Drive. I brought in my extra bags from the Cadillac and changed into fresh clothes and put in new contacts.
Despite the heightened security, I was getting back in the Grand Atlantic. However, I couldn’t let myself get complacent about Goodman. Maybe I was tracking all the wrong clues. What if this involved something supernatural that I wasn’t familiar with? What if my pursuers were in plain sight and I didn’t know? Even though I saw no evidence of being followed or spied upon, I remained wary as a cat sneaking through a kennel.
The Undead Kama Sutra Page 13