“I think it is.”
“That’s mighty trusting of you.”
He leaned forward and grinned. “Here’s what I know. I know you’re old enough to remember a time when there were no words.”
He was wrong, I think. I don’t remember any fully preliterate societies. But close enough. Who the hell was this guy? Did he work for the people who sent me the message in the paper? Was he the guy who sent it?
“Do I have your attention now?” he asked.
“Sure. What do you want?”
“I want you to sit right there for a second.” He pulled a black case out of his jacket and slid it across the table. “Open it.”
I popped it open and found a syringe.
“We just met and we’re already doing heroin?” I said. “Seems sudden.”
He leaned forward and whispered, “Keep your goddamn voice down. Now I want you to take that and inject yourself with it.”
“Um, no?”
“You want to spend the rest of your very long life without your balls?” he asked.
I was amazed that our dialogue had gone unnoticed. You’d think this was far enough off the conversational beaten path to send up a signal or two to somebody. But everyone was stubbornly minding their own business.
I picked up the syringe and examined it. “What’s in it?” I asked. Not that I had anything to fear regardless. Nobody had invented anything yet that could poison me.
“It’s the only way I have to verify your identity. It’s concentrated botulinum toxin. It’ll kill a man in about fifteen seconds. If you are who you’re supposed to be, it won’t do anything to you.”
“I never claimed to be anyone special,” I pointed out. “That’s all you. And you seem convinced already.”
“I am convinced. But if I don’t test you I don’t get paid.”
I laid the syringe on the table and examined it. “How’s it work?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve never used one.”
He sighed and rolled his eyes. I wasn’t kidding. I really had never used a syringe before.
“Find a vein,” he said. “Your wrist is fine.”
I laid my hand flat and palm-up on the table and looked at it. “Like that one?” I asked, pointing to the largest vein I could see.
“Yes, fine.” He was getting impatient. All except for the gun under the table, I was sort of enjoying this.
“Okay,” he said. “Insert the pointy end into the vein at an angle, and then push the plunger down. And don’t do anything stupid like sticking me with it. You kill me, I kill you.”
And so, at gunpoint, I gave myself my very first intravenous injection. It was a little painful. I don’t think I have a future ahead of me as a junkie.
When I was finished and the fifteen seconds wherein I continued to be alive passed uneventfully, he said, “Good, now put it back in the case and slide it over to me.”
I did as I was told. He returned the case to his inside pocket.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Get up. I’m parked about two blocks down the street.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’ll get to that later. Do you know how to drive?”
“No.” He tapped the gun barrel against the bottom of the table. “Yes.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
He stood. I stood. He was much taller than he had looked when sitting in the chair. A full head-and-shoulders taller than me. I remember when I used to be the tallest guy on an entire continent. At this rate, in another century or two, I’ll be the shortest.
I led the way out the door, leaving behind the bitter, spiked coffee and the paper while he trailed, keeping close enough so I knew he was there but far enough so it didn’t look like I was being coerced.
“To the right,” he said. “Down the alley, then left.”
“I just met you, you’ve got a gun pointed at my back, and you want me to go with you down an alley?”
“Yep.”
“Just checking.”
It was a fairly unremarkable alley. Not too narrow, with a couple of trash cans, a Dumpster, and a fire escape ladder just out of reach. Pretty typical. But it was long and it was out of view to the public at large, and there was nobody else in it.
At a convenient moment, I spun around and hit just the right spot on his wrist to compel him to drop his gun, which I caught with my free hand. With one sweep of my leg I buckled his knees, and just like that I was standing over my erstwhile captor holding his gun with him kneeling before me.
Here’s a little bit of advice if you ever meet an immortal and feel like challenging him to a fight. It is simply impossible to live this long and not pick up a few hand-to-hand combat techniques here and there. I was a black belt before there was such a thing. Not that I’m bragging.
“Well,” my new friend said, “that was impressive. Did you break my wrist?”
“No, but you may have to give it a couple of minutes before you try and use it again. What do I call you?”
“Stan.”
“What’s this about, Stan?”
“Can I get up?”
“No.”
“It’s just that my knees kinda hurt.”
I pressed the gun against his forehead.
“All right,” he conceded. “I’m a bounty hunter.”
I pulled back. “That’s a new one. Who put a bounty on me?”
“No idea. It’s a private contract. Unofficial. Very under the table.”
“Sounds illegal.”
“That’s sort of splitting hairs, isn’t it?” he answered. True enough. It had to be illegal, as the police had only been looking for me for two days. This was about something else.
Stay where you are and we will find you.
“Dead or alive?” I asked.
“Alive.”
“That’s heartening.”
“With allowances for wounding.”
“You’re over-sharing,” I pointed out. “What were you supposed to do with me once you found me?”
“Call a number.”
“What number?”
“The job came with a scrambled phone. It automatically calls the correct number, so I have no idea.”
“That’s convenient,” I said. “Did the syringe come with the package, too?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the phone?”
“In my car,” he said, adding, “look, my knees are starting to hurt here.”
“Oh, stop whining. Keys?”
“In my pocket.”
“What kind of car?”
“Caddy Escalade. Black.”
“Nice ride,” I commented. I didn’t know what an Escalade looked like, but I knew what a Cadillac was.
“I make a decent living,” he said. “Look, I really wasn’t going to hurt you. You seem like a nice enough guy and all.”
“Thanks, Stan. I need to know something else. A couple of nights ago two friends of mine were beaten to death in their apartment. You know anything about that?”
“No,” he said.
I cuffed him in the ear with the butt of the gun.
“Oww!” he cried.
“Try again,” I suggested.
“It wasn’t me, all right? There are other bounty hunters out there. You’re worth a lot of money to somebody.”
“How much?”
He hesitated. “Five million.”
“Wow.” I know inflation has changed the relevance of the word “million” but that still sounded like a lot.
“Yeah, wow,” he agreed. “So, now everybody is in on it.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Lucky,” he said. “I saw your picture in the paper. I was heading to the police station to ask for details on the case. Figured they had a lead on you. But then I saw you outside.”
Guess my big makeover wasn’t as thorough as I thought. “Cops just hand out information like that?”
“I’m FBI.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Show me.”
I let him pull out his wallet. He handed it over. It looked real enough to me, but then what do I know? I pocketed it.
“Thought you said you weren’t law enforcement,” I said.
“I said I wasn’t police. And I’m not acting in an official capacity at this particular moment in time.”
“The ID says you’re based in San Antonio. They let you drive off whenever you feel like it?”
“Technically I’m on suspension.”
I smiled. “You’re a bit dirty, aren’t you Stan?”
He didn’t respond.
“Okay, you can stand up,” I said.
Stan pulled himself to his feet with help from the wall, while I checked both ends of the alley. Didn’t look like anybody had noticed us.
“Thanks,” he said. “Now what?”
“Now we have a problem,” I admitted.
“Yeah?”
“Look at it from my perspective, Stan. You’re a killer. You know how I know that? Because you were willing to accept the consequences of your little injection without blinking. Now I can’t let you go because you’ll just try and find me again, and next time you probably won’t give me a chance to disarm you. And I’m not at all fond of the whole being-turned-in-on-a-bounty thing in general. I’m more of a free spirit in that way.”
“I could just walk away,” he said, his voice rising somewhat. “Forget we ever met.”
“I don’t think you’d do that. Plus, you know what I look like. You could put that information to pretty good use. Maybe make a little money out of it.”
“I wouldn’t,” he insisted.
“Stan, Stan, Stan. I’m not stupid. I didn’t get to live this long by being stupid. I’m sorry, but when you think about it none of this was my idea.”
“But…”
I pressed the gun up to his chest and fired, once.
It made a little pop like a cork. Just like he said.
Chapter 10
Today I saw him watching me as I walked to the lab. He’s got a nice big office on the other side of the compound, with a nice big picture window to look down on his subjects. I’m sure all he sees when he looks at me is dollar signs, but that doesn’t mean he’s not enjoying the fact that he beat me. Although I suppose I could just be projecting, because it sure as hell bugs the crap out of me that I let someone like that put me in this position.
The encounter—if you call staring at a hundred paces an encounter—brought home the idea that my escape plan is going to have to involve killing him.
But an escape plan would be good first. I definitely need to start with one of those.
* * *
“You did what?” Brenda asked. This was much later. After taking poor, foolish Stan off the list of things I have to worry about, I strip-searched his car for items of interest—which I found—and then took the most circuitous route imaginable to return to Brenda’s, on the off-chance there were any others like him following me.
“I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?”
“You could’a hit him over the head or, or turned him in to the cops, or…”
I was busy checking out the contents of Stan’s car, which I’d dumped out on the bed.
“You’re not thinking straight,” I said. “You’re a vampire, you should know about this. Think in terms of predator/prey.”
“What?” Brenda was freaking out, which resulted in her voice getting louder. Almost too loud. Among the many things that are amplified by the vampiric transformation are the vocal chords. I remember Eloise used to hunt rabbits by shrieking at them, which either stunned or killed them outright.
“I’ve never killed anybody!” she nearly shouted, and I swear the walls quivered. Apparently she’d rethought her whole “being a killer is sorta sexy” thing.
“For Baal’s sake, keep it down,” I said, clapping my hands over my ears.
“I haven’t,” she repeated, much quieter.
“I know,” I said, lingering near the things on the bed that I very much wanted to delve into. But I was going to have to calm down my hyperventilating vampire friend first. (Ironic, as vampires don’t need to breathe.) I stood up and stepped toward her.
“Don’t touch me!” she exclaimed, and I bet they heard that downstairs.
“I won’t,” I said. “Look, just… calm down a minute, okay? Yes, I could have clubbed him over the head and run off, but what would that have gotten me? He’d already found me once, and he wasn’t going to be as careless about it the second time. If I had just wounded him, I couldn’t guarantee he’d never tell somebody else where I was and what I currently look like. I couldn’t go to the police, because who do you think they would believe? The word of the FBI agent, or the word of the guy with no legitimate identification who’s already a suspect in another murder?”
She glared at me. “You didn’t have to kill him,” she insisted.
“If he had to, he would have done the same to me.”
Blood tears started to well up in her eyes. I’d clearly overestimated the prowess of the modern vampire. The ones I’d known over the centuries were fundamentally aware that they were killing machines and were largely okay with that.
“I didn’t think of you as someone who could really do something like that,” she added quietly.
“Neither did Stan,” I pointed out. “But I didn’t live this long by being polite.”
* * *
I committed my first murder when I was twelve. I wasn’t even aware of my immortality at the time. I was just trying to get by. It happened when our little band of nomads happened upon the hunting grounds of someone else’s little band of nomads, and one thing led to another. This was almost literally at the dawn of man, so “us good, them bad” was just about the only thing that figured prominently in our philosophical outlook.
Using a heavy stone—very much in vogue at the time—I crushed the skull of an enemy warrior who couldn’t have been much more than ten years old, feeling no particular remorse about it, because again, they were “them.” We won the fight and rewarded ourselves by raping several of their women. It’s what one did. Don’t ask me to feel bad about it if you weren’t there.
Violence continued to be the norm for the vast majority of my life, peaceful existence the exception. It may have seemed like things quieted down a bit once we all figured out how to farm, because farming begets society and society develops laws, and laws enforce peace in the interest of the greater good. But society is just another kind of tribe and it eventually bumps into a larger one, and there’s more violence, only then it’s called war.
In those early days, I must have been directly responsible for hundreds of deaths and indirectly responsible for possibly thousands. Sometimes it’s just what you have to do.
The advent of civilization—an overly optimistic word—didn’t change things as much as one might think, because no matter how large a city or empire became there was always another “them” to go out and kill. And when organized religion really got going… well, there’s a fantastic excuse to murder people in bunches.
My point is that despite the patina of civility coating most of modern society, underneath it is a thick layer of savagery. Many people go their entire lives without even realizing it’s there. I’ve never had that luxury.
* * *
I returned to my immediate concern, which was the stuff I’d been able to carry from Stan’s Escalade. I would have just driven the car someplace where I could search it thoroughly, but that struck me as a dangerous thing to try. There was too much I didn’t know, such as whether his car could be tracked or whether he would be found and connected to the car soon enough for the police to consider looking for it. I had taken what I could, tossed his keys into the sewer, and left the scene.
I found only two things worth keeping—a large square suitcase and an oversized manila folder. I slid the contents of the folder onto the bed and examined them b
y candlelight. There wasn’t much, just the phone Stan had talked about and a two-page info sheet.
Page one had a bad black-and-white photograph of me. It was recent. Within the last six months recent. I couldn’t fathom how anyone had managed such a photo, as I take great precautions in that regard.
The rest of the page was notable for its lack of information.
Name: Various
Age: looks early thirties
Sex: Male
Race: Various
Height: 5’ 11’’
Weight: 180 (Approx.)
Hair: Various
Eyes: Brown
Scars, other identifying marks: None
Clearly, whoever had sent Stan knew enough to list race as various, which is not the sort of thing one customarily sees in a tally of vital statistics. I flipped to page two.
Target is an immortal man, but in all appearances and mannerisms a normal human being. He is immune to all diseases but can be physically harmed with ordinary weaponry. He typically travels alone but has been known to befriend humans at times, and also various underspecies. He prefers to use cash when he travels. (Source of cash is unknown.) He will rarely stay in one place for an extended period. He was last spotted in Cleveland.
Target is not usually armed. However, he is extremely cunning and is not to be taken lightly. His greatest weakness is his penchant for alcohol, which makes him sloppy and overly reliant on strangers.
Goal: Target is to be taken
ALIVE
. Use of lethal force—or damage caused leading to his subsequent demise—will result in nonpayment or forfeiture of payment. Once you have safely secured and positively tested target, contact is to be made via the enclosed phone. N
O
OTHER
FORM
OF
CONTACT
IS
ACCEPTABLE
. Transfer of target and the necessary payment arrangements will be negotiated at that time.
“What does it say?” Brenda asked quietly, not yet willing to approach the bed, or me.
Immortal Page 10