“I don’t know, man. They were all little kids, like middle school. I didn’t really pay attention, ’cause I didn’t know any of them. But I did kinda know this girl whose little sister got kidnapped. I think they said she was number eight or something like that.”
“Does your friend have a name?” I had the beginnings of a plan, but I needed to be able to leave Tommy alone and know he was safe. He was a moron, but he was my moron for the moment.
“Dude, she’s not my friend, I barely know her.” I motioned for him to go on, because I didn’t care. “Janice Reynolds. My buddy Rick used to go out with her or something. Or maybe hooked up with her at a party. I can’t remember. But she lives in that new development over by the high school. What are you gonna do?”
He held out his ginger ale and waited. I finally put it back on the tray for him. I hate pretend invalids.
“I’m going to go talk to your friend Janice. But I’ve got a couple of other stops to make first, and I need to make a little noise so your guard will come back. Try to make this convincing.”
“Make what convincing?”
I didn’t answer. Instead I put a pillow over his head and counted to twenty. He thrashed around pretty well, but wasn’t anywhere near smart enough to press the call button for the nurse. After he passed out, I made sure that he was still breathing, pressed the call button myself and threw the armchair out the window. I figured that would be enough to draw attention even at a hospital, so I wheeled my mop bucket in the opposite direction from where all the people were running and ducked into a stairwell to make good my escape.
Chapter Nine
I walked past the crowd of people looking at the armchair that had crushed the hood of a police car in front of the hospital and headed toward the bus stop. The cop car was a nice touch, if I do say so myself. I thought my luck was finally starting to look up as I got to the bus stop, but my phone rang and proved me wrong again.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Dude, you gotta get over here!’ Greg sounded more than a little freaked out, but he freaks out when he burns a Pop-Tart.
“Slow down. One, where are you? And two, what’s up?”
“I’m at Tommy’s house, and the cops are here! They’re talking to his parents about a string of kidnappings. They think Tommy might be involved, and they’re talking about taking him out of the hospital and arresting him!”
Great. “Is there a woman detective there? Tall, ponytail, boots, attitude?”
“Yeah. She’s a real ball-buster, man. She’s got Tommy’s mom in tears and his dad all freaked out about college scholarships and lawyers and that crap.”
“Don’t sweat it. She’ll be leaving any second.”
“What are you talking about? Wait, there she goes. How did you . . . ?” Greg trailed off.
“I’ll explain later.” I looked up and down the street, really wanting a bus to arrive before Detective Kickass got back to the hospital. “Now here’s the plan—go knock on the door, and when Tommy’s dad answers, mojo him into not seeing you, then deck him. Leave him out cold in the doorway, and then break a couple of windows. Get the hell out of there and meet me at home. We’ve got work to do.”
“What?!?” I held the phone away from my head as Greg freaked out again. I counted to ten, and when he paused for breath, I put the phone back to my head.
“Do it, and meet me at home. I’ll see you in half an hour.” I hung up, and when I didn’t see a bus anywhere, stepped out into the street in front of an oncoming car. The poor banker-type slammed on the brakes, and I pulled him out of the car. He started to say something, but then took a look in my eyes and fell silent, like a rabbit staring at a wolf.
I didn’t plan to snack on him, but it had been a long night, and I was still really hungry. And that deer-in-the-headlights look got to me. I grabbed him by the tie and pulled him in. I spoke to him, not really saying words, just noises meant to calm the prey while I sniffed the side of his neck, smelling the fear-sweat and listening to the blood pulse in his carotid.
I took a quick glance around at all the cars in the parking lot, all the people milling around, and decided this would really have to wait. I looked into his eyes and whispered, “Sleep.” He sagged like a sack of slightly overweight potatoes, and I tossed him into the passenger seat of his BMW SUV. I hopped in the driver’s seat and headed off toward home with a plan in mind and dinner next to me.
I didn’t go all the way home, obviously. There are good ideas, and there are bad ideas. And for vampires, leaving a car with your last meal in the front seat parked outside your lair definitely falls into the “bad idea” column. I drove to an alley behind a biker bar called The Thirsty Beaver a couple miles west of our place and got into the back seat behind my meal. He was still out cold, so I grabbed his left hand and brought the wrist to my mouth with little fanfare.
Feeding is a basic need, and not deserving of androgynous and mildly homoerotic adjectives. A man’s gotta eat, plain and simple. And what this man has to eat is human blood. I normally would have raided the blood supply at the hospital, but all the police there had made that a little too high profile for my tastes.
I pulled his wrist to my mouth and licked the place at the bottom of his forearm where the veins run closest to the skin. I used the left wrist because between the rapid healing inherent to vampire bites and the fact that this yuppie wore an expensive watch, I figured there were better than even odds that he would never notice he’d been snacked upon. Not that anyone would believe him, but I tried to keep things neat when I could.
My canines extended into razor-sharp points, and I tore as small a hole as I could while still letting the blood flow. It splashed against the back of my throat all hot and coppery, and the thick syrupy liquid went down as smooth as twenty-year-old scotch. And as a matter of fact, I could taste a little hint of scotch. Somebody had been driving while intoxicated—bad boy.
It had been a while since I drank from the source, and it was good. Greg doesn’t approve, so whenever we’re together I drink from the bag, but man, there’s nothing like the taste of fresh blood right from the vein. It’s hot, with that metallic and salty taste that’s like nothing else in the world. We can live on blood bank supplies, but it’s the difference between a really good rare filet mignon and a frozen hamburger patty. I drank for a couple of minutes, just a couple of pints, and then leaned back in my seat behind the yuppie, who was still out like a light.
“Was it good for you?” I asked my sleeping dinner. He was as silent as I expected him to be, which was good for both of us. I probably would have flipped out had he woken up at that exact moment, and it’s usually not a good idea to be the human trapped in a car with a freaked-out vamp. I took a minute to make sure I hadn’t dripped anything on my shirt, steal the snack’s wallet and leave him behind the bar. The Beaver had enough hipster traffic that one more SUV wouldn’t draw too much attention until closing time, and by then I’d be miles away.
I tossed his wallet minus the cash in a dumpster and headed home. Now I had bus fare to get home on, but since I was close, I took it at a quick jog and was there in fifteen minutes without breaking a sweat. The four-minute mile is a big deal to human runners, but it’s pretty much a warm-up pace for dead guys.
Greg was waiting for me when I got home, and he was practically bouncing off the walls. “Apartment” is a generous term for our home, I suppose. We live in the basement of a caretaker’s house in a local municipal cemetery. Municipal cemeteries work best for our brand of lurking, because they’re not consecrated ground. We can hang out there. Greg and I figure we can cycle through as the “caretaker” every dozen years or so, just to keep the folks that own the cemetery from getting suspicious about the fact that we don’t age. We fixed up the basement with a couple of hidden entrances, and outfitted it the way we wanted. The caretaker’s cottage is decorated in vintage redneck, so anyone stopping by sees exactly what they expect to see. On they go, and no one gets in our way.
&nbs
p; I made up some story for the cemetery owners about being an insomniac writer with an online poker addiction, so they leave me alone when I never go outside in the daytime and am up all night. They don’t really care, as long as the graves stay mowed and clean, and I subcontract that work. As long as we don’t charge anything for our “maintenance services,” they don’t charge us anything to live there. It’s a pretty sweet deal, if I do say so myself.
“Dude, what the hell took you so long? I’ve been going nuts here waiting for you!” Greg had an Xbox controller in one hand, but hadn’t even bothered to turn on the game. He usually crushes the games, but obviously tonight he was more interested in what I had to tell him.
“Sorry, had to stop for take-out on the way.” I sat beside him on the couch and picked up the second controller. “What are we playing?”
Greg was having none of that and grabbed the controller out of my hands. “No frickin’ way, man. What is the deal, and what are we going to do about that man-eating woman cop?”
“I don’t know what the deal is yet, but I’m starting to get the idea that our little demon chasing Tommy is just the tip of the iceberg. And I’m pretty sure that our distractions will keep the detective out of our hair for a little while. Hopefully she’ll be busy chasing after whoever busted up Tommy’s house and jumped out the window of his hospital room long enough for us to get to the bottom of all this.”
“But I busted up his house, and I guess you broke his hospital window . . .” My partner’s book smart, not street smart, but he’s damn loyal and has super-powers, so I keep him around. Besides, he’s been my best friend since sixth grade. We met getting stuffed into adjacent lockers in gym class. Even then, his was a tight fit.
“You broke the hospital window,” Greg repeated as understanding dawned on him.
“Now you get it. So we need to find out everything we can about these kids that have gone missing. Tommy said there were ten or eleven of them, and that’s why the cops were after him so quickly. You get online and see what you can dig up, and I’m going to go interview the sister of one of the earlier kidnap victims. Then we crash for a little while and try to catch up with Dad early tomorrow night. Sound good?”
“Works for me. Hey, did you bring any leftovers with you from the hospital? I’m getting a little peckish.” Greg headed over to his desk and its brand new MacBook, external monitor setup and a ridiculously large array of external hard drives. Greg’s on a mission to collect every vampire movie ever made, so he needs serious storage. He uses more bandwidth in a week than most of Nebraska uses in a year, so it’s a damn good thing he figured out how to piggyback onto the network of the bank headquarters down the block.
“Sorry, dude. No leftovers. Not even a drop to spare.” And it was true. My donor would probably have felt really crappy when he woke up if I had drunk any more. I wasn’t lying to Greg exactly, just avoiding a repeat of the fight we always have when I drink straight from a human.
He barely even looked up from his keyboard as he muttered “Pig” at me. By the time I’d gotten to my closet he had four Firefox windows open with a different Google search running on each one. I swear I think instead of super vamp-speed he got super-fast typing when we got turned.
I went over to my closet and started weapon loading for bear. I usually only carry one good knife, a Marine-issue Ka-Bar tucked into the back of my belt, but this gig had been anything but usual to this point. I put on my shoulder holster and grabbed my Glock 17. I checked that it was loaded with silver bullets, and put a spare magazine of silver ammo in my back pocket. The silver load was for anything supernatural we encountered. I knew how much the touch of silver hurt me, so I figured nothing else in the magical world would like it, either. It meant I had to wear gloves when I loaded my magazines, but I considered that a small price to pay.
I loaded the holster with two spare magazines of regular ammunition, and strapped my backup to my right ankle. I carry a Ruger LCP for a backup when I think things could go really bad, and everything I’d seen in this case told me things could go from “peachy” to “holy crap” in the blink of an eye. I put another knife on the other ankle, rolled my jeans down to cover all the hardware, and straightened up, reaching for my black hoodie. Greg had turned away from the computer and was sitting still, staring at me.
“How bad do you think this is going to get?” He suddenly looked as worried as I’d seen him in a long time, and I sat on an arm of the couch and looked at him.
“Bad. I don’t know what we’re up against, but if what was in that little girl isn’t the boss, and I don’t think it is, then whatever is running this operation is even meaner.”
Greg sat back in the chair and sipped on a juice box. I don’t know where he picked up that habit, because all it did was make him pee purple half an hour later, but he was hooked on the silly things. After a long sip, he said, “Then guns and knives aren’t going to be a whole lot of help, are they?”
“Probably none at all,” I admitted. “But on the off chance that they might be useful, I think I’ll bring them along. Besides, the really bad guys use human pawns a lot of the time, and guns and knives work fine against humans. That reminds me.” I reached into the floor of the closet and grabbed a couple of spare magazines for my LCP backup pistol. They went into a jacket pocket.
“Man, you can’t go killing humans just because they front the bad guys. We have to be sure. What if they got suckered into working for a Big Bad?”
“I know. I know. If I take out any humans, I promise to verify their complete and utter evilness first.” I might have grinned a little, but just a little. “I just meant—”
“I know what you meant. I promise not to kill anyone that doesn’t deserve it.” I held up one hand, three middle fingers together. “Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a scout. They wouldn’t let you in.”
“Objection, your honor! Relevance!” That got a chuckle out of him. “I promise I won’t kill anyone who’s not a bad guy. We cool?” I started toward the stairs.
“Yeah, yeah. Hey Jimmy?” I stopped, not turning to look at him. I knew what he was about to suggest, because I’d already thought of it. He was right, of course, but I didn’t want to think about it.
“Do you think we should talk to Phil?”
“Probably.” I still hadn’t looked at him. I could feel him looking at the back of my head, and it was a little itchy.
“Then you’re going to talk to him now?”
“Only because I have to.” I hate dealing with angels. They always make me feel so damn unclean.
Chapter Ten
I’ve never been a fan of strip clubs, and I’m even less of a fan of angels, so putting the two together is so far out of my comfort zone it’s like dropping Huck Finn into Times Square. I walked across the parking lot into Phil’s place, shaking my head, as always, at the blue neon sign flashing “Heaven on Earth” to the passing traffic. I paid the cover, flashed my library card at the bouncer and mojo’d him into thinking it was a driver’s license. I’m not terribly photogenic, and I haven’t renewed my license since the early nineties. Putting the whammy on people is easier. I took a seat at the bar and tried to order a beer, but a pair of six-inch Lucite platform heels kept getting in the way. I finally waved the girl down to me, slid a dollar in her garter, and she jiggled on down the bar to more interested parties.
A different night, a different case and maybe I wouldn’t have waved her off, but this wasn’t the time or the place. Especially not the place. Fiction vamps that sparkle and fixate on true love give the rest of us a bad name. I don’t sparkle, I’m no more perpetually horny than anyone (or anything) else, and I don’t use my vampire powers to get laid. I’m not even particularly angst-ridden, and don’t know any vamps that are.
I ordered a Miller Lite and told the bartender I needed to see the boss. He waved a thirty-something woman over who bore all the signs of an ex-dancer who had moved up, or at least sideways, in the world. “I’m Lil,
I’m the manager here. What can I do for you?” She slid onto a stool next to me. Dark hair cascaded down her back and she was dressed in black leather from head to toe. Her eyes hinted at some undefined ethnicity I couldn’t place.
“I didn’t ask for the manager, Miss. I asked for the Boss.” I put a little emphasis on the last word, hoping she might pick up on the idea that I knew more than the average lap-dance customer.
“As far as you need to know, kid, I am the Boss.” She raised me an auditory italics and returned my verbal capitalization with one of her own. When she looked me straight in the eyes, I got a little hint that there was more to her than a fading stripper with aspirations of earning a GED.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” I asked, looking around at the gyrating bodies. It was loud, but not so loud that I wanted to risk someone overhearing me go into the supernatural aspects of life.
“Follow me.” She slid off the stool and walked towards a dark alcove with VIP in pink neon over the doorway. I now understood how the neon industry was staying alive. Apparently it’s all being used in strip clubs. I followed her and noticed that the view of Lil from behind was, in a word, incredible. Ex-dancer or not, she still had plenty to show, and the tight black miniskirt she was wearing displayed it very well. Naturally, I thought the most covered woman in the place was hotter than any of the naked ones. I’ve always been a sucker for a little mystery.
We walked down a black-carpeted hallway with doors on only one side. Each door had a light over it. Some were red, some green, and one was blinking yellow. Before I could ask what the caution light was for, Lil said over her shoulder, “Time’s almost up in that one.”
I didn’t want to think too much about what was going on inside the rooms, and I didn’t have to, because past the room with the blinking yellow light Lil opened a door with no light over it. I hadn’t even seen the door from the hallway, but when we entered, I realized it led into a spacious office complete with desk, a sofa, a full bar and a bank of monitors that covered the club, the parking lot and all the VIP rooms. She motioned me toward the chair facing the desk as she went over to the bar.
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