by Alex Bledsoe
But that was only the immediate problem. Somehow Cocker had tracked him down at Barrister’s establishment, and considering his investment of both money and time, this presented a problem. He would have to phone Fauvette and tell her to report any of Cocker’s further visits.
And, he realized with surprising disappointment, discretion might force him to miss Patience’s show the next night.
Cocker sat at the red light fuming, both from the heat and his temper.
The fucking foreign dipshit asshole had lost him. That insane turn down the grassy ramp had completely surprised him, and by the time he’d reached the street below Zginski had vanished. He spent thirty minutes searching for the Mustang parked in some lot or driveway. He had not found it.
Finally he pulled in at a convenience store and bought a quart bottle of Miller. He sat in his hot car and drank it, feeling his tension dissipate as his head grew fuzzier. He ate the still-warm steak with his bare hands. Eventually he had to pee, so he went inside to use the restroom.
As he stood at the urinal, reading the graffiti scratched on either side of the condom machine, he decided on his next move. He might not be able to follow Zginski, but the man had been talking to Gerry’s new musical act, and Cocker knew where to find her. She would lead him to Zginski, either willingly or otherwise. He had ways of making women talk.
He stopped urinating as his penis stiffened at the thought.
CHAPTER 13
WHEN HE ARRIVED at Alisa’s, Zginski parked the car in the backyard and came in through the kitchen. As always, it made him pause for a moment. He had been in some of Europe’s gaudiest dwellings, from the palace of Versailles to London’s Hyde Park mansions, but even these paled in comparison to the sheer audacity of common home furnishings in this new era. It seemed that the ability to decorate in a manner previously reserved for royalty had bred an utter lack of restraint in the populace. When every home looked like a palace, none of them were.
Alisa’s kitchen was a prime example. The wooden cabinets were painted orange and lacquered over so that they gleamed like plastic. The wallpaper was a cubist pattern of interlocking black, brown, orange, and yellow blocks, while the ceiling used the same colors, but in a different pattern. The floor’s tile was cream-colored, with hexagonal starburst patterns in each square. The overall effect, he mused, was what it must feel like to stand inside a tangerine.
He went into the living room, where he found her at work. From behind her desk Alisa looked over her glasses at him and almost gasped in surprise. She had never seen him look worried before. “Rudy?”
“I have put my car in the rear,” he said as he drew the curtain across the front window, then peeked out around the edge. The late-afternoon sun was golden and intense. “I apologize if I have damaged the lawn, but the grass is so dry it seems unlikely.”
She stood and put her notebook aside. She wore sweatpants and a Memphis State T-shirt too large for her, which made her look even more wan and wasted. “Why?”
Zginski took off his sport coat and draped it across the back of the recliner. “The drought, most certainly.”
“No, I mean, why did you put your car back there?”
He debated whether or not to tell her, and finally decided in favor of it. “I found myself pursued earlier today.”
Her eyes opened wide. “By who? The police?”
“No.”
She said more quietly, “It wasn’t a vampire hunter or anything, was it?”
Zginski smiled. She asked with such seriousness that it became absurd. “No. I believe my pursuer was once with the police in some capacity, but is no longer in their employ.”
“Why?”
“Why does any man leave a job? Perhaps he was dissatisfied, or wished more payment for his services.”
She swatted his arm. “Stop that. You know what I mean. Why were the ex-police chasing you?”
He undid the top button of his shirt. Fashion in this era may have been simpler, but it remained just as uncomfortable. “I believe it was the man who attempted to buy the car. I told you about him before.”
Alisa’s eyes opened even wider. “Byron Cocker? Byron Cocker was chasing you?”
“Indeed.” He sat on the couch and unzipped the leather stack-heeled boots.
She looked out the window herself at the empty residential street. “That’s insane. He’s not a sheriff anymore, he lost the last election. I remember reading about it. That movie embarrassed everyone in McHale County, so they elected one of his former deputies instead.”
Zginski sat back with a sigh. “Then perhaps he is merely a man who reacts badly when he feels wronged.”
Alisa sat down beside him. “He’s trouble, Rudy. Back when he was sheriff he pulled over a pair of my black students, and beat them so badly one lost the sight in his right eye.”
“I am not worried about his physical prowess.”
“No, but he also doesn’t give up. Ever. Even after his wife was murdered and his face was blown off, he didn’t give up.”
He looked at her suspiciously. Had Cocker found him through Alisa? “How do you know so much about him? Is he an acquaintance?”
“No, I saw the movie.”
“Ah, yes. The gentleman who sold me the car mentioned it.”
Alisa nodded. “Swinging Hard.”
Zginski picked up the newspaper from the ottoman. “Perhaps I may learn something by seeing the same film.”
“It’s probably not playing anymore; it came out a couple of years ago. My point is, the man is crazy. I don’t know how you got him on your trail, but he’s a good one to avoid. Especially for a man like you, with so many secrets.”
Zginski found the movie listings, but as Alisa predicted there was no mention of Swinging Hard. “What is the plot of this movie?”
“Well, Cocker was the sheriff over in McHale County. There were a bunch of bootleggers and crooked gamblers settled in along the state line, and they tried to bribe him to look the other way. When that didn’t work, they ambushed him, killed his wife, and shot him in the face. He survived, and then beat the main villain to death with a baseball bat. Hence the title.”
“And this is a true story?”
“I’m sure they simplified it so it was pure good-versus-evil. The real Cocker was—is—a racist redneck thug, by all accounts. But his wife was killed, he was shot in the face, and he did clean out the gang.”
Zginski went back to the window and watched a car pull into a driveway on the opposite side of the street. There was still no sign of Cocker, and his sense of pursuit told him he’d made good his escape.
“Is he out there?” Alisa asked.
“No, I have eluded him.” He turned to face her. “And I will deal with him, so you do not have to worry.”
“Right,” she said wryly.
Zginski, annoyed by her sarcasm, reached out with his power. Softly but with great fury he said, “If I say you should not worry, you will do as I say.”
Alisa swallowed hard, her priorities instantly realigned. She ached for him now, both intimately and emotionally. The pure sexual lust he first inspired in her had now, with time, become something she could only classify as love. It left her craving more, even the moment after an orgasm. There was never enough to satisfy her. She reached for the bottom hem of the T-shirt to pull it off.
He held up his hand. “I must rest. I will attend to you when I return.”
Alisa hated the pleading whine in her voice. “What? You’re just leaving me this way?”
“The next time I give you an assurance, you would do well to accept it without the irony.” He headed toward the cellar door.
Alisa stared after him, her body on fire with sexual need. She could minister to herself, she knew, and it would dim the intensity a bit. But only the touch of his icy skin, and the sensation of his teeth penetrating her neck, would cause this arousal to dissipate.
She slid her hands beneath the T-shirt and squeezed her breasts. “Oh, you bastard,” she
breathed, and sank back onto the couch. Not since she’d been a teenager had she so wantonly touched herself.
As she endured the effects of his power, she also felt absurdly grateful. He’d completely removed the pain from her consciousness.
Zginski padlocked the cellar door behind him and descended the stairs. The basement was a small concrete room containing the water heater and assorted boxes of miscellanea belonging to Alisa’s late husband. The one small window had been boarded over, which rendered the room pitch-black. For Zginski that was not an issue.
A faux Oriental screen separated the rest of the room from the cot where Zginski slept. On the back of the screen, and the concrete wall opposite, he’d taped up pictures from various magazines of the devices that seemed central to his new era. It was a silly affectation, but somehow waking among these images helped him grow more acclimated. He still did not understand all of them, such as the “pet rock,” or why “linear tracking” made a modern gramophone work more efficiently. But most of them were of automobiles, and the shiny surfaces and exposed engines filled him with energy whenever he awoke to them.
He settled onto the cot, feet crossed at the ankles and hands folded across his chest. A vampire’s sleep rendered him indistinguishable from a corpse: his joints would stiffen like rigor mortis, he had no pulse or respiration, and his skin was cold to the touch. If discovered in this state he would be helpless, so finding a secure spot was crucial.
Folklore said that vampires must return to their graves to rest, and for some he knew that was true. Many simple peasants, disoriented and confused by their new vampiric state, did exactly that. It took a certain mental sophistication to accept that one had become a vampire, and not everyone could accomplish it. Many embodied every vampire cliché because they thought they were supposed to behave that way. Fortunately, because of this they were often quickly destroyed. As Leonardo once said in his peasant patois, play by the rules and you’re sure to lose.
Even Fauvette and her friends were gullible enough to believe what the movies, the modern equivalent of folklore, told them: sunlight would destroy them, they must kill each victim, and the universe’s morality damned them for all eternity simply for being what they were.
Zginski, too, had fallen prey to these delusions—for about a minute. He had been disoriented and puzzled after he clawed free of his coffin and emerged from his grave, but never once believed the superstitious nonsense about the moral state of his new condition. He had changed, irrevocably and permanently, but he was no more bound by the laws of God and man than he had been as a mortal human being. He quickly realized the advantage, though, in using these superstitions for his own ends, such as revenge on the woman who had inadvertently turned him.
Until Sir Francis Colby, and that night in Wales sixty years earlier.
He would adjust his schedule, he decided. Overconfidence had been his downfall before, and now it led him to move about more and more in daylight, when his powers were weakest. Now he would resume a mainly nocturnal existence, and prowl the day only when it was unavoidable.
His mind drifted as his body transitioned into corpse-sleep. As always, for just an instant before he lost consciousness, he felt a jolt of terror that he might in fact awaken in that ghastly limbo again, that his resurrection had been simply a vast cosmic hallucination or dream. It was one of the few things that completely and utterly terrified him. But then the usual nothingness took him over, and like all dead things, he had no worries at all.
Alisa, her naked body soaked with sweat, stood just outside the cellar door and pressed her cheek to the wood. This was her house, hers and Chad’s, but since Zginski took over her life she felt like a guest in her own home. He used her car, her money, her resources, and especially her body whenever he felt like it. And he made her want it.
She wanted it now, that was certain. She wanted to feel his weight on her, wrap her legs around his wiry form, and pound up against him until the need within her was sated. But try as she might, she could never conjure an actual memory of them having sex. Surely they must have; whenever she awoke after he’d fed on her, she felt satisfied and a little sore in that unmistakable way. But why couldn’t she actually recall it?
She had been working frantically on the Festa Maggotta’s section on vampires, but progress was slow. For most of the years she’d plugged away at the translation, she considered the book a mere collection of folk tales. Now that her worldview included undead lovers, though, she saw it as a source of useful, practical information. If she learned more about vampires, she might be able to adjust the balance of power, which at the moment tipped entirely in Zginski’s favor. She would love to see him as desperate as she was, just once before she died.
She scratched her fingernails on the wood. It sounded pitiful and plaintive, like a trapped kitten. He was down there, immobile and asleep, as helpless in his way as she was. She could free her life from this parasite simply by knocking down the door and driving a stake through his heart. Would he wither and crumble as she watched?
But she knew she wouldn’t do that. If he left her, the pain would return. Her death was a foregone conclusion, and she didn’t fear it; but she dreaded the deep agony as her body devoured itself. Since he arrived she’d lost weight and grown weak, but her hair was back and she was able to work with a reasonably clear head. Without him she would be bedridden, bald, and so doped on morphine she would barely know day from night.
The wooden door felt cool against her heated skin, and she squirmed against it with an unmistakably sexual rhythm. “Please,” she whispered, “wake up soon.”
CHAPTER 14
BARRISTER UNPLUGGED THE jukebox, stepped up to the microphone, and said, “Howdy, everybody. Hope you’re enjoying your drinks and dinners, and don’t forget to tip your servers, they work mighty hard.”
“Then you ought to pay ’em more,” someone called out.
Barrister chuckled, enjoying this brief return to the spotlight. Here at least he didn’t have to worry about being blind-sided with a folding chair. “I’ve got a special treat for you tonight. The Ringside is about to start featuring live music with our drinks and world-class steaks, and tonight I want you to see the reason for that. She’s an amazing performer, and I can almost guarantee you’ve never seen or heard anything like her. She’ll flat-out take your breath away. Folks, I give you Patience Bolade.”
He gestured to the side of the stage. Patience stepped up to polite applause. She wore a macramé vest with a palm tree pattern on the back, and tight-fitting dark blue slacks. A Native American-style choker encircled her throat. Her pale face sported deep blue eye shadow. She carried her acoustic guitar, and as she put the strap over her head she said, “I’m not sure I can live up to that introduction, Gerry. But I’ll sure do my best.”
She strummed once and said, “Like Gerry said, my name is Patience. And it’s true, I have a lot of it. But you know what they say.” She smiled, sly and sophisticated and totally in command. “That’s a lot of patience to lose.”
There was some laughter, but she didn’t wait for the joke to settle in. Instead she began to play rapidly and confidently, barely glancing at her hands. She hummed, loud and deep, and it was like a signal going out that locked the attention of every person in the room on her.
Then she began to sing.
Barrister watched from the bar, and Fauvette had to peer around him. Every face was rapt and attentive; no one looked away or spoke, and no silverware clinked. Even the waitresses and busboys stood immobile, a couple of them in midmotion. She felt a tingling as the energy from the crowd found its way to Patience. No one supplied very much, but the combined surge was strong enough to make the air shimmer in her vampire vision, like waves of summer heat over a highway. There was no question of seeing it now, it was as plain as trees waving in a storm.
“Holy shit,” Barrister whispered. “She’s amazing.”
“She’s built like a brick shithouse, ain’t she?” another man at the bar
said admiringly. His friend immediately shushed him.
Fauvette grew more excited at the prospect of learning to do this herself. Except. . . how? Would she have to sing or perform in some way? Or could she learn to do it by just willing people to send energy her way?
When the first song ended there was a moment of total, complete silence. The air conditioner, the compressor on the refrigerators beneath the bar, even the traffic outside could all be heard. Then as if someone threw a switch, every person in the bar began to clap, whistle, and cheer. Most of them got to their feet. Patience stood with a shy smile, accepting the approval with apparent bemused delight.
Only Byron Cocker did not join in. He stood in the shadows at the back of the room, fighting to keep his attention on the task at hand and not the enchanting Patience. He could not explain why he was suddenly so exhausted, since he’d deliberately had no alcohol. But he knew Zginski would show up, and he was not about to let the man slip past him this time.
Zginski placed the bouquet of roses in Patience’s dressing room, making sure the note was plainly visible. He went back into the hall and opened the door to the dining room just enough to catch a glimpse of her onstage. From this angle he saw both her and the rapt faces of the crowd. She was telling a story to introduce her next song, and it was as if everyone in the audience was hypnotized by her words; they stared, some with bites of food halfway to their mouths.
Her voice needed very little amplification to fill the room, and she played the guitar expertly. Halfway through she stopped singing and admonished, “It’s okay to clap along, you know,” and everyone immediately did.
Zginski smiled. He was well rested, well fed, and at his full power. He had slept through the day and emerged with all his vampiric abilities at their strongest. Nothing happened around him of which he was unaware, so he knew that Cocker was in the restaurant, no doubt with his eyes peeled for him. The ex-lawman would end the evening sorely disappointed.