Augie left the Caddy with the parking valet at the Gold Dust. At the registration desk the clerk punched his name into the computer. Whatever she read there caused her to pick up the phone and mutter his name into the receiver; a moment later an impeccably coiffed and suited woman in her late middle years approached him carrying a clipboard. "Mr. Fetterman? I'm Holly Taylor, the concierge. No need for you to check in—we have Mr. Whistler's penthouse suite prepared for you. Do you have any luggage?"
He indicated his travel bag. A bellhop snatched it up as Augie followed Miss Taylor to a private elevator in an alcove around the corner from the bank of peasant elevators. There were only two buttons inside, an up and a down. The bellhop made the appropriate choice, and after a smooth ride of a few seconds' duration the elevator doors opened directly upon a glass-walled white-carpeted room with a sweeping vista of the lake and the surrounding mountains.
Augie whistled. "Nice jernt." The beribboned, cellophane-wrapped fruit basket on the coffee table by the window could have fed a Third World family for a week. As soon as he'd tipped the bellhop, accepted Miss Taylor's card, and pushed the lockout button on the elevator behind them, he tore the ribbon and red-tinted cellophane off the basket and was rummaging through it looking for something sweet when the door to the bedroom opened behind him.
"Mister Augie, sah?"
There in the doorway stood a pair of twins dressed in oversized red Gold Dust souvenir T-shirts that covered them to mid-thigh. Of course, Augie didn't know that they were twins, but they were obviously brother and sister—same narrow face and dark round possum nose, pretty much the same height (about five feet) and build (slender) and color (milk chocolate) and, if Augie was any judge, the same age as well—an extremely dangerous fourteen or so. So twins was a pretty fair bet.
Augie quickly raised both hands in the air—not as if he were being held up, but as if he had been caught at the cookie jar and were protesting his innocence. "Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my hotel room?" he demanded.
"Mister Whistler send us, sah." The girl was obviously the spokesperson for the pair.
"And how old are you?"
"Four-teen, sah, nex' summer."
"Then you'll just have to hurry right back to Mr. Whistler, and tell him Mr. Augie said thanks, but no thanks. Tell him that inasmuch as Mr. Augie does not feel himself capable of doing the time, Mr. Augie prefers to avoid doing the crime. A bit of advice Mr. Whistler might do well to heed himself."
"Me ain' know about no crime, sah, but we cyan' go back to Mister Whistler until mornin'." The girl led her brother into the living room. "An' Mister Whistler say if you ain' drink our blood an' fuck us, he gon' to beat us stripe-ed."
They were standing between Augie and the light, so that he could see their slim-hipped outlines under the oversized T-shirts. The girl saw him staring, and nudged her brother—in unison they pulled their shirts over their heads, and stood there not six feet from Augie's clenched hands, both naked, neither with a trace of pubic hair, and the boy's little erection just starting to rise in the warm circulating air of the suite.
Then Augie saw that the boy was holding a Swiss Army knife in one hand, and watched, unable to speak, unable even to move except to tug his trousers away from his own desperate erection, as the lad took his sister's hand and raised her palm.
Wait, Augie tried to say as the knife sliced into the tender, lighter skin at the inside of the girl's wrist; his mouth opened and closed a few times, but no sound emerged.
TWO
The next time the white Eldorado made the trip to Tahoe, after the V.A. meeting the following Saturday night, it carried three passengers in addition to Augie. Louise occupied the shotgun seat, while Sherman and Catherine billed and cooed in the back.
Actually, they were considerably beyond billing by the time the Caddy reached the Sierra foothills, and Catherine's vocalizing had taken on an urgency more often associated with moaning than cooing. " What is going on back there?" Louise asked.
"Just don't turn around," Sherman replied jovially.
Louise's reaction was anything but jovial—Sherman felt a fierce yank at the fringe of hair that rimmed the back of his head, and found himself being tugged away from his husbandly duties by his puny new ponytail, while Catherine, squirming beneath him with her eyes closed, moaned, "No, don't stop," and tightened her grip on his buttocks.
" 'Now don't fight, girls, there's plenty of me to go around,' " he quoted from a thousand porno movies, but Louise only tugged harder. Reluctantly, Sherman made the sensible choice: he could always get laid later, but it would take him another six months to grow that pitiful fringe of hair long enough to twine into a ponytail again.
"What on earth, Lou?" he said, from his cramped position atop his wife, head tugged to the side like a pony on a lead. He pushed himself away from Catherine with one hand while attempting to loosen Louise's grip with the other.
"It was you, wasn't it?" Louise let go of his hair, unbuckled her seat belt, and knelt backwards on the front seat.
"I've always been me, as far back as I can remember," Sherman remarked, sitting up and rubbing the back of his head gingerly, his blood-induced erection pointing irrelevantly at the roof of the Caddy.
"You know what I mean. It was you that kidnapped us Christmas night, wasn't it? I kept telling myself it couldn't have been, until just now. The way you said 'Don't turn around'—I'll never forget the way he—you—said that."
"Actually, Lou, it was us that kidnapped you." Catherine had rolled on her side and drawn her knees up, the soles of her feet jammed against the side of Sherman's thigh. "Only it wasn't really kidnapping, was it?"
Louise's chins were quivering with rage. "How could you do that to somebody—to a friend? Do you know how terrifying that was?"
Sherman drew back into the corner of the back seat, out of reach. "Oh come on, you said the other night if you knew who the guy was, you'd thank him. I almost told you then. Besides, it worked, didn't it?"
"So you're saying what, that the end justifies the means?"
"If I may interrupt here?" Augie put his right hand on Louise's right shoulder, and gently urged her around. "First of all, Lou, please turn around and put your seatbelt on before we attract any unwanted attention." He slowed to sixty, pulling into the right-hand lane of the mountain highway.
"There, that's better. Now secondly, speaking as an attorney, let me say that this 'ends justifying the means' thing has always gotten a bad rap. Of course the ends justify the means—if I break into your home with the express intention of saving you from a fire, it's quite a different thing, legally, from breaking in to rob you, whether I actually steal anything or not.
"Conversely, the ends also unjustify the means: luring a lost child into your car with a lollipop in order to molest her is different, both legally and morally, from luring her into your car to return her to her parents. Same lollipop, though, same car." He glanced over at Louise. "That was a hypothetical example, of course."
"Of course."
"Take myself, for example: Whistler set me up like a bowling pin last week. For all I know, he even had my room bugged—"
"You should ask him to show you the videotape," interrupted Sherman from the back seat. "You done yourself proud, Aug."
"There, see?" He glanced to his right again; Louise's jaw was still set.
"Well he didn't have to call me a bitch," she muttered, but managed a reluctant laugh when Catherine pointed out that Sherman had actually called her a bitch.
"You he called my dyke girlfriend, which I thought was kind of a nice touch." Catherine slipped her toes under Sherman's thighs, and edged him forward so she could lie on her back again. "Now if you'll excuse us, my husband and I have some unfinished business to take care of. Love these roomy leather seats, Augie."
"General Motors would be so pleased."
They arrived at Whistler Manor a little after one-thirty on Sunday morning; Whistler met them at the back door, eager to show
off the remodeling job he'd had done on the lodge. He led them along the wood-paneled passageway that led from the back door to the kitchen; where once a water closet had stood, there was now a pantry—Whistler demonstrated with pride how the rear wall swiveled to reveal the cellar steps.
He flicked on the light switch at the top of the stairs, and Augie and Lou and the Baileys followed him down to the newly dug cellar, which consisted of two rooms. The first was four feet wide and six feet long, both long walls lined with shelves and stocked with canned food. Hidden behind a swiveling section of one of the long walls was the second room, a refrigerated compartment with storage space for a few months' supply of blood for a dozen vampires.
It was not even half full as yet—Whistler said he figured that problem would take care of itself when they'd converted Beverly. He selected a Seal-a-Meal pouch so stuffed with blood it resembled a miniature crimson pillow, then ushered the others out of the cellar. When they had cleared the outer door, he slammed it behind him.
It was a hell of a door: four inches thick, with padding on the inside and a stout bolt on the outside. He'd had it built strong enough to resist even a vampire on blood, he explained, should it ever become necessary to contain one for a short time. Locking a vampire in need of a time-out into a vault full of blood rather appealed to Whistler's sense of the absurd.
Selene was waiting for them in the kitchen with five empty glasses and her green notebook at the ready. "Welcome, cabal," she greeted them. "Lourdes is taking a nap—she'll be down in about an hour." She took the bag from Whistler, snipped the corner with a pair of poultry shears, and poured them each a few fingers of blood. "Now don't get too loaded yet, we have some business to take care of first."
"How about a few minutes with the twins first?" requested Augie. "I've been looking forward to them all week."
"I sent them packing back to Santa Luz," said Selene firmly.
"But why?" he moaned.
"Vampires or no vampires," Selene replied, "you have to draw the line somewhere." She had left Augie's reclamation up to Whistler, but although she was far from ingenuous, when the nature of the twins' servitude had become clear to her, she'd hit the roof.
"What line? Since when?"
"Slavery and child molestation may be acceptable among the Caribbean vampires, Mr. Fetterman," she informed him, "but they are very much frowned upon by us California witches, who—" She raised her voice and her palm to cut off his objections: Selene and Whistler had already been over the morally squishy battleground of cultural relativity, and had trampled it to muck in the process. "Who, I might add, do not argue with lawyers. Or frogs!" Another warning gesture.
"I'm not Fre—" Augie began, then realized that the amphibian reference had been a threat and not a Francophobic slur. He decided not to pursue the point. "But their sister? The older girl?"
Whistler reached across the table and patted Augie's hand. "Currently in my employ, Counselor, and very possibly the highest-paid housemaid in the state of Nevada. Her duties, however, are wide-ranging—I'm sure you can work something out with her. But hold on to your wallet during the negotiations: she's taken to capitalism like a duck to water."
He took a sip of cold blood. "Now, on to business. Counselor, what's the report on the Henderson front?"
Augie pulled his hand out of the front pocket of his slacks—he'd been fingering his bankroll, trying to remember how much cash he'd brought with him. "Moving along just fine, Jamey-o."
"What are you going to do, hold a gun to his head, too?" asked Louise, still a little miffed about her own kidnapping.
"Not at all, Lou. We're working with one of the partners in my firm who specializes in entertainment law. He thinks he's helping me with a client that's looking for a tax write-off or possibly a cash laundry—you can move a lot of green around in the music business, as the mob has been proving for fifty years." He went on to explain how Henderson would be going into the studio next weekend with one of the most demanding producers in the record business. The idea was, when the Texan was good and stressed out, Augie would be waiting with blood and encouragement.
Selene performed a quick calculation in her notebook. "So by next Monday—what's that, the twentieth?" She looked over at Augie, who glanced at his watch for the current date, then counted on his fingers and nodded.
She turned to Whistler. "By the twentieth, then, we stand even: six vampires using, six in recovery. Do you want to risk a confrontation then, or wait until you have a majority?"
He nodded thoughtfully, took the notebook from her, and began flipping through it. "Better still," he mused, "let's try to actually obtain a majority by then."
"Whom did you have in mind?" asked Sherman, who was over by the cupboard looking for something to snack on with his cold blood. Which wasn't all that easy—the stuff was already salty enough, so pretzels and chips were out, but candy left a cloying aftertaste.
Whistler thumbed ahead a few pages in the notebook. "I'm not sure yet. Doesn't have to be anyone influential—let's just look for an easy nut to crack." Then—bang!—he slammed his fist down on the eleventh page. "Aha!" he cried. "Speaking of nuts…"
Sherman stepped up behind him to read over his shoulder. "January! I don't think so," he said. "She's still living at Nick's house—I'm not sure how we'd get to her."
"Leave that to me," said Whistler. "I'd like to handle this one personally."
THREE
"I think I'll call it a night," remarked Nick, yawning. You couldn't say something like that and not yawn.
"What else would you call it?" January asked, straight-faced. "I mean, it's practically midnight."
"When you're right, you're right." He stood up. "How about you?"
"I'll just surf awhile." She'd been crashing with Nick for over a month and still hadn't tired of his full cable setup. And if the futon in the parlor was a little narrower than her former bed in the residence hotel, it smelled a whole lot better, and the view of Nick's rock garden with its colored pools of light was a good deal more peaceful than the madness of Telegraph Avenue.
"Okay." Nick gave her an air kiss—"G'night"—then turned around in the doorway. "But don't forget, you've got that interview in the morning—you'll want to be fresh for that."
Yes Daddy. Another copy shop. Happy happy joy joy. She made up the futon, changed into her flannel nightgown in the downstairs bathroom, then set the sleep-timer on the TV to thirty minutes, turned off the light, and climbed into bed, planning to drift off watching Nirvana Unplugged on the thirty-two-inch screen built into the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves against the far wall.
Hog Heaven, she tried to tell herself, but then that little voice in her head—the one that she had learned to call her addict—couldn't help remarking on how much cooler that rock garden would have been if she were stoned on something, even just pot, the way the little floodlights splashed color across the gracefully distorted bonsai dwarves and jagged cacti set artfully among rolling hillocks of white pebbles.
She wasn't sure she saw it at first—a shadow at the edge of the garden. She held her breath, clicked off the TV, and lay still; after a minute, hearing nothing, she slipped out from under the covers and tiptoed two steps across the cold hardwood floor, then gasped and leapt back as Whistler appeared at the window with a finger to his lips.
Let me in, he mouthed. He was dressed in black slacks and a black turtle-neck, one of the floodlights casting green highlights across his yellow hair.
She shook her head.
It's only a dream, he mouthed again—or perhaps he spoke the words—it was as if she were hearing them from inside her head. She wondered if perhaps she was dreaming. It sure felt like a dream—otherwise why wasn't she calling for Nick? So she did what they always did in movies: she pinched herself on the forearm. "Ow."
She saw Whistler laughing. Dream-weird again, his mouth open, but no sound through the cold glass panes. He pointed around the corner to the door that led in from the garden; she opened it a crack,
but left the chain on. "What do you mean, it's only a dream?" she whispered.
"Everything's a dream, m'dear," he whispered back.
"I'm gonna call Nick." But the fact that she had whispered it told Whistler all he needed to know.
"Go ahead—you'll get him killed, but go ahead."
"What do you want?"
"I've brought you a birthday present."
"My birthday was in October."
"My mistake—your name, you know."
"Everybody gets that wrong. Count backwards nine months from October."
Whistler smiled. "Of course. That sounds more like Glory."
Suddenly January felt the chill for the first time; she gathered the neck of her nightgown tighter. "You knew my mom?"
He pointed to the latch on the door instead of answering. January was torn—she suspected he was only jerking her around, but what if he had known Glory? She shook her head again, resolutely. "I'm not letting you into Nick's house," she whispered. "You just said you were going to kill him."
"Only if you force the issue. Think about it, dear—if I wanted to harm Nick I could climb straight up the fucking wall to his bedroom, I am that stoned on blood. And if I wanted to harm you, I assure you I could snap that chain like a licorice whip."
"I knew it! I knew I smelled blood on your breath."
"Yes. Very clever of you. Now open this door."
"First tell me how you knew her?"
"Glory? I lived in Bobo. Do you want your birthday present or not?"
"Jan?" Nick's voice from up in the kitchen. "Somebody down there?"
Her eyes found Whistler's. Gray, amused, bloodshot. One of them winked. He pointed to himself, then up towards Nick, and made a throat-slitting motion.
"Nope," January called behind her.
"Sounded like you were talking to somebody."
"Just practicing for my interview." Her eyes had not left Whistler's.
"Okay, g'night."
"Night." January gestured for Whistler to step back from the door. She closed it in his face, then unhooked the chain and opened it again. Whistler slipped in sideways with one hand behind his back as she crossed the little room to close the door at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the first floor. When she turned back he had seated himself on the shorter futon that formed an L with January's bed.
The World on Blood Page 24