Summer 2007

by Subterranean Press

  The athlete gestured broadly, taking in the restaurant patrons, the casino beyond it, the city and the world. “The ones who tell the stories,” he said. “And your next question is going to be, ‘What do you mean, ghosts and dreams?’ Isn’t it?”

  “Yes–”

  “Take an example.” The athlete glanced up at the ceiling. “The MGM Grand wasn’t here in the sixties. There wasn’t anything here in the sixties. And the Desert Inn, where you’re staying–it’s a ghost as well. They imploded it. You guys are sort of a memory, something that got left over, created by the world’s collective memory of the stories that were told about you.”

  “Jetways.” The Russian, and the American knew that focused tone in his voice very well. It was the tone that meant a clue had just snapped into place, revealing a much larger section of the puzzle. It was a tone he trusted, although he couldn’t always follow the twists that brought it on. “Jetways, jetways.”

  The kid–Jackie–was looking at the Russian, a thin smile playing with the corners of his mouth until the American couldn’t take it any more and snapped, “What?”

  “There are no jetways at McCarran Field–”

  “There were no jetways at McCarran Field,” Jackie said calmly. “It’s McCarran International Airport now, and the seventh busiest in America.”

  “The lights I saw when we were flying in.” The American’s gut gave one more squeeze of denial, and then it settled down and let him think. When you’ve eliminated the impossible–

  Hell, it wasn’t as if his career hadn’t spanned U.F.O.s, killer robots, and radio controlled vampire bats. His own nonexistence wasn’t such a big stretch, after that. “You’re telling me I’m a fairy tale? Make-believe?”

  He ignored the Russian’s sharp, offended stare. Whatever his partner had been about to say was cut off when the waitress arrived, was roundly charmed by the assembled, and departed with their orders. The American looked at Jackie again as Jackie shrugged, one-shouldered, and lit a cigarette. “I’m telling you what I know.”

  “Fine. All right. I believe you–” He could almost be amused by the surprise his friends evinced at his willingness to believe what they were telling him. Mind control rays, earthquake machines, being told one’s life was a mass hallucination: all in a day’s work. The coffee came, and he picked up his cup to hide the way his hands wanted to shake. “–now on to the interesting question, Mr., ah–

  “Just call me Jackie.”

  “–Jackie.” Smoke curled around the young man’s fingertips and outlined the patch over his eye as he raised the cigarette again, but didn’t puff.

  “The interesting question. You said you summoned us.”

  “Yes.”

  “How? And to what purpose?”

  “Ah,” Jackie said, and dropped the cigarette in his ash tray before he reached for the creamer. “That’s what makes the question so interesting, you see. I’m not exactly sure. But I have a couple of propositions to make, if you like.” He locked gazes with the American. Neither looked down.

  The mug was burning the American’s fingers. He lifted them to his lips and blew on them, and laughed at the back of his throat. “I don’t suppose you play chess.”

  Jackie smiled hard. He was missing a tooth far back in his mouth. “Only for money, my friend.”

  #

  Tribute faces the music. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

  Half an hour before dawn, I found my way back to the room I’d rented at the Motel 6 just off the strip. It had enormous windows, but the black-out drapes reached floor to ceiling, and I made sure to overlap them and pin them in place with the chair. One of the consequences of what I am is that I can make out the patterns on the hotel bedspread and carpeting, even in the dark.

  The bed was that spongy texture only hotel mattresses have. I squared my shoes underneath, lay down on it and pulled the pillow over my face. It was a little bigger than King-sized, no matter what they called it; I could have laid three of me down side by side.

  I couldn’t sleep.

  By sunrise, I was ravenous.

  Sycorax and the poisoning had taken it out of me in more ways than the metaphorical, and I would need something that night if I was going to keep passing for a mortal. And feeding–

  Isn’t quite what the romantic fancies of novelists and poets and moviemakers would make it. The stable of willing paramours, the idyllic pleasures of the feast–

  No.

  It’s not like that at all.

  It didn’t matter when I was with Sycorax. I took what she told me when she told me and tried to put it off as long as I could, and I mostly pretended I couldn’t hear Jesse. Especially when he asked me to have him exorcised, to let him go.

  But things were different now that I was on my own. I found I had qualms.

  In addition to my qualms, I had questions. Like Angel and Stewart, and why Angel was out of her city. And why they were with each other, and not with their own partners. And what was wrong with Stewart.

  I rolled over in the dark behind drawn curtains, keeping a healthy distance from the scalding brightness that glowed faintly around the edges of the blackout curtains and contemplating whether coming to Vegas had been such a good idea. It didn’t have to be here. I knew that.

  But I wanted it to be here. Vegas had changed even more than I had; I barely recognized the place. But we’d been traveling for the better part of three decades and it wasn’t like I could just go home to Tupelo. I haven’t got much good to say about Sycorax, bless her black little heart, but twenty-five years with her filled in the gaps in a public school education pretty well. And besides. Las Vegas was a place where I could perform, and nobody would find it strange that they never saw me out in the sunshine.

  I could pass.

  There’s nothing more pathetic than an insomniac vampire.

  I sat up in bed, reached for the remote, and turned the television on.

  Maybe forty minutes later, the corridor door opened. I’d heard the footsteps pause in front of it, but I didn’t get off the bed, even though it didn’t sound like a chambermaid. They usually don’t wear military boots.

  Once he opened the door, I caught the scent of leather and sweat and nicotine and the blood under his skin, and then I didn’t need to turn. The black-haired kid in the suit and Doc Martens slipped inside and shut the door behind himself. “King,” he said, smart enough to stay in the narrow corridor with the bathroom on one side and the closet on the other and to keep his back to the door, “we’ve got to talk.”

  “How did you find me?” Not bothering to disguise my voice for once. Even though he had to be expecting it, he startled: fresh salt sharp in the cool musty air. His flickering heart kicked up a notch.

  “I got lucky,” he said, layers of irony lacing his voice. Something there I’d have to tease out someday. I didn’t turn to look directly, but I saw him move out of the corner of my eye. He jerked his chin at the television. “You gonna shoot that?”

  “Nah,” I answered, thumb on the mute button. “It’s too much of a pain in the ass when you haven’t got a road manager to fill out the paperwork for you, and besides, I haven’t got a gun. My next question is supposed to be how you got through the locked door, but that’s easy. So–how’d you recognize me?”

  The hurt in his voice was thick and evidently artificial. “You don’t remember me, King?”

  “I go by Tribute, these days.” I left the remote on the bed when I stood up, rug fibers catching on my socks, and tightened the covers before turning to have a look at him. Just a mortal boy, but it would be cocky to let him get in between me and the window in daylight. “The King–that’s somebody else. Where should I remember you from?”

  “Vegas,” he said, stepping forward so the bathroom light would fall across his face. One eye was covered by the eyepatch. The other one sparkled in a way I’d seen too much of lately. I squinted at the face, though–the eyepatch stood out, and there was no telling what color his hair was under a couple of
gallons of Gothic black. He looked a bit like Dean Martin, maybe–a much skinnier Dean, with higher cheekbones and a thinner nose–and when I pictured him with shaggy dark brown hair or a slicked DA, I nodded.

  There are always people around the entertainment business whose role is never made particularly clear. They’re attached to somebody, or they know somebody, or somebody owes them a lot of favors or a lot of money. They’re glad handers and compromisers and the sort of people who throw parties that nobody dares miss. I’d seen this kid before, all right, and I’d thought at the time he was one of those people. A good-looking little pansy, nice enough, better conversationalist than me.

  But he hadn’t aged a day in thirty years, and gold-and-white streetlights shimmered behind his unpatched eye. Yeah. I knew his name. “Jackie.”

  “You do remember.” He folded his arms and stepped back, leaning, the crease in his trousers pulling tight as he kicked one foot up and braced the sole against the door.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I think I gave you a Cadillac.”

  A quick look down, and he scratched his ear. “It wound up welded to a stand at the 15 and Jones a few years back, being used as a billboard. They painted it pink. Perfect symbol of Las Vegas, if you ask me.”

  “Yeah. Perfect. I didn’t know you were Vegas, Jackie.”

  “Would you have treated me any different if you did?”

  “At the time, I’d never heard that cities had genii and I didn’t believe in vampires or werewolves, so probably not.” He didn’t look down and his heart didn’t skip when I smiled, and I smiled wide enough that even human eyes would catch the way my front upper teeth hooked over the bottom row. “You’re here to run me out of town.”

  His breathing quickened, just a touch. The lines beside his eyes deepened. I almost heard the incidental music shift tempo, a little bit faster, a little bit louder. “I came to ask what you thought you were doing here.”

  “Just moving from Memphis to the Luxor,” I said. He gave me the blankest look ever, and I sighed. No use wasting any jokes about the underworld on him either; he wouldn’t get any more use out of them than I would have back in 1962. “Just looking for a place to stay out of the sun for a while.”

  “It seems unfair somehow that you didn’t need my permission to be here.”

  “Walking into a city isn’t like walking into somebody’s house–”

  “Las Vegas is my house. And don’t you forget it, King–”

  “–it’s more like walking into somebody’s hotel room.” As dryly as I could pull off, and to his credit, he tipped his head to the left, acknowledging the hit. Hah. I wondered if I would have been that clever in the old days, if I’d given myself half a chance.

  Probably not. As Ted Williams once said, if you don’t think too good, it’s best if you don’t think too much.

  “Touché,” Jackie said. “We still have a problem, King. What are we going to do about you?”

  “I’ve got no interest in hunting your city out, kid.”

  “I’ve got no intention of letting you hunt my city at all, King. And I’m older than you. I just aged better, is all.”

  What was his word? Touche. “Most people did. But that’s all behind us now, isn’t it? Tell me something, Jackie–”

  I let it hang but he didn’t jump in again, and he didn’t uncross his arms. I wondered if he had a stake up his sleeve. Rowan and garlic, and a cross of silver threaded on a chain around his neck. There was no shortage of crossroads near here to bury the body under. My lip twitched up; I wondered if I could go on down to one and sell my soul for the power to sing the blues, the way old Robert Johnson was supposed to have done.

  He was looking at me smiling, and I looked right back. “–what can you think of that belongs in Vegas more than me?”

  He didn’t blink. “Sunrise, King. I’ll give you tonight to set your affairs in order and to get out of town. For old time’s sake, I’ll give you tonight. I’d head for Salt Lake. Not a lot of myth brewing up there, and those boys don’t keep a very good eye on their town.”

  “Mormons taste like shit,” I said when he hesitated. His lip curled, but I didn’t manage to crack him up.

  “You can’t stay here. I’ve got too much on my plate right now to even think about having a vampire in town.”

  I’m embarrassed to admit it took that long for the penny to drop. I should have listened a little better to old Ted. “Your full plate, Jackie….”

  He nodded, his one eye gleaming in the shadows, his gaze locked on mine.

  “Has that got anything to do with why your other half is running around Las Vegas with a genius from LA?”

  Touche, indeed. His heart kicked, and I smelled the cold sweat on his skin as he came toward me. Too smart to walk out into the room, but he was just out of arm’s reach when he stopped. “What do you know about Stewart, King?”

  “Call me Tribute,” I said for the second time. “Give me your parole, Jackie, and I’ll give you mine, and come sit down and we’ll crack open the minibar, and I’ll tell you.”

  “Your parole?” Incredulous: his rising eyebrows shifted the eyepatch enough to show a pale thread of untanned skin on his cheek. “You’re going to promise me you won’t hunt in Vegas? I don’t really think–”

  “Don’t be dense. Of course I can’t promise that.” I stepped back, away. Closer to the window, but careful of the white-hot glow that still limned the edge of the curtain. “But I won’t take any of yours, and I won’t take anybody you’ll miss.”

  He was watching, measuring, but I had the advantage. I could smell the eagerness on him, the need to know trembling on his skin. It smelled like a win.

  I held my peace, humming a few bars of a Big Mama Thornton standard as I swung an armchair around, where it wouldn’t be too close to the light.

  He stepped into the room. “What do you know about Stewart?”

  “It’s not much, baby.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “I can stay?”

  He stopped. His lips twisted, and he turned away to inspect the rack of bottles on top of the minibar. “Bit early for the hard stuff.”

  “Did you get any sleep last night?”

  “This is Vegas. Baby. Nobody sleeps.” He waited for me to look. His decision hung on the air around him like the smell of blood, delicious and thick. He’d have liked to have hit me; his frustration was metallic, harsh. “How do I know you’re not jerking my chain?”

  “If you don’t like my peaches, Jackie–”

  “It’s not shaking your tree that concerns me.” He picked a mini and cracked the seal, a sharp, limited sound. The scent of bourbon filled the hotel room and I sneezed. “All right,” he said, and knocked the whole bottle back without bothering to dump it in a glass. He put it down and stepped away; I tidied it against the others. “Screw it. Tell me what you know, King, and I’ll tell you if you can stay.”

  #

  The Assassin and the ghosts of Gods. Los Angeles. Summer, 2002.

  It had been a long time indeed since blood–with or without the trappings of authority–had bothered the assassin. He wouldn’t flinch from the blood of a cop.

  Not even the need to do it eye to eye, and hand to hand.

  The assassin climbed the steps two at a time, the carpet sticky beneath his shoes where it wasn’t threadbare. He paused at the landing and looked up, caught the eye of Angel, in a red pleather skirt, descending. Her hips swayed as she danced over worn treads to the industrial strains of Object 775. The music, loosely so termed, blasted from a chopped Honda Civic parked under a partially burned-out sign visible through the rain-streaked window on the landing. The window was stuck halfway open. The sign read Gilbert Hotel.

  Angel nodded, and the assassin nodded back. “He’s in the room?”

  She smiled, an expanse of pricey dental work, and held up a hand to show a buck fifty in quarters pinched between her finger and thumb. “Two twenty seven. I told him I hadda buy rubbers.” She winked, scraping a p
latform sole across the edge of the stair to cock her hip, and then made doe eyes. “Fifteen minutes all you need?”

  “It won’t take longer,” the assassin said, and turned around to smile at her derrière as he passed her on the flight.

  She’d left the door unlocked. The assassin slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves and turned the handle silently. The cop was in the bathroom with the door just cracked; he hadn’t thrown the chain.

  If he’d had the opportunity to live more than a day or two, he might also have had the opportunity to learn better. “That was quick, sweetheart,” he called over running water.

  The assassin kept his back to the wall, his shoes shining despite the muddy streets outside, and slid his right hand under his immaculately pressed lapel to retrieve the Walther PPK from his shoulder holster. The silencer screwed down oiled threads like a kiss gliding down a woman’s belly.

  He thumbed the safety off.

  “Don’t call me sweetheart,” he snapped, and shouldered aside the door.

  The cop had stripped his shirt and his bullet-proof vest off, and stood before the mirror clad in a white singlet and his uniform pants. A wad of money lay crushed up on the scarred bathroom counter; peeled silvering on the back of the mirror and the sickly overhead light gave the cop’s reflected face the appearance of leprosy. He was half-bald, Caucasian, a small paunch doming his belly. The assassin caught sight of his own chiseled face in the mirror over his target’s thickly muscled shoulder, his black hair drooping over one grey eye, his scar livid white against skin flushed with excitement. He leveled the Walther.

  The cop half-turned, eyes wide, reaching with a knuckle-crushed hand for the automatic holstered at his hip. He never touched it.

  The assassin grouped two bullets through his target’s heart, then sank the third one in between his eyes while he was still falling, blood and brains and bits of white like a dropped china bowl all over the place. The loudest sound was the crack of the bathroom mirror as a tumbling bullet exited the dead man’s body and punched through glass to the wall behind.

  He met Angel in the lobby four and a half minutes later. The blood hadn’t spotted his shoes. “Did you get what we came for?” she asked.