Dante's Awakening

by Devon Marshall

  “Her name is Bartlett. Lois Bartlett,” Amelia told us. She smiled. “And I would say no, she’s not a fan. She maintains a politely cooperative façade but I think she’d be glad if all the freaks and lunatics were to just leave her little town.”

  Some small towns visited by the Hollywood circus are so star-struck by the event that they tend to accept and forgive just about anything we do, short of actually blowing up the town. Not so Holly Bush Junction, however. Sheriff Bartlett mightn’t have been entirely wrong about the “freaks and lunatics,” but it did scupper my plans to bribe her with some tickets to the next Academy Awards ceremony. You have no idea how often that works.

  Of course, it had to happen that leaving the makeup trailer we ran into my ex-girlfriend, Caitlin Harris. She stopped when she saw me, stared for a moment like she was seeing something very out of place—a giraffe in the grocery aisle of Wal-Mart for instance—and then she scowled.

  “Dante,” she said. She made my name sound remarkably like “turd.”

  I smiled. “Caitlin. Hi there.”

  Witty repartee indeed. Caitlin scowled some more. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  I could hardly tell her the real reason, so I simply said, “Negotiating” and let her chew on that. It’s a catch-all word in Hollywood. It can mean anything from buying drugs from the madam who also supplies you with high-class call girls to hanging around the back lot of some studio hoping to get within throwing distance of Jerry Bruckheimer with your screenplay.

  “Oh. I see,” Caitlin responded. She looked at Ellis, let her gaze linger there for a moment too long, and then she went back to scowling at me. I think she had just decided that Ellis must be my latest girlfriend. Great. Caitlin is the insanely jealous type. She’s redheaded, green-eyed, five-feet-two, wiry, she can throw an unearthly fuck even when she is stoned off her tits, and she has a very ugly temper indeed. It would not be beyond the realm of possibility that Caitlin could work her imaginings about Ellis and me into a scenario where she became the wronged lover and had a suitably dramatic meltdown. Fucking actors. Caitlin said, “Well, that’s nice for you. I suppose I’ll be seeing you around then.”

  “I expect so,” I agreed.

  She stalked past us and went into the makeup trailer, letting the door bang behind her. We carried on our way. I could feel Ellis’s eyes on me. “You know her pretty well,” she said. I shrugged. Ellis added, “You were romantically involved with her, I take it?”

  “If by that you mean staying home and screwing because she’s in the closet and doesn’t want to risk being seen with me anywhere that can’t be easily explained, then yes, we were ‘romantically’ involved, I suppose,” I replied.

  “Bad break-up?”

  “She threatened to pour bleach into my fish tank.”

  Ellis snickered. I glared and she held up a palm in apology. “Human women tend toward the emotional,” she pronounced.

  I eyed her, wondering where this was going.

  “Vampire women aren’t like that,” Ellis assured me.

  I stared at her. “Right,” I said. Vampires are crazy, insanely, deadly jealous as lovers. They don’t just go out with a human—they own a human. You are their possession in every sense of that word. It’s why I have continually rebuffed Voshki’s advances, however appealing I might find her sexually, and also why I have never gotten involved with any vampire. Not even the very appealing Ellis. I don’t do well in those kind of smothering, intense relationships.

  “What I meant was, I’m not like that,” Ellis clarified for me.

  That sickly smile made a return. “Good to know,” I told her. Then: “Let’s go talk to the sheriff. See if we can’t convince her we’re not all freaks and lunatics here to destroy her town. It might be difficult, but we can always try.”

  * * *

  The sheriff’s office was a one-story, ugly red brick building in what passed for Holly Bush Junction’s town center—a square of grass with a bandstand in the center and some old geezers sitting around on benches, smoking and jawing. The sheriff’s office had a tin roof that I would bet was noisy as all hell when it rained and left you baking in summer, and there was a little gravel square of parking lot out front. A cruiser was parked there, and an SUV with sheriff’s markings. There was also a beat-to-hell rusty pickup with fly-speckled windows and a grungy-looking dog chained in the bed. It barked us all the way into the building.

  “I hate dogs,” Ellis said. She considered. “Don’t much like cats either. Fish are okay.”

  “That’s only because fish don’t bark or hiss at you,” I pointed out dryly. Dogs and cats are none too keen on vampires. They can smell something is not quite right and they get hostile. Vampires dislike dogs and cats for that reason, and because, well, they don’t taste very nice. Apparently. I don’t like to even think about that.

  Inside, the sheriff’s office was as plain and down-home as its outward appearance suggested. Beige walls, beige vinyl flooring much gouged and scored, chunky wood furniture and that universal police station smell: stale coffee, staler sweat and human fear. Someone had stuck a potted plant on a windowsill in an attempt to cheer the place up. The plant looked forlorn beside the grey bars. An overweight, ruddy-faced deputy straight from Central Casting leaned on a front desk, reading a newspaper and munching on a pastry. He had no hair and substantial man-tits. He looked up as we entered, peered at us for several seconds as we traversed the short distance from door to desk, and seemed to come to the decision that we must be Movie People. Ellis’s good looks and the dark shades she was wearing probably added a good deal to his coming to that conclusion. The deputy’s lip curled.

  “Help ya?” he inquired, not sounding much like he wanted to do anything of the sort.

  I put on my best swimming-with-sharks smile. I’m an agent, I spend practically every working hour schmoozing people, so if I could not charm a small-town deputy with pastry crumbs on his uniform shirt, I might as well pack up and go home to East Bumfuck, Idaho.

  “Hi there,” I oozed, “we’re with the studio? They sent us up here to iron out some difficulties?” I was using the California Question. End every sentence with your voice on an upswing, as though you were asking a question, even when you are making a statement. The practice originated in Australia, quickly infected the West Coast of America, and was perfected by the Valley Girls of California. Naturally.

  “Uh-huh,” Mayberry RFD responded. He was still giving us the fish-eye.

  “Yeah. There’s been some problems with a peeper? The actors—you know how they are, kinda squirrelly, right?” Okay, so I was pinching lines from Voshki. It’s a Hollywood tradition to steal your best lines from someone else. Imitation, highest form of flattery, blah blah bullshit. I shrugged around a chuckle. “Anyway, the studio likes to protect its investment, you know? So they sent us up here to smooth the wrinkles out, if you like?” I had a sense that Deputy Dawg here very much did not like. I should care? I just wanted to get past him to see the sheriff. If I had to have Ellis glamour him in order to achieve that, I would.

  “We’d love to talk to Sheriff Bartlett?” I persisted. Deputy Dawg was harder work than I’d expected.

  Ellis would tell me later that she had been able to peer inside the deputy’s head as easily as if his forehead were plate glass. Mostly his thoughts revolved around food and whether he would be able to convince his wife to have sex with him this weekend. Sans shades now so that he got the full benefit of her flashing dark eyes, Ellis gave the deputy a dazzling smile. “I think Sheriff Bartlett would be very displeased if you didn’t let us see her,” she lied smoothly.

  Deputy Dawg’s face had gone slack. Well, slacker than before. His eyes had a dreamy, faraway look in them. Ellis was glamouring him. “Uh, yeah,” he mumbled. He moved aside, lifted a section of the desk to allow us to pass through into the inner sanctum. The bullpen, they call it. On TV, anyway. However, unlike the bustling, noisy bullpens of TV cops shows, no one was in this bullpen. Not ev
en a telephone rang to shatter the silence. Either Holly Bush Junction was the most crime free place in America or everyone there had realized the cops were too damn ineffective to even bother calling on and were busily taking justice into their own hands. I filed that, too, under stuff best not thought about.

  “Her office is right back there,” Deputy Dawg told us, pointing with a fat finger that had pastry icing on it. Ellis smiled and winked at him. I swear I saw his brains—what there was of them—turn to sawdust.

  We left Deputy Dawg staring cow-like into space. He would recover in a while and not remember a thing except that some Movie People came by to see the sheriff. He might also recall that one of them was terrifically hot. He would have very little recollection of me, on the other hand. We found Sheriff Bartlett’s office, marked by a door with a frosted glass panel and her name in black letters. Sheriff Lois Bartlett.

  I knocked. A female voice from within told us to come on in. I figured Sheriff Bartlett probably thought it was her deputy knocking. She was about to get a surprise.

  She was not the only one. If asked, I would have denied having any such preconceptions, but really I had been expecting a small-town female sheriff to be pretty much a twin of her deputy, except maybe with more hair and breasts that were intended to be, and maybe a shade smarter, or else she would not have been sheriff. What I got was a tall, sleek, Norwegian-looking blonde, with blue eyes and very nice breasts indeed. Everything about her figure was very nice. She looked up at us from behind a modestly sized desk, frowning but not unduly alarmed. I suppose with that giant hand cannon she had strapped to her right hip she could afford to be a bit calm. Too bad it would have been as effective against a vampire as throwing bean bags at a herd of charging buffalo. You can kill vampires. You can shove a stake through their heart, or cut off their head, or set them on fire. Any of those will work. Very little else does. Shooting them, stabbing them (anywhere but in the heart), poisoning them—those things might all hurt them, slow them down for a short while, but it won’t kill them. And you can be assured they’ll be spitting mad with you when they recover.

  “And you would be…?” Sheriff Lois Bartlett raised a blonde eyebrow at us.

  I stepped forward, biggest, most shit-eating grin on my face. “My name’s Dante Sonnier. Sorry for the intrusion, Sheriff Bartlett. Your deputy showed us through? We might rather have conned him into doing so. My apologies.”

  Sheriff Bartlett twitched the tiniest of smiles. “That right?” I sensed Deputy Dawg was going to be in a shitload of trouble later.

  “Yes, ma’am. As I said, I’m Dante, and this is my associate, Ellis Kovacs. The studio sent us to see what exactly is the rumpus going on…” I gave a hearty laugh just to show that things were not that serious. If Sheriff Bartlett found me funny at all, she did a damn good job of hiding it. I could feel the grin starting to strain. “So, we figured our first stop ought to be to talk to your good self,” I added smarmily.

  She was not to be bought. Her blue eyes filled with the kind of denigration you got used to seeing from non-movie-business types. She regarded me, then Ellis. I thanked God we had left Samson with the car. I had a feeling Sheriff Bartlett would have arrested him just for looking like someone who ought to be arrested. The blue eyes came back to me. “Well, thank you for including me,” she drawled. The sheriff was leaning back in her chair, looking all relaxed and friendly, but I could see the tension coiled in her body. Athletic, sturdy. Nice. Like I said.

  “You’ll be talking about the peeper, of course,” she guessed. I nodded. Finally she indicated that we should sit, having decided that since we were in her office already we might as well be spoken to. “I checked it out. Couldn’t find anything that suggested there’d been a peeper at work. Not even a footprint in the dirt below anyone’s trailer windows.”

  “You think all those women may have been imagining it?” I asked. I gave her another grin, a sort of conspiratorial one this time. “I mean, the actresses, now I’d be willing enough to believe it of them… But some of the reports were coming from crew members. In my experience, they’re usually pretty hard-headed and sensible sorts.”

  Sheriff Bartlett gave a ponderous nod. Her eyes strayed from me to Ellis. But it was to me that she spoke once again. I wondered about that. Usually having a vampire in the room overshadows everyone else. And besides, Ellis is too damn gorgeous to ignore for long. “That’s pretty much the way I figured it, Mizz Sonnier. If not for the crew, I’d have called it ‘overactive imagination.’”

  “Dante, please. Call me Dante,” I urged her.

  “Okay. Then that’s pretty much the way I figured it, Dante.”

  “But you do believe there was a peeper?”

  Sheriff Bartlett nodded.

  I counted off thirty seconds in my head before I spoke again. Just the act of letting a little silence into the room can be effective in negotiations. It makes people think you are a careful and considerate person, one who does not rush easily into things, who weighs all the options. Blah blah blah. In fact, you are just psyching them out. I could soon see, however, that that tactic was not going to work with Sheriff Bartlett either. God, the woman was hard work! I rather liked that.

  “So how would you explain it?” I asked, deferring to the law enforcement official in the room.

  Instead of answering she treated me to a bit of her own silent treatment. It worked better on me than it had her, I have got to say. I squirmed. Ellis might as well have been made out of stone—something which did not escape the sheriff’s notice. I saw her frown slightly, as though she were trying to put her finger on what it was about Ellis that perturbed her. Then she asked me: “So what exactly is it that you do for the studio, Dante?”

  Shit. I smiled. “I’m an agent,” I confessed. That raised both of her eyebrows. I shrugged. “Studio sent me up because I don’t look out of place here. Any media sniffing around are just going to assume I’m here to negotiate something with someone, not to calm a bunch of superstitious and hysterical actors.”

  Sheriff Bartlett nodded, gave me a cynical smile. “No need to have the investors infected by the actor’s unease, right?” she guessed.

  I nodded, actually impressed by her cynicism. “That’s about the size of it.”

  The trick to telling a good lie is to take a kernel of truth and concoct the simplest recipe you can around that. And the truth here is, sometimes agents do get called upon to calm a location situation down. As far as actors go, there is a rule of thumb regarding any crisis. If they throw a tantrum—and most of them will do at some time—the first person you call to try calming them down is their PA, if they have one. That doesn’t work, you call the director. Then the producer. If none of those are efficacious, you call the actor’s spouse or partner. Failing that, you try their Mom. Usually this is as far as it needs to go since an actor’s mom is often as egotistical and high-strung as they are, and because of this they know exactly what a ruffled ego wants to hear. However, just occasionally you will experience a truly recalcitrant soul who responds to none of the above. It is only at this point that you may call the agent to the set. Calling the agent to the set before, say, the director, would be a terrible breach of both professional protocol and personal regard. I have been called to sets on several occasions to deal with recalcitrant souls in the midst of spectacular meltdowns and tantrum-throwing. You can be assured none of them remained my clients for very long afterwards.

  Whether or not Sheriff Bartlett bought into my story was not of great concern to me right now. All I needed was to know what she knew, preferably without having to resort to Ellis glamouring her.

  “I think there is a peeper, yes,” Sheriff Bartlett admitted. She raised her shoulders in an elegant shrug. “But I’m damned if I can figure out how he’s doing it and not leaving any trace of himself behind. If you have any better luck, my congratulations.”

  I asked the next question carefully. “Did you get any sense of where the peeper might have originated from?�
�

  The sheriff’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “If you’re asking do I think the peeper is a local rather than one of your lot, then yes, the thought had crossed my mind. But I just don’t know for sure.”

  One of your lot. Dear me, Sheriff Bartlett really did not care for us Movie People invading her little town. I nodded, pretending to think this through. Then I told her how helpful she had been, that we would ask around at the shoot, maybe talk to some locals, if that was okay with her? Her eyes got narrow, but she didn’t object.

  “I’d appreciate if you didn’t get folks all riled up,” she said.

  I had no intention of riling any of the locals up and assured her so. She didn’t seem too convinced.

  “The suicide,” I began tentatively, and once again Sheriff Bartlett’s eyebrows jogged for her hairline. I tried to look concerned. “Have her next of kin been informed yet?” I was not sure where I was going with this line, only that I was angling to get a look at that body without having to explain to this not-so-stupid sheriff why I wanted to see it.

  The sheriff shook her head. “Seems Cherie Dunlop’s mother and father are dead and she doesn’t have any siblings. I can’t find anyone else yet.”

  Excellent. Just what we needed. I put on my best look of sympathy. “Damn, that is so sad,” I murmured and Sheriff Bartlett nodded, looking at me for the first time like she actually thought Movie People could be human too. Under the circumstances I decided I had little compunction about deceiving her. I leaned forward to get the maximum effect. “Sheriff, I would like to offer to fund the poor woman’s funeral, if that would be okay with you to release the, um, the remains to me?”