Blood on Their Hands

by Lawrence Block

  “Why did she start looking for me just three years ago? Why would she start looking at all if she didn’t know I existed?”

  “My kidneys started to fail, and we needed medical information,” Laurie said. “It was a terrible time for us both. Just terrible. She had to tell me. It just killed Mother to admit she wasn’t my biological parent.” Her chin quivered. “I grew up thinking I was their little girl. I, we, sort of looked like Howard Simms. He couldn’t have any children. And really, they didn’t need any more. They had me.”

  Annie’s stomach lurched. She should have been in on this fairy tale childhood.

  “In fact, I had to beg Mother to let me out of her sight long enough to go to college. Vassar, you know.”

  Community college and night school for me, you know, thought Annie.

  Two days later, Elaine came into the room during Laurie’s dialysis treatment. She beamed as she announced to both of them, “Adoption proceedings are formally under way. My lawyers are satisfied that you are not a pretender. You will soon be a full heir in my estate. Now I have the satisfaction of knowing if anything happens to Laurie, our name and traditions will be passed on.”

  Tears of joy gushed from Annie’s eyes. For an instant, she felt real warmth toward this woman. “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, thank you, Mother.”

  “There will be one more medical test. Since you’re twins, I want to make sure you don’t have Laurie’s problem. And would you mind terribly, darling, taking the name of Annie Simms? While we’re finalizing the paperwork, it would be a good time to make the legal name switch.”

  “I would be honored,” said Annie. “Nothing could please me more.”

  Hell, honey, you can call me Scarlett O’Hara, if it suits you, she thought. Frankly my dear, I Just don’t give a damn. After the paperwork was final, she would put her plans into motion. During the remainder of Laurie’s dialysis, she spent the time daydreaming about a shiny black Mercedes and expensive trips. The money. The lovely, lovely money.

  The next morning, as Annie waited for the maid to bring her breakfast, she heard the nurse’s voice in the halfway.

  “This is the last round of tests?” asked Elaine.

  Annie could not hear the reply, but in a moment, Elaine spoke again.

  “Be careful what you leave lying out in Laurie’s room. Annie has volunteered to sit with her during dialysis, and given her past, it’s simply not a good idea to leave drugs lying around.”

  Annie shot up in bed, stunned that Elaine would put such a false wicked idea in someone’s mind. She had never done drugs. Not ever. She liked being in control too well to risk the vulnerability. She didn’t drink much either.

  Steaming at Elaine’s suspicion, she was barely civil to the nurse. She sullenly signed the papers, then thrust out her arm so she could draw blood. She tried to settle down. Elaine hadn’t said she was a drug addict. She had just implied the possibility, given her past. Well, what in the hell did that woman know about my past? She had never shown any interest before.

  “Are you awake?” Elaine called softly that night long after Laurie had gone to bed.

  “Yes,” said Annie, “come on in. Is it Laurie? Has something happened to Laurie?”

  “No, darling. Nothing yet. But tomorrow is going to be a very big day for her. The biggest day in her whole life.”

  Annie looked curiously at Elaine, who was carrying a tray of medical paraphernalia.

  “We need more blood,” said Elaine. “The nurse called and said a lab technician dropped the sample she took this morning. I’ve been trained to do this, so there was need to have her come back tonight.”

  Christ, thought Annie. Not again.

  “Just once more, darling.” Elaine injected the needle into the big vein at the crook of her arm.

  Annie was hit by warmth and a deep sense of peace. The room blurred as she stared at the needle. Blood was not flowing into it. Her mouth was dry. Elaine had injected her with something instead.

  “Why? What?” she mumbled.

  “Why? Oh you must know,” said Elaine. “Surely you do? On your own, you would never have consented to donate a kidney to Laurie. Although you’ve signed consents to that effect.”

  Stunned, Annie remembered the array of documents. Papers she had barely glanced at. The myriad of blood tests.

  “You’ll never, never get away with this.” The words were fuzzy, garbled, but Elaine understood them anyway.

  “No? What could be more likely? A known drug addict. An overdose. And as often as I’ve warned the nurses to keep drugs locked up when you’re around? I’m going to call 911 at once, of course. I’ll ride with you in the ambulance. Pity they’ll never be able to bring you out of the coma. They’ll find an overdose of morphine. They’ll see an arm with a few scars in the veins. And we will all decide together there is no point in wasting a good kidney.”

  Annie gasped, closed her eyes, tried to speak.

  “A perfect, genetically-matched kidney.”

  Guile Is Where It Goes

  Dan Crawford

  Waldo raised one long finger. “It is a world, Frederick, which is having no sensitivity whatever for justice.”

  Freddy slumped on the step at the back of the truck. “Yeah. It is.”

  Still with that long finger pointed at the sky, Waldo stretched long legs to march around the comer of the truck and back again. He passed Freddy once, and then swung back, pointing. “It is almost becoming enough, Frederick, to confirm one’s depressing conclusion that the world was not, after all, prepared for the sake of men like you and I.”

  Now Freddy just nodded. Like most of Waldo’s plans, it had been a work of art. That old plastic baby doll, the feathers, the pipe with the ice cubes and balloon—it had sounded so silly when Waldo talked about it (you never said anything to Waldo about this, though). But everything had gone just as Waldo predicted, even to the way they whistled as they drove away in the hijacked truck without anybody saying a word. And so now they owned a truck and everything in it. Something to ride in, and something to sell to pay for the gas: Waldo had done it again.

  Only when they came to look over the inside of the truck and see just what Waldo had done did the beauty of this work of art lose some of its luster.

  The heavy cardboard cubes all held clear plastic bags of reddish brown liquid. According to the orders Waldo found on the clipboard, each package contained exactly one liter of cow’s blood.

  “But what is it for, Waldo?” Freddy had demanded.

  Waldo simply threw the clipboard to the pavement. “It isn’t going to be making much of a difference, Frederick.”

  Now Freddy set his back against the door of the cold truck and watched Waldo stalk back and forth, back and forth, around that corner of the truck and back again. This went on and on. Freddy was sure Waldo was capable of doing this until his shoes wore out, which would be expensive and was therefore to be discouraged.

  So he sat forward. “Why don’t we just walk away from it, Waldo?”

  It stopped Waldo walking, at least. He fixed his eyes on Freddy’s face, and his eyebrows met over them. “We have been four days planning this particular learning experience, Frederick. And now we have only—” he reached down and patted his pocket, “—eleven dollars and ninety-eight cents left in the world. Do you know how far we can continue to keep traveling with eleven dollars and ninety-eight cents, Frederick?”

  That index finger came up again; Freddy watched the tip of it. “How far, Waldo?”

  “Not quite so far as a remote control could be changing a channel, Frederick.” Waldo’s mouth came out in a little pout. “No doubt this has been intended as a lesson to us, Frederick. We were taking for granted that we would succeed in selling anything we found on a truck.”

  He looked so unhappy. Freddy leaned forward. “But we could, Waldo! We could!” He sat back again as the finger pointed toward him. “Um, we could if our customers could just be vampires.”

  The glare turned on Freddy
was dire indeed, but was replaced almost immediately by a frown of puzzlement. The long index finger waggled back and forth.

  “Be silent a moment, Frederick,” Waldo said, his voice quite different now. Freddy felt his shoulders rise with hope and just a hint of apprehension. He could see Waldo’s genius working from here.

  When Waldo spoke again, it was in a third voice, dreamy and distant, and Freddy knew the answer had been found. It came in the form of a question.

  “Do we still have belonging to us, Frederick, those black suits in which we succeeded in fooling that little congregation in desirable old Abita Springs, Louisiana?”

  Freddy nodded. “Oh, yes, Waldo. They do still smell just a little from when they threw us in the—”

  Waldo raised his whole hand to cut off unnecessary reminiscences. “All the more to the better. Fetch them out, Frederick, while I am purchasing the essential necessities.”

  The necessities brought back by Waldo were a bucket of black paint and a box of bendy straws. The bucket of paint barely stretched to cover the whole truck; painting the truck stretched to cover the rest of the day. Then Freddy got behind the wheel and drove slowly as Waldo directed.

  This had looked too nice a town by daylight to have a neighborhood like this. But the cars that went by the low black building seemed respectable enough. Guards stood at the door of the building, which a bright red sign declared to be Gekhenna. So Waldo instructed Freddy to park the truck around the corner, well out of sight.

  “Now what, Waldo?”

  “Now we commence conveying to them our wares, of course.” Waldo stepped out of the truck and stepped around to stand under the only part of the truck not painted black, the letters that spelled the word drink.

  “And Frederick,” he said, pointing that index finger toward the letters, “we will concentrate on not letting ourselves lean against our transportation. I believe it has yet to finish its drying, and it is not good for business to stick to the walls.”

  They waited by the back doors of the truck. Freddy watched several people walk by wearing heavy black jackets, which must have been terribly hot. Others drove slowly past, studying the truck but making no remark. When Freddy eased up to the corner to peek, he found that people were stopping their cars in front of Gekhenna, giving the keys to a guard, and then strolling inside. And all of them did this without first spending any money at all at the nice black truck labeled drink.

  He came back and asked, “Shouldn’t we be shouting at them, or something, Waldo?”

  “No, Frederick,” Waldo told him, voice serene, “Merely continue to keep looking bored.” He frowned at his shoulder. “I realize it isn’t being an easy assignment, to be looking bored without leaning.”

  Freddy had no trouble looking bored, except when customers walked by. Two of them actually paused to look up at the word on the truck. The young man had close-cropped hair, long pointy eyebrows, and a short pointy beard. He wore an awful lot of earrings for each ear. How could he tell when he lost one? The woman wore a feathered headdress, and on her neck was a tattoo showing a girl with a horse’s tail.

  The young man sniffed. “Drinks? They sell drinks inside.”

  “Only having liquor in there,” replied Waldo, looking at a streetlight, and not the young man at all.

  The man puzzled this over. “Why? What’ve you got?”

  “The usual.” Waldo poked open the door and reached inside for a bag and a straw. The man stared at the bag.

  “Is it good?” he asked cautiously.

  “Only getting the best here.” Waldo hefted the bag. “Type O: the Universal Donor.”

  The man’s mouth spread open; his eyes shifted a bit toward the woman. “How much is it?”

  Waldo still wouldn’t look at him. “The usual.”

  “Oh. Sure.” The man reached to his back pocket and brought out a twenty-dollar bill. “That should cover it.”

  Freddy, at this point, would have snatched the lovely bill out of the lovely man’s hand. Waldo had more control, and merely lowered his eyes a fraction to regard it. He sniffed. “You’ll be wanting only the one, then?”

  The woman pulled at the man’s shirt. He produced another twenty. Waldo smiled, just a little, as he reached into the truck and brought forth a second bag and straw.

  Freddy barely restrained himself until the two people were around the corner. “You did it, Waldo! You can sell anything!”

  Waldo merely folded the money away. “Be so good as to be opening a few more boxes, Frederick. I’m feeling the luck roll in.”

  His feeling was accurate. Whether the first two told their friends inside Gekhenna about the Drinks truck, or whether cell phones were involved, now nobody walked past without stopping. First by twos and by threes, and then by the dozens, they came up to buy cow’s blood. All were darkly dressed, but very nearly undressed at the same time. Freddy saw a greater variety of tattoos than he’d seen since that ocean trip he and Waldo had accidentally taken, and he saw more colors of hair than he’d ever seen at all.

  Some of their customers opened the bags and stuck in the straw to take a drink right there. (These were especially the ones who came in pairs.) Other ones said they weren’t thirsty just now, or that they needed a glass, or that they preferred their blood warm. Waldo made no comment at all as he was required to move farther and farther into the truck to reach the stock; his apparent lack of interest was positively an insult to all of the interesting people who forced him to accept so very many twenty-dollar bills.

  But at last the dozens gave way to trios and pairs again, and after a while, hardly any customers were stopping at the black vehicle. Only about half the bags had been sold, but neither Waldo nor Freddy was unhappy about this. Waldo patted the lump of money in his jacket pocket. “Perhaps closing for the night would be the wisest course now, Frederick. Tomorrow we might well—”

  “Hello?”

  A woman and three men had stepped up among the boxes of blood. She was a tall woman with immense dark eyes and long dark hair, at least on one side of her head. The ear Freddy could see was studded with little gold stars, while chains and discs and other baubles swung below it. She was older than the other women who had stepped into the truck tonight, and she was very warmly clad above the waist. The dark glasses stuck in her waistband were actually larger than whatever it was the waistband was holding up.

  The men with her were dressed similarly, even to the stars in their ears. One carried a small hatchet instead of the glasses in his waistband, while another had a short whip. Freddy had seen other whips this evening, but he wasn’t sure he liked it that this one wasn’t at all glossy.

  “Good evening,” said the woman, gliding past the empty boxes. She stopped a few feet from Freddy, and tipped her head to one side, her eyes sliding all the way up to the left. Her face was very friendly, so friendly that Freddy took a step back. He couldn’t have said why. All his life he’d considered having such a woman rest her head on his shoulder. Only maybe with not quite so much hardware.

  “This is the only thing Gekhenna lacked,” she said, her voice warm and laudatory. “But aren’t you afraid of health inspectors?”

  Waldo shrugged. “We will be moving to convey our wares to the fortunate in some other location elsewhere tomorrow. Unless we are risking the danger that you will be doing some inspecting?”

  She had the most beautiful laugh. “Only in the usual way, I think.” Reaching behind her glasses, she drew out not one but four one-hundred-dollar bills.

  Freddy stared; Waldo didn’t even blink. He simply picked up the two nearest boxes and brought them forward. One of the men took them.

  “Thank you so much,” said the woman, sounding as if she brought every syllable from her innermost heart. “Perhaps we’ll come find you at your new location tomorrow.”

  She reached into the nearest box for a bag of blood as the four of them started for the door. Freddy was not too distracted by this new prospect to notice that she raised the bag to her
lips and daintily bit through the corner of the thick plastic. He didn’t especially want to watch this, and lowered his eyes again.

  Therefore his gaze was elsewhere when the woman choked, spat, and snarled, “Fraud!”

  The bag hit the floor, spreading its contents in an untidy fan-shaped puddle. Waldo opened his mouth to object to this, but that was when the woman turned, and the flames burst from her hands. “This comes from cattle!”

  To Freddy’s surprise, she was still smiling. Her smile was not in the least bit pleasant. “You dare!” Her flaming hands gestured the three men toward Waldo and Freddy.

  “Tonight, my darlings,” she announced, “we drink from the bottle!” Freddy could not help noticing how white her teeth looked. Or how very many of them there seemed to be.

  Freddy saw six thick snakes slide from the blood slick, and after that things got a little mixed up. The truck seemed to be spinning, and people started to shout: this was absolutely going to hurt.

  Waldo did not wait for his four customers to reach him. Snatching up a bag of blood, he strode forward and smacked the woman in the face with it. Then he ducked under a swinging hatchet. The man swinging this hatchet had to turn his back on Freddy, so Freddy threw a shoulder into it, blocking the man into his companions.

  Freddy dove for the doors, and Waldo joined him a second later, clutching what was left of the torn black suit jacket. Thrusting this into Freddy’s hands, he slammed the door shut and clanked the latch into place.

  “Let us commence to motate, Frederick!” he shouted, heading up front. “Quickly! I’ll be taking the wheel!”

  Freddy looked at the truck. “But they’re inside, Waldo; we’ll be taking them along with us. Let’s just run for it!”

  “Run?” Waldo stared at him. “Running in this neighborhood? Carrying that amount of money?” He nodded toward the torn jacket. “We’d be more safer back in there with the vampires! Motate, Frederick: do not hesitate to motate!”