Silver Zombie dspi-4

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I touched the silver familiar on my chest, still posing as an art-gallery-class piece of turquoise-embedded Native American jewelry.

  “That silver shape-shifter sure knows how to complement your eye color,” Ric said as he noticed my gesture.

  Quicksilver barked in the backseat.

  “Your baby blues too, Gray Shadow,” Ric twisted around to tell my dog.

  “This is awfully Southwest style for Kansas,” I said doubtfully, fingering the familiar, which warmed to my touch. “Although Coronado did mosey this far north hundreds of years ago, searching for silver.”

  “Coronado? The conquistador?” Ric sounded sharply surprised.

  “Ooh, say that again. It sounds so sexy with the proper accent.”

  “Coronado?” Ric repeated in an are-you-nuts tone.

  I wasn’t about to confess that his authentic pronunciation of the lovely rolled r and soft d of the Spanish language was quickly becoming my instant aphrodisiac.

  “No. Conquistador, hombre,” I cooed.

  “Don’t flirt so hard when you’re at the wheel, Delilah. Dolly might end up in the ditch.”

  I laughed, feeling good about going back to Wichita for the first time.

  Now you’re getting it, Irma said. We’ve got nothing to fear here but fear itself.

  She was right. Wichita was my home, “sour” home. It housed my orphanage and group homes, my fancy private high school on scholarship, my old job, the empty lot of my destroyed rented bungalow, and my old enemies. All “former.”

  “Take this next exit,” Ric said.

  “Are we heading for the horse pasture or the cow pasture?”

  “Neither. I hope we stay on the road. We’re aiming at the state highway junction with the county road, where the ‘gas’ and ‘grub’ signs tower. I didn’t know Kansas looked so Western east of Dodge City.”

  “Millions and millions of longhorn cattle have been herded over this earth since the mid–eighteen hundreds. We are in ‘bleeding’ Kansas, city boy, the Free State that started the Civil War over the slave issue.”

  “Then it fits that vampires should show up here early and often after the recent millennium meltdown. All that historic blood spilled.”

  “Interesting point. I never thought of those greaser vamp gangs that hassled me in the group homes before puberty—mine—as early adaptors.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Ric said, redonning his sunglasses. “To give you new insight on your unhappy childhood history. You’re not the only bleeding heart in this car.”

  I slowed Dolly to take the exit ramp, again wondering if I wanted to know more about a past that included repeated assault attempts and some unknown event or events that had made me too paranoid to ever lie on my back again.

  “Rape survivor” wasn’t a convincing piece of personal history I wanted to claim. I shivered in Dolly’s sun-warmed red leather interior. Usually she felt womblike, and—after I’d met Ric—sexy. Now, she just felt damn bloody. Like Kansas.

  RIC AND I sat outside at a wooden picnic bench, slurping giant paper cups of root beer, soaking up early summer sun. I’d bought a corny straw cowboy hat inside the Red Ryder Ranger Station to shade my face.

  “You put on your high-SPF sunscreen this morning?” Ric asked, eyeing my blazing white forearms.

  “Yes, dear. Gallons of it. Isn’t that citified silk-blend blazer hot without Vegas air-conditioning to duck into?” I asked in turn.

  “Yes, dear. I’ll dress down for the job later.”

  I looked around, hearing an oncoming horsy clickety-clank and then spotting a bleached-blond-maned woman in gold lamé spikes and bun-hugging capris, heading into the restaurant. She was layered in brass jewelry—on neck, wrists, and ankle.

  Hardly a Fed.

  Unless … she was a CI, a confidential informant. Maybe she was a gangster’s wife in the witness protection program. In her place, I sure would want Ric for a contact agent on that detail.

  Me too, would-be mob honey, Irma said.

  Ric’s sunglasses were not following her tail, but aimed at other ones in the adjoining pastures. Grazing cows don’t do much for me, though I find a mare and foal pretty to watch.

  In a bit, my eyes spotted and followed a tall, lean man with a kick-ass belt buckle holding in a faded denim shirt over a significant belly. He bent through the wooden fencing to amble his Justin boots across the road to the restaurant asphalt.

  When he got to our table, Ric stood in his pale Vegas suit and held out a dark hand glinting with bleached golden hairs. “Good to see you again, amigo.”

  The man wearing the straw cowboy hat that made mine look like a kid’s model nodded in my direction. “This your amiga?”

  “Wichita girl, born and fled,” Ric said. “Delilah Street.”

  I stood to shake hands, that not being necessary socially, since I’m a lady. Something about the man required standing.

  “Leonard Tallgrass,” Ric introduced him.

  Tallgrass’s sunburned skin was darker than Ric’s. The black eyes in a seamed face with broad cheekbones told me Ric’s ex-FBI buddy was pretty pure Native American– born.

  Exactly what tribe would be hard to guess. The Cheyenne and Kiowa fought the Long Knives here, and almost every tribe in North America had been moved to Kansas after the Indian Wars before most of them were finally moved to Oklahoma. That left contemporary Kansas with a trio of tiny reservations of Kickapoos and such in the state’s northeast corner. Most of its Native American population lived all over the lower forty-eight, and beyond.

  “Mr. Tallgrass,” I said.

  “Miss Street. You look even better in person. That was a real interesting TV piece you did on the mutilated cows a couple months back, but there was no follow-up.”

  “I left the station rather unexpectedly.”

  He nodded, giving me that Western scout squint. Leonard Tallgrass had been living up to that cowboys-and-Indians cliché with a tongue in his seamed cheek for a long, long time.

  “That anchorman did give it a lame mention later,” Tall-grass said. “Reported it was found to be teenage mischief. You must have known him, the paleface with the lipstick.”

  I swallowed a smirk. “Undead Ted is an up-to-date media vampire. Apparently they prefer a vivid background for their bleached canine fangs on TV.”

  “Speaking of canines—” Tallgrass turned to squint at Dolly. “That your ride?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That your dog in it?”

  Quicksilver heard, of course, and sat up in the backseat to establish his presence, front paws braced on the open window rim, looking seriously protective.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “What’s this dead-dowsing young amigo of mine doing in such fine company? And that is not a dog, Miss Street; he is Brother Wolf, and a member of my tribe. Why isn’t he dining with you?”

  “He guards Dolly and Ric guards me, and I guard both of them. And the food here sucks, Mr. Tallgrass.”

  “Then we’ll all go to my place.” He turned away, then turned back. “Miss Dolly is the Cadillac?”

  I nodded.

  “She is prime. Follow me.”

  LEONARD TALLGRASS’S RIDE was a new but mud-crusted hybrid black Ford 350 pickup, and his “place” was an apartment in a complex with a soaring fountain in the courtyard. Inside, an art gallery of weapons ancient, new, and unknown to me decked the walls. So much for “prairie squint.”

  “I like that necklace,” he said when we were seated in his dining alcove digesting his walnut and blue cheese chicken salad with lemongrass and extra-virgin olive oil. “It’s not an authentic native design, though.”

  “It’s not an authentic necklace.”

  He slouched onto his blue-jeaned tailbone. “Mi amigo Ricardo has found an extremely interesting young lady. I’ve already made contact with a series of your social workers.”

  My sass went south.

  “Those folks mean well,” he added, “but your job
clearly was to survive them, and you did. They’re still here in Wichita, and you’re not. You have a much better ride than any of them, and a better class of company.”

  “I assume my ‘classy company’ includes you. I don’t remember any social workers.”

  He nodded. “They were pretty forgettable. An ungrateful job. Almost as ungrateful as ours sometimes was, eh, Ricardo?”

  Ric nodded.

  Tallgrass took a new tack. “That cow mutilation story of yours, Miss Street, was an important one.”

  “Call me Delilah. The station barely deigned to run it.”

  “Don’t call me Leonard. Tallgrass will do. Was it the usual stupidity? Or a cover-up?”

  “I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.”

  Tallgrass eyed Ric. “We should check out the site. You a movie star now?” He directed his formidable squint at Ric’s sunglasses.

  There was a long, long pause. I knew enough not to say a word. Quicksilver stood defensively, which made Tall-grass lilt a shaggy eyebrow.

  Ric finally doffed his sunglasses. He hated wearing the brown contact lens and obviously hadn’t anticipated an indoor meeting. So his silver eye winked like a built-in monocle.

  Tallgrass observed, mulled, and finally nodded. “You’ve become an even more interesting young man. I think Miss Street—Delilah—should liberate that film she got on the messed-up cows from WTCH-TV.”

  I opened my mouth to unreel a string of reasons why that was unnecessary, humiliating, and impossible.

  “While,” Leonard Tallgrass went on, “mi amigo takes me to that field and Mr. Quicksilver does a thorough nose job on it.”

  I objected. “Quicksilver isn’t a drug-or bomb-sniffing dog, and he certainly isn’t a cadaver dog.”

  “I told you the moment we met, Miss Delilah. He isn’t much dog, but he’s a lot of something else.”

  At that point, Quicksilver went to Leonard’s chair and sat, after glancing his agreement at me.

  My necklace shrunk into a plain, career-woman circlet at the base of my throat that wouldn’t protect me from a mosquito bite, much less a vampire fanging.

  It was The Three Amigos (like the movie) and an animated hair against my self-respect.

  Guess who won?

  I programmed the cow pasture directions into Ric’s GPS and revved up Dolly for our return to Wichita. At least she wouldn’t be getting her undercarriage dusty on unpaved country roads.

  Chapter Ten

  WITH THE GUYS off in Leonard Tallgrass’s pickup to examine the cow-killing ground, we girls had time for less gory expeditions of our own.

  First I stopped at a centrally located, low-profile place I knew, the Thunderbird Inn (Tallgrass would approve) to book a room for Ric and me. When I called Ric with the info, we agreed to meet there when it got too dark for field explorations.

  Suited me. An unloaded Dolly and I made a beeline straight for my Wichita place of employment … before I’d been effectively driven out of it by a lecherous vampire, a scheming weather witch, and a rogue personal tornado.

  Most TV stations are modest one-story buildings attached to tall broadcast towers occupying high ground where land is cheap, far from the city center. WTCH-TV had the usual long entry driveway and suburban neighborhood.

  I reflected that by now the male investigative team of two guys and a dog was sniffing and sifting through a cow-patty-laden field I’d last seen by the gleam of a flashlight illuminating mutilated cattle corpses.

  Another lovely Wichita memory, but it wasn’t as scary to me as all the “missing time” in my growing-up history. Right now, my major problem was to park Dolly discreetly. The aim was to avoid contact with anchorman Undead Ted Brinkman and Sheena Coleman, the station weather witch, during this hit-and-run visit.

  I eased Delilah behind the far side of one of the station’s mobile broadcast vans.

  Wichita was having a quiet news day. Videographer “Slo-mo” Eddie Anderson had been happy to hear from my cell phone and was at the station as of ten minutes ago. One never knew when news would break out, so I slipped around the building to the back loading dock.

  I’d have to scale it in my mid-heeled suit pumps and black leggings, worn under a mini-length navy shirtdress, the casual opposite of my conservative hose-and-suit-wearing on-camera self. Eddie was an ace camera guy, but the lanky, morose type who was always down on “management,” so he was a born liaison for a disgruntled ex-employee.

  “Delilah,” he greeted me with a whisper when I’d clambered the four feet up to the loading dock and eased into the slightly open end of the steel security curtain. “Man, it’s been no fun fest with only the supernaturals running the news desk. You look like being gone agrees with you.”

  “I’d had some bad days before Sheena sent a ‘freak’ tornado to take out my rental house. Sorry I didn’t stick around to say good-bye.”

  Eddie scratched at his scrawny new mustache. “Can’t blame you. They stole your paranormal news beats and then flaked out on covering them. They even rescheduled the interview we had cancelled, with the old lady at Sunset City retirement place. Then the new regime sent me back to Sunset City with Sheena, but her interview was pretty boring.”

  “Really? That old woman, Caressa Teagarden, moved to the Vegas Sunset City. At least I found her there after I arrived.”

  “Well, she must have been swept up and out in that targeted tornado of yours, because the old dame Sheena interviewed was named Lili West and she was a total fox of forty-something, like all of those artificially preserved Sunset City senior citizen residents. Your old Caressa lady looked senior. Kinda cool to see these days.”

  I smiled, knowing what he meant. “She still does. Was Lili West at the same address as our aborted assignment?”

  “Yeah, come to think of it. No general manager has ever done that to me, called me back from an assignment for no good reason, like a fast-food place mass shooting. Good thing he’s gone too.”

  “Fred Fogelman is gone? Who’s running the station?”

  “Guy named Javier. Hah-vee-air. Like I said, the place has gone downhill. It’s all happy ‘news you can use’ now.”

  “It’d be a wonder if the station hadn’t declined with Undead Ted and Sheena taking over my beats,” I said. “Ted is an empty suit and a lame pair of fangs, and Sheena is a lousy weather witch without one reporter’s gene in her artificially supplemented body.”

  “A little competitive with our weather gal, Sheena? You had network written all over you, Delilah. Sheena sure had it in for you.”

  “Was it because I’d agreed to go out with Undead Ted that Friday? Didn’t even happen. He acted up and I kicked him out. He must have gone sniveling back to Sheena.”

  “Maybe. Whatever bee got in her bonnet, it just sprung up, like a high pressure cell. While you were off for the weekend, she was in the general manager’s office trashing you from that Saturday on through Monday. She tried to get our scoop footage from the cow pasture scene off the air, I know that. Then you and I were called back Monday en route to that dumb old-lady interview assignment at Sunset City the GM put you on. I think that was her doing too.”

  “Saddling me with that lame feature or getting us called back?”

  “One, or maybe both,” Eddie said. “It was just unprofessional, that’s what it was. And now, Undead Ted, he just trots along on Sheena’s leash like a vamp tranqued on blood thinners.”

  The conversation reminded me I’d spent that Saturday off taking my suddenly ailing dog to the vet, then finding he’d contracted blood poisoning and couldn’t be saved. All from biting Undead Ted’s ankle after the lech had tricked me into cutting a finger he wanted as an appetizer before mainlining on one of my major arteries after our dinner out.

  I’d never heard of a vampire’s blood being poisonous to house pets before, like some species of plant, but then, they seldom did the bleeding and the Millennium Revelation was still revealing unsuspected supernatural variations and species. A pang of
anxiety about Ric hit when I wondered what losing all your blood to vampires could do.

  “I don’t know what went on that weekend, Eddie,” I told him. “I not only wasn’t scheduled to work, but I … lost my dog that Saturday.”

  “That feisty white Lhasa? Too bad, Delilah. No wonder you were kinda down that Monday. You brought him in once. Akita or something.”

  Eddie’s mistake saved me from a total emotional rerun. Reporters live to inform and correct. “An Akita is a breed of Japanese dog. My Lhasa’s name was Achilles.”

  “Oh.” As if he cared. Cameramen have seen it all and are a nonchalant breed. “Like the Greek hero with something wrong with his heel.”

  “Like the hero with the bum heel,” I agreed, beating back the memories. As a pup, Achilles had always chased my heels, so the name was appropriate. I just didn’t expect that the “hero” part would get him killed.

  Eddie shook his head. “I don’t know what was going on that weekend, or since, but it’s been hell around here after you left. I’m thinking of quitting too.”

  “You’re a great videographer.”

  “But who does traditional ‘news’ anymore? We’re a dying breed. Whatcha doing in Vegas for a living?”

  “Investigative work for a television producer, among other, er, major Vegas Strip clients.”

  “Cool. You’ve landed on your girl-reporter pumps. I don’t wanta get you charged up about what’s over and done at the station. Besides Sheena being Bitch Witch, it’s a lot of management political correctness that’s been coming on for years. Hire the minorities, like the Latino brass, and the anchor vamps and the weather witches. You know the news has been going to hell since the big flare-up after the Millennium Revelation. It’s like, ‘Hey, the aliens have landed,’ but now they’re coming up out of our caves and cornfields and They R Us. Anyway, you can download your piece on the cow mutilations to your cell off my backup flash drive.”

  “Great.” I was glad simple computerized functions didn’t need hookups now, just proximity. It was like zipless sex. In a second, his info was my info too.