The Fixer: A Lawson Vampire Novel 1 (The Lawson Vampire Series)

by Jon F. Merz

  "What’s the bad scenario?"

  "If what I think is happening truly is, the humans Cosgrove is allying himself with aren’t the leaders of the free world."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, I would expect Cosgrove to form alliances with others like him. Psychotics, terrorists, criminals. They would understand each other. And the benefits they’d reap from each other would aid their own causes proportionally. With the aid of the vampires, criminals could become even more ferocious in their ways. Can you imagine a new brand of global vampiric terrorism? And again, in exchange for the aid of the vampires, we’d get access to untold amounts of blood. Just what we need to survive. And Cosgrove would emerge victorious. The Council would be disbanded. The old guardians of the ways would be unceremoniously killed. And as for us Fixers, well, we’d be seen as public enemy number one. Cosgrove would waste no time hunting us down. If he had access to the files, he could unleash his human allies on our heels. We’d have no safety anywhere and go from saviors to the refuse of our society."

  My mouth was dry, and even several gulps of good German beer did little to restore its moisture.

  "But humans could only frustrate us. We’d be more than a match for them if they chose to engage us in combat."

  Zero looked away and then back at me. "Cosgrove would use the humans to herd us into a trap. Then he’d use other Fixers, Lawson. Some of the disenchanted Fixers who don’t work anymore. There are plenty. Plenty who feel a kinship with Cosgrove’s demented ways. Plenty enough to be a very viable threat. Especially if Cosgrove grants them invulnerability to the crackdown."

  "What about the Council? Have you gone to them?"

  Zero shook his head. "No, for several reasons. First, while the Council is vital to our society, they are slow to see the dangers we see. You’ve had firsthand experience with that when you tried to kill Cosgrove before."

  I nodded.

  "And second," said Zero. "I don’t know how far up this conspiracy goes. And if we’re to move to stop it, to maintain the balance and do our job, we must do so in absolute secrecy. I have doubts as to who can be trusted and who may be under Cosgrove’s spell. Every step we make must be cautious, and yet we cannot afford to wait any longer."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "Your job has been to hunt down Cosgrove. That’s what you will do. Find him. Kill him. It’s essential."

  "There was a woman with me in the hotel room yesterday."

  "Who?"

  "Name’s Talya."

  Zero squinted in the darkness. "Still using the present tense. I take it she’s alive?"

  I shrugged. "Don’t know. According to McKinley, they never recovered another body. Just me."

  "So, she’s alive."

  "Damned if I know how," I said. "I barely escaped with my life. But she’s human. She should have died in that room."

  "She got a background?"

  "Professional. Freelance assassin. Cosgrove killed her fiancee. She’s sworn vengeance. I thought if I offered to help I could keep better tabs on her. Hell, she might even come in handy. Now, she’s gone."

  Zero frowned. "Give me some time. I’ll see if I can’t locate her. I still have some pretty decent contacts around here."

  "There’s something else."

  He watched me and I had trouble even saying it. "Last night – while I was out of commission – Cosgrove took out an elder."

  Zero frowned. "Why would he do that?"

  "I don’t know. According to McKinley they found his intestines strewn across his apartment and his head on a bedpost. That mean anything to you?"

  "Just that Cosgrove’s got a pretty strange sense of interior decorating. Can you get some details about this?"

  "Yeah, McKinley wants me to check it out anyway. I’m going over tomorrow. You want me to look for anything in particular?"

  "The elder’s name and age. But on your own, see if you can dig up exactly what he was charged with safeguarding."

  "On my own? What’s that supposed to mean."

  Zero frowned again. "It means involve outside sources as little as possible. Even your Control. Like I said before, we don’t know how far up this thing might go. We don’t want to alert anyone we don’t need to."

  "All right. I’ll see what I can do."

  He stood up. "Finish your beer and wait fifteen minutes before you leave. I’ll be in touch soon."

  I watched him disappear in the gloomy darkness as easily as a shadow. There was a strong gust of cool air as the door opened and Zero exited. But the cold air died quickly under the curtain of smoke still hanging in the bar.

  And there in the subdued interior, I stared into my beer stein and felt very much alone in a very dangerous world.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I left the bar after twenty minutes of beer swilling and found a pay phone a block further down close to the Dunkin’ Donuts. On a vague whim, I phoned the Four Seasons and asked for Talya’s room. There was a minute of silence on the phone before the operator told me the room number no longer existed. I asked for Talya. The operator told me there was nobody registered under that name.

  If Talya had gone to ground and effectively disappeared, it didn’t really surprise me. I guess a part of me had actually hoped against hope that she wasn’t bad. That she was really a player on the right side of the fence. But because she had gone under, because she’d vanished, I was left with no choice but to accept the fact that she was probably in league with Cosgrove.

  That meant I technically no longer had just one target to eliminate. Talya had become a liability and a potential threat to the Balance. After all, she knew Cosgrove was a vampire. Hell, I’d told her as much. Not that she probably hadn’t already known. She could have been playing me for a while, who knew?

  What I did know was that she was now a threat case and had to be eliminated as soon as possible, preferably after I had eliminated my primary objective, Cosgrove. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and if Talya showed herself as a target of opportunity, I’d waste her and then track down Cosgrove. Really made no difference to me. It was just part of the job.

  Or at least that was the idea I was trying hard to sell myself on. It would have been nice to honestly believe Talya hadn’t affected me at all during our brief interaction. It would have been.

  Of course, it wasn’t.

  On a purely physical level, Talya had aroused a desire in me I hadn’t experienced for a human woman before. Sure, I could bed down with them whenever I wanted. I just had to turn the charm on and that was it. But I hadn’t turned any charm on with Talya and she’d responded regardless. Of course, she could have been playing me, but maybe there was something more to it.

  Or maybe I just hoped there was.

  Truth be told, I never exactly felt as though I’d ever had much of a handle on women. Whether they were vampires or humans. Hell, they confused me.

  On the professional level, I respected her immensely. Usually, I want the chance to see somebody in action before I pass judgment on their skill level. I want to see how they react under pressure before they get any ounce of respect from me.

  Are they a shooter? Or do they just talk a big game?

  It’s a common sentiment among professionals like myself. Doesn’t matter whether you’re vampire or not. Seasoned combat veterans are the same way. They keep quiet about what they can do, because talking will get you killed. And it’s always the blabbermouths who turn out to be the worst under fire.

  But for some reason, I hadn’t needed to see Talya under duress to know that she’d respond accordingly, with grace and ease that only comes from years of being in the field.

  Even knowing about her background hadn’t affected my evaluation. Sure, the dossier McKinley had dug up on her dovetailed nicely with what I sensed, but there was something more.

  Experience can’t be bought no matter how badly you want to believe it. And Talya had experience written all over her face. It was in her walk, that calculated even
flow as she glided over the sidewalk. It was instinctive. It wasn’t something she tried to put on. She just had it naturally.

  You don’t find that very often these days.

  And frankly, it pissed me off to no end she was in league with a psycho like Cosgrove. Now, I know the rules as well as the next guy, but it would have been nice, even if just for a moment, to think of her as something more than just a convenient fuck.

  Well, it would have been.

  Reality sucked sometimes.

  My reality sucked pretty bad right now. It would have been nice to crawl home, feed my cats and get about eighty hours of sleep to cure my headache. It would have been.

  Instead, I took a mud-slicked yellow cab back downtown. Wednesday nights meant a lot more people out cruising the bar scene and night clubs. Landsdowne came alive on Friday and Saturdays, but Wednesdays belonged to the Theater District’s clubs. Smaller and more intimate than Landsdowne Street, they nevertheless sucked in their share of eager sexual conquistadors and the maidens they sought.

  I got out of the cab by the Wang Center and took a quarter from my pocket, tossed it in the air, checked the result and set off for the club.

  What, you think it’s odd I chose to use a coin to make a decision? Maybe you thought I had some kind of super-homing sense I’d be able to detect Cosgrove with, eh? I wish. Doesn’t work that way, though. And sometimes, just like any good detective will tell you, you just make a guess, close your eyes, and pray it’s right.

  I usually did everything but pray, since I was under no illusions that the gods had far more important things to tend to than a silly vampire hitman.

  The Roxy sat across the street from the Wang Center and I skirted three shiny white limousines and a red cab to get to the door. The doorman at this establishment took one look at my jeans and frowned.

  "Got a dress code here, buddy."

  I smiled. It was apparently time for what I affectionately refer to as the Jedi mind trick. "Yeah, I didn’t have time to change your mind that’s not really important with me."

  He got a thousand yard stare on his face, his skin color blushed slightly and his pupils dilated. Then he nodded, moved aside and mumbled something incoherent.

  No, it wasn’t some kind of cool vampire mind control. It was a science known as design human engineering that as Fixers, we’d been required to study as well. Back when I took the course, it had been called neuro-linguistic programming. Whatever you wanted to call it, the damned stuff worked like a charm.

  Inside it was romping. A trio of well-proportioned women hung back by the door and checked me over as I threaded my way past them. I smiled at the ugliest one and that set them all chattering and giggling.

  The darkness of the club made it easy to move around unnoticed. I swung back by the dance floor, checking out the red velour seating area bordering it more than the gyrating and twisting bodies occupying the cramped parquet dance floor.

  It must have been Euro night here. I saw more kids with OPEC written on their faces than anything even faintly resembling WASP. And if the number of yellow BMW’s parked out front had anything to do with the current population of this club, I was definitely on the mark.

  Cosgrove would stand out easily in a crowd like this but he’d be watching as he always did, from an advantageous position. I didn’t know the Roxy that well which put me in a bad situation. The only way to figure out the best area would be to move around the entire club and spot from various angles.

  Which, naturally, would expose me.

  My choices were limited though so I did just that. I started at the closest bar and wound counter-clockwise. If Zero had been with me, we could have cut the pie and covered the distance a lot sooner.

  Cutting the pie is a term special operations units use when they take a room down. They divide it up into sections just like a pie. Each man on the team has an assigned section and that’s it. Everything in that field of fire is his. It allows a hostage rescue team to take control of a room in an extremely short amount of time. In my case it would allow Zero and I to comb the room for Cosgrove, simultaneously knowing we had each other’s backs.

  But Zero wasn’t with me on this.

  And so I did it the old fashioned and much more dangerous way. It meant a lot more risk because if Talya was working with Cosgrove, I felt sure she’d be poking around somewhere. Maybe they were even waiting for me.

  It’d be simple enough to take me out then.

  Even in the darkened confines of this club.

  A perfect ambush.

  Cosgrove would prefer a big show, being the ego maniac, but Talya would be inclined to keep it subtle. She’d stay true to her professionalism.

  I wondered if Cosgrove had told her what I was. Maybe she’d known from the start of this whole thing.

  I felt behind my right hip and felt a surge of reassurance as my hand brushed against the pistol. The wooden tipped bullets it held could kill a human just as easily as Cosgrove. The loads were designed to blossom on impact, spraying and splintering the wooden heads all across a tremendous cavity caused by the impact.

  Worked well for all types of enemies.

  Hadn’t used it on any werewolves yet, though.

  The swirling lights of the dance floor forced me to move slower than I would have liked. I didn’t want to stay fixed in any position long enough for Cosgrove or Talya to see me. If I kept moving, slow and with a lot of flow, chances were good I could get close without them seeing me.

  But the strobe effects of the dance floor lights made pinpointing anyone difficult, so I had to move slowly, edging my way around the perimeter, checking, moving, checking, moving.

  It was when I was three quarters of the way around the club that I heard the voice tickling my right ear. The low, husky drawl startling, but unmistakable, even over the roar of the throbbing dance music.

  Talya’s voice.

  Chapter Sixteen

  "Nice to see you again, Lawson"

  I started to turn around, but the sharp prod in my back, unmistakably a gun barrel, stopped me.

  "Uh uh uh, not so fast, lover. I wouldn’t want to have to kill you before we get a chance to talk this out."

  I felt her fleece my gun off of me and then she steered me over to the left. "Back of the club, head for that empty booth. Move and keep very very still."

  I knew any number of techniques which technically would have allowed me to disarm Talya and kill her, but I chose not to employ them for several reasons.

  First, while I knew I could get out of the way, I wanted to make sure I could get far enough such that Talya wouldn’t be able to fill me full of holes. I didn’t want to lose any more blood and since we were in cramped quarters, maneuvering would have been problematical.

  Second, she was a pro and would have anticipated my strategies. Therefore, by my doing something, I would be playing right into her countermoves. Who knew what kind of contingency plans she’d arranged for? Not good.

  And most importantly, I had questions of my own I wanted to ask. Maybe I’d even get some answers. Maybe Cosgrove was waiting for me at the back of the club. Even though on my first pass I hadn’t seen him.

  So curiosity kept me from trying anything. And we reached the booth uneventfully.

  No one joined us. No one sat nearby.

  No Cosgrove.

  Talya gestured. "Take a seat Lawson."

  I did. "Why is it lately every time I run into you, you seem to feel leveling a gun on me is necessary?"

  She frowned. "Given what’s happened. Recent events seem to dictate it out of necessity."

  "Necessity?"

  "My survival."

  I watched another couple collapse into a booth ten feet away and proceed to engage in fully-clothed sex. I turned my attention back to Talya. "Last time I saw you, your hotel room exploded. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me how the hell you survived when everything else, including me, got blown to shit?"

  She sniffed. "I might ask you the same qu
estion. Unless, of course, I’m talking to a dead man right now."

  "No, I’m alive. No idea how I came through it, but I did." I shrugged. "Just lucky."

  It was as feeble as a fifteen year old’s claim that he reads Playboy for the articles, but it was all I had.

  She didn’t buy it.

  "Give me a break, Lawson. You’re a professional just like me and you know damned well there’s no such thing as luck." She leaned closer. "You should have died in that room."

  "Maybe I’ve got a guardian angel."

  "Maybe you’re lying to me."

  I shifted slowly. "Well, what about you? How’d you come through it without a scratch?"

  "I have the gun, Lawson. You first."

  I cleared my throat. "Why don’t I finish what I was going to talk to you about before the explosion interrupted us?"

  She scanned the area. "All right."

  I shifted again. "I believe we were discussing your companion whom I saw you speaking with when I came back downstairs the other night."

  "What about him?"

  "Do you know who you were talking to?"

  She shrugged. "Said his name was Robert. Why?"

  "And the language you were speaking?"

  She frowned and I could almost hear the gears grinding in her head. She’d remember to ask, I was sure, how the hell I could have overheard their conversation. "He guessed my nationality."

  "He spoke Russian?" That was bullshit. They hadn’t been speaking Russian and I knew it.

  She shook her head. "No. He used a Kazak dialect that my mother taught me to speak. It’s very rare."

  "Imagine the chances of someone knowing that, huh?"

  She nodded. "Almost non-existent."

  "Unless you’ve had a lot of time to travel and learn languages," I said.

  "What are you driving at, Lawson?"

  "The man you were speaking to. Robert. Whatever he told you was a lie. Whatever you discussed. All of it was nothing but a lie."

  "How can you be so sure? How did you overhear us?"