CHAPTER
7
My arm hurts. That was Domingo’s first thought.
Cold. That was the second.
“Drink,” Atl said.
It was a glass. She was pressing a glass against his lip and it felt cold. Domingo swallowed.
“Open your eyes.”
He did. She was sitting beside him, on the floor. Domingo blinked. His head felt like it was about to explode.
“Am I a vampire now?” he asked.
Atl chuckled. “Don’t be silly. I told you that wasn’t possible. You should stop believing the crap they say about us.”
He rubbed his hands together. “It’s what they put in books,” he said. More like comic books, but what was the big difference?
Atl snorted and pressed the glass against his lips once more. Domingo swallowed obediently.
“The books, right. All that garbage from before 1967 still sticking around,” she said. “Can you hold this?”
“I can try.”
Domingo clutched the glass with both hands and slowly raised it to his mouth.
“What about 1967?” he asked, because he wasn’t sure of the reference.
“Doesn’t ring a bell?”
“No. I didn’t do well in school, though,” he admitted.
It hadn’t been Domingo’s fault. Most days his mom didn’t pack a lunch for him and it was a pain in the ass completing his homework with his stepfather bellowing. His brothers were not much better. He had liked art class and music class and reading, but the teachers were indifferent and many of his classmates unkind. He didn’t mind dropping out.
“That’s the year humans discovered we existed, that it wasn’t just folklore and superstition. There was a huge panic. A bunch of countries tried kicking the vampires out. Spain and Portugal made a big show of it. That’s how we ended with so many European varieties in Mexico.”
Yeah, he vaguely remembered hearing about that, but this had happened long ago, before he was born. Besides, Domingo was more interested in the splashy vampire stories—these often involved guns, gangs, and drugs—but since he had a real vampire talking to him now he’d thought he’d ask. It was an educational moment, and his teacher had always chided him for letting such moments go by, too mesmerized by comic books to consider a dusty history fact of any value. But he wanted to know everything about her.
“How come we don’t have vampires in Mexico City, then?” Domingo asked.
“’Cause you guys are pussies,” Atl said with a shrug. “You’ll need iron pills. Anytime we drink from a human we are supposed to give them iron pills, my mother’s orders. Finish your juice.”
He took another sip.
“So, like, no type of vampire can turn a human into a vampire, ever?” he asked.
“No. Some can make you real sick and kill you if they bite you.”
Domingo stared at Atl. She snatched the glass from his hands, chuckling again.
“Not my type,” she said as she stood up and walked toward the kitchen. “But vampires are a completely different species. Homo cruentus.”
Domingo did not try to follow her. He was too tired to get up. He sat there, his back against the wall. He wiggled his fingers and felt like a hundred ants were walking up his arm.
“Homo … you’re gay?”
Atl’s laughter drifted from the kitchen. She came back with the glass of juice refilled and handed it to him.
“My species is Homo cruentus, though there are different subspecies. I suppose if you were to be really precise you might say some of us don’t qualify as members of a subspecies since you have to be able to interbreed.” She stopped, noticing his puzzled expression. “Do you know what a species and a subspecies are?”
“Not really,” he said.
“It’s like we are different types. Wolves are Canis lupus. They are a species. Dogs are Canis lupus familiaris. There’s also dingoes, which are called Canis lupus dingo. They’re two different subspecies.”
She crouched down next to him as she spoke.
He nodded. “I get it now. I wasn’t too good at science in school.”
“When did you stop going to school?”
“’Bout four years ago,” he said. “I kind of got kicked out of my home.”
“How come?”
He took a sip of juice and shrugged.
“I used to stay out a lot. I’d come home real late at night. My stepdad said if I didn’t start bringing in money and stopped hanging out with troublemakers he was going to kick me out. One night I came home and he wouldn’t let me in. He had dumped my clothes by the door, in a trash bag. That was that.”
“What did your mother say?” she asked, looking surprised.
“She didn’t really say much and I didn’t want to come back, anyway. My stepdad was always hitting me with the belt. One time he hit me with the iron and another with a frying pan.”
The belt was small potatoes. Now the iron, that one had hurt. Domingo had to get stitches.
“What about your real dad?”
“He went away a bunch of years ago. I don’t know where he is now. I’ve got two brothers and we’ve all had different dads.”
It sounded a lot worse when he said it than when he thought about it. Things just were the way they were, but judging by the way she was looking at him maybe it had been worse than he’d thought.
“Drink up,” she said, helping him tilt the glass.
Domingo downed the rest of the juice in one huge gulp and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. She took the glass from his hands.
“What’s your mom like?” he asked.
“She’s dead,” Atl said simply, turning the glass in her hands, a finger sliding along its rim.
“I’m sorry. How’d she die?”
“She died. What do you care?” she said, standing up. “The sun will be coming up soon.”
She wasn’t wearing the watch and there was no clock in the living room. Domingo didn’t know how she could tell. Maybe it was one of those vampire powers.
“I need to sleep,” Atl said.
He wanted to ask, “Can I look at your coffin?” but stopped himself in time, realizing how stupid that might sound.
“Will you do me a favor?” she asked.
“Um. Sure.”
“I need you to go look for someone today. It’s a guy. His name is Bernardino. I have his address but I haven’t been able to visit him.”
“That doesn’t sound too hard.”
“Wait.”
She moved away and returned with a small cloth bag. She reached into it and took out a single jade bead, placing it on the palm of his hand.
“Go see Bernardino and tell him that Atl, Daughter of Centehua, needs his help. I need to find someone, and only he can tell me where she is. Give him this piece of jade.”
“Who do you need to find?”
“This person,” she said.
He took the folded piece of paper in her hands and looked at it. Her handwriting was very tight and neat, not the sloppy strokes that Domingo managed when he chanced to write something. “Verónica Montealban,” said the note. Below it Atl had scribbled “Bernardino” and an address.
“Will you go? Today? This is extremely important. A matter of life or death.”
“I’ll try to go,” Domingo said. “I’m feeling a bit tired right now, but definitely, I—”
“I’m serious. This is important. You can rest for a few hours. There’s a mattress in the bedroom.”
She looked worried and he did want to help her. Domingo shuffled tentatively into the bedroom. The dog padded behind him. It was very dark.
“I can’t see much,” he muttered.
She turned on the light. There was not much to see. Atl did have a mattress in the center of the room, but no sheets. She slid a closet door open and rummaged inside, tossing him a blanket. Domingo placed it on the bed and lay down.
Atl flicked off the light. He was at the edge of the bed, waiting for her to join
him. Instead, he heard the closet door slide shut and then nothing but a deep silence. He counted up to ten in his head before wetting his lips and gathering the courage to speak.
“Atl, you are not coming to bed?” he asked.
“No,” came the muffled reply.
“You don’t have to sleep on the floor. It’s not like I’d try anything,” he said. “If it makes you feel better, I can take the floor, no worries.”
She chuckled. “I like small spaces. Just as the animals in the desert have their burrows, I have mine.”
“Oh,” he said.
He shifted his position and wrapped himself in the blanket. He hoped he hadn’t sounded like a creep asking if she’d come to bed. He didn’t want to give no wrong impression.
“Do you want to hear something interesting? Tarantulas line their burrows with silk to stabilize the burrow wall. They also use silk trap lines to alert them of potential prey.”
“That is neat. How’d you learn that?” he asked.
“My sister told me that,” she said, and her voice was faint.
He waited for Atl to say more, but she did not. Domingo wrapped the blanket around himself and slept. When he woke faint traces of light had begun to slip underneath the curtains. The room was still dark, but he could make out the outline of the closet and the shape of Atl’s dog resting by it.
There was his answer. Mexican vampires slept in closets. Who would have thought?
Domingo tiptoed outside the bedroom, quietly closing the door behind him. His stomach was rumbling. It was time for breakfast. He could use a good bowl of birria. He grabbed the apartment keys that were dangling by a hook next to the door and stepped outside. When he reached the first landing, he slipped on his headphones and pushed play.
CHAPTER
8
People had to get themselves murdered on Saturday. Never Tuesday or Wednesday, when Ana Aguirre was off duty. Always Saturday. She shouldn’t be on duty on the weekends. As a matter of fact, Ana should have been working a pleasant desk job supervising junior officers. But Castillo had blocked that move yet again. The twat. If Ana Aguirre had ever held dreams of a real career in law enforcement, they had long been dashed under the persistent hammer of the outdated Mexican police system.
Worst of all, when she arrived at the crime scene, knelt down, and lifted the blanket, she saw it was a kid. A young girl in a tight miniskirt, her top drenched in blood.
Ana looked at the girl and couldn’t help thinking of her own daughter, Marisol, who was seventeen. Ana kept working this shit job for her daughter. But she worried. She wasn’t home nearly enough and the city had a hungry maw, one ready to swallow the young and the innocent.
Ana aimed her flashlight at the girl’s face. The neck had been torn, savaged.
“Hey, you’ve got anything for me?” she asked, turning toward a policeman who was lounging against the wall, smoking a cigarette.
“What you see’s what you’ve got. It looks strange as fuck. Vampire, no?”
Ana tilted her head. Great. She’d left Zacatecas to avoid the vampire gangs. It seemed they were all over the country. All over except for Mexico City. Not because it was a city-state, autonomous in many respects. That was just a geographical demarcation. No. Mexico City had held tight because it was territory of the human gangs, and the gangs, usually unwilling to cooperate, had managed to come together against the single enemy that mattered to them: the bloodsuckers.
But violence lurked at the edges of the city, in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and other areas. There, in the slums, the vampires sometimes made their incursions, trying to expand their fiefdoms. They failed. For now.
“I phoned and they told me you’d know what to do,” the policeman said.
Like hell, Ana thought, but she knew why they’d placed her on this case. Because none of the others wanted to touch it. Because she was from Zacatecas and it didn’t matter if you’d lived in Mexico City for six years, you were still an outsider. Because she came from the gang lands. Because Castillo hated her. Because the shit jobs always wound up dripping her way. Because she had put forth a sexual harassment complaint against another officer one time, and everyone had laughed it off, saying no one would want to smack the ass of such an ugly woman.
“When did you find her?”
“I called it in half an hour ago. Took you long enough to get here.”
Ana wanted to backhand the punk. He looked shy of twenty. Probably thought he was God’s gift to the Secretariat of Public Safety simply because they’d issued him a baton.
“Well, anyone see anything?”
“Nobody saw nothing,” he said.
“You sure or you just guessing?”
The young man gave her a blank look. They’d already set the yellow tape across both ends of the alley and onlookers were peering curiously at the cops. A couple were even raising their cell phones and trying to take photos.
For souvenirs, she thought bitterly. She thought of lodging a complaint about this cop’s performance, then decided the paperwork wasn’t worth it. Her note would end up at the bottom of a file, anyway.
“She had the blanket on top of her when you found her?” Ana asked.
“Yeah.”
The vampire had covered her. She didn’t think it was modesty. Although he’d done a shoddy job of it, he’d probably been trying to delay the finding of the corpse. Had he simply dragged the body to the next alley he would have found a pothole so large it could probably fit half the girl’s body. It wouldn’t have taken too much effort.
Stupid, she thought.
“Go talk to your friends over there and see if they have any witnesses for me, will you?” she said, pointing toward a couple of cops who were talking animatedly with some of the onlookers.
The young man huffed, but obeyed her. Ana leaned down and took out her camera. In theory, forensics would come over and photograph the crime scene, but that was in theory. Many times they just wouldn’t show up, because there was too much shit going on, there weren’t enough of them, or they didn’t want to get up and drag their sorry asses out of bed. Mexican police work didn’t play out like in the movies. Traditionally, there was almost no investigative work. They relied heavily on confessions and wouldn’t even blink if they contaminated a crime scene. Physical evidence was used in about 10 percent of convictions and the rest were signed affidavits. Things were changing, supposedly. Ana was one of the shiny new breed of detectives, a real investigator, but that was a bunch of PR mixed with only a little substance.
She was tired of this game.
Ana snapped photos and took notes, wondering if she should even bother but doing it anyway. She was up and about already, so she might as well work. No reason to give Castillo more fuel for his fire.
“There’s a chick who says she saw the dead girl with a guy inside the nightclub,” the young policeman said as he returned, pointing at a teenager with spiky hair and tremendously tall high heels who was standing nearby.
“All right,” Ana said. “Call forensics and see if they’ll get their ass here before someone from the morgue hauls the body away, will ya?”
The boy looked terribly annoyed, but he had the good sense to comply. Ana went toward the young girl in the heels, quickly pulling out her notepad and her pen. They were supposed to have standard-issue mini-tablets, but hers had broken and nobody had bothered to give her a replacement. Ana preferred the feel of a pen between her fingers, anyway. Old school but reliable. Just like a knife. Electric zappers were also good for vampires. But knives had their appeal. She still carried the good old silver knife with her.
Cut off their heads and burn the bodies. No other way.
“They’re telling me you saw the girl inside,” Ana said, and the teenager gave her a vehement nod of the head.
“Uh-huh. Sure did. She was with this majorly hot guy.”
“What did he look like?”
“Platinum blond hair, pale. He was wearing nice clothes,” the girl said.
; “Age?” she asked, her short hand neat against the yellow pages of the notepad. She’d taken typing classes in high school. Technical high school. She had been trained to be a secretary and picked an application for the local police department instead.
“About my age. I dunno. Nineteen? Twenty, maybe. Hard to say.”
“Anything special about him? Any marks, tattoos, piercings?”
The girl seemed to think it over. She rubbed her arms and finally spoke. “He didn’t have piercings. But, yes, I remember a tattoo.”
“What did it look like?” Ana asked.
“He took off his shirt to dance,” the girl said, mimicking the motion of a man lifting his arms. “He was wearing a wife beater and I could see, kinda, part of the back of his neck. It was a shark.”
“Anything else you saw?”
“No. I was inside ’til someone came running in and said the cops were here and someone had killed a girl. I just wanted to see.”
I hope it was amusing, Ana thought.
* * *
Ana got home around 6 a.m., nearly time for Marisol to wake up for school. She peeked into her daughter’s room. The girl was peacefully asleep. Ana recalled the spectacle of the dead girl in the alley and shook her head.
God, a vampire kill. She hadn’t looked into one of those since Zacatecas. You took statements, nodded, maybe caught one, and then a couple more bodies popped up in another part of the city, like mushrooms after the rain. It never ended. It was a fact of life. That was what brought her to Mexico City. It was safer, and they were starting the new investigating units. Reforming the police system. She was going to have a chance to be a “real” detective.
Not that I’m anything “realer” now, she thought as she walked into her bedroom and peeled off her uniform. It was a dark blue, form-fitting suit woven with a nano-fiber worn under a standard-issue raincoat in the same color. It itched, and she often found herself scratching her neck.
Ana carefully folded her clothes and lay down on her bed. She lay on top of the covers and wondered if the examiner was going to get to the girl’s corpse that evening. Probably not. The girl was nobody of importance and Ana didn’t have much pull around the office. If the coroner looked at the girl and if he deigned to produce a report, it might be weeks later.
Certain Dark Things Page 6