My God. What a horrible thing to have happened. His picture was in the file. He’d been a handsome man and now that she had something to occupy her mind, Joy intended that he would be again. She strode to her locker and grabbed her things to begin embalming Eddie.
He lay covered on her table from head to toe and as she pulled back the white sheet, Joy grimaced. Sometimes this job sucked. Pulling on her gloves, she prepared the embalming fluid and readied herself to remove his blood and gases, turning to assess the damage to Eddie’s head.
And then an instinctual chill ran along her spine, spreading fear throughout her body. Joy didn’t want to look, but she had to because something told her, before she saw the evidence, that Eddie would have the same marks on his neck that Alan and Brian had.
Joy held her breath and ignored the injury to Eddie’s head as she lifted his neck and began to inspect it.
Motherfucker…
Joy gripped the cold metal table and swayed against it. She took deep breaths, panting as the dizzy, heady fear subsided.
Of course, Eddie had vampire bites too. Small and barely noticeable to someone who wasn’t looking and had a perfectly logical explanation to rely on for Eddie’s death.
Joy trembled with a combination of rage and fear.
Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you want? she screamed mentally at whomever, whatever was doing this.
And where was the good detective when she really needed him? It occurred to Joy that she didn’t even have a phone number for him.
Okay, well if that was the case then she’d just do the Tarzan yell in her head. That oughta get his attention. Joy pushed her way out of the embalming room and sat on the bench by her locker so she could concentrate.
Breaker one-nine. Breaker one-nine. This is Joy to Larkin. Can ya hear me, good buddy? Um, hey, Sherlock! It’s Joy. I need you. Like now. Ya know, pronto. I have something we need to discuss, so stop wallowing in self-pity and come help me or I’ll have to arm wrestle you just to show you who the man is in this relationship.
Joy anticipated hearing his car come screeching around the corner at any second. She waited with only the sound of her labored breathing.
Nothing.
Shit. She pressed her fingers to her temple. Joy had no clue how to do this. Maybe it didn’t work if she wanted it to? How could that be? He was in her head all the damn time. How convenient that he chose now to disappear. Just like a man…
Yoo hoo, James Bond! Where the hell are you? On any given night in the past two weeks I couldn’t have yanked you out of my ass if I had hemorrhoid cream. I said I need you. Where are you? Larkin, you son of a bitch, get to the parlor now! Pick up the phone and call me or I swear to God I’ll let Liam take me out and do me like a wild boar in heat.
She shuddered, then gagged. Oh, ick, ick, ick.
There, if that didn’t work, nothing would.
Stupid head.
* * *
Larkin hunched down in his booth at the Hole and sucked on his soda. Liam was a busy guy. He was over in a corner with a tall, blond guy, smiling his perfect fucking smile and sticking his pinky out as he drank from a wine glass.
Well, Joy wasn’t far off the mark. He was a pansy.
Joy.
Larkin’s stomach did a nosedive as he thought about the woman who made his cock wag like an overexcited puppy and his thoughts muck up like a stopped drain.
She was a vampire.
A vampire. That alone should make a guy go long, but Larkin wasn’t able to do that. As he tried to tonight, while he staked out Liam, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
“Hey, buy a girl a drink?” A perfectly acceptable, pretty, human brunette slid into his booth and flashed him a seductive smile. She slid close to him, pressing her thigh to his.
And nothing. Nada. Not a solitary twitch of interest down south.
It was the single most fucked up thing he’d experienced in a long time. Larkin McBride didn’t pass up the op for a horizontal hop between two consenting adults, especially if they looked like this chick did. But he couldn’t see shit except for Joy. Her dark eyes, heated with desire when she came. Her ass, full and soft in his hands as she rode him. Her strawberry, ripe lips when she was tearing him a new one.
Well, hell.
Lar -- ki --!
He cocked his head and his ears burned. The brunette beside him made a face, but he ignored it.
H -- e --
Larkin tugged his earlobe and tried to block out the monotonous beat of the club’s music as he attempted to focus on syllables and letters swirling around in his head. As the brunette tried to catch his attention, he rudely waved her off and turned his back on her.
-- lock!
Sherlock… Larkin chuckled to himself as he hurried out of the booth and stayed in the shadows of the crowd so freak-boy Liam wouldn’t see him. He had to go.
Ding-dong. Avon calling…
* * *
“It’s about Goddamned time you got here!” Joy yelled at him from the steps of the funeral parlor. “I’ve been waiting forever for you. Do you realize I don’t even know where you’re staying?”
“At the motel in Easton.”
Joy threw her hands up in the air. “Well, whoopee for you! You forget, Detective, I can’t read your mind! Didn’t you hear me calling you? What happened, Kreskin? Did you lose your touch?”
Larkin smirked. “I was otherwise detained,” he said as he reached the step below her, where she stood hands firmly planted on her hips. “Now kiss me hello.”
Joy rolled her eyes at him. “Yeah? Well, that’s good to know and I don’t care what you were doing.” Yeah, not even a little. “And no, I’m not giving you anything. You didn’t even say goodbye to me this afternoon. Now come with me, Detective. I have another ‘problem’ and I don’t have time to waste sparring with you.”
She turned and flew up the stairs as Larkin followed close behind her. “I had to go get something to eat. You don’t have crap in your fridge and I was hungry,” he semi-whined.
“That was nine hours ago, Larkin.” Joy shook her head. “Forget it, whatever. Look we have a problem and it’s in my embalming room.”
Larkin grabbed her arm to slow her down. “Another vamp bite?”
Joy’s face held concern and fear and she knew it, but she didn’t care anymore. Larkin had to figure this out or it looked like people were just going to keep ending up dead and that wasn’t something she wanted to think about or be a party to. “Yeah. Another vamp bite.”
“Shit!”
“Exactly my thought. Of course you wouldn’t know that, now would you, Kreskin? All out of my mind-meld radius doing whatever it is that hunky, brooding cops do! C’mon, I’ll show you. Cover your nose.” Joy led him into the embalming room and showed him Eddie Mason. Larkin reached for the clipboard and asked, “Can I?”
Joy nodded and waited as he read over Eddie’s chart. His eyebrows shot up, she’d guess it was because he saw how Eddie had died. “We have to start thinking connections here, Joy,” he said as he pushed his way out of the doors and into the locker room. “All men in their early thirties, single, one suicide and two apparent accidents. Brian Reynolds wasn’t nearly as solid financially as Alan was. I wonder about Eddie. I thought maybe money was the motive, but not with Brian’s stats.”
Joy frowned at him and asked, “How did you find out about Brian’s stats?”
“There aren’t too many Brian Reynolds in Easton. It was easy. He didn’t seem to have any romantic involvement either.”
A glimmer of an idea hit Joy between the eyes. Maybe it was all the talk with Ethan over his homosexuality as of late, but for sure Alan was gay. “I’d bet Brian was gay and I’d bet Eddie was too… and I’d bet they hid it from everyone.”
Larkin kissed her squarely on her lips and gave a yell, “I’d bet your cute ass you’re right!” He smiled, then frowned. “So somebody’s whacking gay guys. Sort of like ethnic cleansing or what? And why the vamp bites? Do
vampires have an aversion to gay men?”
Joy’s head shook again. “Not that I know of. I mean, I’m beginning to think I’ve been a really sheltered vampire all these years, because I never would have thought Ethan would be afraid to tell me he was gay, but he was. Different clans do things differently. It’s like being black or white in the human world. African Americans celebrate Kwanzaa. Christians celebrate Christmas. Some vampires drink the blood of other vamps. The Polanskis don’t, partly because there are ways around it and it made us less likely to have anyone take issue with us. My father believes that someday society will come to accept us and he’s doing his part to make that happen. We don’t abuse our abilities, but we do drink from our mates. Each clan of vampires has their own rules, so maybe some do have an aversion to homosexuality, but I can’t see it. I’ve heard of many who are bisexual. I think Ethan’s fear stemmed from Alan’s paranoia.”
Larkin frowned. “Okay, so we more than likely have someone who hates gay men… Tell me about the blood thing. How does a vampire kill a human with a bite? For that matter how does a human become a vampire if not from a bite? Because wouldn’t Eddie, Alan and Brian be vampires now too? From the bites?”
Joy pinched the bridge of her nose. “First things first. A vampire can suck a human dry -- draining is what we call it -- it leaves the human a shell and obviously blood is an essential part of any human body. When a vampire turns a human we do bite our intended, but at a crucial moment during the turning, a vampire feeds the human their own blood. Voila, instant vampire. So the answer to the question is no. Those men wouldn’t have been vampires per se and they weren’t totally sucked dry either. Alan may have bled out, but he didn’t lose all of his blood. Blood coagulates. If a vamp had drained him, trust me, there would have been nothing left. That would have left me and any coroner suspicious as hell.”
Larkin nodded at her. “I wondered how the vampire thing happened. Okay, so none of these men were drained and they all have vampire bites. Eddie and Brian are quite possibly gay.” Larkin paced the length of the room in agitation. “Maybe it isn’t a vamp? Just some asshole that’s getting off on making it look like one? You said yourself that it happens a lot. The police have been fooled into believing that a crazy bunch of cultists or kids were responsible for deaths that really could be attributed to vampires.”
She reached a hand around her neck and massaged it. “Yes, that’s true, but I’m telling you, these are vampire bites. I know the difference between the plastic dime store shit you can buy and stick in your mouth at Halloween and a real vamp bite.”
Larkin looked skeptical, but answered, “I’m not even going to ask how you know something like that. I’m just going to take your word for it. So it looks like I have to go look around Brian and Eddie’s.”
“You?”
He grinned. “Yeah. Me.”
“What about me?”
Larkin chucked her under the chin. “I think you’re taking this Charlie’s Angels thing too far, Farrah.”
“Listen up, Sherlock. You could use a little Farrah in your life. Besides Farrah doesn’t have what I have.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “What’s that?”
“Night vision and super powers. Lest ye forget our little arm wrestling match. I’m the key to successfully breaking into Brian and Eddie’s.”
Snorting, he laughed. “Lest ye forget, I’m a cop. We’re practiced at this kind of stuff.”
Well, damn.
Larkin obviously saw her disappointment -- or heard it in her head and grabbed her by the waist. “Listen, Farrah, you can come with me, but you can’t touch anything. Just like at Alan’s.”
She held her palms up. “No touching, promise, and I’ll be so quiet you’ll never know I’m there.”
Larkin looked at her quizzically and then they both burst out laughing at how utterly absurd Joy’s statement was.
Chapter Eleven
The Hole.
It seemed to hold the key to everything and nothing. Both Eddie and Brian had matchbooks from the Hole and Eddie’s matchbook even had a number scribbled on it which led to a big, fat disconnected phone number.
Joy sighed long and loud as she and Larkin sat in his car at a local burger joint and he finished eating his burger. “I don’t get it. How can it be that we found nothing? If these guys were gay, they hid it as well as Alan did.”
Larkin chewed and swallowed a big bite of burger. “Yeah, they did, so I have to go back and hang out some more at the Hole. See what I can see.”
Joy shuddered. “I hate that place, it’s loud and obnoxious and creepy.”
“And your boyfriend Liam loves it.”
Joy threw a napkin at him. “He is not my boyfriend, smart-ass. I ditched him. He called and I told him he was no lifemate of mine and if I could smell I’d rather rip my nostril hairs out with my teeth than partner for life with him.”
Larkin threw his head back and laughed, holding the napkin over his mouth. “What happened to courtesy of the clan?”
Joy snorted. “I told Daddy he could be as courteous as he liked, but no way was I ending up with Liam. Daddy was okay with it because he didn’t like him either. What I’d like to know is what Liam thought he’d accomplish by claiming to be my lifemate and why? He’d never met me until the night of Alan’s wake.”
Larkin nodded. “Yeah, but you said that your lifemate can smell you. How would you know he couldn’t?”
She bristled. What did he want, Liam to have her on a silver platter? “Yes, yes, my sniffer is on the blink, but out of the blue like that? Isn’t there some kind of warning before some guy comes along and decides you’re his? I mean, I don’t know. I’m kind of out of the loop in the lifemate department.”
Larkin turned to look at her and put his arm around her shoulder. “If you don’t know I sure as hell don’t either and I’d like to see you on a silver platter all right, but not at Liam’s end of the table.”
Well, that was better. She knew it shouldn’t be, but it was. Joy tried to ignore the heated caress of his fingers and the warm fan of his breath not far from her face. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Liam is history as far as I’m concerned. We need to find out what’s going on before someone else gets hurt and people start to get suspicious. There haven’t been this many deaths in all the time we’ve been in Easton.”
“We need to take care of something else too.”
Joy frowned. Now what? For crap’s sake, she couldn’t keep up with everything that needed taking care of. “Now what?”
Larkin grabbed her hand and gave her a serious look. His eyes were dark and mysterious. “This,” he said as he brought her hand to the place between his legs.
Oh, my. Warmth pulsed beneath Joy’s hand and pressed against it, insistent and quite obviously voracious. “Look, mister. If you think for one second you’re going to distract me from my mission in this hunk of junk in the parking lot of a burger joint -- you’ve got another think coming.”
“Hey, this is my set of wheels, baby. You’re supposed to be kind to it. It’s not so bad. She needs work, I’ll admit. But not bad. I get around in it. Now let’s work on my problem.” Larkin grinned and wiggled his eyebrows.
“In the parking lot of a burger joint? Um, no. I have standards -- class -- good breeding.”
Larkin’s hand moved to her breast, caressing it with persistence through her thin sweater. “It could be very romantic,” he coaxed.
Joy found herself leaning into his hand, large and hot against her cool skin. “What is romantic about this hunk-of-junk, Detective?”
Larkin leaned forward and grazed her lips with his. “It has me in it.” He slid his tongue over her mouth, tracing the outline of her bottom lip.
“Couldn’t we be cited for a public display of lewd lasciviousness?” Joy touched his tongue back, an arrow of heat shooting to her pussy, wet now with the idea of doing it right here out in the open.
Larkin chuckled. “Nah, I know people in high places.”
>
Joy popped the button on his jeans and the hiss of his zipper echoed in the small space of the car. “Oh, well in that case, what’s the hold up?” Joy freed his cock and slid her hand over its length. Larkin moaned, but then grabbed her hand to stop her.
“Shit. Look, it’s Liam.”
Joy’s head popped up and she snatched her hand away. “What?”
“Liam, he’s going into the burger place.”
Joy frowned. Liam just didn’t look like a Happy Meal kinda guy. “What the hell is he doing in a burger joint?”
Larkin leaned forward and squinted. “Picking up some guy.”
Joy leaned forward with him and gasped. “That’s Ethan!”
Larkin’s eyes shot to Joy’s. “Your brother Ethan?”
Joy nodded wordlessly as Liam and Ethan exited the burger place and went to the back of the building. “What the hell is going on?” Joy said out loud.
“I don’t know, baby, but we need to find out. Liam’s a skunk. Maybe he’s crying in his milkshake over losing you to Ethan and he needs an ally?”
Somehow, Joy didn’t see Liam as the kind of guy who would cry over anything. Besides Ethan didn’t know about Liam… “Ethan doesn’t even know about Liam, Detective.”
Joy reached for the door handle, but Larkin grabbed her firmly by the back of her sweater, yanking her back against him. “Oh, no, Joy, you stay the frig away from Liam.”
Joy struggled against him and said through her teeth, “But he’s with Ethan and I don’t want him filling Ethan’s head full of shit about me! How many people do you suppose he would try to convince in my family that I’m his lifemate?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t want you anywhere near him, got that, Farrah?”
“Fine,” Joy spit, even if her insides were all aglow over Larkin’s protective stance. “But I plan to find out how Ethan knows Liam and I plan to find out soon. So don’t try and stop me, Kreskin.”
Larkin chuckled. “Me? Try and stop the big, bad vamp that is you? Never, but I do want you to be careful. Liam is a skunk and I can’t say why I know that, I just do. I can’t prove it, but I know it.”
The Polanski Brothers: Home of Eternal Rest Page 10