Veronica clung to the banister. "Give me a minute. My stomach is sorting through this love-hate relationship I have with tequila."
Closing her eyes for a moment, she took a deep breath and exhaled. I helped her trudge up the stairs. We paused at her door while she dug keys from her shorts pocket.
She fumbled with the dead bolt. "Felix, are you enjoying yourself?"
"Of course. Why?"
"You picked at your food. I practically swam in my margaritas. You barely sipped yours. Now you hold me like I could give you cooties."
"Maybe it's me who has cooties."
Veronica slurred a laugh. "You don't have cooties." She pecked my cheek. "See. No cooties. Was that so complicated?"
Being an undead bloodsucker makes everything complicated.
With my hand steadying her shoulder, she guided me into the apartment and her bedroom. Veronica plunked face first onto the mattress. Her feet dangled off the edge of the bed and her flip-flops dropped to the floor.
Veronica's right hand came up and pointed to the hall. "Felix, be my hero," she mumbled, "and bring some water."
I went to the bathroom and filled a glass. When I returned to the bedroom, Veronica had turned onto one side and gathered a pillow under her head. The little screen of an iPod on the nightstand gave an inert glow.
I set the glass beside the iPod, took off my shoes, and lay next to Veronica to spoon. Her firm rump pressed along my pelvis. I pushed one hand under the pillow and laid the other on her hip.
The music playing was a woman crooning about frustrated love. She must've cribbed my notes.
Up close, Veronica was a cascade of smells: sweat, tequila, mango chutney, shampoo, aloe vera lotion, and her delicious pheromones. This beautiful, healthy—albeit pickled to a hundred proof—creature that I rested against was a reservoir of savory blood and sexual release.
I could zap Veronica and enjoy the ride. What would prevent me?
A junkie going cold turkey and finding a syringe loaded with smack, a pyromaniac with matches, gasoline, and an empty house, their temptations were trivial whims compared to the roiling hunger that stoked my desire.
Her heart thumped a beaconing tempo.
My fangs pushed out from my gums.
The valves in her veins ticked like stopwatches, counting the seconds before my attack.
My kundalini noir coiled as it prepared me to strike and feed.
Chapter Twenty-One
NO. I WOULDN'T take advantage of Veronica.
God had taken away my soul, but I remained with a free will. I am vampire, not an animal that surrenders to every impulse.
I'd reciprocate Veronica's affection, nothing more. Let her decide, sober and willing, how this relationship would progress.
I held Veronica tight and waited for temptation to pass. My kundalini noir finally relaxed and my fangs shrank back under my lip.
Veronica snored faintly and I waited for the songs on the iPod to end.
I stayed with her until 3 A.M., then got up and removed my contacts. Veronica lay swaddled in her red aura, undulating with dreamy thoughts. I walked to the front room. The floor creaked, and I levitated to pad about noiselessly.
Something rustled outside the window. A small red aura betrayed an opossum munching grapes.
"Better scat," I whispered, "before Coyote finds you."
The opossum's beady eyes stared from under a crown of grape leaves as it continued eating.
I dug through my overnight bag for blood I brought from Coyote's. I microwaved one package of type B-positive.
While sipping blood through a drinking straw, I opened the box with Roxy's file and removed the first folder. I sat in a chair with the folder on my lap and unfastened a binder clip.
This file contained photocopies of the agendas and minutes from city council meetings. Someone had scrawled along the margins and between the paragraphs. Words were underlined with bold strokes, as if the pen had been slashed across the paper like a blade.
I recognized names from the Los Angeles political scene. Lucky Rosario. Councilwoman Petale Venin. I kept tripping over her name in this investigation. She was the quarterback behind the effort to get Project Eleven on the ballot. I assumed she had plenty of dirt under her fingernails—what politician didn't?—but I couldn't imagine someone in her public position risking murder.
Nowhere in the papers did I see mention of Cragnow Vissoom, Dr. Mordecai Niphe, or Reverend Journey.
I flipped through the stack. It would take a month to go through these documents. I'd get a clearer picture of the battle over Project Eleven, but would anyone have said something to incriminate him- or herself with violent crime? Or even more improbably, vampire-human collusion?
I leafed through the next folder, a collection of grainy black-and-white copies of photographs.
The first photo that caught my interest was of Lucky Rosario standing beside a washed-up Hollywood celebrity. The actor had done a series about a bounty hunter in Miami until low ratings and a drug habit did him in.
Where had I seen these pictures before?
On the wall of Rosario's office.
How did Roxy get these copies? When I first saw the original pictures at Rosario's they didn't mean much. What had I missed? What was the significance to my investigation?
Something like this next picture.
Three men stood before a restaurant table.
The man on the left was the shortest. Wearing a pinstriped shirt and fashionable tie, with keen eyes peering through wire-rims, and a thick mat of kinky hair, was Dr. Mordecai Niphe. In the middle of the group, a white shirt rumpled under the armpits, collar and tie digging into a fat neck, grinned Lucky Rosario. Lucky's arm draped over Niphe's shoulder like they were best buds.
Standing to the right was a tall, older man in a suit. He had gray, almost whitish, well-groomed hair. I didn't need a caption to know who he was.
Reverend Dale Journey.
He projected the arrogant bearing of an elderly senator or a retired air force general. Yet his smile appeared too tight. Nervous. The gap between Journey and Rosario told me that Journey didn't want to be seen in this company.
Journey and Niphe together, with Rosario in the middle. What linked them? Who lurked unseen in the background? Cragnow Vissoom?
The time was 5:30 A.M. Sunrise would come soon. I needed to hide from the deadly rays of first light. Sunblock wasn't enough to protect me.
The photos were promising, but first I had to protect myself from the sun. I clipped the file together and set it back in the box.
The front room faced east. I closed the drapes tight and retreated to a room at the back of Veronica's apartment, the west side. I felt like a spider slinking down its hole.
What made the sunrise so dangerous? I didn't know. Perhaps a vampire's psychic defenses weakened over the night and the splash of sunlight breaking across the eastern horizon was too intense to endure. Or was there a special property of sunlight when it penetrated the atmosphere at a low oblique angle? Let another vampire, some undead egghead, solve that mystery.
I closed the door of the back room and shut the curtains to block any stray reflected sunbeams.
The room was Veronica's home office. A laptop computer sat on a small desk. Assorted notes to call Mom, pick up laundry, dangled from thumbtacks stuck to a corkboard on the wall. Binders stuffed with papers lay stacked on an ironing board.
One paper lay half out of the binder, and I slipped it out. It was a letter from the dean of the Graduate School at Brown University offering a tenured position teaching public affairs and public policy. I opened the binder. The next paper was a letter of introduction from the marketing department of Toyota of America. Buried in the binder were unopened envelopes from Princeton, a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., and Univision. This was a basket of brass rings, and yet Veronica ignored them to stay where she felt needed most—in the ramshackle surroundings of Barrios Unidos.
What I had run away from, Veron
ica embraced as her calling.
But I had left years ago. As a boy. Human. Now I returned as vampire on a mission of vengeance.
I waited in a cheap office chair next to the desk. Slowly the curtain turned into an illuminated rectangle as sunrise began. The minutes passed, and the rectangle got brighter and brighter.
A quarter past seven. Trie window was as bright as it would get. The worst of the deadly rays had abated and the threat passed.
I left the back room to fetch my overnight bag. Veronica remained silent in her room, evidently fast asleep. The kitchen and dining area were lit with sunshine flooding past the curtains. Though I was safe, I felt a tinge of fear, like standing close to a river of hot lava.
I went into the bathroom and covered with makeup—sunblock as much skin as I expected to show. I sat in the kitchen, my wet hair slicked back, my fangs squeaky clean and minty fresh. I wore a T-shirt and shorts, and propped my bare feet on the cool tiles along the edge of the counter. My contacts were in, to keep from scrambling for them once Veronica got up.
After brewing coffee, I mixed half of another bag of blood into my cup of Java. The rest of the blood I dumped into a bowl and sopped it up with a warmed cranberry scone.
The third folder from the box rested on my lap. The folder contained a jumble of loose papers, printouts of emails, and Web blogs.
I found a small greeting card. A soft-focus photo of a coffee setting decorated the cover. Tucked inside the card was a restaurant credit card receipt made to Freya Krieger. Time of purchase: 1:12 P.M. The date? Three weeks before the death of Roxy Bronze.
The note in the card was neatly penned in blue:
Sis, Great to see you.
Lara
Who was Lara? Sis?
Did Roxy Bronze—Freya Krieger—have a sister named Lara?
They had gotten together for lunch, and because of the card, I gathered the two didn't see each other often. Was Lara visiting, or did she live in L.A.? If the latter case, why the card? Was there an estrangement between the two?
Veronica stirred in the bedroom.
I put the file aside. With the last piece of scone I blotted the remaining globs of blood. I poured plain Java into a cup to let it cool, then swished the coffee in my mouth to have the proper breakfast breath. As I washed the dishes and cleared away all evidence of my blood meal, the door to the bathroom closed.
When Veronica came into the kitchen I was arranging the files in the box. She cinched the belt of a white terry cloth robe. Strands of wet hair curled beside her freshly scrubbed face. Even though she smelled of bayberry soap, her eyes still carried the wilted look of overdoing it the night before.
With her hands thrust into the pockets of the robe, Veronica leaned against the doorway from the hall into the kitchen. "Thanks for being a gentleman."
Me? A gentleman? Give me a chance to change that opinion. I filled a cup with coffee. "Cream? Sugar?"
She took the cup in both hands. "Black is fine." Eyes closed, she slurped several times. Every swallow brought more life to her expression. A finger uncurled from the cup and pointed to the box. "Any progress?"
"Some. There's a lot of info. I'll have to take the files to study them."
Veronica rested her hip against the edge of the sink counter.
Her brown eyes, shiny as gemstones, stared over the rim of her coffee cup. "What a hot Latina babe I turned out to be."
"Not to worry. My interests are strictly professional." I'm a practiced liar.
An amused smile played across her lips. She glanced to the wall clock by the refrigerator. "I've got brunch with the girls from Barrios Unidos. Wanna come with?"
The girls from Barrios Unidos? Plus Veronica. Could make for an interesting, if tangled, way to pass an otherwise boring Sunday.
"Thanks"—I tapped the box containing the files—"but I should get started."
Veronica looked at the box, then to the clock, and finally to me. She put her cup in the sink. That amused smile returned. "Yes, it's time you got started." She undid her belt and let the robe slip to the floor. "Let's make up for last night."
Naked, Veronica was spectacular.
Chapter Twenty-Two
VERONICA AND I rushed down the stairs from her apartment, her flip-flops smacking as we ran through the breezeway to the parking spaces in the back.
"Ay Dios," Veronica said. "I hate this. I'm the one getting after the girls at Barrios Unidos to watch the clock. Now look at me."
She ran to the driver's side of a Nissan sedan and aimed a key remote. The door locks clicked. I opened the rear door on the passenger's side and put the box with Roxy's files and my overnight bag on the seat. I sat up front next to Veronica.
She jammed the key into the ignition and started the car. With one hand on the gearshift she whispered to herself, "Wild Oats. Coffee. Bakery. Fruit."
It was half past ten. Her brunch was at eleven. No way she'd make it.
I, on the other hand, congratulated myself. Veronica surprised me with her expectations for a morning quickie in the kitchen, followed by an encore on the dinette table. The challenge had been to keep Veronica hypnotized enough to remember some but not all of what happened. I wanted her to recall that sex with me was very good, great, outstanding, the best ever, but not that I was a vampire.
When I removed my clothes she would've noticed the pale, translucent skin not covered by makeup. To use hypnosis, my contacts had to go. I had no choice but to use my vampire powers, not to seduce her, but to keep my secrets safe.
I gave her the occasional stare and a measured application of fangs to keep her in a modulated state between conscious and completely whacked out. Her silver jewelry needed to come off to keep from burning my skin when she stroked and clutched in passion.
Vampire hypnosis or not, Veronica showed remarkable initiative when demonstrating her many carnal skills.
She flicked down the sun visor and examined her neck in the vanity mirror. "The hickies you left are barely noticeable, gracias a Dios." She wiped at the corner of her mouth to tidy a smear of lip gloss. She spread her fingers. "Don't remember taking off my rings. How do you do it, Felix? One minute I'm with you. The next I'm fogged over. You're not slipping me something? Roofies?"
"All you're getting is Felix Gomez." And Trojans.
"Besides that, I mean." She put the Nissan into reverse and backed into the street.
I told Veronica that a friend had dropped me off at her place and I needed a ride to the closest car rental. The place was on Beverly Boulevard
not far from her apartment and on the way to her morning shopping.
Veronica stopped in the rental lot. We kissed good-bye. She drove off in typical L. A. fashion, foot flat on the gas and a cell phone pressed against one ear.
I slung my overnight bag over one shoulder and carried the box of files into the rental office.
An older woman—blue hair, skinny legs with varicose veins, high-water pants covered with an upchuck of colors—stood against the counter. The woman glared at the tense young man in a baggy dress shirt whose attention was directed at a computer monitor. The little wiry dog in the woman's arms saw me, growled, and started a yapping fit.
The surveillance camera on the wall peered through two mirrors, each at a different angle, so that this single camera could cover a wide area. A thrifty arrangement and one that worked in my favor. I could be captured on video but not if my image was reflected through a mirror.
The rental clerk raised his head and scowled. "In a minute, sir."
The elderly crone wrinkled her face in disdain, as if I were a booger with legs.
These two needed an attitude adjustment. "If you please," I said and removed my contacts.
Their auras gave nice bursts of crimson. They stared zombielike. The dog kept yapping.
With the clerk hypnotized, I ordered him to look up my account, override any holds, and issue a luxury car at subcompact rates. Add maximum insurance coverage at no extra cost so I could've rolle
d my rental off the Santa Monica pier and not owed this company a dime.
I left the clerk and the old woman comatose and naked on a table in the break room. Glazed donuts covered their naughty parts. The pooch swung from the overhead fan, his harness and leash tied to one of the blades.
The rental, a blue Chrysler 500M, was the kind of fancy, overly macho car a Klingon would've appreciated. I locked the box with Roxy's files in the trunk. What new clues waited for me?
New clues about Venin and Niphe.
But first I needed to do something I should've done earlier in my investigation. Visit the spot where Roxy Bronze had been killed.
I drove north to the corner of Hollywood Boulevard
and Cahuenga and passed the alley where she had been found. I circled the neighborhood. LAPD Hollywood Station and the city hall annex were four blocks south. What a convenient walk for the detectives "investigating" Roxy's murder.
I parked near the corner of Selma and Cahuenga, next to a café and close to the alley. Wooden scaffolds shaded the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. Posters covered the plywood sidings. Scruffy men mingled in the shadows, smoking cigarettes and sharing drinks from a bag.
This being Sunday midmorning, other than the customers in the café and the bums, there weren't many people out.
I walked up the street toward Hollywood Boulevard
. I passed a couple of shops that sold either porn or really bad art—I couldn't tell through the dingy windows. There was a take-out barbecue joint and at the corner, a twenty-four-hour newsstand. Except for the newsstand and café, everything was closed.
Considering its glamorous reputation, Hollywood Boulevard
seemed disappointingly low rent. Grime caked the shuttered storefronts. A dead pigeon rested near an empty tallboy of malt liquor. Trash on the sidewalk sullied the marble stars and brass plaques of the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
I returned to the alley and stopped at the entrance. A multistory office building stood to the right, the northern side. A two-story, gray brick building was on the left, the southern side. Posters for musical acts were pasted to the gray walls.
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