Nightblood

by T. Chris Martindale

  Billie looked at him with motherly concern. “No, maybe I should stay here tonight. If you’re not feeling good . . .”

  “I think they’ll both be okay,” Stiles assured her. “And I have nothing planned. It might be fun.”

  She seemed uncertain, at least until Del gave her a wink and a grin. She returned the latter. “Sure. C’mon, I’ll walk you to your van.”

  He put an arm around her as they stepped off the porch and strolled down the walk. Bart stood, holding his chair to his butt, and scooted it closer to the swing. “What the hell was that all about? I haven’t seen that movie.”

  The younger boy gaped at him. “You like being a third wheel?” Then he saw the defensive look on his brother’s face. “You don’t like him, do you?”

  “Sure I like him. Just not for our mother. He’s not right for her.”

  “And who is?”

  Bart scowled. “How about someone with a steady job. I mean, what if Mom gets serious about this guy?”

  Del grinned. “Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “Jeez, what if she decides to marry him or something?”

  The grin widened. “Wouldn’t THAT be great!”

  “Cut it out, Cap. We don’t know anything about him.”

  “I know he saved our asses last night.”

  “So what?” Bart was animated now, getting up to pace the porch, barely controlling his voice so as not to attract their attention out by the street. “That doesn’t mean I want him for a dad. I can just hear it now. ‘Oh, what does my father do for a living? He hunts monsters. No, I don’t think it pays too awfully well, but there’s always Mom’s income. . . .’ ”

  Del stalked toward him and threatened him with a milky spoon. “All I know is this, Bart. I had a nightmare after I went to bed last night, about that thing we found. I woke up sweating and crying. You couldn’t help me. Mom couldn’t. Then I looked out my window and there was his van out on the street, and somehow I wasn’t scared anymore. I felt safe. That’s the only way I got back to sleep last night. So if Mom likes this guy and wants to keep him around, I’m all for it. Hell, I’d almost marry him myself.”

  Bart was icy. “That’s the only person you’re thinking about, Cap. Yourself.”

  Del took hold of his brother’s face in both hands and turned it toward the road. Stiles and their mother were there by the door of the van, in each other’s arms, oblivious to their stares. “Tell me, Bart. Just who are you thinking about?” He took his cereal bowl back into the house and left his brother on the porch.

  Stiles drove out to the Danner estate and parked off the road not far from the big wrought iron gate. It was six-forty in the morning when he settled in to wait for the three boys from Seymour to return for Del and Bart. And as he sat there, his mind started to wander.

  How long’s it been since you were in love, my friend? He kept denying the question. I can’t be, I’m not some dreamy-eyed high-schooler anymore and besides, it’ll only complicate things and someone will end up hurt. But it kept hovering in front of his eyes, refusing to go away until he at least recognized the legitimacy of it. How long had it been? Months? Years? Had he ever been in love, really? Maybe not, because he couldn’t remember feeling this way before. He knew he had it, and bad; he’d told her about his family. Hell, he hadn’t talked about them to anyone before. Not even Marion, the girl he had in Louisville, and he thought that was serious!

  His family wasn’t exactly a secret; there was no reason for it to be. He just didn’t like talking about them, the same way an intelligent man keeps from pounding his hand with a ball peen hammer. It was just that, whenever he brought up his parents and Alex and his childhood, the bitterness he thought was well stored in the back of his mind would come flooding back as well, tainting his mood, fouling it. That’s what was so strange this time. When he told Billie, somehow it was okay. It was the past, finally. It was behind him, it didn’t bother him. Of course, it may have been that he was simply too preoccupied to notice. He could have been concentrating too much on Billie, on her face, and the caring expression he found there, on the closeness of her next to him in the swing, on the gravelly, sultry tone of her voice, a perfect bedroom voice . . .

  Down, boy. Save it for tonight.

  He’d have to pace himself today. He had a lot of things to get done before picking her up for their date (yes, it was a date so he might as well call it that). Once done here—if ever, he grumbled to himself and looked down the road impatiently—he would stop at the motel and catch a few winks, get cleaned up, then go to the marshal’s office and see about that desk Bean had told him about. It shouldn’t take long, probably an uneven leg or a rough drawer channel, something he could fix in an hour or so. If it were an old desk and anything worse was wrong with it, they would probably have to shit-can it. But he hoped that wouldn’t be the case. He could use the pocket money tonight. Having never been swayed to the feminist cause, he was not one to easily accept a woman’s paying his way.

  He grumbled and glanced at his watch, then returned his eyes to Sykes Road for the umpteenth time. Almost nine o’clock. He’d been there nearly two and a half hours and still no sign of the T-Bird. Bart had said they were supposed to meet around seven—that was the predetermined time—but it was becoming readily apparent that the Millers’ three “friends” had welshed on the bet and were not coming back. A practical joke. Just as well, Stiles thought. Three less things to worry about.

  So much for phase one. Get on to phase two. A little hide-and-seek with Sebastian Danner.

  That had been all Del could think about the night before. Every time Billie turned her back or went into the kitchen the boy was at the window, peering into the night, making sure his own personal boogeyman wasn’t loitering on the back porch or picking the lock. He didn’t sleep much either. Stiles could hear him padding around upstairs in his room, pacing, returning to the window over and over. Then, this morning, even though his spirits seemed to have improved, there was still that look in his eyes. At this rate he would worry himself into an ulcer, and eleven-year-olds shouldn’t have ulcers. So Stiles was back today, ready to go into the woods if for no other reason than to ease the boy’s mind.

  Should he take his pistols? It would be dark in those woods even in daylight, perhaps even dark enough in places for Danner to still be moving about. Just because it was daytime didn’t mean the creature would automatically be sleeping; that was a lesson he’d learned the hard way. Vampires, like the people they used to be, fluctuated in their need for rest. Some took the full twelve hours to hibernate, while others could get by on three or less and, if their lairs were dark enough, could be wide awake and active. That’s why he wanted to head off the boys in the T-Bird this morning, to stop them from going to look for Del and Bart. It wasn’t always safe in the daytime. Something could be waiting.

  To hell with it, he decided. He left the guns hidden. You’re turning into a pussy, Stiles, a worrying old woman. Danner’s already fucked up. Just stay in the light and everything’ll be okay.

  He found a big stick by the side of the road, or was it a “stake?”, then slipped over the wall of the estate.

  The density of the woods did indeed limit the intrusion of sunlight. It left the grounds subdued, gloomy, with only occasional beams of liquid gold, like linear rainbows, stabbing through the trees. Faint shadows danced across his face and chest, dappled leaf stencils that moved with the breeze and distracted the eye. Sharpen up. You don’t have the time to waste.

  He worked his way to the house and started his search there, retracing last night’s battle and even digging a few errant 9mms from the siding—he didn’t like leaving loose ends behind. Then he followed in the footprints and, later, the crawlprints of the vampire as it had scrambled for the sanctuary of the woods. The trail wasn’t hard to follow. Danner had flopped and thrashed like a landed trout, leaving nail furrows and a snake-belly impression
clearly visible through the blanket of leaves and in the dirt underneath.

  He followed it for almost fifteen minutes, under logs and through dense underbrush, losing it here and picking it up there, until finally it vanished altogether. He looked around, perplexed. There were no tree hollows nearby, no exposed roots Danner could have squeezed under. It was as if he had simply . . . disappeared.

  No. No rats, no bats. No turning into fog.

  There had to be an explanation. He poked at the earth with his stick, then stooped and sifted some of the soil between his fingers. Could this be Danner? There was sunlight here, faint but warming the back of his neck. And the vampire did die some time ago, around seventy years according to the boys. That would’ve made Danner a dustpile just waiting to happen. Like he had told the boys last night, a single beam of sunlight and poof! No more danger.

  Then why was . . .

  He cut the line of thought at its root. This was the only logical assumption. It would satisfy the boy, allow him to sleep at night. No, it didn’t satisfy Stiles himself. Not altogether. But he was prepared to stick around Isherwood and see it through, to make sure that Danner was really dead.

  No telling how long that could take.

  He thought of Billie and smiled. Yeah. No telling.

  A last cursory inspection of the immediate grounds, and then he went back to the van. His watch read almost nine-thirty.

  Danner was reduced to a nagging inconsistency in the back of Stiles’s mind as he returned to town. His thoughts shifted from the details of the hunt to the more mundane matters of the day, like rest. He went to his room at the Tri-Lakes Inn and sacked out on the bed till almost two-thirty, then showered and slipped into some fresh clothes. Then he headed into town to check up on his potential employment. He parked the van in the next block up from the diner and walked the rest of the way to the town marshal’s.

  From the outside the office looked like it was straight out of Mayberry, and even more so once he stepped through the door. There was one main room, complete with low courtroom gate and cordons to separate the two deputies’ desks. File cabinets and gun cabinets lined one wall; another was reserved for community citations and departmental awards and, more prominently, mug shots of the bass and catfish arrested at the last Lake Monroe raid. Across the room was a large bulletin board for wanted posters and notices and “DON’T DRIVE DRUNK” placards. On either side of the board was a doorway: to the left, a shallow corridor that led to what appeared to be holding cells on the one side and, further along, a supply room and restroom and extra bunk; to the right, the office of Town Marshal P. Thomas Larson. It said it right there on the frosted glass of the closed door.

  The young man at the first desk with his feet up and a copy of True Detective in his lap stopped trimming his nails just long enough to fix the stranger in the doorway with a suspicious glare. Then he looked back to his magazine. “Whaddasay?” Rusty Sanders sighed, though it was a greeting devoid of civility. It was more a rote welcome, and could just as easily have meant “What the hell do you want?”

  “My name is Stiles. I came for work.”

  The deputy muffled a snicker. “You wanna be a cop, huh? Well sorry, but we ain’t got no openings.” His nose went even deeper into the magazine. Sanders was a lanky boy with bony features and hair that was too long, and the beginnings of a beer belly gave him the appearance of a snake digesting a meal. His uniform was badly pressed and looked strange without a tie; he could have been a furnace repairman or a plumber, for all Stiles could tell. The soldier’s eyes went automatically to the deputy’s gun and judged him accordingly. It was a Smith & Wesson Magnum and was in poor shape. The bluing was bad and the metal wasn’t just scratched but gouged. The wooden grips sported deep divots where it had been used to hammer nails. Stiles winced, wondering if Deputy Sanders carried his bullets in the gun or his shirt pocket.

  “I’m here about a desk,” Stiles told him. “Charlie Bean said you might need some work done on one.”

  Another sigh. Sanders pointed across from him without looking up. “That one. I think the top drawer drops out or something like that. It’s probably nothing. You know how Charlie is.”

  “No, I don’t,” Stiles said, stepping through the gate to inspect the desk. “I just met him yesterday.”

  “Oh. Well, I’ll tell you. Charlie’s a good old boy and all, but he’s a bit gung ho at times, if you know what I mean. Thinks he’s Elliot Ness or something. Sometimes I just wanna say, ‘Goddamn it, Bean, just sit down and shut up for a while,’ you know?” Stiles nodded; he could see right through the boy’s bravado, and knew those words would never be spoken to Charlie Bean’s face. “I guess you’ll be wanting to talk to Dutch, huh?” The young man made no move to rise; he just cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Hey, Dutch! C’mere!”

  The frost-paned door to the rear opened a crack, just enough for a squat, rounded head to poke through. Tommy “Dutch” Larson must have been in his late fifties, but he dyed what hair he had jet black and Brylcreemed it into a 1950’s perpetual wave. “What is it, Rusty?” he barked around a mouthful of lunch, spitting crumbs in the process.

  Sanders was back in his magazine. “Some guy’s here about Charlie’s desk.”

  “Oh.” The door closed for a moment, and then the town marshal finally stepped out of his office. The pants beneath Larson’s considerable stomach were newly snapped and his fingers licked clean of ketchup. He had slipped on his aviator shades, the reflective state trooper kind, despite the fact that the blinds were drawn. He rubbed his hands together, big meaty things without knuckles, and didn’t offer one in greeting. “So you’re the writer-slash-handyman, huh?” he said in a tone that made it sound like a punishable offense.

  “Boy, word gets around.”

  Larson continued to eye him suspiciously through reflective plastic. “I don’t know how to tell you this, mister,” he drawled, “but I’m afraid there ain’t no work for you here. Bean didn’t really have the authority to offer it to you in the first place and, frankly, I’ve already promised the work to my brother-in-law.”

  “Then why hasn’t he fixed it before n—” Sanders started before the marshal cut him off.

  “Like I say, I’m real sorry. Maybe there’s some other work around town. Better yet, maybe you should try Bedford. More people, more repairs.”

  Stiles recognized the pig-squint behind the marshal’s sunglasses. It was the look of a property owner, the one reserved for trespassers. This guy’s paranoia made Charlie Bean a piker by comparison. “Aren’t you going to ask me my price? Maybe I can undercut your brother-in-law.”

  Larson actually smiled at that. “I’m sorry but—”

  “Ten dollars . . .” Larson’s eyebrows raised in unison. “. . . besides the cost of any new materials.”

  The marshal turned to examine the desk, walking around it and kicking the legs as if pricing a used car. He pulled the top drawer and it clattered to the floor. Luckily Charlie kept it empty for that reason. “Hell, I never liked my brother-in-law anyway. But if I don’t like the work, you don’t get a cent. Them’s my rules, take ’em or leave ’em.”

  Stiles wanted to tell the haggling old fart to stick his rules up his ass, but there was tonight to think about, and Billie. “You’ve got a deal.” He held out his hand, convinced that the fat man wouldn’t take it. Larson regarded it like some alien gesture, then, to his surprise, shook it. Stiles wished he hadn’t; despite his size, it was a limp handshake, all fingers, like a cloying politician’s. With that the marshal turned on one heel and went back into his office, back to his hamburgers and his newspaper. He didn’t wait till the door was closed before unbuttoning his pants to ease the strain on his belly.

  “Real friendly, isn’t he?” Stiles muttered, then realized Sanders wasn’t listening to him either. He decided he had new respect for Charlie Bean. Anyone who could work with those two witho
ut killing them must have had tremendous self-control.

  The phone on the deputy’s desk rang, not once but four times. But Sanders made no move to answer. Stiles was just about to reach for it himself when the kid motioned toward Larson’s office. “He’ll get it.” Then the phone stopped ringing. “See what I mean?” He went back to his True Detective, at least until the marshal’s bassoon of a voice rattled the closed office door.

  “Rusty!” he called. “Someone saw an abandoned car out by the Tunnel. Go check it out.”

  Stiles’s blood went cold. The Tunnel.

  “Aw, shit,” Sanders muttered, dropping the magazine onto his lap. “Hey, Dutch,” he yelled back, “somebody probably just went home with someone else, you know? They leave ’em there all the time. Why don’t we wait till—”

  “Goddamn it, Rusty, do I have to come out there! What the hell do I pay you for? Now get your goddamn nose out of that goddamn magazine and don’t let the door hit you in the ass!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Rusty sniped under his breath. He stood with an exaggerated sigh, as if it were the hardest thing he had done all day (and it may well have been), then picked a jacket and cap from the coat rack by the door. Last came his own reflective sunglasses, completing the “uniform.” It all must have given him a false sense of authority; he turned and noticed Stiles still standing there, and he actually muttered, “What are you looking at?”

  The soldier barely controlled his laughter. “Nothing, friend. I was just about to get my tools.”

  Sanders smirked. He started out the door, then went back and snatched the magazine from his desk before leaving.

  An abandoned car? Near Danner land? It had to be a coincidence, Stiles thought. Didn’t it? He had to be sure. So he followed the deputy outside and started for the van even as he watched him climb into the squad car at the curb. But when he looked back he realized he needn’t hurry. Sanders had his True Detective propped against the steering wheel and was still reading.