The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  The Shake

  by Mel Nicolai

  Copyright 2012 Mel Nicolai

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best of 2011

  "...contemplative but lean and stylish ... intriguing narrative blend of philosophy and crime fiction ... thought-provoking and relentlessly entertaining ... An utterly readable fusion of vampire fiction and labyrinthine whodunit powered by a highly intelligent narrative ... Anne Rice meets Dashiell Hammett at a Zen Buddhist monastery."

  — Perry Crowe, Kirkus Reviews

  Chapter 1

  I could hear and smell them as they turned the corner, a young man and a dog coming down the sidewalk in my direction. The man smelled like a broth of testosterone, sweat, tobacco, and some remarkably foul cologne. The dog smelled like a dog. From the sound of its nails scratching the cement, I knew the animal was big and not well trained. The chain rattled every time the man reined in his disobedient darling.

  They were about twenty yards away when they came into view. The guy was just a kid, maybe fifteen or sixteen, wearing a baseball cap cocked at a bizarre angle, an oversized t-shirt, clownish pants with the crotch at his knees, and court shoes trailing their laces. He looked like his mommy had dressed him in preparation for some precious home video footage. The dog was a big male mastiff, bulky with muscle, as if it were on steroids. It had that nervous determination dogs have when their owners finally take them out for their daily walk.

  I was sure the kid would walk by without noticing my presence. What the dog would do was anyone’s guess. I waited as they drew nearer, wondering how the dice would fall. Would the dog, intended to shield its owner from a threatening world, end up being the cause of his death? People so often fell victim to their own defenses, stepping into their own traps, almost as if that had been their original intent.

  I was downwind, so the dog didn’t notice me until they were quite close. When it caught my scent, its body froze and its head snapped around, eyes searching the darkness as it huffed through flared nostrils. I could tell from the direction of the dog’s gaze—well off to my left—that it couldn’t see me. The kid had continued walking, apparently confident that when the chain’s slack ran out, the dog would be pulled back into step. But the animal had other priorities. When the chain stretched taut, it just lowered itself slightly, and its master jerked to a halt.

  “Justice!” the kid half shouted, yanking impatiently on the leash.

  How appropriate, I thought. The dog’s name was Justice. No doubt justice was what Justice was expected to dispense, to anyone or anything foolish enough to violate their private space.

  “Goddamnit, dog!” the kid shouted, yanking harder on the leash, “Move your ass!”

  And that’s what Justice did. I made a low animal growl, just loud enough for the dog to hear. It lowered itself a couple more inches, not sure what to do, then took off like it was late for court. It shot past the kid and when it hit the end of the chain, it didn’t even slow down. The kid lurched like a cartoon figure and would have bit the pavement if he hadn’t let go of the leash. He yelled the dog’s name again, this time more disgusted than angry, before running down the street in pursuit.

  There is often something comic about a brush with death. As if, by seeing how little of life is actually under our control, we can’t help laughing at the chaos of it all. Every moment teeters so delicately. We scurry about under a continuous rain of random variables, every second potentially disastrous. And all we can do is walk the dog. Our fate can be altered by the merest puff, so we bow to practicality. We inure ourselves to the chaos with our common-sense priorities. We attend to what we can process, and filter out the rest. And if we’re lucky, we make it through the day. Or through the night.

  •

  The house I was watching was just south of Highway 50, across the freeway from the university. It belonged to Francine Arnaud, my next “donor,” as I sometimes referred to people who were in line to make that singular contribution. She was twenty-eight years old, a widow, working as a clerk in a downtown law firm. I’d gathered these little facts a few weeks earlier by breaking into a psychiatrist’s office and spending a couple of hours in a very comfortable, very expensive chair, reading patient files behind a very large and expensive desk. According to the good doctor, Francine had been suffering for about a year from bouts of severe depression, a condition apparently brought on by the unexpected death of her husband. On paper, she was an ideal candidate for my standard suicide scenario.

  The plan for tonight was just to check out the house. There was a time when I was less cautious, less inclined to bother. But as mishap followed mishap, I finally accepted the fact that if something can go wrong, it probably will. And something can almost always go wrong.

  A few years back, I was following a man I’d chosen as a suitable donor. The man had gone into his house and, on the spur of the moment, I followed him in. After taking his blood, I noticed a security camera partially hidden on a bookshelf. I searched the house thoroughly and found several others, all connected to a computer in the den. By the time I’d gotten into the computer, erased and reformatted the hard drive to make sure there wasn’t any recoverable video footage, it was getting close to sunrise. I’ve been more careful since, accepting that precaution is the lesser inconvenience. Better safe than sunburned.

  It was around 2:00 a.m. when I let myself in through Francine’s unlocked back door. A good sign, I thought, the serious depressive’s lack of concern for self-preservation. There was a small laundry room behind the kitchen. Dank water had collected in the bottom of the washing machine and smelled a bit like a dead rat. The door to the kitchen was closed, but the stink of garbage was palpable, even before I opened the door. The kitchen sink was full of what looked like several days’ worth of dirty dishes. I went through the kitchen and the adjoining dining area into the living room. Francine Arnaud was asleep on the sofa, still in her clothes, tangled up in an old blanket. It looked like she struggled with her sleep as much as she struggled with her waking life.

  I continued down the hall to the master bedroom. An undisturbed king-size bed dominated the room, giving it the look of a department store display—a space with a precisely defined function it wasn’t actually serving. Everything was clean and tidy, but the tidiness, in contrast to the rest of the house, only added to the bedroom’s haunted air. The dresser top was clear except for a small night lamp and a framed photograph of, I assumed, the dead husband, wearing a sheriff’s uniform. He was a likable looking fellow, average build, maybe a bit on the slender side, with a pleasant, friendly smile. The kind of cop Norman Rockwell might have painted, helping an old lady cross the street.

  In the closet, all of the husband’s clothes were neatly hung on one side, Francine’s not so neatly on the other. There was a trunk on the floor, on the husband’s side. I was about to open it when I heard Francine’s movements as she sat up on the sofa, then her shuffling steps as she went to the bathroom, the tinkling of her pee, the flush of the toilet, and more steps coming my way. She entered the bedroom wrapped in the old blanket. Without pulling back the covers, she crawled onto the bed, curled up in a fetal position and went back to sleep.

  I could have taken her blood then, rather than wait until the following night. There wasn’t any obvious advantage in wai
ting. It might only allow time for something unexpected to crop up and complicate matters. I wasn’t as prepared as I liked to be. I hadn’t brought a razor blade, so I would have to find a substitute: a kitchen knife, or something. But that was simple enough. Still, after thinking it over, I was inclined to stick to my original plan. I didn’t want to be in a hurry. Human beings tend to think they don’t have time to take their time. They rush through their days like their hair is on fire. It rarely occurs to them that they have it backwards. Hurrying is what they don’t have time for. Haste is a form of blindness. I reminded myself of something Montaigne wrote in one of his essays: “He who does not give himself leisure to be thirsty, cannot take pleasure in drinking.”

  As a vampire, drinking was one of my few real pleasures, so I left the house the way I’d come.

  Chapter 2

  The next evening, I was standing in the shadow of oleanders in the yard across the street from Francine’s house. A light southerly breeze drifted up from the delta. The moon was a thin crescent, low on the horizon. Half a block away, a street lamp lit the intersection, but the light didn’t penetrate much beyond the corner. Porch lights illuminated most of the houses, but Francine’s porch was unlit. The cathode-ray flicker of her old-fashioned television cast its distinctive glow on her closed curtains.

  I crossed the street and made my way to the back of the house. Again, the backdoor was unlocked. The kitchen was the same mess as the night before, the odor about a day more pungent. A small herd of cockroaches grazed the counter, like the contented residents of a miniature wild animal park. In the dining area separating the kitchen from the living room, the same debris littered the table, except for a space at one end that had been cleared by shoving everything toward the center. A large kitchen knife occupied the cleared space, almost glowing with suggestive intent. I couldn’t help wondering if Francine had been contemplating using it on herself, a thought that was followed by one more self-serving: that what I had come there to do was somehow in accord with the young woman’s own intentions.

  After a century as a vampire, I still had a tendency to indulge in pointless rationalizations. When humans rationalize, they’re usually trying to get away with something they might otherwise be held accountable for. They frame events in a way meant to reduce their culpability. This kind of whitewashing was completely senseless in my case, for the simple reason that I wasn’t accountable to anyone. It didn’t make any difference if Francine had been contemplating suicide. I didn’t need permission to take her blood. Yet, I would habitually come up with ways—like calling my victims “donors”—to make them complicit in their own deaths. As if I needed to convince myself that I was simply acting as a surrogate in a progression of inevitable events over which I had no control.

  It wasn’t a very clever evasion, and in the end only highlighted the fact that I didn’t understand my own choices. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except that I wanted there to be a distinction. I wanted life and death to be somehow deserved. And I wanted there to be a way to decide who deserved which. I felt there should be a way to make the distinction; a way that wasn’t completely arbitrary. But I didn’t know how to do that. So I was reduced to rationalizing my choices. At best, I chose my victims on the basis of practical concerns over my own safety, killing people whose circumstances offered me a way to cover my tracks.

  I could have circumvented the whole issue by meeting my dietary requirements with non-human blood. I’d tried more than once. Relying on non-human sources offered definite logistical advantages, but in the long run it just didn’t work. A few months of nothing but cow and horse blood, and I would begin to feel a subtle and debilitating loss of vigor, as if my metabolism were slowing down in some protective response to malnutrition. It wasn’t life-threatening. I suspect I could have survived indefinitely on non-human blood. But it would have been an impoverished existence. I could live on animal blood, but to live well I needed the sapiens vintage.

  Unfortunately, dead people whose bodies have been drained of blood attract a lot of attention. If I wanted to stay in one location for any length of time, I couldn’t litter the neighborhood with dehydrated corpses. Sooner or later, I’d become suspect, and at that point, I’d have no real choice but to relocate. I liked where I was living. I liked being settled, having a fixed abode. So I had to find ways of feeding regularly that minimized the risks.

  The question was, who to target? It made sense, I thought, to look for people who had already been marginalized by society, people about whom I could rely on a maximum level of indifference from the authorities. My first thought was to target criminals. The police might be relieved, even entertained, by the terminal misfortunes of my victims. This idea wasn’t completely without merit, but there was a definite drawback to harvesting the criminal contingent: they were people whose activities were already integrated into the vast intersecting networks of law enforcement. More than an occasional odd death would soon set off alarms. In short, the criminals were as much a part of the system as were the police. Which made them an impractical choice as a dietary staple.

  Then it occurred to me that there was a group of people who were made to order. Death among them was never really unexpected. And once dead, they were quickly and efficiently consigned to the anonymity of statistics. Bureaucratic indifference would summarily record their departures and just as summarily forget them. As luck would have it, such people were an abundant commodity. In fact, they comprised a significant percentage of the human population. They fell under a spectrum of medical and psychiatric classifications, but what they all had in common was depression. Most of them had at least thought about suicide, and many had made half-hearted attempts. When they succeeded, the police treated their deaths as a formality, filed their reports and trudged back to their case loads. Perfect, really. I could expedite their desire to end it all, and it would be exactly what everyone half expected.

  Still, as abundant as the depressed were, I couldn’t harvest them like fruit from an abandoned orchard. In a sense, they had their own niche in the human ecology. Exploiting them for their blood required a significant amount of resource management. They would remain a viable staple only so long as I didn’t kill too many. On the bright side, the resource management gave me something to do with my time, dreaming up ways to cull the herd without attracting the law, planning all the details. The down side was that each meal required a lot of work. It wasn’t something I could do more than a couple of times a month. I still needed a source of human blood that I could take quickly, without much planning or preparation, and walk away unthreatened.

  I suppose I was a little slow in coming up with a solution, but when it finally dawned on me, I realized immediately I had a made-to-order supply of human blood pretty much on tap. Every year in the U.S., over 40,000 people die in traffic accidents. That’s well over one hundred a day. These deaths are so routine that they pass unquestioned. There may be inquiries made for the purpose of establishing insurance liabilities, and in some cases, to determine if any criminal misconduct was to blame. But the deaths themselves are explained by their occurrence: death by car crash. If a car goes off the road and hits a tree, there is very little chance that the accident will be attributed to the mischief of a vampire.

  All I needed was a dark night, a winding road, perhaps some rain or fog. Add to that the nearly universal tendency of humans to press their luck by driving as fast as they think they can get away with; all these combined to create an ideal scenario for a thirsty vampire. Not that I could just wait by the side of the road, hoping someone would oblige me by driving into a tree. I had to encourage drivers to make the necessary course adjustments.

  I would wait along a winding road for a lone driver and walk casually in front of their oncoming car. The driver would hit the brakes, swerve, maybe close his eyes and hope for the best. For my part, all I had to do was jump a few feet into the air and let the car pass under me. Or if I wasn’t in the mood for gymnastics, I could snatch someone’
s pet—a medium-sized dog was just right for the job—and wait for the lone car. As it approached, I’d simply throw the dog against the car’s windshield. Very few people can keep their cool in a situation like that. When everything went as planned, the car would go off the road. If the driver was lucky not to be hurt, he’d have a real roller coaster ride and a good story to tell, and I would let him live to tell his tale. Those who weren’t so lucky were my supper.

  In one respect, it was a game of random selection. I had no control over who might drive by on any given night. But it really wasn’t random. I was still deciding which of the many passing cars I would step in front of. I even managed to rationalize this. I told myself that, by people’s own standards, a full and successful life was best measured by one’s possessions. People with all the expensive toys had already enjoyed their fair share of life. So I’d let the ten-year-old pickups and economy sedans pass, telling myself it was more equitable to terminate the driver of a Mercedes or a BMW. This kind of pseudo-reasoning was completely unconvincing, but with my need for blood and no way to make an objective choice of who to kill, I was reduced to this kind of weak-minded rationalization. Like people, I was usually ready to abandon my critical faculties whenever they failed to serve my self-interest.

  At any rate, between the staged suicides, the car accidents, and the lucky chance opportunities that occasionally presented themselves, I was able to feed on human blood at least three or four times a month. The rest of the time, drawing blood from horses and cattle provided an abundant supply of adequate nourishment to tide me over between real meals. This methodical moderation, this submission to a program of planned management, was an acceptable price to pay for a permanent residence. The stability, I told myself, made up for the lack of adventure. I would eventually get tired of it. Either that, or one of life’s little surprises would bring it all crashing down. But in the meantime...