“You work behind the bar long enough, you develop a way with people.”
“You’ve been bartending a long time, then.”
Rick just smiled.
“Thanks for looking out for me,” she said.
“Not a problem.”
“I really didn’t come here looking for a date. I really did just want the drink.”
“I know.”
“But I wouldn’t say no. To a date. Just dinner or a picture or something. If the right guy asked.”
So, Rick asked. Her name was Helen.
Rick answered the responding officer’s questions, then sat in the armchair in the living room to wait for the detective to arrive. It took about forty-five minutes. In the meantime, officers and investigators passed in and out of the house, which seemed less and less Helen’s by the moment.
When the detective walked in, he stood to greet her. The woman was average height and build, and busy, always looking, taking in the scene. Her dark hair was tied in a short ponytail; she wore a dark suit and white shirt, nondescript. She dressed to blend in, but her air of authority made her stand out.
She saw him and frowned. “Oh hell. It’s you.”
“Detective Hardin,” he answered, amused at how unhappy she was to see him.
Jessi Hardin pointed at him. “Wait here.”
He sat back down and watched her continue on to the kitchen.
Half an hour later, coroners brought in a gurney, and Hardin returned to the living room. She pulled over a high-backed chair and set it across from him.
“I expected to see bite marks on her neck.”
“I wouldn’t have called it in if I’d done it,” he said.
“But you discovered the body?”
“Yes.”
“And what were you doing here?” She pulled a small notebook and pen from her coat pocket, just like on TV.
“Helen and I were old friends.”
The pen paused over the page. “What’s that even mean?”
He’d been thinking it would be a nice change, not having to avoid the issue, not having to come up with a reasonable explanation for why he knew what he knew, dancing around the truth that he’d known Helen almost her entire life, even though he looked only thirty years old. Hardin knew what he was. But those half-truths he’d always used to explain himself were harder to abandon than he expected.
With any other detective, he’d have said that Helen was a friend of his grandfather’s whom he checked in on from time to time and helped with repairs around the house. But Detective Hardin wouldn’t believe that.
“We met in 1947 and stayed friends.”
Hardin narrowed a thoughtful gaze. “Just so that I’m clear on this, in 1947 she was what, twenty? Twenty-five? And you were—exactly as you are now?”
“Yes.”
“And you stayed friends with her all this time.”
“You say it like you think that’s strange.”
“It’s just not what I expect from the stories.”
She was no doubt building a picture in her mind: Rick and a twenty-five-year-old Helen would have made a striking couple. But Rick and the ninety-year-old Helen?
“Maybe you should stick to the standard questions,” Rick said.
“All right. Tell me what you found when you got here. About what time was it?”
He told her, explaining how the lights were out and the place seemed abandoned. How he’d known right away that something was wrong, and so wasn’t surprised to find her in the kitchen.
“She called me earlier today. I wasn’t available but she left a message. She sounded worried but wouldn’t say why. I came over as soon as I could.”
“She knew something was wrong, then. She expected something to happen.”
“I think so.”
“Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill an old woman like this?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
One night she came into the bar late during his shift. They hadn’t set up a date so he was surprised, and then he was worried. Gasping for breath, her eyes pink, she ran up to him, crashing into the bar, hanging on to it as if she might fall over without the support. She’d been crying.
He took up her hands and squeezed. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, Rick! I’m in so much trouble. He’s going to kill me, I’m dead, I’m—”
“Helen! Calm down. Take a breath—what’s the matter?”
She gulped down a couple of breaths, steadying herself. Straightening, squeezing Rick’s hands in return, she was able to speak. “I need someplace to hide. I need to get out of sight for a little while.”
She could have been in any kind of trouble. Some small-town relative come to track her down and bring home the runaway. Or she could have been something far different from the fresh-faced city girl she presented herself as. He’d known from the moment he met her that she was hiding something—she never talked about her past.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you everything, just please help me hide.”
He came out from behind the bar, put his arm around her, and guided her into the back room. There was a storage closet filled with wooden crates, some empty and waiting to be carried out, some filled with bottles of beer and liquor. Only Rick and Murray came back here when the place was open. He found a sturdy, empty crate, tipped it upside down, dusted it off, and guided her to sit on it.
“I can close up in half an hour, then you can tell me what’s wrong. All right?”
Nodding, she rubbed at her nose with a handkerchief.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Bottle of soda? Shot of whiskey?”
“No, no. I’m fine, for now. Thank you.”
Back out front, he let his senses expand, touching on every little noise, every scent, every source of light and the way it played around every shadow. Every heartbeat, a dozen of them, rattled in his awareness, a cacophony, like rocks tumbling in a tin can. It woke a hunger in him—a lurking knowledge that he could destroy everyone here, feed on them, sate himself on their blood before they knew what had happened.
He’d already fed this evening—he always fed before coming to work, it was the only way he could get by. It made the heartbeats that composed the background static of the world irrelevant.
No one here was anxious, worried, searching, behaving in any other manner than he would expect from people sitting in a bar half an hour before closing. Most were smiling, some were drunk, all were calm.
That changed ten minutes later when a heavyset man wearing a nondescript suit and weathered fedora came through the door and searched every face. Rick ignored him and waited. Sure enough, the man came up to the bar. His heart beat fast, and sweat dampened his armpits and hairline.
“What can I get for you?” Rick asked.
“You see a girl come in here, about this tall, brown hair, wearing a blue dress?” the man said. He was carrying a pistol in a holster under his suit jacket.
Some of the patrons had turned to watch. Rick was sure they’d all seen Helen enter. They were waiting to see how he’d answer.
“No,” he said. “Haven’t seen her. She the kind of girl who’d come into a place like this by herself?”
“Yeah. I think she is.”
“We’re past last call. I doubt she’ll come in this late. But you’re welcome to wait.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Can I get you something?”
“Tonic water.”
Rick poured the drink and accepted his coins. The guy didn’t tip.
Patrons drifted out as closing time approached, and the heavyset man continued watching the door. He kept his right hand free and his jacket open, giving ready access to the holster. And if he did see Helen walk through the door, would he shoot her then and there? Was he that crazy?
Rick wondered what Helen had done.
When they were the only two left in the bar, Rick said, “I have to close up now, sir. I�
��m sorry your girl isn’t here.”
“She’s not my girl.”
“Well. Whoever she is, she isn’t here. You’ll have to go.”
The man looked at him. “What were you in the war, kid?”
“4-F,” Rick said.
He was used to the look the guy gave him. 4-F—medical deferment. Rick appeared to be a fit and able-bodied man in the prime of his life. People assumed he must have pulled a fast one on the draft board to get out of the service, and that made him a cheat as well as a coward. He let the assumptions pass by; he’d outlive them all.
“If you don’t mind me asking . . . ,” the guy prompted.
“I’m allergic to sunlight.” It was the excuse he’d given throughout the war.
“Huh. Whoever heard of such a thing?”
Rick shrugged in response.
“You know what I was? Infantry. In Italy. I got shot twice, kid. But I gave more than I got. I’m a hell of a lot tougher than I look.”
“I don’t doubt it, sir.”
The guy wasn’t drunk—he smelled of sweat, unlaundered clothes, and aftershave, not alcohol. But he might have been a little bit crazy. He looked like he was waiting for Rick to start a fight.
“If I see this girl, you want me to tell her you’re looking for her?” Rick said.
“No. I’m sure she hasn’t been anywhere near here.” He slid off the stool and tugged his hat more firmly on his head. “You take care, kid.”
“You too, sir.”
Finally, he left, and Rick locked the door.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d returned to the storeroom and found Helen gone—fled, for whatever reason. But she was still there, sitting on the crate in the corner, her knees pulled up to her chest, hugging herself.
“Someone was here looking for you,” Rick said.
She jerked, startled—he’d entered too quietly. Even so, she looked like someone who had a man with a gun looking for her.
“Who was he? What’d he look like?” she asked, and Rick described him. Her gaze grew anguished, despairing. “It’s Blake. I don’t know what to do.” She sniffed, wiping her nose as she started crying again. “He’ll kill me if he finds me, he’ll kill me.”
“If you don’t mind your coffee bitter, we can finish off what’s in the pot and you can tell me all about it.” He put persuasion into his voice, to set her at her ease. “I can’t help if I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“I don’t want to get you involved, Rick.”
“Then why did you come here?”
She didn’t have an answer for that.
He poured a cup of coffee for her, pressed it into her hands, and waited for her to start.
“I got this job, right? It’s a good job, good pay. But sometimes . . . well. I make deliveries. I’m not supposed to ask what’s in the packages, I just go where they tell me to go and I don’t ask any questions.”
“You told me you got a job in a typing pool.”
“What was I supposed to do, tell you the truth?”
“No, you’re right. It wasn’t any of my business. Go on.”
“There’s a garage out east on Champa—”
“Rough neighborhood.”
“I’ve never had any trouble. Usually, I just walk in, set the bag on the shelf, and walk right back out. Today I heard gunshots. I turned around and there’s Blake, he’d just shot Mikey—the guy from the garage who picks up the drops—and two other guys with him. He’s holding this gun, it’s still smoking. He shot them. I didn’t know what else to do; there’s a back door, so I ran for it, and he saw me, I know he saw me—”
He crouched beside her, took the coffee cup away, and pressed her hands together; they were icy. He didn’t have much of his own heat to help warm her with.
“Now he wants to tie off the loose ends,” Rick said.
“Of all the stupid timing; if I’d been five minutes earlier I’d have been fine, I wouldn’t have seen anything.”
Rick might argue that—she’d still be working as a runner for some kind of crime syndicate.
“Have you thought about going to the police? They could probably protect you. If they can lock Blake up, you won’t have anything to worry about.”
“You think it really works like that? I can’t go to the cops. They’d arrest me just as fast as they’d arrest him.”
“So leave town,” Rick said.
“And go where? Do what? With what money?”
“I can give you money,” Rick said.
“On a bartender’s salary? That’ll get me to where, Colorado Springs? No, Rick, I’m not going to ask you for money.”
He ducked to hide a smile. Poor kid, thinking she was the only one with big secrets. “But you’ll ask me for a place to hide.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just I didn’t know where to go, I don’t have any other friends here. And now I’ve dragged you into it and if Blake finds out he’ll go after you, too.”
“Helen, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.” He squeezed her hands, trying to impart some calm. She didn’t have any other friends here—that he believed.
“You probably hate me now.”
He shrugged. “Not much point to that.”
She tilted her head, a gesture of curiosity. “You’re different, you know that?”
“Yeah. I do. Look, I know a place where Blake absolutely won’t find you. You can stay there for a couple of days. Maybe this’ll blow over. Maybe they’ll catch Blake. In the meantime, you can make plans. How does that sound?”
“Thanks, Rick. Thanks.”
“It’s no trouble at all.”
One of the uniformed officers came in to the living room to hand Hardin a paper cup of coffee. Rick declined the offer of a cup for him.
“So she had a criminal background,” Hardin said. “Did she do any time?”
“No,” Rick said. “She was a runner, a messenger. Never anything more serious than that.”
“Prostitution?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He was pretty sure he would have known if she had. But he couldn’t honestly say what she’d done before he met her. “I know she saw a lot that she probably wasn’t supposed to see. She testified in a murder trial.”
“You said that was over sixty years ago. Surely anybody who wanted to get rid of a witness is long gone,” the detective said.
“You only asked if I knew why someone would want to kill her. That’s all I can think of. She didn’t have much property, and no family to leave it to even if she did. But I do know that sixty years ago, a few people did have a reason to want her dead.”
“Only a vampire would think it reasonable to look into sixty year-old motives for murder.”
He hadn’t really thought of it like that, but she was right.
“Do you have any other questions, Detective?”
“What did she do since then? I take it she wasn’t still working as a runner.”
“She went straight. Worked retail. Retired fifteen years ago or so. She led a very quiet life.”
“And you said she doesn’t have any family? She never married, had kids?”
“No, she didn’t. I think her will has me listed as executor. I can start making arrangements.”
She rested her pen again. “Do you think she was lonely?”
“I don’t know, Detective. She never told me.” He thought she probably was, at least some of the time.
“Well, I’ll dig up what I can in the police records, but I’m not sure we even have anything going that far back. When was that murder trial she testified in?”
“1947,” he said. “The man she testified against was Charles Blake. He got a life sentence.”
She shook her head. “That still blows my mind. And I suppose you’ll tell me you remember it like it was yesterday?”
Rick shook his head. “No. Even I know that was a long time ago.”
In fact, he had to think a moment to remember what the Helen of that time had looked like—young, fri
volous, hair in curls, dresses hugging her frame. When he thought of Helen, he saw the old woman she had become. He didn’t even have any strong feelings about the change—it was just what happened. His mortal friends grew old and died. He preferred that to when they died young.
Many of his kind didn’t bother, but Rick still liked being in the world, moving as part of it. Meeting people like Helen. Even if it meant saying goodbye more often.
Hardin’s gaze turned thoughtful. “If I were immortal, I’d go see the world. I’d finally learn French.”
Rick chuckled; he’d never learned French. “And yet vampires tend to stay in one place. Watch the world change around them.”
“So you’ve been here for five hundred years?”
“Not here in Denver, but here in the west? Yes. And I’ve seen some amazing things.”
“A lot of murders?” she asked.
“A few,” he said.
She considered him a long time, pondering more questions, no doubt. In the end, she just shook her head. “I’ll call you if I need any more information.”
“Of course you will.”
She smirked at that.
The police were in the process of sealing the house as a crime scene. Yellow evidence tags were going up, marking spots in the kitchen—the teacup, the table, spots on the floor, the counter. Yellow tape, fluttering in a light breeze, decorated the front porch. Time for Rick to leave, then. Now and forever. He paused for a last look around the living room. Then he was done.
He drove, at first aimlessly, just wanting to think. Then he headed toward the old neighborhoods, the bar on Colfax and the garage on Champa. The shadows of the way they’d been were visible—the outline of a façade, painted over a dozen times in the succeeding years. Half a century’s worth of skyscrapers, office complexes, and high-end lofts had risen and fallen around them. The streets had widened, the pavement had improved, the signs had changed. The cars had changed, the clothing people wore had changed, though at this hour he only saw a few young men smoking cigarettes outside a club. None of them wore hats.
If Charles Blake was even alive, he’d still be in prison. Did he have relatives? An accomplice he’d hatched a plan of revenge with? Rick could call the Department of Corrections, talk them into releasing any information about Blake. Just to tie off that loose end and finish Helen’s story in his own mind.
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