“In other news, the Durham vigilante known popularly as The Bull’s Eye has been credited with interrupting a gas station robbery on South Alston Avenue, across downtown from the carjacking, at approximately the same time. Police refused to comment but a witness to the crime described for us a black-clad figure she said disarmed the robber and knocked him unconscious using martial arts before fleeing the scene. Durham Police have repeated their invitation to The Bull’s Eye to come forward.”
The image cut to a uniform addressing someone slightly off-camera: “We want to repeat that The Bull’s Eye is advised to come forward. All of Durham is inspired by his or her example but they are not a trained professional and may bring harm on themselves or another inadvertently.”
The uniform zoomed out and spun, in the magic of video editing technologies, to become a young African-American woman in a suit addressing the same cameras. “The District Attorney's office may be forced to issue charges against this vigilante for having broken many of the same laws as the persons whose crimes they’ve interrupted. Our door is always open, however, to discussion with the so-called Bull’s Eye and we want to remind him – or her – that we have the same goals of a peaceful and safe city for all our residents.” A reporter said something muffled by the distance from the microphone and whatever poor assistant DA they'd dragged out in front of the cameras smiled a little. “I can't comment on whether or not we would trade clemency for The Bull’s Eye's testimony at some of the trials of the criminals she or he has caught, but as I say, we're always open to conversation.” The camera cut back to the newsreader. “And now, the weather tomorrow, tonight. Sam?”
I paused the TV – I don't know how people did anything before DVRs, another innovation to which Roderick introduced me – and sighed heavily. It was bad enough the newspapers were abuzz with Durham having a superhero; now it had a villain, too, and one every vampire in the Triangle would cut off a hand to get at once they got a whiff of that incredible blood.
I realized with some embarrassment that my fangs had dropped just remembering it.
The obvious thing to do would be to warn my colleagues away from him; simply put out the word that he was crazy and off-limits. Of course, if I just announced that with no reason someone would say I did it because I wanted him for myself. It would be like putting him front and center in the clearance section at ÜberBargains: everyone would want a piece of that and at yesterday's prices. If I were to dissuade my constituents from pursuing him like hounds after the hare I would have to be able to tell them why and it couldn't be some bullshit reason I'd made up. Too many of us can tell when someone is lying or when they aren't sure they're telling the truth. I had to be certain if I was going to convince Old Shoe, for instance. Old Shoe can spot a lie through a lead door.
Even if everyone stayed away from him, I reflected, it might be smartest to track him down and kill him anyway. The fact is, vampires do not last long in circumstances that keep mortals awake and alert and afraid, on the lookout for the odd and unusual. We tend to be an odd and unusual lot and our ability to pass in society is in most cases uncertain at best. That's part of why I've never actually met anyone incredibly old: current conventional wisdom says the vast majority of us don't really manage the transition from one era to the next with what you might call finesse. We wind up anachronisms and the idiosyncrasies of our behaviors give off some subtle vibe of the weird. Sooner or later there are mortals with torches and pitchforks and bundles of garlic and holy water. I couldn't have that, and I couldn't have some mortal paragon of athleticism with a bone to pick against Duke or The Bull’s Eye or anybody else running around keeping both the hens and the foxes psychologically off-balance. It doesn't take very many cars jacked or purses snatched or dead kids in the bathrooms of dance clubs for people to go into panic mode and walk around with the pepper spray in their hand rather than in their pocketbook.
I was, of course, curious to find out exactly what made him so appetizing. It would be good to know if it could happen to someone else. If this marked some new environmental factor or something else that might recur in the general population and screw with vampires’ already shaky ability to mix with the herd, better to find out sooner rather than later.
The last thing I knew needed seeing to, but I didn’t really want to discuss with myself just yet, was this: if El Diablo qualified as unacceptably weird and noticeable, was the same true of a hero? I admired The Bull’s Eye's gumption for being willing to do something in her neighborhood, for her people. I admired this in large measure because I found myself doing the same for mine sometimes. On the other hand, if carjackings and purse-snatchers made people a little too vigilant, I had to wonder to myself if a pseudo-hero would do the same.
An uncomfortable truth is that vampires thrive in a setting in which people are just a little bit downtrodden or just a little more comfortable than is good for them. Perfect and alert awareness and involvement in their community was bad for us. Having them just to either side of that was preferred. I didn't enjoy acknowledging it but the truth is we all rely on someone else's unhappiness, somewhere, somehow. For most people it's the two dollar a day anguish and psychic violence of the sweatshop products they line up to buy down at ÜberBargains. For me and mine it is the cheap, certain fear that there are monsters out there in the dark, every night, just waiting. It keeps most people out of the alleys and off the back roads so we can hunt the few who refuse to listen.
I couldn't solve a damned thing just sitting on my ass watching the TV news, though. If Roderick was coming and we were going on a hunt in Durham then I needed to make preparations to relocate temporarily.
Before I left, I walked out onto the porch and texted Old Shoe. Like I said, he’s a Raleigh vampire who can smell a lie from across the street and down the block. I told him I needed to see him at the usual place. He texted back: he’d see me there in ten minutes. I loaded Smiles into the back seat of my old ’76 Firebird, opened the t-tops and drove around the clock face that is the network of highways encircling Raleigh and referred to commonly as the Beltline. In Raleigh’s northwest quadrant, squeezed behind a gas station and pressed against an embankment with a dead end street at the top, stood a tiny graveyard. I couldn’t help but wonder if any Steeplechasers had emerged from its forgotten graves on Z day, some seven years before. I doubted it. This was a family plot no longer remembered by the family who’d put it here. The city maintained it haphazardly in their absence. It was dark enough and private enough for Old Shoe to feel comfortable emerging from the sewers he called home. As the local enforcer of some standards of normalcy and secrecy, I was awfully glad he took that much consideration given his appearance.
Smiles and I stood around the graveyard for a minute or two after we arrived, the frame of the Firebird pinging as it cooled. Eventually there was the sound of boots on an iron ladder somewhere below and a manhole cover lifted out of the ground and slid aside. Old Shoe climbed out, not bothering to knock dust or cobwebs from the maintenance worker jumpsuit he always wore. It was stained fourteen different shades of muck and smelled like a year’s worth of used diapers. Old Shoe is a repulsive piece of work: skull halfway caved in, a snaggletooth snarling smile frozen in a rictus of fangs and gapped teeth, exposed muscle and bone down the back of his head and a nose broken in so many places it looked like modern art. I’ve never asked how he got that way but we get stuck however we are when we get turned. The obvious answer was that his maker had turned him about five seconds after he’d been dragged half a mile by the dump truck that hit him. In my opinion it was an act of cruelty to “save” him in that shape but I wasn’t there and I’d never know what went through his maker’s mind. Old Shoe never seemed inclined to comment on it and neither would I as long as he knew to stay out of sight. He’d picked up the nickname based on how he smells most of the time and it was so long ago no one was left who’d known him by anything else.
Smiles has never quite been at ease with Old Shoe. It’s like he can sense th
e injuries as a kind of sickness. He always stands between us with his ears up and his eyes half-lidded. He looks like he’s daring Old Shoe to make a move. I can’t imagine anything less likely to occur.
“Evenin’, boss.” Old Shoe’s voice is a rasp of collapsed trachea and punctured lungs. He always sounds like he’s trying to whisper to me across a cancer ward. He calls me “boss” but I’ve never asked him to. If it were anyone else I’d object but Old Shoe is so pitiful I just let it slide. “What’s shakin’?” For all I just painted him as a Picasso turned inside out, Old Shoe is the embodiment of good spirits.
“I’m going to be occupied for a few nights.”
“Durham?” He chuckled. It sounded like rocks in a tin can.
“How’d you guess?”
“You’re the boss. That means you go where the trouble is.” He shrugged, or at least I think he did.
“Well, keep an ear to the ground for any trouble around here. Let me know if something odd goes on. I’m especially keeping an eye out for a tall guy, good looking, blue skin. Don’t ask.”
“Blue like those freakjobs in Kentucky, or blue like body paint or what?” Old Shoe elevated himself above some definition of “other” based on appearance without batting an eye. I nearly started to laugh, but I kept it down.
“Just blue. I said don’t ask.”
He rolled a cracked and crackling joint somewhere in the upper half of his torso. “You’re the boss. I’ll let you know if anything turns up.” He paused before asking another question. “Why not tell Seth?”
“This guy isn’t going to be showing up out in the open very much. You’ve got even odds of running into him in the shadows.” I fluttered a tired breath out between my pudgy lips. “Are you done with the questions now or do I have to tell you again not to ask?”
Old Shoe put his hands up in front of him, placating me. “Sorry.”
I nodded. ‘And keep my semi-absence quiet, if you would.”
“You got it. My lips are sealed.”
I doubted that was physically possible with what skin he had left, but I just thanked him and departed. I like Old Shoe a lot, to be perfectly honest, but that doesn’t mean I want to sit around shooting the breeze while he looks like last week’s dinner.
6
I live in a typical suburban neighborhood called London Towne. It was nearly destroyed by zombies several years ago, and yes that extra “E” is almost awful enough for it to deserve to be destroyed in a zombie attack. It’s a good forty minutes from the campus of Duke University. Commuting back and forth to investigate the doings in my personal fiefdom wasn’t impossible but it wasn’t ideal. I wanted to be in Durham in order to get a sense of where the action might be concentrated. I needed a taste of which neighborhoods might be good or bad places to hunt a villain or find a hero. I wanted to press my lips against the flesh of that town and feel the thrum of its pulse.
I also wanted to be able to walk around to do my investigating. Driving through them, most places look about the same as most others. Walking around is how you get the sense of a place’s character. Walking keeps you slow enough to notice the little things. Driving, you don’t want to notice anything; you just want to get there and forget about the in-between.
That all added up to moving to Durham for just a little while.
Vampires who’ve been around for a while and managed to rub a few pennies together often are the same ones who start getting paranoid. It makes a kind of perverse sense: a bloodsucker with something to lose fears having it taken away from them. They start acquiring hidey-holes for all their junk. They start stuffing their metaphorical (and sometimes literal) socks with wads of cash and cheap property and burner phones. They build caches with a couple of hundred bucks, a fake ID, a prepaid phone and a change of clothes in every bus terminal, self-storage place and hollow log they can find. Like squirrels storing acorns for the winter, they pack away more than they’ll ever remember having.
I haven’t gotten there yet but I have started acquiring basic accommodations in parts of the state where I’ve got occasional business. I have my little house up near Asheville and I have my home in Raleigh but I’ve also got a cheap apartment thirty minutes from Wilmington, a basement efficiency in a student ghetto in Chapel Hill and a dilapidated log home in Durham.
The log home is the one of which I’m proudest. The others are nothing more than convenient crash pads: places I can land in an emergency without being noticed or sought. The log home, though, is a vampire’s equivalent to an inflatable bounce-castle on his birthday.
Once upon a time I imagine the old house was someone’s pride and joy. I’ve looked far enough into the history of its ownership to know it hasn’t been owned by anybody special or worrisome. The last occupant died of old age and left it to relatives too far out of town to be fussed with taking care of it. I took it off their hands at an estate auction so long after the fact of their inheritance there was no one interested in buying it for all the repairs they’d have to make. I had the roof replaced and the windows fixed with that security plastic stuff to make them almost impossible to shatter. I nailed up three layers of blackout curtains around them to keep the curious from having anything to see. After that I didn’t touch a single other thing.
From the outside, it looks like a home built seventy or eighty years ago out of rounded gray timbers with white chinking between them. After the roof was put on I went up there myself with the old shingles and spread them around so it looks like it’s never been repaired. The yard has been almost totally reclaimed by the old pine woods in which it sits and the gutters have been clogged with leaves so long there are saplings growing out of them. On the front of the house that gutter has sagged or fallen off completely so it hangs down across the front door at an odd angle. The carport is crumpled from where a tree fell over on it. The yard is so grown up in shrubs and saplings the house is almost invisible from the road and none of the neighbors can see it so no one complains about their spoilt view. An inspector told me the house was structurally sound but unsellable, which was exactly what I wanted to hear. I didn’t want to attract some real estate agent sniffing around for new prospects. I wanted it to stand as a warning to the respectable and the nice: stay away, keep moving and forget this is here.
On the inside, the house is badly dated and mostly empty. I left the last guy’s couch and a pile of old photographs because it seemed a little sad to throw them away and they make the perfect sentimental defense. They give it the ambience of a ransacked grave. It’s the sort of place a mortal knows to avoid. Humans have been telling their children to stay away from houses like that since they were caves.
The basement, on the other hand, is solid and sealed against both water and daylight. I’ve got a blast door between the cellar and the interior of the house and the exterior exit is via a tunnel I paid some guys to dig. It leads over and up to a false manhole riser in the back yard with another blast door in the way. I keep a mattress and a big tarp in the middle of the room and a few bags of sand covered in old chemical hazard labels. I want it to look like the sort of place a high school kid with any brains would think is about to blow their ass to Kingdom Come should they stumble inside. I want the truly implacably adventurous to decide it’s more trouble than they bargained for and get the hell out of Dodge.
The only place from which the house is at all visible is a cycle and pedestrian path running through ten or fifteen miles of detached suburban housing. The American Tobacco Trail connects downtown Durham to its southernmost suburbs then skids off downhill into countryside, crossing country-fried waterways with old-fashioned names like Panther Creek and Nancy Branch before disappearing into dark, lush forests. While it’s still up in the suburbs that trail wends between the huddled homes of people at a lot of different income levels. Every once in a while someone gets mugged on it. I imagined the sort of idiot kid who robs people in the middle of suburbia, surrounded by houses and cameras and places their victims could go for help would be a pr
etty good place to start looking for the most desperate human being in town. Middle class teen playing thug dress-up or aspirational loser trying to launch a career in crime: either way, I would be happy to drain them until they died if that’s what this would take.
Roderick showed up the next night about five hours after sundown. He had his dog, an ancient St. Bernard named Dog who stands about as high as the middle of Roderick’s spindly chest. Roderick was driving his great big gold convertible Cadillac DeVille.
I was standing out front of the log house around half past 11:00 when he pulled up. I directed him into the driveway that seemingly went nowhere and he crawled his behemoth across the grass-carpeted gravel to the little parking area out of sight between the house and the evergreen in its front yard.
Roderick was wearing a pair of shorts in a loud plaid print, penny loafers and a pink shirt like the kids wear these days. He looked just like one of them in that get-up. At a glance, he was just a skinny teenager like any other. I couldn’t help but admire his ability to blend. He would have been invisible in any gay bar or shopping mall: just another blond twink in casual wear. Dog, on the other hand, was anything but invisible to the naked eye. He was two hundred pounds if he was an ounce. He looked like a normal dog hiding under a bearskin rug.
Smiles was seated by my side when they climbed out of the car – Roderick first and Dog right after him – and maintained admirable composure as Dog sniffed the ground here and there. Smiles ignores other dogs but he’s never met another hellhound he likes. I could tell Roderick had been feeding his own blood to Dog because of his size and the intelligence gleaming in those deceptively sad-seeming eyes. I wondered if Smiles would be able to smell the power and presence of Roderick in Dog, who had been boarded when we went to Seattle. When we turn a canine into one of our hounds we extend a part of ourselves into them. We and they are never exactly separate as long as both are alive.
Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3) Page 8