The Vampire Files Anthology

by P. N. Elrod

  The sheer wickedness of it—and I’d seen more than my share in the last two years—sickened and infuriated me. I wanted to put a fist right through Foxtrot Joe’s face. I nearly put one through the wall, but there was enough damage to the joint.

  Shaking as well from unspent adrenaline, I helped a violently trembling Emma to the washroom and put her on the toilet seat before her legs gave out. The light was gone, but I kept flashlights in every room in the place. Myrna’s predilection for playing with the electrics made them a necessity. I found the one under the sink and clicked it on. I can see fine in the dark, but I need help in windowless spaces like this one.

  Emma was drained white, her breathing down to little panicky hiccups. I told her everything was all right, because that’s what we both needed to hear, and gave her a glass of water. I had to help her hold it. She got one sip, then turned away, coughing. Wetting a towel, I made her put her head down and eased the towel onto the back of her neck. When I was sure she wouldn’t fall over, I went to check the remains of my office.

  The walls were pocked and holed, lath and plaster exposed, dust everywhere. The desk was riddled with shrapnel. The lights were out; anything made of glass was shattered. The liquor cabinet in the corner leaked like a boozy Niagara. It hadn’t been hit, the concussion had been sufficient.

  The sofa was inside out, with stuffing all over. Just as well that I’d vanished. The metal shards of the grenade would have gone right through my body—hellishly painful—but wood was deadly. Even if a piece missed my heart or didn’t tear into my brain through an eye socket, I could bleed to death with dozens of splinters piercing my skin.

  The two windows overlooking the street had been open to air out the office and had allowed some of the force of the blast to escape. Both swung outward and were wire reinforced and bulletproofed, so they were intact, but the blinds and curtains were shredded. I crunched across the debris-choked floor and checked the neighborhood.

  The shops and other businesses were closed and Sunday-night quiet a block either way. There were no residences in the area, so no out-of-place cars or startled pedestrians caught my eye. No watchful bad guys lurked in the false security of alley shadows.

  I heard a click from the radio, the sound it makes when you switch it on. The dial remained dark. The speaker had shrapnel stuck in it, and every tube inside the case must now be junk.

  “I’ll get you a new one, Myrna,” I said aloud. “Are you okay?”

  Not that I expected a reply, but she had ways of making her presence known.

  Nothing. Which worried me.

  I’m nuts. There was a live dame in my washroom in need of help, and here I was anxious about a dead one. But Myrna was a friend, even if I had never seen her.

  “It was a grenade, honey. That’s why I’m asking.”

  Total silence clotted the room like a physical thing. For a second I thought I’d gone deaf; it was that profound. The temperate air drifting through the windows turned deathly cold and still. I breathed in to speak again, and it was too thick to use. I had to make do with what was left in the bottom of my lungs, and my voice came out high and wheezy.

  “Myrna, honey . . . you okay?”

  The chill got colder and colder still. Gooseflesh galloped up my arms and pinched the back of my neck. The feeling in the room turned oppressive, the weight of it so great that if my heart could beat, it might have stopped from the excess pressure. I’d never felt anything like this from her before. Though fairly immune to cold, I gave in to a sudden shiver.

  “Myrn—”

  Icy wind howled to unexpected life around me, blowing outward through the windows. A terrific cloud of plaster dust and stuffing whipped past, stinging my eyes.

  “M-Myrna—calm down!”

  Now that was stupid. Never tell an angry female to calm down. It just makes things worse. The lady rattled me through and through.

  The door, propped at an angle, suddenly shifted and toppled like a tree, making a heavy, oddly musical whannnng when it struck the floor. The ventilated desk shifted as though being shoved by an invisible Charles Atlas, shooting broadside across the floor until it slammed the wall behind. My sturdy chair, caught between, broke into sticks.

  Papers swirled; I grabbed what I could reach, then gave up and fled before any wood shards got picked up in the storm and started slicing me.

  “Jeeze,” I muttered, getting out of the line of fire from the gaping doorway. Papers fluttered out and sifted down. All the wind was confined to the office.

  The ghosts in movies and plays weren’t like this. They moved ponderously slow or stood in place, looking unearthly. Myrna was throwing things around like an invisible, intelligent tornado.

  After all this time, she’d finally scared me.

  I shouldn’t have mentioned the grenade. Considering how she’d died, she was bound to be sensitive about that kind of thing.

  I hustled toward the washroom, thinking to get Emma out until things settled.

  She still had the wet towel on the back of her neck and her head between her knees. She began to straighten.

  “It’s just me,” I said. “How you doing?”

  “What’s all that noise?”

  “Wind. Looks like we might get some rain.”

  She didn’t question it and kept her head down, asking if I was all right. I made sure she hadn’t broken anything from being pitched out and told her what had prompted the action. She wanted to know how I’d escaped.

  “I dove behind the desk. Got lucky.”

  “B-but a bomb? There was a bomb in the box?”

  “Not a big one,” I said, glad she couldn’t see me wincing. If I could still hypnotize people, I’d have eased her right over this part of things.

  Myrna must have tuckered herself out: the office-sized cyclone abruptly ceased. The building went silent again, the normal sort, not the pending disaster kind.

  “J-Joe left that for me? . . .” Emma straightened, tears spilling from her eyes. “He meant for me to take it t-t-to Gordy and kill us. . . .”

  Another stupid thing to do is to tell a female to not cry. I knew better. My girlfriend was not the kind to turn on the waterworks gladly or often, but she’d taught me how to deal with them. There were five thousand other matters I had to see to before dawn came, but I put an arm around Emma, offering her one end of the toilet tissue to unreel to soak up her tears.

  She cut loose, loud and ugly, but I couldn’t fault her for it, not one damned bit. I wanted to kill Foxtrot for doing this to her.

  Maybe I would.

  Emma’s initial reaction eased, and she lurched up with determined strength, spun in place, and yanked up the toilet lid just in time.

  I’d done my duty holding her while she cried, but Bobbi hadn’t said a word about what to do when a lady is being sick. I backed off, glad I didn’t need to breathe, and looked the other way. Some instinct told me to start the water in the sink, so I did that, then backed the rest of the way out of the little room.

  Right into Gino Desanctis, Foxtrot Joe’s boss. He looked as surprised as I felt.

  I glared at him, an intruder in my territory and indirectly responsible for Foxtrot. Hardly aware of the action, I slugged Desanctis square in the gut.

  He folded and dropped, but he wasn’t alone. The two guys behind him surged forward to teach me manners, and I took them out just as quick.

  There was a third man behind them, but he stayed in place, calmly regarding the rumpus.

  “Greetin’s to ye, Jacky-lad,” he boomed cheerfully. That Irish accent . . .

  He flipped open a lighter, the little flame overwhelmed by the gloom of the hall, but enough to show his face.

  “Riordan?” I returned, unpleasantly surprised. He was supposed to be a private investigator but was happy enough to ignore the law when it suited his bank account. We’d had a few run-ins, none of them good. The first time we met, he’d broken my shoulder with a tire iron. He had been aiming for my skull. “What the hell a
re you doing here?”

  He held the lighter with a steady hand. Me punching flat three of Gordy’s best didn’t deserve so much as an eye twitch. He’d seen me cut loose on bigger and tougher guys and not break a sweat. “Those fine lads strewin’ the floor are looking for Emma Dorsey.”

  Riordan had an egg-shaped balding head under a rakish hat, plenty of teeth, and brown eyes topped by arching brows. They gave him an ingrained expression of perpetual naïveté that he wholeheartedly exploited when he thought he could get away with it. In truth, he was as clever-brained as they come, but certifiably insane. If some head doctor locked the Irish bastard in a booby hatch, I’d have been glad to lose the key.

  “You’re looking for Foxtrot, you mean,” I said.

  “They are for certain. The lads an’ me were havin’ such a nice game of billiards when Gino came by wantin’ ’em to earn their keep. Seein’ that one owes me three dollars and the other owes me four, I’m keepin’ an eye on ’em till we finish our game. Have ye seen our Foxtrot?”

  “No.”

  “What about the lovely lady we followed here?” He pulled out a cigarette.

  “She’s not feeling well. Foxtrot tried to scrag her with a grenade rigged in a box. It was meant for her and Northside Gordy.”

  Riordan let the lighter burn a fraction longer than needed to fire up his smoke. “So that was the mighty flash and bang we saw from the street. A grenade, y’say? Sure?”

  I glanced at the floor where Emma had landed. The twine bow and the ring with its attached pin lay almost at his feet. I pointed at it and at the now quiet office. “What do you think?”

  He picked up the twine, then peered in the room. Not much glow from the streetlight came in the windows, but he saw what he needed to see. “Damn. You’re one lucky mother’s son. The lady’s all right?” His tone changed, losing its usual sardonic grate, his accent softening.

  “Shaken but in one piece.”

  “Glad to hear it.” He switched back to what I had thought was his normal voice. “Y’say that was her fella’s doin’?”

  “She thought she was returning the money Foxtrot took. He left her a note to take it to Gordy, but we opened—”

  Desanctis lurched from the floor, favoring his bruised middle, and pulled a revolver from his shoulder holster a second short of getting his full balance. I was on him and grabbed the gun away, my hand freezing on the barrel to keep it from turning. He was startled, then swung a fist, but I stepped out of range, too ready pop him again. It had felt good to have a target.

  “Oh, now, Gino. Leave the man be,” said Riordan, a little sharply. “We’re all friends here.”

  Desanctis put the brakes on, glaring. “You saw it, he busted me.”

  “This hall’s darker than the inside of Satan’s arse. He didn’t know ye.”

  I went with his lead. There was more going on here than Riordan looking after his pool hall bets. “I thought you were Foxtrot come to look at the blood.”

  “Gimme my piece. I’ll show you blood.” The man was not interested in explanations and clearly not used to coming in second in a fight. I am tall, but on the lean side; he had an inch and fifty pounds on me, all of it muscle. Most guys never challenged that combination; the others rarely lived to regret it. Desanctis was one of those specialists who knew all the finer points about how to turn people into fish food.

  “That’s over, Gino.” Riordan’s voice had gone ominously low and level, his eyes narrow and razor sharp. He got a surly grunt in reply.

  “Keep it put away,” I told Desanctis, handing the gun back butt first. “This is my place; only I am allowed to shoot people here.”

  He snorted contempt and called me a goddamned punk, which was an accurate description, so I let it pass. We were about the same age—late thirties—but I look a lot younger. I’ve gotten used to hearing “punk” flung my way.

  “How’d you get in?” I asked Riordan.

  “Picked the back door lock.” He inhaled deeply from his cigarette and blew the smoke to one side. “Took a few minutes. That’s good-quality brass you got for keepin’ out the riffraff.”

  I accepted the compliment with mixed emotions and vowed to find a locksmith who could install something better. “Thanks for not breaking the door down.”

  “Seemed best not to irritate the landlord. You’ve quite the temper, or so I’ve seen.”

  There was little point discussing his lack of haste to get inside. He knew something about explosions. If you don’t hear screaming afterward, chances are high that no one survived, and you don’t want to see what’s left.

  “I’m thinkin’ we should take this news to Gordy, along with the lady,” said Riordan.

  Exactly what I planned to do.

  “We keep looking for Foxtrot,” said Desanctis, helping one of his men up. “I’m not running to the boss every time something don’t work out. We got the dame. She’ll know where Foxtrot is.”

  Without being too obvious, I put myself between them and the washroom. “If she did, she’d have contacted him by now. He set her up. Guess he thought if she could knock off Gordy, we’d be too distracted to go after him.” I’d purposely included myself in matters. It was time. Any bastard trying to kill a nice gal like Emma deserved my personal attention. “But why would he do that for a lousy eight hundred?”

  “And Gordy put you in charge.” A scornful Desanctis got the second man on his feet. “What does this dump turn that makes that lousy money?”

  I looked at Riordan. “What’d I miss?”

  “Books have been gone over, sums have been added, and stacks of lolly counted and counted again. There’s eight hundred thousand missing from this month’s take, Jacky-lad.”

  It required a long, still moment for me to absorb that large a sum. Such numbers weren’t real. They had to be made up. That kind of money was for governments, not people. I’d known the scale of Gordy’s operation was huge, but not that huge. “Jeeze.”

  “Y’can imagine Gordy’s not in the least amused.”

  He wouldn’t show it. Maybe his pale eyes would be a little harder than normal. If Foxtrot had any sense, he’d be on his way to Outer Mongolia and hoping it would be far enough. So much cash explained why Riordan was hanging around. If there was a chance in hell for him to nab some of it . . .

  “Come on,” said Desanctis. “Let’s get the skirt and—”

  “Take her to Gordy,” I finished. “He’ll want to talk with her. Riordan, bring that grenade pin. I’m going to shove it down Foxtrot’s throat.” I took a step toward the washroom, and my foot caught on something. Emma’s purse. It hadn’t been there before. Myrna again, now in a helpful mood.

  I picked up the little bag and looked in on Emma. She’d set the flashlight on its end on the floor like a candle. She had apparently heard everything and looked anxious.

  “You ready to travel?” I asked, voice low.

  “Guess I have to be. But those men . . .”

  “Are gonna behave. I’ll stick by you. If I have to be someplace, you get next to the Irishman out there named Riordan. He’s crazy, but he’ll look after you. He’s got a soft spot for women.”

  “I know him. He’s kind of scary.”

  “Right now you need scary friends.”

  She gave a brief, blotchy grimace, accepted her handbag, pulled on her gloves, and stood straight. Not much height to her, but plenty of poise. I got the flashlight and backed out like a knight making way for his lady.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, certain none would take exception to the irony, “Miss Emma Dorsey needs a safe escort to the Nightcrawler Club.”

  Riordan’s eyes flickered with amusement as he swept off his hat. “It’s my specialty and privilege to be of service to ye, missy. Shamus Riordan, me name is me game, spell it the same.”

  Desanctis growled under his breath, then spoke aloud. “Where’s your boyfriend, Emma?”

  “I don’t know. That’s God’s honest truth.”

  “He ain’t hiding
in your flat, we checked, so where else would he go?”

  She shook her head, glancing at me.

  “The lady doesn’t know,” I said. “You’re familiar with how he does business. Where do you think he’d go?”

  “We checked those places. He ain’t in any of ’em.”

  “Then figure he’s on a train, bus, or car with a hell of a head start. You cover the stations?”

  “In this town and all stops between here and both oceans. With eight hundred grand running loose, we got more eyes than J. Edgar Hoover.”

  “You didn’t tell them about the money, did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Foxtrot can buy his way past anyone with it.”

  “That he can,” said Riordan, looking pleased.

  “You’re after the money,” I said, unsurprised.

  “Why, Jacky-lad, on the life of my sainted aunt Murgatroyd, of course I am. A man can go far and live high forever on that much lolly.”

  “Until we find you,” Desanctis pointed out. He didn’t sound worried that Riordan would get anywhere near the cash.

  “Well, life’s uncertain, Gino. I’d live well for as long as I could. That’s all any of us have till Saint Peter whispers in your ear.”

  It was an impossible quest. Foxtrot had time to put himself anywhere, either to hole up until the initial search slacked off or to get as far away as possible. If it had been me, I’d have hired a pilot and flown south to a whole different continent.

  “Been watching Emma’s place?” I asked as we trooped unhurriedly down to the lobby.

  “We went by to see if she’d join up with her boyfriend,” said Desanctis.

  “Why didn’t you talk to her sooner?”

  “Dames are funny when they’re gone on a guy. They clam up no matter what you do to ’em. It was a better bet to have her lead us to him.”

  Emma’s hand, which was on my arm, tightened its grip. I did not ask how Desanctis came by his information about women. I’d already slugged him once tonight and didn’t need a fresh excuse.

  “The delay gave Foxtrot a big head start,” I observed.