by P. N. Elrod
Gordy caught my glance over her shoulder. Yeah, he’d also spotted the clumsy bruising and red marks on her throat. Under her ghost-pale skin, her heart raced too fast, trying to pump blood that she didn’t have.
Proof enough. It told me all I needed to know about Slaughter.
I focused hard on her but the effort was unnecessary; she was still under his influence and shifted loyalties easily enough. “Take it easy, you’re going home, now.” I could have said she was going for a swim in Lake Michigan in January and gotten the same lack of comprehension.
I gently peeled her off and made her sit.
Gordy and I looked at Slaughter.
He put on that half-smile and twitched some fingers in a self-deprecating gesture. “You know how it is, boys. They like me to tire ’em out.”
Gordy had the most poker of poker faces, but I could tell he was pissed as hell. That wasn’t even close to how I felt, but tempting as it was to take two steps and punch Slaughter’s nose out the other side of his head, I held off. This wasn’t my show for the present.
While I kept the girl from falling over, Gordy left and returned with the club’s hostess in tow. He could move and talk fast when necessary.
“You know her?” he asked the hostess, indicating the lady in red.
“That’s Penny. Is she drunk?”
“She’s sick. I want you to look after her. You know a doctor?”
“Uh. . .yeah. . .”
“Give him a call. You know who I am?”
“Uh-huh, Northside Gordy, you run the Nightcrawler Club—unless you want me to forget all that.”
“Have the doctor call my club after he sees Penny.” He gave her a C-note. “That’s for expenses.”
“Golly!” Her eyes popped.
“You get another if you take care of her good.”
“Just call me Florence Nightiebird,” she said, quickly stuffing the money down the front of her dress.
I looked hard at Penny again, trying to reach whatever lay dozing behind her glazed eyes. “You rest up, get yourself well again. Don’t come back.” I handed her over to the hostess, who guided Penny out the door. The poor girl chose her steps slowly, one at a time, an old woman’s walk.
Slaughter had a narrow eye on us during the exchange, but I didn’t think I’d tipped my hand. If he saw us as mugs with a soft spot for dames, all the better. He seemed to be at ease with himself and what should have been dangerous company. Gordy took a chair, and I shut the door so we wouldn’t be disturbed. I remained on my feet, still playing bodyguard.
Slaughter shot me another dismissive once-over and beamed a smirk at Gordy. “You wanna talk? What about?”
“This club is run by Herm. I picked him. Who picked you?”
“I did. It was a sweet setup, so I moved in. Herm decided he should leave. He told me to expect you to notice.”
“He was right.”
“You got nothing to worry about. I run it the same, maybe better. No fights, no problems with the cops. Everything’s copasetic.”
“Except for the weekly payment.”
Slaughter flashed teeth. They were very white, but otherwise normal appearing, as were mine. “Yeah, I decided I don’t need your kind of insurance after all. I’m glad you came by so we could straighten this out.”
Gordy studied him a long time. He could take the spine out of most men when he gave them the cold eye, but this one seemed immune. “You are not being wise.”
“Maybe, but I’m getting rich.”
He really wants to die, I thought. Of course it’s easy to take risks when you know you’re damned-near impossible to kill. In the brief silence to follow I heard one heart beating, one set of lungs pumping: Gordy’s. Given the situation he was almost relaxed. It seemed to be a good example to follow.
“If you want to keep the club, you have to pay for the privilege. That’s how things run in this town.”
I worked to not show surprise. Gordy was open to leaving things as is? I’d expected he’d want this gatecrasher pitched out on his ear. Maybe he was considering the advantages of having another vampire as an ally. I couldn’t blame him. I’d turned out to be damned useful when occasion demanded.
Slaughter shrugged. “Those rules don’t apply to me.”
“To you more than most.”
“Uh-uh. You’re gonna listen to me from now on.” Slaughter took his feet off the desk and leaned forward, fixing Gordy with a good hard stare. He had emotional strength behind it, had worked himself into a little anger, which was dangerous. Though it helped to hammer a point home, too much rage can shatter minds. I should know.
Gordy’s expression had gone as blank as the girl’s.
I stepped in before things went over the edge, slipping a .38 revolver from my coat pocket and standing between them. “Lay off,” I ordered, my voice calm.
The unwelcome reminder of my presence startled Slaughter. He rocked back, eyes blazing. “Hey!”
“Fleming?” began Gordy, puzzled. I spared him a glance. He made a vague movement toward the gun he packed under his left arm, then stopped.
“It’s all right,” I said. “He’s covered. He was working a persuasion move on you. Might be better if you let me take it from here.”
He bit off further questions, trusting my judgment. That’s why he’d asked me along. He quit his chair and got out of my way.
Slowly standing to bring us even, Slaughter turned his persuasive stare full on me. “You’re gonna to listen to me, punk. You have to listen, understand? From now on I’m the only voice you can hear.”
I felt pressure inside my skull, like the air gets when there’s a sudden weather change. Nothing I couldn’t ignore.
“You are gonna listen and do everything I say. . .”
Familiar words. I’d used the same ones countless times. It’s a great way to get out of speeding tickets.
“You must listen—”
And it doesn’t work on another vampire.
“The hell I will. Sit down and shut up.” I pushed him hard enough to knock him back into his chair, then cocked the gun and brought the muzzle level with his left eye.
That broke his concentration. His mouth dropped open with shock. I wondered how experienced he was, if he knew he could survive a bullet. I had, but getting shot hurts. Slaughter’s hands went palm-out in sudden placation. The keystone of his confidence was quite gone.
An intake of breath from him, a sniff. He was checking me for booze. He knew how that could interfere with hypnosis. What else had he figured out?
“You can’t do this,” he said, dumbfounded, maybe a little hurt. It’s a tough moment, that awful one when you realize you’re not all-powerful. Usually it happens on the first day of school when the teacher isn’t looking. Slaughter must have forgotten that lesson.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Your age. I won’t ask again.”
“Uh. Twenty-five.”
“You got this dumb in just twenty-five years? Amazing.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“To you, kid, I am Mr. Fleming.”
“Don’t call me kid!”
“How old do you think I am?”
“Who the hell cares?”
“This dumb with bad manners. What a world.”
“You—”
But he didn’t get a chance to finish. I vanished first, cocked gun and all. Though invisible to Gordy, Slaughter would be able to see me in this state—as an amorphous gray shadow—and if this was his first experience, it would startle the hell out of him. I wasted no time sweeping through the bulk of the desk. When I reappeared, I was behind him, leaning over his shoulder, my mouth close to his ear and the revolver’s cold muzzle pressed to his temple hard enough to leave a bruise.
“You will be quiet now, new boy,” I whispered, trying to be as scary as possible. It didn’t take much; I was in the mood and had seen enough movies to know how it was done.
Though h
e no longer used his lungs regularly, Slaughter caught his breath. “Oh, shit, you’re—”
“Yeah, I’m in the same club, and you screwed up on the secret handshake.”
His lips moved, but nothing came out. He looked a lot younger without the self-importance.
“You’ve been putting your foot wrong ever since you crawled out of the woodwork. You’re making certain people unhappy.” A pause to let it sink in. I straightened enough to check on Gordy. His slab of a face was impassive, but I got that he was highly amused by my act.
Slaughter tried to twist toward me. “Jeeze, I didn’t mean anything—”
“Shuddup, kid. This piece has a hair-trigger and lead hurts just as much as a wooden stake. You can’t vanish faster than I can shoot.”
He made like a statue. Maybe he did not know about our relative immunity to bullets.
I eased back, giving him an opening to jump me. He didn’t take it. Going around the desk in the normal way, I hitched a hip on the front, taking the gun off cock, but keeping it aimed at him. Used to be I didn’t bother carrying, but Chicago’s a tough place, even for a vampire, as Slaughter was beginning to learn. I looked him over, the same as he had for me, only I didn’t make the mistake of underestimation. He was inexperienced, but every bit as physically dangerous as I when it came to supernatural abilities like strength, speed, and vanishing. What he’d done to the collection boys and the blonde girl indicated he knew how to cloud minds better than Lamont Cranston.
If Slaughter was smart—I had no confidence in that—he would listen to sense before he went too far and really hurt anyone.
“You made a messy start, kid, nothing that can’t be fixed, but only if you decide to get wise. You begin by apologizing to Gordy. Tell him you’re sorry for being such a rude son-of-a-bitch.”
Too off-balance to argue, Slaughter made a handsome, word-for-word apology. He didn’t mean it, but was obeying orders. Just what I wanted. “That’s good. So—how long since you died?”
Wall-eyed, he glanced at Gordy.
“He’s wise about this stuff,” I added. “Answer.”
“About a month.”
“How’d it happen?”
“I don’t wanna say. It was in a fight, that’s all.”
One’s death is a very personal experience. For me, it was singularly unpleasant and violent, and even after a year I could still get a case of lockjaw when the topic came up. “Okay, never mind. Who made you?”
“Nobody made me, it just happened.”
I gave a short laugh. “And the stork finds babies under cabbage leaves. Come on and spill, we’re all grown-ups here. Who was she?”
“No one.”
“Was it a he, then?”
That made him sputter. “You son-of-a—”
He saw my expression and a twitch of my hand reminded him about the revolver. He thought better about finishing and settled back. “It was some girl.”
“Where?”
“Here in town, the south side. Saw her in an alley, thought she was whoring a drunk. Looked like she was kissing him, then she—there was blood on her mouth. It was sick. I tried to chase her off, but that didn’t happen.”
“What did?”
“She came after me instead. When she looked at me. . .I wanted her to, so she did. We did. I don’t wanna say any more.” He’d gone beet red.
“No need. But sometime during this enchanting encounter you exchanged blood, right?”
He nodded.
That was disturbing. What kind of vampire runs around doing a blood exchange with a stranger? Was she ignorant or just reckless?
“And then you got killed sometime after. And then you woke up.”
“Yeah. That’s how it was.”
If his story was true, I had to find this careless girl. Vampires are damned rare, and the few that I knew were levelheaded and conscientious about their second chance at living, particularly when it came to bestowing the possibility on others. They didn’t just leap out of alleys and attack people for blood, nor casually exchange it. Stupid behavior like that can get you permanently killed. Even in these days of electricity and skepticism you might run into a would-be Van Helsing who’s more than happy to rid the world of a medieval kind of bloodsucker. It had nearly happened to me once.
On the other hand, not everyone in the world is a sane, sensible, law-abiding citizen. Why should a vampire be different? I had a prime example right in front of me.
“What about you? She do you, too?” he asked.
“No. The lady I was with had a better sense of responsibility. What’s her name and where does she live?”
“I don’t know where she is. That was months back. I forgot about it until the night I woke up. I guess she made me forget.”
“She didn’t tell you what to expect, what to do?”
“I figured it out. I remembered what she did and how she did it. It wasn’t hard. I read that book about Dracula, but it was fulla crap. I can’t turn into a bat or a wolf.”
I snorted. “You do more than enough as it is. You’ve been abusing the privilege, taking this place over.”
“It beats rolling drunks.”
Thus did I get an idea of why Slaughter had been in that particular alley.
“How else am I supposed to make money? The guys in the bread lines can work days, I can’t. I’m flat on my keister the whole time. You want I should rob a bank?”
“You’ve got options, but stealing isn’t one of them. It annoys people.”
“That’s what he does.” He pointed at Gordy. “Why do I have to be any different?”
“Use your common sense. Get noticed and get dead. You think we’re the only ones watching you?” That, so far as I knew, was a lie, but maybe a little paranoia would keep this idiot in line.
“There’s others? Like us? Where?”
I just smiled. “They can turn up at the damnedest times—and you won’t know until it’s too late. There’s plenty who would have staked you on sight. It’s just your good luck I’m willing to give you a chance to clean up your act before they come calling.”
“Why should they bother? Or you? I’m not hurting you. Who the hell do you think you are to march in my place and tell me how to live? You some kind of king vampire around here?”
“Only when it comes to the dumb ones. Don’t be dumb, kid. You’ve got a lot of great years ahead so long as you wise up fast. Gordy might not mind you running this place, but you have to follow the rules and show respect just like everyone else.”
“Huh. What can he do to me if I don’t?”
“He just waits for the sun to come up—you work out the rest.”
Gordy played it through with an appropriate cold-faced stare. I knew him to be a good egg when it suited, but he was also a killer. He showed that side now.
Slaughter scowled, sullen. He only half-understood, half-believed. “So just like any other mug, I pay him and he doesn’t kill me?”
“Unless you tell Herm to come back, that’s all there is to it.”
“But—”
“Taking over a club ain’t the same as stealing apples from a sidewalk cart. Every boss has his boss.”
“Not me.”
“Especially you. I know how you feel. You got something that puts you on top of the world, but you let yourself get noticed by that world and suddenly you’re having a bad night. You read the book. What did they do to Dracula at the end?”
“I’m too smart for that.”
“You think so? Gordy, what happened to the last vampire who went wrong in these parts?”
“You don’t want him to know.”
“Yeah, I do.”
Gordy surprised me and shook his head.
Was he being careful about admitting to killing someone or was the memory that bad for him? Could be a bit of both.
Slaughter couldn’t miss this exchange. “What’d you do?”
I tried to read Gordy, but he gave nothing away. He had more experience with intimidatio
n. Sometimes keeping shut was more frightening than being up front; this was one of those times. So be it. I turned back to Slaughter. “Use your imagination. Suffice to say it was ugly and the party involved did not survive. You sure you want to be stubborn just when things are going good for you?”
“What do you want from me?”
“Pay your dues on this club, same as Herm. Beyond that, you live like a normal human being and keep your nose clean.”
“How am I supposed to be normal? I’m not!”
“If I can get away with it, so can you.”
“Why should I?”
“Figure it out. Your answer will tell you how long you’ll live. Lay off the hypnosis until and unless you really need it to stay alive, the headache ain’t worth the trouble. And you stop feeding from people like you’ve been doing.”
“I gotta eat!”
“Then go to the Stockyards.”
“What?”
“Plenty of cattle there, or hadn’t you figured that out yet?”
“She didn’t.”
“The one who made you was careless. And I will find her, don’t kid yourself.”
“Animal blood? You nuts?”
“They were good enough eating before your change, what’s so different now?”
“But—”
“Just try it. They’ve got blood to spare. You can have all you want then.”
He clammed up, hopefully thinking it over.
I hooked a thumb toward the door, indicating where Penny had left. “What about the twist? You exchange blood with her? With anyone else?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you. Think you can live forever with just one eye?” I raised my gun again.
“Hey! I didn’t!” He half-rose from the chair, hands out, trying to back away. “I didn’t! Swear to God!” The chair crashed over. He pressed against the wall and seemed to fade to an overall gray tone, about to fully vanish.
I put the gun away. “All right, get off your hind legs. I had to ask.”
He grew more solid looking, but was still shaken. “Who the hell are you?”