Microsoft Word - The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.doc (79 page)

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I remember thinking that for a dame who wore green so much, she had awfully red lips. I remember snapping the shot, and I remember  the flash of white calf as she turned to follow her husband past the velvet ropes and into the restaurant.

There in black-and-white was Kendall and Malloy, and a crowd of other schmucks, and there was a space where the dame in green should have been.

But Letitia Kendall wasn’t in the picture. She was sitting across the desk from me, the last ghost of her cigarette rising in the air, and her face suddenly shifted under its little green veil.  She came over the desk at me like a feral tiger, and everything went black . . .

“There he is,” Dale whispered. “The redhead.”

And sure enough,  there was Shifty Malloy, dapper as ever in tails, getting out of a shiny new Packard. The Blue Room had a long awning to keep the rich dry, but the rat-faced bum actually unfolded an umbrella and held his hand out to help a lady out of the back seat. Miles of white, white leg through a slit in her dress, and she rose up out of the back of the car like a dream. Only she wasn’t in green. The dame was in mourning like midnight, her red lips a slash on the white powder of her face, and I wondered how long it would take people to catch on that she liked to sleep in all day. I wondered if anyone would know her hands were as cold as ice cubes under the satin gloves, and I wondered if anyone would guess how Arthur Kendall gurgled when she had her teeth in his throat.

Because if I hadn’t killed him, that only left one suspect,

didn’t it?

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It was cold. I lay on the floor and looked at the shapes in front of me  –  a wall full of splinters and long handles ending in metal shapes. It was the type of shack you have when you’ve got a pool and a garden and you need somewhere to store all the unattractive bits needed to keep it clipped and pretty  –  a lawnmower, shovels, all sorts of things.

“You’ll do as I say,” Letitia Kendall said.

“Aw Jesus,” Shifty Malloy whined. “Jesus  Christ.”

Then a dainty foot in a green satin pump stepped into view.  I blinked. Felt like I’d been hit by a train, throat burning, couldn’t take a deep breath, and I couldn’t even squirm. My hands were tied back and my feet felt like lead blocks. She bent down, the dame in green, and she wasn’t wearing her pretty face any more. The smear of crimson on her lips was fresh, and she wiped it with one white, white hand as her other hand came down, snagging a handful of my suit coat and shirt, and hauled

me up  like I weighed nothing.

“You have to cut off the head,” she said. “It’s very

important. If you don’t, you won’t get any more.”

Malloy was sweating. “Got it. Cut off the head.”

“Use a shovel. They do well.” Her head tilted a little to the  side like a cat’s considering its prey. “It is very important,  Edward, to cut off the head.”

If I could have opened my mouth, I might have said that asking Shifty Malloy to decapitate someone was like asking a politician to be honest. I knew the bum. Malloy might shoot  a man in the back, but he was squeamish about cockroaches, for  Christ’s  sake.

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“All right, already.” Malloy stepped into view, and his  ridiculous little pasted-on-moustache was as limp as a dead  caterpillar with sweat. He raised the gun, a serviceable little  derringer, and put it to my forehead. “You might wanna put him  down. This is going to make a mess.”

“Just do it.” Letitia gave me an impatient little shake. My

feet dangled like a puppet’s. “I have a party to attend tonight.”

When I came back from the  war some bum asked me what the worst thing about it was. I told him it was the goddamn food, in the service. But the worst thing in the war was the not knowing, in the smoke and the chaos, where the next bullet was coming from.

The only thing worse than  that is knowing where it’s coming from, and when that gun is to your head and nothing comes out of your crushed and dry throat but a little sound like nuh-nuh-nuh.

Then the world exploded.

“Wait until I get around the corner,” I said, handing her the

file. “Then go home. You’re a stand-up dame, Dale.”

“For Christ’s sake.” She slid down in the seat, as if afraid  someone would see us parked here. “Call me Sophie, Jack. How  long have I worked for you?”

“Three years.”
 
Kept me on time and kept that office  from

going under, too.

“I deserve a raise.” Her pulse was thumping again. Like a

rabbit’s. The thirst was back. It scorched the back of my throat

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like bile from the worst hangover ever, and it smelled her.  Chanel and softness and the steak she’d cooked,  and my fingers  twitched like they wanted to cross the air between us and catch  at her dress. It was a pretty blue dress, high in the collar and  tight in the waist, and she looked good.

Never noticed before how easy on the eyes Miss Dale was.

Yeah, I’m an  unobservant bum.

“Go home, Sophie.” It was getting hard to talk again, the  teeth were coming out.
 
Sophie
, I mangled her name the first  time I ever said it. “You’re a doll. A real doll.”

“What are you going to do?” She had never asked me that  before. Plenty of questions, such as ‘Where did you put that  file?’ and ‘Do you want coffee?’ and ‘What should I tell  Boyleston when He calls about the rent?’ But that particular one  she’d never asked.

“I’m going to finish the Kendall job.”

I slid out of the car and  closed the door softly, headed down the street. She waited, just like I’d told her, for me to reach the corner. Then the Ford’s engine woke and she pulled away. I could hear the car, but the biggest relief came when I couldn’t hear her pulse any more.

Instead, I heard someone else’s. The drumbeats were a jungle, and here I was, the thirst burning a hole in me and the rain smacking at the top of my unprotected head. I flipped up the collar of my coat, wished like hell a bottle of scotch could take the edge  off the burning, and headed for Chinatown.

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You can find anything in Chinatown. They eat anything down there, and, I have a few friends. Still, it’s amazing how a man who won’t balk when you ask him to hide a dead body or a stack of bloodstained clothes might get funny ideas when you ask him to help you find . . . blood.

That’s what butchers are for. And after a while I found what

I was looking for. I had my nineteen dollars and the twenty in pin money from Miss Dale’s  –
 
Sophie’s
 
–  kitchen jar. She said I was good for it, and she would take it on her next pay cheque.

I would worry about getting her another pay cheque as soon

as I finished this. It might take a little doing.

After two hours of heaving as my body rebelled, the thirst took over and I drank nearly a bucket of steaming copper, and then I fell down and moaned like a doper on the floor of a filthy  Chinatown slaughterhouse. It felt good, slamming into the thirst in my gut and spreading in waves of warmth until I almost cried.

I paid for another bucket. Then I got the hell out of there, because even bums will stop looking the other way for
 
some
things.

It’s amazing what you can do once a dame in a green dress

kills you and pins you for murder.

The next thing I needed was a car. On the edge of Chinatown sits Benny’s Garage, and I rousted Benny by the simple expedient of jimmying his lock and dragging him out of bed. He didn’t know why I wanted the busted-down pickup and twelve jerry-cans of kerosene.  “I don’t want to know,” he whined at me. “Why’d’ja have to bust the door down? Jeez,

Becker, you  ”–

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“Shut up.” I peeled a ten-spot off my diminishing bankroll  and held it in front of him, made it disappear when he snatched  at it. “You never saw me Benny.”

He grabbed the ten once I made it reappear. “I
 
never
goddamn see you, Jack. I never wanta see you again, neither.”  He rubbed at his stubble, the rasp of every hair audible to me, and the sound of his pulse was a whack-whack instead of the sweet music of Sophie’s. How long would his heart work through all that blubber he had piled on?

I didn’t care. I drove away and hoped like hell Benny wouldn’t call the cops. With a yard full of stolen cars and up to his ass in hock to Papa Ginette, it would be a bad move for him.

But still, I worried. I worried  all the way up into Garden  Heights and the quiet manicured mansions of the rich, where I found the house I wanted and had to figure out how to get twelve jerry-cans over a nine-foot stone wall.

The house was beautiful. I almost felt bad, splishing and

splashing over parquet floors, priceless antiques, and a bed that  smelled faintly of copper and talcum powder. There was a  whole closet full of green dresses. I soaked every goddamn one  of them. Rain pounded the roof, gurgling through the gutters,  hissed against the walls.

I carried two jerry-cans downstairs to the foyer  –  a massive expanse of checkered black and white soon swimming in the

nose-cleaning sting of kerosene  –  and settled myself to wait by  the door to a study that probably had been Arthur Kendall’s  favourite place. I could smell him in there, cigars and the fatheaded, expensive cologne. I ran my hands down the shaft of the  shovel while I waited, swung it a few experimental times, and  tapped it on the floor. It was a flathead shovel, handily available  in any garden shed  –  and every immaculate lawn needs a garden  shed, even if you get people out to clean it up for you.

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I’m good at waiting, and I waited a long time. The fumes got into my nose and made me light-headed, but when the  Packard came purring up the drive I was pouring the last half of a jerry-can. I then lit a match and a thin trail of flame raced away up the stairs like it was trying to outrun time. Even if her nose was as acute as mine she might not smell the smokethrough the rain, and  I bolted through the study, which had a floor-length window I’d been thoughtful enough to unlock.  Around the corner, I moved so fast it was like being back in the war again, hardly noticing where either foot landed as long as I kept moving. The shovel whistled as I crunched across the gravel drive and then smacked Shifty Malloy right in the face with it, a good hit with all my muscle behind it. He had gotten out of the car, the stupid bum, and he went down like a ton of bricks while Letitia Kendall fumbled  at the door handle inside, scratching like a mad hen.

The house began to whoosh and crackle. Twelve jerries is a lot of fuel, and there was a lot to burn there. Even if it was raining like God had opened every damn tap in the sky.

She fell out of the Packard, the black dress immediately soaked and flashes of fish-belly flesh showing as she scrambled on gravel. Her crimson mouth worked like a landed fish’s, and if  I was a nice guy I suppose I might have given her a chance to explain. Maybe I might have even let her get away by being a stupid dick like you see in the movies, who lets the bad guy make his speech.

But I’m not a good guy. The shovel sang again, and the sound she made when the flat blade chopped three-quarters of the way through her neck was between a gurgle and a scream.  The rain masked it, and she was off the gravel and on the lawn now, on mud as I followed, jabbing with the shovel while her head flopped like a defective Kewpie doll’s. I chopped the waywe used to chop rattlers back on the farm and, when her body

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stopped flopping and the gouts and gouts of steaming blood had  soaked a wide swatch of rain-flattened grass, I dropped the  shovel and dragged her strangely heavy carcass back towards  the house. I tossed it in the foyer, where the flames were rising  merrily in defiance of the downpour, and I tossed the shovel in  too. Then I had to stumble back, eyes burning and skin peeling,  and I figured out right then and there that fire was a bad thing  for me, whatever I was now.

She was wet and white where the black dress was torn, and the flames wanted to cringe away. I didn’t stick around to see if she went up, because the house began to burn in earnest, the heat scratching at my skin with thousands of scraping gold pins, and there was a rosy glow  in the east that had nothing to do with kerosene.

It was dawn, and I didn’t know exactly what had happened

to me, but I knew I didn’t want to be outside much longer.

Of course she hadn’t gone to sleep. As soon as I got near her door, trying to tread softly on the worn carpet and smelling the burned food and dust smell of working folks in her apartment building, it opened a crack and Sophie peered through. She was chalk white, trembling, and she retreated down the hall as I shambled in. It was still raining and I was tired. The thirst was back, burrowing in my veins, and my entire body was shot through with lead. The pinpricks on my throat throbbed like they were infected, my skin cracked and crackled with the burning, still, but the divot above my right  eye wasn’t inflamed any more.

I shut her door and locked it. I stood dripping on her

Welcome mat and looked at her.

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She hadn’t changed out of the blue dress. She had nice legs, by God, and those cat-tilted eyes weren’t really dark. They were hazel. Her  wrist was still bruised where I’d grabbed her; she had peeled the Ace off and it was a nice dark purple. It probably hurt like hell.