No Rest for the Wicked (4 page)

I questioned our mission statement on a daily basis, but my involvement with them seemed to comfort Peter considerably.

“What do you
do
all day?” He was standing in my subbasement digs beneath the
Academy, surveying the mess with a pensive expression. Hands on hips and lips pursed, just like
some Dutch housewife.

“I sleep a lot.”

A quick look from Peter. “That can't be healthy.”

“Healthy?” Is he kidding?
Dead
man here.

“You know. Mentally. You need something to do to keep you occupied.”

“I could learn to knit.”

Which surprised a quick grin, but he said, “I'm glad you have your little group.”

On a scale of one to ten, I'd guess that vampire hunting rated about a six as a hobby. Just above NASCAR. But it got extra points for the way it made Peter look at me sometimes.

“I think he just popped up to two on the Most Wanted list,” he said.

The greasy ash drifted a little across the cement where I'd dusted a certain serial killer.

“I wish I could give you a corpse to call in,” I told him.

Peter shook his head. “Last count, he'd killed fifteen people. I don't much care what makes
him stop. How long you think he was…you know?”

“Recent. That's why we caught him so easily.”

“So he was still alive when he killed all those people.”

You want another scary truth? Of all the monsters I've met in the past crazy year, human beings still rank highest in the sick and twisted category.

“The PD will be mucking around with the scene all night, but Caballo and I might be able to slip in and pick up the trail without being noticed,” I told Betsy.

Caballo grinned at me and licked his teeth. “It's a date,” he said. And his gaze dropped to where my body was responding to the new blood. “If you can wait that long.”

His gaze was like a touch. “I'll let it fall off first,” I said.

Caballo's eyes flashed a momentary brilliant green and he snapped his teeth. “Bitch.”

“Whore,” I said.

“Stop it, both of you,” said Betsy.

On one of the other monitors, the CNN feed, which Drew seemed able to watch while playing computer games and crunching numbers, suddenly switched to an emergency broadcast.

Bizarre killing
, read the streaming Chyron. Behind it, we could see the Grauman's Chinese with its mob of officers and the flashing EMT vehicles.

“That your stiff?” asked Drew.

“That's the guy.”

Drew hit a switch; his video-game screen went black, and the volume on the CNN feed ramped up.

“From Hollywood, Internet mogul, corporate dragon, and Nobel Prize recipient Justin Lake has been found dead in the restroom of the Grauman's Chinese Theater.” The neatly coiffed blonde newswoman turned her head so the camera could zoom in on the crime scene tape and the milling techs. I searched the crowd for my heart's desire, but Peter must have followed the corpse back to the coroner's office already.

“Mr. Lake and his former partner, Orville Suits, have been in the news for the past several months as they battled over rights to software developed by their business, Cloud Ninety,” said the reporter. “Lake's lawyers were standing outside Suit's Hollywood mansion waiting to serve him with new warrants when the news came that Mr. Lake's body had been found.”

The camera cut to another part of town. In the background, a skyscraper view of downtown Los Angeles from the vantage of a fine restaurant, where a camera showed the beefy red face of Orville Suits saying into a microphone, “I have no comment, no comment, no comment…” he kept repeating. He had that supercilious, conceited expression that I was used to seeing on the faces of politicians and crime bosses who were sure they were getting away with something.

“Two guesses who done your stiff,” said Caballo.

“That man isn't blood,” said Betsy. Betsy has something Caballo calls “vaydar.” She can spot a bloodsucker a mile away. I can smell 'em, so I usually have to be in the vicinity. Caballo, oddly, can't tell a thing. It's like he's sense deprived.

The broadcast cut back to the reporter in front of the Chinese. She walked and talked while behind her grinning tourists waved at the camera. “Mr. Lake was taken to UCLA Medical Center where he was pronounced dead of what a source close to the medical examiner has called a 'bizarre act of violence.'”

There followed a photo montage of Lake in newspaper photos. Giving speeches, accepting awards, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity…

Drew switched off the set. He looked more shook up than I've ever seen him.

“Do you know who that is?” he said.

“The stiff in the stall? No.”

“Justin Lake was the next Linus Torvalds,” Drew explained. “Rumor was he had coded the new cloud network.”

“Cloud?” I asked.

“It was only a theory, really,” said Drew. “4G would have enabled users to work off a worldwide net, like networking works in a company but in a larger, faster, global way.”

“Um, English?” I said.

Drew made a sour face. “Your hardware wouldn't limit your speed of access. Like that pathetic relic of a computer Caballo here uses? He'd actually be able to do something with it besides play Pong.”

“Hey!” said Caballo.

“Everyone everywhere could utilize the cloud of individual users' systems. It would make the Internet exponentially faster and more reliable.”

“Sounds like a clusterfuck of a mess to police,” I said. “There'll be kiddie porn showing up everywhere now.”

“
You
would think that,” he said. “Don't you see what it means that Lake is dead?”

That Peter would be working around the clock for at least the next month if we didn't catch this mofobag, I thought.

Caballo gave me a wise look, like he knew what I was thinking. “Suppose you tell us,” he said to Drew.

“Justin Lake was going to liberate the entire computer industry,” said Drew. “He was releasing the kernel next month, open source, just like Torvalds, despite bids from Jobs, Gates, and every other greedy mogul out there who wanted to privatize it.”

Caballo's eyes were starting to glaze over. “Tragic,” he said.

Drew had closed his zombie game and begun typing madly into a new Internet screen. His eyes were enormous and he looked freaked out. “The CIA has been trying to monitor him for years, and I'd heard he hired protection.”

“The CIA?” I mocked. Drew was a rabid conspiracy theorist.

He didn't even pause in his typing when he said, “Didn't 9/11 teach you anything?”

“So, you think we got a little time before we head back to Hollyweird?” Caballo did a leonine stretch and gave Betsy the once-over. Those tight jeans did nothing to conceal his bulging package, currently threatening to pop the zipper.

Betsy did a little hip circle and swayed toward him. Like her magnetic north was just being pulled toward Caballo's generous needle.

Drew slapped his mouse a few times. The computer monitors changed images. The map of Los Angeles with victim dots appeared again. His dark gaze sliced sideways at Betsy and Caballo, now noticeably ogling each other. He slammed his mouse a few more times. “You think the partner got a vampire to do his dirty work?” he asked Betsy.

She pulled her gaze from Caballo and frowned at Drew's extensive map. “When was the last draining we had near the tourist zone?”

“Three months ago, that teenager who'd been left up near the Hollywood Bowl,” said Drew. “Remember? He said he'd wandered down and found himself eating a tourist before he even knew what he was doing.”

Betsy sighed. She'd lost that one, and we'd ended up having to dust him. We ended up dusting most of them. Not many were highly motivated to bag it.

“It looked more like murder than dinner to me,” I said. “I bet Drew's on to something. Bet the partner paid someone to drain Lake.”

Betsy chewed at one of her fingernails. She wasn't the brightest bulb, but even she could see the danger here. The last great threat had been a clan of vampires in league with some very criminal citizens of Los Angeles. It was a lethal combo. If Suits had found a vampire who would kill for him, it was like the man had his very own nuclear arsenal.

“The LAPD might be willing to work with us,” I suggested. Besides, the sooner we found the rogue vampire and shut him down, the sooner Peter and I could get back to the vacation I'd planned.

Caballo sneered. “You mean your boyfriend?”

Boyfriend
? Like I was fourteen or something. “Peter's RHD. He has resources.”

“So do we,” said Betsy. She hadn't been, in life, the most law-abiding citizen and carried a certain innate distrust of authority figures, a distrust undoubtedly rooted in the same murky childhood that led her to save children and runaways in her current incarnation. Our little missions were generally the results of the failure of the system. Betsy wasn't inclined to assist the local PD.

“The cops would just get in our way,” she said.

Speak of the devil, my cell phone rang. It was Peter.

“I think I'm gonna take an early retirement,” he said. Peter said this frequently, so I didn't get too excited.

“What happened?”

“The usual. Fucking NSA sticking their big paws into everything.” His voice was low, and it sounded like he was cupping the phone with one hand. National Security was a sore spot for the RHD. Seemed a helluva lot of high-profile cases were swallowed into the black hole of NS

these days. Peter had had a human trafficking case snatched from his hands the year before. Five women dead and the probable perps in witness protection. He was still bitter about that one.

“Seems this guy was some kind of cyber genius. They've brought in the FBI and commandeered the murder room. Davis had us hand over our files.”

“I'm sorry,” I lied.

“How soon can you meet me at my place?” he said.

As if my feet had wings
. “Fifteen minutes,” I told him.

“So Adam, Peter tells me you served a tour in the Marines?”

I gave Peter a look. Bastard just grinned right back at me. I'd shown up at the door already unbuttoning my shirt. Barely waiting for him to unlatch the screen before I'd gotten him up against the wall and my tongue down his throat.

Then I heard the cough behind me.

I whirled around, shoving Peter behind me and flashing into my battle face.

A rather startled middle-aged woman stared back at me.

“Adam, this is Nancy Dickes,” said Peter.

I washed my face with one hand, checking to make sure my fangs weren't hanging out, and stuck the other paw out to grasp the woman's hand.

“Nancy's with the Bureau,” Peter explained. “She's the field agent I worked with on the Amtrak case. Remember?”

The hand that gripped mine was hard, dry, and muscular. I'd heard of her, though I'd never met her. She'd been called “Mulder” Dickes behind her back, after the television character who hunted aliens and urban myths. The Amtrak case, as I recalled, had featured several citizens who claimed a large black wolf with the eyes of a man had run onto the tracks just before the crash.

As it happened, they'd found traces of drugs in the engineer's body, and Peter had made a few jokes privately about the woman standing before me.

“
Ol' Moldy Dickes
.” The nickname had, of course, devolved to the lowest common denominator. “
What a nutcase
,” he'd said.

She didn't look like a nutcase, though she did look like she'd seen better days. The standard black suit, white shirt, and ugly tie all seemed a little worse for wear, wrinkled and just a tad threadbare at the cuffs. The tie needed a trip to the dry cleaner. She exuded a certain musty

smell, as if she'd been sleeping in her car. Blondish hair pulled back tight in a bun, with an inch of new growth that told me somebody hadn't had time to get her roots done. Tired lines around pale blue eyes regarded me with an unflinching weariness. I considered that “Moldy” suited her.

“I've heard a lot about you, Adam.”

I wondered what all Peter had told her. “And you still shake my hand?”

“Heh.” She barely laughed. One corner of her mouth turning up as if even that small humor was too much of an effort.

God knows what she had just seen. My eyes had that bulging sensation, and my lips were curling back. But it had been my experience that most citizens were blind to the unexplainable or distasteful. It was like their memories hit the Delete key seconds after recording something that did not compute.

Nancy “Moldy” Dickes had a considering expression, as if her mind were a little more open to the inexplicable.

Or maybe she was wondering why I'd just been sticking my tongue down Peter's throat.

“Hello, Adam,” said a familiar tenor voice, and Jonathan came around the corner from behind Nancy.

I felt my hackles rise again. “Hello, Jonathan.”

He smiled at me. Crisp cotton shirt, khaki slacks, hands stuffed in the pockets so they tugged snugly against what I'd already surmised was a fairly decent package. Somehow Jonathan always managed to look casual but not sloppy. Clean but never prissy. Well-hung without appearing to flaunt it.

“Jonathan happened to drop by,” Peter explained.

“Happened to?”

Jonathan gave Peter a melty look that made me want to pop him in the nose. “I forgot my sweater the other night,” he told me.

The other night?

“As it happens, Jonathan's something of a computer aficionado. I thought he might have some insight.”

“Of course he is.” Jonathan seemed to be something of an expert at everything. I guess being a perpetual student gave him plenty of time to read up on a wide range of subjects. And plenty of time to drop by Peter's place, leaving behind various articles of clothing. And plenty of insight into what exactly was wrong with yours truly.

“Peter was soaked to the skin and sneezing,” said Jonathan to me. “What the hell did you drag him into this time?”

“So you've got your sweater, right? Why are you still here?” I replied.

“Why are
you
here, Adam?” asked Jonathan. Whenever he smiled at me, he somehow managed to show
all
his teeth.