The God Hunter (11 page)

 

CHAPTER 25

GIFTS AND VANISHINGS

T
he phone rang. I was out cold; for a long time it was only ringing in my dreams. Then I woke and it still rang. I pushed myself up in bed and reached for the receiver, anticipating Seddon's smooth and cheery tones.

“Copeland,” I yawned.

What hit me was a barrage like a road drill stuffed into my ear.

“Copeland! Copeland! Where in fuck hell are you, Copeland?”

Anna Ganz. In all that had been going on, I'd practically forgotten her.

I told her, “I'm in bed.”

“Not in Hoboken hotel. Where?”

Maybe I was slow. I'd barely woken up, when all was said and done.

“You know where. You phoned me here—­”

“Name, number. No address.
Where
?”

So I told her, tried to outline, briefly, yesterday's events.

“You say you are
kidnapped
?
That
is explanation?”

I contemplated a cheap crack about the last time I'd been kidnapped, except she'd called it arrest. Then I thought better of it.

“Seddon left the number with you, right? Or got someone to do it for him? Yes?”

“No one
gave
me number. I am still detective, Chris Copeland. And I have friends who are detective, too. Even in New York City, I have friends.” Her English left her for a moment, and she said a few words in Hungarian I didn't need or want translating. Then, “It has taken afternoon, evening and morning. Just to make this stupid phone call. Waste of time, waste of time! What are you
doing
there? Why there, not here?”

“I said, I . . .” But memories of last night's chat with Seddon started drifting back to me. Anna Ganz was not, perhaps, my notion of the ideal partner in what lay ahead. But so far, she was all I had. “Look. I'm on the Upper East Side. You come over and—­”

“No. I have proposal. Coffee stand at Greeley Square, near Macy's. Subway train stops there. One half hour. We are clear?”

“Yeah, that's—­”

But she'd put the phone down. End of story.

I
got dressed. I made coffee with the coffeemaker in my room. Swilled it down. I wasn't quite hungover, but I knew that I'd been drinking. Drinking, jet-­lagged: eyeballs too big, head too small. I had a bad taste in my mouth the coffee couldn't quite get rid of, and a film of what felt like dirt over my skin which the shower didn't quite wash off.

I took the elevator to the lobby, stopped at the front desk.

“Can I leave a message here for Mr. Seddon?”

The desk clerk dabbed his keyboard.

“Mr. Seddon has already checked out, sir.”

I looked at my watch. It was barely nine. “You mean he's gone?”

He was good about it; scratched his chin, took the idiotic question in his stride.

“Um-­hm.”

“What time . . . ?”

“Around six. If you have a forwarding address or number, we'll be pleased to pass on any message, sir.”

“Gone where?”

“That I can't say.”

I digested all of this. Then the clerk said, “Are you Mr. Copeland? He left a package for you.”

It was not a package. It was a backpack. One glance and I knew what was inside, but I took a look, just to make sure.

All standard issue: reader, flask, cables. In addition: a new cell phone, which I shoved into my pocket, and still more—­a brand-­new passport, courtesy of HM Government. My name, my photo, and a lot of crisp, clean pages, waiting for their entry stamps. I'd thought these things took weeks to come through. Clearly not if you'd the right connections.

The passport, too, I pocketed.

“I'm booked in for another night?”

“Sir.”

“Well—­put it in my room, will you?”

He said he'd call a cab. I said I'd rather walk and stepped out onto the street.

As if Seddon had been carrying a spare pack just by purest chance. Never left the house without one. Pure luck, pure fluke, pure happenstance.

Like hell.

 

CHAPTER 26

FANTINO AND THE VAMPIRE BOY

A
nna was waiting there at Greeley Square, seated on a wall a little off the café area, clutching a cigarette and a paper cup, her sharp face circled in a halo of pollutants. Her legs were crossed, her shoulders hunched. She looked both angry and determined, small but strong, her body balled up like a fist.

I held my hands up, palms out.

“OK, OK. This wasn't how I planned things, this wasn't how I wanted it to go. I'm sorry, all right? I'm apologizing. Yeah?”

Her anger wasn't aimed at me, though. Not this time.

“Here,” she said, and handed me the cup. “You try.”

I tried.

“Is good, yes?”

“Very good,” I said. “Is that vanilla . . . ?”

“French vanilla. Yes.”

I passed the cup back. She unwound a little; her head came up, and something like a smile touched at her lips before she cloaked it with another drag on her cigarette.

“Now we are both doing wrong to each other. I have you locked up, you have me abandoned in America. But we share drinks, we make up. Yes?”

“I wasn't planning to abandon you. I said—­”

She punched me on the arm. “Joke, yes?”

“Yeah. Joke. OK.”

“And now,” she said, “someone we need to see.”

L
ieutenant Mike Fantino, Homicide, had known Ganz in her time here, and in Philly. He was waiting in the Old Town Bar near Union Square; they kissed each other on the lips, not passionately, but not like casual acquaintances, either. I stood back while they did their how-­you-­beens and you-­look-­goods. I won't say I felt jealous; rather, ignored, and the whole reunion thing went on a great deal longer than seemed necessary. I shifted weight from foot to foot, I fidgeted, I sighed, and was at last reduced to stepping up beside her and announcing, much too loudly, “Copeland. Call me Chris,” holding my hand out meaningfully.

He took it. Didn't shake it. But he gripped it, hard.

“Hi there, Chris.”

He was an average-­size guy, wearing a sports coat and a check shirt, with a belly swelling out over his pants belt. He didn't look that big or strong. But his handshake told me otherwise.

Perhaps it was professional. Dependable and reassuring. Bucks you up if he's on your side. Worries you in the event he's not.

We got coffee, took a little booth. There were film posters all around. “See that?” he said. “Signed.” We both peered at the signature of this famous actor, marveling; Fantino seemed more than a little proud, as if he'd personally acquired the thing. Then he opened play. He leaned back, easy and alert, the light catching a gold ring on his finger.

“First off, I am here as a personal favor. This is for Anna, OK?” He said this to me, not her. “It's an Immigration issue. Immigration, Fraud. Whatever. I work Homicide. Let's get that clear. And till he acts to make it otherwise, he's not my jurisdiction. Are we clear?”

I said, “He'll kill again.”

Lieutenant Fantino looked at me over his coffee cup. His eyes were very dark, long-­lashed, and strangely soft, near feminine, set in a face as male as it could be. He put the cup down, dabbed a napkin to his lips.

“You sound sure of that one, friend.”

“I'm sure.”

“Is pattern,” Anna said. “Faster all the time. If he is here—­we have three, four days, maybe. Then, a death. Death will be—­horrible. Like nothing you have ever seen.”

“Doubt that.”

“No. Truly.”

Fantino looked at Anna, then at me.

“He drains ­people,” I said.

“He drains them.”

“Like vampire,” she said.

“He drains their energy. You walk into a murder site, you feel it. You feel the absence.”

Fantino shrugged. He sipped his drink, wiped a hand across his mouth. “So he's a vampire. OK.”

“Something like.”

“Won't be my first.”

“Serious?”

“Hey.” He raised a forefinger, pointed it at me. “New York. You name it, we've got it.” He leaned back, laid his arm across the seat-­back next to him. “Guy I'm thinking of . . . Arne Peeters. This is, oh, ten years back? Big goth scene going here. Still is, I guess. Lot of kids, they like the vampire thing. They think it's cool. They like the look. They wear the shades and leather coats, the older ones, they have their own clubs, all that . . . Plus, this is my theory, these kids get a chance to play at sex, and if you're young, say, thirteen, fourteen, maybe not too sure about yourself, wondering which way you lean, whatever . . . So. Kids an' vampires. Well, some of 'em, the older ones, they want to go a little further, make it just a bit more real, see? And what's a vampire without fangs?

“I don't mean joke store fangs. I mean custom-­made, authentic
fangs,
which fit to a plate and slip over your teeth. Now, that costs money, like any kinda dentistry, and for some of these kids, money's no object. I mean, Christ, when
I
was their age, allowance was a coupla bucks for movies on the weekend. These kids . . . well. It's an act, just harmless fun for most of 'em, you know? But it costs. It really costs.

“Now Peeters, he had money. Also a record, mostly misdemeanors, juvie stuff, but nothing much. Burglarized a family friend once, told us he was looking for drugs. Charges dropped. That's all we had on him. Not that records tell you much. There's the official side, and there's . . . you know. The other side.”

“OK . . .”

“Here's the thing. Peeters got his fake fangs. Slipped 'em on his real teeth, just like all the others. 'Cept his were different. I only saw 'em when we brought him in. He had these, like, inch-­long canines, and in each of 'em, in back, there was a little groove that ran from the top to the bottom. Understand? He asked for that specifically. Know why?”

I shook my head.

“See, that groove, that's a channel. Sink your teeth in someone's neck, and what happens? Sure, you make a hole. But you also block it up. You won't get any blood flowing till you pull out. Unless you've got a little groove runs down each tooth. And then the blood shoots straight up. Especially,” he said, “if you hit an artery.”

“Nasty.”

“Yes in-­fucking-­deed. When we went into his background . . . Now there's the real history. The stuff that's not on paper. As a kid, he liked to set traps for the neighbors' cats. They'd disappear. A few days later, there'd be a little pile of fur and bones seen in the trash. Everyone knew, nobody said. An old lady caught him one time trying to make off with her Persian cat. He said he wanted to take it for a walk. Parents smoothed things over. You know? He got a talking to. Meantime he was drinking blood. Being goth wasn't a game, or a fashion style. The fashion was the cover. Got that?

“He took jobs—­clerking, computers, signed up for a journalism course—­but nothing lasted. Always some kind of fight, he got caught stealing, something like that. He started on marijuana, graduated to crack so fast it was like there was nothing in between. Soon he's doing the whole cocktail. Then the assaults started up.

“It was geared around club hours. Lower East Side, mostly. ­Couple in Williamsburg. All after hours. All tied with the scene. So we interviewed the kids. Some thought it was a joke. But some of 'em were scared, real scared. We heard his name. His street name, and his real name. The boy who played it rough, you know?

“It wasn't a tough case. We brought him in, he denied it all. But then he wanted to talk about himself. He was trying to
explain,
see? ‘I have an iron deficiency,' he told me. Went into lots of detail about red blood cells and hemoglobin and how it was supposed to work and how it didn't work for him, and if he didn't get the iron that he needed, he might die. Science 101. ‘Try iron pills?' I said. He told me that he couldn't digest 'em, got to get it
pre
-­digested, like a blood transfusion, or by drinking blood . . . ‘So you admit the whole thing?' ‘No!' he jumped up in his seat. He shook his head. ‘I need blood. I have a medical condition. But I wouldn't—­' blah blah blah. ‘Yeah,' I told him. ‘You got a medical condition, and I'll diagnose it. You're a fruitloop. OK?'

“And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the true, authentic story of the New York Vampire. I kid you not.”

We smiled. I felt I should applaud.

“So,” said Fantino, “that's what your guy's like?”

“Did anybody die?”

“No. No, they didn't. Assault, yes. No fatalities.”

“Then it's not like our guy, no.”

Anna said, “I've seen when our man kills. You will know it. Please, you will call? Get me into it?”

“You're sure he's here?”

She nodded.

“Not moved on yet? Big country here. If I was him—­wanted fugitive—­I'd be in Nebraska now. Just sayin'.”

“I think he's here,” I said, realizing I probably knew why, as well. “He'll want to recharge after the flight. It's getting less and less time between killings. I'd guess his energy's draining away. He,” I corrected myself, “
thinks
his energy's draining away. He'll want somewhere busy. Lots of ambient emotion. I bet he loves New York.”

“ ‘Ambient emotion'?”

“Uh-­huh.”

Fantino drained his coffee. “Well, I'll let you know.” He made to stand, then stopped himself. “I have a question.”

“Yeah?”

“Guy steals your passport. OK, it's an Immigration question, but, well, what the hell, here goes. He steals your passport.”

“Right.”

“How'd he get into the country? He steal your fingerprints, too?”

“I . . . I don't know,” I said.

Anna said, “Fake.”

“What?”

She held her hand up, fingers spread.

“He has Chris's fingerprints. From a glass, a plate, something in his room. From records, maybe. He makes fake prints. See?” She rubbed her fingertips together. “Made with—­with latex, I think. This I have seen before.”

“Really?” I said.

“Oh yes. He is genius—­mad, evil genius. Is growing problem, all across Europe.”

Fantino said, “Well, I've seen mad. And I've seen evil, too, I reckon. Maybe both together. But genius as well? Nope. Not this boy.” Then he smiled. “Anna—­look after yourself, huh?”

He left his coffee, half-­finished, and raised a hand to us.

Anna's eyes were on him till he left the bar.