The Undead Kama Sutra (8 page)

A
shaft of light hunted
for me. I slunk back and hid until the flying machine left.

I sniffed Johnson’s body, now a lifeless, bloodied heap.

The humans in the flying machine had cheated me. I snarled at them, frustrated. Angry.

In the distance, lights swung through the brush, silhouetting a line of men and their weapons against the glow of the burning boat. The fighting on the beach had stopped, the last echo of gunshots disappearing into the night. Above, the flying machine circled with the chop, chop of its wings drumming against my ears.

I didn’t have much time to search Johnson, and I couldn’t do so as a wolf.

I lay in a smooth patch of sand. Closing my eyes, I sum
moned the transformation back into a vampire. My legs stretched from their sockets, elongating and twisting as pain surged through my bones. Skin burned where fur retracted into flesh. The worst of the agony was when my snout blunted and my skull and jaws re-formed.

I opened my eyes. The pain ebbed and my muscles relaxed. As I gazed about, the world seemed emptier, the sounds duller, the smells fainter.

Naked, I rolled to my hands and knees.

The line of men moved closer. Radio calls and static crackled through the night. The helicopter hovered above, shepherding the group with its searchlight.

I crawled to Johnson’s body. I pulled the satchel with the money from his shoulder, opened the bag, and thumbed the pads of hundred-dollar bills, estimating a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. No sense in wasting the cash. I looped the satchel’s strap over my head. Searching his pockets, I found a magazine of ammunition, cigarettes, a lighter, keys, a coke spoon, coins, and his wallet.

A loudspeaker boomed over the island. “This is the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.”

The Sheriff’s Office? Johnson, the stupid criminal bastard, had betrayed his own. This death might have been a favor.

The loudspeaker continued: “You are surrounded and outgunned. Put down your weapons and come out with your hands behind your head.” The message was repeated in Spanish.

Red auras floated through the brush like a string of glowing balloons. The auras belonged to police agents advancing closer, now about two hundred meters away. No time to go through the wallet. I stuffed it inside the satchel.

The agents called to one another. There was no doubt this was a drug war; they were as well-armed as infantrymen and very trigger-happy. Laser pointers from their guns traced before them, like glowing red feelers probing the shadows of the brush.

Except for the bag of money slung over my shoulder, I stood naked with my dork hanging in the sea breeze. I crouched to hide behind a bush. To escape the island, I had to get to my boat, which was moored in a swampy inlet behind me, about a hundred meters away. The agents were fifty meters away and moving closer. I could slip into the brush and make it to the boat except…my wallet and ID remained in the pile of clothes I had stashed when I had transmutated into a wolf.
Damn.

The clothes were to my left, somewhere within a grove of palmettos and saw grass. The agents hadn’t reached the spot yet. I counted fifteen red auras, clumped into groups of three. One group turned in my direction.

“The grass here is trampled,” an agent said. The optic tubes of his night-vision goggles gave him a lobster-face. “And I see shoe prints.”

Despite his night-vision goggles, I had the advantage with my vampire eyes. But they had the advantage of numbers and guns.

“The copter nailed one of the assholes around here,” a companion added.

The first agent stopped. “Hold on. There’s another set of prints. Someone barefoot.”

I glanced at my naked feet. Those were my prints.

These agents were no more than twenty meters away. A laser pointer swung toward me. The red line quivered across the branches and leaves above my head. Careful. Steel-jacketed lead slugs could hack my flesh as effectively as silver bullets.

If they were looking for a barefoot suspect, I’d give them one. I lay on my back next to Johnson and shut my eyes.

Brush scraped against fabric. I smelled perspiration from the agent, and hot oil and burned ammunition from his recently fired gun.

A strong light played over my face, making the insides of my eyelids glow. “Here’s the second guy.”

Boots scuffed the earth by my head. “Son of a bitch is naked.”

“You noticed?” Another man’s voice. “You feds got a real grasp of the obvious.” A gloved hand touched my shoulder. “Don’t see a mark on him.”

The first man said, “Don’t recognize him from our list of suspects. Maybe he’s got ID in that bag or shoved up his ass.”

His breath and the odor of a menthol cigarette puffed against my face.

I opened my eyes.

He crouched beside me. His nose was inches from mine. I hit him full-force with vampire hypnosis.

His aura flared like a match. His pupils dilated and his expression went slack. He fell on his ass. The submachine gun slipped from his grasp and clattered to the ground.

The other two agents stepped back. I rotated on my heels, zinging upward in the classic vampire fashion.

“What the f—” one gasped and then froze when I zapped him.

His companion jerked an M-16 to his shoulder. I locked onto his gaze and instantly hypnotized him as well.

Their jaws drooped and they stood slump-shouldered. Hypnosis would hold them long enough for me to escape.

Another group of agents moved toward where my clothes were stashed. I had to act fast.

The palm trees grew close together, the fronds overlapping. I sprinted for the nearest tree and hustled up the trunk, where I leaped to the next tree. From that tree I bounded to the next.

“What was that?” An agent turned on the flashlight attached to his submachine gun and panned the cluster of fronds where I had been. I kept still.

“The wind. I don’t know.”

“Wind, hell, let’s see what jumps out.” The agent shouldered his submachine gun and opened fire. The bullets chopped the tree and tattered palm fronds whipped through the air. He quit shooting and examined the gnarled tree with the light from his gun. He turned off the light and lowered his weapon.

An agent at the far end of the line halted at the spot where my clothes were. He yelled, “I found something.”

Better hurry. I leaped from tree to tree, nimble as a monkey, silent as a bat.

Three agents clustered around my clothes. I jumped and landed beside them.

Startled, they turned toward me. First snatching my clothes, I shook my nakedness and taunted, “Wooga, wooga, wooga.” No need to hypnotize them; I wanted them to panic.

Pie-eyed with surprise, they opened fire and shouted into their radios. By then I was back up the tree, my clothes tucked under one arm and the satchel of money swinging from my shoulder.

I bounded to the next group and repeated my “wooga” introduction. They started shooting. Bullets clipped the brush in every direction. The other groups opened fire and, within a minute, they were gunning for one another and yelling:

“Watch out. We got one wacked on meth.”

“Shoot the bastard. Drop him.”

The helicopter returned. Its searchlight probed the ground and held for a moment on the outline of an agent huddled among the palmettos and bushes.

“Police. Police,” he shouted, panicked like he was about to shit his pants. “Don’t shoot.”

I ran through the brush toward where my boat was moored in the bog. I stepped through the muck and tossed the satchel and my clothes into the boat. I cast loose and climbed aboard.
The helicopter and the confused shooting masked my starting of the Evinrude. I kept the throttle cracked enough to quietly back out from under the overhanging vines and cypress moss and into the surf. I pointed the bow to the dark sea and, with the muffled outboard churning the water, slipped away.

I wasn’t worried about what the agents would report. That a naked Tarzan whacked on meth jumped from tree to tree?

My path to the island had been to follow Johnson, and now I had to guess a reverse course. An hour northwest at moderate speed, then turn northeast until I returned to the Keys. The compass ball mounted to the windshield didn’t move. I tapped the plastic housing, to free the compass. The cheap housing broke apart and the compass ball fell to the deck.

What now? I found the Big Dipper and fixed the North Star to keep myself oriented. Sooner or later I should run into one of the islands in the Keys.

What did I have to show for tonight’s work? My best lead was dead, a crooked deputy shot and killed by his fellow cops.

I pulled Johnson’s wallet from the satchel. Maybe I’d find something. I went through his wallet. Monroe County Sheriff Office ID. Credit cards. Gift cards and coupons. After I read each one and decided that it added nothing to my investigation, I tossed it overboard.

Just as I was about to fling one business card away, I stopped and read it again. The card belonged to a hotel resort
in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Along the bottom was the name of the resident golf pro. I remembered Odin’s enigmatic clue: Goodman.

Now I knew where I could find a Goodman. The golf pro. His name was Dan Goodman.

F
inally, the trail was
once again hot, hotter than before. I had a strong lead to the name Odin had given me—Goodman—and where I could find him.

But a golf pro? What would a golf pro have to do with the murder of an alien and the chalice, Marissa?

I slipped the business card into the satchel and laid the satchel on the deck by my feet.

Before me, the horizon lightened from indigo to cerulean. The eastern stars faded. Sunrise approached.

Despite my spider-bite vaccination against the sun, I had my doubts. My mouth went dry. I was scared. For centuries, it had been the first rays of the new day’s sun that incinerated vampires. It was like facing a tiger I knew could never be completely tamed.

Even worse, I should’ve spotted land by now and I was getting hungry and lightheaded. Rummaging through the boat I found nothing but empty bags of Doritos. There were obviously no cups of blood lying about. The fuel gauge indicated that the tank was full to the brim—a lie, considering I’d been motoring for a good part of the night. At any moment I expected the Evinrude to cough and quit. Well, I did have all those hundred-dollar bills, which meant I had plenty of paper handy in case I had to blow my nose.

I could’ve planned this sojourn better. For starters, stealing a better ride instead of this piece of rusted junk.

My consolation was that I knew how to find Goodman—Dan Goodman—who might be the man the alien Gilbert Odin had fingered as his murderer. Goodman killed Odin for what reason? It had to be more than Odin being an alien. And, if so, would I have to include Goodman as part of my investigation ordered by the Araneum?

White light scrolled up from the horizon. Dawn was about to break.

Not wanting to take more chances, especially when it came to my privates, I shook the sand out of my cargo shorts and put them on. I crouched behind the instrument panel.

The rays of the sun unfolded in a rush of brilliance. Not burned to a crisp yet. Still, I waited until shadows slanted across the deck, telling me that the sun had risen safely above the horizon.

I stood. The yellow ball of the sun hovered majestically before me. Its heat warmed my skin, a gentle, loving caress.

Had we broken the sun’s tyranny? My fear at the cruel bite of solar rays ebbed as I noticed how much I’d tanned. The sun was no longer a ravenous beast to be cowered from—I’d seen those morning beams devour vampires—but more like a friendly dog that wanted to cuddle.

If the sun could be defied, then what else about our vampire nature could be altered? Enjoying the sunlight without protective cosmetics was a human privilege. Was this a step to becoming more human, and, if so, could we find a way to forever quench our barbarous thirst for blood or reverse our accursed undead immortality?

Become human again? I nurtured the idea like a tender sprout. What would those fruits be—real love? No longer living as fraud beneath a disguise of makeup? Shedding the fear that I might be outed as a vampire and destroyed?

Suppose I did become human again? Would the Araneum let me live with the secrets of the supernatural realm? Or would I be killed—this time for sure, no undead funny business—to protect those secrets?

I had barely figured out how to exist as a vampire, and these new questions made my head hurt.

Squinting toward the east, I spied slivers of land in the haze of the distant water. I tapped the throttle lever anxiously, hoping that enough gas remained in the tank.

The slivers of land grew into a series of humps that I recognized as the Snipe Keys. If vampires counted only on skill for survival, we’d be extinct by now. I was grateful for all the breaks that Lady Luck pushed my way.

At last I saw Houghton Island and I chugged victoriously into the lagoon and headed for the pier.

Carmen and several chalices—she was topless, they were nude—tended the mooring lines of her boat. Carmen saw me and walked to the end of the pier, where she waited, smiling.

I nudged the speedboat against the pilings.

Carmen set her hands on her hips. Man, what a great pair of boobs. It was a good thing I wore shorts or she would’ve seen me weathervane toward her. I stayed behind the instrument console and let the moment pass.

Carmen stood on tiptoes to get a better look inside the boat. “You’re wearing shorts? I was hoping you were naked. This
is
southern Florida; all you really need is a tan and a smile.”

I spread my arms to show off my bare torso. “Here’s my tan. And here’s my smile.”

“Well, you do look good. The parts I can see.” Carmen moved to the edge of the dock and planted a foot on the gunwale of my boat. She kept her expression calm but her aura grew writhing tendrils of apprehension. “Anything about the murders?” Her voice was low. “Marissa the chalice? The alien?”

I picked up the satchel and flashed the business card with Goodman’s name. “Pay dirt. I find this guy and chances are good that I solve the murders, save the Earth women, and learn what the aliens are up to.”