Vampire Moon (28 page)

 
      
 
I was quiet, leaning my hip on the fender of the minivan, my hands folded under my chest. A small, hot wind blew through the clearing.

 
      
 
“So then I ask myself, ‘What will you do if he does show up? What will you do if Samantha Moon really can deliver him?’” He lowered his head and looked over at me, his face partially hidden in shadows. I could mostly see through shadows, but I doubted he could. I’m sure to him I was nothing more than a silhouette. A cute silhouette, granted. “But that’s the easy part, Sam. If you deliver him to me, I will hurt him. I will do everything within my power to make him feel the pain he has made me feel. But first I will play my wife’s last message to him. I want him to hear her voice. I want my wife’s voice to be the last thing that son-of-a-bitch hears.”

 
      
 
A single prop airplane flew low overhead, its engine droning steadily and peacefully. A bug alighted on my arm. A mosquito. Now there’s irony for you. I flicked it off before I inadvertently created a mutant strain of immortal mosquitoes, impervious to bug spray or squishing.

 
      
 
Stuart went on. “But I’m going to give him a fighting chance, more than he gave my wife, the fucking coward. I’m not sure what sort of fighting chance I will give him, but I will think of something.”

 
      
 
We were quiet. The woods itself wasn’t so quiet. Tree branches swished in the hot wind, and birds twittered and sung and squawked. A quiet hum of life and energy seemed to emanate from everywhere, a gentle combination of every little thing moving and breathing and existing. Sometimes a leaf crunched. Sometimes something fast and little scurried up a trunk. A bird or two flashed overhead, through the tangle of branches. Insects buzzed in and out of the faint, slanting half-light.

 
      
 
Stuart was looking down. A bug had alighted on his bald head, threatening its perfection. He casually reached up and slapped his head, then wiped his palm. Whew! Disaster averted. Stuart, I saw, was crying gently, nearly
imperceptively
.

 
      
 
I waited by the van. He cried some more, then nodded and wiped his eyes. His whole bald head was gleaming red.

 
      
 
“Let’s do this,” he said, nodding some more.

 
      
 
“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

 
      
 
“No, this is the best answer. This is the
only
answer, Sam. I want justice, but the courts won’t give it to me.”

 
      
 
“Jerry Blum is a professional killer. He’s going to know how to fight. And he’s going to kill you the first chance he gets.”

 
      
 
“I have been taking boxing lessons these past few weeks, since our last talk.”

 
      
 
“Boxing lessons where?” I asked.

 
      
 
“A little Irish guy. Says he knows you. Says you’re a freak of nature.”

 
      
 
“Jacky’s always exaggerating,” I said.

 
      
 
“Says you knocked out a top-ranked Marine boxer.”

 
      
 
“The top-ranked Marine boxer had it coming to him.”

 
      
 
Stuart looked at me. The red blotches that had covered his head were dissipating. He looked so gentle and kind and little. I couldn’t imagine him taking on a crime lord single-handedly. “You are a fascinating woman, Ms. Moon.”

 
      
 
“So they say,” I said, and decided to change the subject, especially since the subject was me. “Stuart, there’s a very real chance you aren’t walking out of this grove alive in a few days.”

 
      
 
That seemed to hit him. He thought about it. “Well, this is a good place to die, then, isn’t it?”

 
      
 
“You don’t have to die, Stuart,” I said.

 
      
 
“No,” he said. “I suppose I could always just shoot him before he knows what hits him. Or have a whole array of weapons at my disposal.”

 
      
 
I said nothing. I was liking this plan less and less.

 
      
 
“But he killed my wife, Sam. He put fear in her. He put terror in her. He made the woman I love feel
terror
. Think about that. He made the woman I loved, the woman I had committed my life to, the woman I was going to start a family with, die in a fiery crash. I hate him. I hate him more than you could ever know. Yes, I suppose I should just step out of the shadows with a gun. I suppose I should just level it at him, and blow his fucking brains out. Maybe I still will. I don’t know. But I want to beat him, Sam. With my fists. I want to hear his nose break. I want to see his blood flow. I want to punch him harder than I have ever punched anything in my life. I want to see the terror in
his eyes
when he realizes he will never get up again, that he will die in that moment.”

 
      
 
“And when you kill him?” I asked. “What then?”

 
      
 
Stuart turned to me and looked perplexed by the question. He hadn’t, of course, thought much beyond this. A red welt was blistering on the side of his head, where the mosquito had gotten to him a fraction before he had gotten to the mosquito. The blood-sucking little bastard.

 
      
 
“I don’t know, Sam. I don’t know.” He paused, then looked me directly in the eye. “Will you still help me?”

 
      
 
I was never much for vigilante justice. I had taken an oath years ago to uphold the law. This was very much outside the law. This was also crazy.

 
      
 
These are crazy times,
I thought.

 
      
 
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

 
      
 
“Thank you, Sam.”

 
      
 
And when he said those words, a dull tingling sensation rippled through me, and something very strange happened to the air around Stuart. A very faint, darkish halo briefly surrounded his body. The black halo flared once, twice, and then disappeared.

 
      
 
Chapter Forty

 
      
 
There was a knock on my hotel door.

 
      
 
Monica, who had been lying on her side and reading, snapped her head around and looked at me.

 
      
 
I stepped away from my laptop and moved over to the bedside table. I quietly pulled open the top drawer and removed my small handgun from its shoulder holster. Then I slipped quietly over and stood to one side of the door. Never directly in front.

 
      
 
“Who’s there?” I asked.

 
      
 
“Detective Sherbet.”

 
      
 
I grinned. I was quite fond of the detective, who was an aging homicide investigator here in Fullerton. A few months back, Sherbet had helped me solve Kingsley’s attempted murder case. And spending long nights sitting together in the rain on stakeouts had gotten us close. But not so close that I had revealed to him my super-secret identity.

 
      
 
I unlocked and opened the door to find the big detective standing there holding a greasy bag of donuts. He was also breathing loudly through his open mouth, and I realized just the effort of walking down the hallway had been a bit much for the old guy. The donuts didn’t help.

 
      
 
“Got a minute?” he asked.

 
      
 
“Do I have a choice?” I asked.

 
      
 
“Not really.”

 
      
 
“In that case, come in, detective.”

 
      
 
He came in, nodded at me, spotted Monica on the bed, and went straight over to her. He took both her hands in his one free hand. The other, of course, was holding the donuts. Monica sat up immediately when she saw him, and now she looked a bit like a teenage girl talking to her grandfather.

 
      
 
“Hello, Monica,” he said warmly. “Are you keeping Samantha out of trouble?”

 
      
 
She smiled—or tried to smile—and then she burst into tears. Detective Sherbet calmly set the greasy bag on the night table, then sat next to her and put an arm around her. He made small, comforting noises to her, and they sat like this for a few minutes.

 
      
 
Sherbet squeezed her shoulders one more time, patted her hands, and then stood. He grabbed the bag of donuts and led me out onto the balcony. He closed the sliding glass door behind me. He then sat on one of the dusty, cushioned chairs, calmly opened the oily bag, peered inside, and selected a bright pink donut.

 
      
 
“I thought you didn’t like the color pink,” I said. “Or, for that matter, pink anything.”

 
      
 
“I’m coming around,” he said, and held up the effeminate-looking donut.

 
      
 
“Speaking of pink,” I said. “How’s your son?”

 
      
 
Sherbet paused mid-chew, breathing loudly through his nose. He finished the bite and looked at me sideways. “That was a low blow, Ms. Moon.”

 
      
 
“You know I adore your son.”

 
      
 
“I do, too,” he said. “The kid’s fine. I caught him trying on his mother’s pantyhose the other day. Pantyhose.”

 
      
 
“What did you do?” I asked, suppressing a giggle.

 
      
 
“Honestly? I went into my bedroom, shut the door, and sat in the dark for an hour or two.”