Sweeter Than Wine Page 6

  In one swift movement, the traveler seized the animal, twisted its head to break its neck, then took the girl, almost paralyzed with fear and grief, by her shoulders and spoke to her quietly for a minute or two.

  Under rigid control, and following the traveler’s commands, the girl lifted the body of her dead companion, carried it to a dumpster a few yards away, and without visible expression on her face—but with tears flooding down her cheeks—lifted the lid and threw the animal away.

  They walked to the end of the alley, turned, and started for the abandoned motel. On the way, they passed an old woman breathing oxygen from a tube and using a wheeled walker. She noticed the young woman’s tears.

  “Are you all right, dear?” she asked, concern etching her wrinkled face.

  The traveler answered, “Her dog just died.”

  The girl nodded and followed the traveler back to the motel.

  Safe, secure shelter for the day, a dark, quiet, comfortable place to sleep until sunset—all those tablecloths together, clean on the side in contact with the tables, would make excellent bedding—a tasty “midnight” snack, and perhaps, with sufficient restraint, even breakfast.

  The traveler had certainly fared worse over a long, eventful lifetime.

  9: FRIENDS IN NEED

  “Speak no evil, that thou mayest not hear it

  spoken unto thee.”—Baha’u’llah

  Mornings and vampires don’t mix. This vampire, anyway, I can’t speak for others. I don’t know any other vampires I could speak for. Except for lovely Surica, back in 1944, I’ve never met another vampire.

  I’ve often wondered about that. But then I wonder about a lot. It’s a desirable quality in a detective, I suppose, but it’s also annoying.

  This vampire doesn’t seem to need much sleep, though. My theory is that, twenty-four hours a day, the virus takes care of the physical repair folks normally undergo in their sleep. What that leaves is whatever happens in the human mind during sleep. Science doesn’t know what that is, but says that if it doesn’t happen, you eventually die. Cats, they claim, deprived of Rapid Eye Movement sleep get odd lesions in their brains, a lesion supposedly epidemic in winos whom alcohol takes directly from the waking state to deep sleep without passing through REM.

  Sorry, make that “homeless persons” or maybe even “homeless peroffspring”.

  I got up, drank my blood for the day—you don’t want to hear this, but the virus makes it taste like everything wonderful you ever ate or drank, like the elixir of the gods—and started on some real breakfast: three eggs over medium, hash browns, refried black beans, on a huge flour tortilla (sometimes I fry it in a skillet, which makes it nicely crisp and bubbly), the whole thing smothered in green chili. Tabasco and Cholula to taste. Huevos rancheros, for the rancher with balls.

  Fiddlestring will eat green chili gladly enough, provided it has plenty of little chunks of pork in it, but it makes him fart a lot, and he greatly prefers a can of smoked sardines in “spring water”, mashed up with a fork. The damned things are good—lots of calcium; I often eat them myself—but unless I handle them just right (the secret is to put the empty can and lid into a Ziploc bag before throwing it in the trash), they screw up my sense of smell for hours, afterward.

  My kitchen is big and sunny and bright, white walls and ceiling, white cabinets, laminated birch furniture, and stainless fixtures. Ceramic tiled floor. I’d spent a fortune putting special glass in the windows that cut the ultraviolet down to what you’d expect from the bright light of a full moon, which is to say, nothing. It’s a pleasant room.

  I was halfway through my splendid huevos when at once there came a rapping, as if someone gently tapping, tapping at my back porch door. Only Quinn and someone more. I could hear them talking, and caught her scent. I arose from the counter, stepped onto the glassed-in porch, careful of the direct morning sunlight that was about to flood it, and turned a key that lives permanently in the old-timey lock.

  Quinlan “Quinn” Kowalski stepped onto the porch as I made room for him. He needed room. Even in the world of professional wrestling, he’d been known as “Man Mountain Quinn”, six foot three, 300 pounds, with long silver hair and a massive beard that made him look like the old fat Las Vegas Jesus. The man had worked his way through college and graduate school that way, had a PhD with oak leaf clusters in physics, and knew more about computers than any other sapient in the Known Universe.

  He held a big carrying case I recognized.

  Right behind Quinn came Tran Thi Thu-Quyen—also pronounced “Quinn”, his partner, confidant, lover, and, for all I knew, wife. A formidable mathematician, she was all of four-feet eleven inches, probably weighed 95 pounds soaking wet with a bottle of pop in each pocket, as Brother Dave Gardner used to say—or was it Justin Wilson? Strangers often took her for Quinn’s adopted Vietnamese daughter.

  They thought it was funny.

  Quinn set the case down on the table, looked at my plate, then at the pans on the stovetop. “Mmm! Gay ranchero food! Got any to spare, J?”

  “Stop that!” Quyen ordered with mock ferocity. To me: “We’re on a diet just now—high protein liquids—um, different from yours.” She sat down at the other end of the table, and Fiddlestring hopped up into her lap. In no time, he was purring loud enough to rattle the windows.

  I nodded. “I understand. Make mine Clamato.”

  She giggled. Quinn and Quyen made a handsome living as freelance scientific consultants and expert trial witnesses—although Quinn took some delight in calling himself a “defrocked physicist”. They probably knew more about me than I did, and a great deal of what I did know about being a vampire, I’d learned as a direct result of their research.

  I’d met them several years ago when they went to buy a particular microscope and discovered that someone else—guess who—had bought the last one in the state. Not wanting to put their work on hold while another microscope got back-ordered, they’d persuaded the scientific supply outfit in Denver to call me and get permission for them to drop by.

  In the end, they’d borrowed that microscope and other bits of equipment several times. (They were bringing it back again today.) We shared certain interests and a particular outlook on life. We’d visited, gone out together, and barbecued in their back yard and mine. They knew Anton’s family—Quinn had tutored Patrick in computer science; his companion had done high school physics with Amber—and my cat was absolutely crazy about Quyen. They’d never bought my lame-assed stories about lupus or porphyria or whatever, and had guessed what it really was with me the third or fourth time we’d gotten together.

  And kept their mouths shut.

  To get it out of the way of conversation, I took the microscope into the spare bedroom I use as a study, and came back to find Quyen making a fresh pot of coffee. Quinn sat in her place, one pants leg pulled up, making adjustments to his prosthetic leg. He’d never told me what had cost him that leg, from the knee down, and I’d never asked, but he would squint one eye and make pirate noises from time to time.

  He looked up at me now, and said, “Arrrrh!”

  I sat, taking a steaming cup from Quyen when it was ready. I don’t know how, but she made better coffee than I do with the same stuff. She sat at my right, between us. For a while we were silent. Suddenly Quinn said, “We need to talk to you about something. Ever sweep this room?”

  I nodded toward the pantry. “Only with a broom,” I answered.

  Quinn grimaced. He felt that it was his job to make sorry jokes like that. Quyen grinned. He said, “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “I do. The place is clean.” I meant it. If somebody had bugged my home and office, I would be able to smell their fingerprints on the devices—or the odor of their latex gloves—and possibly even hear the bugs working. I explained that to my friends and asked what was up.

  “All right,” said Quinn. “We had a visitor yesterday. Represented himself as working for a federal agency. He showed us a badge and ID, but
I’m not sure if that means anything. He wanted to know all about you.”

  “Moi? What agency? What did he want to know?” I’d carefully avoided any kind of notoriety, and kept under the radar and off the grid as much as possible, for many years, so this was more than mildly unsettling. I’d paid what taxes I couldn’t get out of through a dummy corporation.

  “No Such Agen—” Quinn started.

  Quyen stepped in. “How long have we known you. How well. What do you do for a living. How much money do you have. Who are your other friends. Do you have guns. Do you use drugs. Do you ever go out in the daylight.”

  That last question really made me worry.

  It appeared that somebody knew I was a vampire.

  10: IS IT SAFE?

  “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”—Henry David Thoreau

  “Okay, open wide. This won’t take long.”

  He was right. It never did. And, although it was the silliest thing I was compelled to do from time to time, it was necessary for survival.

  T.W. Beemort, D.D.S., ran a small dental practice within easy walking distance of my home, although I seldom walked there. I had chosen him, originally, because his building, a former residence, had a roof with a deep overhang. I could park under it and get through his door in just a few seconds, without having to expose myself to direct sunlight. Of such constraints, I reflected, is an individual’s life composed.

  T.W., I should explain, kept my fangs under control.

  He was a big guy, heavily muscled, with sun-darkened forearms, and just about the shiniest bald head I’ve ever seen. I was always surprised that he didn’t have any visible ink work. Or maybe an earring.

  Despite his outward tough appearance, he was also the gentlest dentist who had ever worked on me, and probably the best educated and most literate. I didn’t know what the man pursued as a hobby—his Muzak played 60s rock—or to stay in physical condition, but my guess was that it involved motorcycles, and maybe martial arts. He looked like a sai guy. I wondered if he ever visited Bryce’s Bar in Otomy.

  I never had any other dental problems. No tooth decay, no abscess-generating streptowhatsit stood a snowball’s chance against the virus. I hadn’t had a sore throat, a cold, or the flu since 1944. But my goddamn upper canine incisors just wouldn’t stop growing until they were twice the length of those on either side. Sharp, too. If I left it too long, I’d end up nicking the tip of my tongue on them every time.

  Your own blood doesn’t do you any good, vampirewise.

  I leaned back and tried to relax. The procedure never hurt, but the noise of T.W.’s handpiece, whirring through my enamel and dentine, up into my brainpan, never failed to remind me of that scene—you know the one—from Marathon Man. Dr. Mengele meets Tootsie. The enamel would reappear in couple of days. The rest of the tooth would start growing until I had to come back and see T.W. again in a few weeks.

  Usually, we talked about books and movies—rather, he did, when my mug was full of dental equipment. Today, though, it was different. Through the noise of his micro-jackhammer, he said, “Somebody was in here asking after you yesterday afternoon. Somebody with government credentials.”

  “Rowrgh?” I replied, a little alarmed after Quinn and Quyen this morning.

  “The trouble is, I happened to glance at a wall mirror in the waiting room, and his hand—which had seemed to hold his badge flipper and ID card, was empty in the mirror. I looked back, and they were there again. Then I looked in the mirror again and they were gone.”

  “Vernffle!” I attempted to exclaim.

  “What does it mean, J? Can you tell me what it means?”

  “Yurhnurngna—” I sat up and took the hose out of my mouth. I hadn’t been anesthetized. “It means someone, someone like me—you know what that means—is checking me out. What did he want to know, T.W.?”

  “Everything that I know—about you. I told him I didn’t know you very well.” Which was a lie. T.W. played poker every Thursday evening at my house, with Anton, Quinn, and Quyen. “He wanted to see your X-rays.”

  “Interesting. And you told him...?”

  “To come back with a warrant. Sometimes I think I watch too much TV.”

  I hadn’t known that, about phony vampire credentials in a mirror, but it was a good thing to have learned. I’d be more careful in the future.

  If there was a future.

  ***

  Greeley stinks.

  There’s no way to put it more politely than that. When the wind blows from a certain quarter, the smell of that city’s world-famous feedlots—for both cattle and sheep, a deadly olfactory combination—can be overwhelming, even to those without a vampire’s heightened sensibilities. Only worse thing I’ve ever smelled was a rendering plant.

  And tannery.

  I keep thinking about having a fancy new air conditioning system installed in the Suburban, with those super microfine filters you always hear about in vacuum cleaner commercials. Then the wind shifts, the awful smell goes away for a while and—just like the leaky roof in the Andrews Sisters’ song Manana once it’s stopped raining—I forget.

  The Andrews Sisters? Think of the McGuire Sisters in military—

  The McGuire sisters? Okay, think of the Lennon Sisters, then.

  The Lennon Sisters? Guess you had to be there.

  Greeley lies about as far east of I-25 as New Prospect lies west, so that horrible smell travels about 40 miles to get here. People often complain about it. Politicians often threaten to do something about it. But I’ve never heard anybody complaining about their T-bone, their lamb chop, their nice woolen winter blanket, or their Cordoba, upholstered in fine Corinthian leather. It all kind of balances out, somehow.

  Driving up the alley and pulling into the garage behind my house, beside the PT Cruiser, I waited for the big double door to come down before getting out of the car. It was much better in here; it only smelled of oil, gasoline, insecticides, weed killer, and bags of fertilizer.

  I threw a couple of big bolts that locked the door down securely.

  I don’t know why it’s become traditional for an attached garage to communicate with the house through a door in the kitchen. I’ve been in a few where that wasn’t the case, but it was with mine, a fine old Arts and Crafts model built in the early 1920s on a quiet, tree-shaded street in one of the oldest neighborhoods in New Prospect. The garage had been added a couple of decades afterward and lay mostly behind the house.

  Fine with me, less grass to mow. Hard enough to do as it is, in the dark, neighbors on both sides, also front and back, complaining. Given vampire strength I can use a non-powered mower, but I do it enthusiastically.

  Extracting a small package from an inside pocket and laying it on the desk in my office, I took my hat and coat to the closet, and would have put a sweater on, like Mr. Rogers, to cover up my .45, except that I hadn’t been carrying it that morning, not wanting to worry T.W’s receptionist. But with what my dentist had just told me, on top of the news from Quinn and Quyen, I wouldn’t be leaving home without it again until I knew why this faux fed was going around asking after me.

  For now, having been greeted by Fiddlestring, and making sure his bowl was full—I keep dry food for him all the time, adding fishy snacks more or less randomly—I went upstairs to the bedroom where I keep my weapons, took my .38 from beside the .45, in a hidden drawer built into the bedframe, and dropped it into my right-hand front pants pocket.

  Then I hurried back downstairs to the office.

  I had an appointment with an important client.

  THE TRAVELER: LEOTI, KANSAS

  “An evil life is a kind of death.”—Ovid

  The stolen blue Camaro pulled into the tiny village of Leoti, Kansas as a blush of false dawn began to paint the sky behind it. Windmills turned in the prairie breeze, where the car had just come from, and ahead, a tall water tower stood gleaming white in the rising sun.

  Risking being caug
ht by daylight, the traveler, feeling hungry, stopped at a restaurant on a street that grandly called itself Broadway, for something resembling breakfast. Choosing a secluded corner booth, the traveler ordered coffee, four eggs, and country sausage.

  Protein seemed important at the moment.

  The room was warm, noisy, and smelled of pancakes, maple syrup, and coffee. It was filled with a group of individuals who might have come straight from a Norman Rockwell painting—workmen, farmers, a woman who could easily have been the town’s librarian, another who appeared to be a nurse—perhaps as many as twenty-five or thirty of them, mostly in late middle age, who swapped jokes and good-natured insults over their bacon, waffles, and French toast and were obviously long accustomed to having breakfast together every morning. It was going to very dangerous to feed properly in a town as small as this one.

  The same horrible music—“Stand By Your Man” this time—was being played in the kitchen, interspersed at intervals by the farm report.

  “Lee-OH-tuh,” said the waitress, as she delivered the stranger’s food, correcting the traveler’s pronunciation in response to a question about motels in the area. “I’m from Hayes, originally. I don’t know why it’s spelled the way it is. Must be some kind of Indian name.”

  “No, honey,” said an elderly waitress who had overheard her younger colleague. “It was named after Leoti Kibbee, one of our local pioneers.”

  An elderly man in a plaid wool farmer’s jacket swiveled on his stool at the breakfast bar. “I beg to disagree, Mabel,” he said in a surprising Oxford accent. “The best evidence is that the town was named after lovely Leoti Gray, the daughter of one of its founding fathers.”

  “Never mind him,” the younger waitress said, grinning at the old man. “What does he know? He’s just a retired Kansas State history professor.”