Still standing in front of the cool canned breeze kissing my face, I open the curtain a touch and peer out. A crowd is forming. I can hear people’s indistinct muttering. With a growing sense of dread I sniff at the air through the glass. I can hear the flies buzzing. Some bebe kids are throwing rocks.
I hear the stones strike an object that is both solid and soft, yet yielding. I can smell Juan’s faded essence. I can smell death.
The crowd parts enough for me to see. When I do, I let my head slump forward, smacking the cool glass. I put my hands up to the window. I’m not hungry but the fangs surface, dropping long and sharp; curving slightly inward. I squeeze shut mine eyes against the horror looming just outside the window. The image will forever be engraved on my retinas. I no longer care that this lair has also been compromised. I will now be forced to go to ground, use one of my nasty emergency shelters. I just keep my eyes closed. I keep seeing my friend, Juan.
“Aw damn, Juan,” I murmur softly, my uncased talons chalking down the glass blackboard, “what they do to you?”
Chapter Five
I DISCONNECT AND STARE AT THE PHONE. I need to see the Pharisees and- snap- they just up and call a nigga. I put the phone away and continue driving and thinking. Juan’s head is in a box in the same seat his girl sat in the day before. Juan died thinking Mary is dead. They put his head on a pike and stuck it in the ground. That’s what I had to wake up to.
I come to the edge of the pier and stop. It is empty of people. I get out and take the box from the passenger seat. I fill the box with fist-sized stones. I curl duct tape around the box and walk it out to the water’s edge. I sigh and drop the heavy box over the railing. I watch it as it quickly disappears beneath the filmy surface of the polluted lake. My bloody tears follow it.
“I’m sorry,” I tell my friend.
I go back to my car and start it up. I turn it around and point the car’s nose toward Big City. The Pharisees are waiting for me there.
* * * *
Soon I exit The Harbor, pass the state line, and motor swiftly through Big City’s South Side. I drive past the baseball stadium and the infamously looming housing projects. I distance myself from the empty-eyed junkies, penny ante hustlas and the mentally dangerous as fast as the neglected, pot-holed streets will allow. There are some places even we vampires steer clear of. Normally I’ll avoid this stuff like the plague. But there’s a pile of money on the line and that pile is mine.
I peer through dark sunglasses at the disgusting festival enacting outside. More human flotsam, I think. However if I play my cards right and the Pharisees listen to reason, these wrecked excuses for people might very well be future customers. The thought makes me grin, but I sure as hell don’t slow down. Not until I reach my destination.
Chapter Six
HAVING ARRIVED, I wait for the Pharisees in their penthouse. I was summoned and, like a good boy, I wait patiently for them to arrive.
The wall slides behind me.
“Caiaphas,” I greet without turning. I smell the horrid stench of death in the old man. “You’ve changed.”
“Yes,” he replies, “So I have.”
I turn. The flesh of the old human’s face quivers and moves about. Caiaphas seems to be actually decomposing and he smells like a swamp fart. It’s as if the old man has not realized he is dead.
I smell oxygen coursing the Pharisee’s veins. He is definitely alive. Caiaphas Pharisee merely appears to be dead: his body a rotting shell. I conclude that something powerful is keeping his rotting shell and soul together. I don’t know what sort of entity could keep the Pharisee intact, or why it would even want to. But something is.
“Like you with us Pharisees, Pilate,” Caiaphas begins, ending the wondering, “I too have a Master to please.” He gestures for me to sit and I take a chair. “And our Master demands a sacrifice,” Caiaphais explains.
“What kind of sacrifice?” I ask.
“More on that in a moment,” he states with a cracked, false smile. “Let’s discuss you and your troubles of late,” he continues, “You are having difficulties?”
I look to him direct. “Yes,” I agree, “I’m having a great deal of trouble.”
Caiaphas reaches forward and removes a custom-made smoke from a thin titanium case. He offers one to me and I decline. The Pharisee puts the cigarette to the rotting, peeling parchment where his lips used to be. I’m there with flame to kiss the tobacco. If Caiaphas is startled by my unseen vampire movement, I can’t tell. I return to my chair with the same speed.
There was no comment from Caiaphas, so I decide to boogie right in: “Did Herod have your blessing to grab my spot and shut me down?” I ask one of the Caesars, “Or was Mr. Crazy acting on his own?”
“Quite alone, I assure you,” Caiaphas replies, smoking.
I thought for a moment, then: “Where do you stand on this?” I ask. “I need to know what side of the fence you’re on.”
“Well,” Caiaphas begins, “Herod was technically justified sanctioning you due to your three missed quotas.” I try to protest, but the Pharisee stifles me with a raised hand, “But we feel he was too wanton in the implementation of said sanction.”
This shit, I tell you. It makes me quiet. Hell, I know bull when it’s set down in front of me. It seems I’m to be spoon fed this rot. But I don’t eat that kind of garbage. It’s time to set the record straight. I lean forward, counting off:
“Your Herod broke into my lair, he killed my Second,” I retort, counting fingers as I list, “then he stole my product and my money.” I stop. “Three million dollars in washed cash he stole from me and I’m gonna take it all back,” I boldly tell the Pharisee through aching, clenched jaws. “I need you to look the other way.”
Caesar Caiaphas Pharisee considers me for a time, smoking.
“What about Herod?” Caiaphas asks next, the shadow of lipless smile showing through his collapsing face, “What do you suggest we do with him when you are finished? Herod isn’t exactly going to be thrilled with this. He could be a big problem for us.”
“I wouldn’t fret too much about Herod,” I assure the old man, “I don’t think there will be anything left of him to worry about.” I lean back and cross my legs. “It will be as if he’s never been.”
“I see,” Caiaphas replies. “I believe you and I can come to an accommodation.” The Pharisee squashes out his cigarette. He leans in my direction with his folded hands on knees. “We need to agree on terms.”
“Will you consent to look the other way?”
“Better than that, Pilate,” the old man retorts, smiling big now. A surprise, he tells me: “I will give to you Herod’s throne.”
Perhaps, I think, Herod has tripped once too often.
To be sure I ask: “The business, all of it?”
“Yes, vampire, all yours, answering to none but us,” he tells me. “But you must do something for us first.”
Of course, I can see that coming. Gas, grass or ass, nobody rides for free. No matter.
“Just tell me what you need,” I reply.
“First you tell me something, Pilate,” the Pharisee counters, “What do you know of this little girl, this Immanuel?” The Pharisee stops, lights another cigarette. I stay put. “You know, the one they call the Christ?”
Chapter Seven
I’M NOW IN THE PARKING LOT of the main building of Harborside District Hospital, watching it. I’ve been in my car who knows how long. Dark sunglasses shade my peeps and I have the air-conditioning set on high. I am parked in the shade and eyeing the entrance. As soon as it gets dark, this blood drinker’s going in.
Officially, I’m on assignment. The Pharisees made me an offer they knew I’d find hard to refuse. Even though I’m not hungry for blood, I need fuel. I need high octane. I am going into Clarkston next. And then I must do the Pharisees bidding.
While I sit there I plait myself two fat braids. I lift sunglasses and check the muted reflection in the rearview mirror. Stony face staring ba
ck at me is as hard-looking as my insides feel. I am ready to kill. Hell, I’m looking forward to it. I kid you not.
I want to cut, slice and pull the skin from Herod’s body in one immense sheet like removing window tint. I long to stroll about Herod’s compound, his flayed skin wrapped around my shoulders. I will sport it as a cape.
I am going to yank free every single one of Herod’s teeth while he is still alive. Then I will string them on a chain, and wear them around my neck. All the while Herod’ll be screaming and begging for his miserable life.
I will sit upon the throne of Herod, claiming it.
The reflection staring back at me sprouts teeth deadly. I never wanted to kill anyone so badly. The thought makes me ache.
* * * *
I turn off the engine and exit my car. I walk quietly and unassuming toward the employee entrance. I dash in through the sliding doors.
The hospital staff, patients and visitors feel a cold breeze pass and that’s it. An unexplained sense of dread makes them frown. No one sees a thing.
Outside, the sun falls.
Chapter Eight
THE HOSPITAL’S INTENSIVE CARE UNIT has enough space and equipment for ten critically ill patients. Four beds are occupied. I sniff the air, locating the one I want. The patient smells delicious. He’s the one.
I enter the room, still slightly dizzy from my latest seizure and vision. The patient is unconscious. He is attached to a wide array of life support equipment and monitoring devices. He has a tube in his nose. A bigger one feeds his lungs with pressurized oxygen. The oxygen is delivered by a mechanical ventilator. The level on the overhead monitor shows a steady 100%. The patient’s blood is completely saturated with oxygen.
I can smell it. The patient has polycythemia. Long-term emphysema forces the increase of a patient’s red blood cells. This assists attracting the small amount of oxygen left from his trashed and overstretched lungs. The ventilator fills every bit of increased capacity in the blood with blessed oxygen.
I go to the bedside and make double-damn sure I stay out of camera view. It’s bolted like a sentry above the doorway to the patient’s room. The video frames the patient’s torso and head.
I turn off the heparinized pressure bag to the arterial line. It’s secured to the femoral artery, deep in the apex of the groin. I undo the little cap, peek at the doorway, and open the stopcock. A hot, salty-sweet stream shoots from the port like a fountain. I bend swift to it and sup from the stream as fast as it spurts out.
Blood pressure flat-lines on the monitor. Vital signs dump as I feed. The stream is thick and steady.
I am filling up with the super-juice. My skin is flushing, my muscles swelling, my toes curling. The heady scent fills my sinuses. Oxygen is pulled directly from the blood in my stomach and jejunum. A unique form of osmosis, the swallowed blood is absorbed directly into my bloodstream. Then it rides the crimson byways to my wretched vampire heart.
Once there, the oxygen will go up into my aorta, then pumped under pressure out of my heart, and then down and out through the various arteries to feed all my organs and tissues.
Fuck me if this isn’t such good blood! It’s premium. It is, hands down, some of the best I have ever had. There’s so much oxygen in it. Drinking this deep cherry blood makes me feel like I am swallowing sunshine. Tasting it is waking up to Christmas morning, or the first day of vacation.
It’s liquid power and I am lit up.
Then I hear a noise.
The ICU nurse is standing there at the doorway and he gasps. He sees the man slurping up blood from the arterial line port and he’s in shock. I raise my head from the blood line, and see the nurse staring back at me. I swallow all the red salty power and then tear past the startled nurse with a whoosh of cold breeze and a splattering of bright red blood.
The nurse blinked. The man with the yellow eyes and two long braids had vanished. Just like that. It was so weird, thought the nurse: a solid gone vapor, an ignored thought, gone.
A trail of blood splats dot-dot-dashed a long thin line across the stark white floor. Then it squirted up scrub pants to the nurse’s t-shirt. He felt dizzy, wanted to sit down.
“I know I saw,” he told himself. He stared at the blood and knew he saw.
The nurse stayed like that, staring blankly at the tiny spots of blood. Mumbling, he held on to the life preserver of his sanity with a death-grip.
A few moments later, the nurse snapped out of it. The patient had slid into cardiac arrest. The symptoms suggested a root cause of sudden, acute hypovolemia: massive blood loss.
No one could determine where the missing blood went. The Code Team suspected internal bleeding. The surgeons opened him up, and an exploratory laparotomy showed not a drop puddles the abdomen.
The nurse wasn’t surprised. He knew where the blood went. The man with yellow eyes and long braids has got it. And the nurse never said a word about the man with the yellow eyes and long braids to anyone. Not once in his long, long career.
No way.
* * * *
I do a tight turn-squeal out of the hospital’s parking lot. I am heading toward Clarkston to get my emergency money-stash.
Chapter Nine
I AM MOVING AGAIN TOWARD MY STASH of emergency money. I am activating my contingency plan. Dealers should always have a Plan B.
I have $100,000 in one hundred dollar bills wrapped in shrink-tite plastic. This stash I keep in a watertight, padlocked box in Mary Magdalene’s childhood home in Clarkston. I bought the little house years before and gave it to Mary. I have a house key that nobody knows about.
The Pharisees made a deal with me. I expect them to keep their word as a solemn business contract, but once again, one never knows, not in The Harbor. And I wasn’t about to be without a quick exit. I can always come back for Herod at a later time if things go south.
If I have to run with naught but the shirt on my back, it’s nice to know the shirt is stuffed with hundreds. So much for the good news; the bad news is the mysterious and treacherous Clarkston itself.
The neighborhoods of Clarkston are some of the oldest in The Harbor. It is situated in a half-square mile, all single lane roads. It is a closed square. There’s only one way into the square, the same way out. Outsiders are not welcomed. Those who stray and find themselves inside regret it with their dying breath.
Clarkston has its own gang affiliation and it is the real deal. Nobody messes with these dudes: not even Herod’s cops. If folks have to be dealt with, the police wait to catch them outside the square. Even then, retaliation is to be expected, depending on the relative worth of the individual in question.
My boys sling dope on the periphery of Clarkston, but definitely not inside the square. I, myself, am barely tolerated inside out of respect for my clout and status. The fact that Juan has also grown up inside the square helps pave the way for tolerating my presence.
So, with Mary and Juan being from Clarkston, it seemed the perfect place to hide my last ditch emergency cash. Except now that I need it, Mary is unavailable and Juan is dead. My runners are gone. Herod and I have only a shaky truce imposed by the Pharisees. There is no more protection under Herod’s name.
Also Clarkston’s where the little Christ was raised. The whole area knows Immanuel and I stand on opposite sides of the Plata fence.
I have no help with me and none forthcoming. I’m going in naked, with no back-up. Where there are gangsters with automatic weapons and Christians with shotguns.
I check the 9mm I keep in the glove box. I have two fully loaded spare clips. I hope it’s enough.
I park outside the square of Clarkston. About three blocks away at a gas station I own. I carefully drive around to the back; the station is dark and closed for the night.
The former owner became a hardcore Plata addict. Eventually he signed the business over to me. The man’s daughter manages the place as my employee. The young woman’s father died soon after he graduated to the needle. His daughter is doing much better
than her father.
I sit in the close dark for a bit. I ponder my sudden reversal. The day before yesterday I had my whole world dangling by a string. Now it turns on me. It has evolved into an all or nothing proposition.
Now that I have calmed, I realize there’s more to it than revenge on Herod. My choices are less clear. I can kill the innocent preacher girl and win back my world. That is certainly what the Pharisees want from me. Or, I can save the innocent and lose everything I ever coveted, including my own life. I know that if the Pharisees’ protection is ever compromised – well… Herod will have his goons digging for me in every hole. My life won’t be worth squat.
My final choice, way down on the list, is to just say forget it and run. I can always do that. If I can grab the money, the little bit that’s left. And I can hardly believe that’s what it comes down to. Here I am about to risk life and limb to get money that amounts to less than four percent of my fortune.
Not much in the way of choices and ain’t none of them easy. But I can’t dwell on this any longer. There’s no more time left to plan. I’ve got to move.
The phone I’m supposed to keep on hand is left purposefully in the car. I’ll need to be silent and deadly now. There are thick stores of oxygen feeding and strengthening me. My muscles are swollen, poised and on the mark.
I shut the big bay door. I look out toward Clarkston. My fingertips tingle, the talons are pressing. The nubs harden and sharp tips tease the soft, pink flesh. I am all set.
I’m a blur as I travel swift and deep into Clarkston. I know running faster than the human eye will still make some residual noise. I prudently keep to the shadows and dark crevices.
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