by Riley, A. M.
Used-looking bills of small denominations. I wondered where he was getting it.
“Well, cool then. Let's roll.”
* * * * *
“It stinks down here.” Albert toed the mattress in the corner.
“It's completely dark and nobody comes down here,” I said. I'd stopped at
the Seven-Eleven and picked up some supplies. We'd popped open Albert's
supply of blood and guzzled it down as soon as we'd entered the room. The first
rush had passed, and now I lit the thick votive candles and set them in a row
against the far wall. St. Jude, St. Joseph, and the Virgin of Guadalupe leaped
in shadows and light across the dirty floor.
I threw the cheap sheets across the mattress and lay down fully clothed,
folding my hands across my chest. My hard-on was raging, but I felt
disinclined to do anything about it at the moment. Actually, just the thought of
it made me think of Peter and that thought made me feel more sad than sexy.
“You sleep much?” asked Albert, pulling one of the broken chairs over and
sitting.
“No. But I never did.”
“I can't sleep at all, 'mano. I have crazy dreams.” Albert reached into his
shirt pocket and drew forth a fat spliff.
I eyed the thing as he lit it. “You still get high?”
His scarred eyebrow rose in surprise. “Sí, why would I not?”
“Just doesn't do it for me anymore,” I said, stretching my arms over my
head. When I looked back at him he was eyeing my crotch.
“You got it bad, 'mano.”
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“Don't you?”
He shook his head, inhaling so deeply the joint burned almost to his
fingertips. “Don't get me wrong. I'd never say no to a wet pussy, but I never
craved it like you did.”
“You calling me a whore, Albert?”
He flicked the end of his joint on the floor and ground it with the toe of his
tight black boots. “You, who will fuck anything? Sí, puta, and you love it.”
I wondered if Peter thought this too. I'd never made much of a secret of my
twenty-minute suck and fucks around town. I didn't regale him with tales of
my exploits, of course, but I didn't exactly lie. Did I?
“Tell me about your plan, Albert.” I shelved the Peter thoughts. Useless
and painful as they were.
“While I was in there, I met a doctor's assistant. He knows their
computers. When the mutiny went down, I helped get him out of there. He
owes me.” Albert rose from his chair and came over to the mattress, sitting
down next to me.
“So?”
“So it takes a lot of money for Ozone to run something like that, 'mano. A
lot of money. My friend, he says all of the money is in accounts that he can find
with a computer. He can, how do they say it, ax in.”
“He can hack into the accounts?”
“Sí, and transfer funds to us. Then destroy the trail. We take some back
pay, let's say. Go north. Canada, Northwest Territories, Alaska. You know, they
have thirty days of night there, 'mano?”
“Thirty days of sun too,” I reminded him.
Albert unbuttoned his shirt and let it drop behind him. His shoulders were
round and hard and gold in the candlelight.
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205
My erection was throbbing painfully and I let my hand drop, thumb
caressing the hard ridge where it pressed against my zipper. “I could use that
information too,” I told him. “Maybe it's all they need to bust Ozone.”
“I hear maybe Ozone is dust.”
I wish I'd been the one swinging that sword, I thought to myself. “Who's in
charge then?”
“You still playing cop?” asked Albert. He'd focused on the movements of
my hand and his fingers were a play of shadows as he unbuttoned his jeans
and drew out his cock. I couldn't see it clearly but the smell went straight to
my head.
I could barely unzip my jeans, but the moment my cock popped out and I
wrapped my fingers around it, I felt that uncomfortable sorrow well up in me
again.
Breathing faster, supporting his weight with one arm, eyes closed, Albert
jerked himself off. I watched him, painfully horny but unable to bear touching
myself. When he'd finished, hips jerking and sexy little grunts as his cum
dirtied my already filthy mattress, Albert's gaze took in my untouched penis
and then traveled up to my face.
“What are you waiting for?”
“Nothing.” I tried cramming my cock in my pants. I squeezed it hard
enough to deflate it a bit, zipped up, and rolled on my side to face the wall.
“Just don't feel like it.”
Albert made a surprised noise, but in a minute he was elbowing me
sideways so that he could stretch out on the mattress next to me. “So, you
want to run to Alaska with us, Adam? Pick up your sweetheart and ride with
me again, man.”
It was a tempting thought. Ride with my brothers again? Open road,
nothing but me and the bike and the camaraderie? Fuck the LAPD. Fuck Peter.
“I can't,” I said.
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“What the hell is wrong with you, Adam? You in love or something?”
“Go the fuck to sleep,” I said. “I'll consider it, okay?”
“Women,” snorted Albert. “It's that undercover cop you were fucking, isn't
it?”
I didn't need to be reminded of my guilt about Alli, on top of everything
else.
“Shut up.”
“Not that I blame you, 'mano. She was hot. I would have gone for her
myself but…”
I rolled, grabbed him around the neck, and let my face slide into that
other personality. The one that slithered and writhed seemingly just below the
surface all the time these days. “Shut. The fuck. Up,” I growled.
Albert was sufficiently intimidated. “Sorry,” he croaked. His diamond tooth
flashed in the candlelight. “'Mano, you just need to get off. Let me help you.”
“You touch me, I'll break your hand, 'mano,” I said, and rolled over, facing
the wall again.
A long silence. The undead can be very, very quiet. It still bothered me a
bit. “Sorry, Albert.” I spoke to the darkened wall. “Maybe you're right. Maybe I
just need to get the fuck out of Los Angeles.”
“That's all I'm saying, 'mano,” said Albert.
We were quiet then and eventually I slept. When I woke, Albert was not in
the room. The halogen lights in the stairwell were on, their pale blue light
illuminating the doorway and, after a minute, I heard steel-toed boots
pounding down the staircase.
“It's a beautiful night,” sang Albert, coming into the room with his jacket
flung over his shoulder like some undead lothario. He was flushed and his
black eyes glittered.
I staggered to my feet, searching for the pack of cigarettes I kept by the
mattress. “You killed somebody, didn't you Albert?” I lit my cigarette.
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207
Albert averted his gaze and said, “We should hurry; the nights are short
this time of year.”
* * * * *
I'm a creature of expediency. In the Marines I'd done a few things I di
dn't
enjoy thinking back on, and in Vice I'd bent the rules so far they'd resembled
pretzels. With the Mongols, the line between undercover officer and full-out
criminal had become progressively vague, but I'd never committed murder.
Sure, I'd harbored murderers, broken bread with them. Colluded,
supported, and protected them. But it was my line. Or, rather, it was Peter's
line.
I didn't want to become Albert.
I followed him, now, into the downtown loft area. Twenty-three years
earlier, artists had rented the old factories and bakery buildings for thirty cents
a square foot. Now, those spaces had been partitioned into one thousand-
square-foot boxes and sold for half a million to well-heeled urban professionals
with pretensions of artistry.
A series of fresh red brick buildings came up on our left. We turned our
bikes into an immaculate narrow parking area with a VISITORS ONLY sign that
had been enthusiastically tagged and an old man with a shopping cart sitting
on the curb in one space. Albert parked near a deck and stairs, designed to
look like a loading dock.
“Wait here,” he said.
Shopping cart guy shambled over. “You got a cigarette?”
I shook one out of my package for him. His fingers were red and yellow
and chapped at the ends. He took a hardcover cigarette pack out of his many
layers of coats and slid my ciggie into it, then sequestered it back among the
folds.
I had a thought. “You see anybody biting people or drinking blood around
here?”
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“You kidding me? All the time,” he said.
He was crazy, right? Suddenly I understood the expressions on the faces
of the LAPD and ATF agents I'd spoken to in the past couple of days.
Albert reappeared, followed by a svelte young Asian boy with gorgeous,
salon-cut dark hair, a London Fog duster kicking out from his creased trousers
as he walked. A slim black leather case hung over one shoulder. From the way
he hefted it, I assumed it held some sort of equipment.
Albert placed a hand on the back of the man's neck, which he immediately
shook off. “Drew? This is Snake,” said Albert, grinning.
Drew looked at my hand when I held it out, but instead of taking it he
withdrew the unlit cigarette from his mouth and said, “Whose rod am I riding?”
He wasn't a vampire, yet. I could smell him from three feet away. I glanced
at Albert and surprised a ravenous expression on his face. “Hop on,” I said,
scooting forward on my seat.
Drew clung to me as we roared off. His body was lithe and fitted up tight
against me and gave off the odor of mint. In my ear, he yelled, “I told Albert we
only need to be within twenty yards of the main computer and I can do the
rest.”
* * * * *
Drew appeared to be something of a vampire groupie. “So, have you
noticed a change during full moons? New moons? I have a theory that the
vampiric entity is more affected by the changes in the planetary motion than—”
“Would you please shut up,” said Albert, pacing.
Drew's mouth turned down at the corners. I shot Albert a glare. We
needed this guy, right?
“I haven't been this way for long,” I told Drew. “So I don't know.”
“Interesting,” said Drew. He had wire clippers and cable and seemed to be
making some kind of art across the open beams of the room we sat in.
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We'd parked our bikes at the bottom of the steep roads leading up to
Ozone's building, threw tarps and then brush over them. I had an alarm on my
bike that would wake the dead, or undead as the case may be, but we were
more concerned about discovery than theft at the moment. We'd scaled the wall
of a house behind Ozone's compound and lifted Drew through the window. We
sat now in an unventilated attic. Drew kept complaining about the lack of air,
but Albert and I were fine.
“You don't need to breathe. I do,” said Drew.
“I breathe,” I protested.
“Wow, you really are a newbie. You don't need to breathe. You only do it
out of habit. I bet when you sleep, you stop.”
I figured I'd never sleep again after hearing that.
“Who the fuck cares,” said Albert. “How much longer is this going to
take?”
“I need a tall antenna to use the WiFi at the compound,” said Drew
patiently. He stapled another bit of wire to a beam. “You know, the whole
subject of vampirism is fascinating. I've interviewed quite a few subjects and
I've been thinking of writing a book. I've noticed that the demon, as I call it,
enhances the host's, as I call the undead, former human, natural tendencies.
Violent people become more violent. Angry people become angrier. Gluttonous
people overindulge.”
Albert laughed and leered at me, gaze going to my perpetual bulge.
I ignored him. “So how dangerous is what you're doing here?”
“Those bozos are nothing but tweaked-out users,” said Drew disdainfully.
The keyboard on his laptop sounded like a machine gun as he typed. “I told
them their firewall was inadequate and they had me plug the leaks, but I'll bet
they never changed the password.” A few more clicks as his fingers moved in a
blur and he said, “See? Idiots.” He turned the laptop so that Albert and I could
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see the page displayed on the monitor. It looked like a bank account statement.
The bottom line was seven figures long.
Albert swore.
“I have to move quickly or they'll spot me,” said Drew, snapping his fingers
at Albert. “Give me the bank account information you have.”
Albert handed across a deposit slip and Drew's fingers flew across the
keyboard again. “There,” he said. “They have several accounts like this, but I
have to dive in, snatch, and run or they'll notice the breach.”
“Wait,” I said before he could exit from whatever he was doing. “Can you
print out a record of deposits or withdrawals?”
“Um, duhh, no printer,” Drew replied in a weary voice. “I can forward a
PDF to any e-mail address you want, though.”
I gave him Alli's e-mail address. Then, as an afterthought, Peter and
Stan's at the Parker Center. “Put in the subject line 're: Adam,'” I said. Drew
typed like a fiend and then hit a few keys with finality and shut the laptop.
“We should get out of here now,” he said.
“Why? I mean, I thought you could hit all the accounts,” said Albert.
“Listen, I set up the security on this place. We only have a few minutes
and then the computer begins to report a breach. If there is anybody in there
with any knowledge whatsoever, they can trace the breach back to our
location.”
“Fuck, you little shit, you didn't tell me that.”
“Well, the odds of anyone there actually knowing how to do that is pretty
slim. I'm telling you, Ozone hired meth heads who needed the extra cash, not
technically experienced professionals.”
Albert froze and held up a hand. “What was that?”
“Don't be paranoid,” sneere
d Drew. “There's noth—”
“Shut up,” I said. Sure enough, in the bowels of the house in which we
were hidden, a door slammed and voices rose in alarm.
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211
“Damn,” said Albert, sprinting toward the dormer window and the only
means of escape. But it was too late. Like something from a spy thriller, black-
clothed men swarmed through the opening. Grabbed the three of us and
Drew's laptop just before more of the same popped up through the attic door.
The residents of the house, a man and woman and at least two kids that I
could see, had been herded onto the living room couch where they huddled,
terrified, staring up at the demonic faces. I felt a twinge of regret when the boy
watched me being shepherded by.
Worse, when we were herded through the back yard, I saw another human
on the ground. Too familiar, even on his belly and wearing a dark jacket, for me
not to know on sight.
Fucking hell. I should have known Peter would be following me. His face
pressed into the turf, his eyes rolled up and his gaze caught mine as I was
muscled out of the yard and through the gate.
“Who the hell was that?” I asked one of the lackeys who shoved me up the
stairs to the compound.
“Whoever they are, they'll be food soon enough.”
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Chapter Twenty-two
“'mano, sit down,” said Albert. We had been placed in the same ceramic-
tiled room with the high-powered vampire-torching beams of light imprisoning
us. I had an urge to throw myself at the beams, equal parts desperation and
self-loathing I guess, which I was quelling by pacing up and down the ten-foot
space.
Albert crouched on the floor, head on his arms, bemoaning his fate. “We
will be pinned,” he moaned again.
“We fucking deserve it,” I said. “Why are they taking so long?”
“Probably interrogating the other prisoners,” said Albert. “Or eating them.”
This was exactly what I feared and I almost exploded with impatience,
hitting the wall, hard with both fists. “Fuck!” I yelled.
