Death's Excellent Vacation

by Charlaine Harris

  “Some blood, please,” Pam said. She loosened her coat and leaned back in the chair.

  “Nothing for me, thank you.” I didn’t want to drink anything Rudy had touched. I hoped the human-elf hybrid would leave the room to get Pam’s drink, but instead he turned and bent down to a little refrigerator to extricate a bottle of Royalty Blended, a premium drink that mixed synthetic blood with a large dash of the real blood of certified royalty. He popped the top off the bottle and put it in a microwave sitting atop a low filing cabinet. There were odds and ends on top of the microwave: a bottle opener, a corkscrew, a few straws in paper wrappers, a small paring knife, a folded towel. Quite the home away from home.

  “So, you come from Eric? How is the North man?” Michael asked. “We were together in St. Petersburg at one time.”

  “Eric is flourishing under our new ruler. He wishes you well. He’s heard good things about your club,” Pam said, which was outrageous flattery and almost certainly untrue. Unless there was a lot below the surface, this was a sleazy little club catering to sleazy little people.

  The microwave dinged. Rudy, who’d been fiddling with the items on top of the microwave, took the drink out, putting one of his thumbs over the open top of the bottle so he could shake it gently. Not the most hygienic way of doing the job, but since vampires almost never get ill, that wouldn’t make any difference to Pam. He came around the desk to hand the bottle to her, and she accepted it with a nod of her head.

  Michael picked up his own bottle and raised it. “To our mutual venture,” he said, and they both drank.

  “Are you truly interested in having a further discussion with our new masters?” she asked. She took another sip, a longer one.

  “I am considering it,” Michael said slowly, his accent even heavier. “I am tired of Russell, though we share a liking of men.” Russell liked men as fish like water. I’d been in his mansion, and it was full of guys who ranked from cute to cuter. “However, unlike Russell, I also like women, and women like me.” Michael gave us an unmistakable leer.

  This woman didn’t like him. I glanced at Pam, who also enjoyed sex with either gender, to see her reaction. To my dismay, her cheeks were red—really red. I was so used to her milky pallor I found the effect shocking.

  She looked down at the bottle in her hand. “This was poisoned,” she said slowly, almost slurring her words. “What did you put in it, elf?”

  Rudy’s smile became even more disagreeable. He held his hand up so we could see the cut in his thumb. He’d put his own blood into the Royalty Blended. The human blood had disguised the taste.

  “Pam, what’s this going to do to you?” I asked, as if the men weren’t there.

  “Elf blood isn’t intoxicating like fairy blood, but . . . it’s like taking a huge tranquilizer or having lots of alcohol.” Her speech was even slower.

  “Why have you done this?” I asked Michael. “Don’t you know what will happen to you?”

  “I know how much Eric will pay me to get you two back,” Michael said. He was leaning forward over the desk, his expression one of sheer greed. “And while he’s getting the ransom together, Rudy will be drawing up a paper about your mission in coming here, which you and the vampire will sign. That way, when we return you to Eric, he can’t retaliate. If anything happens to us, Russell will have the ammunition to start a war. Your new masters will be quick to dispose of Eric if he causes a war.”

  Michael was as deep a thinker as he was charming. That was to say, not at all. “Do you have something personal against Eric, or are you always this double-dealing?” Keep ’em talking while Pam got in a little recovery time.

  “Oh, always,” he said, and he and Rudy laughed. They were certainly two peas in the same pod; they were relishing my anxiety and Pam’s intoxication.

  “Stand up, Pam,” I said, and she laboriously worked her way to her feet.

  Rudy laughed again. My insides were burning with a huge brushfire of hate.

  My friend’s face was mottled, her movements sluggish, and her eyes were frightened. I had never seen Pam scared of anything. She was a revered fighter, even among the vampires, who were known for savagery and ruthlessness. “Let’s try walking it off.”

  “That won’t help you,” Rudy said with a sneer. He was lounging against the wall. “She won’t be feeling herself again for a couple of hours. In the meantime, we’ll have fun with you first, Michael and me. Then we’ll have her.”

  “Pam, look at me,” I said sharply, trying not to picture their idea of fun. She did look. “You have to help me,” I said intently, trying to get a message into her addled brain. “These men are going to hurt us.” Her eyes finally focused on mine, and she nodded slowly. I moved my head slightly to the right, pointed a thumb at my own chest. Then I inclined my head oh-so-slightly toward Michael, pointing the same thumb at her.

  “I understand,” Pam said clearly, but only with great effort.

  Michael was still seated, but Rudy had pulled away from the wall at the moment I drew the gun. They smelled it as I was drawing (and they might have sooner if Michael hadn’t been smoking) and reacted with the quickness of their races. I fired into Rudy’s face as he grabbed for me, and Pam threw herself across the desk to grip Michael’s ears. He clawed at her arms and slammed her down onto the desk. Ordinarily she would have tossed him over her shoulder or something equally spectacular. But in her drugged state, she could only hold on to what she had. He was hitting her repeatedly, too angry to pry her hands away when he could be doing damage to her body. She’d have to loosen her grip, eventually.

  While Rudy gurgled and grabbed at the hole in his face under his left cheekbone, I said, “Pull, Pam!” and she obeyed.

  She pulled Michael’s ears off.

  When he flinched back, his mouth open with the pain, she lunged again and stuck her thumbs in his eyes. Instead of throwing up, I shot Rudy again, this time in the chest.

  Michael wasn’t dead, of course, but he was rocking in silent agony. While he was distracted, Pam pulled out his tongue. I averted my eyes as quickly as I could and swallowed down the bile that rose in my throat. This was Pam on a bad night.

  I checked on my target. Rudy was down, though he wouldn’t stay that way. If elves were as tough as fairies, he’d be up within a half hour. I grabbed the towel from the top of the microwave and wiped off the gun, then tossed it on the desk. I don’t really know why—I just had to get rid of it.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said to Pam, and she dropped the bloody ears. Slowly and deliberately, she wiped her hands on the chair cushion. The ears lying on the desk looked like discarded Play- Doh shells with red paint sprinkled on them. I wondered briefly if Michael could stick the ears back on, if the eyes and tongue would regenerate.

  Whoops! Rudy was already up on his elbows, trying to drag himself toward us. I kicked him under the chin as hard as I possibly could, and he collapsed. Pam had started to waver, but I put my arm around her again and she steadied.

  “I took care of him,” Pam said, enunciating with care. She smiled at me. Speckles of blood had landed on her pink silk blouse, so I told her to button her coat up again. I tied it shut. “That was fun,” she said guilelessly.

  “I’m glad you had a good time,” I muttered, “since I planned all this for your benefit.” We stepped out of the office in the corridor and let the door shut behind us. If we could just make it to the car . . . Mohawk was staring at us from his place on the stool by the back door.

  Then that door opened, and two cops walked in.

  And we’d been doing so well.

  The pulsing noise of the stripper music and the office soundproofing had drowned out the shots. I knew this, because no employees had come to check on the gunfire. So no one had summoned these guys; therefore, they must be friends of the management, since they’d entered through the rear.

  I was trying to think, and think fast, and my brain was a little too crowded (what with shooting an elf, seeing a guy lose his facial fea
tures, and whatnot). One thing I was clear about was wanting to stay out of jail. These cops might not even be within their own jurisdiction, but we had to avoid coming to their attention.

  After giving Mohawk a casual wave, they’d stopped to talk to a short, curvy stripper in a platinum wig, which meant they were blocking the rear exit. If we reversed direction and tried to walk out through the front, we’d attract even more attention, I figured.

  “Whoops,” said Pam cheerfully. “What now, my perky friend?”

  “You girls ready to try out?” Mohawk called, and the cops glanced at us before resuming their conversation. Mohawk pointed to the DANCERS IN HERE sign.

  I said, “We sure are, sugar! We go in there to put on our costumes?”

  He nodded, and his Mohawk swayed. Pam giggled. I’d never heard Pam giggle like that. “Course, most girls don’t even bother with a costume,” Mohawk said, grinning.

  “I think you’ll find we’re not most girls,” I said, arch as all hell.

  He was interested. “How’re you two different?”

  “We’re always together,” I said. “Get what I mean?”

  “Uh, yeah,” he said. His eyes darted from the clearly sloshed Pam to me. “So, go change. It’s audience night. They vote after you take your turn. You could end up on permanent staff.”

  Oh . . . yay. I knew there were speckles of blood on Pam. Vampires could always smell blood. As we passed him in the narrow hall, I didn’t dare to meet Mohawk’s eyes.

  I steered my drunken vampire friend into the designated room. It was a huge nothing. There were about twenty folding chairs set around at random, and about six of those were occupied by women waiting their turn. The others had already had their stage time and left, I assumed. No screen to change behind, no makeup table, no hangers—no clothes hooks, even. There was a full- length mirror propped against the wall, and that was it. The glamour just overwhelmed me.

  The aspiring strippers were all blondes: At least, they’d achieved blonde-dom by some means. They glanced at us and looked away. One face looked vaguely familiar.

  I helped Pam to a chair. She sat heavily. Her complexion was still hectic, but at least the red patches were fading and she looked more like a regular vampire and less like cherry vanilla ice cream. Speaking of red dots, I hastily spat on a tissue and dabbed at the specks of blood on Pam’s blouse. I’d been very fortunate; a quick glance into the full-length mirror confirmed that I was unbloodied. “All right, genius, what do we do now?” I asked myself, aloud.

  Pam said, “I’ll, I’ll . . . appeal to her. She has two extra costumes.” She nodded toward the woman I sort of recognized.

  Pam was oddly sure about what the wannabe dancer—who I realized was a vamp—had in her huge tote bag.

  “Pam, you did great in there,” I whispered.

  “So did you. You’re so cute,” she said. “No wonder Eric likes you.”

  I glanced out into the hall. The cops were still there, still having a lively conversation with the curvaceous stripper. Crap.

  Pam rose cautiously and went over to the vamp, who was sitting by herself, looking bored. She had the requisite blond hair (so did the only African American applicant, by the way) and enormous boobs, and she was a few decades old, I figured. She was thin, with the sulky expression of someone who’s used to being spoiled. She wore a yellow bikini top with a tiny pleated gray and yellow skirt, a take on the “naughty schoolgirl” image. Where had I seen her before?

  As soon as Pam acknowledged her, the vamp straightened in her chair, inclined her head, and dropped the sulkiness. When Pam murmured in her ear, she began rummaging around in the big bag. She handed Pam a handful of material and two pairs of shoes. I was amazed until I realized that she could have carried twenty costumes in there, if the size of the one she was wearing was any gauge.

  Pam cocked her head at me, and I hurried to help.

  “What you got?” I asked. She dropped the garments into my hands. She’d snagged a glittery gold spandex bandeau to go around the chest and a matching—well, it was flattering it to call it a thong. There was a pair of translucent heels to wear with it. Then there was a sort of sky blue leotard with black trim: a former leotard, since most of it had been snipped away. A little swath of blue for boob coverage, descending in a tiny strip to the bottom part, which was like an abbreviated bikini. Black heels and thigh-high black hose completed the look.

  Pam sat down on a chair, hard. She giggled again. “Get ready, buttercup! I’ll take the gold; you take the blue. It’ll look great with your tan.” She shrugged off her coat, and when the speckled blouse came into view, she read the alarm on my face correctly. She turned her back to the room to unbutton it, then turned it inside out and tossed it on the floor, close to the vamp. To my amazement, the vamp waited for a moment, then in one quick movement picked up the blouse and stuffed it into her huge bag.

  Pam was out of her clothes and into the costume as if it were her daily routine.

  I turned my back on the room, though no one seemed in the least bit interested in my goodies. In the course of wriggling into the thing, I found out the descending strip Velcroed to the bottom of the costume. Convenient.

  I looked at us together. “Wow,” I said. “Pam, we look great.”

  “We do,” Pam agreed, with no attempt at modesty. We gave each other a high five. “I’m coming down,” Pam said. “Really, I’m feeling almost like myself.”

  Mohawk called from the door. “Okay, the doubles act!”

  I had no idea how we were going to get out of this, so we started toward the door. Even drugged, Pam managed walking in her platform shoes without a wobble in her step, but I had to concentrate ferociously to master the spike heels.

  “What’s the names?” Mohawk asked.

  “Sugar and Butterscotch,” I said, and Pam turned her head to give me a look that clearly said she thought I was an idiot.

  “Cause she’s white and you’re brown,” Mohawk said. “Cute.”

  I hadn’t spent all that time tanning for nothing.

  “Okay, you’re on,” Mohawk said, opening the door at the end of the corridor to reveal a short flight of steps leading up into darkness. The noise surged out at us. A Latina blonde stomped down the steps, topless, followed by the sound of whistles and catcalls. She looked sweaty and bored.

  The cops were still in the hall.

  “Shepherd of Judea,” I muttered, and Pam and I looked at each other and shrugged.

  “New skills,” she said. “Eric told me you are quite the dancer. You just have to try doing it naked.”

  So we went up the steps, teetering in our high, high heels, to begin our careers as strippers. Suddenly we were on the stage, which was simply wood painted black, punctuated with three stripper poles.

  The emcee was a brunette guy with a big white smile. He was saying, “Remember, gentlemen! The applause each girl gets is measured with our applause-o-meter, and out of all our dancers tonight, the three girls getting the most audience response will be hired to appear right here at Blonde!”

  So we were supplying the audience with free entertainment in the faint hope that we might get a job out of it. Michael was an even bigger asshole than I’d thought, which was saying something.

  “Here, straight from their record-breaking engagement in Vegas, I give you Sugar and Butterscotch!” the emcee said, with considerable drama. I figured he took drugs.

  I put on my biggest and emptiest smile, and managed to make it to the front of the stage without falling down, thanks to Pam’s sudden grip on my hand. Together, we looked out at the men hidden in the darkness, catching a glint of beard here, shine reflecting off a belt buckle there. The hoots and whistles were deafening.

  We hadn’t specified a song, of course. Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” came blaring over the sound system, and that was all right with me. “Move it,” yelled a rough voice.

  We had to dance. NOW. And then we had to get the hell out of here before Michael and Rudy recov
ered enough to come after us.

  I half turned to look at Pam flirtatiously, and she stared blankly back at me until she got my drift. “The pole,” I muttered, and she gave the audience a saucy smile and wound herself around the nearest pole. The cheering started. I felt the lust begin to dominate the men’s minds as I hugged Pam from behind. Pam got with the program, and we swung around the pole together as if we’d been glued. I caught a glimpse of Pam’s face. She was licking her lips in a lascivious way.

  “You go, Pam!” I said.

  “They want a show, we’ll give them a show,” she said. She bent me over her knee and pretended to spank me in perfect time to the music. In fact, Pam got a little carried away. But the guys loved it; oh boy, did they. I got spanked, licked in the ear, had Pam’s hands running over my barely covered chest, and more stuff I just won’t mention. We both ended up doing things the stripper pole had probably endured many times.

  You know, it was kind of fun after I got the hang of it.

  I wouldn’t go close enough to the side of the stage to get grabbed. And since I already felt naked, I wouldn’t take off my top. Since that was something the audience clearly expected us to do, it was lucky that at that moment the police pulled the plug on the music and switched on the house lights.

  They weren’t the cops who’d been in the hall. “All right, everyone!” called a tall detective in a blue Windbreaker. “There’s been a murder here, and we need to talk with all of you.”

  “Murder,” I said to Pam. “Murder?”

  As our eyes met, I could see she was just as bewildered as I was. And I have to say here: With the lights up, we could see our audience, and they looked even worse than I’d expected.

  OFFICER Washington, neat and shiny in his brown uniform, tried to look anywhere but at my chest. He’d been on the force long enough to have a kind of worn-out face, but he hadn’t become so world-weary as to be able to completely ignore the abundance of Pam and me that was on display. I learned that the idea of being with a white woman didn’t do a thing for Officer Washington, which helped him do his job.