The Dragon Delasangre

by Alan F. Troop

  “Never, I hope,” Elizabeth snarls.

  She takes the helm of the Grady White, turns the key in the ignition while I stow her packages from Gucci, Saks and Lord and Taylor in the cabin. The Yamahas cough to life without the slightest hesitation.

  I undo the dock lines, settle into the companion seat next to my bride. By now, when it comes to handling boats, I trust Elizabeth as much as I do myself. Relying on her to pilot us home, I close my eyes and prepare to allow the fresh air and the rolling motion of the boat to lull me into an afternoon nap.

  “Peter!” she says, about halfway across the bay, the brittle tone of her voice jolting me awake.

  “What?”

  “Something’s wrong. The boat’s not handling properly.”

  Still groggy, I check, listening to the Yamahas’ drone. “The motors sound okay.”

  “But we’re slowing . . . the steering feels strange. . . .”

  I take over the wheel, turn it slightly to the right. After a slight pause, the boat reacts to my touch, heeling more than I would have expected from such a slight move. We hit a small wave and plow through it, the boat shuddering, rather than cleanly slicing the water. I push the throttles forward and the engines rev but, instead of leaping forward, the Grady White only slowly increases its speed.

  “You’re right,” I say, cutting back on the throttles. “We’re riding lower in the water than we should.” The boat settles into the water, wallows as we slow, the bow dropping lower than the rest. I check the depth finder, find it reads eighteen feet.

  Opening the cabin hatch, I shake my head when I find what I expect to see. Water everywhere—seat cushions, Elizabeth’s packages floating, ruined. “We’re taking on water,” I say. “Something’s leaking, somewhere.”

  “What do we do?” my bride asks.

  “Worse comes to worse, we’ll take a long swim. Still I’d rather not sink in the deepest section of the bay.” I take the wheel, throw the throttles forward, my anger growing at the boat’s sluggish response, the water rushing back as we speed forward, weighing down the stern, slowing our movement. I turn us toward shore, hope we arrive at the dock before we sink low enough to stall the engines.

  I have Elizabeth call Arturo on my cell phone, arrange to have him speed out to meet us on the water, somewhere before we reach shore.

  By the time the yellow Seatow boat approaches us, we’re already close enough to make out the large green marker of the marina’s main channel. The Grady White has sunk low enough that saltwater reaches up to our ankles in the cockpit. Arturo, still in his suit, stands next to the rescue boat’s helmsman, waves with one hand while he dials a cell phone with the other.

  Our phone rings and Elizabeth answers, listens. “They want you to cut the engines and let them come aside and pick us up,” she says.

  She frowns when I shake my head. “They say we’re too low in the water to keep going. . . .”

  I push the throttles further forward, aim the Grady White for the channel to Monty’s a few hundred yards to the north. “Tell them to follow us. If we sink, they can pick us up.”

  We make it as far as the pine-covered spoil islands on the perimeter of the marina before I’m willing to concede defeat. “Brace yourself!” I tell Elizabeth and steer the craft toward the sandy shore of the northernmost island, shuddering at the yowl of the Yamahas as they collide with the bottom and tilt back from the impact, wincing at the scream of sand tearing at the hull bottom—even before we reach the beach—furious that my boat has to be treated this way. The Grady White slams to a stop, its bow dug into the sand, water rushing forward from the cockpit, then sloshing back.

  I cut the engines and silence overtakes us, interrupted only by the whisper of the seawind through the pine trees and the growl of the Seatow’s engines as it approaches us.

  “Are you all right?” Arturo yells.

  “No,” I say. “After you get us to shore, you damn well better get someone to bring my boat in and I damn well better be told, damn soon, what the hell happened to my boat!”

  Arturo brings the Grady White back to my island two days later. I meet him at the dock. “I thought I’d save you the bother,” he says, and nods his head toward the twenty-five-foot Wellcraft tied nearby. “I’ll take the rental back for you.”

  I say nothing, even though I’m glad to have my own boat again, glad not to have to endure a lesser craft.

  “I don’t know what they were thinking,” he says.

  Cocking an eyebrow, I ask, “Who?”

  He shrugs. “We don’t know yet but whoever it was certainly didn’t wish you well. They reversed both your bilge pumps and opened the seacock to your head. If a plastic bag hadn’t been sucked up by the intake and blocked the seacock, you would have sunk far before shore.”

  “Saved by litter,” I say, and can’t help grinning.

  Arturo grins too, then turns solemn. “It could just as easily have been a bomb.”

  “Santos?” I ask.

  “I don’t think so. He just made bail yesterday. We both know where he was before that.”

  “Then who?”

  “My people are checking.”

  “Your people are always checking,” I growl.

  Arturo sighs. “Be patient, Peter. These things take time. Just be careful in the meantime. Check your boat and cars before you use them. I’ll have my people watch them but, until we get this resolved, you have to take care too.”

  To my relief, my bride agrees to cut back on her landside shopping trips. Our life as a couple settles into a comfortable pattern. Elizabeth turns her attention to her garden, which prospers under her renewed and constant ministry. Within weeks, new plants—many of them strange, brightly colored ones I’ve never seen—begin to crowd the formerly empty earth. The Dragon’s Tear and other herbs become so numerous that she has to harvest her first crop.

  Most of the time I go about the necessary chores to keep up the maintenance of our household while Elizabeth divides her free time between the garden and the kitchen, planting and weeding in the former, processing herbs and potions in the latter. Sometimes I work in the garden alongside my bride, brushing against her, both of us smiling, enjoying the intimacy of quietly sharing the same tasks. She never mentions Jorge Santos’s name and, while he remains in my thoughts, neither do I.

  “I’ve just brewed my first pitcher of Dragon’s Tear wine,” Elizabeth tells me a few evenings after her first harvest, just before we’re to venture forth for our nightly hunt, both of us already in our natural forms. “Here,” she says, placing a blue ceramic pitcher and two large crystal mugs on the oak table in the great room. She pours the clear liquid into the mugs. “Let’s try it.”

  I recognize the pitcher as one of my mother’s and wonder if she used it for the same purpose. I pick up my mug, sniff the colorless liquid, then swirl it. It gives off no smell. Looks like simple tapwater. “Should we, before we go out?” I ask.

  Elizabeth nods. “Just remember, never drink this in your human form.”

  “Why?”

  “In that form you have no defense against its power. It will stun you the same way it stupefies them,” she says, and waits for me to drink first.

  I have a hard time believing it can affect anyone. The wine looks harmless, tastes as featureless as it appears. I drink two large swallows and then glance at Elizabeth. “It tastes like water, maybe a little thicker, a little greasy. . . .”

  She laughs, drains her mug with one long, sustained swallow. “Finish yours and then tell me what you think,” she says.

  I shrug and follow her example. The warmth follows a moment later, radiating from my insides, tingling its way to my extremities. For a moment I feel dizzy. I have to readjust my stance, brace on my tail, to remain upright.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Elizabeth asks, moving closer, rubbing against me with her body, her tail.

  My senses explode wherever she touches. I feel nothing like on my wedding night when Dragon’s Tear wine, mixed with
Death’s Rose and alchemist powders, enabled us to merge our minds, but I find myself unable to stop grinning and unwilling to defer any of my appetites.

  We begin to make love in the great room, let our passion take us from its floor to the sky outside, soaring upward until we consummate our union in the midst of a long dive toward the sea. Then we fly, side by side, in search of prey, the Dragon’s Tear wine still warming our insides, making us hungry. I guide us offshore, thinking to take us to the island of Bimini, only sixty miles away.

  Elizabeth, who has long complained about my insistence on our hunting over the waters, preferably far from home, asks again, “Why fly so long for food when there’s so much prey nearby?”

  “Father always insisted we do most of our hunting far away from our island,” I say. “Even if we weren’t spotted, too many missing people would make the humans too suspicious, too wary. Cuba and the Bahamas lie close enough and their people remain primitive enough to dismiss our acts with their superstitions.”

  But Elizabeth turns back toward land. “I’m hungry,” she says. “It won’t do any harm to feed close to home this one night.”

  “I don’t like the homeless ones. It takes months holding them in the cells, feeding them, to make them edible,” I say.

  “Isn’t there somewhere out of the way? Where we can find what we want now?”

  Warm and content, my hunger a pleasant rumble in my stomach, I sigh, wishing she didn’t have to puncture my mood. But either the wine or her enthusiasm makes me reckless. I guide us south, so we can approach the agricultural area west of Homestead from the Everglades.

  By the time I decide on a white, two-story farmhouse, acres away from any other dwelling, I’m as ravenous as my bride. We burst through their windows, go from room to room, slashing, killing. I feed on the father, while Elizabeth feeds on the three small children and the mother.

  We dispose of their remains over the ocean before we return home. Later, lying in each other’s embrace on the hay in my room, the wine still coursing in our veins, we make love again.

  News reports flash the missing family’s pictures on the TV the next day and for days afterward. I have to turn away each time they show the children.

  20

  When the middle of October arrives without our receiving a single new report on Jorge Santos’s activities or any information on the shooter or the boat saboteurs’ identities, I call Arturo.

  “We have a problem,” he says. “I didn’t want to call you until I had some solutions.”

  “Do you?”

  “Not yet. But my friends in the islands did find the two Bahamians who handled the shooting. The fools were flashing a lot of money at all the bars on Andros. On a poor island like that they were bound to be noticed. After some persuasion from my people, they admitted they had received a contract from an Italian gentleman in New York, Ralph Escalante.”

  “With the Gambini family?” I say.

  Arturo says, “Yeah . . . gave them ten thousand dollars down, promised them ten more on completion. Someone he knows wants you dead in a big way. . . .”

  “I would think that’s fairly obvious,” I say.

  “Anyway, you know there’s no way we can intimidate Escalante. Fortunately, some of our Italian friends are friendly with him. They were able to find out that he was acting as an agent for some Chinese guy in Los Angeles.”

  “Has anyone talked to him?”

  Arturo sighs. “No. No one’s seen him for weeks. The word is, he may have gone back to China.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “Why would someone from China care about me?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me. And there’s more too. . . . When Santos got out of jail, I wondered how he could make bail so quickly. The judge is a friend of ours, he set it for far more than Santos’s family could afford. I had my people check into it. The lawyer that posted bail for him was acting on the behalf of an attorney in California. Neither of them knew the name of the principal who put up the money and issued the instructions. . . . And Santos didn’t know any of them.”

  “I just don’t get it,” I say. “If Santos has so much help, then why hasn’t he tried anything since he got out of jail? He’s not the type to give up.”

  “Maybe he is,” Arturo says. “He hasn’t bothered anyone about you since his arrest. My operatives say his restaurant, Joe’s, just opened for the season. He has to work again, five nights a week. He may be too tired to do much more on his days off than sail or hang out with the Morton woman.”

  “In the meantime your people need to find the Chinese guy,” I say. “Ask him some questions.”

  The Latin says, “I’ve already given those instructions.”

  As the days pass, Santos remains on my mind. What plan can the man have that he’s waiting to spring? It bothers me to remain passive, waiting to see what may happen. As usual, Elizabeth’s counsel is short and direct. “My father would never let a human take up so much of his thoughts,” she says. “Kill him.”

  “No,” I say. “Not yet. I don’t see any need for it. But I do think I’d be more comfortable if I saw him again. I need to get a sense of how he’s feeling, get a look into his eyes.”

  Elizabeth stares at me. “I think you’re worried he’s given up. Whatever game you think the two of you have, you don’t want it to end.”

  I look away from her emerald-green eyes. “Maybe,” I say, shrugging. “I don’t know.”

  We arrive on Miami Beach early, but not early enough for Joe’s. Even though it’s just six-thirty and a weeknight, cars pack the parking lot. I let the valet take the Mercedes and escort Elizabeth into the Mediterranean–style building, newly redone to blend in with all the other new and remodeled buildings taking advantage of the resurgent popularity of South Beach.

  Inside the cavernous room, a line of people wait to talk to an indifferent maître d’. “It’s too crowded, too noisy,” Elizabeth mindspeaks.

  I nod. At every table people dine or wait for food, tuxedo-clad waiters bustling around them, carrying large trays laden with beige-and-orange stone crab claws, the restaurant’s specialty. Other patrons crowd the lobby and the bar, waiting for tables that might not become available for an hour or more.

  It takes me fifteen minutes to get close enough to talk to the maître d’. He barely reacts when I say my name, but after I say, “Arturo Gomez said I should tell you we’re good friends of his,” he looks up and smiles, reassures me it will be only a few minutes and suggests we wait in the bar.

  Three bartenders, each wearing red brocade vests, rush around the U-shaped, mahogany bar. At first I worry that Santos has the night off, but then I see him pouring a scotch for a red-faced man at the far end of the bar. I force our way through the waiting crowd, push toward him and have the fortune to find a seat for Elizabeth at the bar and a space for me to stand next to her.

  Santos freezes, then frowns when he first notices us. Another bartender comes over to see what we want, but he interrupts. “I know them. I’ll take care of them.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. DelaSangre,” he says as if we were old friends, his hard eyes belying his wide smile. “What brings you here?”

  “Dinner.” I grin too. “I thought you said we should be less formal, Jorge.”

  “Yes.” He nods, places both of his hands on the bright wood surface of the bar. “I did. But that was awhile ago, Peter. I guess I forgot.”

  “It has been quite a while. . . .”

  He nods again. “Too long,” he says. “But, you know how it is, Peter, work and other things get in the way. Then again . . .” He looks at me. “You don’t have to work, do you?”

  “No,” I say.

  “But I bet you know how to play real hard, don’t you? I bet guys you play don’t win very often. But enough of that . . .” Santos motions toward the bottles behind him. “I have a job to do here. What would you like tonight?”

  “Just Evian for both of us,” I say. “We don’t drink.”

&nb
sp; “Really?” he says. “Me neither. I gave it up after Maria disappeared. Funny thing though, the police arrested me a few months ago. . . .” He shakes his head. “Peter, they charged me with DUI even though I was cold sober. I can’t imagine why they’d do something like that. Can you?”

  I shrug. “Sometimes stuff happens.”

  Jorge narrows his eyes, growls, “You’re a profound guy, aren’t you?”

  Before I can answer, the maître d’ calls my name.

  “You must know someone big,” Jorge says, bantering again. “Barely anyone gets a table that fast. I bet someone with that much drag could get someone transferred from their job. You think so, Peter?” He motions us away. “Go ahead, don’t worry. You don’t have to wait. I’ll send your drinks over to you.”

  “Happy?” Elizabeth asks me once we’re seated at our table.

  I am, but I’m not sure I want to admit to enjoying my exchange with Santos. Elizabeth would hardly understand my curiosity about the man. I hardly do myself. But, whether it’s because I liked his sister and I see something of her in him, or just that he tickles my curiosity—I find myself wishing I could know him better. “Well,” I say, “I think it’s obvious he still plans some sort of response to our last meeting.”

  “Especially after you’ve gone out of your way to tease him.”

  A waiter brings a tray bearing two filled glasses. He places one in front of Elizabeth, the other in front of me. “Jorge said to tell you, it’s with his compliments,” he says.

  I nod, pick up my glass, catch a strong whiff of alcohol before I take my first sip. “Is this Evian?” I ask.

  The waiter grins. “Jorge said you’d kid with me. It’s Ketl One vodka, just like you like.”

  “We don’t drink. . . .” I shake my head, hold the glass out to him.

  “Jorge said you’d say that.” The waiter ignores my outstretched hand, chuckles as if we’re sharing a joke. “He told me, if you said that, I should tell you, ‘You might want to think about starting real soon.’ ”