by P. N. Elrod
Time for a stab of guilt as I thought of Bobbi. Last I’d seen of her was hours ago when she was on her way to the safety of a mobster’s lawyer’s house. I had no name, no phone number, no way to contact her except by talking to the mobster—and I didn’t know where he was, either. Things had gotten pretty crazy and hurried earlier, but this was ridiculous.
I put it off for as long as my conscience could stand, then lurched out of the water, grabbing a towel Trudence had left for me. The floor was cold on my feet, but the rest of me was a nice cherry red as I dried, wrapped the towel around my waist, and padded downstairs.
Coldfield, overcoat off and cup of coffee in hand, was at ease in the kitchen talking with a couple of women as they worked on food preparation. One of them looked up and giggled at the sight of me in my vulnerable and draft-ridden state. I hesitated and shifted from foot to foot, holding on to the towel for dear life.
“Your clothes ain’t ready yet,” she said.
“I’ll take ’em as is, ma’am, if you don’t mind.”
“What for, you goin’ someplace?” asked Coldfield.
“I wanted to check on my girlfriend and have to make some phone calls. Thought it’d be safer if I made them somewhere else.”
“Don’t have a phone here anyway. No skin off my nose if you want to catch pneumonia, but Tru might have something to say about it.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“Brave man.”
“A worried one—my girlfriend . . . ”
“Yeah, yeah, women, I know all about that. Get his stuff together, sweet thing,” he said, addressing the giggler.
“You ain’t my boss, Mr. Coldfield,” she stated, lifting her chin.
His jaw sagged a bit, then he recovered. “Okay, okay, I forgot where I was for a minute.” He went to a clotheshorse that had been set up before an open oven and yanked my pants free of it, tossing them at me to catch one-handed. If not completely dry, then they were at least not soaking. My leather belt was intact; I could smell the damp earth hidden inside. Good, one less thing to think about.
“What the hell . . . ?” Coldfield held up my shirt and undershirt, which were riddled with holes: four distinct large ones front and back and a number of smaller ones where the bullets and grenade shrapnel had gone through. Most of the blood had washed away, but there was some faint staining. My quite visible hide, however, was healed up by now.
“It was Charles’s idea of a disguise,” I said, improvising. “He’s got a closet full of things a ragman wouldn’t touch.”
Coldfield grunted with distaste and threw the stuff at me. I went back to the bathroom and dressed, came down again.
Coldfield pulled on his overcoat. “You’ll need a ride,” he told me.
“I can walk.”
“The hell you can. Show your white ass in this part of town and someone’ll take offense at the sight. I gotta protect their sensibilities. Not everyone’s as tolerant as me ’n Tru.”
“Oh.”
“Come on.”
The pea jacket I’d worn since the start of this business was still pretty spongy, but I thought I could handle it now that I was warmed up. Most of the time excess heat and cold doesn’t bother me, but Lake Michigan was just too damn much at once. The jacket was also marked by a number of holes, but I pretended not to notice them.
The girl giggled again as we left. It might have been fun to go invisible and stick around to see what she and her friend would be talking about for the next few minutes, but I followed Coldfield down the steps and back into his Nash.
“How’s Charles?”
“Tru dragged him upstairs to get some rest. Last I saw she was tucking him in and making him swallow a bunch of aspirin. Only reason she’s not done more for you yet is that accent of his keeps her hanging around him. He can just open his trap and charm the feathers off a goose without even trying.”
“He going to be all right today? Your sister said we’d have to leave.”
He hit the starter, fed it some gas. The motor muttered to smooth life and started purring. “She talks tougher than she is, no need to worry about him, but I’ll catch hell for taking you out before she’s had a chance to check you over.”
“Blame it on me.” The last thing I wanted was her trying to find my nonexistent pulse.
“Oh, I plan to.”
He pulled out of the alley into a larger street. I turned for a look at the front of the place. Still drab, like the rest of the neighborhood, with no sign to indicate what was inside. I asked him about it.
“She runs it like a speak,” he said. “You have to know about it to go there.”
“Why’s that? If she’s helping people, what’s she hiding it for?”
“Something to do with her bein’ a nurse. She thinks if the hospital she works for finds out about it she could lose her place with them, get struck off or something like that.”
“But if she’s doing good for people, why should they—”
“Because it’s an unofficial kind of place. She’s trying to get it legitimate, permits and stuff, but it’s taking time, and the way she sees it, a hungry baby can’t wait until someone in the city office gets off their butt long enough to find the right stamp for the papers. And you don’t talk about this, yourself. She worked too hard to get where she is, first one in the family to really go to school and finish it out. She’s got more guts than me.”
“You didn’t finish?”
“I had to make money and my feet itched, so I built me a shoeshine box for a nickel and started walking and working. That’s how I ended up in Canada knocking on the back door of a theater there. They needed someone to fix their shoes and Charles talked ’em into hiring me for that, then into taking me on for backstage carpentry work. Don’t know how he did it—they didn’t exactly want a black hanging around the company, but when that guy makes his mind up to it, he could sell snow to a polar bear. Before I knew what was happening, he had me building sets and reading and memorizing everything from Bertolt Brecht to Oscar Wilde.”
“And Shakespeare?”
“Yeah, him, too.”
“Must have been some life you had.”
He laughed once. “Heaven and hell. Times be that I was the only colored man in the whole territory. Some people would come to the plays we did just to get a look at me like I was some kind of a zoo display, then the company wised up and took advantage of it. Once I got billed as ‘the famous Mr. C. Coldfield of London as seen by royal command at Buckingham Palace’—I got good at copying Charles’s accent—that was when we did Othello. Nobody in the burg knew any better, so we got away with it.”
“Sounds great.”
He made a flat, disparaging snort. “Hell, any idiot in blackface can do the part. I never really enjoyed playing it. What I really wanted was the lead in Richard the Second. And don’t tell Charles I said that, he busted his ass to get the Othello performance set up for me.”
“Ever want to go back to acting?”
“Hell, yes, but I don’t see how, the way things are these days. Closest I get is running my club. Besides, I got political ambitions. Ain’t no one going to elect an actor to anything important, which is stupid, since that’s the one person who knows best how to swing a crowd.”
“All politicians are actors, though, one way or another.”
“Yeah, but the voters don’t like having their faces rubbed in it, gives the whole business away for the farce it is when you get an actor up there telling them what they want to hear. Just look at Hitler, the way he hypnotizes’em. That bastard should be doing opera, not running a country.”
“Opera?”
“Yeah, he’s got a beautiful voice.”
“All that screaming?”
“Huh, you should hear him when he’s just talking normal. It’s terrifying. That big radio of mine picks up Germany and I listen in sometimes. He’s got the most compelling, beautiful voice I ever hope to hear this side of heaven, but the stuff he says . . . ” Coldfield sho
ok his head. “Got more venom than a cobra and he’d be happy as hell to see people like me dropping dead at his feet, only it’d spoil the shine on his boots. Musta tied his gut up in knots but good when Jesse Owens won all those medals last year.” He broke off and chuckled for a while over that one.
“You know German?”
“Enough to listen to. We had a kraut in the company and Escott would get him to talk German in exchange for cleaning up his accent so the audience could understand him. It was really funny trying to do Hamlet when King Claudius was sounding more Deutsche than Danish.”
I laughed. “This is all new to me, he doesn’t say that much about what he did in those days.”
“Has a reason for it.”
My ears pricked up. “What’s that?”
He shook his head. “When he’s ready to tell you, he probably will.”
Familiar territory there. I wondered what Escott’s big secret was. “It have to do with why he’s always sticking his neck out farther than what’s good for him?”
He shot me a hard glance. “Guess you got some brains rolling around in that head of yours, kid.”
We were about the same age. My condition made me look younger. I let it pass. “Guess I do. So what is it?”
“Uh-uh. Not my table. Tell you what, get him drunk some night. Once he stops quoting Shakespeare you might learn something. In the meantime keep an eye on the fool so he doesn’t get himself killed.”
“Do my best. You, too?”
“My best, though he makes it damned difficult. Always ready to run into a riot. Like tonight, going to see Angela. I knew it stunk, but he talked me into going anyway. I got more sense than that, but once he gets aimed at something . . . ”
“I know. Like a train on a track.”
He shook his head again, then asked, “Where you want to go?”
“Just drop me near the Stockyards.”
He misinterpreted, as I’d hoped. “There’s bound to be someone watching Charles’s office.”
“Just one of the things I want to check on. If it looks clear I’ll go in and make my calls, then find a place to flop for the day.”
“The hell you are. I’ll catch it from both Tru and Charles if I don’t bring you back.”
Damn. And I was hoping to avoid this. I kept shut until he pulled over and parked. His car had a lot of nice extras, like an overhead bulb that came on when I opened the door to get out. It gave me the light I needed to focus on his eyes . . . and get his full attention.
“Shoe, I won’t be coming back until tonight,” I told him, holding his gaze steadily. “But that’s all right. You can go along to your sister’s place and take it easy.”
His normally tense expression was relaxed now, almost serene. “Yeah, sure,” he murmured in a distant voice.
“I’ll call your club around sundown so we can hook up again then. You guys just sit tight and don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”
“You got it,” he promised.
Then I let my control over him slip away nice and easy. I didn’t care much about doing this kind of thing, especially to someone I liked, but I was getting good at it. He had no idea of what had just hit him and would think everything I’d said to be perfectly normal and reasonable. “Make sure Escott gets lots of rest, he needs it. Sit on him if you have to, okay?”
“I’ll leave that to Tru, she intimidates the hell out of him.”
“Maybe he enjoys it.”
I levered from the car, then turned and put my hand out. “Thank you.”
It seemed to startle him, but he recovered and we shook briefly. “Keep your head down, kid.”
“I will.” I hurried away. He put the car in gear and took the next turn back to his part of town.
Over the last several months I’d gotten thoroughly acquainted with the layout of Chicago’s smelliest landmark, the Stockyards. Coldfield had dropped me within a block of the southern end of things. Five minutes later and I’d either walked or passed invisibly through all the various barriers meant to keep the cattle in and the public out and was in the midst of the smaller pens, looking for a likely dinner.
It was noisy, with all that mooing, and it never stopped, like they knew what they were there for. Maybe they did know, since mixed in with the thick farmyard stench and the mud was the smell of blood from the slaughterhouses and processing plants. Unless you were used to it—or craved it like me—it could really ruin your night.
I breathed in the bloodsmell and felt my teeth budding in response. Yes, I’d fed not so many hours ago, but the morphine-tainted stuff had messed me up something bad, had nearly killed me by default. Time now to replace it.
One of the pens had only three occupants, and they looked somewhat cleaner than average. That’s an important detail to me, considering what I have to do to get my dinner. I slipped inside and made calming talk with the nearest cow. This was another version of the hypnosis I’d done to Coldfield, but much more basic and less of a blow to the old conscience. I talked and stared and got Bossy to hold still, then eased down on my heels to find the big vein in one of her legs. She remained quiescent as my corner teeth swiftly cut through her tough hide and the first burst of red life hit my tongue.
God, it had been forever since I’d had anything this good.
Or felt this good about having it.
My girlfriend, Bobbi, had been a big help to me there. Being a vampire didn’t mean I was automatically comfortable with the business of drinking blood. Just talking cold on it and it sounds pretty revolting, but Bobbi finally got it through my thick skull that this was nothing to be ashamed about, especially when it was the only game in town when it came to my continued well-being. I finally stopped worrying about what other people might think if they saw me—fat chance of that since I’m always careful—and just drank it down, having finally admitted to myself just how much I really enjoyed it.
It’s hard to explain what the stuff does to me, only that prior to my change I’d never felt anything quite like it before. Sometimes it soothes; others, it hits like a hammer. Either way was fine, more than fine. Since my heart doesn’t pump I don’t know how the stuff flushes me with that special kind of heat that flows from deep inside right out to my toes and fingers. But it feels great. Better than great. Sometimes when I’m really starved, the tide of it flooding through me is almost as good as sex—but only almost. Making love to Bobbi is something else again.
But I’ll talk about that another time.
After a few minutes I had as much as I could hold. Unless I got on Angela Paco’s shit list once more and she started throwing hand grenades again, I’d be good for two or three nights now. Usually I made a stop like this every other night to keep myself feeling fit, and I never went more than four nights without feeding, too dangerous. Not that I’d turn into some kind of mad-dog maniac and attack people, but it screws up my being able to think straight and I could get clumsy, get caught.
I pulled back and pinched the vein, blowing on the two wounds I’d made until they clotted over, then I vanished and drifted free of the pen. The animals didn’t like that and protested, but by then I was streaming away from the area. Back outside I partially re-formed just enough to see where I was and if it was safe to go from ghost to full solidity. It was. With no one else about, I materialized in a dark patch between two streetlights. Checked the time again, then remembered my watch had stopped. Have to get it fixed or buy another, I thought as I got my bearings and pressed on in the direction of Escott’s office.
His rent was cheap owing to its location near the yards. He could afford better, but seemed to like this joint. Also, he was the half owner of a tobacco shop backing his place that faced the street on the other side of the block, so maybe he stuck around to keep an eye on things. It was convenient for both of us.
I checked the street in front of the office, but saw no stray cars that didn’t belong. That didn’t mean much, though. I went around the block and entered through the closed tobacco shop,
then up its back stairs to a jumbled storage area full of old boxes and junk. One particular crate against the back wall marked the location of the concealed door Escott had installed there. He always excused his indulgence in something so theatrical by saying it was indeed a leftover habit from his life on the stage, but I knew better. He was like a schoolkid about having secret passages and hidden exits handy.
Myself, I just flowed through the cracks in the wall and went solid again on the other side, standing quiet in the tiny washroom for Escott’s office and listening.
Nothing to hear. That was a relief. I’d been afraid one or the other of the gangs had sent someone over to lie in wait, but the place was empty. However, I did find that people had been through it pretty thoroughly. Plenty of light came through the broken blinds for me to use. Just as well, because the lamps were wrecked. The back room where Escott stashed a cot for catnaps was torn up. Someone had kicked everything around: cot, radio, a few books and papers. The front where he received clients was in the same shape: desk overturned, file cabinets open and gutted. Nothing that couldn’t be cleaned up and replaced, but it made me want to crack the responsible party’s head in just to hear what kind of sound it made. No telling who was behind it, the ex-Kyler faction or the struggling-to-come-back Paco gang. Flip a coin.
The phone was off the hook and making funny noises. I dropped the receiver back in place and righted the desk. The drawers were all out, their contents thrown around. I put them back, found the chair that went with it, marveling that it was still in one piece. Tried the phone. It clicked a few times, then the tone came back and I dialed the Nightcrawler Club. I let it ring a long, long time.
Everyone was probably asleep, in jail and trying to get out, or elsewhere laying low. Much earlier this night the late, unlamented Vaughn Kyler arranged to have the cops in his pocket raid the place. I arrived just in the nick to keep his man from bumping off the manager, Gordy, who was a friend of mine.
