The Vampire Files, Volume Three

by P. N. Elrod

  “How is that possible if she’s not in it?”

  “Her contract. She gets paid whether she appears or not. I just gotta get the name of the agent who made a sweet deal like that for her. I’m getting money for the broadcast, but forfeiting one night’s pay on the show. Not that I mind, the radio work pays lots more.”

  “So what’s the story with Gordy and Adelle? I saw her winning a wheelbarrow full of money from him in the casino, and he looked happy about it.”

  “With Gordy it’s hard to tell, but I think he’s head over heels.”

  Gordy Weems in love. My mind boggled. “What about Adelle?”

  “It may take her a little longer to figure it out, but right now Gordy’s giving her the kind of attention she used to get from Archy. That’s got to count for something. For her career, Archy is still the better deal, though, so I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “It could work out as a fair trade. Archy gets you and Gordy gets Adelle.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Yeah, I know. But tell me, if I wasn’t in the picture, if you hadn’t met me, you think you’d go for Archy?”

  Another face as she thought about it. “Oh, he’s fun to flirt with, and very attractive, but no, absolutely not. He’d use me up and spit me out like a piece of old gum.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, angel. It could have been the other way around, and you’d be breaking his heart.”

  “You’re sweet to say so.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “If anyone else but Archy was involved, I would. He’s too sharp to let himself lose his head over a girl. Like I said, he’s after the idea of me, but not me. I’m a prize, nothing more. He probably doesn’t even realize it himself. I don’t think he could even talk to a girl in a normal way; it’d all have to be flirting. For instance, I couldn’t have this kind of conversation with him—he wouldn’t know how—but I can with you.”

  She made a lot of sense, and this was so different from how she’d been acting earlier. The man she’d been with before me had done a lot of damage. She was pretty much over it, but in odd moments, when something sparked an unpleasant memory for her, she’d slip and give in to the past. Her behavior then was how she’d survived. These days it tended to trip her. But that was okay, I was good at catching.

  I had my eyes open for the mystery car, and it was still there when we left. The driver was slumped down in the seat, so I couldn’t get a good look at him. I drove Bobbi home and tried not to watch the rearview mirror the whole time. Whoever it was followed at a good distance; this late at night he could afford to do so. As I walked Bobbi into her hotel, he parked half a block away from my spot, cutting his lights.

  After a long day of practice and performance she was nearly asleep on her feet, so we limited ourselves to a chaste good-night kiss in her doorway, though I did set a date with her tomorrow night for a real dinner out after rehearsals. I’d take her to a nice place with tablecloths, crystal glassware, and a wait staff with foreign accents.

  After the elevator dispensed me in the lobby, I departed by way of the hotel’s back entrance, taking to the service alley that ran through the center of the block. Buildings loomed tall and sinister on either side, but I eventually emerged unscathed onto the street and cut right. When I rounded the corner I was exactly behind my shadow’s parked car. It was a Buick similar to mine, but a different color. One man was behind the wheel, and now and then a plume of smoke came out the half-open driver’s window as he puffed on a cigarette. As I’d hoped, he’d been content to watch my car, not me.

  I walked soft, getting fairly close, knowing the rearview mirror would be useless to warn of my approach and the rain would cover any noise. When I got even with the back bumper I vanished and worked my way around to that open window and slipped in. The only hint of my presence to the driver would be a feeling of intense cold as I passed. Escott said it was the kind of chill that went bone-deep. Just to be mean about it I hung close to the driver until with a violent shiver and a curse he suddenly rolled up the window.

  I was laughing when I materialized in the passenger seat and laughed again at the look on his mug when he turned to face me. If anyone could really jump out of his skin, this guy would have been the one to do it. He also let out with quite a yell of terrified surprise. Startled as he was, he had enough presence of mind to claw inside his coat for a gun, which I took away from him without much trouble. He threw a wild punch in my direction, then hit the door handle and shot out, running as his feet hit the pavement. I shoved the gun away in a pocket and vanished again to ease my own hasty departure.

  Ghosting after him at a pretty fast clip, I got right on his heels, then poured back into myself. I also landed running, but didn’t have to go far. I clapped a hand on his shoulder and spun him off balance. He yelled again, making an echo off the buildings. I got a solid grip on him, put on the brakes, and dragged him over against a wall.

  He put up a good struggle, or did until I lifted him clean off his feet and pinned him against the bricks. He started up with more noise, but I cut that off with a hand over his mouth. After that I got his full attention and told him to pipe down and cooperate.

  We were close to a street lamp, giving me sufficient light to make a firm impression. He got quiet in a magically short time, so I let go my grip. No running away now, he just stood there looking like a beached fish. That’s the chief drawback for me whenever I put anyone under—that dead look they get in their eyes.

  “What’s your name, mac?” I asked.

  “Shep Shepperd.”

  Well, if his parents had inflicted that one on him, no wonder he’d turned to crime. He had a thick body wrapped in a none-too-clean topcoat that was too big for him. He smelled of stale tobacco and garlic, but no alcohol. “Who sent you after me?”

  “Ike LaCelle.”

  That I had expected. As soon as I’d seen the headlights I remembered the phone call LaCelle made before leaving the club. It sounded like Gordy hadn’t gotten around to that talk after all. He’d probably been too busy with Adelle Taylor. What the hell, she was an understandable excuse.

  “What did Ike tell you to do?”

  “Follow you, find where you lived, where you work, who you—”

  “I get it. And then what?”

  “Then tell him.”

  “So he could tell Grant?”

  “Who?”

  I let it go. There was no need for LaCelle to fill one of his soldiers in on the background. “Did Ike say what he was going to do after you found out all this?”

  “No.”

  “You done this kind of thing before?”

  “Yes.”

  “What usually happens afterward?”

  “This!”

  The reply did not come from Shep.

  Someone punched me one hell of a hard one in my right kidney. I couldn’t help but drop. What wind I had in me for talking whooshed right out and wouldn’t come back. He followed up immediately with a sharp, brutal clip behind one of my ears, and that sent me plummeting the rest of the way to the sidewalk.

  My near-automatic reaction to escape such pain was to vanish, but it didn’t happen. He’d used wood, then. Some kind of club. Just enough force to knock me down but not out, and it hurt just as much as it would a normal man. Lucky me.

  The initial shock faded slowly as I lay on the wet pavement with the rain hammering my back. When things eased enough for me to start moving again, my attacker used his foot to turn me over. I squinted up at him, not liking him much.

  He was bigger than his friend, with prizefighter ears and a beat-up face to match. He looked too old for the ring, though. Maybe he sparred for a living when he wasn’t out in the middle of the night helping Shep tail a vampire. He was well armed, competently cradling one of Colonel Thompson’s .45 caliber specialties. It was fitted out with a fifty-shot drum and a fine stock that looked to be made out of walnut. In my opinion, that was overdoing things.

 
; I sat up, testing my recuperation, and rubbed the sore spot on my head. I’d had worse. “Dr. Livingston, I presume?”

  He either didn’t appreciate my humor or didn’t get it. He balanced himself to aim a kick to my gut, but I made a fast lunge and caught his leg in both hands, turning it hard. He gave a surprised grunt and toppled, arms flailing out to save himself. The machine gun clanked heavy as it landed in the streaming gutter.

  His recovery was quick; he must still have had some speed in him left over from the prize ring. He twisted, trying to get to the weapon before I did. We each scrambled hastily across the walk on all fours.

  I won by half a second and managed to violently shove the gun a good five yards out of his reach. Instead of going after it, I got to my feet, pulling Shep’s gun from my pocket, and aimed it like I meant it.

  “Hold it right there, Ace,” I told him as he lurched up. “I’m a rootin’ tootin’ son of a gun from Arizona, so don’t dance with me.”

  “Yeah, sure, with the safety on,” he said, grinning and moving forward in a fighter’s crouch.

  I twitched the muzzle in a threatening movement that made him stop. “It’s a revolver, Ace, and we both know they don’t bother with pesky things like safeties. Next time try teaching your granny to suck eggs, you’ll get fewer laughs.”

  He scowled mightily.

  “In fact, this is a sweet little double-action model, so I don’t even have to cock it to make big holes in your skull, so why don’t you back off and stand over there with Shep?”

  He growled something under his breath about my mother that I pretended not to hear, but did as he was told while I retrieved the machine gun. Shep had woken up from his trance at some point and stared, still looking like a fish, just slightly more animated.

  “What the hell happened?” Ace demanded of his friend. “I go off for one minute to take a leak and—”

  Why Ace needed a machine gun along for that errand I didn’t want to know.

  “Gah!” Shep’s memory had evidently caught up with him. He pointed at me with a quivering hand. “This guy got inna car, right inna car with me! You shoulda seen! He was just there!”

  “Shep,” I said calmly, looking hard at him. “Take a nap.”

  His eyes rolled up, and he slid to the sidewalk.

  Ace’s own eyes went wide, staring at his unconscious friend, before he turned them on me. It was all I needed, just a little of his undivided attention to put him under as well. I gave him the same questions I’d put to Shep and got the same answers. Ike LaCelle was accustomed to hiring them for odd jobs at odd hours, so when he called with instructions for them to get over to the club and follow me, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Night work was one thing that gangsters and the undead definitely had in common.

  They were usually told to rough up the bird they were after, but not this time. I supposed LaCelle just wanted information to start with, then he’d send in his boys to discourage me from seeing Bobbi again. Maybe I was to come home one evening and find them waiting for me with brass knuckles and big grins.

  Fat chance.

  When I’d finished with them both, they’d have to report a dismal failure to LaCelle. I primed them to say they’d followed me diligently, then lost me sometime after I crossed the state line into Wisconsin. In fact, at three in the afternoon tomorrow they would make a collect long-distance call to Mr. LaCelle from wherever they happened to be in that state to let him know about it. I walked them back to their car, saw them tucked in all cozy, and waved good-bye as they drove off.

  I hoped they had enough gas for the trip. I’d forgotten to tell them to stop for it.

  THE house was dark when I got back, though Escott had left the upper-landing light on for me. For once I was sorry that he was attempting to get one up on the insomnia; I’d wanted to tell him about my little interruption, and let him know about Ike LaCelle’s bullyboys. Just because I’d taken care of the two he’d sent didn’t mean he couldn’t find more.

  I sieved upstairs lest the creaking of the house’s old floorboards disturb my sleeping partner and shucked out of my thoroughly soaked clothes. Maybe I could get LaCelle to pay the cleaning bill.

  Having changed into pajamas and a robe, I went silently down to the kitchen and spent some time scribbling Escott a letter on the situation, adding in the news about Bobbi being a full-fledged guest on the Variety Hour. He also had an invitation to come to the studio and watch—Bobbi’s way of thanking him for the orchid. I left the note on the kitchen table with the revolver and machine gun, wishing I could see the look on Escott’s face in the morning when he saw them.

  It’d be a beaut, I was sure, especially before he had his coffee.

  There was still a big slice of waking night left. My condition wouldn’t allow me to cheat and go to bed early, so I caught up on reading the papers. Escott had gotten to them first; some were in tatters from his habit of cutting out any articles that caught his eye. He’d left the clippings on the coffee table; I didn’t miss much. They were mostly concerned with crimes. I skimmed those enough to know what they were about then moved on to other news, little of which was good. The civil war in Spain was going great—for the side that the Nazis were backing. The word “atrocities” was used a lot, but the paper either wouldn’t or couldn’t get more specific than that.

  I got sick of it and the state of mankind in general pretty fast and gave up on current news, trying a magazine instead. The first page I turned to informed me that dynamite was the preferred method of suicide in a Montana mining town. That was enough to send me back up to my room to find a book. I spent the remaining hours reading about a detective who talked tough, got hit on the head a lot, and planned to marry the girl right after the case was finished. He shot several gangsters stone dead and sent the chief bad guy plunging into a cement mixer, none of which brought any objections from the grateful cops. Not a bad life at all.

  It occurred to me at several points in the story that I could do a better job of writing myself, but I just couldn’t trouble myself enough to go down to the basement and prove it. I finished the book off, tossed it on a pile of others I’d gone through, and stared at the ceiling, not thinking about much of anything except Bobbi for a long while. I’d let her read some of my stuff, and she’d said it was good and that she’d liked it, but I wasn’t all that sure myself. She was a singer, not a writer; I needed someone in the writing business to look at it. Since no editors were knocking themselves out to make appointments with me, the only course left was to get to work, finish something, and send it in.

  Which I’d have to do some other night. The clock said I had just enough time to get to my basement sanctuary. I did exactly that, and for my last moments of consciousness I concentrated hard at not looking at my abandoned typewriter.

  It was still in the same spot when I woke up, but I had a busy evening ahead and cheerfully quit the chamber to join Escott upstairs. He sat at his ease at the kitchen table surrounded by several empty cartons of Chinese food and sipping a gin and tonic. He was doing the newspaper crossword puzzle with that damned hypodermic pen.

  “Cripes, it’s the easy life for you and no mistake,” I said, knotting the tie on my bathrobe.

  He was fairly used to my sudden materializations by now and hardly bothered to look up. “Yes, it’s been so dull here lately I was thinking of spending the next weekend in Cuba.”

  “Didn’t you like the presents?”

  Now he managed to crack something close to a smile. “Rather. Especially the machine gun. I took it out to the firing range today and had a bit of fun. The stock got slightly damaged from that roughhousing you described in your note, but it is a very fine weapon, indeed.”

  “You sound like you’re keeping it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it might have been used in a crime. The cops could be looking for it.”

  “Not to worry, I’ll turn it in when I’ve finished playing. It’s not often I get a chance to make so much noise i
n so short a time. You’d be surprised at how quickly one can empty those drums. It’s a pity the Treasury Department has such a tight control over those things; I should like to have one for myself.”

  “Maybe you could ask that mug where he got it.”

  “I meant legally. I doubt he paid much attention to the restrictions.”

  “Yeah, crooks are funny that way. Where is it?”

  “In the basement behind the safe’s alcove. The revolver’s there, as well.”

  We were the only two people on the planet who knew how to open the trick wall that hid the safe. “How’re things going with the Sommerfeld girl?”

  He made a sour face and capped the pen. “They’re not. She’s all right, or was so when she phoned this afternoon to check on me. In fact, she’s phoned several times today, according to my service.”

  “Getting antsy?”

  “That’s an accurate enough description for her growing impatience.”

  “What about that guy Paterno? Find him?”

  “No,” he said, which really surprised me. Escott was capable of tracking down a black cat in a coal mine without breaking a sweat. “I tried asking at the tavern McCallen frequents, and several other leads, but nothing turned up concerning his mystery friend. The single name you provided could be a first name, an alias, or a nickname. Whichever it might be, he’s never broken any laws using it.”

  “I’ll do what I can to clear the books tonight when I see McCallen.”

  “Which may not be possible.”

  “Now what?”

  “He did not go in to work today, nor was he at home.”

  “Where, then?”

  He shrugged. “My guess is that he’s either hiding out from us or devoting his time to searching for Miss Sommerfeld.”

  “That’s just great.”

  “Yes, it is rather disappointing.”

  “I don’t figure him for hiding out, though. There’s probably nothing better he’d like to do than find us. He was steamed hot as hell about my going through his place.”