“Yeah, that makes sense,” I agreed. “The ones I fought last night weren’t any stronger than a human and were pretty clumsy. No way they could handle a full-grown vamp.”
“So how do we find these houngan?” Amy asked. “I doubt they have a sign hanging out on their front porch that says, ‘Evil witch doctor here’.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I said. “Tourist dollars being what they are and all.”
“Bubba raises a good point,” Eddie said.
“I do?” I asked.
“He does?” Amy’s eyebrows went sky-high.
“First time for everything,” Skeeter muttered simultaneously.
I glared at my friends, then turned to Joe. “Thank you for showing what must have been truly herculean restraint there, buddy.”
He just grinned at me. “I figured as far as smartass goes, those two had us covered, so I’d just wait my turn.”
“Screw every single one of you guys,” I said with a half-grin. We’d been through a hellacious year, and if we were still tight enough to give each other shit in the middle of a zombie investigation, we were gonna be fine. Maladjusted and pretty much unfit for polite society, but fine.
“What I mean is that many of the houngan around town do advertise their services, and we may be able to find out a great deal about them through a simple internet search. Then a little in-person investigation would give us a great deal more information.”
“That’s my cue,” Skeeter said, standing up to a distressed look from Detective Jawline. “You can come with me,” Skeeter said to his disappointed beau. “The searches will go faster with some navigation from a local.”
“I wish I could, chere, but I’m due at the station in an hour to fill out a mountain of paperwork about a missing tourist. I’ll meet up with you after my shift and we’ll grab dinner.”
“If I’m not in the middle of killing vampires or zombies,” Skeeter said. He leaned down and brush-kissed the detective’s cheek, then headed up the street toward our hotel and his three travel computers.
“What’s our plan?” Joe asked me.
“I’m planning on a shower, then a few hours of sleep. This coffee has enough juice to get me back to the hotel, but just barely. Then we see what Skeeter’s dug up and go bang on doors.”
“Sounds like a plan. What will you be doing?” Amy asked Eddie.
“I also need sleep, then I will ask my congregation if they know of any new houngan in the Quarter. I will meet you at your hotel at dusk to join forces and scour the town for these abominations.”
“I’m headed to the station,” Ponté declared. “I’ll see you at sunset.”
I grabbed the last of the beignets while Amy took care of the check, then we walked through the Quarter back to our hotel. I felt actually relaxed as I stepped off the elevator, but all that went out the window when I saw the door to our suite standing just a hair ajar. With no cleaning ladies anywhere to be seen, my mind went to monsters and my hand went to Bertha before I remembered she was empty and so was my backup.
“Take these,” I whispered to Amy as I handed her my coffee and the bag of beignets. I drew my Buck hunting knife from a sheath under the leg of my pants, reversed my grip on it, and slammed the door to our room open, barreling through with the same speed I used to use chasing quarterbacks.
Catherine sat on the couch in our small hotel room, reading an Anne Rice novel. She looked up as I crashed into the room. “Oh good, you’re home. Let’s talk.”
Chapter 8
I don’t like surprises, which is a pretty standard mindset for a man who carries around a fifty-caliber handgun. I don’t like vampires, despite meeting a couple of them that were actually pretty decent people. And I sure as hell don’t like being surprised by vampires when I’m tired and covered in zombie parts, and I’m supposed to be on vacation anyway and not have to deal with shit that goes bump in the night for just one week.
All that whining is to explain why I walked past Catherine to the bathroom of our hotel room and started taking off my clothes, completely ignoring her request for conversation. I kicked my boots off barely breaking stride, and turned on the water to somewhere between “scalding” and “rip the flesh right off the bone.”
I don’t know what kind of womanly “men, what can you do?” kind of looks go exchanged between her and Amy behind my back, but with a blur and a breeze suddenly there was a vampire sitting on the bathroom counter. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her black sweater had been replaced by jeans and a Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo t-shirt. Her bare feet hung a foot off the floor and she looked as much like a goth college girl than the ruling vampire of the Crescent City.
“Don’t let me stop you,” she said, looking me up and down like a farmer eyeing a prize hog.
“I wasn’t going to,” I replied, and dropped my pants to the floor. I stripped out of my shoulder holster and laid it gently on the back of the toilet, then peeled off my t-shirt and dropped it to the floor of the bathroom with a wet thwap sound.
“Hey honey,” I called out the open door to Amy. “I was going to invite you to scrub my back, but we seem to have company. Since all my plans for enjoying the morning have gone to shit, can you have housekeeping send up some extra towels, jumbo trash bags, and something to burn my clothes in?”
“Just as soon as I get room service ordered,” came Amy’s voice from the bedroom area.
“Didn’t you get enough beignets?” I asked.
“I’m ordering lunch. You’re going to sleep after we deal with Catherine, and then we’ll both wake up starving.” She really is the smart one of the pair.
“Okay, Catherine, what do you want?” I asked, peeling off my socks and throwing my boxers into a corner of the room. I spent years in locker rooms with coed reporters and various women coming and going for various reasons real and imagined, so undressing in front of a vampire didn’t bother me. That, and I was still a little pissed that she broke into our hotel room, so I figured she needed to put up with a little of my crap in return.
I stepped in the shower as she started talking. “The rogue is getting stronger.”
“We know. I just left Ponté and he told us about the head thing.”
“The ‘head thing,’ as you call it, is just part of it. Another of my establishments was attacked last night, and three of my soldiers were killed. That makes six true-dead just last night, counting the ones you killed, and we can certainly lay blame for those deaths at the feet of this rogue as well. If this keeps up, I’m going to have to launch a recruiting drive, and the Mayor won’t like that at all.”
“Yeah, I can imagine that tourists going home from vacation with new dietary restrictions would put a cramp on business in the French Quarter,” I said, shampooing my hair and beard.
“Not only that, but if this rogue is turning humans, he’s building an army at the same time he’s thinning my ranks. We may be heading toward a war that I can’t win.”
“No offense, Catherine, but why do I care which vampire wins? Both sides look at me like a cheeseburger, so why do I give a shit who wins and who loses?”
“Status quo,” she said simply. “I’m the devil you know. I’ve ruled New Orleans for well over fifty years. Through ups and downs, through storms and floods, through Katrina, and the hurt that did to the heart of my city…my city…this is my city, Bubba, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let some upstart take what I’ve built and tear it apart.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” I said. “We’ll keep looking. There’s some kind of connection between this bad voodoo priest and your vampire king wannabe, we’ve just got to find out what it is. And I think I know exactly how to do that.”
“How is that?” She asked.
“Can’t tell you,” I said, pulling open the shower curtain and reaching for a towel. Catherine had the courtesy to vacate the bathroom so I could dry off, probably because I take up almost all the available space in a bathroom, and I’ve got almost as much body hair as a
werewolf, so it takes a lot of towels to dry me off.
I stepped out of the bathroom a few minutes later smelling better than I had in hours and wearing a towel mostly around my waist. Catherine and Amy were sitting on the bed laughing and giggling like schoolgirls, but they fell silent when I walked in.
“Well, that’s enough to make a man paranoid—the object of every fifteen-year-old boy’s fantasy sitting in his hotel room, but they stop talking the second you walk in.”
“Don’t worry, Bubba, Catherine was just commenting on how different men were today from when she was turned back after the War.”
“Civil?” I guessed.
“American Revolution,” Catherine corrected. Holy shit, I was in my hotel room with an almost two hundred fifty-year-old vampire. That was some serious power. No wonder she was able to run New Orleans without any problems. Until now, that is.
“Let’s revisit this plan of yours that you can’t tell me about,” Catherine said, leaning back against the headboard of my bed and causing all sorts of naughty ideas to run around in my otherwise completely empty skull.
“Plan? Oh yeah, the plan. I can’t tell you about it,” I said, walking over to the dresser. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that traveling with a woman is different from traveling alone or with all guys. For one thing, the dresser actually gets used, and not just as a place to put your car keys. Amy actually unpacked all our crap and put it in the dresser for the week we were going to be there. If I was traveling alone, I’d just wear the same jeans for a week and change underwear and t-shirts out of a duffel bag, or a trash bag if I couldn’t find my luggage. That idea didn’t go over so well with the girlfriend.
I pulled on my boxers and jeans, then turned to face the irritated vampire standing behind me. “I said I’m not telling you my plan, and I’m not. I don’t trust your organization.”
“Why not? And put a shirt on, I feel like I’m standing next to a grizzly bear.”
“I didn’t invite you in,” I reminded her.
“That only matters for permanent residences, not hotels.”
“I meant that I don’t need to be all that polite to you, since you broke in.”
“Oh. I suppose that’s true. But why don’t you trust me?” She gave me a little pout, and I felt a pressure behind my eyes, like someone poking around in my head.
I opened a drawer and pulled out a faded Langhorne Slim t-shirt, then reached back into the drawer and pulled out a silver stake. “Let’s be real clear, Cathy. I understand that you’re the baddest vampire in New Orleans, and we’re working together under some kind of unofficial truce, but if you try to compel me, or anybody with me, to do anything again, I will shove this stake through your heart, then cut off your head and burn your head and body in two separate fires. Then I will scatter the ashes of those two fires on the grounds of different cemeteries and wash them into the earth with holy water. If that doesn’t scream true-death to you, then I don’t know what will. Now stay the hell out of my head.”
She pouted at me. “Can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?” But the pressure in my head relented.
“I don’t blame you for trying, I just wanted to make the consequences real damn clear.” I dropped the stake back into the drawer and closed it, then went to sit on the couch. “Did you want something else?”
“No. Since you won’t tell me your little plan, I suppose you won’t tell me when you’re planning to perform it, so I can’t have you over for a late dinner this evening, can I?”
I forget sometimes just how different from normal, breathing people the undead really are. Especially the ones that are starting to look at time in centuries rather than years. For a human, the most important thing in the world would be stopping a crazed vampire hell-bent on taking over your city. But to a vampire, planning a dinner party took precedence over keeping her city under control. I guess when you think life never ends, you kinda take the long view of things.
“No, I’m sorry Catherine, but we’re going to be busy trying to keep your city from crumbling around you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need some sleep if I’m going to do that.”
She gave me a little nod of the head. “Of course. I’ll leave a pair of my security team here to make sure you’re not disturbed.”
“That’s fine, but if they so much as press an ear to that door without my invitation, I’ll put a hole in their head the size of a softball.”
She smiled and glided out of the room, stopping to say something quietly to the goons standing outside. I guess they’d been on a concession run when I got there. I walked into the room, pressed my finger to my lips, and pointed at Amy’s suitcase. I waved a finger around the room in circles, and she nodded.
Amy opened her suitcase and pulled out a small black plastic waterproof case. She dialed a combination on the case and opened it, taking out a small handheld device that looked like a carpenter’s stud finder. She walked around the room waving it at the lamps, phones, windows. After a couple of minutes, she flicked a switch on the box and collapsed the antenna.
“We’re clear,” Amy said, sitting back down on the bed.
“Almost,” I said. I walked into the sitting area of the room and flipped on the TV. I set the volume on MAX and went back into the bedroom. “Now we’re clear,” I said.
“So what’s the plan?” she asked.
“Walk around Bourbon Street and try to attract a vampire.” I tossed the plastic case back into her suitcase, then put the suitcase on that odd folding thing that hotels put in every room and only gets used when women travel. Guys just put their suitcases on the ground.
“That’s the big secret plan?” Amy gaped at me from the bed.
“That’s part two of the big secret plan,” I said. I dropped my t-shirt on top of Amy’s suitcase, then skinned out of my jeans.
“What’s part one of the big secret plan?” she asked with a smile.
I scooped her up into my arms and threw her on the bed. “Make enough noise the security guards don’t have any questions as to where we are and whether or not we’re safe.” I grinned and laid down next to her, pulling the covers up over both of us.
Chapter 9
Dark fell on New Orleans, and the city really came alive. The bustling tourist city of daytime New Orleans shifted into something darker, more primal, dirtier, more real. In short, my kind of place. Amy and I stepped out of our hotel onto Bourbon Street and I stood there for a second, letting the primal urges of humanity wash over me.
“You love it here, don’t you, Bubba?” Amy asked, a note of surprise in her voice.
“Darlin’, I’ve only found a couple cities in my life where I really felt like I could stand to stay for a while. This is one of ‘em. I guess in the back of my mind I always hoped I’d retire here, buy a little jazz club, make the best damn margaritas in town, and spend the rest of my days listening to incredible musicians and pouring drinks for tourists.”
“I never knew that,” she said, a little smile playing across her lips.
“Hell, Amy, don’t feel bad. I’ve known him since before he could drive, and I never knew that.” Skeeter’s squeaky voice could ruin even the sweetest moment, and this one was no different. I turned, and my best friend had a good-looking police detective on his arm and smile on his face fit to beat the band. Looked like I wasn’t the only one to get a nap this afternoon. Skeeter looked like a cross between a stereotypical tourist and The Joker from The Killing Joke in a Hawaiian shirt, bright pink shorts, and brown loafers with black socks pulled up almost to his knees. Detective Ponté was much more the picture of New Orleans dress casual in khakis, loafers, and a short-sleeved pastel dress shirt untucked to hide his service weapon, or so I assumed.
Amy wore a light jacket for the same reason, with her Sig at the small of her back in a paddle holster. I had my Langhorne Slim shirt from earlier, jeans and my Doc Martens, with a Hawaiian shirt of my own hiding Bertha in a shoulder rig. But I wore it better than Skeeter. Might have had someth
ing to do with the socks.
“What’s the plan?” Ponté asked. “Catherine was plenty irritated when you wouldn’t share it,” he said with a grin.
“I already sent Eddie off to check the cemeteries, so we wander around together, then split off and try to look attractive to vampires,” I said.
“That’s it?” Ponté asked. “That’s the plan you wouldn’t share with Catherine?”
“Yep.” I nodded.
“What’s the big secret to that? It’s kinda the logical thing to do,” the well-dressed detective said.
“Yeah, but she pissed me off, so I was being petty.”
“That could come back to haunt you later,” he said.
“I doubt it,” I replied. “I’ve got a long history of not being the thing you want to mess with in the dark.”
“It’s true, babe, I’ve seen it,” Skeeter said. Babe? I looked at Amy, and she gave a tiny shake of her head. I made a mental note to ask about that later. In private. Where I could mock my friend mercilessly without my girlfriend coming to his rescue.
“Where’s your preacher friend?” Ponté asked.
“Checking the cemeteries we didn’t get to last night,” I said.
“Is he gonna be okay on his own?” the detective asked with a raised eyebrow.
“He’s packing, he’s wired into our comms if he wants to be, and he said something about bringing along local backup, so I think he’ll be fine.”
“Fair enough,” Ponté replied.
“So where do we start? I think I’ll head off this way.” Amy pointed over to a crowded meat market bar that masqueraded as a rock n’ roll bar.
Moon over Bourbon Street - a Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella Page 5
