Vampires 3

by J. R. Rain

  “You mean like in Dungeons & Dragons,” I said. “Or that World of Witchcraft, or whatever it’s called. A slayer is like her—what do they call it?—her avatar?”

  Gladys smiled gently. “I’m not sure I understood half of what you just said, Mr. Spinoza, but what I do know is that she really thinks she’s a vampire slayer.”

  “Do you have her on any medication?”

  Gladys shook her head. “She won’t see a doctor, and won’t go to school.”

  “So she just stays with you?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about that. “How did you meet her, Gladys?”

  “Veronica just...appeared at our house one day. Bloodied and in a horrible mess. She always refused to talk about where she came from or what happened to her. But I later understood her parents had been in a horrible accident.”

  I rubbed my temples. If I had known that by putting a simple ad in the Yellow Pages I would be meeting the world’s whackos, I might never have gotten into this business.

  Not true, I suddenly thought. Getting into this business was something I had to do. Needed to do. Looking for the missing was, in fact, the only thing I could do.

  I asked, “Are you on medication, Gladys?”

  “Many,” she said, smiling. “But not the kind you’re thinking of. I assure you, Mr. Spinoza, everything I have told you is true.”

  “And this girl is sixteen?”

  “Give or take a few years.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She would never tell us her exact age.”

  I thought about that. “When she appeared at your house, did you report her to the authorities?”

  “She warned us that if we did, she would run away and we would never see her again.”

  “And you didn’t want her to run away.”

  “No. It was so...nice having someone in the house with us. Jack is in a wheelchair, you see, and she was always so helpful, even from the beginning.”

  “You enjoyed her company,” I said.

  “We loved having her around. She was a breath of fresh air, despite...despite her problems.”

  “Problems?”

  “You know, typical teenage stuff. Always sad, depressed. Of course, back then we didn’t know why she was so sad and depressed. But later we figured it was about her parents. We didn’t ask her too many questions. She didn’t like questions.”

  “And you didn’t want her to run off because you liked her company.”

  “We loved her company. We loved her. She was like a real granddaughter to us.”

  “Do you have any kids, Gladys?”

  “One. But we do not speak anymore. She disowned us decades ago. All over a fight. One single fight.”

  And now she did weep again, although softer than before. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, which squeaked under my considerable weight.

  “Veronica was our last chance to do it right, and she was our gift from God.”

  We were silent. Outside my office window, the streets of Los Angeles weren’t silent. I studied Gladys. She seemed sane enough. But I have been fooled before.

  She went on, “Since we didn’t know her exact age, my husband and I agreed that she was at least eighteen, and so we felt comfortable about not reporting her. Of course, we would have preferred to contact the proper authorities, or her parents, but she wasn’t giving us many options. In the end, we wanted her safe and well fed and properly cared for.”

  I nodded, wondering if Veronica’s best interests were really being considered. I looked down at my notes. “And Veronica has lived with you for the past three years?”

  “Yes, sometimes.”

  “Sometimes? What does that mean?”

  “It means that sometimes she disappears for a few days and nights.”

  “Days and nights?”

  “Yes.

  “Where does she go?” I asked, and already I was dreading the answer. My feelings of dread weren’t unfounded.

  “Hunting vampires,” said Gladys. She said the words so calmly, so conversationally, so pleasantly, that I nearly burst out laughing. Hearing the words “hunting vampires” come out of this sweet, elderly lady nearly made me question my own sanity.

  Maybe I’m the one going insane.

  “That’s what I get for asking,” I said, mostly to myself. Gladys looked at me curiously.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  I waved off my comment. “Never mind. So when she’s not out hunting vampires, where do you think she really goes? A boyfriend’s house? Parties? Weekend drinking binges in Vegas?”

  Gladys shook her head to all of the above. “No,” she said. “I believe she really hunts vampires.”

  “Of course you do.” I took in some air. I nearly asked her to leave my office. Nearly. “And she’s been missing a week?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long does it usually take to hunt a vampire?”

  “Three days, tops.”

  “Of course,” I said. “So this latest vampire hunt is lasting longer than usual.”

  She nodded and reached a shaking hand into her purse, removing a badly wrinkled and very used tissue. Crazy or not, Gladys was a woman in need, and my heart went out to her. It always did. To everyone. I may not always be able to voice my concerns or sympathies, but I did the next best thing. I helped people with my actions. I knew in my heart I would help her. One way or another, I would give this crazy old woman peace of mind.

  “Mr. Spinoza,” she said. “Veronica was a gift from God. An angel, if you want to know the truth. What she’s involved in, I don’t know. How she became involved with it, I don’t know, but I love that girl, and I need someone to help me find her.”

  I sat back and steepled my fingers in front of me. I had two pending cases sitting on my desk. Both were cheating spouse cases. Oh, joy.

  I had, of course, already made my decision.

  “I will do all I can to help you, Gladys.”

  She nodded and smiled and cried, and finally I was able to force myself to stand and walk around the desk, and give the old woman a deep hug.

  Chapter Two

  I was sitting with Detective Hammer inside a donut shop on Glendale Avenue. Hammer seemed right at home in a donut shop, and I told him as much.

  “Very funny, asshole,” he said.

  Hammer and I had been working missing cases together for the past few years, ever since I got into the business and had made finding missing children my specialty. Hammer was a lead detective at the LAPD Missing Persons Unit, and he was damned good at what he did. I happened to have a knack for it, too, and we made a good team.

  We had also become friends, which is a rarity in the private business. Mostly, cops looked at us private dicks as irritants. Not to mention, I rarely, if ever, went out of my way to make friends, which was partly due to extreme shyness, and partly due to my desire to just be left the hell alone. The fewer the people who knew me, the fewer the people who could remind me about what a fuck-up I was.

  Anyway, Detective Hammer and I were sitting in the far corner booth, which gave the detective a good view of the glass door, and the donut case behind me.

  “How come I never get to watch the door?” I asked.

  “Because you’re not a real cop,” he said.

  “How do I know you’re really watching?” I asked. “And not just planning your next donut?”

  “Because I’m a highly trained detective in the LAPD. I can do both,” he said. “So far, the coast is clear, and I’m thinking I’ll have a maple bar next.”

  And he did just that. A moment later, he returned with said donut and a chocolate milk.

  I said, “When you’re done with that, there’s cubes of sugar over there that you can snack on.”

  “Maybe,” he said, and I wasn’t entirely sure he was joking. “So which case are you working on?”

  I told him about it, although I left out the part about Veronica being a vampire slayer. Which was probably for the bes
t, since I wouldn’t have been able to say it with a straight face, anyway.

  Hammer nodded and took a bite of his donut. “The runaway who’s been living with the old couple.”

  I nodded.

  “We put this case on the back burner,” he said. “We’ve got more important things to do than look for a runaway who ran away again.”

  “Or so it seems.”

  “She’ll turn up alive and well, trust me. Probably out on some party boat in Havasu. She’ll come back to the old folks when she’s partied out.” He finished his donut and sucked on his fingers. “Anyway, to put the old lady’s mind at ease, I told her to go see you, since you’ve got nothing better to do.”

  “That, and I happen to be the best.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. There’s a guy here in town who gives you a run for your money. An old guy. Looks a little like Elvis.”

  “Lucky bastard.”

  “Tell me about it. Anyway, he’s pretty good, too. Maybe better than you.”

  “That’s one thing I don’t mind being second best at. Maybe he and I could touch bases sometime.”

  “Sure,” said Hammer. “I’ll give you his number. Then you and Elvis can solve crimes together—call yourselves Starsky and Hubba-Hubba.”

  “When you’re done clowning around,” I said, “maybe we can think about finding a missing girl. And I don’t give a shit if you think she’s just another runaway. Even so, runaways find themselves in more shit than anyone. She needs help, no matter.”

  “Fine. Quit busting my balls.”

  “Did you do any work on this case?”

  “Enough to know that it looks like she skipped town.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “That’s it. I told grandma to put together as much information as possible on the girl and to give it to you.”

  “She did.”

  “Then you now have twice as much info as we’ve got.”

  We were quiet. As Hammer was about to bite into his maple bar, his bristly mustache sort of quivered in anticipation.

  “When you eat,” I said, “Your cop mustache quivers like a randy mouse.”

  “Does it do it in a sexy way or a creepy way?”

  “A disgusting way.”

  “Probably why my old lady never sleeps with me.” He wiped his mouth. “Did Gladys mention, um, anything else to you?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Something, you know, odd?”

  “Maybe.”

  He said, “You ask me, she’s off her rocker.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You got anything else to say other than maybe? And if you say maybe again, I’m going to go ape shit on you.”

  I grinned. “She might have mentioned something about the girl being into some weird goth shit.”

  “No, it wasn’t weird goth shit,” said Hammer. “And might have and maybe is the same fucking word, asshole.”

  I grinned again.

  “What did she tell you?” I asked.

  “That the girl was some sort of a vampire slasher.”

  “Slayer,” I said. “Vampire slayer.”

  “Thank you for clearing that fucking up,” said Hammer. “Now I can rest well tonight knowing I have it fucking straight.”

  “So what does your gut say about this case,” I said. In this business, instincts were everything, and we often asked this question to each other.

  Hammer, for the first time in quite a while, looked legitimately perplexed; his mustache even sagged a little. “I’ll admit, it’s weird enough that it’s worth looking into, which is why I sent the old lady your way.”

  “That, and because I’m the best.”

  He ignored me and went on, ticking points off on his fingers as he spoke, “So, this girl Veronica shows up at the old lady’s door one day, bleeding and hurt, but won’t tell Gladys where she’s from or how old she is, and warns the old lady not to call the cops or she’s gone. The old folks are so desperate for excitement in their pathetic lives that they happily take on this degenerate.”

  “Way to look on the bright side,” I said.

  “There ain’t no bright side to what I do,” he said.

  “I do it, too,” I said.

  “But not as good.”

  “Go on.”

  He said, “So they take this girl in, treat her as if she’s their own for a few years. Meanwhile she disappears every now and then to hunt werewolves.”

  “Vampires.”

  “Whatever. Look, someone here is clearly nuts.”

  “Nuts or not, we have a missing girl, who’s most likely a minor.”

  “I still say she’s a runaway. A runaway of a runaway is low priority for a prestigious law enforcement agency like the LAPD.”

  “But not for me.”

  “Do I really need to answer that?” he said. “Anyway, since you get paid to do this shit, you’re the lucky bastard who gets to look into it further.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Lucky me.”

  Chapter Three

  I spent the next two hours in my office poring over the file Gladys had given me. I was on my own with this case. The LAPD had effectively shelved the case, and, quite frankly, I was Gladys’s only hope.

  Perhaps Veronica’s only hope, too.

  No pressure or anything.

  There was a time when I was without hope, too. A pathetic, hopeless drunk. There had also been a time when I couldn’t have been happier. A wonderful marriage. A sweet little son. Within a matter of years, two tragic accidents, and a lot of alcohol later, it was all lost to me. My wife, my son, and my freedom. I had spent a year in prison, sobering up.

  Vehicular manslaughter.

  With that afternoon’s donuts still churning sluggishly in my digestive system, I locked up my office and decided to hit the first name on the list.

  According to Gladys’s notes, the first name was Veronica’s best friend. Gladys didn’t have a number for the girl, but she knew where she worked. She car-hopped at Industrial Burger in Hollywood.

  “Oh, goody,” I said to my empty Camry. “More grease.”

  * * *

  I was in luck. And luck is imperative in my business.

  In this case, my luck consisted of catching Veronica’s good friend, Nicole, on the right day at work. According to the manager, (after, of course, I showed him my P.I. license and slipped him a $20 bill), her shift would start in just under an hour.

  Happy that the investigation was off to a good start—not always the case, trust me—I ordered a Diet Coke and sat in my car and waited.

  While I waited, I did some research on my iPhone; in particular, I Googled vampire slayers. I was disheartened to see nearly three million hits came up, most about Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

  I adjusted my search parameters: vampire slayer -Buffy.

  Better. Only five hundred thousand. So I settled in with my diet soda and spent the next hour or so reading about all things undead and those who hunt them.

  My conclusion after an hour of reading?

  Well, outside of popular literature, no one took vampires or vampire hunting very seriously. There seemed, in fact, to be very little evidence of real vampires anywhere. Outside of a vampire hunting kit on display at the Ripley Museum in Niagara Falls, NY, and the ludicrous incident of the Highgate Vampire Hunt in England, which featured a couple of goofballs running around a cemetery claiming to be hunting vampires, there was remarkably little information about honest-to-God vampire hunters. Unlike ghost hunters, whole groups of which numbered in the tens of thousands around the world.

  So what was I to make of this?

  Apparently, more people saw a need to hunt ghosts than vampires. In fact—a quick Google search later—there were no legitimate vampire hunting groups out there.

  Conclusion: obviously more people believed in ghosts than vampires.

  I sat back in my hot seat and thought about it. So why in the hell would a teenage girl claim to be a vampire slayer?

  I op
ened Gladys’s file next to me and took out the two blown up pictures I had of Veronica. Included with the two pictures was a hand written note apologizing that these were the only two pictures she had.

  The girl in the picture was not small. In fact, the girl seemed to have grown three or four inches between the two pictures. One featured a defiant-looking young teenager at a BBQ, holding a paper plate overflowing with food. She was looking at the camera with a smoldering look, daring the picture taker to take another shot. Her hair was pitch black, short and completely straight. She was wearing shorts and sandals and a lot of attitude.

  The second picture couldn’t have been more different. Her short hair was now long. Gone was the attitude, now replaced with an underlying confidence. In the picture she was standing with Gladys, her arm around the elderly woman’s shoulders. Veronica had perfect posture, shoulders thrown back, back perfectly straight, easily a half a foot taller than her adopted grandmother. Veronica wasn’t smiling in this picture, either. Most interesting, she seemed like a young lady who was very secure in who she was.

  A rare feat if you ask me.

  She also didn’t look crazy. She wasn’t dressed in the typical goth fashion, either, which I had suspected she would. If anything, she looked like the captain of her high school volleyball team or the center for the basketball team. She radiated calm and poise and great inner strength.

  Again, a rare feat for a girl so young

  Hell, if this girl in the picture told me she was a vampire hunter, I’d almost be inclined to believe it.

  Which brought me back to Gladys. The old lady was looking more and more like she was, as Detective Hammer put it so eloquently, off her rocker.

  It was at that moment, as I sat there perplexed and sweating, that a young lady skated smoothly across the baking pavement and rolled expertly up to my window.

  “Bobby said you wanted to speak with me?” she said.

  Nicole was still in high school. She was fit and athletic and seemed to have this skating thing down pat. I would have killed myself many times over.

  I showed her my P.I. license. “I’ve been hired to find your friend Veronica.”