by J. R. Rain
We were sitting in a backroom, in an unused part of the bar that might have been used to host parties or wedding receptions or even blood lettings. Roy and I were alone.
He asked if I wanted a drink and I held up my tonic water. I was fine, although I’d had booze on the mind throughout the day. Booze on my mind was not a good thing.
Let it go, I thought. And I did. It was, after all, easy to let it go. All I had to do was think of my dead son.
“Veronica is not like other girls,” Roy began. His shiner was now more than a shiner. It looked like a science experiment gone bad.
“I’m getting that impression,” I said.
Roy was sitting in a black leather sofa, one arm draped over the camel hump back. His legs were crossed. I noticed red marks around his wrists where I had pinned him down. I think he was making a concertive effort not to rub them in front of me. Probably didn’t think it would look cool to rub them.
He asked, “How much did the old lady tell you about Veronica’s parents?”
“That they had been killed in a car accident.”
Roy nodded. He unconsciously reached for his wrists but stop himself. He said, “That’s only partially true. They were found in a car, burned to death.”
“Go on.”
“Veronica would kill me for telling you this, but I have a feeling you’re not going to go away unless you know the truth.”
“Good thinking.”
I might have a gut, I might be a royal mess, and I might be a recovering alcoholic with serious issues, but I could fight my way out of anywhere, and I was packing heat, too. There were very few things that made my blood run cold, and Slim Jim here with his crazy eyebrows wasn’t one of them.
He said, “They were having a picnic in Echo Park, near Dodger Stadium. It had been late. Too late, obviously. The way Veronica describes it, a man suddenly appeared. A man with a long, winding dragon tattoo up and down his right arm. Veronica, who had been throwing away their garbage and was off on a side trail, had heard screaming and shouting. She ran toward her parents and watched just as the man was in the process of tearing out her father’s throat, like a fucking lion. He did the same to Veronica’s mother. Both attacks happened within seconds. Veronica didn’t even have time to scream, which was probably a good thing. She would have been next.”
Roy fished a cigarette out of his pocket. “You mind?”
“Kill yourself all you want,” I said.
He grinned weakly and lit up. He exhaled a long, slightly erratic plume.
He went on. “Her parents were dead instantly. I have no clue what she must have felt watching this animal attacking her parents, but it must have been horrible. Worse, she watched from the woods as he huddled over both bodies, drinking deeply from them. Sometimes he would look up, glance around, sniff the air, and then bury his face back into their torn necks.”
Roy shook his head some more, and I wondered idly what drugs the man was on. Probably one or two, although he didn’t seem high. Still, he seemed skittish as hell. Paranoia? Good old-fashioned weed? Or was he just scared of me?
He went on, “And what the man did next is really no surprise. She watched from the woods as he proceeded to drag her parents across a grassy area to their nearby car. He then used their lighter fluid to set fire to the car and the immediate area.
“Veronica had scrambled away, higher into the hills, in shock and horror, no doubt. She told me the last thing she saw was her parents’ bodies blackening in the burning car.”
Roy finished the cigarette and seemed to debate having another. Apparently, he decided against it. He went on, “In twenty minutes, this girl went from having a normal life with happy, loving parents, to watching their corpses burn into charcoal.”
He stopped talking and his words hung in the air. The room smelled now of cigarette smoke. It had smelled of something else, too. Something coppery. And if I had to guess, I would say the smell was blood. Old blood.
But that could have just been my imagination.
“Who else have you told this story to?” I asked.
“No one, you’re the first. Well, the first outside our group of friends.”
“I’m honored,” I said. “So how long did it take you to make up that bullshit?”
Roy’s eyebrows knitted together irritably, the uni-brow making its grand re-reappearance. “It’s the truth, man.”
“Fine. When did this happen?”
“Three years ago,” he said.
“I’m going to look this story up, Roy. Something like this would have made the news, and if I discover you’ve been lying to me, or have played any part in Veronica’s disappearance, I’m coming back for you.”
His eyes never wavered. “Look it up, man. Three years ago. Echo Park.”
“Fine. Where is she now?”
He looked down. Always a sign of deception.
“Tell me, motherfucker.”
“Look. I don’t know, okay? All I know was that she wasn’t...successful down here, and so she’s up north.”
“What the unholy fuck does that mean?”
Ron looked truly agonized. I knew this because his uni-brow was arched halfway up his forehead. “Look. She’s meeting with someone.”
I didn’t like his answer, mostly because I knew it was bullshit. I hit Roy hard with the back of my hand. It’s amazing how much kinetic energy you can generate with a simple backhand swing. Roy felt it. He stumbled backward and yelped.
“Jesus, what the fuck was that for?”
“What’s she doing up north?”
“Look, I don’t—”
I didn’t like the beginning of that answer, either, and my other hand shot out, low. It caught him in the gut and he doubled over. I grabbed the back of his hair and pulled him up to face me. His nose was trickling blood. He was gasping hard as if he had just run a marathon and it took all my willpower not to slap him again just because I hated his stupid eyebrow.
“Talk. No lies. Or this starts going very badly for you.”
He gasped, sucking wind. I could feel his heartbeat reverberating up through his hair.
“Look, she’s...she’s searching for the thing that killed her parents.” Suck, gasp. “He’s somewhere up north.”
“Who is he? What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. She never tells us anything. She only drops, you know, clues. Says it’s better that we don’t know anything.”
His words jived with Nicole’s. They also had the ring of truth. I always listen for the ring of truth. It’s there, if you know how to find it. I let him go, and he collapsed in a big velvet chair. He looked defeated and fucked up. Good.
“And how did you meet Veronica?” I asked.
He smiled weakly. “Anyone looking for vampires eventually ends up here,” he said, spreading his arms.
“Do you have any clue how fucking lame that sounds?”
“Do you have any clue what you’re talking about?” he countered, and wiped his bleeding mouth and stared down at the blood on his hand. The word longingly came to mind.
“And what do people do in here?” I asked, motioning to this back room.
Roy licked his hand.
“Anything they want, man.”
I stood, sickened.
“You’ll be seeing me,” I said, and left.
* * *
I was sitting in a Starbucks a few streets away.
Adrenalin was still pumping through me. I still felt a strong desire to kick someone’s ass. The name Roy popped into my mind. Maybe later.
I had no clue what was going on, and that was the frustrating part. I’ve been frustrated on cases before, trust me, but this one was taking the cake.
Seriously, what the fuck was going on?
Sipping on a latte of some sort and eating a scone of some sort, I waited while my laptop fired up. Starbucks was mostly empty. No surprise there since it was coming on to midnight. My hands were still shaking a little. Adrenalin does that to you. Sometimes it tak
es me a little while to come down from my ass-kicking high.
Finally online, I did a quick Google search and came up with nothing. I sensed a very thorough beating in Roy’s immediate future. If that weird, blood-sucking asshole lied to me....
A few tries later, after trying different keywords, I came upon the article I wanted. For now, Roy was spared.
The article was in the L.A. Times. There had, indeed, been a car fire in Echo Park, one that had burned nearly half the hillside. Two charred bodies had been found inside a Cadillac. No indication of foul play, and no mention of the daughter who had witnessed the attack. The article gave the couple’s names: Jeremy and Tonya Fortune.
I quickly accessed my various data mining websites, proprietary sites available only to licensed private investigators, and found them soon enough. Jeremy and Tonya Fortune out of Reseda, California. The valley. About an hour north of Los Angeles. It had to be them because all their personal information abruptly stopped three years ago. I even verified the Cadillac.
I dug deeper.
Jeremy and Tonya Fortune had one daughter. Valerie Fortune.
Valerie? Veronica?
It was her, I knew it. Why she had changed her name, I didn’t know. Just as I didn’t know why she had not come forward to report her parents’ murder.
Maybe she feared no one would believe her.
Believe what? That a vampire killed her parents? If so, then she was right. No one would have believed her.
I checked her date of birth, then did the math. Valerie—or Veronica—was indeed seventeen. Which put her at fourteen at the time of her parents’ death.
So what did I have here?
Two dead bodies, and a girl who witnessed something. What she witnessed, exactly, I didn’t know. But a car with her parents inside didn’t just go up in flames on its own.
I sat back and drummed my fingers on the table. Veronica’s story was credible. But it was hearsay. I needed to talk to the source.
I needed to find Veronica. Or Valerie.
I packed up my laptop, polished off the mocha latte, and decided to start fresh in the morning.
After all, I had had enough of vampires for one night.
Hell, for a lifetime.
Chapter Six
We were in bed together.
Roxi had wanted to make love, and I had just wanted to talk. I know, lame. Of course, all it took were a few seconds of persuasion and I soon saw her side of things.
Now, panting and sweating and feeling as if I might very well have a heart attack, I turned on my side and looked at her. Roxi was lying on her back, panting a little herself. Her skin glowed softly from the ambient light coming in through the partially open blinds.
I said, “There’s something screwy going on here.”
“There was a lot of screwy going on here, babe.”
“Of the investigative kind.”
She told me to tell her about it and I did. I had never felt that sense of shyness with Roxi. Ever. It’s one of the reasons why I thought we might just have a chance of making it. I caught Roxi up to date on the case. As always, she had listened with complete attentiveness. Another reason I was falling in love with her. That, and she always called my big stomach a “donut”. You gotta love that.
When I was finished, Roxi said, “Lots of people are talking about vampires here, but no one’s talking about a girl who is no doubt seriously delusional.”
“Or perhaps somehow suffering from the traumatic and horrific events of the night her parents were killed.”
“Perhaps Veronica had been hurt, too. Didn’t Gladys tell you she showed up at her door bloodied and bruised?”
I said, “But the cuts and bruises could have just as easily been from running through the wooded park at night.”
“Fine. So let’s say she witnessed something horrific happen to her parents,” said Roxi. She crossed her hands behind her head and stared up. “Why is she going around telling people it had been a vampire attack?”
“Maybe what happened to her parents was too horrible to deal with, especially for a fourteen-year-old girl,” I said. “And to make sense of it she replaced the reality with something fantastical.”
Roxi nodded, somehow following my logic. “With something that did make sense to a fourteen-year-old girl.”
“But vampires?” I asked.
“Who knows. They’re everywhere these days. Not to mention we don’t know the depth of her psychosis.”
We were quiet for a few minutes. Outside her apartment I heard a lot of street noise. But the noise was steady, soothing. I felt my eyes growing heavy.
I said after a while, “So now she’s hunting vampires.”
“Or what she thinks are vampires.”
“And somehow convinces a few fanatics that she’s a vampire slayer.”
“Wish fulfillment,” said Roxi. “These are vampire lovers, and now they have a girl in their midst who claims to not only have seen one kill her parents, but to hunt them as well. She’s practically their hero.”
“Much like I’m your hero?”
She rubbed my donut. “Something like that.”
“So, if we can agree that there’s no real vampires, then what the hell is she hunting?”
“That,” said Roxi, rolling over and kissing me lightly on the cheek, “is the million-dollar question.”
* * *
I woke up, gasping and weeping.
My son again. Same mad dash through the forest. The smell of burning flesh. The tormenting sound of running water. His blackened hand.
Jesus.
The mad dash through the forest was only in my dreams, of course. The reality had been far different. Twisted car metal, the smell of gasoline, people screaming, my son trapped...reaching for me. A fire under the hood, spreading rapidly. Myself half-unconscious, but too drunk to help my own son....
Sweet, sweet Jesus.
I wept some more, quietly, so as not to disturb Roxi, who slept contently on her side. A few minutes of this later, I realized grimly that Veronica and I were not so different. After all, we had both seen loved ones burning....
Burning....
Oh, God.
We have something in common, I thought. Something two people should never, ever have in common.
And as I sat there in bed, with fresh tears on my cheeks and complete hopelessness in my heart, I suddenly remembered something Roy had told me. Something that hadn’t made sense at the time.
“Her first attempt failed.”
I focused my thoughts, tearing them way my son. So what the hell had Roy meant by that? And now Veronica was apparently up north. How far up north? And what attempt had failed? Had she tried to kill a vampire and the attempt failed? Was she following a vampire north, somehow?
I got quietly out of bed and padded into the kitchen. There, I opened my laptop, fired it up, and soon I was online, jacking into Roxi’s wireless network.
I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t even know what to Google. Hell, I had the complete World Wide Web at my fingertips, and I didn’t even know where to begin.
And so I tried random phrases:
Vampires. Seattle.
Oh, sweet Jesus. That turned up more than I bargained for. Apparently, this was Twilight country. If Veronica was up there, then any information I had hoped to garner was lost to me. Still, I waded doggedly through fifty or so pages, but nothing stood out.
I tried Washington, vampires. I told Google to remove any mention of the word Twilight or Stephenie Meyer. Good, better. Not quite so many hits, and many of these pages were new to me. Still, after about a half hour of searching, nothing stood out. I moved on.
Portland, vampires.
I scanned and scanned. Same shit. This was feeling like a big waste of time. Needle in a haystack came to mind. I predicted that a serious beating was in Roy the bartender’s immediate future. He wasn’t telling me something, and I was going to kick the shit out of him until he gave it up.
&n
bsp; I typed in: San Francisco, vampires.
And on about the tenth page, something turned up. An article from the San Francisco Chronicle about a book signing taking place tomorrow. A popular vampire author. Not necessarily the break I was looking for, since I had by now come across a shitload of articles about vampire writers. But it was the title of the article that caught my eye.
“Security Beefed Up For Popular Vampire Author”
Oh? I read on. The author, James P. Storm, had apparently been attacked by a fan four days earlier at the Glendale Barnes & Noble. According to the article, his assailant had been wielding a silver stake. The article went on to state that the attacker had escaped, and because of this, security had been heightened at all of Storm’s signings.
With my heart now pounding steadily in my chest, I scrolled down and found a picture of Mr. Storm signing books. He was smiling at one such fan as he handed back a book. The man’s skin was unusually tan. Almost golden. Hell, he practically glowed. But there was something else. Although he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, something seemed to be reaching down to partially cover the back of his hand. A tattoo.
I right-clicked and saved the picture. I next uploaded it into my photo viewer. Blew it up twice as big.
Indeed, it was a dark tattoo, but the picture was too pixelated to tell for sure what it was. But if I had to guess, I would say that I was looking at something that looked like a claw.
A dragon’s claw?
As I stared at the picture, completely and utterly fascinated, I found myself wondering if I was looking at an actual vampire....
Chapter Seven
It was early. Too early for someone who’s his own boss. But if I wanted to make it to San Francisco with plenty of time to spare by the 2:00 p.m. book signing at Borders, well, I had to get moving.
Roxi had barely stirred when I got up to dress. I kissed her on the cheek and told her I would be back tomorrow. She murmured that she loved me, which was news to me.
I smiled down at her and told her I loved her, too, but I think she was already asleep.
