The Undead Kama Sutra fg-3

by Mario Acevedo

  “I appreciate the compliment. What are you going to do with this manuscript?”

  “Get it published, what else? The general public will get off on the New Age woo-woo angle and we vampires will have yet something else that we passed under the noses of the blunt tooths. In the meantime, I’ve got more research to do.” She grinned. “The fun stuff.”

  We walked to the pier, sat on the edge, and dangled our bare feet over the water. The resort’s Bayliner was docked next to us.

  “You guys only have one boat?” I asked. “Seems you’d have more.”

  “Antoine’s got one.”

  “Where is it?”

  Carmen pointed to the water fifty feet from the pier. A white oblong object rested on the bottom of the lagoon.

  I asked, “More winnings from one of his poker games?”

  “Of course.”

  We sipped the blood-coffee blend and meditated on the beauty around us. Fish flashed like knife blades through the water. Crabs crept up the wharf pilings and, when they caught us looking at them, skittered back down to the rocky bottom.

  The sun felt great against my skin. In the few minutes I’d been outdoors, my complexion had darkened but I needed to cook awhile more before I matched Carmen’s toasted patina.

  The rhythmic grunt of an engine announced the approach of a motorboat. A white boat appeared around the northern spit of land at our right, about a twenty-footer, with a fabric canopy over the cockpit.

  “Expecting company?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied. “It’s probably a fishing boat and the captain forgot how to read a chart. Happens now and then. Especially when we have naked chalices sunning themselves on the beach.”

  The boat turned and chugged toward us. Sunlight glittered off the gold metallic letters on the hull, which read: SHERIFF. Under that, in dark green letters, it said, MONROE COUNTY.

  A man in uniform-white short-sleeved shirt, yellow chevrons on his sleeve, dark green trousers, gun belt, sunglasses-occupied the helm. I guessed him to be well over six foot. Some of that height came from a pompadour so pointy and stiff it belonged on the nose of a rhinoceros.

  Carmen and I got to our feet, our tapetum lucidum hidden by our sunglasses.

  I don’t like cops. Any cops. Federal marshals, city police, and especially a deputy sheriff, like this guy. A visit by a cop was always a cure for a good mood.

  The boat glided to within inches of the dock and stopped. The tall deputy with the pompadour hailed us.

  “Know where I could find Antoine Speight?”

  “He’s not here,” Carmen answered. “What’s this about?”

  The deputy moved to the front of the boat and tossed the bowline. It landed between Carmen and me.

  “A little help,” the deputy said.

  Carmen didn’t move. “You didn’t answer me. What’s this about?”

  The deputy grimaced in annoyance. He hopped onto the pier and bent over to hitch the rope to the closest piling. He stood and his pompadour towered above us. When he looked at Carmen, his expression became all big-bad-wolf-and-I’m-happy-to-see-you. “Deputy Sheriff Toller Johnson.”

  He removed his sunglasses and forced them through the crust of gel holding his steeple of hair in place. His gray eyes went from Carmen to me and then back to Carmen. He addressed her breasts. “You work here?”

  “I have a face, if you don’t mind, Deputy.”

  Johnson’s gaze rose to her face, and that hungry smile of his widened. I wanted to sew it shut with wire.

  He pulled a memo pad from his hip pocket. “And you are?”

  “Carmen Arellano. I’m business partners with Antoine, so yes, I work here.”

  Johnson pointed the memo pad at me. “And you?”

  “I’m a guest.”

  “Your name?”

  Johnson needed that memo pad shoved up his rectum. I answered curtly. “Felix Gomez.”

  Johnson’s stare didn’t move from Carmen. “Are you missing someone from your resort?”

  Carmen didn’t say anything. I’m sure she and I shared the same thought. Why was the deputy asking?

  True, one of the women guests was missing. That the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office was on to it meant bad news.

  The deputy made a point of resting his elbow on the pistol holstered to his waist. The gesture signified that he had the authority to carry a gun and pry answers out of us. “Well, is anyone missing? Female?”

  “A woman. Yes.”

  “And her name?”

  Carmen looked irritated at having to answer to this over-coiffed blunt tooth. “Marissa Albert.”

  “How well do you know her?”

  “As well as anyone else here.”

  “Really?” Johnson gave a smug nod. “Then I need you to come with me.”

  “Where to?”

  Johnson flipped the memo pad closed and tucked it into his pocket. “To the morgue on Big Pine Key, Miz Arellano.” He worked the sunglasses back out of the pompadour and set them over the square bridge of his nose. “We have the body of a dead woman that needs identifying.”

  Chapter

  9

  Carmen’s brisk, angry steps churned the sand as we returned to her cabin.

  “Fuck,” she kept repeating.

  “You mean about the missing chalice or the deputy?” Deputy Johnson had told Carmen that she had to ride to Big Pine Key in his boat. We were on the way to her cabin to change clothes before we left.

  “Both,” answered Carmen. “I was hoping to find her alive. She was a doll. Christ, now we got the goddamn authorities involved. What the hell happened to Marissa anyway?”

  “Maybe it’s not her in the morgue.”

  “Keep believing that, Felix. She’s been missing for three days and poof, this peckerwood comes around asking me to identify a body.”

  We entered the cabin. Carmen plucked a sundress from a peg on the wall. “Naw.” She put the dress back on the peg and bent over to shift through a basket of laundry. She pulled out a tiny red tank top, whipped off her T-shirt, and stretched the tank over her head and torso. The tank looked as thin as a coat of paint. “How’s this?”

  “I thought you didn’t want Johnson to stare.”

  “The more he stares, the more that lech stays distracted.”

  We put on our contacts. No telling how long we’d have to be among humans and we’d better take care to remain disguised. I got a T-shirt and boating mocs.

  Carmen gathered her hair into a ponytail and pulled it through a scrunchie to hold it in place. She pushed her feet into a pair of flip-flops.

  We rounded up her chalice Thorne. Poor guy had an ice pack on his crotch. Strapping or not, sex with Carmen had put his connecting unit through the wringer. The three of us returned to the dock. Johnson sat on a wharf piling. When he saw Carmen, he immediately stood at attention. His mouth gaped and his eyebrows arced over the top of his sunglasses. I expected his eyeballs would come flying through the lenses.

  Carmen climbed aboard Johnson’s boat and Thorne and I got in the Bayliner. The two boats motored out of the bay and turned northeast from Snipe Keys. The sun hovered above us.

  I went to the front of the Bayliner and stretched out on the deck. As a vampire, I never thought that I’d get a chance to work on my tan.

  I watched Carmen and Johnson in his boat. They talked and he wrote on his memo pad, but I couldn’t hear what they said. I slipped off my contacts and read their auras. Carmen’s orange glow bristled with annoyance. Johnson’s red aura bubbled with lust, even though the conversation should have been about a dead body.

  While I baked like a ham, I thought about what was happening around me. I came to Florida in search of the author of The Undead Kama Sutra. Then Odin’s mortally wounded alien impersonator hired me to find his killer and, in his dying breath, offered the name Goodman. And he added that little gem of needing to save the Earth women. Then the Araneum warned me about aliens and made a puzzling reference to a crashed charter airpla
ne.

  Next I found Carmen, leader of the Denver nidus, who turned out to be recreating this Kama Sutra. She’s also found the secret that keeps vampires from withering in the sun and she’s co-owner of a resort for vampires and their groupies. One of her chalices was missing. And now, Deputy Johnson asked us to identify a body.

  I’m after the one who murdered Odin and within days a second corpse turns up. Suspicious? Definitely.

  Because of my experience with psychic powers and the supernatural, I am aware of a grand cosmic design that binds our actions with what we call coincidences. In this case, what connected the many, many dots?

  We continued east, parallel to the Keys. Dozens of boats cruised around us and we rocked over their wakes. Small airplanes droned overhead.

  Our two boats approached a concrete pier, beyond which stood a jumble of nondescript, rectangular buildings on Big Pine Key. An American flag snapped from a pole erected on a lawn between the pier and the buildings. The Bayliner’s engine slowed to a putter.

  We berthed alongside an assortment of boats representing the agencies working the Keys: Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, DEA, Department of Fisheries, and the Coast Guard.

  We docked next to Johnson’s boat and, after I tossed the bowline to an attendant, Carmen and I disembarked and left the Bayliner in the care of her chalice.

  Johnson saw that I followed him and he halted. “It won’t take two of you to make an ID.”

  “I want Felix to keep me company,” Carmen said. “Or do the corpses complain about too many visitors?”

  Johnson relented with a brisk wave of his hand. He led us around the largest building, past a parking lot, and through the entrance of the Medical Examiner’s Office.

  Government buildings always gave me the willies. Everything seemed stamped with “official business” as the worker cogs turned on their petty duties and counted the days to retirement. It was like a treadmill in a mausoleum.

  Johnson had us wait at a counter while he went ahead. The clerk behind the counter was a sad-faced, middle-aged woman. She did a double take at Carmen.

  The clerk’s pale scalp showed from under wispy strands dyed henna-red, with silver roots. Ignoring us, she perked up and clicked a remote toward a television sitting beside a water cooler.

  She increased the volume for a commercial of a product called NuGrumatex. Photos showed a man with a monk’s crown surrounding a bald pate smooth as a balloon. More photos and a video clip had the same man running and playing tennis-activities that demonstrated how his youthful vigor had been restored by the growth of new, thick hair. The next photos showed a woman suffering with bald patches where her head had been gnawed at by alopecia areata. She looked as miserable as a cold, wet dog, and wore a school-marmish blouse cinched tight against her throat. In her “after” photos, she had the luxurious curls of a forties cheesecake pinup with bare shoulders, inviting cleavage, and come-do-me-now smile.

  The clerk nodded self-consciously and touched her thinning hair. The commercial segued into the usual rapid-fire disclaimers, which I tuned out, except for increased salivation and heightened libido. How wonderful. Thanks to modern pharmaceuticals, America could now be a nation of hairy, drooling, horny nimrods.

  As the ad faded, it mentioned the Swiss conglomerate Rizè-Blu Pharmaceutique, Making Your Life Better Than Ever™. I’d seen a rash of Rizè-Blu’s ads lately, as if their marketing department had gotten the hives.

  Deputy Johnson returned. Maybe that pompadour of his was courtesy of NuGrumatex. But the only thing that made him drool now was Carmen.

  Johnson had the desk clerk sign us in and issue visitors’ badges. He led us past one door, a turn, then to a steel door, where we stopped beside a cart piled with paper face masks and disposable booties.

  “Put these on,” he said. “For your protection.”

  Carmen turned her back to Johnson and rolled her eyes.

  Once we all put on masks and booties, Johnson swiped his ID badge through a reader on the wall. The lock on the steel door retracted with a snap.

  We entered a morgue. The chilled air smelled of antibacterial cleaner and decaying human flesh. The door made another snap when it closed behind us.

  At our end, with its collection of bottles and jars and the white decor, the room looked like a science lab.

  Johnson introduced us to the medical examiner, a woman in her thirties, dressed in green scrubs, matching head cover, and a paper face mask. Because of the silver piercings in her ears and her trendy glasses, I would have expected to find her serving lattes instead of sawing through cadavers.

  The morgue extended into an open examination area with a steel table in the center of a linoleum floor. A white sheet covered a corpse on a table. The examiner went to a computer monitor and tapped on the screen to bring up her files.

  Johnson walked to the table and grasped a corner of the sheet. “We found Jane Doe this morning. Hopefully you can give us her real name.”

  Carmen looked at the corpse. “Why are you asking me?”

  “Just take a look,” he answered.

  Carmen and I stood alongside the table directly opposite of Johnson.

  He pulled back the sheet and uncovered Jane Doe’s head. The eyes were clouded marbles recessed into the dark, wrinkled pits of the eye sockets. A delicate nose pointed from a face molded of spotty, darkened flesh pressed against the skull. Black hair jutted from her scalp in matted tangles. As an amateur specialist in corpses, I guessed the woman had been dead three days. Too bad; alive she must have been a looker.

  Something had left ragged edges at the lobes of Jane Doe’s ears and the loose skin of her throat.

  I looked at Johnson.

  “Crabs,” he said. “They had a munchfest.”

  Carmen’s foot nudged against mine and pressed. The movement was deliberate yet secretive. What was she trying to signal?

  Johnson leaned against a file cabinet and drummed his fingers. “Well?”

  Carmen pulled her foot from mine. She returned Johnson’s gaze and shrugged. “Who is this?”

  Johnson stopped drumming his fingers. His eyebrows slanted downward and wrinkled the skin over the bridge of his nose. “Your missing guest was Marissa Albert. This isn’t her?”

  “Nope.”

  Johnson pulled the sheet back but kept his attention on Carmen. “Are you sure?”

  The knobs of Jane Doe’s shoulders were splayed back as rigor mortis had arched her spine upward. Her breasts lay flat against the rib cage like a pair of rotting apples. There were more spots of hamburger lacerations where the crabs had fed.

  “Holy shit,” Carmen pointed, “what happened there?”

  In the center of the woman’s sternum was a deep, thumb-sized hole lined with charred flesh.

  My fingers tingled as my vampire sense went on full alert. The wound was identical to Gilbert Odin’s. Jane Doe had been killed with an alien blaster.

  Chapter

  10

  The cold trail of Odin’s killer had grown red-hot. The killer was here three days ago. Before that he had been in Sarasota. Where he was today was anybody’s guess.

  My vampire sixth sense sounded a warning, and my fingers trembled against the edge of the table. A warning of what?

  Johnson noticed my twitching fingers. “You’re going to toss your cookies?” I heard the sneer in his voice.

  The medical examiner held up a paper barf bag. “Not on my floor, please.”

  I took the bag to appease her. “Thanks.”

  Carmen appeared puzzled at my reaction. A vampire getting queasy around a corpse? Her expression seemed to ask, What is it?

  Johnson turned to Carmen. “Doesn’t seem to be affecting you.”

  She shrugged. “I lived in Detroit. It’ll take more than this to shake me up.”

  Johnson’s breath puffed against the inside of his paper mask. “You sure you don’t recognize her?”

  “I’ve already told you that I didn’t.”

  Johns
on looked at me. “What about you?”

  “She’s still Jane Doe.”

  Carmen leaned over the corpse and studied the chest wound. “What killed her?”

  “Don’t know yet,” the examiner said. “We wanted to ID the body before we started an autopsy.”

  Carmen’s finger hovered over the wound. “I’ll bet it was this.”

  The examiner narrowed her eyes. Smart-ass.

  Johnson was clearly furious that Carmen couldn’t identify the body. Why? My instinct was to remove my contacts to zap him and the examiner, and interrogate them both. Why was Johnson so upset? Wasn’t this just another Jane Doe? Why ask us?

  Before I did anything drastic, I surveyed the morgue. Two security cameras watched; one covered the front door, the other the examination table.

  We were being taped. Causing trouble might be too complicated to undo.

  Johnson covered Jane Doe with the sheet. He acted like his disappointment was our fault.

  Outside the morgue we took off the booties and masks and dumped them in a trash bin. Johnson took us back to the entrance desk, where we turned in our badges.

  He offered Carmen a business card. “In case you need to chat.”

  “About what?”

  He gave her a final once-over. His frown morphed into a grin, quick as a chameleon changing colors. “Whatever.”

  Carmen refused the card. “I know where to find you.”

  Johnson tightened his lips in annoyance and acted like he wanted to shove the card against her face.

  She gave him an innocent look. “Anything else, Deputy?”

  His lips curled upward and he dropped his gaze to her chest. His eyes flicked left to right. He shook his head and cocked a thumb to the door. Dismissed.

  Carmen and I went out and headed to the dock.

  “I’m surprised he remembered Marissa’s name,” Carmen said. “On the way over here Johnson did nothing but stare at my boobs. I feel I need to wash them. The next time I meet up with that bastard, I’ll drain every drop of his blood. Al dente.”

  That meant fanging someone without secreting enzymes to deaden the victim’s pain. The agony was like having acid pumped through every blood vessel until the organs boiled. It was a ghastly death, usually reserved for the most vile of human enemies.