Red Eye - 02

by James Lovegrove

  But also of her.

  TINA WAS NOW in an East Village basement bar, nursing a Jägerbomb which the man on the stool next to her had grudgingly consented to pay for.

  He himself was nursing a black coffee and a sore patch on his abdomen where her stun gun’s charge electrodes had made contact.

  And while they sat uneasily side by side, surrounded by a half-dozen hardcore barflies and the trebly warbling of Céline Dion, Tina gave John Redlaw a potted version of her story, minus all the unpleasant bits—the unsuitable hook-ups, the naked ambition, the Greek landlord beating his kebab over her every week. A sanitised edition of the life of Tina Checkley so far, in which she came across as the plucky, redoubtable heroine, beset by circumstances but still battling on.

  “The moment I saw you outside St Magnus’s, I recognised you. Not many people over here would, but then I’m not many people. I took one look at you and I thought, what the fuck, I know that guy, that’s John Redlaw. ’Cause I’ve seen stuff from Great Britain, video clips, BBC reports, phone footage, all of it. You guys have got serious vampire issues over there, but I guess you know that already; but you see, I’m into all that. Vampires are my business. You could, I suppose, call me a vampire hunter. Only I don’t actually hunt them as such. Stalker, maybe.”

  Redlaw said nothing, merely sipped his coffee. Tina took his silence as an invitation to carry on.

  “I stalk them because I’m fascinated by them, but also, you know, because it’s my job. I’m a communicator. I communicate things. Communicating’s my thing. And people in America, they really need to be educated about vampires, because like it or not, we’ve got vampires, and the way it’s going, judging by the situation in Europe, we’re only going to have a whole lot more of them in the coming years. The President keeps saying it’s under control, he has a lid on it, he doesn’t think it’s a pressing matter. But hey, this is an election year, of course he’s going to say that. If he ’fessed up and said, you know, ‘Arrrgh, vampires’”—she waved her hands either side of her head in a parody of panic—“then the opposition candidates would jump on him and call him weak and chicken. Instead of what they’re saying now, which is he’s sticking his head in the sand and hoping it’ll all go away, which isn’t so bad as being chicken, is it? Not politically. Am I talking too much?”

  Redlaw shrugged. He was being polite. Was he being polite?

  “So anyways, I’m out to spread the word about vampires, the truth, because someone’s got to, right? I’ve made it my mission. The mainstream media aren’t doing their bit on that front, not really. There’ve been a couple of HBO documentaries, a searing exposé on Fox, but mostly it’s like a war we haven’t got any soldiers in. You know, it ain’t happening here, it’s happening somewhere else, so screw it, nothing to do with us, let’s watch Dancing With The Stars instead. Only, it is to do with us, or it will be soon enough. The vampires—you people call them Sunless, don’t you? You’ve found a nice, what’s the word, euphemism for them. That’s so typically British. Like ‘I’m just popping off to the loo,’ when what you mean is you want to take a crap. I’ve never been to England but I imagine you’re all tipping your hats to each other and making ‘cuppas’ for each other all day long. I’d like to go there. See what it’s like. So you work for the Sunless Housing And Dispersal Executive, right?”

  “Disclosure,” said Redlaw, frowning, as if he was having a hard time keeping up with her. “And it’s worked, past tense.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right. Heard about that on the news feeds. You quit.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Tina echoed. “But you’re still in the vamp game? Please tell me you are.”

  “Miss Checkley,” Redlaw began.

  “Oh, my God, I love the way you said that. Say it again. Makes me feel like I’m in a Jane Austen movie.”

  “Miss Checkley, I’m sitting here with you, against my better judgement, for one reason only. Bad enough that you zapped me with a stun gun, although I’m prepared to take some of the blame for that on myself. I should have seen it coming. My guard was down.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s New York. You should know better than to paw a girl in this town.”

  “You could simply have called my name when you first saw me.”

  “I was going to, but I wanted to get a better look, make sure it was you, before I did. Also, you looked sort of jangled, and I didn’t want to spook you by yelling.”

  “Instead of which, you made me think you were coming after me with hostile intent.”

  “My bad,” said Tina with a shrug.

  “Anyway, what’s done is done,” Redlaw said. “But now I’m having to listen to you prattle on, and no offence, but it’s nearly as excruciating as being electrocuted.”

  “None taken.” Tina felt a peculiar spasm of pleasure. Never before had she been dissed so... so elaborately.

  “You told me, after incapacitating me, that you have something you think I ought to see. Some video footage you captured that might be of interest.”

  “I did, uh-huh.”

  “Well?”

  “First, can I ask why you broke into St Magnus’s? And what were you doing in there all that time?”

  “I might ask you a similar question. What were you doing outside there?”

  “I was on stakeout,” Tina said. “No pun intended.”

  “You knew there are vampires inside?”

  “I suspected it. Are there?”

  “Why did you suspect it?”

  “Who’s interrogating who here?”

  “Right now? Me, you,” said Redlaw.

  “Okay. Well, I suspected it on account of I hunt vampires, like I told you, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. St Magnus’s seemed like a likely place for them to hang. Never mind the whole house-of-God thing. Perfect cover. Who’d even think of looking for them there? But also, I saw someone go in the other night. It was, like, stupid o’clock in the morning, and cold as a witch’s tit. No one else around but nosey old me. This guy just scuttled up the front and got in through a window. Quick as all hell. Damn creepy to see. Like fucking Spider-Man or something. That clinched it. I didn’t get a shot of him on my camera—it was all over in a couple of seconds, I kind of didn’t have my wits about me—but I’ve been going back there ever since, every night, in hopes that it’ll happen again. Your turn. There are vamps in that church?”

  “Some, yes,” said Redlaw.

  “Jumping Jesus on a bicycle! Right in the heart of Manhattan. Who’d a thunk it?”

  “Please. A little less of the blasphemy.”

  “Sure. Sorry. You’re godly, yeah? A believer? Forgot that about you SHADE types.”

  “And the video footage?” Redlaw prompted.

  “Absolutely. I don’t have it on me. It’s on my hard drive at home.”

  “Can you describe it? Give me some idea?”

  “Not really. It’s kinda... murky.”

  “But you definitely think it’s relevant to me? Something I could do with seeing?”

  “Well, no,” said Tina. “What I’m hoping is, given how you’re you, you might be able to explain what it means. Because I sure as hell don’t have a clue.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  THEY TOOK THE subway, the N train out of Manhattan. It was the late train, the last of the night. It felt to Redlaw like the last train to anywhere. No one on it but a few drunks, a few nervy gangsta kids, and them.

  The New York subway stank. The London Underground was bad, but this was worse. Human secretions, seat plastic, brake fluid, ozone. The air in the carriage had an actual taste, like something you could drink but would never choose to.

  While they rocked north, then east, diving below the river into Queens, Redlaw covertly appraised the girl, this Tina Checkley. She sat opposite him, watching tunnel lights flicker past, shoulders hunched high, one leg drumming up and down. Her eyes darted around. Her gaze was never at rest. She was never a
t rest. He wondered what would result from this encounter with her. Nothing, probably. She was just some strange, jittery New Yorker whose path had chanced to cross his. Whatever she’d recorded with her camcorder, it would be meaningless, irrelevant.

  But if it wasn’t, then she might be a useful lead. He had nothing to lose by seeing what she had to offer.

  She caught him studying her.

  “What?” she challenged.

  “Nothing.”

  “You think I’m some kind of fruit loop, don’t you? I can read it in your face. But that’s okay. Tell me, how many vamps have you staked?”

  “We call it dusting.”

  “Again with the goddamn euphemisms. Like you’re doing the housework. ‘’Ello, where you orf to, luv?’ ‘Just orf to do a spot of dusting.’”

  “Is that supposed to be an impression of me?”

  “Yes. So? How many?”

  “I always tried my best to avoid resorting to terminal measures when dealing with Sunless,” said Redlaw. “If I couldn’t get my way through persuasion or coercion, only then would I take the next step.”

  “Blast ’em with wooden bullets. Stick the stake in. You still haven’t answered the question.”

  Redlaw pondered. “Truthfully? I don’t know.”

  “Lost count, huh? That many.”

  “I was with SHADE nearly twenty years. In that time, I had frequent run-ins with ’Lesses. If my personal safety was in jeopardy, if it was a case of me or them, inevitably I chose me.”

  “How’s it feel? Dusting?”

  “Why are you so keen to know?”

  “Journalist. Plying my trade.”

  “Personal curiosity?”

  “Okay, that as well.”

  “It feels...” Redlaw hesitated. Should he tell her? Did he even know himself how it felt? “It isn’t ending a life. It’s more... finishing unfinished business. Making happen what ought to have happened earlier.”

  “’Cause they’re undead, right? Should be dead, but the vampirisation process keeps them going longer—indefinitely.”

  “It isn’t killing, that much I’m sure of. Not the same thing at all. Because of the way they crumble, like a statue of sand collapsing away. Which wouldn’t happen if they were fully human.”

  “But they talk. They’re sentient. They have emotions.”

  “True, but...” He looked at his hands. “It’s a grey area. What is human? How far do you have to go before you’re not human? Sometimes I looked on dusting a vampire as a mercy.”

  “Putting them out of their misery.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Like a vet with a hypodermic.”

  “If less clinical.”

  “You sound like it makes you sad now,” Tina observed.

  “Put it this way,” said Redlaw. “I used to think vampires were monsters. I’ve since discovered that there are worse monsters.”

  “People.”

  “Some. What people can do. What they’re prepared to do.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  But by now the N train had reached an elevated section of track, and there were things to see outside, views, distractions, a snow-blanketed cityscape, a whitened night-time world, and Redlaw pointedly fixed his gaze on those.

  THE LINE TERMINATED at Ditmars Boulevard, and it was a not-so-short walk from there to Tina’s apartment. Redlaw’s watch read three in the morning as Tina unlocked her front door. Late hours normally never bothered him. He had long been a professional nocturnal. But he felt inordinately tired right now. The time zone change was playing havoc with his circadian rhythm. Or could it be age? That was the time zone change you could do nothing about. Life lag.

  Before they went in, Tina put a finger to her lips. “Quiet on the staircase. My landlord lives on the first floor, and he doesn’t sleep too well and he’s got ears like a fucking hawk. I’m not supposed to have male visitors in my apartment after eleven. It’s in the tenancy agreement. Although,” she added, with a speculative glance at Redlaw, “I don’t think you count.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Not like that. You couldn’t be a boyfriend, could you? More like my dad. Or maybe an uncle. Yeah. If Mr Constantinopoulos sees you and asks, you’re my uncle. Uncle John from jolly old England. First Stateside visit in ages. You okay with that?”

  “If you’d only stop talking, there’s every chance we won’t wake him,” said Redlaw.

  Three flights up, without having disturbed the landlord’s repose, Tina ushered Redlaw into a cramped, messy set of rooms with the words, “My luxury condo.” Thin rugs covered not nearly enough of the bare floorboards. Damp-stains dappled the ceilings and walls, a few of them poorly hidden behind tacked-up squares of batik. Icy draughts seeped in through several windows. Outside, the sky was burnt umber—the glare from the airport, reflected on low cloud.

  Tina closed blinds and cranked the thermostat up full, muttering about how rent control was all well and fine but not if it meant the furnace was never serviced regularly. Then she booted up her computer and drew up an extra chair in front of it, sweeping empty cans of Red Bull and Mountain Dew off the seat.

  “All righty, park your ass here and watch this.”

  She clicked open a file, and a dark, grainy image sprang to life on the monitor.

  “Now, I’ve run this through every filter I’ve got, upped the contrast and resolution, unsharp-masked it, edge enhanced, gamma corrected, the works, and it still looks like shit. But I was shooting in ambient light, which there wasn’t much of.”

  Redlaw peered. All he could see were dim irregular blocks of colour, various shades of dark blue, charcoal and black. “What am I looking at?”

  “This is me just doing a bit of preliminary filming, seeing how much I could pick up without switching the camera light on. Didn’t want to use it if I didn’t have to.”

  “No infrared?”

  “Take a look around you. I’m not made of money. So I’m in a subway tunnel. One of a whole bunch that aren’t used any more. Over on the West Side, near Ninth. Used to be where mole people lived.”

  “Mole people?”

  “Homeless. Had themselves a regular little sub-city neighbourhood there. All the comforts of home. Only, they had to leave.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think? Somebody else moved in and evicted them.”

  “Vampires?”

  “What I heard,” said Tina. “This bum I met in Tribeca told me about it. I was digging around, making enquiries about vampires, trying to get a fix on where some might be, and who better to ask than hobos? Who knows what’s going on at street level better than them? So this old guy with ratty grey dreads who you sometimes see playing a penny whistle on West Broadway, I talked to him, and he gave me a whole spiel about how he used to have this place in the tunnels. Bed, stove, storm lantern, all that. Somewhere to lay his hat, out of the weather. But then these foreigners—that was what he called them, ‘foreigners’—came along and he knew he wasn’t welcome any more, so he hightailed it out of there, him and all the other moles, and now he’s back on the streets, freezing his ass off, tooting his whistle for spare change, probably not going to make it through the winter, yadda yadda. I gave him five bucks to make him happy.”

  “Did he describe the ‘foreigners’?”

  “Guy drinks past-its-sell-by mouthwash to get loaded. I doubt he could have described his own mother. But I got the impression they weren’t people, you know what I’m saying? Because those moles, normally they’d defend their turf. Tooth and nail, with box cutters and broken Thunderbird bottles and whatever else they’ve got. And they didn’t, they just ran. Anyway, that’s why I went down there. To find out. See for myself.”

  Redlaw regarded her.

  “I know!” she exclaimed. “Brave or crazy, take your pick. In the event, I didn’t find any vamps. This is what I found. Keep watching. Any second now...”

  Sounds first: the tread of feet, shuffling, echoing. The camera swung. Tina
’s voice, a whisper: “What the fuck...? Oh, God. Oh, shit. Someone’s coming. Who?”

  The image veered about wildly, incomprehensibly.

  “That’s me hiding,” she told Redlaw. “There was this place beside the track, like a room at the top of some steps, a refuge for people working down there, they could sit and have their lunch in it or something.”

  The image stabilised again. On-camera, Tina whispered, “Oh, my God, I hope they aren’t vamps. Maybe they’ve heard me.”

  “I thought the whole point was you were looking for vampires,” Redlaw said.

  “Yeah, but on my terms. I didn’t want to get caught by them.”

  “And for what it’s worth, they’re far more likely to have smelled you than heard you.”

  “Thanks for that, Mister Expertise. I’ll have you know I wash regularly.”

  “Makes no difference.”

  Now figures came into view on the screen. They were moving in a line along the track. Six, no, seven of them. Silhouettes, only just discernible in the gloom. Chunky outlines. Bulky clothing. Guns.

  Tina’s camera jumpily panned right to left, following them as they tramped by. The focus wavered in and out. On the soundtrack, above the marching of boots and soft clanking of equipment, frightened, shallow breaths were audible—hers.

  The figures filed out of sight. The camera dipped, almost with relief. Tina’s voice said, “Jesus, that was a pretty—”

  And there, abruptly, the clip ended.

  “I can’t remember how I finished that sentence,” Tina said. “‘A pretty close call,’ maybe. Freaked the hell out of me, as you can tell. I mean, I suppose technically I was trespassing, and my first thought was those guys might be transport employees or something. I didn’t dare move for about another hour, in case they returned or there were any more of them further back along. Then I just sort of crept out. Didn’t much feel like doing any more vampire chasing after that. Oh, and apologies for all the God and Jesus stuff. It just comes out. I don’t mean anything by it.”

  “That’s the trouble, no one does,” said Redlaw. “Run the clip again.”