by Matt Kincade
The vampire took a step toward her and chuckled softly. “Que es el problema, chica? Tienes…miedo?”
“Shoot him, girl!” Alex yelled. “What’re you waitin’ for?”
The vampire grinned wickedly and snatched the pistol from Carmen’s numb hands. He pointed the gun at her and laughed. “Mujer inútil.”
Cringing, Carmen stumbled backward and waited for the inevitable.
A gunshot boomed. The vampire’s elbow disappeared in a clot of bone and gristle. He stared at his ruined limb for a second, not comprehending. The pistol thumped from his hand to the floor.
Alex cocked the .44 magnum Derringer he’d just pulled from his boot. The second and last shot in the little gun went through the vampire’s knee. The creature tried to stand for a heartbeat, failed, and crashed to the floor.
Alex stood unsteadily, picked up his own pistol, and shot out the vampire’s other knee.
The vampire rolled onto his back and sat up against the wall, growling a string of threats and curses in a fluid mix of English and Spanish.
Carmen sat down unsteadily on the bed, shaking.
“Okay talk, you sumbitch,” said Alex. He holstered his pistol and pulled a short sword from his satchel. “Or you’re gonna start losing parts.”
“Hijo de puta,” said the vampire.
The twisted wreckage of the vampire’s knee crawled like an anthill poked with a stick. The flesh itself stretched out. Bone fragments melted back together. Tendons and veins twisted, wormlike, blindly seeking their other halves. “Oh, my God,” Carmen whispered.
Alex drew his pistol, shot out the knee again, and holstered the weapon in one smooth movement. The vampire screamed. “You’d better tell me somethin’ I wanna know, ’fore I go and lose my temper.”
After a moment, the vampire said, “What do you want to know?”
Alex held out the picture of Mia. “You seen this girl?”
The vampire stared at Carmen with a calculating look. “Ella es…tu hermana?”
Carmen flinched and turned away from the creature’s gaze.
“Sí,” the vampire said. “I’ve seen her.”
Carmen stood up and looked back at him, her eyes wide. “Is she alive?”
The vampire struggled to his feet. Alex took a step back and held his sword ready, one hand on the hilt, one hand gripping the scabbard.
“She is alive,” said the vampire.
“Where is she?”
The vampire only smiled.
“Where?” Carmen said. “Please tell me.”
Alex said, “You best tell the lady.”
The vampire grinned, wider this time. “She is with El Diablo.”
“That ain’t much of an answer,” muttered Alex.
“She is…” the vampire muttered something under his breath.
“What?” Carmen stepped forward.
“I said, she with El Diablo in hell!” The vampire’s arms shot out, one grabbing Carmen’s pistol, the other reaching for her throat.
Alex’s blade flashed, a silver blur in the darkened room.
The vampire’s arms both dropped to the floor. Blood gushed from two cleanly-sheared stumps. The Vampire screamed in rage.
“Well now, that just tears it,” said Alex. He stepped forward, winding back with the sword.
The vampire stepped back towards the wall. Carmen and Alex closed in on both sides. He bared his fangs again.
“You got no place to go, hoss.”
The vampire launched himself backward through the window.
The drapes wrapped him like a shroud. Sunlight exploded into the darkened room. The vampire fell in a cloud of diamond-bright glass shards toward the immaculately hardscaped backyard.
He hit the ground, smoke already pouring from his exposed skin. With an audible chuff, he ignited. In seconds, the fire enveloped him. The drapes melted into his boiling skin. The flames burned hotter and hotter, searing the flesh from his bones as he stumbled across the yard. He collapsed in a heap and died screaming. Still the fire burned like pitch, almost too bright to look at. By the time the flames died down, nothing was left but fine ash, already being scattered by the wind.
“Well, shit,” said Alex, staring through the broken window. He rested one hand on his hip, and the other loosely gripped the sword. “That contrary son of a bitch.”
“Jesus,” said Carmen. She sat down shakily on the bed.
“Jesus ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.” Alex sat down on the bed next to Carmen. He set the sword down beside him, ran his hands through his hair, and loosened his tie. “So you believe in vampires yet?” When she didn’t react, Alex put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, you done all right.”
Carmen turned her head away. “Are you kidding? I froze. It was just like last time. He just—”
“So you froze.” Alex picked up his sword again, and used a bedsheet to wipe vampire gore off the blade. “It happens. In this business, if you live to be another day older, you’re doin’ pretty damned good. Shit, you gone toe to toe with a vampire twice now, and you’re still kickin’. That’s better’n most folks ever do.”
“But, did you hear him? She’s alive.”
“Darlin’, that don’t mean nothin’. It’s real good to hear, but he mighta just been fuckin’ with us.”
“But—”
“It don’t change nothin’, really.” Alex stood again. “But hot damn, we killed us a vampire!” He thumped Carmen on the shoulder. “Gets the blood pumpin’, don’t it? Now c’mon, let’s see what we can find.” He moved to the dresser and started pulling out drawers.
They pulled down shelves, slashed open upholstery, upended drawers, looked behind pictures, thumped on floorboards, peered inside air conditioner vents. In the end they found $54,000 in a duffel bag in the hall closet, a laptop, a handful of sales receipts, a cell phone, and a very old, very sharp sword.
Alex found the sword under the vampire’s bed. He rose up from his knees and stood, then pulled the sword from its sheath. It was a rapier, its hilt a graceful knotwork of burnished steel, its handle wrapped in leather. The straight, thin blade had a timeworn patina, but the cutting edge gleamed like a mirror.
“How ’bout that?” said Alex, whipping the blade through the air. He planted the point in the carpeted floor and pressed on the handle, observing the bow of the blade. “This here’s good steel.” He examined the stamp near the hilt. “Don’t know the maker, but I know some folks who might. It’s Spanish…I’m guessin’ sixteen hundreds.” He resheathed it and tossed it to Carmen.
Carmen caught the sword and removed it again from the sheath. She saluted in the traditional manner, holding the blade vertical in front of her face then cutting down and out to the side. She settled into a relaxed fencer’s stance and lunged with practiced grace. “I like its balance,” she said, “it’s quick. It feels…real.”
“You know somethin’ about swordplay?” Asked Alex.
“I fenced in college,” she said, with a touch of pride. “I made the state semifinals one year.”
“Well, you think you know somebody…” Alex beamed like a proud parent. When Carmen made to hand the sword back, Alex shook his head. “Naw, it looks good on you. You keep it. Vampire hunter needs a good sword. And I already got one.”
She let out a half scoff, half laugh. “I’m not a vampire hunter.”
“Oh, ain’t you?” Alex winked.
Carmen blushed and looked away.
He moved on to the vampire’s closet. “This boy had quite a collection of shoes,” he said, sliding the door open. “Look at this. Handmade in Spain. Bet these shoes cost more than my car.”
“Why are you so interested in his shoes?”
Alex turned and looked at her. “You never know what you’re going to find on the bottom of somebody’s shoes. Plenty of cases been broken that way. You know they can take just the littlest bit of soil and tell you just where it came from?” As Alex talked, he scraped samples off shoes and into tiny plastic baggie
s. “Matter of fact, I heard of one case where they found a flower petal, and…hey, what’s all this now?” He held one of the shoes up to the light.
Carmen leaned in and peered at the sole. “There’s…gunk on that shoe. Brilliant, Holmes. Case closed.”
“Yeah, but what kind of gunk? And what’s this?” He noticed a bit of something stuck to the sole. He picked it off with his fingernails. It was a tiny wedge of paper, accordion-folded down to the size of a grain of rice. Alex unfolded it and smoothed it out. “It’s a piece of a label. You know, like when you scrape a glass bottle on somethin’, and it gets all scrunched up?”
“Yeah, I see,” said Carmen. “What’s it from?”
“Who the hell knows? Could be anything.” The label had a short section of a thick black line and one of thin red, a segment of some kind of border. Near the apex of the wedge was a smudge of black.
The label went into an evidence bag. With the blade of a pocketknife, Alex scraped up the goo and put it in a separate bag. He handed it to Carmen.
“It’s some kind of fruit,” said Carmen, as she held the bag to the light. “See, there’s a seed in there. A grape maybe?”
“What am I? A botanist?” Alex took the bag back. “Could be anything. Lots of plants and trees drop fruits this time of year. I’ll pass this on to a friend of mine. Like I said, cases been broke on less.”
Chapter Seven
Carmen, flipping through channels on the motel room TV, heard the key scrape in the door lock. She dove off of the bed, drawing her pistol as she went. She centered her sights in the middle of the door and tightened her finger on the trigger.
When the door swung open, Alex blinked as he stared down her gun barrel. He held a bag of takeout food. “Damn, girl.”
Carmen lowered the pistol. She smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. I guess I’m a little jumpy.”
“I can see how you’d be surprised, seein’ as how I had a key for the place, and I’m coming back exactly an hour after I said I’d be gone for an hour.”
“Sorry.”
Alex’s hand still rested on the doorknob. “Ain’t nothin.’ I got you a hamburger. Hope you like tomatoes and onions. Come on, we can eat on the way.”
She holstered her pistol and followed Alex to the parking lot, where he climbed into a white utility pickup truck, complete with tool cabinets, a lumber rack, and a vice on the rear bumper.
Carmen shook her head. “Where do you get this shit?”
“When you got a duffel bag fulla cash, a lot of things get easier. Hop on in.”
A few miles from the factory, in the middle of the desert, Alex pulled the truck over. He got out and opened one of the storage panels. He took out two hard hats, two reflective vests, and a plastic storage clipboard. He handed Carmen a vest and a hard hat. “Here, put these on,” he told her. Next, after a quick look around, he pulled out a bolt-action rifle with a scope and a fat black silencer.
Carmen cocked an eyebrow. “What do you plan on using that for?”
“Just you watch.” Another quick look around, and he rested the rifle on the truck bed. He sighted through the scope, took a breath, and pulled the trigger. The gun jerked and coughed. A ceramic insulator high on a utility pole exploded. Alex put the gun back into the cargo box. “Right about now, them guards are wondering why their phones and their Internet ain’t workin’.”
He put on his own reflective vest and hard hat, then pulled out a strange-looking device that resembled a radio. “And this here’s a cell-signal blocker. He turned it on and flicked a switch. Now anybody in ’bout a half-mile radius won’t be able to make any calls. Keeps things nice and private.”
Carmen looked at the union sticker on her hard hat. “What are we supposed to be?” she asked.
“Don’t really matter. Just act official. Like you own the place. Never ceases to amaze me what you can get away with if you got a clipboard and a hard hat.” He pulled out a cloth tool bag and put it in the front seat. It contained two automatic pistols with silencers. “Now there’s a few more people around right now, so we’re gonna want to be a little more discreet. On the plus side, it’s daytime, so there ain’t no vampires. Probably.” They climbed back into the truck.
***
“Okay. Just follow my lead.” Alex slowed down to turn into Consolidated Aggregates.
No one paid attention to them as they pulled the truck through the front gate and past the main building. People drove forklifts around, wrote things on clipboards, tinkered on machinery. “You think these people are in on it?” Carmen asked.
Alex shook his head. “I don’t think so. They look like they’re just doin’ their jobs. Nothin’ suspicious goes on until they go home. If they was in on it, they’d be payin’ more attention to us. And they wouldn’t be workin’ so hard.” Alex pulled the white work truck up to a stop in front of the second gate, which segregated the hidden back third of the lot from the front. Next to the drive-through gate was a smaller, person-size gate, and a tiny guard kiosk with no one in it.
Alex climbed out, picked up a thick storage clipboard with a mess of papers clipped to it, and rattled the gate. He waved his clipboard at the security camera.
After a minute or two, a fat man in khakis and a red plaid shirt hurried around the corner to meet him. He slipped through the smaller gate. “Can I help you folks?” he said. He wore thick plastic-framed glasses and needed a shave. An ID card around his neck read, “Juan Gutíerrez.” The short jog to the gate had him winded.
Alex held out his hand. In an exaggerated upper-crust accent, he said, “Um, yes. We’re from the county department of waste management and reclamation accountability. We’ve received a number of complaints about improper waste-management practices occurring at this site.”
Juan looked confused. “What kind of complaints? I haven’t heard anything about it.”
“We called ahead,” said Carmen. She did a wonderful job of looking impatient. She glared at him. “Didn’t anyone tell you? Someone was supposed to meet us here to unlock this gate.”
The man shrugged. “Nobody told me anything about that.”
Alex continued, “We were assured a company representative would be here to meet us and let us inspect the facilities.”
“Well, like I said, nobody told me about that.”
“It’s really not a problem,” said Alex. “If you’ll just open the gate, we can show ourselves around.”
“Um, yeah.” The big man scratched his cheek. “I’m gonna have to call my manager about that.”
“Look, if it’s going to be a problem, we can wait.” Alex gestured toward the phone. “Why don’t we go in the booth there and give him a call?”
“Well, the thing is, I don’t think my manager is in his office at the moment. Sometimes it takes a while to get hold of him.”
Alex said, “Sir, Doña Ana County takes waste reclamations very seriously, and we’ve gotten wind of some major violations. If I have to make a second trip, I’m coming back with a sheriff’s deputy, a warrant, and a pair of bolt cutters.”
Juan took a wide stance, ran his tongue over his teeth, and hooked his thumbs into his belt. “Before you do that, you might want to call the county commissioner. He’s friends with my boss. He might not be too happy about that.”
“If that’s the way it’s going to be.”
“That’s just the way it is,” Juan said. He paused for a moment, studying Alex and Carmen. “What department did you say you were from again?”
“The, ah,” Alex scratched his head, “waste treatment…”
“Waste management and reclamation accountability.” said Carmen.
“And who is your supervisor?”
Alex said, “Uh…Ronnie Tutt.”
Juan hitched up his belt. “Oh yeah, Ronnie! You know what? I changed my mind. Come on in. Pull that truck through, and then you can have a look around.” He keyed the gate open. Alex and Carmen climbed into the truck.
The truck rolled slowly down a narrow corrido
r, defined on one side by the sheet-metal wall of a building and on the other side by the cinder-block wall surrounding the compound. As they came to the back corner of the building, they saw a long, narrow warehouse with an A-frame roof. Two roll-up doors marked the long end, with a regular-size door off to the side. The warehouse was fronted by a gravel apron big enough to allow cargo trucks to turn around.
The fat man closed the gate and labored to catch up to the truck. Carmen and Alex climbed down out of the cab and waited for him.
Juan gestured towards the door of the warehouse. “You folks just step inside there, and I’ll be right behind you.” Alex didn’t move. “Well, go on, you wanted to go inside,” he said.
“Maybe I changed my mind.” Alex stared coolly at Juan. Juan stared back.
Nobody moved. They eyed each other warily. The silence stretched on.
Finally, Alex winked.
Juan’s eyes grew wide. He stumbled back and pulled a handgun out from under his shirt.
Alex was faster. He pulled the silenced pistol out of the storage clipboard and jammed the barrel into the doughy mass of Juan’s belly. He pulled the trigger three times. The pistol coughed. Juan stumbled backwards and fell headlong, a dark stain spreading across his shirt.
Carmen looked down at the body.
“He’d a done the same to us,” said Alex.
Carmen nodded, “I know.”
Alex snatched the lanyard with the ID card from around Juan’s neck.
The door was heavy-duty steel with a card scanner above the doorknob. Next to the door, a security camera peered down. Alex held the fat man’s ID card in his hand. “Here goes nothin’. I’ll go in first.” He slid the card, and the little light above the door lever flashed green. He pushed the door open a crack and aimed his pistol through it. The door swung open, and the gun followed, covering the ever-increasing wedge of visibility.
Light filtered in through a row of high windows. Dust particles drifted lazily through shafts of sunlight, past bare wooden rafters.
Immediately in front of the two cargo doors was an open space big enough for two large trucks. A nondescript beige sedan was parked in one space. At the back of the warehouse, a wooden stairway led to a balcony loft, along with a cluster of offices. Below the loft, next to the stairs, was a padlocked door.
