by Matt Kincade
On the stereo, Elvis and The TCB Band hammered out the ending to “Hound Dog”, followed a second later by the baritone vocal intro of “Why Do Fools Fall In love.” Then the drums and the chorus joined in, and Alex rocked his head, lost in the music. “God-damn. Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers. 1956, Gee records.” A moment later, he said, “The hell was I talking about?”
“Vampires.” Said Carmen.
“Oh yeah. I mean, look at a junkie,” he went on. “You know, a heroin addict. Does he really mean to do the things he does? Rob and cheat and kill, hurt all the folks that love him? Nah, he just needs his fix. He just needs it more’n he needs anything else.”
Carmen was silent for a long moment. At last she said, “Then we should be pitying them, not killing them.”
“Darlin’, believe me, I do. I pity the ones like Mateo. Fact is, not many folks make it as vampires. Most people can’t handle it. They just off themselves before too long. And all them bodies in the freezer…notice how they all had their heads chopped off? That was so they wouldn’t turn. Vampires don’t like competition. Don’t like amateurs running around, blowing their cover. I dunno how ol’ Mateo slipped past ’em, but they woulda set that to rights before long. You want a vampire like this Don Carlos to turn you, an old-school vamp like that, you gotta want it. You gotta earn it. You gotta show that vamp you’re ruthless and loyal. Gotta prove you like to kill. Them assholes back there that we killed, they ain’t workin’ for the money. They’re workin’ to get made. They want it more than anything. They wanna live forever and eat folks for breakfast. Those are the vamps we’re after. Mateo was an accident. And if I ever end up like him, I hope to hell somebody has the mercy to put me down. Only kind of mercy there is for them.”
Carmen made a face. “Couldn’t they live some other way? Donated blood? Animals? Willing human donors?”
“All I know is it’s gotta be human, and it’s gotta be fresh. A vamp can live off refrigerated blood for a while, but it wears him down. Same with animal blood. It’s like, I dunno, eatin’ toilet paper or somethin’. It’ll fill up your stomach, but it ain’t no substitute. And as far as donors, I’ve heard tell of it. But vampires, they get hungry enough, they get a little crazy. Like Mateo. Didn’t even know what he was doin’…and you already seen what happens to humans who get bit. There’s just no tellin’. They might be fine, might get a raging infection and die, wake up a vampire. Unpredictable as hell. Sometimes a man gets made, on purpose, and it still don’t take. They just die. Then sometimes a scratch is all it takes.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
Alex adjusted the angle of his hat brim. “Ain’t nothin’ fair about it.”
***
A black truck pulled through the wide-open gate and rolled to a stop in front of the building that said, consolidated aggregates. Jacob climbed out of the truck and looked around. Behind mirrored sunglasses, his thick, meaty face surveyed the gravel factory’s office.
A balding man approached him from the building. He was wearing a white short-sleeved business shirt with a striped tie and brown slacks. “Jacob, right?” said the man. “I’m Todd Hartman. I’m the manager here.”
Jacob touched his hat brim and nodded. “Hello, Todd. Why don’t you tell me what happened here?”
Todd put his hands on his hips. “I don’t know much. A truck came through with a man and a woman. They were wearing hard hats. They looked pretty official, so none of us thought twice about it. They drove into the back yard, and then a few minutes later, it was like a war over there. Machine guns and explosions. We all hid inside here, and a few minutes later, the truck left again, and so did a white van.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it. None of us has been through the gate. I mean, what were we supposed to do? They had machine guns. Our landline didn’t work, and even our cell phones wouldn’t get a signal until after they left.”
Jacob nodded. “Probably used a cell-phone-signal jammer. So nobody else knows about this? Nobody called the police? Nobody called their wives? No Facebook? No Twitter?”
“No.” Todd didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He put them at his sides, then moved them back to his hips. “You…you people pay me pretty well to not pay any attention to that half of the yard. I did just like you told me. No police. I called you first. I made it clear to everyone else that if they kept their mouths shut, there’d be…that there’d be a reward.”
Jacob didn’t react.
“I hope I didn’t overstep. I just felt like that was the best way to…keep everyone quiet.”
Jacob smiled. “No, you did just right. I don’t mind greasing a few palms to smooth this all over. Now you’re sure nobody went and had a look? Nobody called the police?”
The man nodded. “Absolutely. There are only eight people here today, and they’ve all been in my sight since the phones started working again.” He jerked his thumb toward the back half of the property, “I don’t know what you do over there, and I don’t want to know.”
“Good. That’s a good, healthy attitude,” said Jacob. “I keep some spending cash for just this sort of thing.” He turned back toward the truck and folded the seat back.
Jacob turned back around with an AK-47 in his hands. He pulled back the bolt. The manager’s eyes grew wide. He held out his hands as if they could stop bullets. They couldn’t.
The machine gun chattered and blew the manager’s guts out his back. The crowd of men inside didn’t even have time to react before the bullets tore through them. Sunlight shone through the cluster of brand-new bullet holes in the sheet-metal wall.
One man managed to dodge the hail of bullets and took off running. Jacob calmly turned back to the truck and replaced the rifle’s magazine. He switched the fire selector to single shot, aimed carefully, and shot the fleeing man in the middle of the back. He collapsed in the desert across the street from the factory. Jacob tucked the rifle under his arm and pulled out a cigarette.
A black SUV pulled in, and four men got out. Jacob turned to them. “Okay, our hunters probably split by now, but let’s not take any chances.” The cigarette bobbed in his mouth. “We’ve got enough dead bodies as it is. You guys secure the perimeter, but don’t touch anything. Get that gate locked, and get that body back in here. Keep your guns out of sight, and for God’s sake, call me if any police show up.”
Jacob walked through the back gate. There was Juan’s corpse, along with a dead Hispanic woman, her throat torn open, sprawled out in the sunlight. Jacob observed the drag marks from the woman’s heels, and the charred pile of ashes that used to be Mateo. He went inside. The cement floor was sticky with blood. The place reeked of blood and gunpowder and burnt electronics.
Jacob inhaled another lungful of smoke. “Son of a bitch.” He took out his cell phone and dialed a number.
On the other end, Armando didn’t pick up.
“Son of a bitch,” Jacob repeated. He put the phone away.
Back in the truck, he used his laptop to access the off-site storage for the security camera backups. He saw the white work truck pull up to the gate. He saw Alex, in his hard hat, standing at the gate. He hit fast forward and watched as the two vampire hunters shot their way into the factory. Jacob picked out a few key frames—good face shots of Alex and Carmen, the truck’s license plate—and saved them. He brought up a full-screen picture of Alex’s face. “So that’s what you look like. Buddy, you’re starting to piss me off.”
He approached the nearest soldier. “Okay, we’re going to have a truck come by. I want all of these bodies loaded up. We’re taking them to site four for disposal. Then I want this place sanitized. No blood, no bullet shells, no paper work, no nothing.” Jacob took one last drag off his cigarette. He regarded the smoldering butt for a moment then flicked it away. “I need to go check on Armando.”
Thirty minutes later, he pulled into Armando’s driveway. Immediately he saw the front door hanging open, the doorknob blown apart. He nudged the do
or aside with the shotgun barrel and stepped inside. The carpet squished under his feet.
He lit another cigarette. “Son of a bitch.”
***
Jacob’s black truck followed a single-lane blacktop road that wound through a narrow canyon, roughly following the path of a meandering stream. Birch trees dotted the canyon floor alongside the creek. A few miles later, where the canyon began to neck out into a narrow valley, Jacob pulled the truck to a stop at a security gate. He raised an eyebrow at the camera, and a second later the steel gate rolled aside. Jacob put the truck in gear and crept through. To his right were low rolling hills, terraced and planted with grapevines. To his left, a cliff rose, a jagged monument of volcanic glass and stone. Its face was past vertical; it leaned ominously over the valley, like the bow of a sinking ship. Clustered around the base of the cliff were a dozen or so buildings, with a Spanish-style manor house at their center, the red-tile roof visible behind a high stucco wall.
Jacob looked out to his right and saw laborers hunched among the vines, pruning and tending. An overseer, mounted on horseback, rested a shotgun across his lap. He nodded once to Jacob and turned his head back toward the fields.
He drove past the cluster of maintenance and administration buildings, past the barracks and the garage and the bottling plant. He drove alongside the ten-foot-tall stucco wall and briefly stopped again as the black wrought-iron gates opened for him. He pulled his truck inside. The blacktop gave way to brick pavers. The main drive cut a path through acres of immaculate landscaping. He pulled his truck into the roundabout that surrounded a fountain in front of the house.
Jacob killed the engine and set the parking brake. He took off his sunglasses, tucked them in his shirt pocket, and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. Tired, red eyes stared back at him from a face reluctantly succumbing to middle-age. His nose was a little bit larger than he remembered, the lines around his mouth a little more like jowls every day. He straightened his hair, then his collar. A cough rose in his throat. After a moment of fighting the impulse, he gave in and hacked into a white handkerchief. He glanced at the fresh blood spots on the kerchief before returning it to his jacket pocket.
He met his own eyes in the mirror. “This is it,” he said. “This is your day, Jacob. It’s going to happen. You’ve got this.” He left his black cowboy hat on the seat and climbed out of the truck.
Before he could touch the doorknob, a young girl in a blue housekeeper’s dress opened the great double doors from within. She was a waifish thing, dark skinned, black haired, brown eyed. Her face was blank, her eyes downcast. Without a word, she stepped aside as Jacob strolled into the foyer.
The great room was pure old-world opulence. Marble tiles. Crystal chandelier. A grand staircase that curved up and around to meet with a balcony. Priceless art hung in gilt frames along the walls. Marble and bronze statues stood atop fluted pedestals.
The girl had gone back to dusting the walnut railing. Jacob climbed the stairs. As he reached the top landing, an older woman in an identical blue dress burst out of a doorway on the left. She was the opposite in almost every way of the girl downstairs: thick, severe, with rounded shoulders and strong laundress arms. She leaned both hands on the railing that overlooked the entrance hall, breathing deep and deliberately, willing herself under control. She took her hands off the railing and rubbed her eyes then slid her hands down to cover her mouth. “Otra niña. Solo otra niña,” she whispered. She saw Jacob and froze.
He smirked. “Hey, Luisa. Rough day?”
A wailing scream from within the room cut off her response. The scream rose to a jagged crescendo then faded away. Luisa’s shoulders tensed and her lips pressed tighter together. Her eyes closed for a moment. She turned away from Jacob.
Jacob didn’t seem the least bit surprised by the scream. He pushed the door open.
The room was as lavish as the rest of the house, from the patterned ceiling, to the paintings on the walls, to the carved baseboard skirting the tiled floor. There was a matching William-and-Mary style chaise lounge and accent chair, a wooden end table, a vase of fresh-cut carnations.
The vampire and his victim swayed in the middle of the room like a couple dancing to a slow song. The vampire raised his head at the sound of the door. Blood coated his chin and neck. The girl in his arms was young and scrawny. She, too, wore a blue housekeeping uniform. Her dark eyes were wide open. She trembled in her death throes, both hands wrapped futilely around Pablo’s wrist as he held her by the shoulder. His other hand was wrapped within her long, jet-black hair. Blood seeped from the puncture in her neck.
Jacob’s mouth fell open. “Pablo?”
Pablo was a lean, tall young man, with tanned skin and deep-black hair. He wore black slacks and a white T-shirt, splashed with blood. “Jacob! Hola, qué tal?”
Jacob’s shoulders slumped. “You? You got the promotion?”
“My first meal,” said Pablo. He lowered his face to the girl’s neck and drank again. Her entire body shivered, her bare heels dancing on the floor. Finally her eyes rolled back in her head, and she went limp. Pablo let go of the dead girl, and she thumped to the tile floor. “It’s amazing.”
Jacob rolled his eyes. “Yeah, congratulations, Pablo.”
Pablo regarded him for a moment. He grinned slyly, wiping blood from his chin. “Oh, are you upset? Did you think it was going to be you?”
Jacob stifled a cough. He looked off to one side. “I’m sure the Don picked who he thought was best.”
Pablo called out, “Luisa!” A moment later, the woman appeared at the door. “I’m finished,” he said. “Clean up this mess.”
Luisa, her face now expressionless, leaned down and grabbed the dead girl’s ankles. The young woman’s arms flopped above her head as Luisa dragged her through the doorway. The girl’s mouth hung open, her eyes seeming to track Jacob as her lifeless head lolled to the side. She left a bloody stripe across the marble tile.
“Don’t worry, Jacob,” Pablo said. “I’m sure your promotion will come soon enough. And it had better, right?” Pablo grinned wider and leaned in. He delicately sniffed Jacob, “You know, before now, I didn’t even know cancer had a smell.”
“Can we just get to business, Pablo?”
Pablo stopped smiling. “Maybe Armando put up with such informality, but I’m in charge now. You can call me ‘sir.’”
Jacob swallowed down some bile. “Yes, sir.”
“So, back to business.” Pablo turned and observed a painting on the wall, some baroque scene of half-naked people sitting in a garden and looking pensive. “Where are we with these vampire hunters? Did you find them yet?”
“We’re working on it.”
“Why haven’t you caught him?”
Jacob put his hands in his jacket pockets. “Like I said, we’re working on it. This guy is good. He doesn’t leave a lot of clues.”
“What about the registration from the truck at Rafael’s house?”
“Oh yeah, James Burton. Turns out he played guitar for Elvis Presley.”
Luisa reentered the room, pushing a mop and a wheeled bucket. She wiped away the red smears on the tile. Both men ignored her.
Pablo said, “You’ll find that I’m not the kind of boss who likes excuses.”
Jacob took a deep breath. “It’s not an excuse—it’s a fact. This was your job, up until about an hour ago. Remember?”
Pablo snorted. “So what do you have?”
“Not much. We have a few pictures, a few license-plate numbers. I sent the pictures in to the national council. Hopefully they have a file on these two. They’ll get back to me. Aside from that, we’re down to checking out every dive motel and bar in the county, looking for the truck they drove to the factory. That’s about all we can do right now, unless we get a break.”
Luisa finished her job. She replaced the mop in the red mop water, and pushed the bucket ahead. The door slipped shut behind her.
“That isn’t good enough,” Pablo said. �
��You find this asshole, and you find him now, or I’ll—”
Jacob rolled his eyes. “Or you’ll what? Kill me? And then how will you find this guy? You’ve been riding my coattails from day one. All I’ve ever seen you do is snort cocaine and diddle the help. Without me to do your job for you, how long do you think it’ll be before Don Carlos realizes you’re dead weight? You can’t do this without me.”
Pablo’s nostrils flared. He drew in breath to speak.
Jacob’s phone rang in his pocket. He turned away from Pablo as he pulled the phone out. “Hey,” he told Pablo, “shut up for a second. I gotta take this.”
Pablo seethed as Jacob took the call.
A minute later, Jacob hung up and put the phone away. He turned back to Pablo. “We found the truck.”
Pablo didn’t respond.
“Look, I’ve gotta go do my job. You come and find me when the sun goes down…sir.”
Jacob turned to hide the grin on his face as he walked out the door and onto the landing. He pulled out a cigarette and lit up while he strolled down the stairs and out the front door.
On the front stoop stood a waist-high ashtray. As Jacob pulled the front door open, he glimpsed Luisa furtively drop a handful of not-quite-finished cigarette butts into her dress pocket. She turned and looked at Jacob wordlessly.
“Pablo gets the promotion,” said Jacob. “Fuck everything. I mean, isn’t there any goddamned justice in the world?”
Luisa raised one eyebrow, which said everything she intended to say.
Jacob chuckled. He took one last draw on his cigarette, still three-quarters unsmoked, then dropped it onto the marble step, where it lay smoldering. He looked down at the cigarette then met Luisa’s gaze as she looked from the smoke to him. Jacob crushed the cigarette beneath his boot heel and ground it into powder. He briefly raised his eyebrows. “Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?”
***
An hour after midnight, Pablo’s car pulled into the liquor-store parking lot across the street from the Wagon Wheel Motel. It eased into a space next to Jacob’s black truck. On the other side of the truck was a white van.
