by Matt Kincade
“And yet look at her now. Happy and well fed. Cannot a hunter admire the beauty of his prey before he shoots? Cannot a farmer choose one lamb for a pet and another for the pot? Your sister was a prisoner, and now she is a guest. It is fortunate for her. Best not to overthink it.”
“Don’t think I don’t know why.”
“Of course you know why. Because you are going to help me.”
“I’ll never help you,” she snarled. “I may be a vampire, but I’m not your friend.”
“Very well then,” said the Don. He pulled out his phone from his suit coat and dialed a number. Outside, the guard answered. The Don spoke one word. The guard nodded and walked toward Mia.
“You wouldn’t,” said Carmen.
The guard seized Mia by the hair and shoved her head underwater. The girl flailed and battered her hands uselessly against the man. Water splashed all over his suit, but still he held her.
“No!” Carmen screamed, pressing her hands against the window.
“Would it not be better to be my friend?”
“Okay!” said Carmen. “Okay. You made your point.”
The Don tapped on the glass. The guard looked up, saw him nod, and released the girl. Mia collapsed to the ground, retching and spitting up water. Luisa stepped forward and helped her sit, wiped her hair from her eyes.
The Don stood up and brushed some imaginary dust from his suit. “Remember, if you will, that you are a guest here. Do not abuse my hospitality.”
“A guest?” Carmen shook her head. “I’m a prisoner.”
“If you prefer to think of it that way.” The Don turned on his heel and left the room.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jen pulled her van to a stop next to the wrecked Chevy, which sat in the driveway where the tow-truck driver had dropped it off. It looked like some twisted piece of modern art. She got out and walked once around the car before she crossed over to the open garage. The blue Ford truck still was up on jack stands, with Alex’s boots protruding from beneath. Orange sparks fountained from under the car. Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” blasted on the stereo, loud enough to be heard over the noise of the arc welder.
Jen yelled a few times and finally resorted to kicking one of Alex’s toes. The sparks stopped, and he slid out from under the car on a dolly. He wore a welder’s helmet, a featureless black surface broken only by a rectangular view window.
He pulled off the helmet. “What?” he said.
“Hello to you too,” said Jen. “Just checking in.”
Alex sat up and stood, brushing dirt off his gray coveralls. He turned the stereo down. “Sorry. How are ya, darlin?”
“That’s better,” said Jen. She pointed a thumb at the wrecked car. “Were you inside that thing when that happened?” She noticed the Band-Aid at his hairline, the slight wince as he stood.
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay? Do you want me to look you over?”
“Nah, I’m okay.”
“Alex, shut up. That wasn’t a question. Go sit down.” She looked around the garage. “Still working on that truck?”
“Yup.”
After a detour to get her medic’s kit from the van, Jen followed Alex to the back deck. He stripped off his coveralls and sat on the top step. She peered into his eyes with a penlight, listened to his breathing with a stethoscope, asked him a dozen routine questions. Then she said, “So what’s going on with you and Carmen?”
“She’s gone.”
“Yeah, I get that. What happened?”
“She went to go kill our vamp by herself. I tried to stop her. She didn’t much like that.”
“Oh.” Jen hesitated. “So did she…”
Alex shook his head. “No. He’s got her. Maybe she’s dead. Maybe she’s a hostage. Hell, maybe they’re fucking. I don’t know.”
“But you’re going after her?”
Alex didn’t say anything for a moment. “Yeah.”
“Why?” Jen said, raising an eyebrow.
“Shit, I don’t know. I just…’cause I gotta know, I guess. I gotta finish it. If she’s still on my side, I gotta help her. If she’s gone over, then I gotta do what I shoulda done already.”
“I can understand that.” Jen lit a cigarette, took a drag, exhaled. “So you’re going to go and take down this vampire. Got any help?”
“Ain’t nobody I’d trust to let her live. Ain’t nobody would go along if they knew that’s what I had in mind. Any other hunter would kill her and call it mercy.” He stood up and headed toward the door. Jen followed.
“You know, Alex. I know others…like her.”
“How you mean?”
“I mean, vampires. Vampires who don’t want to be vampires.”
Alex stopped just shy of the sliding glass door and turned around. “You’re palling around with vampires? Why the hell didn’t you tell me this before?”
Jen put her hands on her hips and glared. “What would you have done if I told you that before?”
Alex stopped and thought for a moment. He shrugged. “Probably woulda quit talkin to you, then gone out and killed them vamps you mentioned.”
“Exactly. You weren’t ready to hear it. You weren’t ready to see that they don’t all deserve to die.”
“Goddamn it, Jen, how can you even say that?”
“Does Carmen deserve to die?”
Alex said nothing. He turned his back to her and crossed his arms.
Jen rolled her eyes. “So, yeah. I know a few vampires. Not everybody gets to choose. I help them out. I help them find others, so they can find a way to—”
Alex turned around again. “Damn it, Jenny, how the fuck could you do that? How could you do that to me?”
“Oh, so now it’s about you?” Jen poked him in the chest, hard, with two fingers. “Shut the fuck up for a second and listen to me. You know why I got into this business? It’s not so I can sew up bullet wounds for you idiots, watching you all die and then go stealing your corpses out of county morgues. I started doing this for the victims. And I’m still here for the victims. I’m here to help the ones who didn’t choose this, the ones who never wanted this. You might remember, you were a victim yourself once.”
Alex didn’t respond.
“What you’ve got to accept is that people like Carmen, they’re victims every bit as much as the ones who get killed.”
For a long moment, Alex was silent. When he finally spoke again, he still didn’t turn to face her. “Well, how’s…how’s that all work? What exactly can you do for ’em?”
“There are a lot of ways. The first one I met was when I was still a practicing nurse. Every so often we’d get a terminal patient. Just somebody who was in pain. No hope, no life. Nothing to look forward to but more pain. We’d explain the situation to them. It was always consensual. After dark, I’d let the vampire in the back door. I called her the night nurse. She’d come to the hospital room, and I’d unplug the IV line. She’d drink out of the IV like a straw. No way to transmit the virus to the new host. They’d just bleed out and go peacefully.” Jen sighed. “It isn’t easy for them. They don’t enjoy killing. They’ve got hunters after them on one side and other vampires after them on the other side.”
“Yeah, like I always say, it’s a mean old world.”
“It sure is. And it doesn’t need us to make it any meaner.”
After a pause, Alex turned back around to face her. He said, “So you’re going to help Carmen out now?”
“I’d like to. But if she’s gone over to the Don’s side…”
“Yeah. Shit, either way, one of us is going to have to take care of her.”
“Please tell me you aren’t going to go in there Wyatt Earp style.”
Alex grinned and tipped his hat. “I got a few tricks I’m comin’ up with. Tell you the truth, gettin’ in won’t be the problem. This vamp’s old school. Wants to kill me himself. ’Course, I don’t intend to give him the chance.”
He opened the sliding glass
door, and they crossed through the kitchen. The living room was a disaster. Opened boxes, Styrofoam padding, and bubble wrap lay knee-deep across the floor. Random electronic components were seeded throughout the mess.
In the corner, a blindfolded man in a rumpled black suit was handcuffed to a chair. He raised his head when he heard Alex and Jen enter the room, but the duct tape over his mouth kept him silent. He rattled his cuffs and hummed through his nose.
Jen took it all in. She looked back at Alex. “Do I even want to know?”
Alex nodded toward the man. “Jorgé here works for Don Carlos. That’s all you gotta know. We was just discussin’ a few things.”
She shook her head. “You don’t need a medic. You need a psychiatrist.”
“Might be somethin’ to that. Say, I gotta ask a favor. I’m gonna need some help on this job.”
“Alex, you know I’m not a hitter.”
“Ain’t nothin’ like that. All you gotta do is push a couple buttons.”
She sat down on the couch. “Somehow, I doubt it’s that simple. Why don’t you tell me about it.”
***
As the sun rose over the cliffs and cast the first rays of light on his grapevines, Don Carlos sat in his private chambers with a carafe of wine, freshly siphoned out of one of the great oak casks in the basement. He poured three fingers into a glass, swirled the wine around, and tilted the lip of the glass up to his nose. He inhaled deeply, opened his eyes after a moment’s pause, and wrote a few notes on a piece of paper.
The cell phone on the table rang. Carmen’s cell. After a brief contemplation, he picked it up. He hit the “answer” button, saying nothing, and held the phone to his ear.
“This Don Carlos?” said Alex.
“Ah, the cowboy.” Don Carlos smiled and leaned back in the leather easy chair. He took an absentminded sip of the wine. “What can I do for you?”
“All right, hoss. Here’s the thing. You said I should just come on in when I was ready, right?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I guess I’m ’bout ready. So here I come.”
“I look forward to it.”
“See ya soon.”
“Hasta pronto, Cowboy.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ten minutes later, a blue Ford truck turned off the main road and plowed through the decorative wrought-iron gate that blocked off the road to the Mondragon winery.
The Don’s security control center was a windowless room deep within the mansion, where four men sat at desks, sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups and watching video monitors. Just as Jacob entered the room, a half dozen alarms went off. No less than five cameras watched the blue Ford as it maneuvered up the narrow, twisting drive.
Jacob leaned over and studied the video monitors. “This asshole should have a little more trouble with the second gate.” He picked up his phone and dialed a number. “Vasquez, I want A and B teams to be waiting at gate two by the time Rains gets there. We need to take him alive. Don’s orders. The Don says he’ll go quietly. No, I don’t buy it either, so watch yourselves.”
While the old truck continued up the driveway, Jacob walked to the coffee maker and poured himself a cup.
One of the techs turned away from his computer. “Hey boss,” he said, “you heard anything about Jorgé? He didn’t show up this morning, either.”
Jacob dumped creamer into his coffee and stirred it with a little plastic straw. “Let’s not worry about him right now. Eyes on the prize.” On the monitors, the beat-up pickup lumbered around the turns, following the narrow blacktop road through the rocky terrain. It almost went off the edge then swerved and righted itself.
“Is he drunk?” said Jacob.
“I guess you’d have to be, to come up here like that,” the tech said.
They all watched the monitors. Two teams of guards approached the second and final gate to the property. They wore desert camouflage uniforms, helmets and goggles, knee pads and combat boots. Their tactical vests were festooned with knives, grenades, and spare magazines. They moved purposefully towards the gate in a well-choreographed dance, their machine guns held at the ready.
Gate two wasn’t decorative. It was a homely, custom-built steel affair that could stop a fully loaded cement truck moving at freeway speed. Security teams A and B, groups of four men each, crouched nearby. Their camouflage blended into the arid terrain. As they waited, they double-checked their weapons and peered down the driveway.
The old blue Ford came into sight around the bend. It drove at an unconcerned pace, occasionally darting wildly to the left or right. As it approached, they heard music, growing louder.
“It’s Elvis,” said B team’s leader. “He’s playing Elvis. What the fuck is wrong with this guy?”
They could make out the driver. He wore a battered white cowboy hat and mirrored aviator shades. He seemed to be bopping his head to the rhythm of the song.
“He’s insane,” said A team’s leader.
“Just hold it steady now,” Jacob said over the radio. “Eyes open.”
Brake drums screeched as the truck eased to a halt, five feet from the gate. The music was blasting. “Okay, A team,” Jacob instructed, “take up defensive positions. B team, approach the truck.”
The guy behind the wheel seemed to be having some kind of fit. He twisted his head back and forth then rocked in the seat so hard that the truck bounced and groaned on its springs.
B team held their rifles trained on him as they approached. “Turn off the radio, shut off the engine, and step out of the truck,” said the team leader. “I said, ‘Step out of the truck!’”
Now two guards were at each door. One reached forward and pulled the driver’s door open. “Oh, what the shit?”
The driver was handcuffed to the wheel. His mouth was stuck shut with clear packing tape. The wheel was a useless prop. The steering wheel shaft connected to a pulley system that ran down to a mass of radio-controlled aircraft components on the floorboards. A tiny camera sat mounted on the dashboard.
“It’s Jorgé,” the guard said. “Goddamn it. Everybody get—”
The truck’s payload, five hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel-oil mixture, detonated. The blast flung the security gate across the valley like a toy. Its twisted remains tumbled down a far hill and flattened a row of wine grapes. The men surrounding the truck were reduced to their constituent atoms. The truck itself vaporized; twisted splinters of metal sheared off and spun away in every direction. The entire security checkpoint disappeared in an enormous fireball.
A twenty-foot wide crater marked where the truck had been. The low rumble of the explosion rolled off the far hills and returned again. Bits of truck and gatehouse and security guard fell, pitter-patter, all around the property.
In the security control room, Jacob had time to see his the remainder of his best troops become a high-velocity meat spray before the explosion took out the cameras. A half dozen squares in the grid of security feeds turned to static.
“Fucking shit,” he muttered. “Shit. Okay.” He switched to a different camera feed, watching the mushroom cloud rising from the driveway. “This is a diversion. Send a team out to the perimeter fences. Get all the workers into the barracks, and I want that drone in the air.”
“Sir,” said one of the techs at a computer, “somebody just cut the west fence. And the cameras went down.”
Jacob sighed. “Send another team to back up the one on the way. And have the last two teams take up defensive positions around the house. Shoot to kill.”
The tech stared at him. “But the Don said—”
“I know what the Don said,” Jacob spat. “Let me deal with that.”
Eight camouflage-clad men jogged up the slope of the low ridge, beyond which stood the western fence. They moved quickly but efficiently, staggered into a loose skirmish line. When they were within view of the fence, they lay prone on the ground. One man turned around to cover the team’s blind side. They settled in and waited for
their quarry to appear.
***
Inside the maintenance building, one man sat, working on a machine part with an angle grinder. He wore gray coveralls and a full-face shield. Sparks poured around his feet. Behind him stood the manor’s small gasoline tanker, the supply truck, and the boss’s limousine.
The grinder screamed and whined as it ate into steel. The man had his radio up loud enough for it to be heard over the grinder.
He shut down the grinder, pulled up his face shield, and examined his work. Then he pulled off one glove to feel the smooth edge of the metal. He glanced out the big roll-up door and saw a column of greasy black smoke rising into the sky. Four men in full combat gear sprinted past the doorway, machine guns in their hands.
“Que coño?” said the maintenance worker. He peeled the face shield off his head and wiped his face with a bandanna as he stood and peered out the door.
Behind him, Alex silently uncoiled himself from the undercarriage of the supply truck and eased himself to the ground. He wore a black Hawaiian shirt patterned with white surfboards, unbuttoned, and a white T-shirt beneath. As the maintenance worker peered in confusion out the door, Alex reached back beneath the truck and came out with a battered white cowboy hat. He adjusted it on his head and crept toward the worker, drawing his pistol along the way.
The worker turned back in time to see Alex thumb back the gun’s hammer.
“Hey—” he said, slowly raising his hands.
Alex noted the man’s fine black hair, the deep earth brown of his skin. He holstered his pistol, then nodded towards the door. “Run. Sal de aquí inmediatamente.”
The man stumbled towards the garage door.
Alex walked over and turned the radio down, then went back to the truck and dislodged a duffel bag from behind the gas tank. As he rifled through the bag, he dialed his phone with the other hand.
