Vampire Fire

by J. R. Rain

  I did know. I sensed it the moment that Anthony had first mentioned hearing his dad’s voice.

  “Your son quite likes having Daddy around.”

  I said nothing. I sat there and breathed and fought an urge to leap across the table and smack the smug look off the devil’s face before me. No, tear it off. Mostly, I sat there and realized that there was nothing I could do. At least, not now.

  “I see I have given you a lot to think about, Samantha Moon. Once again, I am glad your son is safe. And you’re welcome.”

  I blinked. “Welcome for what?”

  “Those handcuffs didn’t uncuff themselves, Sam. It was, after all, the least I could do. Now, I have a train to catch.”

  I blinked and opened my mouth to speak, but closed it again. The devil stood, tipped an invisible hat and sauntered off toward the tracks. There was a train coming, but it wasn’t slowing; apparently, this wasn’t its scheduled stop.

  The devil vaulted over a metal railing and fell down onto the tracks, directly in the path of the oncoming train.

  The horn blew and brakes squealed, but far too late.

  The body of the man named Buck Taggart exploded into a million bloody pieces. And, as people screamed and an alarm sounded, I watched as an oily, dragon-like shadow rose up from the tracks, circled once, and disappeared up into the night.

  The End

  To be continued in:

  Midnight Moon

  Vampire for Hire #13

  (Second in the Devil’s Triangle Trilogy)

  by J.R. Rain

  Coming soon!

  ~~~~~

  Also coming soon:

  Blood Moon

  Samantha Moon Case Files #2

  by J.R. Rain

  and Rod Kierkegaard

  (Fall 2016)

  ~~~~~

  And further down the road:

  New Moon Rising

  Samantha Moon Origins #1

  by J.R. Rain and

  April M. Reign

  A brand-new series that takes you back in time, back to when Samantha Moon was mortal, back before the attack that would render her into something far stranger than she could ever believe...

  (Winter 2016)

  Also available:

  Moon Bayou

  Samantha Moon Case Files #1

  by J.R. Rain

  and Rod Kierkegaard

  (read on for a sample)

  Chapter One

  There’s sunshine―and there’s moonshine. Orange County, California, where I’m from, averages around 278 sunny days a year, and since there isn’t that much in the way of night life, most business is conducted in broad daylight. But in New Orleans, no matter what your business is, the night time is the right time for it.

  And the shadier that business, the better.

  Which makes it my kind of town. Like me, the Big Easy only comes alive after dark. I could feel it the moment I walked out of the main terminal building at Louis Armstrong International Airport and stood waiting for a cab. There was something not quite right about the air, I mean, something besides the dark, sullen sunset sky streaked blood-red and the hot, humid mix of sulphur, swamp-grass, and river water that let me know I was a long way from sunny Southern California.

  It smelled like…voodoo weather.

  The feeling got even stronger downtown at the city morgue, a one-story cement funeral home sandwiched between a pair of old brick slum buildings painted bright red and yellow. One had a big peeling sign across its front that read: “We Cash Paychecks.” I guess I’d been subconsciously expecting the building they’d used in American Horror Story: Coven where they revived Zoe’s dead boyfriend from spare body parts. This definitely wasn’t it.

  Automatically, I checked the doorway and the lintel overhang for security cameras. My skin doesn’t show up on video, which was why I still wore so much foundation makeup under my Jackie O sunglasses. It made travel a bitch, especially in this heat.

  “Bet you’ve never set foot in a coroner’s office like this one, Miss Moon,” said the medical examiner, Dr. Bernardo Willard, after he unlocked the front door and I introduced myself to him. He was a thin gray-haired Boomer in his sixties; in Fullerton, he’d have been retired. But there was one thing I was already learning about Louisiana—nobody retired. Not peaceably, anyway. Around here, they carried you out straight from your desk chair to your grave. My cabbie had been about a hundred years old.

  “It’s Mrs. Moon,” I told Willard, following him inside. “But please call me Samantha… or Sam.”

  Speaking of graves, that was exactly how the place smelled. And I should know; my boyfriend back home, Kingsley Fulcrum, tended to rob them during the full moon. Which reminded me, I needed to text the big guy and at least let him know I’d landed safely. Not that I had much to worry about in a plane crash…

  “And thanks for meeting me here at this late hour.” The morgue kept bankers’ hours, and it was long past closing.

  “My pleasure, Sam. It may be after business hours, but to tell you the truth, I’m still hard at work here. Or hardly workin’. The US government recommends an office like ours only handle 250 post-mortems a year―with our murder rate, we do nearly one a day, on just the one autopsy table. City Hall dumped us here after Katrina, then a fire wiped out half our records and equipment, and things got so bad we have to store our cadavers out in the back parking lot in refrigerated trailers.” He made a beckoning gesture at me. “She’s in here.”

  A holstered sidearm peeked out from under his soiled white lab coat. Which reminded me that New Orleans was the only major American city that still had an open-carry law on the books. I hadn’t brought my Siggy with me; it would have been too much trouble to try to broker it through the airport TSA scanners―and besides, I didn’t really need it, did I?

  Dr. Willard led me into the main mortuary, a room about the size of my basement that looked like Hurricane Katrina had hit maybe yesterday. The floors were slippery and wet, and there was something seriously wrong with the AC; even with my frigid body temperature, I’d felt uncomfortably damp ever since I’d stepped off the plane, and now, it blossomed into a prickly sheen. A big clipboard hanging on the wall in front of me had the cleanup duty roster listed on it with the words, “REMINDER: DUMP BRAINS AND BOWELS IN HAZMAT BIN!” scrawled across the top in big block letters.

  “Here’s your girl!” he said, sounding cheerful.

  I guess for one horrible second, I thought he meant my Tammy. But the doughy dead Jane Doe on the stainless steel mortuary slab was in her early twenties. Not my daughter, Tammy, thank God, who was (just barely) a teenager.

  But not the missing girl I’d been hired to fly to New Orleans to find, either.

  Chapter Two

  I’d been watching Judge Judy on TV―and as usual, sorting my kids’ laundry―when the front doorbell buzzed. In the pleasure of watching her tear some low-life, wife-beating asshole a new one, I’d completely forgotten I had an afternoon appointment.

  The Asian-American couple standing on my front doorstep were named Arthur and Alice Lo, and they were the kind of folks I never want to meet in my line of work: decent ones. The kind you really hate seeing bad things happen to. They were both pushing fifty; Arthur worked at Hughes Raytheon and Alice was a grants coordinator with a Ph.D. at Cal Fullerton, my alma mater. They both gave off an aura of grief and worry as I escorted them into my home office, but mixed in with it was a whole lotta love. Love for each other―and for the missing daughter they wanted me to find.

  Love, like good old-fashioned decency, is something else you don’t often run into in my business. Lust, yeah; love, not so much. Kind of like life in general, I guess. So that much, at least, I really envied them. Kingsley and I had a good enough thing going, but it was complicated―more Munsters than Family Ties. And, of course, there was that little matter of his cheating on me that one time I could never forgive.

  Okay, technically, I guess I’d forgiven him for it; problem was, I still couldn’t for
get it. And maybe I never would.

  “You say you found out about me through Sherbet?” That was Detective Sherbet of the Fullerton PD, an old and dear friend of mine. And one who knew my secret. Although sometimes it felt like: who didn’t?

  Mr. Lo stared at me, his eyes imploring even through his thick glasses. “He says if anybody can find Wendy, it’s you. He says you have…alternative ways of making contact.”

  “At this point, we’re open to anything,” said his wife. “No matter how crazy it sounds. We just need―well, it’s a cliché, but we need some kind of closure.”

  Her voice trembled when she spoke, making me want to light a cigarette, which was strictly verboten inside the house. But all the vibes I was getting from the Los just made their plight all the more real to me, because it was too easy to see myself in their shoes someday. Tammy was already giving me trouble, stealing alcohol and God knew what else from me and other parents with her friends, and getting into trouble with the local police. And my son, Anthony…well, he was already a hell-raiser and was bound to only get worse.

  Alice produced a stack of photos from her handbag, along with a DVD and a sheaf of papers. “These are printouts of all her emails to us for the three months before she went missing, Mrs. Moon. Along with a few family videos. As you can see, she’s a beautiful young woman―and our only child. Never gave us even a minute’s worry. That’s why we can’t understand why anyone would want to…”

  Her husband laid a hand on her shoulder. “Wendy originally went to New Orleans with Habitat For Humanity in order to help build homes. The trip was her graduation present from us. Once she was living there, she fell in love with the city, got a waitressing job and an apartment she shared with a roommate she liked. Everything seemed wonderful. Then, six weeks ago, she went missing―it’s as if she’s vanished off the face of the Earth. We’ve been in touch with the NOLA PD ourselves, but…” His voice trailed off, and I snorted.

  “I can guess,” I told him. “Well, let me make some calls. The bad news is, this may be expensive for you, Mr. Lo. Almost certainly, I’ll have to fly there and restart the case from scratch―and I’ll need you to pay my expenses.”

  “We’ll pay anything,” he said. Usually when a distraught parent says that, they add the words, “within reason.” He didn’t.

  New Orleans had reduced its murder rate the same way a lot of big cities had in the last five years―by reclassifying suspicious deaths as natural ones and more or less ignoring MisPers, or Missing Persons cases. But they were still dealing with at least a dead body a day at the Coroner’s Office. They’d posted a Jane Doe just two days before on their website―minus any photo―who seemed to match the general description the Los had left with Sherbet.

  When I called and asked about matching dental records, the tech who answered the phone told me that they didn’t have the facilities for it. “We use the Jefferson Parish Coroner’s Office just across the river. But there’s a waiting list.”

  When I mentioned DNA testing, she laughed and hung up.

  Which was how I came to be in New Orleans, staring down at the corpse of the dead girl, who was turning all kinds of shades of blue. “It would have helped me if you’d mentioned on the website or over the phone that your Jane Doe was African American. Could have spared me a long flight―my MisPer is Asian American.”

  Willard laughed. “Sorry about that, babes. New mayor says no local government office can racially profile anymore, so…I guess what you’re saying is, this isn’t your girl.”

  There was a lot more I felt like saying, but didn’t.

  “Well, never mind.” The ME pronounced it as “neh’mine.”

  “What say you join me for dinner, my treat? Give me a chance to extend you a proper New Orleans welcome. Maybe K-Paul’s in the French Quarter for some seafood done right?”

  Jeez, just what I needed―the attentions of a horndog older dude. It felt like a visit to Malibu. Still, I guess it was kind of flattering, considering I was still wearing my travel clothes: gray sweat pants, a pair of neon-orange Skechers, and an Anaheim Mighty Ducks T-shirt. I’d left my trademark 2007 Championship black bomber jacket back at the hotel room.

  “Sorry, Dr. Willard, I need to go check in at police headquarters next―since I’m a PI from out of town. Speaking of which, know anybody I can talk to down there?”

  He shrugged. “You could try Lieutenant Labruzzo, I guess. He handles most liaisons with our department on Missing Persons.”

  Something about the corpse on the autopsy table in front of us had caught my eye, and I gave her skin a gentle poke. She felt brittle, yet spongy to the touch.

  “Is it my imagination or has this Doe already been drained of blood?” I asked. I have a finely honed instinct for detecting the presence of blood in the human body―or its total absence.

  “Well, it’s routine to drain the subject of all blood during the course of a post.” He sounded annoyed. “That’s what these tubes are for.” A “post” meant a post-mortem autopsy.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But this one was drained before it even got here. Nobody’s even made an incision yet.” I pulled up the sheet covering the dead young woman. “See?”

  So, all that Anne Rice crap is true, I thought on my way out the door; New Orleans really does have a vampire problem.

  Besides me, of course…

  Chapter Three

  Lieutenant Paulie Labruzzo, Crime Lab and Central Evidence, hated PIs. Know how I could tell? Because the first words he said when I showed him my California State Private Investigator’s license were, “I hate fuckin’ PIs. What the hell are you doin’ in my town? And you better say you’re on vacation and here to party.”

  When I explained, he interrupted me halfway through. “This an open case? Cuz real-life police work ain’t like TV, you know―if it’s an ongoing investigation and I find you snooping around in it, I’ll throw your pretty little ass into the White Street slammer so fast it’ll make your head swim, got me?”

  I put my hands on my hips and looked him in the eye. It wasn’t easy finding one buried in all that seamed brown leather; his face looked just like a pony saddle, with the flaps for jowls and the horn for his nose. “You tell me, Loot,” I said.

  Unexpectedly, he laughed and took his shoes off the desk in front of him. “Tell you what―go upstairs and have a word with Kathy Bordelon in Special Ops. She handles our missin’ gals’ cases. Second floor; she’ll tell you if the Lo file is still open or not. Ya’ll come back now, Miz Moon, you hear?”

  And he checked out my pretty little ass all the way to the elevator. It did not take a supernatural being with extra-sensory powers to receive his thoughts loud and clear…

  Especially in this heat. I’d noticed the AC wasn’t working properly in here, either. And I wasn’t in some rundown substation in Algiers or Tremé―I was at the big new NOPD headquarters building on South Broad Street. Every vent I passed seemed to be wheezing like a congested old dog with bad breath.

  At least Bordelon―Detective Kathleen Bordelon, Special Operations Division, said the sign on the door―was a breath of fresh air, an attractive blonde about my own age―but if I’m honest, looked ten years older. She was obviously stressed from her job and had dark circles under her eyes.

  “It’s open!” she yelled when I tapped on the window glass. “It’s officially after hours, so I was just having a little taste of bourbon. In honor of whatever festival we’re celebratin’ this month.” She waved the half-empty bottle at me as I sat down. “Care to join me?”

  “No thanks, Detective.” Alcohol does nothing for me, though I still enjoy the taste. But I’ve been trying to set a good example for my kids lately. Plus, I had to throw all of mine out of the house because of my daughter’s behavior.

  You should get your money back when they turn into teenagers.

  “Just as well; I don’t have any Dixie cups left, anyway. What can I do you for?”

  She took another swig, then screwed the cap on an
d stuck the bottle back in her bottom desk drawer.

  “I’m looking for a young woman named Wendy Lo, from Fullerton, California. She was reported missing about six weeks ago. I need to know whether the case is active and if I can investigate it.” I put my security pass and PI card on the desk so she could see them.

  Bordelon sighed and tapped her computer keyboard, then stared tiredly at her terminal screen. “Welp, the case is open because we don’t have a clearance on it. That doesn’t mean it’s a hot file, though―a murder or kidnapping―so you can investigate it to your heart’s content. For all the good it’ll do you. Who told you different?” When I mentioned Labruzzo, she snickered. “Oh, old Bruise-O was just bustin’ your chops. He’s all bark and no bite. Tell you what, I’ll print out what we’ve got on Wendy, and you can take it with you. Who’s your client? The parents?”

  That’s another TV myth―that PIs protect client confidentiality like lawyers do. Truth is, we sing like canaries; otherwise, we’d never get anywhere with the cops. Or avoid getting sued all the time.

  I nodded, and she went on, “Good, makes it even easier for the department to cooperate. Says here…that’s odd. Her roommate disappeared, too. They both worked at the Morgue.”

  I was confused. “You mean, the city morgue? Where I just came from?”

  She laughed again. The bourbon seemed to have relaxed her. “No, honey, the bar. There’s a place called the Morgue Bar in the building where the old city morgue used to be back in the 1850s. They run a ‘ghost tour’ out of there, show busloads of tourists haunted houses and the sites of famous murders all over the French Quarter. Hey, I got a date tonight with my boyfriend. Why don’t I give him a call and tell him to meet us over there? That way you can talk to the other waitresses, maybe take the tour. We could grab some supper. Lemme give Darryl a call.”

  Obviously, I couldn’t keep on fighting it―New Orleans was a party town. Even on a weeknight.