Jules’s head was swimming. “Wait a minute-who’s this ‘they’ you keep talkin‘ about? Your loyalty to who was bein’ questioned? And what’d you stick in the tub water, anyway?”
Her voice lightened a bit. “Oh,that — that was holy water. A little vial of it. That’s why you felt the burning and I didn’t.”
He waited for her to continue. She didn’t. For all her tearful apologies, she was still yanking his chain. “Again, lady-who’s this ‘they’ that’s makin‘ you do all these bad things?”
Her voice turned serious again. “I told you-I can’t explain that over the phone. It’s too dangerous. They could be listening in on our conversation right now.”
Maureen was standing with hands on her shelflike hips. “Jules, who thehell is that on the line with you? This ismy house-I don’t appreciate you giving out my number to your goddamn floozies!”
Jules put his paw over the phone and glared at Maureen. “Shut your face and gimme some peace! I’m tryin‘ to figure things out here-”
“Not onmy phone, you aren’t! And never,ever tell me to ‘shut my face,’ you womanizingfreeloader!”
Trapped between two obstinate women was no place to be. “Look,” he said huffily into the receiver. “If you ain’t spillin‘, then I’m ending this conversation right now. You got two seconds before I slam this phone down. One-one-thousand-”
“Wait!”The phone was silent for a few long seconds. “I–I can’t reveal their identities over the phone. But I can tell you this-they know you were the one who killed those twenty-three people in Covington.”
Jules’s heart plummeted. He’d almost forgotten about that little misadventure. “You mean the Knight supporters?”
“Yes. My handler headed up a special crisis intervention team following the massacre. They tagged you as the culprit within forty-eight hours.“
“How…?” He was sinking again. Sinking into the grasping mud that underlay every street and sidewalk in New Orleans, just when he thought he’d been starting to climb toward the light.
“I can help you, Jules. We can help each other. I know this operation. I’ve been near the center of it for the past eighteen months. I know I hurt you, but I’m not your enemy. I want to be yourally, if only you’ll let me.”
Her words clutched him like silk tentacles. Jules realized he had no choice but to find out what she knew. “All right… where do I meet you?”
“Would the Palm Court be okay? In half an hour?”
“Sure.” He hung up the phone with the weariness of a death-row inmate who’d just been denied his final reprieve.
Maureen’s fists were still planted on her hips. Only now they were trembling. “So now you’re going to meet this whore of yours?“
Jules shuffled toward the basement to retrieve the rest of his clothes. “Ain’t none of your business, Maureen.”
Doodlebug grabbed his arm. “What’s this I overheard about the Nathan Knight rally?”
Jules shook him off and headed down the steps. “I got some investigating I gotta do. And I gotta do it alone.”
Maureen followed him down the steps. “Investigating!I know what you’ll be ‘investigating’! You’ll be
‘investigating’ that whore’spussy!“
Jules pulled on his shirt. “I should be so lucky,” he mumbled to himself under his breath.
Doodlebug descended the steps. “I don’t like the sound of this. If you’re going somewhere tonight, I’m going with you.“
Jules turned a steely gaze on his partner while he tied his shoes. “Like hell you are. Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And this here man’s gonna do it.”
“But-”
“‘But’nothin‘. You’re off the case tonight, Doodlebug. You try to tag along, I’ll send you packin’ back to California. This is a solo job. The Lone Ranger rides the prairie. And Tonto hightails it back to the wigwam.“
Maureen tailed him back up the stairs. “Jules-listen to me, Jules! If you walk out that door… if you walk out thatdoor — I’ll neverspeak to you again!”
Jules put his hand on the front doorknob. The wordsFrankly, my dear… flittered briefly through his mind, but he decided he could be more original than that (if not quite as pithy). He turned to face her.
“Y’know, Maureen, I just realized somethin‘. You’re a helluva lot more worried that I might get laid than you been scared I might get killed. Well, you can rest your pretty little head, babe. ’Cause before the night’s over, I might doboth.”
Jules arrived at the Palm Court half an hour later. He’d darted from doorway to darkened doorway through half the Quarter. When he squeezed himself through the entrance to the club, the wait staff were beginning to put chairs on top of the tables. Nearly all the late-night crowd had cleared out. Half a dozen young musicians, plus a couple of middle-aged veterans Jules recognized from traditional jazz sessions around town, were packing up their instruments. Porkchop Chambonne, standing near the end of the bar, was engaged in a heated discussion with a younger man whom Jules recognized as Roddy Braithwhite, the club’s owner.
The elderly musician’s eyes lit up when he noticed Jules enter the room. He stopped arguing in midsentence to call his friend over. “Jules! Hey, Jules! C’mon over here!” He turned back to the owner. “Nowhere’s a man who remembers how good the music useta be. Jules, tell him about my big bands back in the forties and fifties.”
“Uh, Chop, that was my dad, JulesSenior, remember?”
The trumpet player huffily smoothed his stringy comb-over back into place atop his head. “Oh,stop! I ain’t got time for that foolishness right now. Rod here is tellin‘ me I can’t have my big band no more. He wants me to cut back to a quartet, or even atrio!”
The club owner looked acutely embarrassed. “Uh, Mr. Chambonne’s a little upset-”
“Upset!You want me to lay off half my frickin‘ band! Rod, I ain’t gonna be around this earth forever. How is them teenagers gonna learn enough to become the Porkchops of tomorrow if I can’t have them in my bandtoday?”
The owner stared at the floor. “In a perfect world, I’d employ you and your big band-hell, atwenty — piece band-from now until the end of time. I’m a music fan. You know that. But I’m also a businessman. And right now I’m a businessman who’s facing four new competitors in the Quarter. I just can’t afford to hire the whole band anymore. Maybe you could get some of the youngsters to sit in on weekends-”
“Them boys can’t afford to be doin‘ novolunteer work! They’s savin’ up for college. Tell him, Jules! You’s a regular customer around here.Tell him what a big attraction my big band is-”
Just then Jules saw Veronika waving him over from the far corner. “Uh, Chop, I’m really sorry, but I gotta go. Look, another night, maybe we can do us some brainstormin‘ on this situation-”
The bandleader angrily waved him off. “Oh, thehell with you, then!” He immediately redirected his pique at the owner, reiterating the hardships his laid-off band members would face, beating his leather cap against the bar for emphasis.
Jules felt perfectly awful as he shuffled toward the table in the back. He slumped into a chair across from Veronika, glancing back over his shoulder at the diminutive bandleader, silently praying the old man wouldn’t suffer a coronary.
“Thank God you came!”
Jules reluctantly turned his attention toward his companion. “Yeah, I’m here. Now make like a Hurricane glass and spill.”
Veronika looked cautiously around the rapidly emptying room. She nervously laced her fingers on the table and leaned closer to him.
“Have you ever heard of the Strategic Helium Reserve?”
“No.”
“Virtually no one has. Do you know what an airship is?”
“That’s like a blimp, right?”
“Very good. During World War One, the U.S. government established a crash program to develop a lighter-than-air scout fleet for the navy. Helium is a much more stable gas than hydrogen,
which is what the Germans used for their airships-theHindenburg exploded, remember? America built the only large-scale plants in the world for the production of helium. After the war, the federal government established the Strategic Helium Reserve, to ensure that the navy would always have an adequate supply for its scouting fleet.”
Jules squirmed in his chair. “That’s a real interestin‘ history lesson. But what the hell has any of it got to do with me?”
“I’m coming to that. Now when was the last time the navy flew any airships?”
“I dunno. World War Two, maybe?”
“That’s right. The navy had already retired its last airship, theAkron, before World War Two. During the war, all they used were a few blimps for antiaircraft coverage. By the late forties the navy had no airships or blimps at all. But year in and year out, Congress kept funding the Strategic Helium Reserve. It’s still being funded, even though the navy hasn’t used a cubic foot of helium in more than fifty years.”
Jules rubbed the end of his nose. “I guess now is when I’m supposed to ask, How come?”
Veronika’s voice fell to a whisper. “Certain elements in the armed forces and federal law enforcement found the Strategic Helium Reserve to be a useful front for activities they didn’t want Congress or the public to be aware of. Things like possible alien incursions into our biosphere. Unexplained, widespread cattle mutilations. Strange atmospheric phenomena that would black out America’s radar defense network for days at a time.”
Jules grunted with the beginnings of understanding. “Things that go bump in the night. Like me.”
“Like you, yes. I’m an employee of the Strategic Helium Reserve. A year and a half ago, I was specially recruited to work on your case.”
A red-skirted waitress approached their table. “Last call, folks. What’ll it be?”
“I’ll have another one of these,” Veronika said, pushing her half-empty goblet toward the waitress. “A strawberry margarita. Tell the bartender to make it a little sweeter this time.”
“Sure thing. Anything for you, sir?”
Jules nodded without taking his eyes off Veronika. “Coffee.” He waited for the waitress to walk out of earshot. “Now I guess the next question I’m supposed to ask is, How come you’re tellin‘ me all this? It’s not that hard to guess from the stuff you were packin’ beneath your bathroom sink that your job is to get ridda me. I figure I can trust you about as far as I can toss you. Which ain’t that far. How do I know you ain’t got the block surrounded by feds with wooden stakes and crosses, waitin‘ for me to walk outta here with you?”
“Let me show you something.” She retrieved her purse from beneath her seat. When she unzipped it, Jules scooted back from the table, a look of alarm on his face. She laughed. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m not reaching for garlic spray.”
“Garlic spray?You’ve gotgarlic spray?”
“Of course. The agency wouldn’t send me out into the field less than completely equipped. Here.” She handed him a photograph. It was of a shapely young woman in an evening gown, clutching a trophy to her ample chest.
“Who’s this?”
“That’s me. It was taken a little less than two years ago, after I’d just won a statewide Miss Plus-Sized beauty contest.”
Jules looked at the picture again, this time more closely. It was Veronika’s face, all right. There was no mistaking that tiny cleft in her chin. But it was pushing the boundaries of the believable that the plump-but-pretty girl in the photo and the supersized goddess sitting across from him could be one and the same person. This picture was two years old? Nobody could gain that much weight that fast. Not even Jules himself.
The waitress returned with their drinks. After she left, Jules felt Veronika’s hand on his thigh. “It seems unbelievable, doesn’t it? That the ordinary girl in that photograph could have been transformed into the… freak… that I am today.”
Jules was stunned by the depth of self-loathing in her voice. “Baby, you’re no freak-”
She clenched her eyes shut. Her hand tensed on his thigh. “You have noidea what they did to me. All I wanted was to go to a good university. To start an exciting career. Maybe serve my country in the bargain. The agency recruited me right after I won that beauty pageant. I had no way of knowing at the time that they’d sponsored the entire thing. In return for five years of service, they promised me the moon. All I had to do was agree to certain…experimental procedures.”
She ran her hands down her figure, tracing the massive globes of her breasts and the majestic roundness of her hips. Despite his wariness, Jules sensed his little soldier responding, waking up for morning reveille. “This body,” she said mournfully, “it’s not… normal. Notnatural.” She took a long sip of her margarita. “My handlers, they knew all about your preference for supersized women. So they designed this body I’m wearing as the ultimate honey trap. Most of what you see isn’t really me. It’s implants. Sixty percent or more of my, uh, curves are thanks to special lightweight saline-gel implants. The implants weigh much less than an equivalent volume of real flesh would. Otherwise, I’d probably be immobile at this size.”
She brushed a tear away from her cheek with a perfectly manicured fingertip. “They… theypromised they’d reverse it all. When my five years were up. But I found out that was a pack of lies. A woman contacted me. An ex-employee of the agency’s. Another one of their ‘projects.’ They’d turned her into a freak, too. When they didn’t need her anymore, they strung her along for years, buying her silence with constantly broken promises of turning her back to normal. She just got older and older. Her body grew less able to tolerate the horrible things they’d done to it. She stays in hiding and just waits to die. I don’t want to end up like that, Jules. Ican’t end up like that.”
Jules almost forgot to breathe. Her story hit him like a wrecking ball made of silicone. “So, uh, how do I fit into all this? What can I do?”
She gazed into his eyes. She was Venus and Rita Hayworth and Jayne Mansfield all rolled into one. “I don’t want to grow old. I don’t want to decay into a pathetic heap like she did. I want to stay young forever, Jules. I want you to make me your vampire queen.”
They checked into a different hotel from the one Veronika was registered in, a precaution that Jules, even in his state of enthralled horniness, insisted upon. As soon as they closed the room door behind them, Veronika wrapped her silky arms around Jules’s neck and planted a luscious kiss on his waiting lips.
“Darling,” she said as she slowly pulled away, “I’mstarving! Let’s celebrate and order room service! I simplyadore early-morning breakfasts! I know you can’t join me, of course, but you’ll be havingyour breakfast soon enough. We’ll stick it all on the government’s tab, okay?”
Jules sat on the edge of the soft mattress and unbuttoned his collar. “Sure… my tax dollars at work,” he murmured dazedly.
She phoned the front desk and ordered virtually every item on the room service breakfast menu, then she sat next to him on the bed. “Oh, Jules, this is soexciting! What does it feel like, to be a vampire?”
“What does it feel like?” Jules didn’t know what to say. But it didn’t matter, really. “It feels good. You’ll like it.”
“Will I be able to change into a bat, like in the movies?”
“Sure!”
She kissed him again. “What is it like, to fly over a city on your own wings? Is it beautiful?”
Jules tried to remember the last time he’d actually flown. Who had been president then? Kennedy? But he remembered how New Orleans had looked from the air, the lights of the river-embraced city twinkling like an enormous crescent-shaped Christmas display. “Yeah, it was beautiful, baby.”
A knock on the door interrupted Jules’s reverie. Veronika got up and opened the door. “Oh, isn’t this wonderful looking!” She ushered in the waiter, who carefully steered his cart heaped with steaming platters of fruit-covered pancakes, eggs over easy, hash brown potatoes, and strawberries drowne
d in cream.
She tipped the waiter lavishly, then attacked the strawberries and cream, balancing two of the plump berries on her spoon at a time. “Dessert should comefirst, I always say!” She turned those liquid eyes on him again. “Oh, Jules, can you imagine howsweet all this will make me taste? All those months they had me studying you, learning your habits, they had no idea I was developing the biggestcrush on you.” She ate the last of the strawberries, then lifted the bowl to her lips and drank the remaining cream. “ Mmmm… simplydelicious. I used to lie in my bed at the compound and fantasize about you all night long.”
It was all Jules could do to keep himself from ravishing her right then, drinking in her sex and then gulping down her blood. But through an extraordinary exertion of will, he reminded himself that the whole point of tonight’s adventure was to gather information.
“You, uh, you said earlier that your handlers found out it was me who did in those twenty-three boobs across the river. You got any idea how they was able to pin it on me?”
“Oh, do wehave to talk about thisnow?” She pouted briefly, then dug into the tall stack of blueberry-and baked-apple-covered pancakes. “Oh,all right. If it’ll make you happy. They did some kind of tests on that goop you left on the floor. They were able to separate out your saliva, then genetically match it against some kind of tissue sample of yours.”
Tissue sample?What kind of sample could the government have? He hadn’t been in a hospital since before World War I. He certainly hadn’t donated any blood for the past eighty years or so. Doc Landrieu? Sure, the doc had poked and prodded him to satisfy his medical curiosity, but Jules couldn’t believe his ex-boss would’ve betrayed him.
A more recent recollection hit him.The baby teeth. The missing vampire baby teeth. Sure. It made sense. Who knew how long they’d been missing? If it was the teeth, that meant they’d been ferried to the feds either by Maureen or by her ex-lover-boy. Had Maureen asked him about the missing teeth to throw suspicion off herself? He didn’t want to think it. But it was possible.
Fat White Vampire Blues Page 28
