Blood Oranges

by Kathleen Tierney

  “Dude, you’re working for monsters. Likely as not, nasties who make me look like a teddy bear. And you’re surprised when they don’t play fair. Doesn’t that staggering level of stupidity embarrass you at all?”

  “I don’t want to talk about the lying bastards.”

  “Then please stop bringing them up. Next question, since you’re clearly not going to cooperate and cough up the info all on your own, I’m guessing you were a middleman, acting on another’s behalf. I know Bobby Ng didn’t buy the gun. Not only did the rat tell me so, but he wouldn’t have given Ng the time of day, for any price. Plus, you’ve already copped to that part. I also have a hard time imagining you had some sort of beef with Cregan or her porcelain-doll mommy. This leaves me to conclude you were a middleman. But you tell me, is this true or is this false?”

  “I answer that question, lady, I’m a dead man.”

  “You don’t answer that question, same difference. Only I’m pretty sure I could draw it out at least five or six days before you shuffled off the mortal coil.”

  That’s when I noticed the video camera mounted in one corner of the room. The tiny red LED told me it was recording. I leaned forward and began slicing chunks out of the down comforter.

  “You’re a paranoid man, Mister Doyle. Must make a lot of enemies, a man of your caliber. Me, for instance.”

  “It pays to be careful.”

  “Yeah, sure. But you, you pay for security cameras, but rely on old wives’ tales and keep your windows unlocked. You can’t even be bothered with a burglar alarm, for Christ’s sake. Exactly how does that make sense?”

  He didn’t reply. I’d cut through to the mattress. It was also filled with feathers, and snow-white tufts spiraled to the floor.

  “Then again,” I said, “might be that you’re not the one taping. It just might be it’s someone else, and that someone else just might be whoever hired you to buy the gun. Could that be the case?”

  “Yeah,” he whispered so softly I wouldn’t have heard him without my vampire superpowers.

  “So, you’re the middleman, which is a conclusion I admit was already my working hypothesis, before I came creeping in through your unlocked window. That correct, you’re the middleman in this whole mess?”

  “Yeah,” he replied, even quieter than before. Maybe he was hoping the camera wasn’t going to pick up his answers. I didn’t really care, so long as I could make out what he was saying. But more jigsaw pieces were falling into place. It was becoming a matter of discovering the pattern printed on the puzzle.

  “We’re almost done, Jack. In fact, I’ve only got one more question. Then I leave the way I entered, and you go back to whatever’s left of your crappy life.”

  I didn’t even see the pistol until he was holding it, until after he’d flipped off the safety. But . . . I’ll give him this much credit. He at least thought he knew it would be best to answer me before he squeezed the trigger. He wasn’t beyond attempting half a smart move. Right about then, I was wishing more of those myths about bloodsuckers were true. Specifically the one where they can move quick as lightning. You know, like Blade in the comic books. Were that the case, I could have simply plucked the Colt from his hand between his next heartbeat and the one after that.

  Instead, I said, as calmly as I could, “You know that won’t hurt me, and if it’s not meant for me, you know this shit doesn’t end with death, not if you’ve pissed off—”

  “Evangelista Penderghast,” he said, taking the opportunity to interrupt me. “The Bride and Evangelista had some sort of misunderstanding, back in the twenties.”

  “You’re kidding?” I asked. “You’re telling me this is some sort of decades-old vamp catfight?”

  And I remembered what B had said that night after I died—The undead, they don’t think of time the way you and me think of time. Six months. Six weeks. Not much difference to them. Six months. Six weeks. Nine goddamn decades.

  I’ll explain about Evangelista Penderghast shortly. Maybe in the next chapter. Right now, let’s stay focused on Jack Doyle.

  “If you were the middleman, who was on the other side of the deal you made with Evangelista Penderghast? You didn’t give the gun to Bobby Ng, did you? You gave it to someone to hire Bobby Ng.” That part there, sheer fucking intuition. A stunning intellectual leap, if you will. Eureka and all that.

  “You said the last question was going to be the last question,” Doyle replied, staring very longingly into the barrel of the .45mm. “You lied.”

  “We covered that part already.”

  He smiled. He smiled like the proverbial cat that ate the proverbial canary. “Blood oranges,” he said, then slipped the barrel into his mouth and pulled the trigger. His skull came apart like . . . never mind. I caught some of the back spatter, but mostly the blood and brains and shards of bone ended up on the bed, the headboard, and the wall behind the bed. He slumped backwards, and his body bounced a time or two when he hit the mattress.

  And then the pain came.

  I woke up naked in an alley in Olneyville, covered with bruises and abrasions—naked, same as the two times before. This time I did vomit, and in amongst what was left of Doyle (and a couple of house cats the beast must have come upon later) were scraps of mint-green silk.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE

  So, yeah. I woke up in this alley in Olneyville. It was morning, and it was raining, just drizzle, but cold drizzle. But still. The rain made it all just that much worse. The clouds had even more bruises than my body. All evidence of the knife wound in my shoulder was gone.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, but right there in the alley off Manton Avenue sat my Honda, waiting for me like the ghetto version of Cinderella’s coach. The door was unlocked, and the keys were tucked into the driver’s side sun visor. Small miracle no one had boosted it while I slept off my lycanthropic hangover. Yeah, I know. Repetition. I’m not a writer. This is pretty much what happened before, but it’s also what happened again. Sue me if it annoys you. There was a plastic bag from Old Navy in the backseat, and I managed to dress without anyone noticing the naked, raggedy-ass white girl standing in the rain by her ugly car (more repetition). There was even a shoebox, from a place on Thayer Street, with a brand-new pair of Converse high-tops still wrapped in tissue paper.

  I sat behind the wheel for at least ten minutes—staring at the thing in the rearview mirror. I hadn’t bothered with the makeup before visiting Doyle, of course. Neither that, nor the contacts. My benefactor had not seen fit to include those in the bag. Clearly, their generosity had its limits, I knew. I had to be trying someone or something’s patience in the worst way. Finally I looked away from the mirror—nothing here to see, move along, move along—and there was a CD in an orange translucent case lying in the passenger seat. I picked it up and saw it was actually a DVD-R. Through the jewel case, I could read “From B” written in what looked like black Sharpie.

  “You slimy bastard,” I muttered, and then, then I drove back to my dump on Gano Street. The rain had kept the domino guys inside. I slipped in through the front door, and my nostrils were immediately assaulted by the smell of the three dead vampires decomposing beneath my kitchen. If the stink of the place had been bad before . . . well, let’s just say I have no idea why no one in the building had called the cops. I tossed my keys and the disc on what passed for my sofa, and stood over the hole in the kitchen floor, over the bodies, for a bit, considering my options. The usual routine—filling the torso with something heavy prior to consigning it to the murky, conspiring depths of a river or bay or reservoir—that was out. No way I was hacking those three up, stashing the parts in plastic bags, and hauling them all the way to Fox Point or the Seekonk. But there was another option. That hole in my floor. Fuck, Ron Perlman with a bad haircut, all but his head was already down there.

  I reapplied the MAC and the hazel-green contacts, slipped on the Wayfarers, left again, and drove to Wickenden Street. There’s a hardware store
there. I bought a shovel and a bag of lime. Probably looked suspicious as hell, but I was past caring. You get indifferent, you get sloppy. Maybe that was the deal with Jack Doyle. Maybe he’d gone so far in hock to the nasties that he’d just stopped caring.

  Back home, at least I had the forethought to change out of the new clothes first. I didn’t have any other jeans, so I settled for a pair of boxers and a Ramones T-shirt. Yeah, punk-rock grave digger. I decapitated the two vamps that still had their heads, cut out the hearts, and buried the whole mess below the floor. There wasn’t a basement. There was hardly enough space to stand upright, and by the time I’d finished, twilight was coming on. I pulled myself out of the hole, cleaned the kitchen floor best I could, and by then I was filthy as a pig, right? I resolved to take time for a shower before having a look at the DVD.

  Oh, I didn’t bury the hearts, by the way. You have to be careful with those. Not gonna get into the whys of that. Lots of eerie mumbo jumbo. I tossed them in the freezer, to be dealt with at some later date. I did wonder about the mess in Doyle’s apartment, and what his neighbors might have heard (and/or seen), and what the police would make of it all. But fuck it. I was done burying dead and mutilated sons of bitches (and bitches) for one day.

  After the long, long and very hot shower, and after I’d brushed my teeth, and put the Old Navy stuff on again, I slid the DVD into the player and sat down on the floor in front of the television. I must have sat there watching the screen for ten minutes before I finally had the nerve to pick up the remote and press PLAY.

  There was a noisy burst of static, but that ended so fast I didn’t have time to lower the volume.

  And then, in grainy black and white, a view of Doyle sitting on the foot of his bed, gun already in hand. I was sitting against the wall, at the left side of the screen. The sound quality wasn’t so great, but the dialog was audible.

  HIM: You said the last question was going to be the last question. You lied.

  That .45mm automatic looked huge in his hands.

  ME: We covered that part already.

  HIM: Blood oranges.

  The gun . . . well, I’ll spare you a few tiresome adjectives. It made the sound that a Colt .45mm does when it blows off the back of some dude’s head. There was a dull thunk as it fell from his dead hands and hit the floor.

  What happened next . . . you’d think that after almost two years, it wouldn’t bother me writing it down. All the horrors and carnage and crazy goings-on I’ve seen since that day, sitting there in front of the TV, you’d think I’d have grown . . . what’s the right word? Just the right word? Blasé? Jaded? No . . . so maybe there isn’t a word for what I should have become by now. But you get the picture. Or you don’t. Either way.

  Like I said way back in the beginning, whoever started calling loups werewolves might have done better. I watched my body shift, skin and bone, muscle, metamorphosing organs emerging, then vanishing decently inside again. I saw it all, happening to me. And what was left, there wasn’t much of me that resembled me . . . and what was there instead didn’t precisely bring anything canine to mind. The sort of abomination that might result from the half-starved pairing of a mangy grizzly bear, a tarantula, and a pig. That’s as close as I can come; like I said, I’m no writer. No author. But, that thing, me, also looked like it hurt. Like it was in fucking agony. And here I am saying it instead of I. All this time later, I’m still trying to distance myself from that broken thing on the television screen. I watched myself rip Doyle’s corpse apart, and I watched myself eat quite a bit of him. I heard people shouting in the distance, from other apartments, maybe from the hallway. I heard a siren.

  And then the beast that was me turned away from the bed and departed the same way I’d come in. Exit stage left. There’s the sound of glass shattering and rusted steel straining under more weight than it was ever meant to bear. The camera recorded an instant of stillness before a second burst of static erupted from the DVD.

  Then the picture was in color, and Mean Mr. B was inside that magic television box manufactured in Japan or South Korea or where the hell ever, inside and smiling at me from the other side of the glass. He briefly spoke to someone off screen, then he winked at me.

  “Pretty, pretty pictures, Siobhan? Or don’t you agree?” he smirked. I was still holding the remote, and I almost pressed OFF. No, my mind whispered to itself—that voice that had once been mine, and was now mostly his. This is something important. This is something you have to hear. This is where those scary questions have led.

  And I suppose I owed it to Clemency and Aloysius, if there was an iota of decency left anywhere inside me.

  “Outside looking in,” he said, “and all that silly rot. Found art. Cinéma vérité, my dear.”

  It was impossible to tell where he’d been when the tape was being shot. There was nothing in the background but yellow wallpaper, peeling away in long strips. Some safe house he’d set up long ago against this very sort of calamity. A squalid, unknown sanctuary. He was wearing one of his tailored pinstripe suits. His hair was shiny with pomade, and he was smoking a baby-blue Gitane.

  “But let’s get down to business, because as you may have guessed, the clock is ticking, and there’s not so much time remaining as you may think there is. The wolves are at the door.” And then he paused to let the pun sink in, to be sure I’d gotten it.

  “You’ve done well. I never imagined you’d get half this close to the truth. If I had, well . . . I’d have taken care of you myself that very first night. But no use crying over spilt milk, water under the bridge, opportunities come and gone and never to come again.”

  Then he proceeded to tell me things I’d already figured out for myself.

  “You know, my dear, or you strongly suspect, that you’re being used. What was it the Bride of Quiet, the venerable fucking Mercy Brown, said to you? ‘You’ll be my pet’? Was that it? And, too, that she was making a weapon of you? Yes, those are the things she said. By now you’ve begun to correlate the available data, as they say.”

  “A pet and a weapon,” I said.

  Right then, I’d never hated anyone as much as I hated Mean Mr. B. Not even Jack Grumet when he bit me in the ass, or the Bride when she had her way with me.

  “A puppet, and she pulls the string, yes? Isn’t that the way you have it reckoned?”

  I muttered something. Maybe it was “You set me up, you motherfucker.” I don’t exactly remember what I said.

  “But just in case you’re not as bright as I think you are, my sweet, a quick recap. Oh, I’ll freely implicate myself. We’ve gone too far for masquerades, I think. Doyle, he gave up Penderghast. I’ve just refreshed your memory on that count. Sometimes the transmogrification suffered by lycanthropes can cause a partial, though temporary, specie of amnesia. But if that were the case, now we’re on the same page. So, you know Penderghast hired the late and unlamented Mr. Doyle to buy the blunderbuss. There was a middleman betwixt her and him, but isn’t there always. There was a middleman between him and me. Can’t be too cautious, Siobhan. Oh, no. A gent can never, ever be too cautious.”

  “Cut the crap and get to the point,” I hissed between my sharp, triangular teeth. Though I suspect I was already hot on the trail of the point.

  “Yes, I was hired in January to get rid of Alice Cregan. Simple as that. Don’t know all the specifics, but Evangelista Penderghast, undying firebug that she is, recalled some slight or another, and finally saw fit to ignite a squabble of old. She wanted the Bride hurt, and hurt badly, yes? So, she took out a contract on Miss Cregan. It was an awful lot of money. How was I supposed to say no? You are well enough aware of my various, unfortunate, and occasionally profitable weaknesses.”

  I stood up and began pacing the filthy living room.

  “Way I had it figured, I hand it down to Ng, and with the right instrument, an instrument that could almost do the job on its own, well, even the supremely incompetent Bobby Ng wasn’t going to botch the hit. But . . . I’m only human, al
as. Well, mostly. I underestimated him.”

  Personally, I sort of doubt Bobby could have taken out Cregan even if he’d had a hydrogen bomb at his disposal. I would have thought B would have expected no more of him. Clearly, I was wrong, with a side of toast. And, by the by, I think this is what authors pejoratively call an “infodump.” Be that as it may, I’m only parroting what was on that DVD, or close enough. No need to draw it out, or reorder events to contrive a more suspenseful tale.

  “Your turning up at Swan Point that night in February,” he said. “That was sheer happenstance, Siobhan.”

  “Stop calling me that,” I muttered and paced some more.

  “It’s your name, dear,” he said and winked again. “We ought never be ashamed of—or careless with—our Christian names.”

  Never mind what he said, or if he could hear me, or if this was an oh-so-clever dash of bewitchment he’d added to the disc. It put to rest the mystery of his ever-shifting name. Whatever B’s Christian name had been, he’d likely bargained even the memory of it away long ago, names being of such value among the nasties. So, he was just using whatever came along, but probably the terms of the deal prevented him from using any particular name for very long. I digress.

  “Call it kismet, fate, coincidence . . . whatever floats your boat, darling. You were there when he screwed the pooch, and it was you, my remarkable enfant terrible, who got the job done, who saved my derrière. Even with the turn events have taken, don’t think I’m not grateful.”

  I grabbed a cut-glass ashtray, scattering ash and butts; somehow, I managed not to hurl it at the screen. I dropped it, and it lay there on the carpet. A sorry symbol of my unspent rage.

  “No,” said B, “this might sound like a happy ending. After all, I got the job done, through the agency of someone in my employ.”

  “The druggie in your back pocket,” I replied.

  “Touché.” B smiled his smug smile. “Regardless, Cregan was dead, I’d fulfilled the terms of my contract, and Penderghast was happy. I supposed all was right with the world. Who’d have reckoned the demon child, that Bride of Quiet, would notice her daughter’s absence that soon. I thought it would take so many decades I’d surely have since perished of old age before she noticed. Must be they were closer than I believed. I’ll take full fucking credit for that faux pas.