by Jeff Gelb
I hate hangover mysteries, and this one was a fucking ball-breaker. Literally.
As I stood there in the living room, holding open my waistband and staring down the front of my pants, Mo’Lock, my best ghoul and partner, appeared at the door, staring at me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
I knew I was busted, so I went along. “Checking out my junk,” I said back. “What the fuck does it look like?”
Mo’Lock was of the ghoul variety, the living dead, but, luckily for all of us, the kind of walking dead that doesn’t need anything from humans.
Except for Mo. I guess he needed me as a friend. We’d been partners a long time. Almost ten years. He’d even dragged his dead-ass from DC to LA when I sort of moved without telling anyone.
I was about to close the top of my pants when I noticed something else. There was blood beneath my boxers as well. I panicked and pulled them open wider. There was a soup of bodily fluids inside. I recognized semen and vaginal fluid, but there was also blood.
And the rest of the tooth was there too, embedded right in the side of my sore-ass nut sack. I reached down and took the fragment out. It was slightly larger than the other piece.
The ghoul stepped over and watched as I placed the second tooth fragment next to the other. They fit and almost made a whole tooth.
I looked at the ghoul. He looked down my pants.
“You have any idea where I was last night?” I asked the dead man, closing my pants.
The ghoul shook his head. “I saw you early in the evening. You were quite inebriated, and you were not alone.”
Okay, great. This is the info I was looking for. Super.
Mo’Lock held up his hand before I got all excited, “You were walking with a vampire.”
Man, I must have been wasted.
“What’d she look like? Any bloodsucker we know?”
“She was unknown to me.”
Then it hit me. Vampire. Broken tooth. Sex. Blood. What the fuck had I gotten myself into?
I bolted for the shower like a jackrabbit down its hole. I used the hottest water I could and checked every inch of my body.
I seemed okay. Even the nut-sack wound was minor, and also the only source of the blood.
I checked my neck. There were a couple scratches, but nothing new or too deep. I checked my arms and wrist and ankles. I didn’t find any fang marks anywhere. I even had the fucking ghoul come in and look my back over.
“You are covered with scratches,” he said somberly.
“Do they look infected?”
“I sense no evil coming from them,” the ghoul said. “If these are the wounds made by a Nosferatu, I believe you have escaped the infection.”
I stared at the ghoul. “How about a simple ‘no’?”
Then I kicked him out of the bathroom.
I washed off and checked my parts for any further damage. Besides the usual and pre-existing wounds, I seemed to have escaped with a scraped sack and a scratched-up back.
Evidently I’d had the best sex of my life, and I didn’t have a clue who with, other than the fact that it may have been with an undead woman.
After the shower, I went through my clothing, looking for clues. I found zero dollars in my wallet, which was par for the course. No numbers or anything I hadn’t had the day before.
The whole time I sat on the couch rifling through my stuff, the ghoul stood at the front window and stared out, down to the streets of Koreatown below.
I’d slept most of the day. It was already turning to night again. Good. The last thing my throbbing head needed was sunlight.
I found what I was looking for in the pocket of the jacket I’d worn the night before. Inside the left pocket was a book of matches from a bar. It was called the Fang Club.
Then it all started coming back to me, and I really started feeling sick.
The night before had started innocently enough, with a gram of brick hash and a bottle of pills. I smoked and swallowed and chased it all with a bottle of whiskey.
By nine o’clock I was already trashed.
At nine-thirty the phone rang.
Like a fucking idiot, I answered.
“Is this Cal McDonald?” the female voice on the other end asked.
I made some sort of grunting sound, made myself laugh, and choked an affirmative response along the lines of “Yeah.”
Her name was Nichole Harris, and she was calling me because her husband, Chad, had disappeared a few nights before, after he called from a bar called the Fang Club. She thought, you know, maybe something happened to him and wanted to see if I’d look into it.
I gave her my rates. She agreed. I said I’d check out the club.
I figured good ol’ Chad had probably met a girl and left his wife. I doubted even vampires were dumb enough to hang out at a place called the Fang Club, let alone hunt at one. I laid my bets on Chad having a chubby for goth girls and ditching the wife.
That was my theory, anyway.
I know I went to the club. It was in North Hollywood. Just a dump of a place with walls painted black and purple and filled with eighty-pound boys and girls made up to look spooky.
The music was perfect for a night of brooding and sneering. I doubt if anybody in the bar had ever dealt with the true undead, or they wouldn’t be pretending to be one.
I sat at the bar, asked the bartender about Chad, and pounded back a few. After that, I woke up home with a scratched-up back, a sticky wet mess in my drawers, and a busted sack.
I stared at the matchbook, all black with white fangs and a touch of red on the tips, and tried to piece together the rest, but it just wasn’t there.
Mo’Lock finally turned from the window and spoke to me. “Did you check your car?”
“I parked it out front,” I said, concerned. “Is it gone?”
The dead man shook his head. “No. It is still there, but I’ve seen you park better.”
I walked to the window and looked down. I’d parked in front of the apartment all right, on the sidewalk right outside the door to the stairs. I must’ve just drove up and poured out.
I went down and moved the car. It had a couple tickets and a boot on it. The ghoul ripped the boot off with a single yank, breaking the metal like it was plastic, and then I moved the car to a proper parking spot and checked it out.
The ghoul stood by as I inspected the car. In the front was the usual mess, but the backseat was clear. It was usually covered with papers and garbage. Shit.
There was a wet spot right in the center of the seat. It was mostly dried from the daylight but moist enough to still be sticky in the cracks of the seat. I cautiously smelled the sticky on my fingertips. There was no odor whatsoever. Very odd.
Evidently I’d had sex with an odorless vampire.
Mo’Lock was standing off to the side. The sun hadn’t fully gone down, and, even though the light didn’t hurt him, he preferred the shadows like any self-respecting ghoul would.
“Did you see me come home last night?” I asked him.
“I was inside the office. You came through the door,” he rumbled, “and said nothing to me before you passed out on the couch.”
“Wait, I thought you said you saw me with someone.”
The ghoul hesitated. “That was earlier.”
“Oh.”
I nodded. Figured.
I had no other option than to retrace my steps of the previous night. After a quick replenishing of drugs and alcohol, I got back in the Nova and peeled for North Hollywood.
By the time I was cruising over the hill, past the Hollywood Bowl, the sun was down. It was late February, and the nights were dry, with a cool breeze coming in from the coast.
It was one of those evenings where the city looked peaceful. You’d never suspect that within the hills and valleys dwelled some of the most heinous evil that walked the earth. And besides the entertainment people, there were also killers and monsters of all kinds.
On the other side of the hill w
as the Valley, a huge spread as flat as it is crowded. It was a grim place. I lived there before my home was leveled by a creature made of the pieces of murdered weightlifters. I’d only been in the Koreatown office/apartment for a couple months.
The Fang Club was on Magnolia Avenue about a block up from where it crossed with Cahuenga Boulevard.
It was a plain stucco building painted black, with no windows and only a single door inside. That’s where the sign was: a poorly painted copy of the graphic on the matchbook.
Outside the door stood a muscle-bound kid with black eyeliner and a spankin’ new Misfits T-shirt. He stood with his arms crossed so he could tuck his hands underneath and make his arms look bigger.
I parked the car across the street and smoked a few before heading inside. It was still early. I figured I had time to get my buzz on good and tight before scoping the creepy club.
As I sat there, several groups of people came up. Most of them were dressed in standard goth garb, all black, purple, and red vinyl and leather. The hair styles varied. Most had normal day-hair greased up to look like a widow’s peak, and the women had lots of attachments, or whatever they call them.
Most of them looked like kids in their twenties out for a good time, posing and wishing they were dead. Every tenth or so person would arrive solo, and some of these folks looked older.
I saw several women walk by whom I couldn’t keep my eyes off of, and I found my attraction to them disturbing. I hunted vampires.
I found it damn annoying that I got heated up seeing women who essentially dressed like vampires, or at least what people think they look like.
Actually it was pretty close. Real vampires and vampires of legend are pretty similar. They like to dress up and play it all dramatic and fancy-pants. I really fuckin’ hate vampires.
But, and this is a big-ass but, I had to admit there was a certain allure to the women bloodsuckers. There was something about them that was so sensual. Maybe it was how dangerous they were, that they could make you cum and drain you of your life at the same time.
I’d killed every vampire I’d ever come across, with few exceptions. Men, women, children, it didn’t matter. They have to be killed.
I try to never engage, and I certainly never touched any. They are, despite the romantic notions people have formed, disgusting, rotten, dirty, infected creatures that spread disease and misery wherever they go.
But yet, yeah, the women bloodsuckers are kind of hot.
I dunno. Maybe I just like black.
After a couple smokes laced with hippie-nip, I pounded back a fifth and got out of the car. It was past ten. I figured I must have hit the place around the same time the night before.
As I crossed the street, the hulk in the Misfits shirt spotted me and did a double take. Real quick, but I saw it. He either recognized me or hated me on sight. Either one didn’t feel too promising as I stepped up to the door.
“You got ID?” he demanded.
Maybe I was wrong on both counts.
Then I froze, reaching for my wallet. I looked like a lot of things. One of them isn’t too young to drink. The doorman was fucking with me.
I took out my wallet and showed him my license. He snorted at it, then looked me in the eye.
“You gonna make trouble tonight?”
Okay. Good. He knew me.
I went along. “Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “I guess the cold medicine I took yesterday didn’t mix too well with the drinks.”
“I guess not.”
And that was it. He stepped aside.
A big donut.
I didn’t want to push him for info. If I let on that I was so wasted I didn’t remember being in the place, he might’ve thought better than to let me in. I let it dangle. At least I knew for certain I was at the club the night before.
My big mistake was glancing sideways as I entered. I caught a glimpse of the doorman smirking as I passed and as he turned away. I was shit-ass stoned, and maybe it was me being paranoid, but something told me I wasn’t.
Inside, I stood in the dark, waiting for my eyes to adjust. It wasn’t much inside either. The walls were, you guessed it, black. There were paintings on the wall—cutesy, wide-eyed monsters and shit. I didn’t like it. There were tables with candles stacked in a mass, and booths with velvet curtains.
The bar was decent and well-stocked. It was big enough and busy enough to need three bartenders: two women and a guy. All three had too much makeup, like it was the club uniform.
You could tell, outside of this club, they would have no part of the scene. They all looked the same, healthy and athletic in that LA way.
I moved through the crowd and made eye contact with as many people as I could to see if I got a reaction. In every case, male or female, I got the cold, closing-eye turn-away. Every blow-off was a suspect eliminated.
Then I saw a reminder of the reason I was even in the fucking club in the first place—Chad Harris was sitting at a table with a young woman dressed like an undead astronaut. She had so much makeup on, I doubted I’d be able to pick her out of a lineup without it.
I walked straight over to the table and stopped a couple feet short. Harris had eyeliner and a new black Hanes T-shirt on. Even under the getup I could see he was closer to my age than that of the girls.
I took out a small credit card–size camera I carry on me and pointed it at the couple.
“Smile!” I yelled and snapped an adorable shot of them cuddling.
I put the camera away.
“Chad Harris?”
“Y-yeah.”
Just wanted to make sure I had earned my rate.
“Go home to your wife. You look like an idiot.”
I turned and walked back the way I’d come.
My natural homing mechanism led me straight to the bar. I tried to get in on the far left, closest the entrance, but the crowd was thick and annoying, so I tried the center. It wasn’t much better there, so I pushed right where the dude was tending.
As soon as he saw me, his eyes went wide as Don Knotts’s. Needing his hand to slap over his mouth in horror, he dropped the drink he was preparing, backed away, and then bolted out the back door.
I exploded through the crowd and shoved my way clear to the bar. One guy thought about getting in my way until I looked him in the eyes. He knew he would die or get very injured, and he stepped back, making way for me to drunkenly leap over the bar.
I landed on the slick rubber matting on the floor and was immediately bum-rushed by the other two bartenders, the women. One elbowed me in the face while the other caught me and twisted my arm. In less than two beats, she had me pinned to the wall next to the still-swinging back door.
“You let Jimmy be,” she said.
“Lady, I just want to ask him some questions.”
She told the other bartender to get back to the bar. She’d handle me.
And she did, by trusting me and letting me go.
“Don’t you think you caused Jimmy enough grief for one weekend?” she asked.
She had long black hair, intense eyes, and a build like a boxer.
I took a deep breath and dumped a big pile of total honesty. “Look, Miss—”
“Bekka.”
“—Bekka. I’m not entirely sure what the hell I did last night,” I said sheepishly. “That’s why I’m here.”
“To find out?” She smiled.
I could see she was trying to contain laughing in my face. I suddenly felt my face flushing red, and my stomach lurched, thinking of the possibilities of what I’d done.
Now, all of a sudden, finding the vampire I might have screwed wasn’t so important.
I was about to speak again when the smile dropped off her face, but not because of me. She was reacting to someone or something behind me. My first thought was Jimmy with an axe.
“You mean to tell me you remember nothing?”
The soft, low voice speaking to me at least let me know I wasn’t going to get split in half.
>
I turned, and there stood a woman about my height, with blond hair, green eyes, and the whitest skin I’d ever seen. She looked like she had been carved from marble and covered with silk. Her lips were full and glistening red. That was the only makeup she had on.
I was pretty sure she was a vampire.
She had the expression of a woman who was deciding if she was mad or not. The longer I stood there with my face as red as my eyes, she seemed to lean toward not being mad.
I must have stood there stammering for a full minute before she allowed the smooth lines of her face to glide into a slight smile as she told Bekka to get back to work. She said she’d explain what had happened to me.
“Come with me, Cal,” she said and walked to a private area behind the far wall.
It was completely dark.
I followed, glancing back to see Bekka and the other bartender talking and looking at me. For the first time since I’d arrived, I felt a hint of danger and touched the gun jammed in my waistband.
Ahead, the gorgeous blond vampire had stopped at a doorway covered only by a curtain. She held the curtain back and asked me to step inside the dark room.
I went inside, and for a beat she was behind my back. I felt a cold chill all over my body. I knew the feeling. I’d felt it before. It had only happened once or twice, when I’d almost been killed and someone had allowed me to live for whatever reason. I’d turned my back on a vampire. She could have ripped my spine out, but all she did was close the curtain and offer me a seat.
It was a small, private party room, with overstuffed chairs and couches built into the walls. There were tables with black roses in a vase. I flopped down into one of the couches.
“Would you like a drink?”
“Yes. Whiskey. Whatever you have is great.”
She smiled and poured me a drink, then slid in next to me.
“Do you even remember my name?”
“No.” What was the point in lying?
She smiled. “It’s Gwen.”
“Hello, Gwen.”
“I own this club.”
I looked her in the eyes, and she just leaned in and kissed me, real soft like, and my head lit up like a torch.
