The Wages of Sin (Blood Brothers Vampire Series Book Two)

by Greg Sisco

  So go.

  Leave town.

  Tonight.

  He was sitting at a table in the corner of Liquid Skin, surrounded by the kind of young person who skips car payments to buy tattoos. He’d come in telling himself he was looking for a drain, but he wasn’t paying much attention to any of the girls who surrounded him. He was busy arguing with the devil on his shoulder.

  ‘I can’t go tonight. It’s after one. The sun will be up in a few hours.’

  ‘You could get a hotel and you know it.’

  ‘What’s the rush? Nobody’s going to cut our heads off between now and tomorrow night.’

  ‘It could happen. Loki’s been advertising the grand opening. There could have been Chosen in that club tonight.’

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. He was probably being paranoid but he had to acknowledge the outside chance. And if there was a reckoning coming, it was probably best to go now. If he went back and destroyed the club and then went home and killed Eva, maybe he could save all of them, but more than likely it would be an overreaction and succeed only in provoking the wrath of his Brothers.

  But if he got a hotel tonight, caught a flight tomorrow…

  He started to stand up.

  “Doug,” said a familiar voice.

  Thor looked up. It was Clyde, one of the bartenders he’d met a few times. He sat back down at his table.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine, Clyde. Just thinking.”

  “Okay. Okay. Say, do you know a real big fella in a trench coat who might be looking for you?”

  “Not that I can think of…”

  “Big angry guy, talks real quiet, threatens people with a carpet stapler.”

  “Not ringing any bells.”

  “You’d remember.”

  “He was here?”

  “Couple hours ago. I think he’s looking for a girl you went home with.”

  Shit. Those weren’t words Thor liked to hear. Being a suspect in any disappearance meant dealing with human authority figures and that was a pain to say the least.

  “Is he a cop?”

  “Eh, maybe. Don’t think so though, ‘cause of the carpet stapler.”

  “Ah. Right. Carpet stapler. Who is he then?”

  “Don’t know. But he’s pretty serious about talking to you.”

  Sometimes a pneumatic stapler is used as a carpet stapler, though the two aren’t technically the same thing, no matter what Clyde might have said or thought. Carpet staplers are typically small devices carpenters operate by swinging them into the floor with a lot of force. They go bap! Some people use electric ones, which are a little scarier. They go zik-zik-zik, pretty much as fast as you want them to. But the pneumatic stapler, that big Co2-powered bastard Horace swings around, it’s the only one that goes CLACK!

  As a general rule, pneumatic staplers are powered by a hose that compresses air, but Horace’s stapler ran on the kind of cartridges you use in paintball guns. Probably he didn’t buy it like that. Probably he made the damn thing himself or borrowed it from a homicidal friend who was an amateur engineer.

  “A girl named Samantha. Comes here often. Hasn’t been around the last week or so. What do you know about her?” Horace asked Clyde when he walked into the club two hours earlier.

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Point me to somebody who’s here more often than you.”

  “Hey dude,” some idiot a couple seats down shouted, holding up an empty shot glass.

  “Look, pal,” Clyde said to Horace. “Buy a drink or go home. I’ve got a lot of customers to serve.”

  As he poured a shot of Buffalo Trace for the bro, there was a CLACK! next to Clyde’s hand and he jumped back to see a staple an inch long with its two spikes barely sticking into the marble countertop.

  “I’m not here to bother anybody,” said Horace. “I’m just trying to track somebody down.”

  Clyde drank the shot he’d poured for Mr. Awesome.

  “I don’t know who she is, the girl you’re looking for,” said Clyde, giving Horace a little more attention than he had a moment ago.

  “I’ll say it again,” said Horace, “Point me in the direction of someone who knows the customers better than you.”

  “Dude, seriously!” shouted Brother Dudeman with the empty shot glass.

  “He does,” said Clyde, pointing to the belligerent prick. “He’s here all the time.”

  It wasn’t exactly true. The kid was there on a semi-regular basis, but he mostly hung around with a couple of his dude-bro buddies and got rejected by loose women for being a dumb-shit. It was a busy night though, and sending Big Bastard after Dumb Bastard solved two problems at once, at least for the time being.

  Horace took the kid into the bathroom to talk to him and a few minutes later the kid came out grabbing his thighs with bloody hands. Apparently he’d been at least vaguely familiar with the girl in question and remembered seeing her with another customer, because the big guy came back to the bar and put the staple gun down.

  “If you didn’t call the cops, he will, so I’ll make this quick,” he said. “A blonde-haired kid, early twenties, comes in pretty regularly, always leaves with a pretty girl, sometimes two or three. He’s got to attract some attention. You know him?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Clyde probably would have lied about this if it weren’t true.

  “I’m writing my phone number on this napkin. Next time he comes in you call me and I’ll come have a chat with him. And this probably goes without saying but don’t give my number to the cops or I’ll come back and staple your balls to the inside of your asshole.”

  “Okay. That sounds good. Will do.”

  Well that did it then. Thor wasn’t leaving town. Not tonight.

  If the guy was a cop—though cops didn’t use staple guns on civilians in public very often anymore—it meant he was dedicated to finding Thor and there was probably no way out except to kill him, leave town, and find a new alias (Doug sucked anyway).

  If, on the other hand, the staple-gunman was not a cop, it probably meant he was even more dedicated to finding Thor than a cop would have been. That probably meant asking around until he found somebody who said, “Oh, Doug? Yeah, I’ve seen him hanging around with Jack Loki from the papers.” And that meant he’d try to pull his staple gun shenanigans on Loki and Loki would kill him and all his loved ones. It wasn’t a big problem, really, but leaving Loki to clean up his mess was trashy behavior. He was leaving town so as not to have to clean up Loki’s, after all.

  He told Clyde as soon as Horace got in touch to pass on a message: he’d be here every night at 10:00 PM until they’d had a chance to talk. If he’d been paying better attention, Thor might have noticed the way Clyde was trying incessantly to engage him in conversation and avoid letting him leave, but his mind was preoccupied and he ended up leaving, not noticing that Clyde was rubbing his fingernails together fast enough to burn himself.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Just before he’d approached Thor, when Clyde had made the call from the house phone, Horace told him to keep Thor busy and he’d be there in fifteen minutes. Clyde didn’t have anything against Thor, but it was a habit of his to avoid staples to the testicles whenever possible and that was his primary concern at the moment.

  His instructions were to keep Thor talking, not to let him leave, and not to tell him Horace was on his way. While it really should have been a given that it wasn’t a good idea to mention Horace at all, Clyde wasn’t great at following orders from brutes who were threatening physical violence (and probably shouldn’t have been a bartender in the first place, for this reason).

  “Where is he?” Horace asked when he came into the club, about three minutes after Thor left. “Which one is he?”

  “I couldn’t… He left.”

  “He left? When?”

  “Few minutes ago. I offered him a drink on the house, but he said he had to go. I didn’t know what to tell him.”
>
  “Did you get his phone number?”

  “I… did not.”

  “Are you trying to get stapled?”

  “No. No, I’m really not. I don’t even have my ears pierced. I… I don’t want…”

  “So what are you telling me? He was here for a few minutes. You offered him a free drink. He left. Did he take a girl home?”

  “No. But he said he’d be back to talk to you tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean ‘to talk to me?’”

  “He said he’d come back every night at ten until he saw you.”

  “You told him I was coming?”

  “No. I told him you had been here.”

  “I told you not to mention me.”

  “That… is not exactly what you said.”

  “So he came in, you told him I was coming for him, he left early.”

  “You’re really twisting this to make it sound like it’s my fault.”

  CLACK!

  After putting one staple in Clyde’s shoulder, which the little pissant cried over like an eight-year-old getting her nipple pierced, Horace resigned himself to meeting this Doug character tomorrow and stepped out into the Las Vegas night. He’d gotten into his car and driven a couple blocks when a voice came from the backseat.

  “You’re looking for Thor? Douglas Thor?”

  Horace grabbed for the staple gun, which he’d set on the passenger seat a moment ago, but it wasn’t there.

  “Who are you?” he asked, still more calm than anyone ought to have been under the circumstances.

  “Nobody worth mentioning,” said the stranger, who happened to be an ancient vampire and a wanted serial killer known nationally as the Wandering Butcher, “but I can confirm for you that he’s the guy you’re looking for.”

  “Yeah, what do you know?” Horace watched the rear view mirror, trying to get a look at the stranger in the back seat whenever a little light found its way into the vehicle.

  “A woman named Samantha was murdered recently. You’re looking for the guy who pulled the trigger on her—or ripped her neck open, more specifically. I’m telling you Thor’s your guy.”

  This was the point in the Hollywood movie where the hero drives his car into a wall at forty miles an hour, narrowly saved by his seatbelt and airbag, and the bad guy flies through the windshield and explodes like a water balloon. Problem was, Horace wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and for all he knew the guy in the backseat was. Still, he considered putting his seatbelt on as quickly as possible and taking a chance on the crash.

  “I think you’d better tell me who you are, guy. Me and the police are the only ones supposed to know about the neck wound, so whatever you’ve got to do with this, you better come clean now or there are gonna be problems between you and me.”

  “Don’t talk tough, please. Badgering an informant is bad form.”

  “How do I know you’re not him? Maybe you ducked out of the club just before I came in, now you’re posing as somebody else to throw me off the trail or take me somewhere quiet and kill me.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. The parking lot was quiet, I could have killed you there. I could kill you at a stoplight and get out of the car—this is Vegas. I told you Thor’s your man. I can tell you where to find him. Or you can run this car off the road, kill us both, and never get closure. Your call.”

  Horace weighed his options. He relaxed his hands on the steering wheel and let off the gas a little.

  “How do you know this Thor guy killed her?”

  “It’s kind of a hobby of mine. I watch certain people and I fuck with them. You ever heard of a bar called The Chupacabra?”

  “No.”

  “It opened tonight. It’s owned by a guy named Jack Loki. Thor’s a partner. You go look in the tabloid newspapers, you’ll find plenty about these guys. They call themselves the Blood Brothers. They think they’re vampires. Thor hangs around clubs at night, he seduces girls, and he drinks their blood. Sick fuck, right?”

  “That’s it? No motive at all? Just to drink her blood?”

  “Technically that’s a motive, but let’s not split hairs.”

  “So my daughter’s dead because of some kid who’s seen too many movies and thinks he’s Bela Lugosi?”

  “Kiefer Sutherland’s probably more like it, but I guess you’re an older fella.”

  “Tell me where to find him.”

  At a pawn shop specializing in guns and knives, Horace asked the clerk if he had anything with a silver blade on it. It was an idea the Butcher had planted in his mind, but Horace needed a weapon anyway, something better than a staple gun. You could kill somebody with that thing but it would be a long and messy process, like skinning a deer with a pair of pliers.

  There were likely to be at least two people in the house, both of whom liked to pretend they were vampires and drink people’s blood according to the guy in the car. That sounded like a lot of excitement to handle with a staple gun. He thought of buying a handgun, but killing somebody on the same night you buy a gun is an easy way to get caught and Horace had always been a lousy shot anyway.

  So a knife it was, and if they had a silver one then so much the better.

  Either by astonishing coincidence or, more likely, by orchestration on the part of the Butcher, there was a silver knife with a six-inch blade in stock and the shopkeeper wanted a hundred and fifty bucks for it.

  “Sold,” said Horace.

  “So why silver?” asked the shopkeeper, putting the weapon in its wooden box. “Hunting werewolves?”

  “Vampires.”

  “Oh right. Werewolves are just the bullets, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “Silver bullets?”

  “I don’t know. Everybody’s a goddamn horror movie expert tonight.”

  When Horace got back out to his car, the Butcher had disappeared, but by now he’d been told how to get to Thor’s house and he had his new knife. He didn’t need the stranger’s help anymore.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jewel sat in the car biting her nails and shifting in her seat. She’d read articles about Loki in a few tabloids after going through Jonathan’s e-mails and had to grant the similarities to the story Jonathan had told her. A criminal who claims to be a vampire. A club opening in Las Vegas.

  She’d spent a long time doubting everything Jonathan had told her, but somewhere in her mind there was a glimmer of possibility that Jonathan was telling the truth. She just wanted to get a look at Jack Loki, the man who had presumably kidnapped her lover and led her life into shambles. She didn’t think she had it in her to confront him, but she wanted to see his face. Nonetheless, she found herself sitting in the car too terrified to enter the building. She didn’t know what she was scared of specifically. She could think of no reason entering the club would put her in danger, but she had trouble convincing herself to get out of the car and walk in.

  It is a sad fact of human life that people live their lives in perpetual mundanity, which becomes the only state in which they are comfortable. For this reason, they become anxious in circumstances where any significant thing, good or bad, has the potential to happen.

  “Well if you’re gonna do it, do it. Otherwise go home,” she told herself.

  She’d been sitting in the car for almost an hour now watching young people strut in and stumble out. There was loud music and a big crowd and clearly a dangerous supply of alcohol. Somewhere inside was a guy named Jack Loki who might have kidnapped a struggling writer and forced him to write a book about vampires.

  Jewel got out of the car and shut the door, doing her best to steady her heart rate. All she was doing was taking a peak, after all, and she was a black woman from Idaho. There’d been bigger villains in her life than vampires.

  At a table on a far end of the club, Jonathan was sitting with a big man whose back was to Jewel, and who had a tiny white girl sitting in his lap with her hands all over him.

  Jewel froze. She’d wanted to get a look at Loki, but she hadn’t prepared hers
elf for the possibility of seeing Jonathan here. In her mind she saw herself running to him and embracing him, or throwing a drink in his face and demanding he explain himself. Then she thought of running to get the police in case there was truth to the story she’d dismissed as bullshit.

  Before she’d made up her mind, Jonathan made eye contact with her and his eyelids retreated into his brain. He became paralyzed for a moment, then seemed to gesture for her to leave. As she debated whether to obey, the big man at the table turned and looked at her.

  He was mildly frightening, but mostly because of his size. His face was one of tremendous confidence and charisma. He smiled and waved his hand, inviting her to join them.

  Her decision wasn’t one that came easily, and in some parallel universe she ran for the door and found a group of cops across the street and they rushed to her side and detained Jack Loki and Jonathan thanked her profusely and everything was hunky-dory for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, Jewel didn’t live in a parallel universe. She lived in the universe where she walked over to Jonathan’s and Loki’s table and took a seat with them.

  “So who is this?” Loki asked Jonathan.

  “Uh…”

  “I’m his girlfriend. Was his girlfriend, till he vanished.”

  “Ah. From what I understand, writers have a tendency to do that.” Loki shot a look to Jonathan, who swallowed.

  “You’re Jack Loki?” asked Jewel.

  “That I am, little lady. And who might you be?”

  “Jewel.” She shook his hand, not taking her eyes off his.

  “Vivienne,” said Vivienne, not wanting to be left out of the conversation, but everyone ignored her all the same.

  “You know, Jonathan has told me so very little about you,” said Loki. “Shockingly little. Nothing at all, as a matter of fact.”

  “Jewel and I dated back in Idaho before I came here,” Jonathan said a little too anxiously. “Idaho’s awful, there’s not much worth talking about in that section of my life. What brings you to Vegas, Jewel?”