by Greg Sisco
“So what happened? Why are we killing our friends and running around in a panic like a bunch of fledglings? Why are Jonathan and his girlfriend in a room with two dead women to begin with?”
“Forget it, Tyr. It’s complicated. If the woman got away, then there are cops coming and we have a lot of cleaning up to do. We’ve got two dead women and one giant fucker on the floor, another body out back, a cancer patient upstairs—all this shit needs to be dealt with.”
“There’s a dead Mexican in the bushes out front too.”
“Jesus Christ. We’re talking about police response time to a multiple homicide. That’s no more than an hour or so. We have to move fast.” Loki stepped out on the balcony and looked into the gorge. “I’m thinking we could use some extra help.”
Thor shook his head. He’d seen this coming.
Jewel drove for miles without experiencing a decrease in heart rate. She could barely operate the vehicle. She was jetting down the road at a hundred miles an hour, sliding around corners, nicking a signpost every mile or two and killing small woodland creatures by the dozen. By the time she was within the city limits, she was still driving in the manner that identifies a person to Vegas police as a tourist operating a stolen car while under the influence of alcohol, methamphetamine, and oral sex. She was pulled over by three cruisers on the outskirts, not having realized she’d been in a high speed pursuit for the last four minutes.
“Hands where I can see them!” shouted an officer who was pointing a gun at her—the second gun she’d had pointed at her in the last hour.
She stuck her hands out the broken driver’s side window.
Two of the cops ran to her car with their guns in her face. They grabbed her hands, dragged her down, and pushed her into the asphalt, shouting things like “Outta the fuckin’ car!” and “On the fuckin’ ground!”
“He tried to kill me. Somebody tried to kill me,” Jewel kept saying through tears, but nobody was paying much attention. This was mostly because she’d been driving ninety-five miles per hour in a thirty-five mile an hour zone. The fact that she was black did not help.
She was handcuffed and shoved into the back of a squad car, screaming all the while about a man trying to kill her, two women who had been shot, a man getting stabbed, another man who had fallen off a balcony, the usual shit.
She’d been in the car half an hour and they were halfway back to the station before an officer even acknowledged that she was talking.
“Shut the fuck up,” was all he said.
Loki, Tyr, and Thor had leapt from the balcony and were standing around Jonathan’s body. Loki had a knife in his hand and was kneeling over Jonathan’s chest.
“I want to go on record as saying I don’t like this idea,” said Tyr.
“You and I don’t like any of each other’s ideas these days. How about you, Thor? Any objections?”
Thor said nothing. The truth was he hated this. He was set on the idea of running out on everybody, especially now that the situation with Horace was resolved. He would have spoken up, but fifteen minutes ago when there had been a silver knife in his chest and Loki was ignoring the issue, Jonathan had been the one to pull it out. Without Jonathan, it would have been second death for sure. He owed Jonathan his life. If he came back, though, he wouldn’t come back as Jonathan. He’d be somebody else. He’d inhabit the same body, but his past would be erased from his mind. In that regard, Thor wondered if his decision really mattered—if it was even possible to give Jonathan anything he might have owed him. But that was just making excuses, trying to get out of paying a life debt.
“I’m for it,” he said finally.
“Really? Why?”
“I’m for it,” he said again.
“Well, that’s a two-thirds majority, not that I need it,” said Loki.
He slit his own wrist and let it bleed onto the blade until the steel was drenched in red, than he stuck the knife in Jonathan’s heart.
Jonathan’s eyes opened. He gasped for breath and pushed back away from his new Brothers.
“Heimdall,” said Loki.
Heimdall. The Norse god who killed Loki at Ragnarok. Who Loki killed right back. Tyr’s and Thor’s eyes went to Loki.
“Your name is Heimdall,” he said again.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The cops arrived at the Brothers’ house an hour before sunrise, two and a half hours after the shooting had taken place. This is roughly what is to be expected.
The Brothers had been sitting eagerly by the door for some time now, since it would have been a dangerous situation if police were to arrive during daylight hours.
“How are you doing today?” asked Officer Edward Halleron. He was a young guy with an almost profoundly low level of charm, but he had two other officers with him who somehow managed to look even less interesting.
“Not too bad,” said Loki. “What can I do for you, officer?”
“We brought a drunk driver in a few hours ago, really rattled, who claims there was a shooting at this address, a few people killed.”
“What?” Loki looked convincingly baffled. “No, there hasn’t been any kind of excitement at all, other than—oh, you know what? We set off some fireworks last night. Maybe that could have been what he heard.”
“Who said it was a man?”
“Oh, I don’t… I just assumed,” said Loki. He had strategically used the word ‘he’ to sound as ignorant as possible. Cops liked ignorance.
“You mind if we come in and take a look around?” asked Halleron.
“Sure, absolutely,” said Loki. They’d come in either way. Refusal only meant wasting precious night while they waited for a warrant.
Once the police were in the living room, Tyr and Thor stumbled in wearing pajamas as though they’d gotten out of bed when the police knocked. They’d hidden Heimdall away in the bourgeois prison after cleaning the place up, aiming to minimize his interaction with the police.
“How many people are in the house?”
The sixty-four thousand dollar question.
“Uh… four—no. Five,” said Loki.
“You three and two more?”
“Yeah, our other roommate and his girlfriend.” He gave Tyr a pissed off look.
“You mind having the others come in here, please?”
“I… If it’s really a must. I mean, she’s got a bad stomach bug and we just got him to bed. He had way too much to drink. They’re really off to a miserable Christmas so far…”
Halleron sighed, almost gave in. It was easy for Loki to see. “I really have to insist.”
But Loki had to insist as well. Eva couldn’t be expected to answer questions in a way that benefited the charade, and ugly questions about cancer, why she wasn’t under hospice care, and God knows what else could have put the police there an extra hour and forced the Brothers to kill them when the sun presented itself. That meant reinforcements, which meant a hostage situation to bide time until nightfall, and that didn’t bode well for anybody.
Heimdall was slightly less of a risk, but a vampire that young around humans was unpredictable. If he got the scent of blood and drained one of these officers, once again, Merry fucking Christmas.
Loki groaned. “I mean, it’s gonna be a real chore for them to…” Halleron looked guilty, so Loki switched gears. “Eh, I understand. Todd, will you help Eva down here, and…” he sighed, “wake Jon up, I guess.”
“You know what? That’s all right,” said Halleron the way Loki knew he would. “I trust you guys.”
“Oh, thanks. We really appreciate it. Really.”
“Hey, it’s Christmas, right?”
Loki turned to Tyr and Thor. “You guys hear anything a few hours ago that could have been a shooting?”
They shrugged and shook their heads, imitating stupid humans.
One of the cops was standing at the sliding glass door, which was now covered in trash bags and hidden behind curtains. “Broke your window?”
Loki groaned. “Supp
osed to have it replaced. Dust storm came through and cracked the shit out of it. Guy comes out here yesterday to replace the glass, bashes out the old stuff, then it turns out he brought the wrong sized plates. They don’t work on Christmas so now I’m stuck with a busted door all weekend.”
“Pain in the ass,” said Officer Halleron.
“Yeah, but they’re gonna replace it for free now, so that’s something.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“Yeah, you gotta be optimistic.”
Sitting on a bed in the bourgeois prison, Heimdall was thumbing through a strange book he’d found hidden in a desk drawer. It was leather-bound and not much bigger than pocket-sized with long passages scribbled in vaguely familiar handwriting. The story it told of a man arriving in Las Vegas with his girlfriend was vaguely familiar as well.
When he got to the parts about a car accident and a kidnapping and two enigmatic men named Loki and Thor, he realized why it was familiar. He flipped back to the inside cover.
“Jonathan Price,” he read aloud. “Heimdall.”
He tore into the remainder of the book. With a combination of memory, reading comprehension, and deductive reasoning, he pieced together most of the past. He’d been a writer. He’d been kidnapped. He’d been asked to ghostwrite the first draft of an autobiography.
His fangs protruded from his gums and then retracted. He ran his tongue over them.
A vampire. So Jonathan was the man and Heimdall was the vampire.
Aside from the first few pages dealing with life before the kidnapping, there was little mention of this Jewel character, the significant other who had come with Jonathan to this new city. Heimdall didn’t know it, but Jonathan had avoided writing about her out of a paranoid fear that Loki would discover her. He’d hardly been able to write her name on the page.
There was, however, a single sheet of computer paper folded up and tucked into the back of the diary, which Heimdall took out and read.
It was a letter from Jewel. It was saying goodbye.
All at once he remembered the last of the details. The two beautiful years of which she spoke, their meeting in a purgatorial thumb-twiddling station called Idaho. Her diabetes. The way she twitched her feet when she slept, and yelped like a dog. Her smell.
He remembered Jewel. And suddenly Loki terrified him.
“What exactly are you fellas looking for?” asked Thor. “Bullet holes or shell casings or something?” He laughed faintly.
The furniture and the picture frames on the walls had been rearranged to cover the bullet holes. The shell casings had been stashed in a hidden safe.
“Anything that shouldn’t be here,” said Halleron. In police code, this meant they didn’t expect to find anything having to do with the alleged shooting but they were on the lookout for drugs or weapons, anything they could jack the boys up about.
“Where was this taken?” asked one of the officers. He was looking at a picture hung on a wall with three bullet holes behind it.
Tyr joined him. “That is… Hong Kong.”
“Oh wow. Other side of the world.”
“Yeah it’s a bit of a trip.”
“Bright city. I didn’t know there were cities with more lights than Vegas.”
“Oh yeah. You should get out more. See the world.”
“I should. So what were you doing in—” the cop went to tap the picture and the frame slipped off the wall and fell. This was not an uncommon phenomenon for law enforcement officials. Breaking people’s shit is something of a pastime.
As any magician in the Las Vegas area could explain, a movement such as a picture falling from a wall draws one’s eye to the picture, not the wall. As the picture fell and the bullet holes behind it were exposed, the eyes of all three police were stuck on the falling picture. It had only fallen about twelve inches when Tyr caught it and and deliberately fumbled with it to give himself an excuse to step in front of the bullet holes while everyone’s eyes were on the picture. Then he caught it.
“Wow,” said Halleron. “Good reflexes.”
“Yeah, well… Asia, you know? Kung fu and shit.”
All three policemen laughed.
“Can we look around upstairs?”
“That’s where the sick people are,” said Loki. “Do you really need to?” He knew the answer but it seemed in character to protest.
“I’d like to make a proper search of the area if you don’t mind. That way we won’t have to come back.”
The Brothers escorted the cops upstairs.
In Eva’s case they had to hope there weren’t too many questions, that her cancer was never mentioned, and—shit!—Tyr hadn’t thought to hide the medication, the prescription painkillers in the name of an eighty-year-old woman who had been murdered on the back porch of her summer home last week. They had to hope those were overlooked as well.
And in Heimdall’s case, they just had to hope.
“What’s in here?” asked Halleron.
“My room, with my girlfriend.”
“Open it, please.”
Tyr sighed and opened the door. Halleron walked in with him.
Eva sat up a little. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing, sweetheart. Go back to sleep.”
“Just having a quick look around, Miss. Routine stuff.”
Eva shut her jaundiced eyes, probably for the best.
“This medication is yours?” Halleron asked Tyr.
“Hers.”
“Ingrid Hoffman?” he read the name from the bottle.
Tyr nodded.
“All right.”
He continued to mosey around the room.
When Loki stepped into Heimdall’s room to warn him about the upcoming search, he found him sitting on the bed with his face buried in a small book.
“What’s that?” asked Loki.
Heimdall shut it instantly. “Nothing.” He backed away, displaying discomfort toward Loki that hadn’t been there when they’d last interacted.
Loki pulled the book away and opened it. “A journal? First e-mails and then… Goddamnit, are you reading this?”
“I just found it.”
“Don’t read this.”
Loki put the journal in his pocket. He was unaware of it, but Heimdall had taken out the letter from Jewel and slipped it into his own pocket before Loki had entered.
“What did you find out?”
“What do you mean?”
“You forget about anything you read in that book. Every piece of information is bad for you, understand?”
“Okay.”
“Forget all of it.”
“Okay.”
“Now, there are cops coming in here. You just sit here and talk as little as possible. Don’t touch them. Don’t do anything. Just follow my lead. Got it?”
“Okay.”
Halleron entered the room then, right on cue. He’d managed to go through Eva’s room without realizing she was dying of cancer, without realizing there was self-prescribed medical marijuana in one of the dresser drawers, without realizing she was in possession of the medication of murder victims, and without realizing that some of the walls still bore scratches from the fingernails of hysterical women who had been trapped in the room at some time or another. There wasn’t much left for him to overlook before he could go.
“How you doing?” Halleron asked Heimdall.
“This is Jon,” said Loki, and Heimdall nodded a little.
“Sorry to wake you up,” said Halleron. “We’ll be out of your hair in just a few minutes.”
Heimdall was seated comfortably on one edge of the bed as Halleron rummaged around his room and the other cops chatted with Tyr and Thor in the hall. All the while Loki stood by, his eyes fixed on Heimdall, and Heimdall wasn’t sure if he was sizing him up to figure out how much he’d read of the diary or if he was expecting him to make some kind of stupid move with the cop.
Halleron picked up the unfinished manuscript for Loki’s autobiography and thumbed thro
ugh it.
“Novel?”
“Memoir, or something.”
“Ah. Never was much of a writer myself.” He went to turn a page and sliced himself with the paper. He put the papers back on the desk and squeezed his thumb with his other hand. “Damn. Paper cut.”
Heimdall’s eyes lit up at the sight of the blood. It taunted him, tantalized him. He couldn’t explain his reaction, but he needed it.
Loki’s hand tightened around Heimdall’s shoulder and held him in place.
“Anything else we can do for you, officer?” asked Loki.
A steady flow of blood ran from Halleron’s thumb down the index finger of his opposite hand and a red speck dropped off his fingertip and hit the floor. Heimdall tried to sit up and run to the blood, to bite into Halleron and guzzle it down, but Loki’s hand was still clamped around his shoulder and pressing him down onto the bed.
“Jeez. That’s bleeding pretty bad. Don’t suppose you’ve got a bandaid around here somewhere?”
“Bandaid? Sure. Doug, will you get the officer a bandaid? I want to ask Jon about something.”
“You all right there, bud?” Halleron asked Heimdall. He stood in front of the young vampire with blood dripping down at their feet. “You look a little shaken.”
Loki’s hand squeezed Heimdall’s shoulder tighter.
“I’m fine,” said Heimdall.
“He’s just a little tense around the sight of blood,” said Loki.
“Oh, oh, I’m sorry,” said Halleron, and he was out of the room instantly.
“It’s almost day now,” Loki said to Heimdall after the door closed. “When night falls, we’ll go out and find you a drain. But you stay the hell away from cops. You forget anything you saw in that journal and if you find anything else like it in this room you show it to me before it gets us all killed. Tonight your new life starts.”
