by Sarah Lovett
She stepped out of the truck and heard whistling. The sound was coming from the garage. More precisely, from Ray Sanchez's lips. Sylvia found him on his back wedged beneath a battered gray Chevrolet Impala. Another set of legs, lying parallel to Ray's belonged to his eighteen-year-old son, Tomás. In Sylvia's eyes, the car was a wreck, but she knew that to the Sanchez males, it was a low-riding work of art in the making.
Ray's body appeared inch by inch from underneath the automobile, until finally his grease-smudged face was visible. "It's our hero!" With surprising agility, he was on his feet, wrapping her in a bear hug. When he finally released her, he made a show of dusting off her clothes.
"I'm sorry, Ray," Sylvia began, "I screwed up the party—"
"Sorry? You've got a fan club waiting inside."
"Yeah." Tomás had scooted out from under the Impala. He unfolded his lanky frame until he stood two inches taller than his father. "We heard he shot you!" His brown eyes glowed with admiration.
As father and son escorted her across the garage to the kitchen door Ray said, "Rosie and my abuelita are enjoying the sunset from the portal." A quizzical expression crossed his face. "Your party decorations are still up from yesterday."
Sylvia followed him into the kitchen. "I feel so badly—"
"Hey, we had more fun without you, jita." Rosie Sanchez pecked Sylvia's cheek. She was barefoot, on her way from the refrigerator, two beers in hand. "And you better watch out, Matthew almost got engaged to someone else. Remember Angelique from the lab? She just happened to invite herself over."
"You mean Angelique from latent prints? Bleached blonde, room-temperature I.Q.?" Sylvia smiled sweetly, and Rosie gave a throaty chuckle. The penitentiary investigator was one of Sylvia's oldest friends—Sylvia had gone to elementary school with Rosie's younger sister—and the women had renewed their friendship a few years back when Sylvia returned to Santa Fe from California.
Rosie raised dark eyebrows. "It's over and done, and everyone's just glad you and the little one are safe. Getting chased by a madman is a decent excuse."
"I don't think so."
Sylvia recognized Matt's voice coming from the portal. She accepted a beer from Rosie and stepped out the back door to find her fiancé seated next to Abuelita Sanchez. The wide, screened porch ran the length of the house. It faced west, offering a view of the sunset framed by a white wooden fence and a variety of trees.
Sylvia kissed Matt on top of his head, and she smiled down at the elegant eighty-one-year-old face of Abuelita Sanchez. Ray's grandmother occupied her garden chair like a queen on a throne. And why not? She was surrounded by generations of her family: her fifty-year-old grandson, Raymond, her great-grandson, Tomás, and his three-year-old cousin, who now utilized Matt's knee as a rocking horse.
Sylvia heard Abuelita Sanchez murmur. "Sylvia, tienes una familia, necesites un esposo ahora." You have a family, now you need a husband. "¿Matrimonio éste semana?" The old woman's expression was serious, but she pinched Sylvia on the bottom with strong fingers.
"Did I hear someone say we're getting married this week?" Matt reached into a dish of tortilla chips. Sylvia smiled at the man she'd been involved with for the last . . . year and ten months. She shrugged.
He winked back at her, then cast a baleful eye at la vieja. "¿Abuelita, comprende usted? Estoy desolado. Sylvia's been stalling me for a year. She even goes out and gets attacked to avoid her engagement party. I think maybe I'll have to marry Angelique after all—an old flame never dies." The three-year-old squirmed his way off Matt's knee, propelling his tiny body away from the adults toward a pile of small metal race cars on the floor of the porch.
Abuelita Sanchez patted the empty chair by her side, and Sylvia sat as ordered. Through wrinkled eyelids, the grandmother studied the two lovers. After a few moments, she grunted. She produced a flask from the pocket of her floral-print dress and shook it. She unscrewed the cap, which doubled as a shot glass, poured out a full measure, and held the brew out to Sylvia. "Salud, Sylvia."
Gingerly, Sylvia sniffed the concoction; she caught the essence of rosemary, sage, vervain—and God knows what else. She was familiar with the old woman's herbal beverages, designed to cure rheumatism, grippe, and "female complaints." She put her lips to the shot glass and drank; she didn't dare refuse. The beverage was sticky sweet, then bitter with a zinging aftertaste, and it made her skin tingle. As she returned the small container to Abuelita Sanchez, she caught Matt watching her. His grin was cocky, insolent, and irritating as hell.
"¡Jijito, ahora, tú!" Abuelita Sanchez refilled the shot glass and held it out to Matt. Sylvia laughed at the old woman's familiar use of tú. As far as the abuelita was concerned, Matt was just an unruly kid.
He drank, wrinkled his nose, and wheezed dramatically. "Is this one of your love potions?" he asked.
Chortling silently, Abuelita Sanchez rattled off a response in Spanish. Matt answered, and Sylvia enjoyed the soft, sensual sounds of the language. Her own mastery of Spanish tenses was limited to present and simple past.
Matt reached across the woman's lap and pulled Sylvia close. He whispered in a deep voice: "She said she doesn't make love potions, but if I need something for arthritis, gout, or bunions, no problem."
Rosie plopped down in an empty chair. "If you're that much of a wreck, Matthew, I won't let Sylvia marry you."
"Hey, watch it—she's looking for an excuse to back out." Matt laughed, but his eyes stayed serious.
Sylvia eased her hand from Matt's grip and made a too casual show of stretching her long legs. He set his empty beer bottle on the floor, where it promptly toppled and rolled with a clatter.
He called out, "Ray! How about a quick game of one-on-one?" He tipped an imaginary hat—"Ladies"—and then disappeared into the kitchen.
Sylvia leaned forward, resting both arms on her knees. She expelled a puff of air. "He's pissed."
"Totally pissed—and only because you missed the engagement party he'd been planning for the last three months."
"Thanks for the support."
"You're welcome." Rosie's cheeks were flushed from beer, and she raised Sylvia's left hand so the abuelita could see the flash of metal and stone. "Did you see the ring Matt gave her?"
"Caro." Precious. The old woman lit a small candle with steady hands.
The women drank their beer in silence. Unconsciously, Sylvia pulled Serena's medallion from under her white cotton blouse. Her fingers played over the raised metal.
"What's that?" Rosie asked. Outside the screened porch, night had fallen. But the soft darkness was unsettled when a floodlight suddenly accented a rectangle of concrete behind the garage. The light was followed by the flap-flap-flap of a dribbled basketball and the rumble of male voices.
Sylvia lifted the chain from around her neck. "I can't keep my saints straight, but it belongs to Serena."
The abuelita took the necklace in her bony fingers, staring closely at the delicate carving. "No es santo—no saint."
Sylvia turned toward the old woman and found herself trapped by black eyes. "Los cihuateteos." Abuelita clasped one withered hand over the pendant, the other over Sylvia's wrist. She said, "They walk at night, searching for children because they've lost their own."
The viejita's grip was strong. "Los cihua—what?" Sylvia jumped when someone growled in her ear. She twisted in the chair and saw Tomás. The teenager straddled a bench and popped open a can of Coke. He gulped half its contents and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
Tomás said, "I know a vampire." His tone was deep and extremely serious.
"Is that what they are? Los whatevers?" Sylvia asked.
"In Mexico, they call them chupacabras, goatsuckers." Tomás delivered this statement with academic largess.
And now Sylvia remembered. Recently, the story had been carried in the local papers and in The Wall Street Journal. The same vampirical-beast scare that had captivated much of Mexico a year earlier had occurred again in the Pacific-coast state of
Sinaloa. Psychologists speculated that this recurrence of collective psychosis was connected to Mexico's political destabilization. But there was a twist on the most recent story: reported sightings of the bloodsucking beast had reached across the border into southern New Mexico and Texas.
Tomás said, "The vampires I know, there's this girl at school who wears black and she's real white. And I saw some on America's Most Wanted. They didn't have bat wings, or vampire teeth, or the horns of a goat. But they suck blood, and they murdered this girl's parents—"
"Enough, Tomás." Rosie shushed her son.
Sylvia took a swallow of beer, and the liquid foamed up, dripping down her chin. She said, "There are clinical vampires. The Hanover Vampire, beheaded in the early 1900s for biting and killing something like twenty-five victims. In the 1970s, the Sacramento Vampire murdered a pregnant woman, a baby, and three or four more people. Shot them, then drank their blood."
"You're as bad as Tomás," Rosie clucked.
"That's harsh," Tomás said, fascinated.
Sylvia continued. "Before the murders, he'd been in a psych hospital where he was known for biting the heads off birds. He even tried to inject rabbit blood into his veins."
Tomás leaned closer toward the flickering candle. "What happened to him?"
"F.B.I. caught him. He ended up committing suicide." Sylvia's body was completely in shadow, only her face illuminated by the glow of candlelight "Psychoanalysts would tell you the"—she raised two fingers to the light and dipped them in quotes—"vampire suffers oral-sadistic rage because of maternal rejection. Then he banishes those impulses, splits them off to some dissociated portion of his ego. Teeth and mouth are all about the late oral stage—you've got sadistic biting, controlled feeding, and, ultimately, merger because the victim ends up a vampire."
"That's crazy." Rosie bit into a chip loaded with salsa.
"Go on!" Tomás said.
Sylvia gave Rosie a light jab to the leg. "The Jungians have a different theory on vampires. They talk about narcissism, self-obsession, moral self-absorption. The vampire is the perfect reflection of our culture—our obsession with ourselves. The vampire is the ultimate narcissist; he thirsts for himself in others—relates to others only as they reflect his image back to him. Remember, he has no image of his own in the mirror."
Unconsciously, Sylvia had acquired a slight Lugosi accent. "He exists in grandiose isolation, he's empty, and in an effort to refill himself, he 'drains' those closest to him—but he can't allow himself to acknowledge the depth of his pathology, his destructive power, so he 'sleeps' in the day and walks at night."
"The living dead," Tomás intoned carefully. "But the chupacabra is not just psychological stuff. I'm telling you, it's real."
"Narcissists are definitely real." Sylvia laughed. "You mean your chupa-thing rides around on a broom and sucks the blood of innocent children?" She bit back the urge to add something about Catholic hocus-pocus or mumbo-jumbo and men in funny hats.
Abuelita Sanchez interrupted in her low, gruff voice. "Sylvia, you don't believe because you're a faithless infidel. When I was a girl, I saw el vampiro. In the cornfield at night. He came out of the acequia.
"It was the year all the corn rotted and the acequias dried up. I came over for the first time to stay with mi tío. This girl Erlinda and her family lived near Ojo Sarco. One day, we were walking in the arroyo. We saw a big black dog run into the trees ahead. I followed, but my friend refused to go." Abuelita's head and hands shook very slightly—age or fear? "A few minutes later I heard my friend Erlinda scream. When I found her again, her leg was broken, the bone sticking out like a branch."
"Did she fall?" Sylvia asked. Her eyes had grown big in spite of her cynicism, her Ph.D.
Abuelita Sanchez turned to stare. "The dog had doubled back and jumped on her. She fought and screamed. But when she was down, he tore open her leg, licked her blood."
Sylvia said, "I have the same problem in my neighborhood; no one controls their dogs. They run wild and pack—they killed a burro. And they almost killed a little boy last year."
Tomás spoke up. "This is different, Sylvia."
The abuelita remained silent. Sylvia stared at her. "But what does the chupacabra have to do with the medallion?"
The old woman's raisin-sized pupils seemed to shimmer. "In Mexico—and in some parts of Latinoamerica—parents give these medals to their little ones, to keep them safe from the vampiro, el demonio. Without the medallion, a child is vulnerable."
Abuelita Sanchez nodded pendulously. Her gray hair seemed to cast a glow. "Someone cared very much about your little girl. And now you care for her, too. Give her back her protection. Keep her safe from the evil one."
BY ELEVEN P.M., the fever from the infection was blistering Renzo Santos. His skin was on fire. His eyeballs shriveled and shrank in their sockets. His skin peeled back from his neck and face. He was sure his bones would pop from their ball joints.
Renzo bit down on the washcloth stuffed between his teeth. Even when he was caught in the delirious arms of fever, he knew he could not cry out; someone in the hotel would hear and call the police.
Past midnight, the Virgin de Guadalupe came to see him when the flame was at its hottest. She came as she had appeared to Juan Diego—Cuauhtlatóhuac—in Mexico three centuries earlier. But now she sat on the edge of the bed, and she pressed her palm to Renzo's forehead. Her touch was cool, soothing. He thought he saw tears stain her cheeks. Her eyes were an ocean of empathy—so much pity, so much sorrow. She was more beautiful than she had looked long ago when his mother took him to pray at her feet.
Before he could thank her, she disappeared.
Dirty, bloody Coatlicue made the bed shake when she sat in place of La Virgen. Her eyes were red. Her face was black. She stank of rotting flesh. When she opened her mouth, snakes crawled out from between her lips. They slithered between her withered breasts, they twined between her thighs. Into the world they carried slime from the goddess's viscera.
Renzo cried out, biting even harder on the towel, cutting his own tongue. He raised one hand to ward off the poisonous animals. Coatlicue kept screaming that she had been buried too young; buried in a closed casket because he had destroyed her face and her body. That's when he understood that it was not the angry goddess, but Elena who screamed at him. She wanted revenge. She cut out his beating heart with a knife, eating it in front of his eyes.
He wept as he watched his pulsing heart devoured. His mouth was so dry he thought his teeth would crumble. Through the early morning, he stayed rigid with pain until he finally fell into fitful sleep.
Before dawn, his eyes flew open. He sat up, his body still oddly stiff. He made it to the bathroom. For minutes he could not find himself in the mirror. But slowly, his reflection filled the glass. His battered and bruised face looked younger, newer, somehow fresh. Through thin hotel walls, he heard a toilet flushing. Someone else was awake, if only for a moment.
Someone was banging on his door. He waited—without answering—until it grew quiet once more. When he cracked the door and peered out, he saw that a tray of food had been left on the welcome mat. Had he ordered food? Yes, he remembered vaguely . . .
He set the tray on a table and returned to the bathroom. This time, when he cleaned and dressed his wounds—removing dead tissue and pus—the pain was bearable. He swallowed more painkillers and injected himself with penicillin.
He walked out of the bathroom feeling revitalized, reborn. He sat in front of the food tray, took the stainless steel covers from the plates, and gazed down at three rare steaks and a full loaf of bread. He poured himself a glass of Burgundy from a bottle he had saved. He ate, drank, ate again. As food filled his stomach, he realized the extent of his hunger. He was ravenous. When he was finished with the meal, only a small portion of meat remained on the plate.
For almost an hour, Renzo sat stuporously. His stomach was full, his belly protruding, but the hunger was not gone.
He returned to the bath
room, where he swabbed one arm with iodine. With his gold straight-edged razor, he made an incision on the inside of his left elbow, cutting deep into the median cubital vein.
He lifted his arm to his mouth, and he drank from the wound.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MATT ENGLAND STOOD inches from a dozen vials filled with cloudy blue liquid, which were arranged in a small wooden stand in the chemistry section of the D.P.S. crime lab. Serologist Hansi Gausser was busy rinsing his gloved hands in a decontamination basin.
"If you break those, I'll kill you," Gausser said.
"I'm too young to die." Matt backed away from the glass vials and bumped into the edge of a computer monitor, nudging the keyboard but avoiding the rectangular body of the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer.
Gausser made a face. "Trash the GC/MS while you're at it."
"Anything to make you happy." From street experience and basic forensic-science classes, Matt had learned the rudimentary chemistry of drug identification. For instance, he knew gas chromatography provided a tentative I.D. by separating a drug from its diluents. But chromatography, in combination with mass spectrometry, was a whole other ball game: GC/MS separated the components of a drug and provided positive identification of each substance in the mixture.
When a sample was injected into a heated port, a carrier gas swept it into the GC column, where it was separated into components; electrons caused the sample molecules to fragment, and those fragments were isolated according to mass and counted. The computer data system monitored the entire show, and a printer spat out a paper displaying a series of lines, graphs, and numbers. In a courtroom, in the hands of an expert witness, that printout could work miracles.
