Sanguine Vengeance

by Dias, Jason

  “They’re worried about you at the department. But with Daniels dying, they haven’t had time to get serious about it.”

  “They’re not looking for me?”

  “Not officially. Given what we talked about, I reported you sick. Your girl has been trying to find you and you haven’t been answering, though, so…”

  “My girl? Ayame?”

  She nodded. “You made an impression. She’s going to be a detective soon. And Beatrice is worried, too. Did you really kill her?”

  “Daniels? Yeah. Smothered her with a pillow. Look. I’m going to pull over up here, by these other campers. Blend in for a few minutes. I should tell you everything.”

  “Okay.”

  “No shots.”

  Her hand poised over her bag. “No promises.”

  We sat in the truck for half an hour. I told her everything. Most of it didn’t make me look very good or terribly sane. When I finished, Jo sat facing me, back against the door, feet against my hip, chin in her hands.

  “So, what do you think?” I said.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “What?”

  “It’s eleven. I eat lunch at eleven. Had to choose between taking my lunch sack and my doctoring bag.”

  “Wendy’s?”

  She nodded.

  “You drive.” We switched spots.

  “I can’t believe in vampires.” She started the truck and punched the gas.

  I slid down in the passenger seat, trying not to look like I was trying to be inconspicuous, while doing exactly that. “That’s all right. Neither does Ysabeau.”

  “I can’t believe it, but I sort of have to believe it. I saw that coffin. It was old. I’ve never seen you near an antique store. And the blood. And the necks. It’s impossible. Just flat impossible. Not even residue in the veins. Not even a trace of blood plasma left. If impossible medical conditions, why not supernatural entities to inflict them?”

  “That’s where I am, but with a lot more evidence in my face.”

  She made a left on yellow, earning a honk from someone who had been trying to race the light. “Killing Daniels is serious. I’m going to have to turn you in for that.”

  “When Enrique is safe and Ysabeau is dead or gone, or whatever, I’ll turn myself in for it. For everything. Won’t even try an insanity plea. It would be a comfort to know I was insane but I’m not. I can’t live with myself, Jo. But I can live less with the people I love tangling up with her. It has to stop.”

  “I’ll help. Here’s a Wendy’s. But if you look like you’re going to hurt anyone else, I’m going to stick you with a couple milligrams of Lorazepam and you’re taking a dirt nap. All right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want to eat?”

  Nothing. I couldn’t imagine eating food. Hunger fought me on that one. “Bacon double. Extra fries. Shake.”

  “Chocolate?”

  “Whatever. Large.”

  “You’re buying.”

  “Naturally.”

  We ate in the parking lot. I briefly felt bad about making a mess in the truck, but it was so minor a transgression compared to the rest that I didn’t have time for a lot of guilt. I took two bites of the burger, choked down a third, and wondered if I really was sick. The shake went down better. I wrapped up the rest in its crinkly paper and stashed it.

  “You’re not eating?”

  “Too guilty to eat. Too scared.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah. Move over. I’ll drive while you finish.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I haven’t been home because I assumed I’d be arrested if I got within three blocks. We’ll circle, paranoid-like, but if it looks safe, I could use a shower and fifteen minutes to think.”

  We switched places again. I drove across town. Traffic was light this time of day, my neighborhood quieter still. So few cars moved that the camper stood out just by existing. But no patrol cars lurked. No undercover cars, either. I knew every car we had. If you’re in the trade, they’re pretty obvious. I felt safe going into the house. We parked out front.

  “Make yourself at home.”

  Jo sat on my sofa and put her feet up.

  Hot water revitalized me. Soap: good. Shampoo: great. Nothing could wash away the shame or the anxiety that squirmed around my chest cavity, shaking my heart, twisting my stomach, clenching my rectum. But in the silence, I could think. Trails, or at least trail-heads.

  Off the lake, in a dark, poor neighborhood, one porch with a red light.

  South. A safe house rendered unsafe.

  The funeral home.

  Ysabeau was invisible on camera, but she had to eat. People knew her, or thought they did.

  I stepped out of the shower, dripping on the fuzzy bath mat, practically walking into Jolene. I jumped two inches, hands going naturally into a fighting stance. “Shit, Jo. Shit. Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Materialize out of steam and vapor like a fucking vampire.”

  “Sorry. You were just off in your own head. Have you always had a nipple ring? Doesn’t seem like your aesthetic. Never mind. Show me your foot.”

  “What? Give me that towel. Jesus.”

  She passed the towel. “Lord’s name. Don’t use it like that. If this girl is really a vampire, faith is your only armor. Now sit down there. Lift up your foot.”

  I’d forgotten about the wound there. Did as she asked.

  “Not a spider bite, is it?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Not for certain.” I did, really, but my evidence remained something other than material. I couldn’t prove it in court. Circumstantial. Feelings are not evidence.

  She had her bag out. A cotton swab on a stick and a collection vial. She did what those things are for. Then put an antibiotic salve on the wound. “Doesn’t hurt?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a problem. Spider bite would hurt like crazy, especially right there. This is something else. Blood came back normal. You have herpes, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “Like a third of people do and it’s no big deal, probably asymptomatic. Don’t worry about it.”

  “So why did you tell me?”

  She stood up and let me have my foot back. My hair dripped into my face.

  “Geology came back. Mass grave.” She didn’t make me ask. “Not a definitive match for anything, but she said the closest she’d seen was an old mass grave in Czechoslovakia. Your sample seemed to be older but same ratio of humus to mineral content. She wants to know where it came from. Professional curiosity.”

  “You can tell her. It’s in Paris. Name is French. Obviously. Something something innocents.”

  “Cimetière des Saints-Innocents?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I read. I’ll pass it on. So where to, Detective? Daylight’s wasting.”

  Right.

  Where to? Couple of avenues. Closest first. “Bring your medical kit. First stop is a blood donor.”

  “A donor? Like at the Red Cross?”

  “No, a willing victim. Ysabeau messes with his mind so he enjoys being bitten.”

  On our way out: “Some minds don’t need messing with to enjoy that. What? I’m just saying.”

  The camper was still conspicuous and not. In the Lakeside neighborhood, it fit in fine. Campers adorned more than one lawn.

  Daylight made the place harder to find – but not impossible. The bulb remained red even though dark, and that night burned in my memory. The truck looked fine on the curb, like it belonged there. Jolene led the way, losing confidence as she approached the door.

  “This seems weird.”

  “It is.”

  “What should we do? Should we knock?”

  I twisted the door handle. Open. A smell. Spicy, sour.

  Jo said, “Smells like a teenager’s socks. The ones he uses for porno time.”

  I had no experience with that. But it did smell like sex. And worse. A fam
iliar rancid smell underneath.

  Light hardly penetrated the entryway. A dark like fog hung over the interior. I only knew how to find the bedroom, so I led Jolene that way. Glimpses of other rooms revealed slobbish personal habits. Mess everywhere. Take-out containers, pizza boxes, plastic cups. Clothes. Dirty socks (the prudish part of my mind insisted they were only traditionally dirty). The local independent newspaper on the couch, open to the back pages where less-than-legal personal services could be obtained.

  The bedroom. Dark. Curtains drawn so the red velvet shut out almost all the light and painted the rest the color of congealed blood. Everything looked red or black. Our man lay spread across his bed, sunken partway into a mattress that needed replacing. Tangled sheets formed a crazy topology all around the clearly dead man.

  “Did you do him, too?” Jo asked. At my sharp look: “Kidding. Settle down.”

  “Hardly kidding material. It was her. Look, his neck’s all twisted up like the others. But there’s blood this time.”

  “Looks like.” She went in for a closer look, pulling med gloves from her back pocket. “Not a ton of it. The spinal wound is probably COD. Not enough blood spilled here to kill him, although he does look pretty gray. Want to risk the light?”

  I snapped it on with an elbow. No prints.

  It hardly helped. She poked him on the shoulder, on the face. “He’s totally dehydrated. Normal rigor seems inhibited. No lividity. Eyes…” She pried one open and stuck a penlight in it. If she saw anything in them, she didn’t say. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I want to toss the place anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Clues. Not a lot of other starting points.”

  “This one’s different, Dom.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. The blood. She did him personally. Like a real vampire. You know what I mean. Bit him right on the neck and slurped the blood out of him. Probably took ten to fifteen minutes. She didn’t get it all. Underneath, there is some lividity after all. Blood pooling. Once his heart stopped…” She didn’t need to finish.

  “Yeah. I wonder why.”

  Nothing informative in a messy closet. Jumbled clothes. Boots. Shoes. Some leather gear. A foot locker. I pried it open with one foot. Something informative in there, after all, but nothing helpful.

  Jo appeared at my shoulder. “Kinky.”

  “Not surprisingly.”

  “Looks like he liked to do the restraining. I mean, wrists tend to be pretty similar in size, hard to tell, but that’s a full-wrist sleeve restraint. Too small for him. And those other toys…”

  “Anatomically incompatible.”

  “Well, possible, but you know… I don’t know if I should tell you this. Two years ago, there was that body found in the Ranchville neighborhood? In the barn?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Guy had, uh, carnal relations with his horse. Perforated his rectum. Died of internal bleeding.”

  I kept moving around, looking under the bed, behind the curtains. “Let’s just go with anatomically incompatible, then.” Nothing, and nothing. Attached bathroom, just a stand-up shower and a toilet. The latter looked well-used and indifferently maintained, the former too clean for the rest of the environment. BDSM and bad hygiene.

  Kitchen: disaster area. Boxes of dirty magazines moldered gently, stacked everywhere. A leather smell emanated from a separate stack of boxes. I didn’t really want to know but, in the interest of due diligence, poked one open. Boots, various sizes. With the Post Office boxes in the back hallway, that made this a mail-order business.

  Nothing else to find.

  “This is a bust,” I said.

  “Not entirely. Another dead body. That’s information, just not a location.”

  “Right.”

  “So where to next?”

  “Funeral home. Not likely to find much there, but it’s the next nearest possibility.”

  “Streetlight effect?”

  “Right.” We bundled out, taking everything with us that we’d brought in. The neighbors minded their own business. I should have called this one in but had no way to explain my presence here, so I left it to the usual ways these bodies were found. He likely had no friends and no family, just the occasional customer. He wouldn’t really be missed until he started to smell bad enough that the neighbors called it in.

  Jo took her phone out. She read my look. “Calling it in. Anonymously. It isn’t right to just leave him there, Dom.” I stayed quiet while she did it.

  The camper definitely stood out in the funeral home lot, so we parked behind the gas station across the road and trotted over. The back door, away from the street, was locked. But it wasn’t hard to trip the latch and force entry. I knew from experience the place lacked security. Who would rob a funeral home?

  These days, my mind corrected, they were behind the times.

  Inside, again with daylight starting to wane. If we moved fast, we could risk a light. No help in the showroom. No customers lately, no coffins to look at. Back office had a bunch of paperwork, none of which I understood. Looked like invoices. A bulletin board strewn with random-seeming business cards, family photos, insurance forms. A five by nine card offered the esoteric advice to push in the key code then the pound sign then push in the key code again: three-five-two-seven.

  “What’s this?”

  “Passcode,” Jo said. “How many boxes they keep here?”

  “Storeroom downstairs. Twenty, thirty.”

  “Probably not a warehouse, then. Could be a chem locker. I’d keep it here, though. Transporting all those fluids…”

  “Did you see a Hearse outside?”

  She shook her head. “An old one, in back. Not what they’d drive around in.”

  “See if you can find an address for a garage.”

  Jo looted through desk drawers. “I found a keychain.”

  “Does it help?”

  “There’s an address on it. And a picture of a car.”

  “Winner. Let’s check downstairs real quick and then split. This place makes my neck prickle.”

  Downstairs. In the dim room with coffins piled around. Jo said, “What are we looking for, anyway? You said she wasn’t real except at night.”

  “Dirt. She has to sleep with a handful of grave dirt.”

  “Weird.”

  We opened boxes. Tossed them aside to access the ones underneath. Nothing helpful. “Time to go.”

  We went.

  Outside, the sun stood three-quarters of the way to the horizon. I checked the address on the keychain and did mental math. “We can be there before dark.”

  “You got someplace to be at nightfall?”

  “In the back of this camper. Her coffin is in there. We’re going to wait with crucifixes held high when she comes out. Burn the bitch to hell. Or something.”

  Jo kept quiet. I drove. Fast. No more subtlety.

  “I’m hungry again.”

  Not me. “No time for that. Got to find her. And Enrique. Fast.”

  “Fasting is not as good for you as the infomercials claim.”

  “No, I mean quickly.”

  “What good is it to find him if you’re too weak to help him?”

  Good point, only I didn’t feel weak. I felt driven. The address was an indoor garage rental place. “I guess if your car costs a hundred grand, you want to park it inside.” At the keypad, I punched in the number from the bulletin board: three-five-two-seven. The gate went up. “There a number on that key?”

  “Four fifty-eight.”

  I drove around the place, a huge asphalt jungle. Time slipped slowly away. “Here.”

  We jumped out of the truck, running, feeling the urgency. The key fit the padlock. The red door rolled up on tracks. Inside, the black Cadillac gleamed, sleek and sinister. We didn’t have a key but the doors weren’t locked. It sat nose-out, so checking the back meant either climbing over the seats or throwing it in neutral and rolling the car into the path.

  Jolene voted,
“Push it out. I’m not fumbling around in the back of a hearse. Not today.”

  Heavy car. Took both of us straining to move it. Jo cranked the handbrake on as soon as the back bumper cleared the garage. Then we went and stood behind it. After a minute:

  “You going to open it?”

  I looked back at her. “Yeah.”

  She stared at me, at the handle. Back at me.

  “All right.” I grabbed the handle and pulled. The door opened to one side. Nothing in there. No coffins, no flowers, no grave dirt. Clean. “Fuck.” Disappointed and relieved at the same time. I didn’t want to meet Ysabeau again. I wanted her to disappear. But she wouldn’t leave me alone.

  “Sundown,” Jo said.

  Close. Ten minutes. We sweated the Caddy back into its space then, leaving the door open, piled into the back of the camper. I threw the coffin open on the back seat and snatched out Enrique’s coffin-crucifixes. “One each.”

  “Shoulda brought garlic. And roses. And holy water.”

  I knelt in front of the box, crucifix in my right fist, tablet in my left. I woke the device up to check the time. “Sunset in two minutes.”

  “She’s regular?” Jo stood next to me, crucifix out at arm’s length.

  “Yeah.”

  “This gonna work?”

  “Yeah.” I had no idea. But I knew that faith was the essential thing. If I looked confident, Jolene could have faith in my faith. That could help. “Crosses hurt her. You believe in Jesus.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Don’t guess. Know.”

  “All right, I know. Lord Jesus, save me from this fucked-up shit. Happy birthday and please let’s put this vampire bitch down.”

  I nodded. It sounded like some kind of conviction.

  Time.

  Nothing.

  “Is it sundown yet?”

  The dark that had stolen over the world said yes. The clock on my tablet agreed. “She’s not here.”

  “Put a light in that box. I want to see.”

  I told the tablet to give me a flashlight function. A single, narrow beam ate up the dark in a pencil-thin line. The inside of the box looked as it always did: old, shabby, worn.

  Jo leaned in close. “That’s not right.”