The Fixer: A Lawson Vampire Novel 1 (The Lawson Vampire Series)

by Jon F. Merz

  "You’re hunting him, too."

  "Yes."

  "So, why don’t you go ahead and do that."

  It wasn’t even vaguely a question, which disturbed me to no end. Like I said before, I am not used to attractive and highly capable women being a part of the equation that is my life.

  You might think this whole thing ridiculous but you’ve got to appreciate what I go through. Sexually speaking, I can get it whenever I want to, but sex is usually just a part of securing my sustenance. Sure, I can enjoy it and I can make it absolutely spectacular for any woman I want. Multiple orgasms, the whole bit. And we’re not talking about those pathetic triples that so many women seem to think are so awesome after six hours of sweaty grinding. No, I’m talking about you have three before my pants even come off. I’m talking about long oral devotion. Hell, I bring a thermos and sandwiches and camp out. I enjoy pleasing women. Makes them a lot more eager to please me. And that means I get a lot more energy from whatever precious juice I can get out of them, whether it’s a playful love bite or what have you. So I’m good. I have to be good.

  But Talya was something else again.

  So, instead of questioning it, I stood there looking silly for a moment.

  Talya waved the bartender over and ordered another drink without looking at me. "I’ll be fine. Go hunt him down, Lawson."

  Sometimes I think this whole vampire thing is really overrated. With Talya around, I wasn’t even feeling like I still had control.

  Now that was weird.

  She was right, though. I was supposed to be hunting him.

  I left her at the bar and started to make my way around the place. Get a feel for it. I hadn’t been here before since I usually try to avoid these joints altogether.

  It was large for a bar. One main polished mahogany bar ran down the left side for about a hundred feet, stocked with simple wooden stools. On the opposite side there were the kind of high-backed booths the beautiful people liked to lounge in as they

  ordered their Cristal champagne in crystal flutes. They were packed.

  I moved upstairs to the second floor where a small dance floor had been erected surrounded by more tables and more chairs and many more people. Guys watched girls dance from the safety of the seating area, not willing to venture on to the floor and risk exposing their inability to move in time to the beat.

  Lights flickered in time to the music and spinning globes of crystal and light strobed the atmosphere into a dizzying array of light and sound.

  It was entirely too chaotic and cramped to have made hunting easy for Cosgrove.

  An arm reached out from the crowd and grabbed my hand. It was attached to a young woman with a black miniskirt on and a buzz that would have made a homeless drunk proud.

  "Dance with me!"

  I maneuvered away, freeing myself from her tenuous grasp and headed back downstairs. If Cosgrove was here, it wouldn’t be on this floor.

  Back downstairs was even more crowded than when I’d left it five minutes earlier. So much for the fire code. They seemed intent on stocking as many people in here as they could. And to think this wasn’t even the busiest night of the week. Amazing.

  I took another sip of my drink as I meandered past the booths again. The other night Cosgrove had been sitting in one with his back to the wall watching everything in the club happen around him.

  Watching the many people he could reach out, stroke, and then pluck from life, raping them for their precious fluids. Just the thought of it brought back a fresh image of Simbik on the gurney.

  That was quickly replaced by a need, an unquenchable thirst, for revenge. I wanted the man who had killed my friend.

  And we are a vengeful people, let me tell you.

  Even I, as a professional Fixer, even I fell victim to the desire for revenge. Especially if the victim had been one of my friends.

  So even though facing Cosgrove made my stomach ache, I knew I’d do whatever it took to gain justice.

  I moved around a gaggle of giggling girls putting far too much effort into flirting with a paunchy Euro-type and headed back to the bar.

  I could just make out Talya over the tops of about twenty heads. Even from this distance she was a good looking woman. Check that, she was gorgeous.

  And currently laughing.

  Talking.

  Nodding.

  She sat next to a man at the bar. Apparently, the idea of saving my seat hadn’t occurred to her.

  Frustrated that the immense crowd made it difficult to move, I frowned and then got a better look at Talya and her companion.

  I stopped breathing at roughly the same second my sphincter shriveled up and my testicles headed north to my throat.

  Cosgrove.

  Chapter Nine

  There is a technical term for what I experienced when I saw Cosgrove chatting Talya up. Well, it’s technical in my book. It’s called the ‘jaw-drop-mouth-holy-shit’ reaction. Because that’s exactly what I did.

  Cosgrove had his back to me and Talya obviously hadn’t caught sight of me trying to push my way through the crowd. That gave me a moment to clear my head and try to put sense to what I was seeing.

  Several theories popped into my head at once: the first was that Talya had no idea she was talking to Cosgrove and was using him as a convenient shield while she scanned the room for any suspicious goings-on. The second theory was that she knew exactly who she was talking to and was baiting him along until I got back so we could take him out together thus enjoying a better chance of success. And the third was that she knew it was Cosgrove and wasn’t the least bit concerned about it.

  And that concerned me.

  As I said before, I’ve danced in the covert operations circles a few times before. Conspiracies are nothing new to me. Hell, if I was honest with myself, and I tend to be unless I’m looking in a mirror, my whole role in life was based upon maintaining a very successful conspiracy. As a Fixer, I preserved the Balance, never letting humans know there was such a race as vampires among them. Never letting that fact become exposed.

  But if Talya was in league with Cosgrove, that meant something extremely bad was afoot. And just like failures, I’m not a big fan of "afoot."

  I grabbed a seat close to the end of the bar and flashed just enough magnetic energy at a short-haired blonde who said she worked in human resources (didn’t they all?) at some huge mutual fund conglomerate down the street. That’s all it took. While she played "let me fascinate you with my pitiful existence", I feigned enough interest to keep her tongue moving and used her to study Talya and Cosgrove at the other end of the bar.

  Have I mentioned anything about my Fixer training? Probably wasn’t enough time before, but let me digress here and spend a moment describing a few things I went through in order to become the Fixer that I am today.

  The instructors harped on the ability to be able to communicate in as many way as possible. Then they reversed it and told us the more ways we knew how to communicate, the more methods of surveillance we’d have at our disposal. And one of the most effective means of eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation was to practice the art of lip reading.

  We practiced for months. It was not an easy discipline. Sure, there were the textbook cases we started with. Perfectly articulated speakers who made the right shapes at the right times with their lips and tongues. We practiced with them until we got every word being said from across the room. Then we were sent out to practice in the big wide world.

  Talk about a reality check.

  Nobody speaks as carefully as out test subjects did. We found that out quick. And when you add in the sprinkling of idiomatic speech, accents, second languages, and a myriad of other verbal booby traps, it got pretty difficult.

  But we mastered it.

  We had to.

  So, while Marijane, the pixie personnel recruiter with mosquito bites for breasts chewed my ear off about loving a man with a strong chest, I watched Talya’s lips move for ten minutes.

&nbs
p; The prognosis was not good.

  I speak roughly fifty languages, and maybe twelve other very esoteric dialects. And I speak them well.

  Talya was speaking a language I didn’t recognize.

  Is there such a language as Kazakstani? I didn’t know. But whatever language it was, it was fairly obvious that Cosgrove spoke it too. Fluently.

  That fact alone did not warm my heart.

  And I was faced with more possibilities. Maybe Talya had somehow been planted on me by Cosgrove. Why? Perhaps to watch my movements. Perhaps to try to turn me to Cosgrove’s side. Whatever mumbo-jumbo he’d been spewing on the rooftop, it was obvious I hadn’t put much faith in it. After all, it was Cosgrove, and the freak had always been a hell-bound glory seeking bastard. And besides, I was pretty well near dead at that point anyway. All in all, I think I could forgive myself. But this new revelation put a different spin on things.

  And it raised new questions about Talya.

  Number one might be what the hell she was doing communicating with a vampire? Was she one herself? I didn’t think so, but there was the unnerving fact that she emanated a hunter’s presence. Her background was an acceptable explanation for that. Or at least it had been.

  If she was a vampire, how the hell could she have gotten that close to Simbik’s family? And if she wasn’t, how could she reconcile being in league with the killer of her fiancee?

  My head swam with confusion. This was definitely getting out of hand and I was truly worried. Even without confirming my suspicions about Talya being in league with Cosgrove, things looked pretty dim.

  I watched them talk for another ten minutes, still unable to decipher any of what Talya said. She seemed to grow anxious and began waving her hands around. Then Cosgrove eased himself out of the seat and disappeared out the front door of the bar, leaving Talya alone with her drink.

  And me confused as hell.

  I took the Pixie’s number and slid it into my pocket. I’d file her under the "divorced, easy lay" section of my phone book. Women with no self-esteem come in handy sometimes, and as ruthless as that sounds, when you’re in my line of work, you need all the assets you can get.

  Talya looked up as I approached. I hadn’t quite decided on a course of action, but I did want to take a wait-and-see approach and watch what developed.

  She smiled at me. "Any luck?"

  "No. I didn’t see him. You?"

  She shook her head, closing her eyes just enough that I couldn’t make out any fluctuation of her pupils which might have indicated lying. Not that I really needed to see that at this point.

  "Nothing happened down here, that’s for sure."

  I said nothing. I just watched her. It was an old trick I’d learned in an interrogation course I took once. Don’t say anything and people will feel compelled to fill in the void of silence. Often, they give away some valuable information.

  Apparently Talya had taken the same course because she just kept looking at me. After about two minutes of this, she smiled. "So, are we partners now?"

  Too many doubts about what I was wading into filled my head. Partnering with Talya might not have been kosher from an objective viewpoint, but I needed to keep an eye on her. And this recent turn of events mandated a close watch even more.

  If I’d been feeling particularly sure of myself, I might have put a gun to her head and demanded she tell me what the hell was going on. But I wanted some background on her first before I confronted her. I could be making a big deal out of nothing.

  I usually do when there’s a woman involved.

  So I shrugged. "I suppose it makes better sense to stick together than go it alone. At least this way we can watch each other’s backs."

  She smiled again. "Exactly."

  I checked my watch. It was already climbing toward 2AM.

  Whatever had transpired, it seemed fairly certain that Cosgrove wasn’t going to be killing anyone around here tonight. There was a chance he was still full from his meal of Simbik the other night. Or he’d killed before he’d come to see Talya.

  "Doesn’t look like much is happening."

  "I wouldn’t say that," said Talya.

  "No?"

  "You just made a wise decision about us becoming partners. I’d say that was important."

  I mustered a small grin, but I had more questions than answers, a gnawing headache, and a feeling that before I figured out what the hell was going on, it was going to get a helluva lot worse.

  And to think, people used to call me an optimist.

  Chapter Ten

  Outside the bar, Talya leaned in close to me. "So, what now?"

  I eased back off of her. "It’s late."

  She smiled. "It’s never too late, Lawson."

  I should mention that vampires have an acute sense of smell. Our olfactory sense is one of the most heightened things we possess. So it was fairly easy to discern that Talya was horny. Pheromones leapt off of her like a lemming convention being held at high tide.

  And she did little to hide it. "Why don’t you take me home?"

  Yeah, right. Not while I was still trying to figure out whose side she was playing on. Seeing her with Cosgrove had really fucked me up, to not put too fine a point on it. I needed some background on Talya, and to get it, I’d have to let McKinley know what was going on.

  "Not tonight, sweetheart. I’ve got work to do."

  "But you said yourself it was late. What more can you do tonight?" She snuggled herself against me and I was instantly aware of the her curves and the warmth they contained. I wish I could say I wasn’t tempted. I wish I could say that she wasn’t extremely attractive. I wish I could.

  But I couldn’t.

  However, given that I have an extremely ingrained sense of duty, and given that she happened to be my now-dead friend’s fiancee (or was it ex-fiancee?) I did manage to find the self-discipline to pull myself away from her.

  "Your hotel’s as far as I go. That’s where we say our good-nights."

  She pouted the entire two blocks back down Beacon Street, but it wouldn’t do any good. If Talya was dirty, her attempts to bed me could just be an ambush. I didn’t feel like walking into one.

  It also didn’t help matters that the entire way back to the hotel, my other senses screamed at me. We were being watched. I presumed it was Cosgrove. But, in truth, it could have been anyone. Whoever they were, they knew their business. I couldn’t pick anyone up, and since the streets were nearly deserted, it meant they were a lot better at their trade craft than I was comfortable with.

  Across the street from us, the Boston Public Gardens stretched out jagged tree trunks devoid of leaves, yawning their shadowy limbs and expanding the realm of ebony that occupied the park. An entire surveillance team could set up shop in the stands of trees and I’d never see it.

  The sensation of being observed only made me want to drop Talya off as soon as possible and get home. I needed to know who she was, what she was doing, and who might be connected to her.

  If she’d just hopped in from New York and hadn’t been careful enough, she could have a kill team following her just waiting for the right moment to waste her. Talented pros like Talya always accumulated enemies the way a politician accumulates scandal and corruption. The kill team might be entirely unconnected to what I was working on right now. But I wasn’t naive enough to think they’d spare me. Guilt by association meant they’d try to kill me just the same.

  And that was the good news.

  The bad news was if she was dirty, and Cosgrove was waiting for me, there was no telling how well I’d fare against the two of them. And if Cosgrove had more troops to call upon, odds weren’t good on my getting home to feed Mimi and Phoebe. They’d be pissed.

  We got back to the Four Seasons and went through the revolving door past the sleepy doorman in the long overcoat. Talya turned to me in the lobby.

  "You sure you won’t come up?"

  I tried to smile but I don’t think it came out too well. "I don’t think s
o."

  "Don’t you like me?"

  Now there was a question I didn’t have an answer to. At least, not yet. I grinned. "I like you just fine. I’m tired and need to get home. My cats get jealous if I stay out too late."

  She smiled. "You don’t strike me as being a slave to pussy."

  "Think of it more as a healthy respect."

  "You sure you won’t come up?"

  "Positive."

  Her shoulders drooped but she seemed to accept my excuse. "Tomorrow?"

  "I’ll call you in the morning. We’ll strategize then. All right?"

  She leaned in, lips already puckering. "Russians customarily kiss when they say good bye."

  I left her standing there. "Sleep well, Talya."

  As I left, the doorman, who had come awake during our brief exchange, winked at me. "Nice."

  Guess he’d seen his share of whipped guys come through and I was the exception. If only he knew how much of an exception I really was.

  I picked up my car from the valet and drove home to Jamaica Plain via Somerville. Which, if you know Boston, makes absolutely no sense at all.

  Unless, of course, you know all about taking people to the cleaners. That’s how you lose a surveillance team.

  Even if Cosgrove was following me, by the time I got through my circuitous drive home, he wouldn’t have been behind me. When I went through Fixer training, losing tails was something we practiced in Moscow. Probably the toughest place during the height of the Cold War to practice trying to lose people. During those years, the KGB routinely assigned an average of six rookie gumshoes to every tourist who came through the city. Most of the time, the tourist merely smiled and accepted it.

  For us, it was different.

  We used to have to get them to notice us, most usually achieved by snapping pictures of the KGB building on Dzherzhinsky Square, and then losing them across the city. Without getting caught.

  I favored the old GUM department store for its huge selection of big coats and fur hats. You could duck into old stairwells, or back storage rooms and easily lose the surveillance team. It was tough, though. Getting caught would have exposed us all, so the pressure was really on. But we all passed.