by Jon F. Merz
I shifted in my seat listening to the leather squeak and whine underneath me. "Not really. It’s a very old organization, my employers, they’re rather used to some oddities in life."
"Sounds interesting. Sounds a helluva lot more fascinating than any of the dreary assignments I’ve had lately."
I didn’t know about that. One of her most recent assignment had been to assassinate the leader of a rival cartel operating out of Mexico. According to the dossier Zero had shown me, she must have lain in wait for four days in order to get close enough to take him out. Gee, what a boring life she had led.
"It has its ups and downs."
She leaned forward. "Have you ever killed any other vampires?"
I was becoming uncomfortable with this line of questioning. And discussing killing others of my kind doesn’t really thrill me. When I told her it was a job I did, I meant it. It was a job. I didn’t particularly relish the thought of killing one of my own. But the Balance had to be maintained at all cost. And if that meant I had to put down someone, then so be it. But I wasn’t about to sit here in a bar in Harvard Square and recall any glory stories like I was proud of them. I did my job and I did it well. And the community stayed safer because of it. That was it.
"Cosgrove is the first," I lied.
She sat back. "And yet…you don’t seem particularly fazed by it. It’s almost as if you’re accustomed to the idea that there are vampires."
"Look who’s talking. When I told you about Cosgrove, you didn’t even flinch-"
"But I’m from an area of the world where superstition and reality overlap. My region is known for its wild legends. We’ve got it all: vampires, werewolves, ghosts and goblins. I’m immune to being shocked by any of it."
"I highly doubt you grew up accustomed to the idea of vampires being around you."
She shrugged. "You’d be surprised Lawson. We’re talking about a very remote area of the world. Old parts of the world. I grew up on the land bridge that joins Asia and Europe. I heard some amazing stories growing up. Who’s to say where myth stops and reality begins? It’s a blurred line, believe me." She twisted a lock of her hair around a finger. "And when I got out into the big wide world, the more I worked, the more I saw things ordinary people would deem as bizarre. For me, they became commonplace."
"Like what?"
"Well, of course, not vampires or ghouls. But enough times I encountered strange things, like precognition, heightened awareness and so on. Spiritual residue from kills. Even bizarre dreams." She leaned forward again. "I’m not one of those skeptical types who tries to discount everything only because I’m too scared to accept the possibility that something might be real."
"You’re a believer."
She smiled. "Call it whatever you want. Doesn’t matter to me."
"You’re proud of your convictions, apparently."
She smiled even more. "Lawson, you seem disturbed by all this. Is everything all right?"
"Fine," I said. But I didn’t mean it. Even if Talya thought she was immune to her reality being forever skewn, I strongly doubted she’d come through our mission without being affected.
Cosgrove seemed to almost be more of a novelty to her right now rather than the vicious bastard I knew him as. If she took that attitude when it came down to the wire, Cosgrove would kill her without a second thought. And that meant she might not be entirely reliable for backup duty. After all, it would be my ass on the line if she couldn’t back me properly.
But I had little choice. With Zero temporarily out of sight, I had to place my safety into Talya’s hands.
And, for better or for worse, we were about to step into the line of fire.
Chapter Nineteen
Talya stayed silent as we drove back towards Boston. In truth, we didn’t have much to discuss and besides, I’ve always liked the quiet. I hated being around people who always felt the need to stuff useless conversation into otherwise beautiful periods of silence.
Quiet introspection can have a profound effect on the problems of life. I bet myself five bucks that Talya’s thoughts centered on Cosgrove and how to best play the coming battle. I hoped she’d be able to come up with some better ideas than I’d had recently.
She seemed strangely content to keep right on staring out the window as we drove. In some ways, she almost reminded me of myself.
And that scared the hell out of me.
We broke out of traffic just in time to hit the Massachusetts Avenue bridge spanning the Charles River. We cruised down past Marlborough Street and turned right on to Beacon Street. I timed the light perfectly and we sailed easily down toward Kenmore Square.
Throngs of college students clogged crosswalks like too much cholesterol in your arteries, filling the square to its capacity. Lights from nearby stores cast their shadows across the sidewalks and streets. I tried to remember the last time I’d felt as carefree as most of the students milling around us. I couldn’t. But part of me doubted I ever had been.
"Where are we heading?"
She’d broken her silence, apparently finished strategizing for the time being. I wondered if her failure to kill Cosgrove thus far discouraged her.
Professionals tend to be patient people. They have to be. Their survival depends on them not making any stupid mistakes due to being overzealous. They’re cautious.
But they’re also driven.
And when time begins crawling by and results still have yet to surface, it becomes frustrating. I suspected our lack of progress frustrated Talya to no end. It certainly frustrated me. But then again, frustration and I are old pals. I’m used to it.
I rolled the window down a crack to let some air in. "Club further up Commonwealth Avenue. Calls itself M80. Home to the Euro crowd on Thursday nights."
"What’s a Euro crowd?"
She asked half-interested, but I decided to humor her by giving her a lot of detail.
"You know, the foreign nationals who come over to Boston to go to school. Mom and Dad give ‘em a huge expense account, buy them garish colored luxury cars, and tell them to sow their oats before they come back and assume their roles as heirs to the family fortune."
Talya smiled. "I’ve never known anyone who used the word ‘garish’ in a sentence before, Lawson."
"Stick around, you might learn something."
"I’ll bet." She looked out the window again. "You joking about the expense account thing?"
"Not at all. I read an article about some Joe on Newbury Street who handles the kids’ accounts for mom and dad, you know, to give them peace of mind. After all, if junior blows through a hundred g’s in a month, that’s not good."
"A hundred thousand dollars? In one month?"
I shrugged. "Well, that may be overstating it slightly, but the truth is they have a lot of money. These kids buy bottles of Cristal champagne for their friends at these clubs. I remember Simbik-"
I stopped short. Damn. "Talya, I’m sorry-"
Her face fell slightly but she composed herself. "No, don’t stop. Go on. It makes me happy to know you shared some good times together."
I cleared my throat. "It doesn’t really matter."
She touched my arm. "Yes. It does."
I looked at her long enough to see she was serious, and then continued. "Well, Simbik used to say the most popular drink at his club wasn’t beer, it was champagne. He said the volume they had to buy just to keep the kids wet was absurd. There’s tons of money to be made in the nightclub business, take my word for it. It’s just a matter of knowing how to attract the rich kids and keep them coming back."
"Is that why Boston has such a limited night life?"
I shook my head. "No. Boston has a shitty night life because we’ve got Puritanical laws still on the books. Damned things date back to the 1600s and no one’s bothered to change ‘em." I chuckled. "Cambridge is even worse. Everything over there has to shut by one in the morning. You get an extra hour in Boston."
"Amazing," said Talya. "And yet everywhere else i
s open twenty-four hours a day."
"Price we pay for having a beautiful city."
She went back to staring out of the window.
I eased the Jetta into a spot close to the McDonalds further up Commonwealth Avenue. I turned in the seat.
"Give me your gun."
Talya’s eyebrows shot off of her forehead. "Excuse me?"
"What kind of loads are you using?"
"Standard 9mm. I think the brand is Federal."
"Planning on shooting Cosgrove with those?"
The look on her face softened as she realized the bullets wouldn’t harm him. "All right, but you still aren’t getting my piece." She smiled. "Give me the ammunition."
I sighed and dropped the bullets into her outstretched hand. She fingered them and examined the tips.
"Wood?"
"Yeah. They splinter on impact causing massive damage."
"I thought the old legends didn’t apply. Now you’re giving me a stake to put in his heart."
"Something about the physiological makeup makes them vulnerable to wood. Don’t ask me to explain. I can’t. All I know is it works."
She kept her eyes on me, ejected the magazine from her gun and thumbed the old rounds out into her lap. Faster than I would have thought possible, she reloaded the magazine with the wood tipped bullets and slid the magazine back into the pistol butt.
"You’re quick," I said.
She jacked the slide, chambering a round. "And now I’m deadly to vampires. Shall we get going?"
I nodded and suggested we walk. Talya eased herself out of the car.
"What time do you have Lawson?"
I checked the dashboard of the Jetta. I never carry a watch because the damned things jump off my wrist with alarming frequency. I’d swear they were committing suicide rather than sit still on me.
"Going on ten o’clock."
She frowned. "Aren’t we a bit early?"
"Yep, and that’s exactly the reason why I think we’ll find him tonight. We get here early enough, get a good vantage point and try to beat him to the punch."
"You mean bite."
I looked back at her in the darkness and her smile radiated an almost tangible warmth. A breeze swept up her hair and tossed it around before she reached up with her hand and regained control over it.
"Yeah," I said thickly. "That, too."
She nodded. "We’d better get inside then."
"Hold on a second." I pulled out my cellular phone and dialed McKinley’s number. He answered on the second ring.
"Lawson? That you?"
"You always answer the phone that professionally? I could have been important. I could have been a Council member."
"Up yours, you bastard. Where the hell you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all day."
I’ll bet. "Out and about, of course. Remember, I’m supposed to be doing my job."
"Yeah, but you’re also supposed to be checking in with me. What if Cosgrove got to you first and I had no idea of where you were? I couldn’t send any help."
As if he would have. "Yeah, well, I’m checking in now. Got any fresh news for me?"
"None. What’d you find out at the elder’s place? Anything that’d give us a clue as to why he hit him?"
"Place was a mess. Guy had a ton of books in the old language, but it’s all scribble to me. Did me no good being there."
He grunted on the other end of the line. "Where are you?"
"In the Alley, by Tremont."
"Weren’t you there the other night?"
"Monday, yeah. But you know how deserted the bars are on a Monday night. We figured we’d have a better shot at him if we checked them out again."
"What’s this ‘we’ shit, Lawson?"
"Got Talya with me."
McKinley paused. "Jesus, Lawson, you think that’s a good idea? What if you have to take Cosgrove out in front of her? How the hell you going to explain that one?"
"I’m not worried about it."
"I am."
"Worry about your elders. This is not an issue."
"It could well be if the Council got wind of it. They’d shit themselves silly knowing you let a human work with you on a termination."
"The Council doesn’t care about how I get results, McKinley. As long as I get them. So they don’t have to know how I do my job, right?"
Another grunt. "I’m trusting you on this, Lawson."
"Yeah. Sometimes all we have is trust."
"Keep me informed."
"Will do." I hung up the phone and caught Talya giving me a curious look. "What?"
Her eyes narrowed. "Don’t trust your Control?"
I shrugged, remembering Zero’s words from earlier. "Let’s just say I don’t believe in showing my cards all the time."
"From what I’ve seen, you never really do anyway."
"What the hell’s that supposed to mean?"
She didn’t answer. "Come on, let’s go find Cosgrove."
I followed after her. Damned if I’d ever be able to figure out women, human or vampire.
***
Just like I’d told Talya: the place was thick with Europeans. I caught snippets of at least a half dozen different languages ranging from Farsi, spoken only by Iranian aristocrats, to a Cairo dialect of Arabic, to gutter Russian straight out Georgia laced with enough Mafia references to make anyone with more than a first grade education steer clear. An interesting and eclectic mix of folks, to be sure. All of them young, and all of them rich.
Talya and I threaded our way through the crowds not even garnering so much as a disapproving glance from the Gucci and Prada-conscious club denizens. If you didn’t wear your money, you didn’t even exist.
That worked in our favor and gave us a degree of anonymity. If they didn’t see us, they couldn’t remember us later.
Despite the early hour by club standards, the dance floor divas jammed on the parquet floor while the music pulsed. I’d assumed finding a good vantage point would not be a problem due to the time. I quickly reminded myself why assuming things usually lands me up in a world of pain.
Talya came through, though. She’d been on point and led me toward the rear of the club about twenty feet from the emergency exit. A VIP area closed off with velvet ropes barred our path, but she simply smiled at the security man standing guard and he let us through. She slumped into the booth and I followed.
"Well?"
I grinned. "Looks good. We should be able to see him if he comes in here tonight."
"You think he will?"
I shrugged. "Who knows? There’s only so many places he can go." Plus, I was hoping if McKinley tipped him off as to our whereabouts, he’d come down to the opposite end of the city and do his hunting here. But I wasn’t ready to tell Talya that. "You know it’s always a crapshoot."
She nodded. "The luxury of having good intelligence."
"Right." I laughed in spite of my growing apprehension. "When was the last time you had good intel prior to a hit?"
"Right around the last time I won the lottery," she said. "Never."
"You’ve got as much luck as I do."
She nodded. "Yeah, but you make do. I was sprawled in a muddy field in the middle of Northern Ireland – County Armagh I think it was – covered in leaves, dirt, manure, and lots of rain, for almost a week one time before my target showed up. And I still had to pull myself together to take him out." She looked at me. "Ever done that?"
"Covered myself in cow dung? Nope. I’m a pro at getting myself into all sorts of other shit, though." I paused and checked the surroundings. "But I can understand the incredible discipline you must have had to summon to keep your wits about you while you waited." I inclined my head. "Damned admirable."
"I stayed in the shower for two hours when I came out. Sure makes you appreciate the little things everyone else takes for granted."
"Like a loofah?"
She chuckled. "Especially the loofah." She looked around the club and smiled again.
"What
’s so funny?"
She shrugged. "Just this. Could you imagine the reactions of every other person on this planet if they listened to our conversations? Here we are discussing the merits of discipline when it comes to assassinating people. Good lord, what kind of times are we living in?"
"Strange times, Talya. Trust me."
"Exactly. And here we are hunting a vampire in the middle of a cosmopolitan town like Boston. You’d think vampires would be the last thing to exist here."
"Yet, they do."
"Indeed. I wonder how."
I watched the front door of the club. "What do you mean?"
"Don’t you wonder about it, Lawson? Aren’t you curious? How do they exist? Are they really the undead like the legends say they are? Do they grow old and die like everyone else? I’m bursting with questions."
And I didn’t want to answer any of them. "Remember what you said a few days back? It’s just a job I do. I’m not really interested in Cosgrove’s life story. I just want to put him down with minimal fuss and no muss."
She narrowed her eyes. "Almost as if you didn’t want to discuss the subject, Lawson."
"Cosgrove killed your fiancee. My friend. And roughly fifty other people. I want him dead. That’s it, end of story."
"If only it was as simple as that."
I looked at her. "It’s not?"
"Of course not. We’re dealing with a vampire. It’s an extraordinary thing, don’t you see that?"
"This from the woman who told me she’d grown up with these legends surrounding her all her life. And now all of a sudden you’re awestruck by the whole damned thing? That’s strange."
She frowned. "Well, fine. Be that way. Maybe I’ll just save my questions for Cosgrove when he shows up."
"Don’t imagine he’ll much feel like answering them by the time I plug his heart full of wood," I said.
"Maybe you could just wound him first."
I looked at her incredulous but she only smiled.
"I’m kidding, Lawson. Just kidding."
Was she? Hell, I didn’t even know anymore. I couldn’t be mad with her for being curious. Anyone in her position, even with her background, would have felt the same way. After all, it’s not everyday you find out that vampires really do exist. It’s akin to discovering that Roswell really did happen or that the CIA really wasted JFK. Kind of a reality-shattering event.
