Flesh and Blood

by E. A. Copen

“Maggie, actually.” I glanced at Hammer Guy as he took his place next to the window. The other one remained in front of the door.

  “Never heard her mention nobody from Queens, but she didn’t talk a lot about her life before, you know?” Tag lifted the lid on a clay pot, the kind I’d seen used to warm tortillas before. Inside were several wax-sealed plastic baggies, each bearing a stylized logo. “How much you need, essè?”

  I struck before he could turn back around, hitting the guy near the door first, right where his chin met his throat. He made a gurgling choking sound and grabbed for his neck. He wouldn’t be screaming an alarm anytime soon. Hammer Guy forgot he had a hammer in his off hand and drew the .45 with his right. I grabbed the gun and twisted it back, snapping his finger bone with the trigger. He grimaced and swung the hammer at me, but he had no idea how to use it offensively. The iron head of the hammer hit my shoulder hard enough to make my left arm go numb. I had the .45 pointed at his face before he could swing again.

  Unfortunately, Tag had also pulled a gun from somewhere pointed at the side of my head. I dropped just in time. The bullet hit the front window, and the glass shattered. The door slammed open, and the two guys that’d been left to guard the balcony stormed in, their guns drawn. I dove behind the sofa and crouched as small as I could while they emptied their magazines. Bullets tore through the material, struck walls, shattered plates, and punched holes in posters. My hand closed around one of the twenty-pound weights.

  I waited for a short break in the shooting for them to reload, then popped up and flung it at one of them. It hit him in the chest, and he went to the floor with a shout.

  Tag growled, dropped his empty gun, and charged at me like a bull, putting himself between the gangsters with guns and me . Meaty hands wrapped around my neck and he pushed me into the wall, lifting and choking me at the same time. I tried to pry his hands free, but the best I could do was give myself a few centimeters to breathe.

  “Maggie,” I ground out. “Where is she?”

  “Fuck if I know!” He dropped me.

  I hit the floor ass-first, hard enough that I wasn’t sure I hadn’t cracked my tailbone. Hammer Guy approached, holding the .45 in his free hand. The hammer hung by the claw from his belt like a trophy. He sneered at me while I sat there gasping and held the gun out to Tag.

  Tag pulled back the slide and pointed the gun straight at my head. “I might not know where Maggie is, but I do know somebody’s gonna die tonight. Who sent you?” His finger tightened on the trigger.

  Sweat raced down the back of my neck as I stared Tag down. Move one second too soon, and I was dead. Too late, equally dead. One breath. Two. The world faded away, my vision narrowing to a tunnel showing only me and the gun hovering inches from my face.

  “I asked you a question.”

  I didn’t have an answer. In the short time I’d been in LA, I’d only picked up a few names, none of which would mean anything to this lowlife. None except for maybe one. It was a gamble, a hunch, and if I was wrong, it would get me killed.

  He pressed the hot barrel of the gun to my forehead. “Who. The fuck. Sent you?”

  I grimaced and leaned back. “Spyder.”

  The room was suddenly so quiet you could hear floorboards creak in the other apartments creaking. Tag looked at Hammer Guy. “I knew that blanco fuck was gonna do us dirty!”

  I pushed the gun aside with a strike to his wrist that would’ve left his fingers numb. Somehow, he still managed to pull the trigger, but the bullet went into the wall beside my head. My fist went into his balls. He staggered back while Hammer Guy fumbled to free the hammer from his belt. I ripped it loose faster and brought it straight up, connecting the solid top of it with his jaw.

  The last asshole near the door fired again, but I dove behind the guy I’d taken the hammer from and let his compadre’s bullets rip him apart. I flung the other twenty-pound weight at him, but he was smart enough to move out of the way. He wasn’t smart enough to keep firing as he moved, though. I ran at him, swinging. The first upward sweep of the hammer claw caught his wrist, and I used the follow-through to twist and snap bone. A kick to the midsection took him to the floor, where a single swing of my hammer to the skull was enough to make sure he never got back up.

  Then I turned back to Tag.

  Tag had stumbled to the weight bench, where he was still trying to recover from the first punch to the groin. I closed, kicking away the gun he’d dropped.

  “Shit, man, not like this.” He held up his hands and backed up farther.

  I stood before him, the blood dripping from the hammer turning my fingers red. “Maggie O’Dale. Where is she?”

  “Fuck, man, I don’t know!”

  I swung the hammer against his kneecap. Tag gasped and fell back, lying flat on the weight bench and trying to curl up. I didn’t let him. I pinned his legs and crawled up to sit on his hips, my hammer raised. “Tell me what you know.”

  He took a shaky breath and squeezed tears from his eyes. “She was here last night. Came in bawling her fucking eyes out, saying she didn’t know what to do. Said she owed some asshole money.”

  “Who?” I raised the hammer.

  “R-Ron something. Man, I don’t fucking remember!”

  I gripped him by the shirt and lifted his upper body from the weight bench. “Give me a last name, goddammit!”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. “Slouch. No, Sloch! That’s it! Ron Sloch!”

  I let him go. He fell back onto the weight bench, sniffling and crying. I looked down at him, debating about what to do. I couldn’t leave him alive now that he’d seen my face, but that didn’t mean he deserved for it to be fast. “Just one more question, Tag. Did you know she was pregnant?”

  “What?”

  “Did you fucking know?”

  He reappraised me. “The fuck do you care? You the daddy or something?”

  I brought the hammer down, striking metal.

  “Of course, I knew,” he screamed. “She never shut up about it!”

  I put the hammer under his chin and used it to force him to look me in the eyes. “You sold smack to a pregnant woman.”

  “Why the fuck wouldn’t I? Money’s money. I gotta eat.”

  “Not anymore.” I pulled the hammer back.

  He tried to bargain until I broke his jaw. Then he wept and begged. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before.

  Georgie used to say the punishment should never fit the crime. It should be more brutal. Brutal punishments are the ones you never forget. Ramona Gardens wouldn’t soon forget what happened the night I served up a little East Coast Greek justice in Maggie O’Dale’s name.

  Chapter Six

  Josiah

  Whoever said money doesn’t buy happiness was full of shit. In the City of Angels, you can buy anything if you’re willing to pay the price. You just have to know where to look.

  I called a cab from the hotel office and took it over to Fairfax Avenue, where an old silent movie theater stood, its windows boarded and doors barred. Graffiti and lost-pet signs decorated the exterior, their own form of modern art. The city had reclaimed this place, a piece of its own bloody history.

  I stood on the street and smoked, watching dark shapes creep in the lights flickering through the boards. Though the old silent cinema looked dead and empty, I knew better. Some things never sleep in LA.

  When I’d finished my cigarette, I approached the door. The posters had been plastered so thick over it that I had to peel them back in layers. Hundreds of listings asked if I had seen this person, this dog, have I seen this cat? Young and old, black, white, brown… The cinema walls told the same story of loss over and over, stories without endings.

  Stripped of its faces, the door lay exposed, held in place by a simple chain lock. Breaking that was easy enough with a pair of bolt cutters out of my bag. The door creaked open on dry hinges, and a fine layer of dust fell like snow from the seam. I stepped into a darkened corridor lined with black and white photographs of fil
m stars. The tabloids and networks had all forgotten their names, but the old cinema kept them up on her walls just the same—effigies of another era.

  I walked down the corridor and into the lobby, where cobwebs and rat droppings filled the old popcorn machines and spiders made the soda fountains their home. But they weren’t the only ones feasting in the cinema that night. Wet eating sounds carried through the lobby from behind the counter.

  I leaned on the counter and struck the cobweb-covered bell for service.

  The vampire who had been enjoying his meal behind the counter sprang up onto it in one leap and squatted in front of me, blood dripping down his chin. He hissed at me, breath reeking of death and viscera.

  “Josiah Quinn to see the Spyder of Los Angeles,” I said.

  Every hint of aggression melted from his face and he leaned back, suddenly uncertain of what to do. “How’d you get in here?”

  I ripped a fistful of napkins from the dispenser and tossed them at him. “Clean yourself up, mate. I’m here to see your master, not to waste time with underlings like you.”

  The vampire wadded two napkins, drew them over his face, and climbed down from the counter. He paused for a moment to cast a long, hungry look at the dying man on the floor, but I reminded him I wouldn’t be kept waiting with the snap of my fingers. He ducked under a moth-eaten velvet rope that I had to move aside and went to the right. Signs with removable lettering marked each theater, the letters long ago jumbled into nonsense words.

  Theater Number Seven was where he stopped and held the door open for me. I stepped into the theater, where a single beam of light stabbed at the darkness. It pooled on the projector screen at the bottom of a gently sloping floor, the image that of Count Orlok creeping through the shadows in Nosferatu. I found Spyder sitting in the middle of the third row, the sole occupant of the theater.

  “Isn’t nostalgia a funny thing?” asked the vampire. “So many long for the past and almost no one remembers it. Our perceptions of what was are skewed by our brain’s inability to process and store the mundanity of it all. Look back at the ‘90s, for example. Ask anyone what it was like, and they’ll talk about Kurt Kobain and Nirvana, The Real World, and Pogs. We talk about race riots, but we forget Rodney King. Children in schools are taught about the Oklahoma City bombing, but not the Waco Siege that ultimately led to the attack. If history has taught us anything, it’s that humans are primed as a species to remember effect, but not cause.” He finally turned his head to look at me. “We were made in the shadows, and to the shadows, we return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we seek each other because we must.”

  “I didn’t come here for a reunion,” I said. “Or a history lesson.”

  He turned back to the screen. “No, you’re looking for Maggie O’Dale. The question is why. I know you know her. Visited her frequently in the bar over the last year and a half, despite your hate for this city. The last time I saw you so fixated on someone, you were fucking them. So, Josiah, are you fucking Maggie Dale? She seems a bit young for you.”

  I slid into the row behind him and took a seat, debating how much to tell him. Spyder would find everything out eventually if he hadn’t already. That’d always been his forte—information. In a city where reputations and relationships could make or break careers, information was a currency with twice the value of a dollar.

  “Maggie’s my daughter.”

  Flame sparked as he lit a joint. “I see. It makes sense now, your interest.”

  I leaned forward. “I know you know something, Spyder.”

  “Of course, I do. I’m the motherfucking Spyder. I know something about everyone who aspires to be anyone in this city. It’s my job to know.” He leaned back, looking at me upside down. “I don’t owe you shit. You want information, you buy it like the rest of those assholes.”

  “I already paid for this.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “You bought three days with what you did for me. A life has already been bought. You can’t use the same currency to purchase another.”

  I threw my hands up. “What do you want from me, Spyder? I’ve been on the East Coast for the better part of a year and traveling the world before that. I don’t know anyone from the old crew except you, and when I hear secrets, I let them go in one ear and out the other. I don’t sell them.”

  He stared at the shadows the smoke made in the projector’s light. “Everyone from the old crew is dead. Drugs, mostly. Coop’s still alive, but he’s in hospice. First AIDS, then cancer. Fucker escaped death at your hands, only to have it pile on him all at once twenty fuckin’ years later.” Spyder shook his head and took another long drag. “I offered to turn him, but he said he’d rather die.”

  “Coop never liked vampires. Not the way you did.”

  We sat in tense silence, thinking about the good old days. Spyder and I had never been what you’d call friends. Not even allies. We were acquaintances at worst and mutual victims of the same madman at best. He’d hated me from the moment I appeared at Christian’s flat, and I’d showed him up every chance I got.

  Spyder’s magic wasn’t like mine. Wasn’t like anyone’s I’d ever met, really. He could climb things, bend himself in unnatural ways as if his bones were rubber, and move through rooms without making a sound. If you needed to get somewhere undetected, Spyder was your man, but if you needed a fireball, he could barely manage the spark.

  Christian kept him around mostly because of Spyder’s interest in becoming the next Victor Frankenstein. If he hadn’t dropped out of school to try his hand at magic, he might’ve gone on to cure cancer or any number of ailments, but Spyder had no interest in curing the sick, nor did he have the knack of healing. He’d spent his childhood summers dissecting neighborhood pets and learning to sew bat wings on dead chihuahuas. Christian had him working on some project that sought to fuse his dark magic with medical science, creating literal beings of magic. Homunculi. Life without a soul.

  Spyder also did other things like brew potions and develop tinctures, but his real first love was heroin. I did a lot of drugs in my time with Christian, but I was thankful I’d never touched that one. It was widely believed at the time that some drugs could enhance magical powers, but Christian taught us all it was bullshit. Altered states were for just that—enjoying an altered state. Spyder, however, had bought the bullshit and gotten himself hooked.

  The one thing about a heroin addict that everyone underestimates is their ability to justify their situation. Spyder stopped working. He stopped practicing. Stopped showing up, and spent whole weekends just gone. Christian ignored it for a long time. Wasn’t until he found the test results buried in Spyder’s things that he cast him out.

  February 1996 was warm. It stayed in the sixties for the most part. Typical Southern California winter. Christian called Danny and me to the roof. I pushed through the door and stood under the starlit sky at his right hand, listening as he read the damning letter.

  “HIV positive,” he spat. “Did either of you know?”

  “No.” I glanced at Danny, who shook his head.

  No one said it, but we all understood the implication. Christian was fucking all of us, and the sickness was supposed to be easier to catch than a wounded beetle. We could be infected, every single one of us, and it was all Spyder’s fault.

  My first reaction had been fear, then anger, then relief. I didn’t want to die, and so many were dead or dying. I hated Spyder for not saying anything, and I loved him at the same time because I knew he’d struck back at Christian in a way no one else could’ve. He’d made Christian feel vulnerable. Our great leader had shown his true colors. He was just as terrified of death as the rest of us.

  Christian crumpled the paper into a ball and lit it with a spell. “Find him!”

  “What do you want us to do when we find him?” Danny asked.

  “Make sure no one else ever does,” was Christian’s answer.

  It took me three days to track him to a vampire nest in Reseda. I could’ve called s
omeone for backup, but I didn’t want to share the glory, so I went in myself. Eight vampires died that night in a fire so hot it melted their very bones, but when I found Spyder, I couldn’t go through with it. He was lying in a pool of his own blood, practically dead already, or so I told myself. Let the rats have him.

  But in a terrible twist of irony, the rats didn’t eat Spyder. No, Spyder ate the rats, and in time, rose like a bloodsucking phoenix from the ashes of his clan’s demise to become the lord of all vampires in Los Angeles.

  I’d made him who he was, same as Christian had made me. We were accidents, survivors, hateful beasts.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Spyder. “You killed that fucker. You killed Christian. It’s too bad my plan didn’t work. I think your way was too good for him, but I have to give you credit. At least it worked, so I owe you a little something. Mind you, it’s only a little something. I can’t go showing you all my cards, but I can tell you she pissed off a powerful person, someone with big-time producer credits. That’s just not done in Hollywood.”

  “I already know she was doing porn.” My fingers curled around the back of his seat. Why’d you do it, Maggie? Was it for the money? I’d have given you whatever you asked for.

  Spyder shrugged. “She was good at it. Liked doing it. But showbiz is hard, and Maggie…well, let’s just say she’d started putting on a few pounds in the face. Some asshole—I don’t know who—turned her onto a way to drop pounds quick, which she needed to do if she was going to stay employed. One of my old vices. You know the one.”

  The seat groaned as my fingers tightened. “Maggie was an addict?”

  “Budding addict. She wasn’t in too deep last time I saw her, but when you mix desperation and drugs, bad shit happens. And by all accounts, she wasn’t pulling in the big bucks.”

  I let the seat go before I broke it. “Why’d she quit the bar gig, then? Seems stupid, giving up stable money for a shot at the spotlight.”

  “Do you remember being eighteen?” Spyder gestured at the ceiling. “The lights are bright, the possibilities endless. Who wants to serve drunks all day and get your ass grabbed when you could be breaking out? Some numbskull in a cheap suit probably dropped into the bar one night with his fat wallet and business card. ‘Maggie, my dear,’ he says all smooth-like. ‘Why not come work for me? I can’t give you your big break, but once you get on film, you’ll have experience. It worked for Stallone and the Kardashians.’”