The Vampire Chase

by Stephen Mertz

  Once inside, he took off at a fast clip up the truck path which led on between the high gravel pyramids. The mini-mountains were shiny with moisture, cold-looking, foreboding. All about him, the grounds were still.

  The big .44 Magnum was in his right fist, held tight and ready. His eyes were wary, scanning the dim valleys between the gravel pyramids as he continued along the dirt road.

  The bottom hadn’t dropped out from those hovering black rain clouds overhead yet, but it was still misting. The moisture was icy and unfriendly. Thunder was a constant, low rumbling sound from above. Jagged silver streaks of lightning slashed across the low, dark sky.

  The sounds of traffic on Route One-Sixty-Nine drifted to him from beyond the fence, car tires singing on the wet pavement and the occasional roar of a passing heavy-duty truck rising above everything else.

  A momentary sense of deja vu gripped him. Without slowing his pace he glanced back over a shoulder to make sure that no more behemoth dump trucks were piling down on him. He continued, deeper into the grounds. It was misting harder now. Harder and colder. Off to his left he saw the closest rim of what seemed to be an immense quarry.

  The road curved to his right and he stayed on it.

  He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. But he would know when he saw it. If his hunch had been right.

  The highway sounds from One-Sixty-Nine grew fainter, until the twisting valley between the gravel heaps became a world of its own. It was those now fading highway sounds that had brought him back here. He remembered Connie telling him that this was the first time that anyone on the tour had ever been to Kansas City. That meant that the killer had probably just picked the gravel quarry at random yesterday on the limo ride in from the airport. He wanted to waste Madison, to get him off his tail. Passing by, the quarry must have seemed like a good place. There hadn’t been any time for much more scouting around. So when Madison had showed up here after dark last night, the killer had already taken the time to pick the lock on the front gates, had hotwired and stolen one of the dump trucks left on the grounds overnight, and had been waiting for Madison in the darkness near the highway, to watch him go in and smash him like a bug once he was inside. Now that the killer had more work to do— work that he would want to take his time with—why shouldn’t he bring Connie back here?

  The highway sounds that had kept drowning out crucial parts of Madison’s last phone conversation with Connie also played a part in his being here. He remembered that certain stretches of Highway One- Sixty-Nine were lined with all manner of restaurants. How much like this sick killer it would be, after he thought he’d killed Madison, to slip on his mask of normalcy one more time, just to get his hands-on Connie? Any man looking at her would wish that he could possess her once before he died. She was that kind of magical woman. And a madman could make it happen.

  A madman was making it happen! He had even taken her to lunch, letting the condemned eat a hearty meal. The guy would really get off, watching her enjoy her meal with no idea that it was to be her last.

  And he would bring her here. Construction always shuts down on weekends. So do gravel quarries. The Sloan Gravel Company was perfect for what the guy would have on his mind.

  The winding dirt road curved once again between two pyramids of gravel. Then a clearing came into view. In the middle of the clearing, trucks and machinery were parked around a cheaply constructed one room office/shack.

  Madison saw a dim light from the side window, shimmering through the mist.

  The mist had become a drizzle, the cold breeze whistling through the canyons between the gravel heaps. Madison was soaked to the skin. He moved forward to keep warm, running, keeping low.

  This was it.

  The single window was next to the door. He glided in against the shack, between window and door. He crouched, pressing flat against the building.

  He raised his right arm, thumbing the Magnum onto full cock. Then he lifted an ear toward the window. It was open an inch at the bottom. He listened for voices.

  At first, the rumbling of thunder from overhead blotted out everything else.

  Then he heard the whimpering.

  They were the sounds of a woman in torment, weak with pain, pleading and total humiliation.

  “No... please...not that!”

  And another voice. A voice more growling beast than human, intoning an obscene litany in-low, passion-choked tones.

  “For the Lord God Satanus, I give to you the hot living blood of this woman, your daughter—”

  Madison stood up and faced the shack door. He aimed a powerful kick at the cheap panel of wood and sent it sailing from its hinges. He stepped inside—and winced at the sight before him,

  Connie Frazer was nude, strung up to the ceiling by a long, rubberized length of line, drawn taut onto her tiptoes. She swayed slowly around in an unnatural, slow motion pirouette. Madison’s senses flared with rage at what he saw.

  He had feasted on her. No more than small bite marks, but hundreds of them. Most of her body was covered with droplets of blood; those he had missed with his tongue...

  She swayed around and saw Madison, and her uncontrollable gasp was what alerted the naked man who had been turning and fondling her.

  Lee Brocchi spun around in a low animal crouch. The road manager’s muscular body was matted with coal-black hair. Blood was smeared across his mouth and hands.

  Outside, the storm unleashed itself. The walls of the shack shuddered to the mightiest roar of thunder yet. Lightning blazed. The silvery flash from the doorway behind Madison was a reflected glint in the madman’s eyes.

  Brocchi charged from across the room, still crouching, fingers clenched.

  Madison lifted the Magnum and sighted down his arm’s length.

  “This is for Laura,” he said evenly. “And for all of the others, you bastard.”

  Brocchi’s mouth ripped open in what should have been a snarl. But the snarl never came.

  Madison squeezed off a round with deadly precision, stopping Brocchi in mid-stride. The slug took the guy at the bridge of the nose and blew his head apart. Grayish pink semi-liquids and chips of bone sprayed the air. Some of it splattered across Connie Frazer’s body like splashed paint.

  Connie looked down at the wet shiny mess across her bare thighs. Then she looked at the nearly headless body of Lee Brocchi that seemed to take two or three steps backward of its own volition before becoming a pile of dead matter in a corner across the room. Then her mouth twisted apart in a scream that must have been yanked from her very soul. Her head bobbed forward onto her chest, her blonde hair a golden cascade.

  Mercifully, she had lost consciousness.

  Madison bolstered the .44. He produced a penknife and approached the woman, cutting at her bonds. There was a couch against the far wall. Madison lifted Connie Frazer into his arms and carried her over to it, setting her down gently.

  The only sound was the pouring rain rattling on the shack’s tin roof. A welcomed breeze blew in from the shattered doorway, smelling clean and fresh.

  Madison wasted a quick glance at what was left of Lee Brocchi, The Screaming Tree’s road manager, Madison felt fulfilled. This was the guy the vampire chase had been all about. It had been a pleasure to send him to Hell to his beloved Lucifer. They deserved each other.

  Connie’s clothes were scattered around the floor of the shack. Madison began gathering them up. He would have to help her dress and see to it that her injuries were attended to. Then he had one more stop to make.

  The vampire chase was almost over.

  Almost...

  The storm had passed by the time Madison pulled into the crowded parking lot of Mun Stadium, just off Interstate Seventy east of Kansas City. The ground was damp, but the air was fresh and clean. It was nine-o-five.

  The sounds of a rock band in full flight drifted out to him front within the stadium. That would be the last warmup band to go on before the star attraction, and they were probably good for another twenty-five m
inutes. That would give the roadies thirty minutes to shuffle around the equipment. The Screaming Tree had been scheduled to appear at ten.

  Madison walked through the darkness, between the lines of cars, toward the front gate. His tour credentials got him through easily.

  Before circling around to the backstage area, he paused for a moment at the top of one of the aisles to the rear of the audience. He stood scanning the packed stadium with tired eyes. It was a sight that never failed to impress: seventy thousand screaming, boogying fans, moving and grooving on the same wave length with driving musicians who were barely specks on the stage from this distance. But that didn’t matter. It was the spirit of boogying together that was important. Madison’s generation had learned that at Monterey and Woodstock. It was what rock ’n roll was all about. A loud, loose, sharing celebration of the joys of life. And this crowd was into that trip completely, having a ball with the soaring music and with each other. To them, Laura Bates was only a name in the newspapers. They were here to have fun.

  Madison turned from the celebration of life and continued along the concourse toward the backstage section, his mind occupied with thoughts of death. He was walking slowly but purposefully. There was no hurry now.

  The police had not liked his story, but they had seemed to believe it. At least as far as they were letting on. They were holding onto his gun, but after five hours of interrogation he had been released. He had kept the vampire angle out of it, as well as the tie-in with the murder of Laura Bates. As far as the police were concerned, Lee Brocchi had kidnapped Connie Frazer for obvious reasons and Madison had come to her rescue with equally obvious results. The physical evidence had been enough to sell them on the story, but Connie backing Madison up every step of the way had helped too. As had the general feeling among the investigating staff that rock stars and their assorted flacks were no damn good. What did they expect, doing all those drugs all the time? The consensus seemed to be that Brocchi’s death was sordid but understandable, par for the game he’d played and the company he’d kept.

  Connie Frazer would be all right. She was resting in the hospital at this very minute, listed in Satisfactory Condition. The bite wounds inflicted by Lee Brocchi were numerous but mostly superficial and were not expected to leave scars.

  The scars would all be inside.

  Madison used his I.D. to get backstage. The dressing room area was every bit as crowded as the one back in Chicago at Soldier Field had been, when Madison had heard The Screaming Tree for the first time. But there was a difference. There was no partying going on here. Backstage among the musicians and their followers, the death of a fellow musician's wife was a real thing. People weren’t exactly standing around weeping—few of them probably knew her and, after all, the gig must go on—but even arriving late as he was, the muted energies and general lack of horseplay were noticeable to Madison, contrasting sharply the festive atmosphere out front.

  He elbowed his way through the tightly grouped clusters of people, not even slowing down. The Screaming Tree’s dressing room door came into view. Two burly rent-a-cops guarded the door, one on either side. But it was late in a long evening and they both looked tired.

  Madison stepped between them before either one could fully react. They were just turning as he slammed the door in their faces. He paused to throw the lock, then turned to face the dressing room.

  Four men stared back at him. The three members of America’s leading occult rock band and their manager, Arn Shapiro.

  Jeremy Bates, Keith Terrance and Mick Adamson were done out in their full rock regalia: the black leather jump suits, the high-heeled platform boots, the slashes of iridescent “lighting” arching across their costumes, and their faces dyed wild colors, beneath frizzed-out hair.

  They were huddled around in a small circle, as if in the middle of an important meeting. Madison noticed none of the electricity usually crackling in a dressing just prior to showtime.

  The band remained seated, glaring, at the interruption, Shapiro rose and faced Madison.

  “You’ve got your nerve showing up here,” he rasped. He touched his jaw. “What was the idea of slugging me back there at the motel?”

  “I told you I had to work solo,” said Madison. “You just didn’t want to listen to sense, remember?”

  “I remember all too clearly. I don’t like being kept out of things, dammit. Did you know about Brocchi when you left me lying unconscious there on the floor? Where the hell have you been since three- thirty?’

  “In a minute,” said Madison. He nodded toward the band. “There sure are a lot of meetings going on today. What’s this one about?”

  “We’ve been patching things up,” said Shapiro. “Brocchi is the one who’s been killing all of these women. The guy’s a homicidal nut. He pulled a gun on these guys this afternoon and threatened to kill them.”

  Madison looked at the band members. “Is that why you disappeared from the motel?”

  Keith fielded the question. “Things were coming totally apart,” said the hefty drummer. “We had to get away by ourselves and sort things out between the three of us.”

  “You could have tried calling the cops.”

  “We didn’t know about you and your vampire at the time,” said Mick Adamson irritably. “After you split from our room this afternoon, we expected Brocchi to sit down and talk.” The lead singer was up and moving around as he spoke, wired as usual. “But the first thing he does after closing the door is to pull a gun and tell everyone he’ll waste the first dude who tries to follow him.”

  “And there weren’t any heroes, huh?”

  “He had a gun, Madison,” said Jeremy Bates wearily.

  Madison touched his own side, wincing at the pain. “Yeah, I guess he did,” he agreed. “So, you spent some time laying low and getting your heads together and now you’re here to play the gig, is that it? Just like nothing’s happened?”

  “I explained that to you this afternoon,” said Jeremy flatly. It was as if the events of that day and the preceding night had used up all his emotion. “Laura was a musician’s woman. It’s the way she would have wanted it. She’d understand.”

  Madison turned to Shapiro.

  “The police just released me,” he reported. “I killed Brocchi this afternoon.”

  The promoter flinched as if he’d been struck. His ulcer must have been giving him hell. “Run that by me again, slowly,” he said.

  “He went off the deep end,” said Madison: “After he left these guys he ran down to my room and tried to kill me. He must have figured I was the root of all his trouble. He thought he had killed me, for a while there. Then he went after Connie. He couldn’t have gone on much longer. He must have been hip to that all along. When his time came, he wanted to go out in style.”

  Mick Adamson stopped moving around and sank back into his chair. The singer and bassist was still keeping his distance from Jeremy, keeping Keith Terrance between them. “How much do the police know?’ he asked. “I’ve had my fill of cops.”

  “I squared it with the police,” Madison told them. “The vampire angle doesn’t come into it at all. As far as the K.C.P.D. is concerned, what happened this afternoon was a one-time thing. A crime of passion. They already think Brocchi went crazy on drugs and maybe he did. But the case is closed.”

  Terrance was shaking his head. “I can remember Lee asking about the occult,” he said, his voice dull with shock. “We used to rap about it a lot but… wow, it’s really hard to believe.”

  “I thought I knew the guy,” agreed Jeremy. “We were supposed to be buddies. Then something like this happens.”

  “I’m just glad it’s over,” said Mick. “Man, will I be glad to get onstage again and let loose.”

  “There won’t be any letting loose tonight,” said Madison. “Or any other night. Not with this band.”

  “What are you talking about?” demanded Shapiro. “That was a terrible tragedy, what happened to Laura. But if Jeremy wants to go on—”<
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  Madison turned to Jeremy. “I wanted to get down here tonight before you went out and played,” he said. “Laura might have wanted you to play tonight, I’ll buy that—except for the way she died.”

  Keith Terrance sat erect. “Maybe you’d better explain what you’re talking about, Madison,” he suggested.

  “He’s still playing his damn head games,” put in Adamson. Now that the heat was off he’d lost all interest in getting along with anybody. “Let’s get those rent-a-cops in here and toss his ass out.” Madison was still facing Jeremy.

  “Laura died looking into her husband’s eyes,” he continued. “The show’s over, Jeremy. You killed Laura and you’re going to the slammer for it.” Jeremy Bates rose to his feet. The elaborate stage makeup could not conceal the tightening muscles or the sudden keen interest of his expression.

  “I don’t quite follow you,” he said softly.

  “Then I’ll spell it out. Brocchi was the vampire, but he didn’t kill Laura. Laura’s body was still warm when I found it. But Brocchi had been at my side for nearly a half hour before that. You killed her, Jeremy. You slipped into that motel room she was sharing with Mick and you slashed her throat while Mick was at the front door with us. Then you raced back to the Holiday Inn to hang out with Keith while you waited for the cops to bring you the bad news. You put on such a good “distraught husband” number they even let you go. But it was you, Jeremy, and you’re going to pay.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “You’re completely out of your mind,” he said. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Arn Shapiro looked like a man who’s used to making snap decisions, who suddenly finds himself not knowing what to do or what to think.

  “Do you have anything to back this up, Steve?”