The Vampire Files, Volume Two

by P. N. Elrod

  I walked to the trapdoor and started down the stairs.

  Below the reinforced flooring of the warehouse were the dozens of thick cement pillars that supported it. They marched away in even rows in every direction, their tops wrapped in dirty shadow, their bases sunk deep in the water. The river had left them stained and stinking. The stairs led to a broad wooden landing that rose and fell with the lap of water. Tied next to it was a sleek inboard; on its deck sat an open crate. It didn’t take much genius work to figure out where Chaven had put the heavy machine parts. Once the lid was nailed down, they had only to take a quiet cruise out to deep water and Marian’s body would disappear forever.

  The closer I got to the water, the higher my back hairs rose. For a few-seconds I had to fight to stay solid, so overwhelming was the instinctual urge to vanish and draw away to the safety of land.

  Kyler and Chaven were still sprawled on the landing. Chaven was groggy but trying to pull himself together. Kyler bled from a cut over one eye and was rumpled all over, almost comic in his disarray. He squinted up at me without recognition. The light was bad here for human eyes. To him, I’d be a silhouette against a slightly lighter shadow.

  “Hodge?” he asked, doubtful.

  “Hodge shot himself.” Not quite true, but details like that didn’t matter now. “You’re going to shoot yourself as well, Kyler.”

  “What the hell… ?” said Chaven.

  I raised my hand high so they could see what was in it. “I brought your gun along to do the job.” Had I been capable of laughter, I might have laughed at their expressions.

  Chaven woke up very fast and clawed inside his coat. I centered Kyler’s gun on him.

  “Jack.” Escort’s voice.

  “In a minute,” I called back.

  “You’ve no time left to make a proper job of it,” he reasoned. “We have to go while we can.”

  That made a lot of sense, but I hated to leave the work half-done when only another minute was all I…

  Chaven got his gun out and fired. His aim was off because of the darkness and his own fear. The slug sang through my arm. Negligible damage anywhere else, sheer disaster here. I dropped Kyler’s gun, staggered back against the rail, and forgot about everything but the necessity of remaining solid.

  Shadows grew lighter, threatening to turn gray and vanish altogether. My hand was going transparent; I willed it back, ordering it to hold on to the stair railing, and not to slide through.

  “Do you see? Do you see?” Kyler’s voice What the hell was he talking about?

  I flickered back and forth between pain-filled reality and numbing dream. Escort shouted my name but I couldn’t break my concentration to answer. Kyler and Chaven were limping away, stumbling into their boat, and I was helpless to follow. While Kyler fumbled at the ropes, Chaven took aim for a second, more careful shot. He hit his target, but for him the timing was ill judged, catching me in a semitransparent phase. The bullet whizzed right through my chest and smacked into one of the steps.

  Before he could fire again, another gun went off. The roar so close above almost buried me in sound. It was all I could do to just hold on to the flimsy stair rail. I’d lost sight of everything except the bottomless black water that seemed to swell closer…

  Escott grabbed my shirt collar and hauled me back. Kyler and Chaven swung into view once more. They were both in the boat now and blue smoke belched from it as Kyler got the motor started. He was doing all the work; Chaven was hanging on to the box and not doing much of anything besides cursing.

  Kyler gunned the boat and it glided rapidly away from the landing. He held a straight course between the tall pillars until he was free of them, then turned onto the river and was gone.

  “You had time for another clear shot, Charles,” I said. “Why didn’t you take them?”

  Escott gave no direct answer to my question. “We have to go, Jack.”

  The searing heat in my arm dissipated and with it the imminent threat of vanishing. Still sensitive to the pressure of the water all around, I was unable to do more than crouch on the stairs. Escott eased past me and retrieved Kyler’s gun. He slipped on the safety and dropped it in his pocket. Coming back up, he held his hand out to me.

  “Come along, old man. It’s very cold down here or have you even noticed it yet?”

  With his help, I found my feet and we trudged up and emerged from the trapdoor. He steered me well around the awful tableau framed by the work light, and we headed toward the distant front door.

  “Are the cops coming?” I asked.

  “It’s best that we leave before we find out,” he said, not really answering again. What was the matter with him?

  The inner door was open and he left it that way. He did the same thing with the outside door, leaving it wide. We stopped at his car and he had me put on my overcoat. As he’d guessed, I hadn’t noticed the cold. I felt nothing at all.

  He took me to my own car and asked if I could drive it. It seemed an odd question, but I said yes and got in. He told me to go straight home and promised that he’d be following right behind if I needed anything. I shook my head, a little puzzled, but strangely touched by his obvious concern.

  We drove off quietly, obeying all the speed laws and traffic stops. For me it was another dream ride like the trip I’d taken earlier over to the Pierce house. I pulled up to my usual curbside spot in front of Escott’s old three-story brick house. Escott broke away to park in the narrow garage behind the building. He reappeared quickly enough to walk with me up the steps and unlock the door.

  The place was warm and, after the fresh outside air, stuffy with the smell of his favorite pipe tobacco. We shrugged out of our coats; I draped mine on the hall tree, he put his on a hanger, and then put the hanger on an empty peg. After that we went into the parlor. I sat in the leather chair by the radio and noticed my hands for the first time. They were very dirty and smelled all at once of wood smoke, cordite, and blood. A sickening combination, but I did not feel sick.

  Escott went into the kitchen and dialed a number on the phone. His call was very short and he’d swapped his English accent for a German one. He gave the address of the warehouse and in a frightened voice complained of hearing gunfire, then hung up. He made a brief stop in the dining room before coming in to sit on the couch opposite. He must have poured half the contents of his bottle of good brandy into the glass in his hand.

  “I wish you could have some as well,” he said. “If anyone needed it…”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, Jack.” His answer was easy and reassuring. After a drink and a minute for the stuff to work into him, he said, “I expect what you really need is a very hot bath and some kip time.”

  I blinked a little, thinking it over. “That sounds good to me.”

  He must have been holding his breath, for he visibly relaxed. “You go on up and do that, then.”

  He seemed anxious for me to go, so I went to my room upstairs and peeled slowly out of my clothes as though shedding an old skin. Another layer came off in the hot water of the tub and yet another as I shaved. When I came downstairs again, my body felt better, but still strangely detached from my mind.

  He was on the kitchen phone speaking in a low voice with a hushed shock that was only partly assumed. On the other end of the line it must have sounded sincere enough.

  “I’m terribly sorry to hear that… They do?… Oh, there’s no question about it, I shall come over immediately. Yes, of course …”

  And so on, until he hung up. “Pierce?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Letting me know about the arson on his guest house He thinks it’s connected with his case and wants me to look at things. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Will you be all right?”

  Again with the questions. “You want me along?”

  “Not this time. Besides, you need the rest.”

  Maybe he had a point there. “Does he know about Marian?”

  His face grew longer. “Not yet. The
police may not have had time to sort it out yet. Anonymous calls don’t always send them bolting off to an immediate investigation.”

  He left to get his coat. I noticed that he’d tidied the kitchen up from Harry Summers’s visit. The empty brandy glass stood rinsed and drying with the others on the sink drain board. He wouldn’t have wasted good brandy and I had no doubt that he’d properly finished it off, but his manner so far was stone-cold sober.

  “I found this,” I said when he returned to leave by the back door. I drew out the black velvet bag from my bathrobe pocket and put it on the table.

  “Dear me.” He arrested his move to put on his hat and opened the little bag instead. He studied the bracelet for a while, turning it over and over in his long fingers. I wondered if it felt as heavy to him as it had to me.

  “I thought you’d want to give it back to Pierce.”

  He pursed his lips, managing to look thoughtful and horrified all at once. “No, I couldn’t possibly—not at this point, at any rate.”

  “The warehouse, then. Plant it on Marian, where it belongs.”

  “We can’t take that chance. As soon as the police get there, they’ll be all over the place with their notes and cameras. It’d be impossible to smuggle it in, especially if Blair conducts the investigation.”

  “Then mail it to Pierce. We sure as hell can’t hang on to it.”

  He balled the thing up in his fist, then poured it into the bag.

  “For the moment, we shall do exactly that.” He sounded like a man with an idea, but wasn’t ready to share it yet, “You keep it for now until I have time to put it in the safe. It’ll be all right in that vault of yours below stairs.”

  It’d be just fine, but I didn’t want to have any part of it. I also didn’t have the energy left to tell him, so I meekly stuffed the bag back in my pocket.

  He locked the back door behind him and soon had the Nash out of the garage and was gone. The house loomed huge and empty about me. The place must have been warm enough, but I suppressed a shiver.

  Without thinking much about it, I vanished and seeped through the floor to the walled-off alcove directly below the kitchen. It was so much faster than using the basement stairs and had the added attraction of taking me out of the world for a few moments. It was some time before I returned to solidity.

  The room was hot and still. The lamp was on, just as I’d left it when I’d walked through the wall to find out why Escott wanted to interrupt my writing. Had that happened only last night? I squinted at the neatly typed sheets as though they were someone else’s property. They were. I felt quite different from the earnest would-be writer that had typed them, different in that I wasn’t feeling anything at all.

  A tremor ran up my spine in the hot little room.

  Bobbi’s photo smiled at me from the makeshift desk. It was a studio portrait, done by the best in the city and glamoured up, though with Bobbi they didn’t have to work very hard. She had one of those faces that the camera practically makes love to; all she ever had to do for a dropdead photo was to smile.

  I started to pick it up for a closer look and noticed my hand was trembling. I gripped it with the other, but it was just as out of control.

  No regrets, remember?

  The trembling spread from my hands to my arms and joined up with the tremor in my back. I couldn’t seem to hold it down or stretch out of it.

  No regrets, so why was every nerve in my body starting to scream? I rolled onto the cot and its layer of earth and shook and shook and shook and never once stopped until the sun came up at last and released me from the night’s terrors.

  Epilogue

  THE fact that it was a whole different night when I awoke was of absolutely no comfort. It was still night, and some can be darker than others, as I’d come to learn, and I was starting this one with my equivalent of a hangover. My head and spine held fast to a residual ache and my muscles were cramped and tired and stiff as a…

  Go on and say it, since it’s true corpse’s.

  I thought of a lot of unpleasant replies for that nagging voice in my head, but it hardly seemed worth the effort. If I felt bad, then no one could blame me for wanting to groan.

  When I finally dragged myself upstairs to the parlor, I found Escott stretched out as usual on the couch smoking his pipe.

  “Are you all right?” he asked in his most neutral tone, but studying me closely.

  “Yes. I think I am, anyway.”

  “You sound better.”

  “How bad was I?”

  “You were in some sort of shock. Last night your eyes looked like black pits with nothing in them. Most disconcerting.”

  Understatement was his specialty, but I didn’t want to spend any time going over my troubles. Too much rehashing and they might come back on me. I dropped into the leather chair by the radio and asked a few questions about the events of the day and got an earful.

  Soon after his arrival to view the smoking remains of Pierce’s guest house, the cops came by with the bad news about Marian. Escott had gone with Pierce to identify her body.

  “How’s Mr. Pierce doing?”

  “As can be expected, he’s carrying a heavy load of grief. It’s very hard for him, since he doesn’t know all the details and I can hardly tell him. He will find full enlightenment, perhaps, to be of little comfort.”

  I couldn’t help but agree.

  The warehouse murders had opened up a whole new line for Lieutenant Blair to follow and he was good at his job. My efforts notwithstanding, he’d figured that Hodge’s suicide had been a complete fake and was looking for the third party who’d arranged it. Escott suggested burning the clothes I’d been wearing at the time, especially the shoes. I’d left a fairly clear footprint behind. That they might trace it to me was unlikely, but why take chances?

  “What do they call it? Accessory after the fact, or aiding and abetting?” I asked.

  “I call it keeping a friend out of trouble.”

  The back of my neck prickled. “Charles, I murdered the man. I had a choice, and I chose to kill him.”

  “And we’ve been down this road before and survived. Would you do it again under the same circumstances?”

  I dropped my gaze, giving him his answer.

  “We may argue the fine distinctions between murder and execution it you like, but it will eventually come out that you no more wish to turn yourself in over this particular business than I do.”

  “It’s just… just knowing that that kind of thing is inside me.”

  “It’s in all of us, not just you. Last night you asked me why I did not take that second shot at them. Believe me, I truly wanted to.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “The idea was to get you out of there as quickly as possible. That was much more important than killing Kyler. Perhaps I should have risked complications at the time and done so, because there are sure to be more problems to come from it.”

  “Good God, he’s going to be coming after you with an army.”

  “When he gets the time. At the moment he is far too occupied with avoiding the authorities.”

  The police had quickly traced the ownership of Kyler’s Cadillacs and were trying to locate him to get an explanation of why they were parked in front of a murder site. Blair was also starting to turn up connections between Marian Pierce and Kyler and the gambling clubs he ran.

  “I doubt much shall come of it, though.” Escott sighed. “Kyler wields a great deal of power in this city, whether the city wants to admit it or not, and he’s inherited some influential political allies from Frank Paco. There are threads to connect him to Marian Pierce, but I fear they are not plentiful enough or strong enough to twist into a rope for his neck.”

  “We’re talking stalemate.”

  “For the moment.” But he looked thoughtful.

  “You thinking about the bracelet, Charles?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Of using it somehow to nail him?”

  “Somehow
. But I haven’t quite decided just how. It will come in time. I’m sure of it.”

  Doreen Grey was far from well, but the doctor was more optimistic than he’d been last night. She’d regained consciousness long enough to state in no uncertain terms who had shot her—and why. Though they couldn’t prove by paperwork that the gun found in Marian’s purse had belonged to Stan McAlister, his fingerprints were still on the bullets. The bullets taken from Doreen by the surgeons were matched to the same gun. Since Blair’s original case against Kitty Donovan was too flimsy to hold up, he was dropping it altogether and backtracking Marian Pierce. His talk with Harry Summers more or less clinched things.

  Sebastian Pierce’s load of grief was proving to be very heavy, indeed.

  Some of my own load lifted, though, at the news about Doreen. While Escott lighted a pipe, 1 trotted upstairs and dressed. It didn’t take long and I was coming down again, in my best suit and another pair of shoes. Last night’s clothes were tied up in a bundle under my arm. I’d snipped off the laundry marks and anything else I could think of and had stuffed those into a pocket.

  On the way to the hospital I made several stops, twice at gas stations to flush away labels, then I detoured over a bridge to scatter the buttons in the river. The latter was the most difficult because of the water; the physical discomfort reminded me of the warehouse, and the warehouse reminded me of Hodge. I was glad to leave.

  It was more luck than looking, but I found an incinerator still going at full blast in a backyard junk pile close to the Stockyards. The air stank of burning rubber and meat, but I was able to slip in and out without being spotted. Invisibility has its advantages. Shoes and clothes safely disposed of, I stopped next at the Stockyards and hoped that the drink I took there would clear away the last of the aches.

  Visiting hours weren’t quite over when I reached the hospital, but Doreen was isolated from the other patients and the nurse was reluctant to let me do more than look through a window set in the door. Dr. Rosin-ski was with Doreen and I cornered him as he came out.