I kept going, slowing down and creeping so that I didn't make a sound, even on the tile floor. The signs for the cafeteria and the scent I'd picked up led me to a pair of double doors with small windows of shatter-proof, reinforced glass set in them. I was mostly in shadow, out in the hall, and the cafeteria was mostly lit, so I risked a peek through the bottom corner of one of them and if I hadn't seen with my own eyes the corpse of Clyde lying dead in a field then I'd swear he'd gained fifty pounds and was sitting inside. The man in the cafeteria was eating gas station gourmet: a cheap ham sandwich and a bag of chips. It was Cliff. He was sitting there chewing slowly, staring at his food, eyes a little glassy. Sweat stood out all over his forehead. He was tall, like Clyde had been, but he was carrying around a bunch of weight his daddy never put on. It had the effect of giving him something of a baby face, but he had to be pushing sixty by now. The bags under his eyes were fighting the youthful illusion created by the absence of wrinkles. A lot of times a really fat person keeps looking young way past their time as their skin never quite has room to sag or crease or otherwise collapse under the weight of too many years. Cliff had that going and his blond hair had started to turn gray but it was stringy and dull to begin with and the gray just didn’t have a lot to contrast against.
Now, I had a fairly simple decision before me: waltz in and do the nonchalant conversationalist thing, bust in like hellfire, or keep walking. I was standing there trying to judge the best approach from his expression - a little stony, a little nervous, a little like an injured person going into shock, a little of the deer in headlights thing, a little woeful resignation - when I caught that scent again. The way I figured it, the vampire was either stalking Cliff or protecting him. This would be some delicate work, and I am absolute shit at delicate work. So, I stood up, adjusted my coat, straightened my shirt a little, grabbed the door handle, ripped the door off its hinges and threw it straight across the hall, against the wall. It shattered one of the cement blocks and splintered to pieces, the reinforced glass spraying in eighteen hundred directions on narrow vectors of noise.
I barged through the door, arms pumping at my sides, the rubber of my boots clomping against the tile floor. Smiles’ massive bulk clattered evenly and rhythmically by my side. Cliff jerked his head up, mouth open, and stared as we strode into the cafeteria, threw a table out of my way one-handed and walked right up to stand across his own from him.
“Hi,” I said. “Let’s get straight to the important part. Are you being protected?”
Cliff blinked his eyes at me, very slowly. His jaw hung there like a detached sole as though it didn’t at all work. I leaned down and snapped my fingers in his face. He jerked back a couple of inches but otherwise just kept staring.
“I asked a question,” I growled. “Let’s hear an answer.”
“Guh...”
I reached out and gripped Cliff’s jaw in my hand. You know that scene in Better Off Dead when Ricky’s mom grabs the French girl by the jaw and says, “Frieeeeeeeeeeeeeends?” I was holding his jaw just like that and I worked it up and down a couple of times. “C’mon, kid. I know who you are. I know why nobody’s seen you around. Well, I sort of know. I imagine you’re in here hiding from the cops. Stashed the car somewhere and you just chill in here and wait for it to blow over, whatever ‘it’ is. Thing is, you left the gatehouse unlocked. We just strolled right on in. Been in town all of two or three nights and I just find you like that.” I snapped my fingers again. “So my guess is you’re being protected. I mean, you could always be just as dumb as a sack of rocks, I reckon, but you’re Clyde’s kid and he was always a smart cookie so I’m guessing you’ve got some brains, too. So where is he? The one who’s protecting you?”
Cliff was still slack-jawed. I looked around, sniffed the air, then leaned close and sniffed Cliff. I snuffled and snorted like a happy terrier, right up in his face and around his neck. I could smell the other vampire in the air but I couldn’t tell if I smelled him on Junior here. Smiles was standing with his back to me, watching behind me. Finally I let go of Cliff’s face, reared back and slapped him across the left cheek just as hard as I could with the flat of my right hand. The blow sounded like a cap gun going off, bouncing off all that concrete and tile and metal chairs and metal tables and Formica counters and fluorescent lighting. Finally Junior’s chair came out from under him and he took three quick steps around it and back to hold it in front of him on the floor, like that would stop me. At least it was a reaction.
“Alright,” I sighed. I reached into my pockets and pulled out my phone nonchalantly to check the time. “So where is he?”
“Who the hell are you?” I was surprised to hear that come out of this old man-child who was carrying a big beer gut and had puffy cheeks and burlap bags under his eyes with a nose that spoke of years of drinking the cheap stuff. I noticed now that his stringy hair was also neatly combed and matted in place with hair oil. Hair oil, in this day and age. I laughed a little, an abrupt chuckle, and he didn’t at all know what to think of that but he clearly knew I found something just a little funny and at his expense.
“Withrow Surrett,” I answered him, voice quiet. “Your daddy ever mention me?”
Cliff flinched. He didn’t blink, he didn’t look away, he flinched, like I’d taken a swipe at him with a knife. Now, at what had he flinched?
“I asked you another question,” I said. “Now that makes one I’ve been asked and in turn answered but two you’ve seen fit to ignore. That’s not very polite.”
“How did you know my father?” His voice shook a little but no other part of him moved.
“I went to high school with him,” I said. I shrugged. Easy answer. That made two, though. I’d take it out of his hide to settle the score at this point.
“But you’re...” He looked at me, up and down. “But you’re half my age.”
I waved the back of my hand at him like so much lint to get rid of before seeing someone important. “OK, so you’re not being protected, in which case I shouldn’t be here and neither should you. Let’s make this easy; just look me in the eye and I’ll make it all better.” I started to gather up the will to work a little hoodoo and, for starters, wipe his mind of any memory I’d ever been here. I figured next I’d send Cliff on a nice little trip down to the police station. Vampires won’t screw around with the cops if they’ve got any brains at all. I figured that was the safest place in the world for him.
“Who are you? You didn’t know my father.” Apparently he was still stuck back at the beginning of the conversation. I shoved the table aside with two fingertips and started towards him to grab his jaw again and do this the hard way.
“Could’ve saved us both a lot of time when I got here if you’d just told me you’re an idiot.” I sighed and had my hand two inches from his face when Smiles let out a whine and a scent washed over me like a massive wave: the predator I’d smelled when I first got there, and several others. I withdrew from Clyde about three steps and chanced a look over my shoulder. A textbook Bubba was standing there in old coveralls and a flannel shirt, chewing a cigar with his hands in his pockets and one eye squinting at me. Crow's feet crowded his eyes and his hair was a thin and greasy jet black. He leaned against the door jam where I’d ripped it out of the wall. He was small, mostly spherical in the middle. He had a salt of the Earth look that probably made people’s eyes glide right over him if he ever went out in public. He looked like everyone’s embarrassing redneck cousin, the one with a Confederate flag license plate on their truck. He was flanked by six guys in varying shades of redneck who were all trying to look tough. A couple of them were still alive but the rest were vampires so new they were practically still in the packaging.
“Alright,” he drawled, “That’s about enough of that.”
I turned around and looked the new guy up and down for long moments, then inhaled deep. I pointedly did not look at his color guard. I could see his own nostrils flair a little as I did so, which I took to be him smelling me
out rather than being offended. I didn't much care one way or the other, though. This guy wasn't on Bob's old list. That meant he wasn't someone in the establishment. That meant I didn't give a good goddamn what he thought of me.
“And you are?”
The guy chomped his cigar for a moment and then stood up straight and put his hands at his side, bowed very slightly, mostly from the neck. “They call me The Transylvanian.”
I snorted. No diplomacy or conscious insult, just a gut reaction. The Transylvanian. Classy. Transylvania County, after all. What I said, though, was a little nicer. “Withrow Surrett. I'm the boss in North Carolina. Came up the mountain to make some calls on people, see how they're doing. You're not on my list.”
The Transylvanian smiled for just a moment and then nodded. “I've never cared much for the formalities, but good to meet you.” He tucked one hand into the pocket of his coveralls: a dingy beige worker bee set that had the Clarke Industries logo stitched over the heart. None of his baggage handlers relaxed.
Scavenger, I thought.
He didn't offer the other hand, just reached up and took the cigar out of his mouth then ashed it with a dismissive wave I could choose to interpret as mimicking what I'd done a couple minutes earlier when I dismissed Cliff as ignorant of his circumstance.
Speaking of Junior, Cliff was still standing there just as quiet as a church on Saturday night. Something about the eight of them standing there like I was a turd on their lawn nearly made my blood boil but I kept my features composed. I took a slow, narrow breath and then made myself smile a little. “So. Why weren't you on Bob's list?”
The Transylvanian took two steps into the room and reached down to get a chair off the floor, then sat in it with one work boot propped on the opposite leg's knee, casual as could be. “Couldn't stand Bob. Surprised he lasted this long, to be honest. Always been the kind to keep to myself anyway.” He shrugged half-heartedly. “So what brings you here if you didn't know I existed?”
I picked up a chair of my own and straddled it, my back to Cliff. This was a conversation for grown-ups, not him. I chucked a thumb at him over my shoulder. “None of his business, is it? Just ours.” I didn’t bother to include the other guys in the supposition.
“Cliff,” The Transylvanian drawled after a moment's consideration, “'Bout time for your rounds, ain't it?”
Junior tried to say something immediately, got strangled, cleared his throat, waited a beat and cleared it again. “Sure. Hit me on the radio if you need anything.” I could just see a little plastic-coated wire sticking out of one of the side pockets on the coveralls. The two of them were right at home, weren't they? Cliff gathered up his lunch, tossed it in the trash and walked out the doors on the far side of the cafeteria without looking back. Smiles didn’t like what was going on at all. He sat up straight beside me with his eyes on The Transylvanian’s goons and his ears pinned back.
I glanced sideways to watch Cliff go before I looked back at The Transylvanian. “Which Bob did you hate? There were three of them that I know of.”
He arched an eyebrow at that and smacked his lips. “All of 'em, then, most likely. The one I met was back in, oh...” He thought, counted on his fingers, then looked at a wall calendar that was out of date. “1911, I reckon. However long that's been.”
Alright, so he was old. Not ancient by any stretch, but older than me assuming he was at all telling the truth. I smiled a little and settled my gut against the back of the chair I'd straddled. “Well I put an end to the last one myself. Got tired of being told how to live. Figured I'd do a better job of keeping the peace but staying out of people's personal business.” I shrugged. “I'll leave the details to the imagination but the plan worked and here I am.” I reached out to give Smiles a scritch behind the ears. He didn’t react, keeping his eyes nailed to the other guys, moving from one to the other in practiced, measured succession. “’We’, rather.”
To be honest, I wanted to tell this yahoo how I'd killed Bob. It had been ugly and brutal and a part of me was very, very proud. I'd left a psychotic leech named Sarah in charge in Greensboro after that in return for her helping me. We'd ambushed his car, killed his men, nailed him down with suppressing fire, and burned him and his Lincoln Mark III to the ground at a deserted exit on Interstate 40. The last time I'd looked at Bob, he was a pile of bubbling fat and a skeleton that was dissolving into ash in the bottom of a ditch. Sarah had looked me right in the eye after that, shaken my hand, smiled a pretty smile and started barking orders at her people. She's like that: she’ll kill a man with you and then flounce out the door and ride her motorbike away into the night with a wink and no helmet. I admire many of her mental qualities but Sarah is pretty seriously messed up.
All that passed through my mind in a flash of memories and then I took another breath to speak again. “So what's your story?”
“I keep to myself,” he said simply. Another shrug. “I don't bother nobody and nobody bothers me. Nice and easy.”
I pointed around for a moment. “This place is going to get torn down sooner or later. How long have you been here?”
“Long time.” The Transylvanian looked around the room, too, then back at me. “They won't tear it down as long as my boys are here.”
I smiled at that. So he needed to mention them since I hadn’t acted impressed. Interesting. “I figured they were the wrecking crew.”
“They certainly know how to make a mess when one needs making,” The Transylvanian grumbled. I ignored it. He was just puffing up his chest feathers.
“What drew you to the place?”
He smiled a little, relit his cigar – it had gone out somewhere along the way – with a cheap lighter from a gas station. “It was a film plant. Do the math.”
I shrugged back at him. “Pretend I'm bad at math.”
“We're on the third floor,” he said after he had the cigar going good. “Eight floors are above us. Those are where the choppers, the rollers and the rest of the lines are. Clarke Industries kept all the heavy equipment up there with film running through them out in the open: total darkness, twenty-four seven. They ran this plant in pitch black for decades. Otherwise, the film gets exposed.” He smiled again. “Easy to hide, easy to sleep, easy to wake up, easy not to be seen or remembered or otherwise noticed at all.”
I gestured at his crew with one thumb. “And now you’ve got a few guys to keep an eye on the place at night and in the day. Clever. Must keep you nice and cozy.”
He nodded at me in a friendly way. “I haven’t been outside since they built the place in the ‘40s.”
I looked mildly surprised. “So what the fuck were you doing out and about on Green River Road in the 1950’s?”
He blinked.
I smiled. It was a good smile, with teeth in it.
The Transylvanian worked up a grim little twist at the corners of his mouth and took a drag. I watched him closely. I could see, hear and smell the gears turning in his head. Whether they were gears of memory or gears of lies, I couldn't tell.
“One of my brief forays into the world,” he finally said. “There was a new vampire in town. He was hunting for the rest of us. He wasn't Bob; I knew that. There wasn't hardly anybody around in those days. This whole region was a lot less populated than it is now and there were fewer of us around to match. I went out looking, didn't find him. He knew someone was onto him, though. I think he cut his losses and ran or went to ground for the long haul.” The Transylvanian shrugged lazily. “Never heard from him since.”
I chewed my cheek for a minute. “So you're saying the ‘outsider’ the locals fingered for a murder out that way – this song chaser guy – was a vamp looking to move into the area, found out he wasn't alone and decided to kill off his moneybag and the rest of the help and high-tail it elsewhere?”
He nodded. “That's how I figure it.”
I took a long breath. “How'd he find out you were looking for him?”
“Never knew,” The Transylvanian said simply. He
lifted both hands as he said it, palms up, flat. “I was a lot younger then, barely eighty. It's easy to make mistakes at that age.”
“And if you spend all your time up here in a film plant, why'd you care that he was around? How'd you find out about him in the first place?”
He smiled a little again and said, “He was living out in the world, among people. He attracted attention. People gossiped. Talk is dangerous. That isn't how we work. My maker raised me up right: keep your head down, stay out of people's way, don't let yourself get tied up in their affairs. There are back roads that run from here to there, short cut, over the hills and down into Hardison County. People who worked here heard the stories going around about that kid and his houseguest. It wasn't that hard to figure it out from my perspective. The way I saw it, if he was out carrying on, living in a place where people are, he's asking for trouble. If he'd been under someone's thumb, had a maker to keep an eye on him, something, maybe that would be different. But we can't just let ourselves go out in the world and live there like there's nothing different about us.” He smacked his lips a little, taking a puff from the nasty, cheap cigar. It smelled like it had been soaked in fuel from the same gas station where he'd gotten the lighter. “By making people talk he endangered me. He endangered all of us. There's a simple solution to that: get rid of him. Scare him off, talk him down, whatever it takes. I don't know what it would have come to had I caught up to him, but that was my goal: take the bull by the horns and give him a talking to, one vampire to another. I figured he'd be more likely to listen to one of his own than anyone else. It was a vampire problem so a vampire had to take care of it.”
“But you didn't take care of it,” I said quietly.
“Well, I did, sort of.” He shrugged again. “He left, two people turned up dead in a tragic but never solved murder. I figure he was probably just going to tap the kid for his cash and bail out anyway, eventually, or something worse.”
Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 10
