If Jules’d had a mouth, this is what he would’ve screamed:
“Whoawhoa WHOAWHOA-HAAAAA!”
Thankfully, he didn’t have a mouth, or any other organs or limbs, because the whirling vacuum blades scrambled him up worse than a ride on the old Pontchartrain Beach Zephyr roller coaster. The suction pulled his gaseous form apart. The blades minced the separate clouds into stray atoms. Tiny fragments of Jules shot the rapids through the suction tube. Sudden compression knocked him into blissful unconsciousness; blissful because he didn’t have to experience the forced mingling of his substance with the street filth already in the sweeper’s canvas waste bag, a mingling that would later play havoc with his delicate complexion.
Half an hour later Jules regained a semblance of consciousness. The machine was silent. His atoms had coalesced in the bottom of the waste bag. He groggily wondered whether it was safe to attempt a transformation back to his habitual shape; after the scrambling he’d undergone, the change could leave him with fingers sticking out of his head and his nose where his asshole normally was.
He had no idea where the sweeper had stopped. He didn’t even know whether the sun was up or down. But a quick reflection upon whatelse might come hurtling down the sweeper’s tube to mingle with his atoms convinced him to make the effort. Any fate was better than intermixing with the disgusting slurry that collected in the gutters of Bourbon Street.
The horror of that thought popped him quickly back to human form. His head and one leg protruded through the sweeper’s canvas bag. He quickly realized that the sweeper was still inside the parking garage; Jules figured the operator had left for a coffee break. A minor application of his strength allowed him to push his other leg and both arms through the bag, which-when torn away from the sweeping apparatus-became a rustic, but serviceable, coverall.
Jules crawled to the front entrance of the parking garage, doing his best to stay out of sight. The sun hadn’t come up yet, thank goodness. The absence of light across the street at Maureen’s house meant she hadn’t come home from her shift yet. So it couldn’t be any later than fourA.M.
He cautiously peered up and down the street, looking for any sign of his pursuers. The street seemed deserted. He considered his options. The parking garage was too open to serve as an effective hiding place while he waited for Maureen to come home. The best thing for him to do, he decided, was to squeeze himself into the crawl space beneath Maureen’s house and hide behind her front stoop.
He’d managed to shove about two-thirds of his body beneath her front steps when he heard a very familiar, very agitated voice behind him.
“Well, Jules, I hate to say I told you so.But I told you so! ”
His already cool blood ran even colder. Facing Maureen’s scornful fury was more ball-shriveling than being hunted by dozens of Malice X’s thugs.
“You justhad to go out, didn’t you?” she continued. “You couldn’t even stay inside for, what-six lousy hours? Why do I even bother trying with you?”
He tried turning around to face her, but the space beneath her steps was a tight fit. “Mo, honey, I can explain everything-”
“Oh, I’msure you can! How about we start with the reason you’re wearing a ripped-up sack instead of your clothes? Let’s see… you donated your ensemble to some sweet old five-hundred-pound homeless man, right? Or you just landed a role as an extra in a caveman picture, and the producers were too cheap to provide you with a bearskin-”
“Can I maybe get a word in edgewise here?”
“No!”
“I’m glad you’re being so reasonable, baby. You think maybe we could continue this inside?”
“Why? Am I embarrassing you? Is itpossible for me to embarrass you worse than you’ve already embarrassed yourself?”
“Probably-eh! — not.” Jules managed to back his way out of the crawl space. He dusted the mud off his hands and knees, then glanced nervously up and down the block. “Look, honey, I enjoy an open-air humiliation as much as the next guy, but it’s just not safe for us to be out here right now. Can weplease go inside?”
Maureen blocked the door with the formidable barricade of her body. “Not until you promise to tell me exactly what you’ve been up to tonight. And don’t even try to bullshit me-when it comes to you, my bullshit detector’s as sensitive as a just-circumcised pecker.”
Jules peered fearfully up the deserted street. “All right! I promise! I promise!”
Maureen unlocked the door and stalked into her kitchen. She flung open her refrigerator door, grabbed a glass milk container filled with blood, and took a long, deep slug straight from the bottle. Pointedly, she didn’t offer Jules a drink before slamming the refrigerator door shut again.
“Tell me,” she said.
Jules cautiously sat himself opposite her, careful to keep the table between them. “Well, since you hafta know, I was out doin‘ some research.“
“What kind of research?”
“Research on recruitin‘ an army.”
“What?”
Jules told her about his brainstorm. Maureen’s face remained strangely expressionless, almost dazed. Hoping to curry favor by reassuring her that he was taking good and prudent care of his health, he also mentioned his acquisition of the miracle antidiabetes pills.
Maureen sank heavily onto a kitchen chair. “The rest. Out with it. Considering how I found you dressed and where you were, that can’t beall you were up to tonight.”
“Uh, well, yeah…” Jules paused before mustering enough courage to continue. “I got jumped by a few of Malice X’s thugs. But don’t worry-I managed to give ‘em the slip.”
Maureen sighed and slowly shook her head. “From bad to worse.” She leaned her forehead against her hand, leaving her palmprints’s impression in her thick makeup. “So now he knows you’re back in town. It’s amazing what you’ve been able to accomplish in a single unchaperoned evening.”
She rose from the table and walked crisply from the room.
Jules had steeled himself for a screaming fit. But seeing her leave was even more alarming. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to do something I should’ve done the instant you arrived on my doorstep,” she shouted from the next room.
Jules overheard the distinct tones of a long-distance number being dialed on a push-button phone. He quickly followed her into her living room. “Who are you callin‘?”
Maureen finished punching in the number from her red leather-covered phone directory. “It’s obvious that you are too headstrong, unpredictable, and stupid to be left unsupervised. Unfortunately, my work makes it impossible for me to be your full-time nanny. So I’m calling someone who can hopefully keep you from getting yourself permanently extinguished.”
“Who?”
“Do the initialsD.B. mean anything to you?”
It took a few seconds to register, but when it did, Jules’s face turned purple in a hurry. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare call him!”
Maureen smiled tightly. “Oh, but I just did. And it sounds like he’s picking up. Yes, here he is now-”
“Put that phone down!”
Maureen tensed her free hand into a menacing claw and waved Jules away. “Hello, Doodlebug? You’ll never guess who this is-yes, that’sright! I’m amazed you still recognize my voice, honey. Iknow it’s been ages! How the hell are you?”
Jules squared his shoulders and took two hulking steps forward. “Maureen, this is the last straw! Either you hang up that phone right now, or I’m outta here. Hear me? Keep talkin‘ to that little nutcase, and you’ll force me to walk right out the door.”
Maureen’s smile remained stiffly frozen on her face. “Oh, that’swonderful, Doodlebug! Look, could you hold on just a minute? I’ve got a visitor here, another person from your past, and he’sunpardonably impatient to speak with me.”
She put her hand over the phone’s speaking end. All traces of a smile immediately melted from her countenance. “You want to walk out the door, Jules? Be my guest. Better yet-don’tbe my guest! Just go. My watch says you’ve got about fifty minutes to sunrise. If you intend to sleep anywhere outside this house, I suggest you get busy. Oh, and while you’re tending to your sleeping arrangements, please don’t forget to give my best to your playmates from the projects.”
Jules knew when he’d been nailed. And she’d just nailed his feet to the hardwood floor. His bluff twitched briefly, then stiffened into rigor mortis. Unable to think of a single word in reply, he stalked out of the room. Behind him, Maureen resumed her conversation. “Oh, I’m so sorry, thank you for being patient. Yes. He was suffering from a bit of stomach upset, the poor dear…”
Scowling under his breath, Jules climbed the stairs to Maureen’s bedroom, a windowless room set in the middle of the second floor. Apart from an impressively large flat-panel television, the only piece of furniture in the high-ceilinged room was a custom-built double-king-sized water bed. This monumental contrivance sat low to the ground in the midst of a neatly combed plot of earth, which was planted with a variety of night-blooming flowers. The orderliness of the indoor garden was marred somewhat by the uneven mounds of dirt Jules had taken earlier from his car’s trunk and dumped around the bed.
The strangeness of this setup compared to the traditional coffins he’d occupied barely even registered on Jules’s troubled mind. Still boiling with anger and humiliation, he grabbed the remote control from atop the flat-panel display and flopped onto the water bed, purposefully mashing a few blossoms on the way.
The slow-motion sloshing did nothing to better his mood. He braced himself against the bed frame and turned on the TV. For the next five minutes he clicked ceaselessly through dozens of satellite stations, searching for a glimpse of naked female bodies (or anything less repulsive than a miracle-diet show or an infomercial promoting adult incontinence products). He finally settled on a low-budget erotic retelling of the Snow White story, dubbed into Spanish. Everyone was a lesbian-Snow White, the wicked queen, all seven dwarfs, and even the prince(ss). Jules made a few feeble attempts to whack off, most energetically during the “Whistle While You Work” musical orgy scene. But his heart wasn’t in it. By the time Maureen climbed the stairs half an hour later, he’d switched over to an episode ofThe Rockford Files.
“Are you done sulking yet?” Maureen asked, standing in the doorway. She’d removed her makeup and changed into a surprisingly modest and tasteful white nightgown.
“Men don’t sulk,” Jules answered, returning his attention to James Garner.
“Yeah. Right. And pigeons don’t shit in Jackson Square, neither.”
“So what kinda big plans did you and your little pervert pal hatch behind my back? Or am I too ‘stupid’ and ‘unpredictable’ for you to bother tellin‘ me?”
“Turn offRockford and I’ll fill you in, Mr. Pouty.”
Jules clicked off the TV.
Maureen crossed the path leading through her garden and sat on the bed’s padded frame. “First off, you should know, whether you’re willing to admit it or not, that Doodlebug is a damn good friend of yours. I told him the whole story, and he’s dropping everything to fly out and help you the night after tomorrow night. Now keep in mind, he’s the head of a very important business-”
“A freaky cult, you mean!”
“A very important and profitablebusiness — more than you’ve ever accomplished inyour long unlife, I might add-and he’s putting everything on hold to fly here from his compound in northern California. Nowthat’s friendship for you! He’s very devoted to you, Jules. I just don’t understand why you shun him so.”
Jules slapped the mattress, making himself bob atop a stormy sea. “Oh, you know damn well why! I’m ashamed to think I’m the one who made him a vampire! I mean, the only person I ever picked to do the change on, and look how he ended up!”
Maureen grabbed his shoulders. “Just getover it, Jules! He could’ve turned out way worse, and you know it! You never hearme complaining about howyou turned out, do you?”
Quickly deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, Jules bit his tongue.
“Well,” she continued, “he’ll be here two nights from now, and it’s out of your hands. So just get used to the idea. You’ll thank me when this is all over. Believe me, you’ll thank me.” She clapped her hands twice to turn out the light, then settled into her side of the bed, leaving a foot and a half between herself and Jules. “All right, enough yacking already. I’m pooped. Good morning, Jules.”
Jules clung tightly to the bed frame until the waves subsided. “ ‘Morning, Mo,” he said. He knew it would take him a long time to fall asleep. There was too much to think about. He lay on his back and listened to the sounds of Maureen’s breathing. It had been so long since they had been this quiet together. This close.
Just before she started snoring, he felt her shift onto her side. In the undulating darkness her arm fell across his shoulder and chest like a scented pillow.
Jules was awakened the next evening by the deep tones of the front doorbell. He hurriedly rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Maureen’s side of the bed was empty. While he was recovering from his disappointment and trying to decide whether the doorbell had maybe been a dream, it rang again. His sack lay crumpled at the foot of the bed. Rather than squeeze into the makeshift garment again, he went into the adjoining room and pulled one of Maureen’s terry-cloth bathrobes out of her walk-in closet.
Downstairs, he went to the front door and peered through the peephole. A white man stood on the front stoop, an impatient look on his face. Jules recognized him as a bouncer from Jezebel’s Joy Room. He was holding a large paper bag.
Jules opened the door a hand’s width, so that a bare minimum of his robed body could be seen from the street.
“You Jules?” the man on the stoop asked.
“Yeah,” Jules said cautiously.
The visitor handed over the bag. “Here you go, buddy. Maureen asked me to come over. She found these on the street. Had to pull the coat away from a bum who was using it as a blanket. Two words of advice for you-dry clean.”
He turned, loped down the steps in a vaguely simian fashion, and walked up Bienville Street in the direction of the club. Jules closed and bolted the door. He set the bag down in the hallway without opening it, not especially eager to see what was inside. But then he remembered that Doc Landrien’s antidiabetes pills were in the trench coat’s pocket. Relieved, he removed the pill bottles, telling himself to leave it somewhere more secure this time.
He walked into the kitchen, his empty stomach emitting watery, squishy noises, much like those made by the water bed mattress. He tried to remember how Maureen had fixed her blood-tomato-juice-vegetable concoction the night before.
A happy surprise awaited him. On the counter, a tall glass sat next to the blender, which was full of Maureen’s patented mixture. He poured himself a glassful, then put the remainder in the refrigerator for later. He sat at the kitchen table, where Maureen had left a handwritten note. The note was short and to the point:
Jules,
There’s coffee grounds and water in the coffeemaker; all you have to do is pressON. I left your dinner on the counter to warm up for you, but don’t leave it out of the fridge too long. I’ll be back around 4:30A.M. Don’t do anything stupid.
M.
Jules downed his initial glassful of Mo-8, then turned on the coffeemaker. As the blissful burbling and heavenly aroma delighted his senses, he mulled over his plan to recruit Nathan Knight’s followers into a white vampire army. Wednesday night, when the rally would be held, was two nights from now. The night after Doodlebug was scheduled to fly in.Hell. Thanks to busybody Maureen, he was stuck with the little deviant for a while. At least pulling off a masterstroke like creating an army would demonstrate conclusively that Jules was still boss.
He couldn’t afford to screw this one up. Too much was at stake. He’d have to plan very carefully. He poured himself a cup of coffee and paced the kitchen. The central question, the one he couldn’t quite get his head around, was this: How could he turn dozens of people into vampires all at the same time?
Gas.
Of course! He could use laughing gas to knock the whole room unconscious at once. Then he could pick the best ones, the biggest, strongest, and meanest, and transform them into vampires at his leisure while they snoozed helplessly away. Oh, he knew the pitfalls, after his last experience with gas, but they’d be easy to avoid. Terrific!
Let’s see… he’d need canisters of gas, of course. And a timer of some kind; that way he could set the canisters to release during the middle of the rally, when attendance would be the highest, and he wouldn’t have to be in the room himself. If he was going to use a timer, then he’d have to set up the whole knockout apparatus ahead of time. A timer meant complications-batteries, wiring, and some sort of electricON switch for the gas nozzles. But luckily, he could get free construction advice from the same man who’d happily sell him the parts.
That man was Tiny Idaho. Anarchist. Tree hugger. Bearded ex-hippie radical. The best gadget man Jules had ever run across. Tiny did most of his business over the Web nowadays, but he still maintained an inconspicuous, disguised storefront operation in a broken-down strip mall buried on a side street in suburban Kenner. Jules had used his services for years.
He checked the contents of his wallet. Thirty-two dollars and a dollop of change. Not a heck of a lot to offer Tiny Idaho for what Jules wanted rigged up. Maybe Tiny would consider it a down payment? Jules hated the idea of going into hock yet again, but he couldn’t think of any alternative. Maybe he could cut a few corners. If the gas canisters in his old garage had survived the fire, then he wouldn’t have to buy new ones.
There was just one more hurdle he had to jump before he could begin his night’s work. What to do about Malice X’s toughs, who might still be scouting the neighborhood for him? Once he was in his car, he could be out of the Quarter in hardly more than ninety seconds; but the short walk from Maureen’s door to the garage was too risky. Even his wolf-form was too conspicuous.
Tooconspicuous-maybe that was the answer. If he couldn’t make himself small or stealthy, then hiding in plain sight was his best option. The Quarter wasfull of weird characters… mimes, human statues, and tuba players, to list only the most common. Dressed as a costumed street performer (the more outlandish, the better), he could fit right in.
He climbed the stairs and returned to Maureen’s walk-in closet. Surely she’d have some old thing lying around that would fit the bill… a stage outfit she used in her stripper’s act, or maybe even a Carnival costume. After digging through a tangle of outsized dresses and gowns, Jules found what he was looking for: a harlequin’s outfit. The black-and-white checkered jumpsuit, with its garish frills on the collar, sleeves, and cuffs, certainly looked big enough for him. There was an easy enough way for him to find out.
The jumpsuit was a considerably tighter squeeze than Maureen’s bathrobe had been. The fully elasticized waist was stretched to its limit. So long as he didn’t inhale too deeply or try any fancy gymnastics, he’d be all right. He couldn’t find the bell-trimmed cap that went with the outfit, so he went searching for something else to cover his head and face with. A broken pink lamp shade from the attic, with two eyeholes cut out, fit the bill nicely.
He slung his trench coat over his arm and headed fearlessly out the door. Malice X might scoff at him. Maureen might doubt him. Doodlebug might pity him. But starting tonight, he’d show them all.
Jules circled his old block, scanning the street and weed-strewn lots for lurkers. Montegut Street was as deathly quiet as a Pacific atoll after a bomb test. He rolled down his windows. His nose twitched happily as it detected the familiar scents of diesel train exhaust and fermenting grain wafting in from river barges.
Jules parked. His garage appeared to be the least damaged portion of his house. If the neighborhood’s scavengers hadn’t been too thorough, he might still drive off with a couple of usable gas canisters. At least the looters had made it easy for him to get inside. A roughly five-foot-tall hole had been cut through the garage door’s aluminum panels.
He peered through the darkness at what remained of nearly a century’s worth of personal and family history. As he’d figured, every one of his power tools was long gone, along with his lawn mower and gardening implements. They’d even taken the poured-concrete lawn Madonna that Jules had wrapped in burlap and stored away after his mother died.
But over in the corner, half buried under the cinders of a pile ofLife magazines fallen from an overhead shelf, were three of Jules’s laughing-gas canisters. Obviously, the looters hadn’t known what to make of them. Jules smiled. The winds of luck were finally blowing his way. He dragged the canisters over to the ruined door and shoved them through the jagged hole.
His foot hit something hard and sharp-edged. The object scraped loudly against the concrete floor. The sudden screeching nearly made Jules’s heart burst through the top of his head. As soon as he regained his breath, he looked to see what lay at his feet. It was a box. A metal footlocker.
He bent down to open it. He hadn’t seen one like it since the war years.
Then a vague but thrilling recollection tickled the ivories of his memory synapses. Could it be-?
The footlocker’s rusty hinges gave way as Jules forced the box open. The distant moonlight revealed a bundle of carefully folded cloth, faded and musty but immeasurably vibrant. Jules’s heart leapt as he lifted the bundle out of the locker. He was certain now that his luck had changed.
Once more, after a span of half a century, he held in his hands the hood, shirt, and cloak of that fabled nemesis of saboteurs, that mysterious defender of freedom and democracy… the Hooded Terror.
Jules loathed Kenner with every fiber of his being. After dark, the suburb, penned in by swamps and airport runways, had the feel of a graveyard where even the ghosts were too bored to stir up trouble. The only exciting thing that ever happened out there was the occasional plane crash. But Kenner was where Tiny Idaho worked his magic, so Kenner was the place Jules had to be.
He pulled into the parking lot of a small, poorly lit two-story shopping strip. Its windows were boarded up and plastered withFOR LEASE signs, except for two occupied storefronts. One was an uninviting bar on the ground level called The Lounge Lizard-only it was really called The Longe Lizard, because lounge had been misspelled on the hand-painted sign next to the screen door. The other tenant, Readwood Forest Used Books and Comix, was on the second level.
Jules climbed the stairs to the second-story bookstore, barely visible as an operating business from the street. From downstairs, a jukebox voice warbled on about hunting dogs and guns, punctuated by a sharper, more distinct sound, possibly a pool stick being broken over a skull. Readwood Forest was dark, but Jules knew that Tiny Idaho lived in an apartment and workshop behind the store.
Jules rang the bell. He waited a long minute, listening to the scratchy country music from below. No footsteps. No lights turning on in the store. Jules rang again. This time, a distorted voice crackled from a weather-beaten intercom beneath the doorbell.
“The store’s closed, man. The weekly comics shipment comes in tomorrow afternoon after three. Good night.”
Jules spoke quickly into the intercom. “Hey, Mr. Idaho? It’s Jules Duchon. We done business before. I’m a buyer of your ‘special’ merchandise.”
The intercom was silent for a few seconds. “Oh yeah? Hang tight while I put on some pants. Be there in a sec, man.”
A minute later the door creaked open. “This better be important, man. You yanked me away from an episode ofAmerica’s Most Wanted. C’mon in before the skeeters eat you alive.”
Under the dim illumination of a bug zapper, Jules took a look at his host. He’d only seen Tiny Idaho in this much light once before, about four years ago, when he’d picked up his first set of laughing-gas canisters. The man’s most prominent feature was his long, thickly tangled beard, made up of curly clumps of gray and red hair that reached all the way to his outsized belt buckle. His small eyes, made even smaller by wire-rimmed bifocals, and two large, somewhat yellowed teeth were all that was visible through his abundance of hair. In overall stature, Tiny was neither small nor huge. Jules ached to ask this medium-sized man where his nickname had come from, but he thought it wisest to keep the question to himself.
“So what’s with the clown suit?” Tiny Idaho asked. “You coming back from a kiddie party?”
“I’mincognito,” Jules answered, straightening his collar. It was a good word, and he liked using it whenever he could.
“That’s cool. So what can I do you for? You need exploding balloons, or a nitrous kit for your clown car?”
“Naww. A few years back I bought some laughing gas off you. And you sold me a set of plans for installing it in my trunk and releasing the gas into the passenger compartment.”
“Oh yeah?” His host shut the door behind Jules and rubbed his hairy chin. “Yeah… I remember now. How’d it all work out, man?”
Jules decided not to go into the whole sad story. “Eh, all right. But now I got another project I need your help with.”
Tiny Idaho raised an eyebrow and grinned. “It involve explosives? I just got in some great stuff from Taiwan. These little honeys’ll peel the tread right off a battle tank.”
“Uh, no. It’s another laughing-gas deal. Only this time, I need an automatic-release nozzle that works off a timer. Think you can throw somethin‘ together for me?”
The bearded man laughed, his small eyes sparkling behind his spectacles. “That’s all? Man, you come in here dressed like that-I figure you’d give me somethinginteresting! Come on back to my workshop while I cobble something together. Unless you’d rather browse out front here?”
Jules quickly glanced around the bookshop. The closely bunched shelves were packed with books on ecology and the evils of industrialism. An entire wall was taken up by racks of comics. Jules recognized vintage copies ofZap! Comics andFabulous Furry Freak Brothers; neither of them his favorites. He followed Tiny Idaho through the door at the rear of the bookshop, into the workshop beyond.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” his host said. Jules inhaled the strong, metallic odors of machine oil and freshly tooled steel. Long wooden tables set along three of the walls were covered with a jumble of drill presses, plastic explosives, tangles of wire, and shiny green plastic motherboards. “You got one of them gas canisters with you,” Tiny Idaho asked, “or you need me to rustle you up some new ones?”
“I got ‘em downstairs in my trunk. You need me to bring one up?”
“Yeah. That’d be what we call in the biz Step One.”
Jules went downstairs to his car and fetched the canister, then spent a few minutes describing the kind of setup he envisioned. As his host listened and asked questions, Tiny Idaho rifled through a series of tool chests and parts drawers, pulling out lengths of wire, a soldering iron, and a digital timer.
Jules leaned against a table and watched him work. The gadget man’s fingers danced a ballet of miniaturized construction.
Jules noticed that his host had paused to give him the fuzzy eyeball. “Hey, man. This gas project of yours-is it political or personal?”
“Personal. Politics is a dirty business. You see this?” Jules put his hands around his own neck.
“Yeah?”
“This is what I’m tryin‘ to save.”
“I got you, man. That’s good.” Tiny Idaho seemed to relax some. He grinned and picked up his soldering iron again. “These last few years, man, I’ve gotten so sick and tired of building antipersonnel bombs for every right-wing Fascist wacko who visits my site on the Web… I mean, business is business-I got bills to pay just like everybody else-but this gig of mine ain’t half the fun it used to be. Y’know, back in my salad days, I was doing stuff thatmattered. Shit, I even got a gig from the Weathermen once, back in ‘seventy-one-”
“Yeah, pal, the times, they are a-changin‘.”
“You can say that again. Hey, I’m runnin‘ a special this week on tree spikes. Can you use some?”
Jules raised an eyebrow. “If they’re wood, I could use some.”
“You can’t pound wooden spikes into a tree, man.”
“It’s not trees I’m wantin‘ to pound ’em into. Hey, you ever make up a batch of silver bullets before?”
“Silverbullets? That’s definitely a special-order item. What, you going hunting for werewolves?”
“Somethin‘ like that. Hey! How about a gun that shootswooden bullets? Can you do that?”
Tiny Idaho frowned. “Naww. The ballistics would be all off. Besides, the bullets’d probably shatter before they left the barrel. How about some kinda souped-up crossbow?”
Jules flinched slightly. “Eh, maybe. But don’t call it across bow-and it can’t be shaped like no cross, neither.”
Forty minutes later, Jules left Tiny Idaho’s shop with everything necessary for the remote and precise release of laughing gas. Jules gave him thirty dollars as a down payment. After a lengthy discussion, the gadget man said he’d have a prototype “handheld wooden-projectile launcher” ready for Jules’s inspection by the end of the week.
Jules carefully loaded the equipment in his trunk. He climbed into the Lincoln and started its rumbly engine. Before he yanked the transmission stalk into drive, the scream of a jetliner shook the night. For a brief second the plane was silhouetted against the yellow orb of the moon. Jules’s right hand drifted across to the old metal footlocker resting on the seat beside him.
He opened the footlocker’s lid. Tenderly, he smoothed a decades-old crease out of his cloak, rubbing the rough, dusty cloth between his forefinger and callused thumb. He smiled. In just another few nights jetliners wouldn’t be the only great winged things darkening the moon.
Three and a half hours later Jules piloted his Lincoln through the empty stall spaces outside the French Market and parked behind the Palm Court Jazz Cafй. It was relaxation time. And catching the second set of Theo “Porkchop” Chambonne’s midnight jam session of traditional jazz fit the bill to a T.
Some RR was definitely called for. The trip to Kenner had been unsettling, a frightening vision of the strip-mall horror that had sprung up outside New Orleans. Then there had been the trip across the Causeway… twenty-four nerve-racking miles with nothing but a slender guardrail between him and the black depths of Lake Pontchartrain. That old wives’ tale about vampires and moving water might just be a myth, but even so, the idea of being surrounded by so much water gave him a case of the jitters.
Setting up his equipment inside the American Veterans Union Hall had gone surprisingly easily (once he’d found the place). The building was set a good way back from Highway 190, half hidden in a patch of piney woods, perfect for Jules’s purposes. The thin plywood door had a puny lock, which busted easily in Jules’s huge paw. The meeting hall was nothing more than an oblong room with a low ceiling, a plain podium, and stacks of folding metal chairs leaning against the walls. Jules quickly located a broom closet, which held his canisters of laughing gas very nicely.
But now it was definitely time for some RR. A small group of black men, all dressed in sweat-rumpled suits, stood beneath the music club’s rear overhang, talking and laughing, their faces lit by the orange glows of stubby cigarettes. Musicians, not vampires, Jules told himself; they were all right. He recognized the slight, elderly man at the center of the group, even though it had been months-years, maybe? — since he’d last heard him play in person. That beak-shaped nose, combined with the tufts of fuzzy white hair that peeked from the edges of his brown fedora, was a dead giveaway.
“Chop!” Jules called, waving vigorously. “Hey, Chop! You on break?”
“Yeah. Who’s that?” Porkchop Chambonne turned to stare at the hulking figure approaching him from the street. He tipped back his fedora to get a better look, and his watery eyes widened. “Oh mah Gawd, boys, it’s Mr. Bingle, come to pay us a visit!”
Being mistaken for the Maison Blanche department store’s round-headed Christmas snowman wasn’t exactly flattering; still, Jules was overjoyed to see his old friend. “No, Chop! It’s Jules! Your old pal, Jules Duchon!”
The elderly trumpet player’s willowy forearm vanished between Jules’s huge hands as the vampire vigorously greeted his friend. The other musicians, all much younger than their bandleader, either backed away from the pair or were innocently elbowed into the gutter by Jules’s sidewalk-hogging enthusiasm.
“JulesDuchon? Why ain’t you out drivin‘ your cab?” Chop backed out of Jules’s smothering half embrace and looked him up and down. “What’s with the outfit? You got yo’self a new gig? Doin’ kiddie parties or somethin‘?”
“Naww. I’m just comin‘ back from a costume party. My cab’s in the shop, so I’m on temporary vacation. How the hell’ve you been?”
“Oh, all right, all right. Doin‘ as well as an eighty-year-old trumpet player with fake chompers can hope for, I guess. But me, I ain’t doin’half as well asyou.” He walked slowly around Jules, clucking appreciatively and shaking his head. “I swear, you neverchange, do you? Oh, maybe a little bigger here and there. But not a wrinkle. Not a gray hair on yo‘ head. And you’skept all yo’ hair! When did we first meet? Lessee… I was just a kid startin‘ out on Bourbon Street, no older than Leroy there”-he pointed at the taller of the two school-aged sidemen-“why, that was back during the early days of WW Two-”
Jules smiled and shook his head. “No, Chop, that was mydad, JulesSenior. I’m JulesJunior, remember? We been through this before.”
The jazzman scrunched his mouth into a frown. “Yousure?”
Jules laughed, along with a couple of the sidemen. “Sure I’m sure!” He felt a twinge of guilt, like a rusty nail in his heel, upon deceiving his old friend yet again. But some things just couldn’t be helped.
The old man sighed, then took a long, hard look at the blunt, hand-rolled cigarette held between his fingers. “Yeah, I guess youis sure. Maybe I’m gettin‘ too old to be messin’ round with this stuff anymore.” He held the joint out to Jules. “Want a puff?”
“No, thanks. I just stick to coffee.”
“Yeah, you right. Jus’ like yo‘ pop.” He took a final drag before pinching it out. Then he placed the roach in a silver cigarette box he took from his jacket pocket. “Funny you should mention yo’ pop. Just earlier this evenin‘, I was reminded of my own pop in the weirdest of ways.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” He turned to his sidemen. “You boys go on back inside. I want to talk with Jules here a bit. I’ll be along in a minute.”
The old jazzman waited until the younger musicians had ambled around the corner before continuing. “I didn’t mention this story to none of the youngsters. Didn’t want ‘em to think I was ’touched,‘ y’know? But somehow, I got the notionyou’ll believe me just fine.”
Jules grinned and stepped closer to his friend. A pair of large cockroaches scurried out of his way. “You drive a cab in this town, there’s not much youdon’t believe.”
“I hear ya.” The jazzman sat down on a window ledge and fanned himself with his hat. “Well, my pop, he growed up in the Quarters, back when it was piss-poor Italians livin‘ here instead of all these tourists. And man, did he used to tell mestories! One that always stuck in my head, it was about the rats that live in the Quarters. These rats, they live inside all these two-hundred-year-old buildings we got here. Inside thewalls, see. They got it so good in there, they never need to come out. In fact, my pop, he told me there was whole generations of rats that lived and died without ever seein’ the sun. Imagine that! Generation after generation, they got whiter and whiter, those rats, livin‘ in the dark like that, until their skins got so white that you could look right through it. Rightthrough it, and see their hearts and lungs and stuff!”
“No shit?”
“Noshit. I never forgot that story. Well, just earlier tonight I be walkin‘ over here from my apartment, takin’ the same old route I always take, when I hear a noise from this alleyway. Sounds like trash cans bein‘ spilled over. I figure it’s some dog or somethin’. Just outta curiosity, I take a look down the alleyway. There, sittin‘ on top of one of them cans, be a rat big as my trumpet. Bad enough, huh? But it’s like no other rat I ever seen. I’m starin’ at it, andit’s starin‘ atme, and I can see its heart beatin’, and blood flowin‘ through its veins. Like its skin isglass.”
“It wasn’t no trick of the light, you think?”
The musician shook his head vigorously. “No trick of no light, no sir. That rat was clear like a neon tube. And the whole while I was starin‘ at it, I had the sense my daddy’s ghost was standin’ there next to me, his hand restin‘ on my shoulder. That’s the absolute truth.” He stopped fanning himself and stared directly into Jules’s eyes. “There’s more strange stuff out there than you or me can imagine, my friend.”
Jules grunted his agreement.
Porkchop Chambonne glanced down at his watch. “Shee-yit! Time slipped away on me. I gotta git. You comin‘ inside to hear the second set?”
“I brought my ears, didn’t I? Lead the way, pal.”
They rounded the corner onto Decatur Street. The bandleader hurried through the Palm Court’s door and headed directly for the stage, where his sidemen were already playing an opening tune. Jules paused outside to slip on his trench coat; he didn’t want to distract attention from the band.
The stage was lit with red and green spotlights. The rest of the club, divided evenly between a polished oak bar and a restaurant seating area, was dimly but charmingly lit with glass-enclosed candles. Jules couldn’t make out faces among the audience; all he could see were silhouettes and hands clutching glasses of beer or wine. The place was about three-quarters full. The six-piece band wound down its rendition of “Chimes Blues,” leaping immediately into a rousing “Basin Street Blues” as Jules wormed his way through the crowded room to an empty table near the back.
The kids were good-damn good-but even the most precocious among them couldn’t touch the lyrical artistry flowing so effortlessly from their leader’s trumpet. Sixty-plus years of experience counted for something, after all. Jules listened, enraptured, as his friend slid sinuously into the famous blues first popularized by King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. That was just after World War I, back in the days of Jules’s youth. Maybe Chop didn’t have Oliver’s fiery aggressiveness on trumpet, and perhaps he couldn’t match Satchmo’s almost supernatural virtuosity, but he had a languid warmth all his own. As long as music like this endured, New Orleans would always be heaven for Jules Duchon.
At first he didn’t feel the soft hand that settled lightly on his shoulder. “Mind if I join you? The other tables are all taken, and I hate listening to the blues alone.”
It was a woman’s voice. Unfamiliar, but as warm and smoky as Chop’s tireless trumpet. Jules leaned back in his chair, and when he saw who it was, he nearly fell out of it. It washer — the woman from the Trolley Stop. The cover girl fromBig Cheeks Pictorial!
She smiled at him, her teeth sparkling in the candlelight. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said. “I could see how much you’re enjoying the music. But seeing you again is such a wonderful coincidence. I simply couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t come over and introduce myself. May I sit down?”
Was this really happening? Or was it a hallucination brought on by accumulated stress, a bizarre waking wet dream? He pinched his upper arm with every last ounce of his vampiric strength. She didn’t fade away. He could smell her musky perfume. He could feel the electric warmth of her body, so provocatively close to his own.If this is a wet dream, he told himself,I’m gonna go all the way with it, all the way to the sticky finish line.
“So may I sit down?” she asked again. So patiently, so unpetulantly (so unlike Maureen, who would’ve bitten his head off by now).
“Uh, you wanna sit withme?”
“Yes,” she smiled.
“Buh-be my guest,” he said, catapulting himself out of his seat in an effort to pull out a chair for her.
“That’s very gallant.” He noticed her voice had a sweet trace of a hill-country twang. Gracefully, she settled herself down, smoothing the folds of her emerald silk pantsuit to avoid wrinkling. Beneath her jacket she wore a daringly low-cut T-shirt, which showcased her mountainous cleavage. Jules’s dream girl turned appreciatively toward the stage, closing her eyes and nodding gently in time with the music. No matter how sublime Chop’s solos were, Jules might as well’ve been stone deaf. His complete attention was glued to the rise and fall of her magnificent chest.
When the band slid into the closing bars of “St. James Infirmary,” she sighed with pleasure. “Isn’t the music simplywonderful?”
“Some of the best in the city,” said Jules, trying hard to sound authoritative. “That means some of the best in the whole world.”
“You sound like someone who knows his music.”
“Sure! I been around music and musicians my whole life.”
Her eyes flashed with interest. “How fascinating!” She laughed and patted his arm affectionately. “I promised to introduce myself, didn’t I? My name’s Veronika, with ak. I’m visiting from New York. I know this’ll soundhorribly immodest, but I’m a model-a plus-sized model-and I’m in New Orleans working on a series of shoots for various magazines. Most of my photos are for women’s clothing magazines, and the others-well, let’s just say I doubt a gentleman such as yourself would’ve seen them.”
“My loss,” Jules said with a poker face.
“I think your city is simplymagical. I’ve been hoping to meet someone who could help me see it with a native’s eyes. When I saw you at that little trolley car diner, you seemed so friendly andinteresting, and I wanted to meet you, or at least say hello, but at the last second I was too shy. Then you were gone. So seeing you again tonight, in this place, with this wonderful music, I just know that we were meant to be friends.”
Jules felt suspended in a warm velvet fog. Every honey-coated word she spoke sizzled a path from his ears straight to his groin. He caught sight of his empty outfit in a mirrored post. Why did this woman have to meet him on a night when he was dressed in Maureen’s harlequin costume?
“I, uh, I’m comin‘ back from some kids’ party. Crippled kids, actually. All stuck in wheelchairs. Charity work, y’know. I do this sorta thing all the time.”
“That’s sonoble of you.” She grasped his paw tightly between her two soft hands and stared into his eyes. They listened to the remainder of the set in silence.When the band finished their final number the house lights came up like a sudden dawn. The forty or so patrons gathered their coats and purses and began shuffling toward the doors.
Veronika turned to Jules and smiled warmly. “Oh, that was simplyexquisite. Thank you for sharing such a fabulous evening with me.” She leaned across the table and lightly stroked his forearm with her fingertips. “Would you mind escorting me back to my hotel? I’d feelso much safer.”
“I-” Maureen’s face flashed on the mildewed movie screen of Jules’s mind. Hadn’t she put her arm over him the night before, just as she’d fallen asleep? What wouldshe think? Oh, she’d be fine with it if he intended to fang the woman… butfanging was not the verb Jules had in mind. He thought hard and furiously about the nature of luck. Until today, his recent luck had beenshit luck. What would happen if, now that his luck had turned amazingly, fabulouslygood, he ungratefully turned his back on it? Would it go and dry up into a desiccated turd again?
“I, uh-I’d behonored to walk you to your hotel.”
Veronika’s hotel was a Spanish Colonial-style mansion on Barracks Street that had been converted into time-share condominiums. She opened the front door, recently renovated to show off its intricate moldings. The air in the foyer was chilled to a crisp sixty-five degrees, a nearly twenty-degree drop from the temperature outside.
Veronika removed a handkerchief from her purse and delicately dabbed her forehead and neck. “Please excuse me… I’m simply not used to this humidity anymore.” She looked at her companion, who was arid as a white desert. “How do you manage to stay so dry in all this dampness? A big husky man like you?”
Jules leaned against the gilded back of a French Restoration side chair. “Oh, y’know, when you’ve been livin‘ in New Orleans as long as I have, you kinda get used to a bit a stickiness.”
She took his hand and led him to a stairway at the rear of the foyer. “Come. I’m up on the third floor.” She laughed, sounding more like a schoolgirl than a (very) grown woman. “The only fault I can find with this place is it doesn’t have an elevator.”
“That’s okay. I can handle two flights easy enough.” Heck, with her holding his hand, her perfume tantalizing him, he’d climb to the top of One Shell Square, fifty stories up.
To Doc Landrieu’s credit, Jules made it to the third floor without even breathing hard. Veronika fumbled with her room key; her excitement buzzed his skin like static electricity. Jules was excited, too. But he was also nervous as hell. His nerves accomplished what the nighttime humidity hadn’t; sweat poured out of the pinched glands beneath his arms. He half expected that when Veronika finally got the door open, Maureen would be standing on the other side, vengefully clutching a stake pointed at his (cheatin‘) heart.
After what felt like a sizable chunk of eternity, Veronika got the key to work. The door opened. No ten-foot-tall Maureen made a jealous grab for his testicles. He took a deep breath and followed Veronika inside. The room was sumptuous. It was dominated by a startlingly large whirlpool bath, which managed to overpower even the red-velvet-covered king-sized bed.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked him as she stepped quickly to the mini bar. “My employers are very generous. Anything I want, I just put it on their tab.”
“I’ll skip it, thanks,” he stammered, fingering the velvet bedspread.
“Well, I’m going to make myself something. I’mthirsty!”
Jules watched her pour Sprite, cranapple juice, cherry concentrate, and vodka into a tumbler. She mixed it with her pinkie and gulped it down quickly, not even pausing to add ice cubes. She set the glass down on the dresser by the bed. Then, before he could brace himself, she was all over him.
Her lips engulfed his mouth. He tasted cherry on her tongue, and a hint of vodka. He felt himself losing his balance as their bodies collided. He tumbled backward onto the bed, and Veronika followed. Their stomachs, like air bags, cushioned their impact, but her top front teeth banged into his as their combined weight mashed the bedsprings to full compression. She rolled off him, laughing uproariously as he struggled to regain the air that had been squeezed out of his rib cage.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha,”she laughed, turning red as she tried catching her breath. “Oh, I think I busted a tooth! Ouch! Are you all right? Oh, that’s not what I meant to do at all! Let’s try that again, okay?”
“Just give-just give me-a second to catch my breath, baby-”
“Sure, sweetie. Ha-heh. Sure.” They both lay there a minute, side by side, each half on and half off the bed. She reached over and tentatively, but amorously, caressed his arm. “Tell you what. I’m so hot and sticky from the walk back from that jazz club. How about we relax together in that big tub?”
“Sure-sure thing!” Jules groaned, rubbing his side where he’d slammed into the bed frame.I’ll have me a bruise worse than Mikhail Gorbachev’s birthmark, he told himself.Good luck explaining thatto Maureen.
“I bet I know how to get you in the mood,” she said, her eyes sparkling. She stood up from the bed and danced to the middle of the room, her hips gyrating to a mambo only she could hear. She slipped off her shoes, then sensuously slithered out of her jacket. The white flesh of her arms was toned and flawless, but that wasn’t what stunned Jules. Her black silk T-shirt clung to her Amazonian form like a good coat of paint. Embroidered just above her left breast was the stylized slogan: I (HEART) VAMPIRES. The picture of the heart was pierced by a pair of cartoonish fangs and dripped droplets of Day-Glo blood.
Veronika noticed Jules’s wide-eyed expression. “Isn’t this shirt justdarling? I picked it up a few days ago at Agatha Longrain’s boutique in the Garden District. She had so much wonderful stuff there. I’ve been one of her biggest fans almost as far back as I can remember.”
“Er, yeah, it’s beautiful, baby. You got good taste.”
“Thanks.” She grinned slyly. “Ithink I’ve got good taste, too. Especially inmen.” She continued her striptease. The shirt came off next. Her bra was massive but exquisitely stylish. Expensive lace hid an underwire apparatus on a par with da Vinci’s marvels of engineering.
She leaned against an antique bureau and gracefully removed her pants. Jules expected to see a girdle of Victorian severity heave into view. Surely her hourglass figure required one-no hips on earth could be so gargantuan and yet so classically and smoothly curved all on their own. But all she wore beneath her pants was a pair of lace panties, which were nearly hidden by the tummy rolls that cascaded down her upper thighs like ripples in a lake of pure cream.
The sight hit Jules like a thunderclap-those photos inBig Cheeks Pictorial hadn’t been airbrushed one bit-!
She grinned salaciously at him, turned on the spigot, then pressed a button on the wall next to the Jacuzzi. The big tub’s waters poured forth and bubbled into life. Veronika eased herself slowly and carefully into the hot froth, a Venus returning to her birthplace in the surf. “Oh God, this feelsheavenly!” She settled herself onto a submerged seat molded into the tub’s steps and leaned back, spreading her legs wide. Her painted toenails peeked above the bubbles. “Okay, handsome. I’m not the only one who gets wet here. Your turn.”
“Uh, maybe you’ll give me just a minute to, eh, get naked in private?”
Her full lips formed an exaggerated pout. “Oh, now what fun isthat? Don’t I get a striptease, too?”
Jules turned red all over. He couldn’t remember the last woman (aside from Maureen) he’d stripped in front of. The notion of taking off his clothes in a well-lit room in front of a strange woman made him feel eight years old again, the little boy who didn’t want to take a naked shower in the St. Ignatius locker room.
“Eh, this, well, this is gonna sound realstupid… but I’d be a helluva lot more comfortable takin‘ off these clothes in the bathroom. And you think, maybe, we could turn these lights down some?”
Her toes sank out of sight as she sat up straighter in the Jacuzzi. “Will that make you feel more in the mood?”
“Yeah. Actually, it would.”
“Okay.” She pointed to her dresser. “Look in that top left-hand drawer there. You’ll find some scented candles and a box of matches. Light some of those and you can turn off the overhead light.”
He did as she instructed. Then he hung his trench coat on the coatrack by the door before slinking into the bathroom.
Good thing this was a luxury condominium-given the size of the typical hotel/motel bathroom, Jules expected to barely have room enough to turn around, but there was ample space here. He examined the harlequin suit after he managed to wiggle out of it. He’d definitely have to get it dry-cleaned; the sides beneath the sleeves were already yellowish with drying perspiration.
He leaned against the sink as he stepped out of his underwear. So he was actually going to do this. He was actually going to get laid. Jules stared down at his stomach. He couldn’t see his privates, but his belly’s white folds were sturdily propped up in the middle.
Maybe his pecker was happy, but for some reason his eyes were beginning to water like hell. What the devil could be causingthat? He checked behind the shower curtain. He saw nothing but a bar of soap, a bottle of conditioning shampoo, and a Lady Bic razor. He examined the sink a little closer. The stinging in his eyes got worse. He knelt down and opened up the cabinet beneath the sink.Whew! What a stink! When his vision cleared, he saw a canvas duffel bag sitting beneath the drainpipe. He pulled it toward the edge of the cabinet and opened it. The contents nearly knocked him against the opposite wall.
What the fuck? Garlic cloves! Enough to cook a feast for the entire Mafia! And crucifixes?What was she doing with all this crap (and in the bathroom, yet)?
“Jules? What’s taking you so long in there, handsome? I’m getting lonely.”
He shut the cabinet and quickly dabbed his eyes with some toilet paper. When he left the bathroom, his fleshy tent was already beginning to sag. Should he ask her about the weird crap under the sink? Or should he just climb in the tub and pork her while it was still an option?
“Thereyou are,” she said brightly. “I was afraid I’d turn into a prune before you got here. Come on in! The water’sdelicious!”
His big head (the one atop his neck) told him to leave. His little head (the one below his stomach) told him to get the hell in the hot tub already. Little head overruled big head. Jules grabbed hold of the side of the tub and climbed in. It was a big Jacuzzi, true, maybe big enough for four or five normal-sized folks, but with Veronika already ensconced, he felt like the proverbial sardine squeezing into a sardine can.
The upside of this situation was that his naked flesh was jammed tightly against her naked flesh. “Mmmm, c’mere, lover,” she whispered. “This time, you aren’t goinganywhere.”
She kissed him more expertly this time. He felt lost in her glorious body. Lost, and he never wanted to be found again. And then she stopped kissing him.
“Huh?” He opened his eyes. “Whassa matter? You were doin‘great, baby-”
“Hold your horses, handsome.” She removed the cork from a small bottle of clear liquid. “This bath oil is my absolutefavorite. It’ll make us smell all flowery fresh for when we climb into bed.”
She poured the contents of the bottle into the tub. The water’s bubbling immediately tripled in intensity. Jules felt the stings of a thousand fire ants over every submerged inch of his body.
“Aahhh!Holyfuck! What’d you do?”
Agonized, Jules struggled to pull himself out of the cramped Jacuzzi. The water boiled fiercely, but Veronika was unaffected-far from being in pain, she tightened her legs’ vise-grip around Jules’s torso, forcing him back into the violent froth.
“Lover, what’s the matter?” Her strong hands pressed down on his shoulders. “Stay in the tub with me, darling-”
“Leggo, you crazy broad! Letgo!” He plunged his hands into the burning bubbles and dug his jagged fingernails into her imprisoning thighs. She yelped. Her grip on him loosened, just enough for him to propel his bulk onto the top step and scramble over the Jacuzzi’s edge. Veronika screamed in dismay and made a last-ditch grab for his privates, but her fingers slid off the slippery, reddened folds of his belly as he flung himself over the side.
His foot whacked her head as he tumbled onto the floor below, hurling her back into the water. He landed on his left shoulder. A sudden sharp pain told him he might’ve dislocated it, but that hurt was nothing compared to the burning he felt from the neck down. He crawled across the floor to the bed, grabbed the bedpost, and pulled himself to his feet.
“Jules! Don’t leave me!”
He didn’t look back. He grabbed his trench coat from the rack, then winced as he flung it around his shoulders. He nearly tore the door off its hinges getting out of the room.
“Jules! Come back!Jules! ”
Her plaintive screams followed him into the hall. His thighs rubbed against each other like poison-coated sandpaper as he stumbled toward the stairs. Every last quivering part of him burned with the fires of hell. Especially the part that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. It’d be a long,long time before his little head was in any shape to give the rest of him orders again.
Served the little bastard right,Jules imagined Maureen hissing as he limped into the darkness of Barracks Street.Served the boiled little bastard right.