“Are you ready for a major surprise?”
Jules rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Right now, the only thing that’s surprisin‘ me is that we’re sittin’ on our asses in your cottage instead of stakin‘ out the Hit ’N‘ Run Club. What’s all this bullshit about you teachin’ me to be a better vampire? Kid, I was an A-One vampire when yourmama was in diapers, much lessyou.”
Doodlebug smiled. “The only ignorant man is he who refuses to learn, grasshopper. Now change into a wolf. I have something very important to show you.”
Jules grumbled. Then he reminded himself that his embarrassing failure of nerve at Elisha Raddeaux’s had nearly gotten Doodlebug’s arms wrenched from their sockets. Maybe he owed his friend a little indulgence. He started unbuttoning his jacket, then stopped. “Hey, this isn’t some kinda trick you’re pullin‘ to get me naked, is it?”
Doodlebug snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself. I dress like a woman, but that doesn’t mean you’re my type.”
Reassured, Jules stripped off his safari suit, shoes, and underwear. He concentrated on the full moon, Lon Chaney Jr., and lots and lots of hair. At least his transformations were coming more easily now. They still made his bones and joints ache, but that was nothing new; five decades of ever-increasing obesity had left him achingly familiar with aching bones and joints.
The universe shifted around him. The visual world turned black and white, like the picture on an old Philco TV, whereas the sensitivity of his ears and nose jumped a hundredfold. His long gray nose twitched; Doodlebug was wearing a pungently vile perfume, a witches’ brew of citrus extracts and boar musk. Jules sneezed violently, three times in quick succession.
“Jules? Can you understand what I’m saying? If you can understand me, scratch the floor twice with your right paw.”
He really wished Doodlebug would stop screaming. But he complied, thumping the polished floor twice with the thick black pads of his right front paw.
“Good. Now come with me into the living room. It’s a tight squeeze with your coffin in there, but we’ll manage.”
His furry gut dragged as he followed his friend from the kitchen. Doodlebug opened the lid of the piano case that served as Jules’s coffin.
“Take a peek inside. You should find this very interesting.”
Whatever was inside smelled weirdly familiar. He trotted up to the big wooden box, placed his front paws on the edge, and peered in. The thing that had invaded his coffin certainly didn’tlook familiar. It was like a huge, pulsating slug, but a slug that couldn’t hold a steady shape for more than a second or two. It filled most of the floor of the box; Jules guessed it was between six inches and a foot deep. He couldn’t tell what color it was, of course, but the shadings and the blotchy patterns on its surface shifted as frequently as its shape did.
Why the hell did the thing smell so damnfamiliar?… With a start of recognition, Jules realized what the peculiar odor reminded him of. The big, amorphous slug smelled exactly likehe did, himself, after a few lazy nights of skipping showers, drinking coffee, and lying around in his undershirt reading old comic books.
“Change back to your normal shape now. But keep your eyes on that thing in your coffin.”
Jules did as Doodlebug requested. As his hind legs unbent and his arms lengthened and his nose shortened, he watched the grayish blob. While he was changing, it gradually grew smaller, like a tubful of dirty, soapy bathwater disappearing down the drain. But the piano box didn’thave a drain. By the time he was on hands and knees instead of hind paws and forepaws, the slug-thingie was entirely gone. He reached in and touched the soil. The dirt was dry and crumbly, just as it had been the last time he’d slept. Whatever the thing had been, it had left no trace of itself.
“Holy mackerel,” Jules muttered. “What the hellwas that? And where the hell did it go?”
Doodlebug crouched down beside his friend and placed his arm on Jules’s shoulder. “That was the part of you that you weren’t using at the time. As for where it went, when you needed it again, it vanished from your coffin to rejoin the rest of you.”
Still naked, Jules leaned against the side of the couch and covered his privates by squeezing together his trunklike thighs. What Doodlebug was implying made him dizzy. “Come again?”
“You heard me. It’syou. And I think you suspected it yourself while you were a wolf. I watched your nose twitch very sharply while you were leaning over into the box.”
Jules rubbed his forehead wearily. His life was taking yet another turn toward the bizarre, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. “Yeah, I heard you. I’m just not sure Ibelieve you.” The whole notion made him nauseated, as if he’d just watched himself having open-heart surgery. “How come no vampire I ever met knew about this-this slug-thingie?”
“There’s a very simple reason. How many vampires bother to peek back inside their coffins after they’ve transformed into another shape? Not many. And vampires tend to be solitary. Most large predators tend to keep to themselves, with the notable exceptions of lions and killer whales. So it’s not as if many vampires would have a companion who might notice this unusual phenomenon. My Tibetan teachers, however, have lived in very close quarters with one another for untold centuries. On a wintery night in the very distant past, one among them made the shocking discovery of where all that extra mass goes when vampire-man becomes vampire-other.”
Jules was more perplexed than ever. “‘Extra mass’? Whoa! Don’t forget, you’re talkin‘ to a guy with a ninth-grade education here. And half ofthat was in catechism. Keep it simple, will ya?”
Doodlebug smiled gently and helped Jules to his feet. “Come back into the kitchen and I’ll make a pot of coffee.”
Jules pulled his pants and shirt back on, then sat at the kitchen table. Soon the air was alive with the blessed odor of chicory.
“Have you ever read anything about Einstein’s theories regarding mass and energy?” Doodlebug asked.
Jules scowled. “Does the pope bless abortions in a whorehouse?”
“Ohh-kay. I’ll do my best to keep this, uh, basic, then.” He poured two mugs of coffee and joined his friend at the table. “One of Professor Einstein’s most famous theories regarding how the universe works is called the Conservation of Mass. All of the ‘stuff’ in the universe can be classified as either matter-like you or me-or energy, like sunlight. All things that are made of matter have mass.”
“You mean weight, right?”
“Well, that’s a limited way of looking at it. But if it’s easier for you to think about it that way, yes, mass can be thought of as weight. Getting back to our friend Einstein, the good professor said that mass can neither be created nor destroyed. Under certain very unusual circumstances, such as a nuclear chain reaction, mass can be converted to energy, but mass can never simply disappear. Now, when you just changed to a wolf, not only your shape changed. Your mass, or weight, changed, too. You went from a man of approximately four hundred and fifty pounds to a wolf of, oh, I’d guesstimate about two hundred. That extra two hundred and fifty pounds or so didn’t disappear. And it wasn’t converted into energy, either. Or else the entire state of Louisiana and a good part of Mississippi would be a smoldering crater now. The mass had togo somewhere.”
Jules took a long, deep gulp of coffee. “So you’re sayin‘ it went into my coffin.”
“Yes. You saw it and smelled it yourself. It didn’tlook anything like you because it was undifferentiated proto-matter, temporarily separated from the conscious and subconscious organizing power of your brain. But I could tell that your supersensitive wolf nose found the proto-matter’s odor intimately familiar.”
Jules winced. “Jeezus… I reallystink, then.” He took another swallow and was lost in thought for a minute. “So you’re tellin‘ me thisalways happens, every time I change into somethin’ else? My extra mass, or whatever, goes back to my coffin, like a batter runnin‘ to home base?”
“Yes. Actually, to be more exact, your extra mass goes back to the last place you slept. If you’d slept last night in the trunk of your Lincoln, that’s where we would’ve found that slug-thingie. This behavior is most likely what originated the custom of vampires putting soil on the floors of their coffins. Maybe some prehistoric vampire discovered that the isolated proto-matter needs soil’s nourishment to remain viable.”
Jules waved his hands in front of his face as if he were swatting pesky mosquitoes. “Whoa! Just when I think I’m startin‘ to follow what you’re sayin’, you zoom up into the clouds again. Look, this is real interesting and all; it’s like watchin‘ an episode ofThe Outer Limits and discoverin’ that I’m the special guest star. But why the heck does this matter right now? You said you was gonna teach me to be a better vampire, somethin‘ that could help me fight Malice X better.”
Doodlebug smiled again, but his eyes betrayed glimmers of irritation. “Jules, you’re not letting me finish. There’s more. Alot more. You’re capable of feats you’ve never even imagined. Let me show you an example.”
Doodlebug’s face hardened with concentration. His slender form began wavering, and a thick mist escaped from his blouse and skirt. A moment later he stood in front of Jules as a little girl-complete with pigtails-who looked about eight years old. With his clothes all billowy, Doodlebug might have been a cross-dressing tyke who’d snuck into his mother’s closet and tried on her fancy party outfit.
“Oh, I see how this could bereal useful in a dustup with Malice X,” Jules said.
Doodlebug didn’t smile. “Just go to the bedroom and look inside my coffin.”
Jules got up from the table, edged around the piano case in the living room, and walked to the four-poster bed in the next room back. He opened the lid of Doodlebug’s coffin. Inside was another pulsating slug-thingie. Only this slug-thingie was much smaller than his own had been; if his proto-matter had weighed 250 pounds, this blob had to be about a tenth that size, maybe 25, 35 pounds.
Suddenly the proto-matter began to vanish from the coffin, disappearing down a nonexistent drain just as the other one had. When it was entirely gone, Doodlebug called to Jules in a high, childlike voice, “All right, now come back into the kitchen.”
The mini version of Doodlebug was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs with a large black cat purring contentedly on his lap. Two other cats, a big orange tabby and a white Siamese, rubbed against the loose folds of hosiery bunched around his skinny legs.
The tabby trotted over to Jules and began rubbing aggressively against his leg. The big vampire’s nose twitched. His sneeze made the windows rattle.
“Ohh maannn… get these damn catsoutta here! I got pet allergies like you wouldn’t believe.” He rubbed his nose and tweaked it from side to side. “Where the hell’d they come from, anyway? They the owner’s?”
Doodlebug called to the tabby with a nod of his head. The big orange cat left Jules’s leg and hopped up on Doodlebug’s lap. “No. They’re mine. More precisely, they’reme.”
“Huh?”
“You watched the proto-matter in my coffin disappear, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, sure, but… since when could a vampire change into acat? Much lessthree cats?”
“Didn’t you tell me that Malice X changed into a black panther?”
“Well, yeah. But I figured that was just ‘cause he was a black guy. I figured, y’know, maybe black vampires follow different rules or somethin’ from us white vampires. Like I can change to a couple of animals from Europe, where my people come from, so I guess he could change to a couple of animals from Africa.”
Doodlebug’s hands kept the two cats on his lap satiated with pleasure. The third cat, the Siamese, sniffed and scratched at the cottage’s back door, perhaps sensing the pondful of fat goldfish waiting outside. “That’s not a bad supposition, Jules. Actually, there’s a germ of truth in what you said, although not in the way you’d think. Let me ask you this: After you became a vampire, how did you first learn that you could transform into a bat, a wolf, or mist?”
Jules pulled one of the kitchen chairs as far away from the three cats as he could and sat down. “I dunno. I guess Mo taught me.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin and thought some more. “Come to think of it, I guess I already knew I’d be able to do those things, even before Mo told me anything at all.”
“How so?”
“Oh, y’know, readin‘ vampire stories inArgosy as a kid. And there were even some movies I saw. Silent movies at the big theaters on Canal Street.”
“So when you first became a vampire, you already knew what vampires could do.”
“Sure.”
“And how do you suppose Maureen learned about it before she gave you lessons?”
“Heck, same way I did, I guess. Some older vampire taught her. And she probably already knew about vampires even before that, from readin‘ novels or penny dreadfuls. How about you? How’d you learn? When I first approached you outside that candy store, you knew exactly what I was offerin’.”
Doodlebug smiled. “Oh, I used toswim in vampire lore.Weird Tales, comic books, movies-Dracula’s Daughter,Son of Dracula,Mark of the Vampire — I saw them all. By the time I met you, I knew perfectly well what to expect. And that’s my point.”
Jules looked mystified. “I lost ya somewhere.”
“When it came to vampires, I knew what to expect: Vampires sleep in coffins. They need to drink blood every couple of nights or so. They can change into three other forms-bat, wolf, and mist. So when I became one myself, I only tried doing those things I already believed vampires were capable of. I was limited by what Ithought I knew.”
“Are you sayin‘ vampires can change intoanything?”
“Notanything, no. But my Tibetan teachers showed me that the range of possible transformations is far, far more varied than the three options that became part of the petrified forest of European legends. One could spend a hundred lifetimes attempting to master all the possible permutations. Some of my teachers have devoted centuries to that very quest.”
“Hold on a minute. Malice X never went to Tibet to study with them monks. How comehe could change himself to a panther?”
“I can only assume he wasn’t exposed to media portrayals of black vampires that would’ve affected his mind-set when he became one himself. Even if he was familiar with the same movies and stories that you and I grew up with, they didn’t mold him and limit him in quite the same way. There may be African folk legends he was exposed to that center on men transforming into panthers.”
“Let’s see if I got this down. What you’re basically sayin‘ is, what we can do as vampires is all a mind-over-matter kinda thing, right? Like them Indian guys who can walk across fire barefoot, just ’cause theythink it ain’t gonna hurt them none.”
“Exactly.”
“So the next time I run into Malice X, I can change myself to King Kong and stomp the creep into a smear on the sidewalk?”
“I’m afraidthat particular transformation is out of the question. Remember what I said about mass? Mass can’t be created or destroyed. But thereis something you can do that Malice X cannot. And the wonderful thing is, you can do it thanks to a personal attribute you’ve always considered a handicap.”
“Oh yeah? What would that be?”
“Jules, unlike me or Malice X, you areblessed with mass. Four hundred and fifty pounds of it. Forget about trying to recruit a platoon of followers. You don’t need them. With some guidance and practice, you could will yourself to become a trio of hundred-and-fifty-pound vampires.”
Jules walked along a twisting, looping path of yellow chalk his friend had drawn on the concrete floor of Maureen’s basement. Doodlebug, now six inches tall, sat on his shoulder.
“Faster,” the Barbie-doll-sized Doodlebug said. He struck Jules’s shoulder repeatedly with an iced tea spoon. The tiny blows didn’t sting, but they were irritating.
“Hey, is that really necessary?” Jules said as he resentfully plodded around the maze.
“I’m the bird that taps against the window.”
“Thewhat?”
“The distraction that will inevitably present itself at your most crucial and vulnerable moment of concentration. Remember, you’re learning to form and control multiple bodies, which requires the clear mind and keen mental vision of the finest archer. You’ll need to maintain this pure mental state in deadly combat, surrounded by perhaps dozens of enemy vampires, explosions, and flying projectiles. Even the tiniest distraction while you are manipulating multiple bodies could prove fatal, if you let it. Now walk the pathfaster.”
Doodlebug whacked his earlobe with the spoon, which really hacked Jules off. He’d show that pint-sized pest. Aping Jackie Gleason’s nimbleHoneymooners dance steps, he pirouetted and dipped along the path, careful to keep his toes precisely on the chalk line. He felt Doodlebug grab hold of his collar, and he smiled as he heard the spoon clatter to the floor.
“That was the easy part,” Doodlebug said. “Nursery school. I don’t think you’ll be able to take this next exercise so lightly.”
Jules stared at the electric train set. Doodlebug had instructed him to assemble it so that the tracks crisscrossed the yellow chalk line. The train was a souvenir from Jules’s and Maureen’s happier days together, a hobby they’d shared on those long nights when there was nothing good on TV and one or both of them weren’t in the mood for sex. He was surprised Maureen had hung on to it. He finished assembling the looping track, complete with tunnel, bridge, flashing crossing lights, and New England-style town center. Then he placed the locomotive and its ten connecting cars on the track and hooked the electric control box into a wall socket.
While Jules was on his hands and knees, Doodlebug shimmied up his sleeve to his shoulder. “Very good. Turn on the train to its maximum speed. You are to walk the chalk path, counterclockwise. Here’s the complicated part: You must time your movement so that wherever the chalk path and the train tracks cross, you and the train reach that intersection simultaneously. You are not permitted to stop and wait for the train to arrive-you may slow or quicken your steps, but you must keep moving at all times.”
Jules eyed the layout carefully. The chalk path and the train tracks intersected at six points, arrayed at nearly even intervals around the basement. It didn’t look too hard.
It was harder than it looked.
Six attempts later-make that three crushed model autos, five flattened pedestrians, and one crumpled church steeple later-Jules made it around the entire course successfully, meeting the train at each intersection. He sat heavily on a bench by the wall, toweling off his dripping forehead and neck as if he’d just run the Crescent City Classic.
He grinned a Cheshire cat smile, despite his exhaustion. “How aboutthat, Tinkerbell? I think I earned myself a coffee break.”
“Actually, Jules, I was just about to suggest that you brew a pot of coffee…”
Ten minutes later Jules stood at the starting line again. This time, however, he held a china cup and saucer in each hand. Both cups were filled with steaming-hot coffee. Doodlebug had returned to his normal size and shed his Barbie clothes for a black leather skirt, neon-pink tank top, and black vinyl thigh-high boots. He sat on a stool with the train set’s control box in his lap.
“I’d like to seeyou do this, hotshot,” Jules grumbled.
“Oh, those monks had me doing much more unpleasant things than this,” Doodlebug answered brightly.
“Yeah? Well, I still think this is a dumb-ass idea. This is Mo’s best china you got me messin‘ with here. I bust any of it up, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“That’ll give you all the more incentive to concentrate, won’t it? On your mark, get set-”
Doodlebug switched on the train’s juice. The coffee cups clattered jarringly as Jules headed down his increasingly hateful path. He made the first intersection. Despite much clattering of cups and saucers, he timed the train’s journey through the tunnel perfectly and made the second intersection with nary a spill. At the third intersection, however, his right toe clipped the corner of a trestle bridge as the train passed over it.
“Shit-aoww-aoww-aoww-aoww!”
Jules spent the next fifteen minutes soaking his throbbing hands in a bucket of ice water. Doodlebug was good enough to mop up the spilled coffee and sweep the broken china into a wastebasket.
“Do you want to call it a night?” Doodlebug asked.
Jules wiped his hands on his pants. “Naww. I’m sure Malice X ain’t restin‘ onhis laurels. Lemme try it a few more times.”
Doodlebug poured fresh coffee into two unbroken cup-and-saucer sets and handed them to his friend. Jules lined up back at the starting point. The big vampire took a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying to clear his mind of all distractions. His hands still throbbed. What if he spilled steaming coffee on them again-? No; that didn’t matter. What mattered was what Doodlebug had promised him. What mattered was the fact that if he worked hard enough, his enormous bulk, the target of endless insults and humiliations over the years, could become an asset instead of a liability. Then Jules Duchon wouldreally throw his weight around.
Jules opened his eyes. “Are you ready?” Doodlebug asked.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
The train lurched into motion. But Jules didn’t lurch. He flowed along the path like a blob of mercury guided by electromagnets.No need to rush, he told himself.I know exactly how fast that train moves-I got plenty of time to make the intersection. Doodlebug’s words bathed his mind like a refreshing warm shower: Flow. Peacefulness. Connectedness. The cups and saucers he held in his hands weren’t heavy at all. There was no clatter, no nervous sloshing. They were part of his limbs, connected to him. Like the path was connected to him. And he knew the train like he knew the beating of his own heart.
He successfully passed the first intersection five full seconds before he was cognizant of having done so. The trestle bridge didn’t trip him up in the slightest. He passed over it without causing even a stirring in the coffee cups.
But then something changed. The train hit an invisible wall of rubber. Some evil outside force took control of his calm mastery and twisted it, slowing everything down.
“You-you’re changing the train’s speed! You can’t do that!”
“I most assuredlycan,” Doodlebug answered.
“No, you can’t! Notnow!”
“The bird that taps against the window, Jules. It always pops up at the worst possible time.”
“Fuckthe fuckin‘ bird!” He was losing it. The cups and saucers were cups and saucers again, not part of his hands. Their clattering sounded like the approach of an onrushing streetcar. The train sped up again. Then it slowed to a crawl.
Sweat fell into Jules’s eyes. “Take that bird and shove it up your-aoww-aoww-aoww-aoww!”
The passing train was caught in a deluge of falling coffee. The tracks sparked. The electrical discharge traveled almost instantaneously around the track to the control box, which shorted out with a sharp pop-pop-pop!
Doodlebug sat stunned for a moment. He stared at the smoking control box in his lap, then stared at Jules, who was fuming even more than the blackened, ruined wall socket.
“Well…” the somewhat embarrassed taskmaster said. “I guess we’ll be breaking for the night. No wonder my teachers had me juggling live rats instead of racing electric trains.”
“Wolfand bat. You can do it, Jules.”
Jules had hardly slept at all the previous day. He’d tossed and turned in his piano box, his mind crammed full with thoughts of Maureen(what does she know that she hasn’t told me?), Elisha Raddeaux(has Malice X found her? does he want to kill me even morenow?), the mysterious Veronika(what’s the deal with that screwy dame, anyway?), and his upcoming training session(what if I can’t hack it?). But now he was back in Maureen’s basement, naked as a jaybird, warily putting himself in Doodlebug’s manicured hands again.
“Shouldn’t we be trying this closer to where my coffin is?” Jules asked, rubbing the side of his nose. The more questions he asked, the longer he could put off having to make his first attempt. “I mean, we’re clear across town from where my slug-thingie’s gonna end up.”
Doodlebug didn’t appear to be swayed. “Think about this logically. In all your years of changing to a bat or a wolf, has itever made a difference how far you were from your coffin? Stop stalling. Let’s just give it a try, shall we?”
The little martinet was onto him. Jules sighed. Wolf and bat. Bat and wolf. He closed his eyes and concentrated. Full moon. Wings. Long nose, long fangs. Long, skinny fingers. Bushy tail. Tiny legs and itty-bitty talons. Powerful jaws. Hair. Ears like a rabbit’s, only not as fuzzy and cute…
The basement began to fill with smoke. Jules sensed his body waver and shimmer, going in and out of focus like the picture on an old vacuum-tube TV. For the briefest of instants Jules’s form was replaced by a creature from a Hieronymus Bosch phantasmagoria-a wolf’s head with a tiny rodent body, black wings sprouting from the tip of its long nose frantically flapping in a vain attempt to keep from falling over. It half yelped and half hissed before it lost its shape. Then it melted into an amorphous gray mass that splattered against the concrete floor with a resoundingshhglorp!
The floor was hidden by fleshy smoke again. When it cleared, Jules was lying on his back, gasping for breath and bathed in sweat.
“Jules!” Doodlebug rushed to his friend’s side and helped him sit up. “Are you all right?”
Jules coughed heavily, then shook his head to clear away the cobwebs. “I been-ahchem! — better. I been a wholehelluva lot better.”
“What happened? Why did you try transforming into both animals at once?”
“Ain’t that what you’ve been yammering at me to do these past two nights?”
“I’m afraid you misunderstood. You should only attempt one transformation at a time-when you have one form fully under control,then you create the other.”
Jules grabbed his shirt and mopped off his forehead. “You sayin‘ you want me to change into a wolf or a bat first, andthen pull a second animal outta that gray glop five miles away?”
Doodlebug appeared mystified. “Well…sure. I thought I was very clear on that.”
Jules dabbed off his glistening chest, then tossed the soaked shirt into a corner. “Lemme tell you somethin‘. There’s no way inhell I’m gonna be able to muster the concentration to pull a second animal outta my hat once I’m a bat or a wolf. With all those super senses rushing in on me, I got too much jumpin’ around my wolf-mind or bat-mind to pull together a second body. It just ain’t gonna happen.”
Doodlebug crouched in front of his friend, put his hand on his shoulder, and looked him directly in the eye. “I beg to disagree. Last night you achieved a special state of mind. Until I was able to distract you and shatter your concentration, you had succeeded in dividing your consciousness. You were paying equal attention to three factors at once.”
Jules’s stonewalling thawed into a wary hopefulness. “Huh. You really think so? I was doin‘ that good?”
Doodlebug smiled and patted his friend’s well-padded shoulder. “You were doingmuch better than ‘good.’ You’ll be able to reach that level again; I have no doubt. All it takes is work. Practice, practice, practice. Plus a little faith in yourself. Shall we try it again?”
Which animal was the easiest? It made sense to do the harder one first and then, when his concentration and mental faculties weren’t at their sharpest, attempt the simpler one. The wolf was a heck of a lot more similar to his normal form than the bat was. Transforming into a bat was downright alien, and more than a little creepy. Growing those long, long fingers, and then stretching his skin paper-thin between them… yuck. The bat was definitely the more difficult of the two.
Jules thought bat-thoughts. His old familiar body, with which he’d shared a decades-long love-hate relationship, melted away. Jules looked around the room, emitting his ultrasonic shriek more by instinct than by rational choice. He could sense Doodlebug’s lithe, graceful presence by the shape of the echoes that bounced off him. He tested his wings, beating them tentatively against the stubborn pull of gravity. No dice. Even with the extra vitality granted him by Doc Landrieu’s wonder pills, his bat-form was still too obese to become airborne under its own power. Why? Why couldn’t he become athin bat?
Too many questions-his rodent brain ached from them all. Right now, he had other irons in the fire. Like pulling a wolf out of his trick bag. He shut down his echolocation, clenched his weak eyes shut, and thought the most cogent wolf-thoughts he could manage. Something started to happen “No, Jules! Notthat way!”
What was the matter? He was doing it, wasn’t he?
He could sense the long wolf snout emerging, complete with its wet nose and fearsome incisors. Unfortunately, he also sensed something else going on-his left wing was disintegrating even as his wolf snout took shape!
“Use the mass in your coffin, Jules! Theextra mass! Don’t reshape what you’ve already got with you! Pullmore in-”
But it was too late. Jules’s grotesque little homunculus was missing its left wing and much of its ears, but a wolf’s levitating jaws were attached to its chest by tenuous floating strands of protoplasm; he splattered into a grayish puddle with a sickeningshhglorp!
Jules needed nearly forty minutes of recuperation before he had the strength, not to mention the intestinal fortitude, to try again. This time he managed to hold his bat-form steady while pulling about a quarter of a wolf from the proto-matter stored in his distant coffin. However, he would’ve done better to build the canine’s hindquarters first. Starting with the head meant that the wolf’s potent senses shattered his concentration before he even reached the neck. Both his bodies imploded, ending up as sluglike puddles on the floor, then a very disoriented and disgruntled Jules.
Threeshhglorps! later, the door at the top of the basement steps opened. Maureen, dressed in one of her Velcro-laden dancing costumes, inserted herself through the doorway.
“How’s the training coming? I’m on my one o’clock break at the club, so I thought I’d walk over and see how you guys were making out.”
Jules said nothing as Maureen descended the steps. Whether this was because of exhaustion or a reluctance to have anything to do with her, he wasn’t quite sure. Doodlebug rushed to fill the dead silence. “Jules has made some pretty impressive progress. The last couple of hours, though, he’s hit a wall. Not unexpected, really. We all do. So we’ll be taking a break.”
“You have him punching sides of beef yet?” She hummed a few bars from theRocky theme and performed some girlish shadowboxing. She stopped when she saw she wasn’t getting even the faintest shadow of a smile from Jules, who was still lying on the floor. “Jeezus… helooks like a side of beef.” She walked over to where he lay flat on his back, breathing in labored, phlegmy gasps. “Hey, you been rummaging through my costume jewelry lately?”
This out-of-left-field question yanked a response from him. “What the… hell… kinda reason… would I have… to dig through yourjewelry?”
“I have no idea. But tonight I was looking for some pieces I haven’t worn in a while, and I noticed that your vampire baby teeth were missing.”
Jules dragged himself to a sitting position and set his shirt over his lap. “My baby teeth? What’re you talkin‘ about?”
“Yourvampire baby teeth. Don’t you remember? I saved them and kept them in a pill bottle. They were soadorable. I still remember the night you lost them. Twelve months to the day after you first became a vampire. Remember? You were soscared. I meanterrified. You thought you’d never have fangs again. You were running around this house hollering like your pecker had just fallen off. It was funnier than the Keystone Kops and Fatty Arbuckle put together.”
“Yeah, I remember. You were a regular Saint Theresa that night. Real supportive. So what’s all this about my vampire baby teeth?”
“They’regone. Like I said, I kept them in this pill bottle, and I kept the pill bottle at the bottom of this box of old costume jewelry. Nobody ever dug through that box except me.”
“Well,I didn’t take them.”
“But you were the only one who would’ve known they were there.”
“What do I need my fuckin‘baby teeth for? I need another pair of fangs like I need a pack ofHispanic vampires on my case. You lost ’em, that’s all.”
“Yeah. I guess you’re right. What does it matter, anyway?” She picked up a folding chair that was leaning against the wall, opened it, and sat down. It groaned like a packhorse on its last legs. “So let’s see your stuff, hotshot. Let’s see what Doodlebug’s taught you so far. Put on a show for ol‘ Mo.”
Jules mopped his forehead with his shirt. “Forget it. I’m whipped.”
“Oh, come on, Jules. I walked all the way back here from Jezebel’s-”
Jules’s voice had more steel in it this time. “I said forget it. I been beatin‘ my head against the concrete floor all night. The only thing I’m good for right now is watchin’ an old John Carradine flick on video.”
Maureen crossed her arms stiffly. “Well, that’s afine attitude to have. I suppose John Carradine will show you in ten easy steps how to get out of the mess you’re in?”
Doodlebug, sensing trouble brewing, stepped between the two of them. “Uh, Maureen, Jules reallyhas been working awfully hard tonight. This isn’t the best time-”
Jules lit into Maureen as if Doodlebug weren’t even there. “Y’know, you got ahelluva lotta nerve, waltzing in here now and givin‘ me shit when you ain’t even been here to see how I’ve been knockin’ myself out. You got noidea what you’re talkin‘ about.”
Maureen didn’t back down a millimeter. “Oh, don’t I? I think I know enough to recognize aquitter when I hear one. Winners don’t crawl away to lie on a couch and watch old horror movies when they’re beat. Winners keep plugging away until they’ve got thegame beat.”
“Well,thank you, Knute Rockne. I’m all inspired now. ‘Scuse me-I gotta go jam a stake up your old boyfriend’s ass for the Gipper, okay?”
Maureen flinched, but her voice remained steady. “I see you’ve gotplenty of vim and vigor left when it comes to blaming me. How about applying some of that energy where it’ll make a difference, like learning how to be a better andsmarter vampire?”
“Aww, hell, why don’tyou try it, Maureen? You think it’s so goddamn easy? Go ahead. Change to a bat and a wolf at the same time. Or change into three ballerinas. No-fourballerinas! I ain’t the only one around here ‘blessed’ with excess mass.”
“That’s right. You just happen to be the one with a bright red bull’s-eye painted on your mass.”
“Painted there courtesy ofyour out-of-control sex drive-!”
The upstairs phone rang, the bell that ended this round of the superheavyweight championship bout.
Maureen rose from her seat, her cheeks flushed. “Excuse me, Jules. Maybe we’ll continue this-discussion-once you’re decent.” She tossed his trousers at him before heading back up the stairs. Two minutes later she stuck her head through the door again. “It’s foryou, buster,” she said. Her voice was a barely contained froth of scorn, anger, and hurt. Jules, flabbergasted, stared at Doodlebug. “But-but nobody knows I’m here. Right?” Doodlebug shrugged his shoulders. Jules turned back to Maureen. “Who is it?”
“I didn’t care to ask.” Her nose twitched, as if she’d just caught the scent of something unmentionably vile. “It’s somewoman.”
Jules finished wiggling into his trousers. Then he hurriedly climbed the steps, wincing as his bare foot snagged a splinter, his mind seething with equal parts curiosity and trepidation. Maureen had left the receiver lying on her kitchen table. Jules picked it up, his heart beating both with excitement and the exertion of hustling up the stairs.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Jules?” He recognized the voice before she said another word. “It’s Veronika.”
Her husky, Memphis-tinged but New York-inflected voice set off a grenade in his brain. A hundred questions whizzed past each other like shrapnel. Unfortunately, his mouth could process only one question at a time, and the resulting traffic pileup resembled the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway during a hurricane evacuation.
“What-how-you tried to-you,you- ”
“It’s extremely important that I see you again.”
One question finally tore loose of the pack. “How did you know I’d be here?”
“I know all sorts of things about you.”
“What the hell’s this all about? Whoare you?”
“I know I owe you an explanation-much more than an explanation. I want to come clean, Jules. But I can’t do it over the phone.“ Jules saw Maureen staring through the doorway with the intensity of a hawk eyeing a plump field mouse. Doodlebug was standing next to her. Jules tried to keep his voice low. It wasn’t easy. ”What the hell do you want?“
“I need to see you again.”
All thoughts of stealthiness were blown out the window by the fury of a male ego scorned. “You must be outta yer fuckin‘mind! Do I look retarded? Am I some droolingidiot? You tried tokill me! You invited me up to your room with, y’know, with false pretensions-I thought you wereinto me!”
“Honey, I can explain-”
“Explain?Explainwhat? That you’re some kinda vampire-huntin‘ wacko-oh yeah, Isaw your little arsenal in the bathroom under the sink. But idiot me, I clambered into that hot tub with you anyway. And boy, did I pay-you tried toboil me like some fuckin’ four-hundred-and-fifty-poundcrawfish!”
Even with the bad connection (she was on either a cheap cell phone or one of the battered-and-abused pay phones in the Quarter), he could hear the anguish in her voice. “Jules, please believe me-Ihad to do it! I had no choice! They’re watching me all the time. My loyalty wasalready in question. So I had to do something to you-but I picked theleast lethal weapon they gave me. Don’t you think Ihated doing it? I’ve been crying my eyes out ever since you ran out of my hotel room. I hate myself for letting them force me to hurt you.”
Jules’s head was swimming. “Wait a minute-who’s this ‘they’ you keep talkin‘ about? Your loyalty to who was bein’ questioned? And what’d you stick in the tub water, anyway?”
Her voice lightened a bit. “Oh,that — that was holy water. A little vial of it. That’s why you felt the burning and I didn’t.”
He waited for her to continue. She didn’t. For all her tearful apologies, she was still yanking his chain. “Again, lady-who’s this ‘they’ that’s makin‘ you do all these bad things?”
Her voice turned serious again. “I told you-I can’t explain that over the phone. It’s too dangerous. They could be listening in on our conversation right now.”
Maureen was standing with hands on her shelflike hips. “Jules, who thehell is that on the line with you? This ismy house-I don’t appreciate you giving out my number to your goddamn floozies!”
Jules put his paw over the phone and glared at Maureen. “Shut your face and gimme some peace! I’m tryin‘ to figure things out here-”
“Not onmy phone, you aren’t! And never,ever tell me to ‘shut my face,’ you womanizingfreeloader!”
Trapped between two obstinate women was no place to be. “Look,” he said huffily into the receiver. “If you ain’t spillin‘, then I’m ending this conversation right now. You got two seconds before I slam this phone down. One-one-thousand-”
“Wait!”The phone was silent for a few long seconds. “I–I can’t reveal their identities over the phone. But I can tell you this-they know you were the one who killed those twenty-three people in Covington.”
Jules’s heart plummeted. He’d almost forgotten about that little misadventure. “You mean the Knight supporters?”
“Yes. My handler headed up a special crisis intervention team following the massacre. They tagged you as the culprit within forty-eight hours.“
“How…?” He was sinking again. Sinking into the grasping mud that underlay every street and sidewalk in New Orleans, just when he thought he’d been starting to climb toward the light.
“I can help you, Jules. We can help each other. I know this operation. I’ve been near the center of it for the past eighteen months. I know I hurt you, but I’m not your enemy. I want to be yourally, if only you’ll let me.”
Her words clutched him like silk tentacles. Jules realized he had no choice but to find out what she knew. “All right… where do I meet you?”
“Would the Palm Court be okay? In half an hour?”
“Sure.” He hung up the phone with the weariness of a death-row inmate who’d just been denied his final reprieve.
Maureen’s fists were still planted on her hips. Only now they were trembling. “So now you’re going to meet this whore of yours?“
Jules shuffled toward the basement to retrieve the rest of his clothes. “Ain’t none of your business, Maureen.”
Doodlebug grabbed his arm. “What’s this I overheard about the Nathan Knight rally?”
Jules shook him off and headed down the steps. “I got some investigating I gotta do. And I gotta do it alone.”
Maureen followed him down the steps. “Investigating!I know what you’ll be ‘investigating’! You’ll be
‘investigating’ that whore’spussy!“
Jules pulled on his shirt. “I should be so lucky,” he mumbled to himself under his breath.
Doodlebug descended the steps. “I don’t like the sound of this. If you’re going somewhere tonight, I’m going with you.“
Jules turned a steely gaze on his partner while he tied his shoes. “Like hell you are. Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And this here man’s gonna do it.”
“But-”
“‘But’nothin‘. You’re off the case tonight, Doodlebug. You try to tag along, I’ll send you packin’ back to California. This is a solo job. The Lone Ranger rides the prairie. And Tonto hightails it back to the wigwam.“
Maureen tailed him back up the stairs. “Jules-listen to me, Jules! If you walk out that door… if you walk out thatdoor — I’ll neverspeak to you again!”
Jules put his hand on the front doorknob. The wordsFrankly, my dear… flittered briefly through his mind, but he decided he could be more original than that (if not quite as pithy). He turned to face her.
“Y’know, Maureen, I just realized somethin‘. You’re a helluva lot more worried that I might get laid than you been scared I might get killed. Well, you can rest your pretty little head, babe. ’Cause before the night’s over, I might doboth.”
Jules arrived at the Palm Court half an hour later. He’d darted from doorway to darkened doorway through half the Quarter. When he squeezed himself through the entrance to the club, the wait staff were beginning to put chairs on top of the tables. Nearly all the late-night crowd had cleared out. Half a dozen young musicians, plus a couple of middle-aged veterans Jules recognized from traditional jazz sessions around town, were packing up their instruments. Porkchop Chambonne, standing near the end of the bar, was engaged in a heated discussion with a younger man whom Jules recognized as Roddy Braithwhite, the club’s owner.
The elderly musician’s eyes lit up when he noticed Jules enter the room. He stopped arguing in midsentence to call his friend over. “Jules! Hey, Jules! C’mon over here!” He turned back to the owner. “Nowhere’s a man who remembers how good the music useta be. Jules, tell him about my big bands back in the forties and fifties.”
“Uh, Chop, that was my dad, JulesSenior, remember?”
The trumpet player huffily smoothed his stringy comb-over back into place atop his head. “Oh,stop! I ain’t got time for that foolishness right now. Rod here is tellin‘ me I can’t have my big band no more. He wants me to cut back to a quartet, or even atrio!”
The club owner looked acutely embarrassed. “Uh, Mr. Chambonne’s a little upset-”
“Upset!You want me to lay off half my frickin‘ band! Rod, I ain’t gonna be around this earth forever. How is them teenagers gonna learn enough to become the Porkchops of tomorrow if I can’t have them in my bandtoday?”
The owner stared at the floor. “In a perfect world, I’d employ you and your big band-hell, atwenty — piece band-from now until the end of time. I’m a music fan. You know that. But I’m also a businessman. And right now I’m a businessman who’s facing four new competitors in the Quarter. I just can’t afford to hire the whole band anymore. Maybe you could get some of the youngsters to sit in on weekends-”
“Them boys can’t afford to be doin‘ novolunteer work! They’s savin’ up for college. Tell him, Jules! You’s a regular customer around here.Tell him what a big attraction my big band is-”
Just then Jules saw Veronika waving him over from the far corner. “Uh, Chop, I’m really sorry, but I gotta go. Look, another night, maybe we can do us some brainstormin‘ on this situation-”
The bandleader angrily waved him off. “Oh, thehell with you, then!” He immediately redirected his pique at the owner, reiterating the hardships his laid-off band members would face, beating his leather cap against the bar for emphasis.
Jules felt perfectly awful as he shuffled toward the table in the back. He slumped into a chair across from Veronika, glancing back over his shoulder at the diminutive bandleader, silently praying the old man wouldn’t suffer a coronary.
“Thank God you came!”
Jules reluctantly turned his attention toward his companion. “Yeah, I’m here. Now make like a Hurricane glass and spill.”
Veronika looked cautiously around the rapidly emptying room. She nervously laced her fingers on the table and leaned closer to him.
“Have you ever heard of the Strategic Helium Reserve?”
“No.”
“Virtually no one has. Do you know what an airship is?”
“That’s like a blimp, right?”
“Very good. During World War One, the U.S. government established a crash program to develop a lighter-than-air scout fleet for the navy. Helium is a much more stable gas than hydrogen, which is what the Germans used for their airships-theHindenburg exploded, remember? America built the only large-scale plants in the world for the production of helium. After the war, the federal government established the Strategic Helium Reserve, to ensure that the navy would always have an adequate supply for its scouting fleet.”
Jules squirmed in his chair. “That’s a real interestin‘ history lesson. But what the hell has any of it got to do with me?”
“I’m coming to that. Now when was the last time the navy flew any airships?”
“I dunno. World War Two, maybe?”
“That’s right. The navy had already retired its last airship, theAkron, before World War Two. During the war, all they used were a few blimps for antiaircraft coverage. By the late forties the navy had no airships or blimps at all. But year in and year out, Congress kept funding the Strategic Helium Reserve. It’s still being funded, even though the navy hasn’t used a cubic foot of helium in more than fifty years.”
Jules rubbed the end of his nose. “I guess now is when I’m supposed to ask, How come?”
Veronika’s voice fell to a whisper. “Certain elements in the armed forces and federal law enforcement found the Strategic Helium Reserve to be a useful front for activities they didn’t want Congress or the public to be aware of. Things like possible alien incursions into our biosphere. Unexplained, widespread cattle mutilations. Strange atmospheric phenomena that would black out America’s radar defense network for days at a time.”
Jules grunted with the beginnings of understanding. “Things that go bump in the night. Like me.”
“Like you, yes. I’m an employee of the Strategic Helium Reserve. A year and a half ago, I was specially recruited to work on your case.”
A red-skirted waitress approached their table. “Last call, folks. What’ll it be?”
“I’ll have another one of these,” Veronika said, pushing her half-empty goblet toward the waitress. “A strawberry margarita. Tell the bartender to make it a little sweeter this time.”
“Sure thing. Anything for you, sir?”
Jules nodded without taking his eyes off Veronika. “Coffee.” He waited for the waitress to walk out of earshot. “Now I guess the next question I’m supposed to ask is, How come you’re tellin‘ me all this? It’s not that hard to guess from the stuff you were packin’ beneath your bathroom sink that your job is to get ridda me. I figure I can trust you about as far as I can toss you. Which ain’t that far. How do I know you ain’t got the block surrounded by feds with wooden stakes and crosses, waitin‘ for me to walk outta here with you?”
“Let me show you something.” She retrieved her purse from beneath her seat. When she unzipped it, Jules scooted back from the table, a look of alarm on his face. She laughed. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m not reaching for garlic spray.”
“Garlic spray?You’ve gotgarlic spray?”
“Of course. The agency wouldn’t send me out into the field less than completely equipped. Here.” She handed him a photograph. It was of a shapely young woman in an evening gown, clutching a trophy to her ample chest.
“Who’s this?”
“That’s me. It was taken a little less than two years ago, after I’d just won a statewide Miss Plus-Sized beauty contest.”
Jules looked at the picture again, this time more closely. It was Veronika’s face, all right. There was no mistaking that tiny cleft in her chin. But it was pushing the boundaries of the believable that the plump-but-pretty girl in the photo and the supersized goddess sitting across from him could be one and the same person. This picture was two years old? Nobody could gain that much weight that fast. Not even Jules himself.
The waitress returned with their drinks. After she left, Jules felt Veronika’s hand on his thigh. “It seems unbelievable, doesn’t it? That the ordinary girl in that photograph could have been transformed into the… freak… that I am today.”
Jules was stunned by the depth of self-loathing in her voice. “Baby, you’re no freak-”
She clenched her eyes shut. Her hand tensed on his thigh. “You have noidea what they did to me. All I wanted was to go to a good university. To start an exciting career. Maybe serve my country in the bargain. The agency recruited me right after I won that beauty pageant. I had no way of knowing at the time that they’d sponsored the entire thing. In return for five years of service, they promised me the moon. All I had to do was agree to certain…experimental procedures.”
She ran her hands down her figure, tracing the massive globes of her breasts and the majestic roundness of her hips. Despite his wariness, Jules sensed his little soldier responding, waking up for morning reveille. “This body,” she said mournfully, “it’s not… normal. Notnatural.” She took a long sip of her margarita. “My handlers, they knew all about your preference for supersized women. So they designed this body I’m wearing as the ultimate honey trap. Most of what you see isn’t really me. It’s implants. Sixty percent or more of my, uh, curves are thanks to special lightweight saline-gel implants. The implants weigh much less than an equivalent volume of real flesh would. Otherwise, I’d probably be immobile at this size.”
She brushed a tear away from her cheek with a perfectly manicured fingertip. “They… theypromised they’d reverse it all. When my five years were up. But I found out that was a pack of lies. A woman contacted me. An ex-employee of the agency’s. Another one of their ‘projects.’ They’d turned her into a freak, too. When they didn’t need her anymore, they strung her along for years, buying her silence with constantly broken promises of turning her back to normal. She just got older and older. Her body grew less able to tolerate the horrible things they’d done to it. She stays in hiding and just waits to die. I don’t want to end up like that, Jules. Ican’t end up like that.”
Jules almost forgot to breathe. Her story hit him like a wrecking ball made of silicone. “So, uh, how do I fit into all this? What can I do?”
She gazed into his eyes. She was Venus and Rita Hayworth and Jayne Mansfield all rolled into one. “I don’t want to grow old. I don’t want to decay into a pathetic heap like she did. I want to stay young forever, Jules. I want you to make me your vampire queen.”
They checked into a different hotel from the one Veronika was registered in, a precaution that Jules, even in his state of enthralled horniness, insisted upon. As soon as they closed the room door behind them, Veronika wrapped her silky arms around Jules’s neck and planted a luscious kiss on his waiting lips.
“Darling,” she said as she slowly pulled away, “I’mstarving! Let’s celebrate and order room service! I simplyadore early-morning breakfasts! I know you can’t join me, of course, but you’ll be havingyour breakfast soon enough. We’ll stick it all on the government’s tab, okay?”
Jules sat on the edge of the soft mattress and unbuttoned his collar. “Sure… my tax dollars at work,” he murmured dazedly.
She phoned the front desk and ordered virtually every item on the room service breakfast menu, then she sat next to him on the bed. “Oh, Jules, this is soexciting! What does it feel like, to be a vampire?”
“What does it feel like?” Jules didn’t know what to say. But it didn’t matter, really. “It feels good. You’ll like it.”
“Will I be able to change into a bat, like in the movies?”
“Sure!”
She kissed him again. “What is it like, to fly over a city on your own wings? Is it beautiful?”
Jules tried to remember the last time he’d actually flown. Who had been president then? Kennedy? But he remembered how New Orleans had looked from the air, the lights of the river-embraced city twinkling like an enormous crescent-shaped Christmas display. “Yeah, it was beautiful, baby.”
A knock on the door interrupted Jules’s reverie. Veronika got up and opened the door. “Oh, isn’t this wonderful looking!” She ushered in the waiter, who carefully steered his cart heaped with steaming platters of fruit-covered pancakes, eggs over easy, hash brown potatoes, and strawberries drowned in cream.
She tipped the waiter lavishly, then attacked the strawberries and cream, balancing two of the plump berries on her spoon at a time. “Dessert should comefirst, I always say!” She turned those liquid eyes on him again. “Oh, Jules, can you imagine howsweet all this will make me taste? All those months they had me studying you, learning your habits, they had no idea I was developing the biggestcrush on you.” She ate the last of the strawberries, then lifted the bowl to her lips and drank the remaining cream. “ Mmmm… simplydelicious. I used to lie in my bed at the compound and fantasize about you all night long.”
It was all Jules could do to keep himself from ravishing her right then, drinking in her sex and then gulping down her blood. But through an extraordinary exertion of will, he reminded himself that the whole point of tonight’s adventure was to gather information.
“You, uh, you said earlier that your handlers found out it was me who did in those twenty-three boobs across the river. You got any idea how they was able to pin it on me?”
“Oh, do wehave to talk about thisnow?” She pouted briefly, then dug into the tall stack of blueberry-and baked-apple-covered pancakes. “Oh,all right. If it’ll make you happy. They did some kind of tests on that goop you left on the floor. They were able to separate out your saliva, then genetically match it against some kind of tissue sample of yours.”
Tissue sample?What kind of sample could the government have? He hadn’t been in a hospital since before World War I. He certainly hadn’t donated any blood for the past eighty years or so. Doc Landrieu? Sure, the doc had poked and prodded him to satisfy his medical curiosity, but Jules couldn’t believe his ex-boss would’ve betrayed him.
A more recent recollection hit him.The baby teeth. The missing vampire baby teeth. Sure. It made sense. Who knew how long they’d been missing? If it was the teeth, that meant they’d been ferried to the feds either by Maureen or by her ex-lover-boy. Had Maureen asked him about the missing teeth to throw suspicion off herself? He didn’t want to think it. But it was possible.
“Babe, you said those guys in your agency were teachin‘ you all about my habits and my likes and dislikes. You got any idea where they came by that kinda information? It’s not like I ever put it on a Web site or nothin’.”
“Oh, don’t worry about allthat!” she said brightly. “Once you turn me into a vampire, we’ll move down to Mexico together. The agency won’t bother with you once you’re out of the country.”
Mexico?Everyone and their brother wanted him to move south of the border! “Just humor me and answer my question, huh?”
“Ohh-kay. I was never privy to what all the higher-ups had their noses into. But I think I remember somebody telling me once that your case came to the agency’s attention when somebody from local government called in some favors from the FBI. The FBI realized this was out of their depth, so they referred it to my agency.”
“‘Local government’? You mean from New Orleans City Hall?”
“I guess. I think it was somebody pretty high up. An alderman or somebody.”
Who had connections at City Hall? Not Maureen; although with all the Mardi Gras balls she used to attend, it was conceivable that she might have some political connections. Doc Landrieu was well connected throughout the local political community-local politics had been his life. But Jules still refused to believe that his old patron had turned against him.
That left Malice X. What kind of connections could a drug-dealing, ex-gang-member vampire have at City Hall? Wait-that big black binder he’d grabbed from Elisha Raddeaux’s heroin lab had listed some of the mayor’s top aides as clients!
“Oh, here’s something else I remember,” Veronika said. “My handler mentioned that he had a local contact regarding your case. Some guy he’d meet up with at this bar on Wednesday nights.”
Jules could barely contain his eagerness. “You remember the name of this bar?”
She forked another load of sugar-coated pancakes into her pretty mouth. “Umm… it had a funny name. Hit-Me-Up. No, that wasn’t it. Hit-and-Go, maybe?”
“The Hit ‘N’ Run Club?”
“That sounds right. Yeah, I think that was it.”
Bingo!Wednesday night was tomorrow night. Now he and Doodlebug would take the fight to Malice X instead of waiting for him to catch up to Jules. The element of surprise would be in Jules’s pocket, for once, instead of pressing against his throat.
“That’s fuckin‘great, baby!” He reached his arms around her ample form and kissed her lustily on the side of her neck.
She grinned at him and wiped a blob of syrup from the corner of her mouth. “Let me give you something better to get you all hot and bothered. Tell you what. For every bite of breakfast I eat, I’ll take off one article of clothing. And when I’m all out of articles of clothing, it’ll be time foryour breakfast.”
How fortune could turn on a dime! Only hours ago he was covered in sweat, sitting on a cold concrete floor, enduring a browbeating from Maureen. “Baby, that’s a better deal than the Pilgrims gettin‘ Manhattan for a handful of beads!”
As the eggs disappeared into her mouth, the shoes and socks came off her feet. A croissant accounted for her blouse and linen jacket. The last bites of pancake were traded for her skirt and the colorful silk scarf adorning her neck.
Finally, all that was left on her body were her bra and panties. All that was left on her plate was half a grapefruit. Smiling wickedly, she plunged her spoon into the moist, pink fruit.
“Wait!” Jules cried, bestirring himself from his erotic haze. “Don’t eat that!”
“Why not?”
“It’s too sour. It might sour up your blood.”
“But Ilove grapefruit! And I still have my underwear to take off.”
“Let me worry about your underwear. Just forget about that grapefruit, huh?”
“You big meanie!” She giggled as she fell into his waiting arms, then engulfed his mouth with a kiss.
A minute later, he almost wished hehad let her eat the damn grapefruit, just so she would’ve taken off the damn bra herself. Why the hell did lingerie manufacturers make their products so incredibly complicated? The clasps on this thing would’ve bedeviled a tag team of Edison, Einstein, and Joe DiMaggio. Finally, he got it loose. The resulting plunge into infinite softness immediately made him forget about his momentary frustration.
Sothis was the payoff. Ever since he’d been a little boy, Jules had suspected that the bad things in the universe were balanced out by good things, or vice versa. Just not necessarily of equal magnitude. Most of his life he’d spent dreading the coming deluge of shit that would follow some tiny, insignificant good thing like finding a quarter on the street. But this time,this time, the deluge of shit had comefirst. And if the universe played by its own rules, that meant the balancing payback had to be even bigger and better. Tonight, he was making love to a gorgeous young woman whose fondest wish was to become his vampire queen. Tomorrow night, he and Doodlebug would squish his mortal enemy like the sewer-crawling cockroach he was.
Veronika moaned lustily. While his mind had been wandering, she’d managed to remove his shoes, socks, and shirt, but his trousers and underpants were prompting squeals of frustration. Once he lifted his behind off the bed, the trousers came off easily enough. His underpants were more problematic, being tightly clasped between his manly belly and his overexcited soldier. Veronika solved the conundrum by ripping them off. Soon thereafter her own panties went flying across the room like a pink bat.
She pushed him down onto the bed, signaling that she wanted to be on top.Fine, Jules thought; since she was the lighter of the two of them, it was only fair that she do most of the work. Besides, the view was bound to be spectacular.
She climbed on top of him, and the room temporarily disappeared behind an engulfing curtain of flesh. Then she straddled him, and her soft hand found his eager-to-serve soldier. She wiggled her posterior a little. There was an instant of erotic limbo while the biologic geometries adjusted themselves. Then he felt it.
Mission Control, we have ignition…
Wow!Being inside her was the most intensely wonderful sensation he’d ever experienced. It was right up there with that first big gulp of blood after days of going without. His body was a Saturn V rocket, flames bursting from its base as it trembled with the mighty effort of breaking free of earth.
Gantries are clear, all systems are go He was going too fast.Way too fast. If he wanted to make this last more than five seconds, he’d better concentrate on something other than the rocket. He watched her thigh muscles bulge majestically as she pumped him for all he was worth.
Ten, nine, eight Aww, hell; there was no stopping liftoff now. The best he could do was squeeze as much sensual experience into the next few seconds as he could. He reached for her breasts seven, six, five and they were fabulously soft, so ample (he wished his hands were bigger), maybe they were phony but he didn’t care, they sure as hell feltgreat, he squeezed and squeezed four, three, two and squeezed and squeezed, she was loving it, “Yes! Yes!” she said, and then there was a funny noise that sounded something likeshplittt!
And then there were two terribly sharp-looking wooden stakes sticking out where her nipples had been.
Abort mission! Abort mission!
“Oh no!” she cried. “Notnow! NOT NOW!”
He looked up into her eyes, and paradise was lost. He saw her awful moment of indecision-to be or not to be-and then he saw the room begin to disappear as she fell forward, her right breast-stake aimed directly at his heart.
His rocket, suddenly just a frightened little soldier again, retracted into the dubious shelter of its sheath. Jules rolled to the left as quickly as his blubber-hindered muscles would allow.
“AAOWW-shit!”
The stakes missed his heart. But his right shoulder suffered a gouging, and her weight and momentum actually drove her right stake through the loose fold of skin on his upper left arm and buried it deep in the mattress. Pain supercharged his strength. He pushed her off him, bloodily dislodging the stake from his arm in the process. Veronika landed on the floor with a loud thud.
Dazed, Jules watched the blood from his torn left arm stain the white sheets crimson. He heard Veronika stirring.Fortune turns on a dime, turns on a fuckin‘ dime… He forced himself to move. His injuries were messy, but they weren’t deep-despite the pain, he still had full use of his stabbed arm.
“Jules! It was amistake! An accident! Please believe me!”
She was on her feet, her face beseeching him, her arms outstretched, begging for a forgiving embrace. But those twin stakes still pointed at his heart like the warheads on a pair of torpedoes.
“I want to be your queen! We can still make it work, darling! Let me prove my loyalty-I can help you with the black vampires!”
She came at him. He scanned the room for a defense, a weapon-anything. All there was was the uneaten half of a grapefruit.
Jimmy Cagney had the kiss-off thing down pat: a gesture was worth a thousand words. He picked up the grapefruit and mashed it in her face.
“Ahhhgh!Myeyes!”
She blindly ran to the bathroom. Jules watched with no small satisfaction as she rammed into a wall on her way. Then he retrieved his clothes. He found himself wishing he were one of those superheroes who could simply say a magic word and have their uniform appear on them, perfectly pressed. This retrieving of a wadded-up mass of clothing was getting to be an aggravating habit.
He left the room door open. Slamming it wasn’t worth the energy. He had to husband all of his energy for tomorrow, when he would finally get the Malice X monkey off his back.
Tomorrow would be better.
Tomorrowhad to be better.
Women!