Maureen hadn’t answered her phone.That doesn’t mean anything, Jules told himself over and over. He pushed the Lincoln hard, overextending its flaccid suspension and denting its axles in the pits of unseen chuckholes on Canal Street.That doesn’t mean anything, ‘cause she’s probably workin’ at Jezebel’s. No one had picked up the phone at the club, either. Butthat didn’t mean anything, because no one ever picked up the phone at that damn dive. So he’d had no choice but to drive like a bat out of hell to the French Quarter.
Even this late, parking was tight in the upper Quarter. Jules had to park three blocks west of the club, just a block from Maureen’s house. He walked as fast as he could, brushing past bunches of wild-eyed frat boys and sport-jacketed conventioneers crowding the sidewalk. He nearly tripped over the legs of an unconscious drunk, half hidden in the shadows at the intersection of Iberville and Bourbon, but he recovered his balance and hurried onward.
The caricature of Maureen posted in the glass display case in front of Jezebel’s was even more faded than Jules remembered. He propelled himself up the foyer’s steep steps two at a time, vaguely recalling the nights when he’d had to rest after every third step. Tonight his muscles answered his desperate commands without complaint, but he wondered how long it would be before his drug-fueled vitality evaporated.
The club was surprisingly empty. The greeter, a balding retiree in a plaid jacket, looked half asleep. He perked up slightly when Jules approached. “No cover charge tonight, buddy. Buy three drinks, get the second one free-”
“Is Maureen here?”
“Who?”
“Maureen.One of the dancers. I’ve gotta see her right away.”
The greeter’s tall forehead wrinkled with thought. “Maureen? One ofour dancers? Can’t say I know of any ‘Maureen’ around here, mister. ‘Course, I’m kinda new, just doin’ this to supplement my Social Security-”
Jules grabbed the old man’s shoulders. “You’vegotta know her! She’s only the biggest fuckin‘ star this dump’s got! She’s blond, got hips out to here-she’s as big asme, practically-”
The greeter’s eyes sparkled with sudden understanding. “Oh! Thatone! You mean Round Robin, mister. Ain’t got no ‘Maureen’ around here-”
Jules nearly screamed with frustration, but he managed to control himself. “Yeah.That’s who I mean. She here tonight?”
The old man sighed disgustedly. “Boy, that girl’s sure got a following! You’re the tenth customer been askin‘ after her tonight. Well, she ain’t doin’ her regular show. I don’t know why, no sir. But don’t walk out on me-we got one hell of a terrific drink special tonight-”
Jules spotted a bartender he recognized. “Yo!Winchell!” Jules called out when he was still five paces from the bar. “You seen Maureen around anytime tonight?”
The bartender looked up from the glasses he was scrubbing with a dirty wipe rag. “Not tonight, pal. She was in last night, but she left after her first set, and she didn’t make it back for her second. The boss was pretty pissed. Dinah might know something. She filled in for Maureen last night.”
“Thanks, Winchell,” Jules said. He stalked past the stage, where a slender, buxom dancer wriggled in front of mostly empty tables, and headed for the door markedPRIVATE-EMPLOYEES ONLY. He shoved the door open and went down the hall to Maureen’s private dressing room, which Dinah sometimes shared with her. The room was dark and empty.
He tried the other dressing room next. Thankfully, Dinah was there. She was carefully applying a ponderous set of false eyelashes in front of an illuminated mirror when Jules burst in. The eyelashes fluttered to the floor as she spun around. “Jules! Honey, am I ever glad to seeyou! What’s going on with Maureen?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Jules answered, barely remembering to step to the side so Dinah wouldn’t spot his unreflection in the mirror. “I’m tryin‘ to find her. The bartender said she skipped outta here last night.”
“What? You haven’t been with her? But that call last night-I thought she ran out of here to be withyou!”
Jules felt a tremor in his chest. “You know who called her?”
“No. I’ve got no idea. She wouldn’t say, but she looked awful worried-”
“You were with her when she took the call?”
“Yeah. We were in her dressing room. She’s got a private line installed, since nobody ever picks up the phone out front. It hardly ever rings, so I was pretty surprised when it rang last night. After she said hello she got this terrible look on her face, like she’d just heard somebody had died or something. I asked her what was up, but she wouldn’t tell me nothing. She just said she had to leave right away, and asked could I cover her second dance shift. Then she ran out of here. She was so worried, Jules, I figured the call was eitherfrom you orabout you.”
“And you haven’t heard from her since?”
Dinah’s eyes grew wide. “No! And that’s what worries me so. I mean, it’s not like Maureen to miss work. She’sdevoted to this job. She’s never out sick. The few times she’s had stuff come up, she’s always gotten hold of the boss the night before and arranged for someone to cover for her. Her running out of here was strange enough. But then when she didn’t come in tonight for her first shift, and nobody had heard from her-”
Jules spun toward the door. “Thanks, Dinah. You’re a peach.”
“Where’re you going now?”
Jules was already out in the hall when he answered. “To her house,” he called out hoarsely, not looking back.
“But, Jules, I already been there! I rang and rang, but nobody answered-”
Dinah’s words faded in his ears as Jules charged through the club. He didn’t even notice the consternation he caused the embattled dancer on-stage, or the exaggerated haste with which the greeter abandoned his stool and got out of Jules’s way. His mind had room for only two thoughts. The dreadful tableau he’d left behind at Doc Landrieu’s house. And the even more terrible vision he feared was ahead of him.
Back on the sidewalk, he began to run. He pushed himself as hard as he could, cursing his body for its inability to move faster. He couldn’t breathe the thick summer air fast enough. Were his heart an engine, it would’ve burned oil and thrown a rod. A skinny wolf would be faster, he thought. A cheetah, faster still. Not worth it, he told himself-he’d have to waste time squirming out of his clothing, and he only had a couple of blocks to go.
A calming notion sprang to mind, a counterweight to the wave of panic that was threatening to give him a coronary. Maybe he was imagining a horror show that didn’t exist? Doc Landrieu had meant nothing to Malice X; all the good doctor had been to him was a tool with which to jam splinters under Jules’s fingernails. Killing Doc Landrieu had been like spitting out a wad of gum.
But Maureen… Maureen was another story entirely. In the world of vampires Jules had been raised in, one’s blood parent was every bit as dear and precious as one’s birth parents were. Malice X had been willing to smash the rules in other ways-particularly in his blithe willingness to abandon the mutual nonaggression pacts that had stabilized vampire societies for untold centuries. But Maureen… hadn’t she told Jules that Malice X had loved her? Hadn’t this whole rotten feud been at least partly fired by jealousy? If the thought of Malice X’s romance with Maureen had been a dagger in Jules’s heart before, now he clung to that very same thought like a life raft in a storm surge.
He finally came to Maureen’s stoop. Her front door was locked. This was a good sign-if Malice X or his goons had been there, why would they have bothered to lock the door when they left? Some of the murderous tension unknotted in his shoulders as he fumbled through his pockets for the key. But as he unlocked the door, he couldn’t help thinking,What if he’d wanted to make sure no strangers walked in and disturbed things? What if he’d wanted to make sure only folks with a key could get in? And who else would have a key to Maureen’s house but me?
His heart pounding hard, he opened the door. The house was dark. All was silent, except for a steady, rhythmic swishing sound. After a second, Jules recognized the noise as the ceiling fans in Maureen’s front parlor, turned up to their highest setting. Maureen, like most vampires, enjoyed the heat. She wouldn’t have the fans on unless she was entertaining company. But the darkness ruled that out.
“Maureen?”
No one answered.
Jules stepped into the pitch-black entrance foyer. He held his hands extended in front of him, fumbling along the wall for the light switch. Something hard and blunt struck him in the face. He swung his fists wildly, blindly. His left forearm connected. Whatever his assailant was, it was surprisingly light. It clattered on impact. A second later, completely silent, it hit him in the face again.
Jules batted it away a second time. This time, he ducked before it could hit him. His fingers found the light switch.
His antagonist was an oblong black object hanging by a piece of twine from the light fixture. It was about the size of a large paperback book. Jules grabbed the rope to stop the thing from swinging. It was a videotape. It had a note taped to it. The words were written with a black marker, in large capital letters:
WATCH THIS-DON’T EAT IT
Jules yanked the plastic cassette from the rope and wadded up the note. He walked into the parlor, steeling himself for the worst. The heavy purple draperies that lined the windows billowed inward, outside breezes battling the countervailing wind power of the ceiling fans. Maureen never left her windows open. She hated the drunken chatter from tourists passing on the street. With her windows closed, the thick walls of her two-century-old house cocooned her in silence. But now the draperies fluttered inward. Not just in the parlor; the windows were open in every room that Jules could see.
“Maureen?”
It was a forlorn, useless holler. Jules knew that. But he repeated it twice more, as though her name were an incantation to drive away evil spirits-or turn back the clock. He turned on more lights. A thick coat of fine, white dust covered all the exposed surfaces in the parlor and dining room-end tables, seat cushions, Victorian red velvet sofas, the hardcover biography of “full-figured gal” Jane Russell that Maureen had been reading when he’d stayed with her last. He’d never seen dust in this house before. Maureen was an impeccable housekeeper; one more reason why it had been virtually impossible for them to live in the same home together. Jules touched the dust on the dining room table with his forefinger. He felt sick.
Listless, empty, Jules shuffled back into the parlor and shoved the videotape into Maureen’s combination TV–VCR. While the set was warming up, he gently cleared the dust away from one of the sofa cushions and sat down. He didn’t bother to check if the tape was rewound. He knew it would be.
What came on-screen looked at first like a modern, color remake of the old Claude Rains thrillerThe Invisible Man. A seemingly empty man’s suit-black jacket and trousers, white shirt, narrow black gangster’s tie-strutted around behind what looked like a gray-and-red mummy. Ribbons of gray duct tape partially encased a billowy-huge red satin mini dress and queen-sized fishnet stockings, which were both bound to a tall-backed kitchen chair. Unlike the men’s suit, the satin mini dress had an attached “face” of sorts. An oval of flesh-colored powder floated a few inches above the dress’s plunging neckline, highlighted with lips formed of fire-engine-red lipstick, almond-shaped ovals of black mascara surrounding empty eye sockets, and thick black false eyelashes that fluttered quickly, nervously, like dragonfly wings.
Jules recognized the room they were in. It was Maureen’s kitchen, only thirty feet from where he now sat. The red satin dress whimpered. Jules knew it was Maureen’s whimper; but it was easier to think of it as the red satin dress’s.
The black suit clapped its invisible hands together. “Welcome toChiller Theater, kiddies,” it said with Malice X’s mocking voice. “Tonight’s thrilling episode is calledThe Fuckin‘ Traitor Ho ’Fesses Up. Sponsored by those fine folks at Big Shot Beverage Company, the makers of cold drinks that turn black men sterile.”
“Malice, please,” Maureen begged. Her voice sounded choked with mucus and tears. “Please let me go. You said you just wanted to talk. What’s with all this crazy nonsense, baby? I’ve been good, honey. I swear. I never said anything to anybody that could get you in trouble. Let me loose. You said you’d tell me what had happened to Jules if I came here and met you without telling anybody. And I did exactly what you asked-”
“Lyin‘bitch!” The black suit backhanded the oval of flesh-colored powder, smearing its lipstick into a red scar. “You can’t speak two fuckin’ sentences in a row without sayin‘ his name!Bitch! Who the fuck else told fat boy and his queer sidekick where my sister lives? Who the fuck even told them Ihad a fuckin’ sister? Huh?”
Maureen was weeping. Jules saw that the battered side of the powder oval was swelling like rotten fruit. “It-it wasn’t me, Malice. You gottabelieve me, baby. I never knew where your sister lived. Iswear it! I can’t even remember if you ever told me youhad a sister. I didn’t knife you in the back, baby. I’d never do anything to hurt you, Iswear…”
The black suit moved behind the red satin dress. Maureen’s face jerked backward, as though her hair had been roughly yanked. “Yeah, that’s right, baby,” Malice X said, his voice lower, almost inaudible. “You’ll never do anything to hurt me. That’s ‘cause youcan’t hurt me. I’m way beyond gettin’ hurt by the likes of you. But I can hurtyou, baby. I can hurt youreal good.”
He stepped off-camera for a few seconds. When he returned, he was holding a five-foot-long wooden spear. Carved of an exotic dark hardwood, it was a cross between harpoon and phallus. “This is a Yoruba ceremonial spear, baby,” Malice X said. “I got a whole collection of these. Bought it at auction. I was biddin‘ against three different museums. Thing cost me half as much as my Caddy. Nice, huh?”
Maureen nodded her head weakly.
“Now where you think I oughtta stick this fine thing, huh?”
“Nowhere, Malice-”
“Shut thefuck up!” Maureen’s head snapped back again. “I didn’t ask you to say nothin‘! That was a fuckin’ rhetorical question. You wanna say somethin‘? Say your last sweet honey-words to your fat fuck of a boyfriend.”
Tears turned the mascara around Maureen’s eyes to black rivers that scoured the powder from her face and stained the red satin of her dress. What emerged from her mouth wasn’t words; it was a preverbal cry of despair, torn between a futile plea of innocence and a moan of bottomless regret.
The first word she managed to utter was his name. “Jules… if you can hear this… Jules, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for everything, darling. I can’t-I’m just so very, verysorry, baby.” On the left of the screen, partially off-camera, Malice X raised his spear to strike. Maureen’s empty eye sockets stared directly into the camera. “Jules!Ilove y-”
The spear plunged through the patch of red satin covering her heart. What Jules heard then was only a faint aural shadow of the scream that had rocked the kitchen hours before. No recording instrument on earth could begin to capture the death-shriek of a vampire. Even so, the sound that assaulted him from the TV’s small speakers was enough to make his ears bleed.
He watched, transfixed, as layer after layer of Maureen appeared on camera, only to progressively flake away like crumbs of burned pastry. First her plump white skin shimmered into view; then the thick layer of yellowish fat beneath; then a highway map of veins and arteries and organs; and then her bones. Jules tried to look away from the TV screen. But he couldn’t. Finally, the camera’s cold eye showed just a crumpled red dress and a sagging, empty pair of stockings, held partially erect by yards of drooping duct tape. On the chair’s cushion and on the floor were mounds of sugary white dust.
Malice X returned to the center of the picture. “Now, wasn’t thatfun, kiddies? Special visual effects courtesy of Industrial Light and Tragic Magic. And dig that Dolby Surround Sound! Feel free to rewind the tape and watch that part over again. I’ll wait.” The suit stood unmoving.
Jules felt numb inside. He could name a list of emotions long as his arm he should be feeling right now. Horror. Grief. Anger. Hate. He pictured himself shoving his fist through Malice X’s waiting image. Rending what remained of the set into tiny particles of plastic and metal. But he didn’t do it. He couldn’t move. He asked himself,Didn’t TVs used to have vacuum tubes inside? That’s what was inside him. A big vacuum tube, empty even of air.
Finally the suit on-screen began moving and talking again. “Okay. Now you’ve had enough time to take that bathroom break and get yo’self another beer. Back to business. Way I see things, you don’t have too many friends left to lose, Jules. Who’s left? Lessee… there’s that cabdriver buddy of yours, right? And then there’s that old-timey jazz musician. But I’m not totally unreasonable. Tell you what. I won’t off your two buddies if you agree to do one little thing for me. Meet me in personal combat. One-on-one. Mano a mano. I’ll even be a sport about it. You get to name your spot. Just call the toll-free number at the end of this tape to let me know your preferred place and time. Phone’s in the kitchen, in case you don’t remember. I’ll expect to hear from you no later than midnight, Friday. Otherwise, this town’s gonna be short one cabby and one horn-playin‘ geezer. Remember, that call’s toll-free. So don’t delay! Call now!”
Midnight, Friday.Tonight was Thursday. The screen turned blue, and a local telephone number strobed against the bright background. The large white numerals flashed across the screen like the tag end of a late-night infomercial. Jules didn’t move to write the phone number down. He watched it dance across the glass tube until it was burned into his brain. Then the tape ended. The screen dissolved into static.
A strong breeze blew the coating of dust from the top of the television onto the floor. The sight of Maureen’s last remnants being scattered into the corners of her home, and perhaps lost forever, propelled Jules off the sofa. He focused his battered consciousness solely on the chore of collecting as much of the dust as he could. Like a sleepwalker, he stumbled into the kitchen to search for a whisk broom and dustpan. He found them in a slender broom closet by the refrigerator. He needed something to collect the dust. Something more substantial and respectful than a cardboard box or garbage bag. He spotted a large glass vase filled with silk flowers on the dining room table. Jules emptied the silk flowers into the kitchen sink.
The chair that Maureen had been taped to was still in the center of the kitchen. The crumpled duct tape and empty dress and stockings offered mute testimony to Maureen’s final, agonized seconds. But Jules wouldn’t let himself think about that.
Almost two hours later, he was nearly done. He had scoured the entrance foyer, the front parlor, the music room, the dining room, and the kitchen. He had moved sofas, tilted an upright piano, and whisked out the corners of long-disused closets. He had beaten the dust out of cushions and rugs, gently blown it from between the ruffled pages of beauty magazines, and even whisked it from the narrow grooves in the soles of his boots.
The vase was filled nearly to its top. He had probably mixed Maureen’s remains with a goodly proportion of ordinary household dust; it simply couldn’t be helped. Now the final part of his chore was before him. The most difficult part-the part that would force him to think about Maureen, the woman, instead of Maureen, the sugar trail. The last thing he had to do was to dislodge those particles of his lover that had remained stuck to the duct tape, and collect whatever dust was still hidden within the folds of Maureen’s undergarments.
Brushing the tape with the whisk broom accomplished nothing. The bent straw only got stuck to the glue itself. Jules had better luck using one of Maureen’s nail files to scrape the dust off, but it was still hard going. Fitting, in a way. Maureen had always been a stubborn woman.
He was almost afraid to touch her panties. Afraid her avenging spirit might incinerate the first male to touch her underwear-too many men; that’s what had led her to this. He lifted them gingerly, like he was handling the Shroud of Turin. A thimbleful of dust was cupped in the cotton panel in the crotch. Jules carefully raised the panties over the vase, then tipped the dust in. He felt self-conscious about what he did next, but he did it anyway. He held the red silk against his nostrils and breathed in deeply. Nothing. Even that was gone. Even her scent had crumpled into dust.
Jules opened several of the drawers beneath her kitchen counter, looking for some aluminum foil to seal up the vase. A small pile of bills and letters was sitting on the countertop. The letter on top of the pile was addressed to him, care of Ms. Maureen Remoulade, cobeneficiary. The letter was from the Claims Department of the First Union Firemen’s Casualty and Insurance Company.
Inside was a check for twenty-one thousand dollars.
The phone rang. Jules yanked the receiver off the wall. “You fuckin‘ sonofabitch,” he said before the caller could utter a sound. “Got impatient, huh? Thought I wasn’t gonna call your fuckin’ chat line? Well, you jumped the gun, asshole-”
“Hello? Jules, is thatyou?”
The voice wasn’t the sneering, somewhat high-pitched voice Jules had been expecting to hear. “Uh… yeah, this is Jules,” he answered, a little embarrassed. “Who’s this?”
“It’s Dr. Marvin Oday. You know, your old morgue buddy? Well, I’ve gotta hand it to you, Jules. You and Dr. Landrieu are quite the kidders. If nothing else, you livened up a slow night by giving me a good laugh.”
Jules tried to decipher this comment, but drew a complete blank. “What are you talkin‘ about?” His mind felt like curdled pudding. “This about those pills I asked you to look at?”
“Those little whiteA pills you gave me? Oh, I’ve looked at ‘em, all right. You really got my curiosity going with all that talk about secret, non-FDA-approved research. I thought maybe my analysis would take a couple of nights, at least. Only took me about ten minutes, though.”
Events were shifting back and forth too fast for Jules to follow. He knew he should feel grateful, but he’d forgotten how. “You know what’s in them pills? That’s great, Marvin; that’s really, yeah, that’s really great. You’ve done me a big favor. So you’ll be able to make more of them for me?”
“The first rule of comedy is never try to squeeze more humor out of a used-up joke. You want more pills? Cough up two bucks and get your butt over to a drugstore. ‘Til next time, Jules-”
“Wait! Marvin, don’t hang up yet! You’ve gotta tell me what’s in those pills!”
The receiver was silent for a couple of seconds. “Hold on-you mean Dr. Landrieu didn’t let you in on the joke?”
“Whatjoke?” Jules cried, totally exasperated. “What the hell is in the damn pills?”
“Aspirin, man. Ordinary, generic table aspirin.”
Jules mumbled good-bye to his old coworker and hung up the phone. He went into the dining room and sat down, resting his elbows on the table and leaning his forehead against his hands.Aspirin. Ordinary table aspirin. That’s what had stripped the years off his weary, weight-burdened body?That’s what had canceled the shooting pains in his knees, restored wind to his lungs and strength to his biceps?
It didn’t seem possible. Ordinary, common aspirin. But it had worked. It had worked just like Doc Landrieu had told him it would. Jules had no doubt about that. Maybe there was more to aspirin than just headache and hangover relief. Studies had recently shown it could prevent heart attack victims from suffering a second attack. Maybe his ex-boss had discovered more about aspirin than was commonly known?
Another notion occurred to Jules. Maybe Doc Landrieu had discovered more aboutJules than Jules had known. Maybe the pills hadn’t done the work at all. Maybe what had really done the work had been his own trust, his ownbelief that the pills would help him.
A placebo. Doc Landrieu had slipped him a placebo. That rotten bastard. Here Jules had trusted him, believed in him, and his old boss had abused that trust, twisted him around his pinkie finger just so he could get Jules to reconsider moving with him down to Argentina Jules barely had time to work a good mad up before the delayed-action epiphany kicked him in the head like the business end of a French Quarter mule:
It wasn’t the pills at all. It wasme. It’salwaysbeen me.
Everything Doodlebug had tried to convince him of was true. Jules had been transforming into a wolf with a barrel-belly because that was the only kind of wolf he’d believed he could become. He hadn’t flown in years because he’d lost faith in his ability to leave the ground. He’d suffered from aches and pains and shortness of breath for decades, all because an unending stream of newspaper articles and TV shows had told him a person of his sizehad to suffer these things.
None of it had been necessary. Maybe it had been safe and comforting… he’d always had a ready excuse at hand whenever he screwed up. But those excuses were a part of his old, familiar self that should’ve burned up when his house did.
His form and his fate were in his own hands.
He was 450 pounds of Grade-A, USDA-choice vampire. It was time he started acting it.
He picked up the phone and dialed the number from the tape. An unfamiliar voice answered.
“Get me your boss,” Jules said. “Tell him it’s the fat man.”
Two minutes later, Malice X came on the line. “I guess you figured out which end of the tape to stick in the machine, huh?“
Jules briefly considered five or six snappy comebacks. But he was in no mood for banter, clever or otherwise. “You and me, Malice. Let’s do it. Let’s get this shit over with.”
“Whoa-ho-ho!You soundserious, man. But I guess losin‘ a friend and a lover in one night can do that to a guy. Just name your time and place, Julio.“
“Tomorrow night. Ten o’clock. Your place.”
“You mean where I live?”
“Whatever hole in the ground you crawl into at the end of the night.”
Malice X laughed. “You hit closer to the truth than you know, man. How come my house? Not that I mind, but you’ve got me curious.“
“I don’t want you worryin‘ about me settin’ an ambush for you. I want you to feel nice and comfortable.”
The black vampire laughed again. “Why, that’s downrightballsy of you, Jules! Stupid, but ballsy. I like that. Fine. My boys’ll watch, but they won’t interfere; I promise. ‘No ambushes’…heh. Youkill me, man!”
He gave Jules directions. The instructions were nothing Jules needed to write down. Malice X lived in the heart of the city, barely a mile from Maureen’s house. At the center of everything-but hidden, invisible-deep down. Jules was surprised when he learned the location of his enemy’s home, but after a few seconds of thought, it made perfect sense.
So in nineteen hours and twenty-three minutes, Jules would battle his nemesis deep beneath Canal Street. That suited Jules just fine. It meant he’d have less distance to travel when he dragged Malice X down to hell.