The Third District police station on Moss Avenue didn’t look like a government building at all. From the outside, the spacious complex, with its horse stables and neatly parked rows of large white sedans, looked like an upscale jockey club. Several horses whinnied nervously from inside the dark stables as Jules crunched across the gravel parking lot.
He rubbed his aching posterior as he ruefully remembered his public bus ride from his neighborhood to the station, along Esplanade Avenue. He hadn’t been on a public bus in more than thirty years, and this ride had reminded him why; aside from being way too cramped for a person of his magnitude, the stale air inside had smelled of rancid chicken grease and the bodily odors of dozens of people who’d been standing in ninety-degree heat waiting all day for buses.Erato’s cab would’ve been waymore comfortable,Jules thought as he approached the front entrance.But some things you just can’t drag your buddies into. And stealing my stuff back from the New Orleans Police Department is definitely one of those things.
Jules wondered what his mother would think of him now-her only son, sneaking into a police station to commit a felony. Sure, he’d killed plenty of folks, but he never thought of that as acrime — that had been eating. Even his mother had accepted this; or she’d seemed to, anyway. It had been one of those things they’d never gotten around to talking about. During his early years as a vampire, whenever Jules had tried to relate to her the guilt his feedings were causing him, she would quickly turn on the radio, and instead of talking they’d listen to the New York Philharmonic orFibber McGee and Molly.
Inside, the station looked like most other city government buildings, except maybe a little cleaner. There were the downscale bureaucratic accents Jules remembered well from his nearly thirty years in the coroner’s office-faded, ugly wallpaper; framed photos of the mayor; and fluorescent lights that hummed annoyingly and made everyone look ghoulish (not just Jules, who looked that way in any kind of light).
Jules approached the front desk and coughed. The phlegmy sound made the petite desk clerk look up from the New Orleans Fairgrounds racing form she was studying. Jules was surprised; not that a city employee would be studying a racing form during work hours, but horse-racing season had been over since the spring. He watched her eyes widen for an instant as she took him in. But only an instant; her expression quickly reverted to studied boredom. “Yes? Can I help you?”
“Yeah. I got a call from somebody in your, oh, what’s it called, uh-y’know, where the cops store the stuff they grab from criminals?”
“Evidence and Recovered Items?”
“Yeah. That’s it. They asked me to come in and pick up some stuff of mine that got stolen.”
“Okay. You’ll need to sign in on this list here. And you’ll need to wear this visitor’s badge. Also, you’re gonna need to show some ID before Marvis will release your stuff to you.”
“Yeah, but what if what I’m here to pick up happens tobe my ID? Those thieves left me naked as the day I came into the world. I got a friend who’ll vouch for me. His cell phone number’s here in my pocket.”
The clerk looked infinitely disinterested. “Whatever. Work it out with Marvis.” She slid a clipboard across the desk.
Jules signed his illegible scrawl at the top of the paper, trying to ignore the coffee-induced rumblings in the pit of his stomach. He clipped the bright pink badge to his shirt pocket. “Thanks. So where do I need to go?”
“Down that hallway there. Fifth door on your left. Just past the ladies’ room.” Before Jules could even manage to maneuver himself through the gateway by her desk, the clerk had returned to studying her racing form.
Jules followed her directions, hoping he wouldn’t accidentally walk into the ladies’ room. The room he entered, markedEVIDENCE, was much larger than he’d expected. The air inside smelled of dust, machine oil, sweat-stained leather, and dried herbs. Except for a desk and a narrow walkway by the door, nearly all of the space was taken up by row after row of metal utility shelves. The floor and shelves were packed with bicycles, chrome-plated pistols, purses of all shapes and colors, cemetery statuary, wrought-iron gateposts, sawed-off shotguns, car stereos, television sets, computers, Mac-10 machine pistols, a grenade launcher, and the cleanly severed marble head of Jefferson Davis. It looked like an unlikely hybrid of a Royal Street antiques boutique and a St. Claude Avenue pawnshop.
Jules loudly cleared his throat and waited for the officer in charge to appear. A minute later he heard a loud rustling from the back of the room, and Sergeant Marvis Mancuso, a short, stocky, balding man who looked to be on the cusp of retirement, carefully picked his way through the tangle. “ ‘Evening! What can I do for you?”
Jules was disappointed. He’d halfway been hoping that Mancuso would be familiar to him, one of the cops who used to drop bodies off at the morgue. It would’ve made things easier. But he’d never seen Mancuso before. Now he’d have to rely entirely on his wits and on his long-untried powers of vampiric hypnosis. The thought made Jules’s stomach turn over like the contents of a cement mixer.
Jules leaned across the desk, putting his face as close to Mancuso’s as possible. “Me? I’m here to pick up my things. Wallet, shoes, shirt, belt, pants. The works.”
The officer stepped back from the desk to avoid Jules’s coffee breath. “Do you have your Form 108-B?”
“Form 108-B?”
“You would’ve received it in the mail. It lists what we recovered of yours. I’ll need to see that and a photo ID, please.”
How could he bullshit his way through this? Jules tried desperately to think, but his mind was blank as tapioca. This was the moment he’d been dreading all night. It was now or never. He took a deep breath, then stared piercingly into Mancuso’s watery gray eyes.
“My name is Jules Duchon. Your will is my will. You will get my clothes, my wallet, and my taxi certificate and bring them to me. Then you will forget you ever saw me.”
Mancuso looked confused. His cheeks and eyebrows twitched, like he was lost in the middle of a bad first-day-of-school dream where everyone else was dressed in freshly ironed uniforms and he was naked. Then his eyes refocused on Jules. “Honey,” he stammered. “Honey, look, I’m sorry, okay? I’ll paint the garage next weekend. The Saints are playing the Raiders today. One more win and they could win their division.”
Jules sighed. He was obviously rusty. He redoubled his concentration and spoke even more slowly, sounding like a seventy-eight record playing at thirty-three rpm. “My name is Jules Duchon. You will turn around and bring me my clothes and all my things. After I leave, you will forget I was ever here.”
Mancuso was as glassy-eyed as Christine Gordon inI Walked with a Zombie. “Bring you-your things…”
“Yeah. That’s right. Bring me my things.”
A cloud lifted from Mancuso’s face. He smiled broadly at Jules, a kindly twinkle lighting up his eyes. He turned and walked into one of the narrow, cluttered aisles. Jules waited expectantly.Hey, he thought,that wasn’t so hard after all. I’ve still got the touch.
Mancuso returned with a small pink bicycle, training wheels still attached. He held it by its banana seat and tasseled handlebars and rolled it through the gate. “Here you go, sweetheart,” the officer said, his voice dripping with honey. “We caught the bad man who took this away from you. He’s in a place where he won’t be scaring any pretty little girls anymore, okay?”
Jules turned red.Okay, the hypnosis definitely needs work. “Aww, fuck this already,” he muttered half under his breath. “Mancuso, you stay here. Don’t move a muscle. I’ll get my shit myself.”
The sight of Jules wiggling through the gate roused Mancuso from his trance. “Hey!” he shouted, rubbing his eyes groggily. “You can’t go back there! Only authorized personnel are allowed behind the desk!”
Shit!This was exactly the kind of scene Jules had hoped to avoid. Panic-induced spasms surged through his gut. What to do? Mancuso shook off the last of his grogginess and grabbed Jules’s arm. The vampire’s stomach rumbled like a freight train. Jules locked eyes with Mancuso. One last desperate shot at hypnosis The sergeant clutched his belly, a stunned, pained look on his face. “Oh, Jesus-!” His protruding stomach emitted a gurgling rumble, an exact duplicate of the angry noises Jules’s gut had been making. He let go of Jules’s arm and stumbled backward toward the door. “Jesus Christ! Oh Mama-!” Holding his stomach like it was about to explode, Mancuso bolted out the door. Jules listened to his frantic footsteps echo down the hallway. Then a door slammed. Jules presumed it was the door to the men’s room.
That would keep Mancuso plenty busy for the next few minutes, at least. The notion of pushing his way through the tangled thicket of stolen possessions and actually finding his stuff was a daunting one, but Jules had no other choice. He sucked in his stomach and dived in.
Most of the recovered clothing was stored in clear plastic trash bags in the back of the room. Jules examined the endless mounds in disbelief. Then Fortune graced him with a bucktoothed smile. His checkered pants were pinned to a corkboard on the rear wall, spread out like a tablecloth on a clothesline. Someone had attached a sign to the pants. It read, in blue magic marker,HEY MANCUSO,EAT ANY MORE DOUGHNUTS AND YOU’LL END UP WEARING THESE. Sitting on the floor beneath the pants, in an open plastic sack, were the rest of Jules’s clothes, his wallet, and, most important, his taxi certificate.
Jules grabbed the sack, yanked his pants off the clipboard, and stuffed pants-sans-sign into the bag. Tucking the bundle under his arm like a football, he hustled his way back to the desk, knocking a few car stereos to the floor and stubbing his toe on Jefferson Davis’s chin.
The door burst open just as Jules was wiggling past the desk. Two officers rushed in, a man and a woman, and drew their guns.
“Freeze!” the man ordered, pointing his revolver at Jules’s stomach, an irresistible target.
“What the hell’s going on here?” his partner said, her eyes flaring as she saw the catastrophe behind Jules. “Mancuso runs past like his ass is on fire, and now Tub-O-Lard thinks he can rip us off like we’re some Circle K?”
Jules’s intestines turned to squishy ice. There was only one thing to do. The new trick he’d pulled on Mancuso still vibrating in his synapses, Jules stared piercingly at the male cop and summoned the hideous memory of the last time he’d attempted to eat a po‘ boy. The man belched like a hippo, dropped his gun, doubled over, and rolled on the floor, groaning in agony. Then Jules turned his gaze on the woman, who still pointed her gun at him, although much less confidently than before. He forced himself to mentally relive the obscene torments that final taste of fried shrimp had cost him. The woman ran screaming from the room.
Jules waddled into the hallway as quickly as his bulk would allow. Back at the front desk, the clerk tried to block his exit through the gate. “Hey! Stop! You can’t leave here with that visitor’s badge! I’ve gotta sign you out!” A quick dose of his Diarrhea Stare shut her up fast. If only Maureen could see him in action now!
Outside, Jules sucked in a deep, proud breath. The damp night air smelled like victory. Actually, it smelled like horseshit and a Dumpster stuffed with rotting cardboard boxes, but that was all right. Jules felt good. Fuck that-he feltgreat! He hadn’t felt this alive and on top of the world since his war days, when he’d stalked the docks as the Hooded Terror.Damn! I wish I had my mask and cape on me! I’m a young buck again! Jules Duchon is back! Good as I ever was-ready to take on the whole fuckin‘ world!
The wind on his face as he ran along the bayou toward Esplanade felt like soft kisses from every woman who’d ever turned her nose up at him during the past thirty fat years. Jules didn’t feel sick at all. His legs were coiled springs. The weakness, the shortness of breath he’d suffered for decades, had fallen away like a pair of soiled underwear he’d kicked off and tossed in the garbage. Even his inconsolable stomach had settled down.
When he reached Esplanade, he tried flagging down a taxi. Two empty cabs passed him by, despite his energetic waving. The third didn’t get the chance-Jules ran into the road and blocked both narrow lanes, confident he could turn to mist in time if the driver couldn’t (or wouldn’t) stop short. After a dramatic, screeching skid on bald tires, the cab halted three feet short of Jules’s stomach. The driver, an Arab or maybe an Iranian, screamed a long litany of Arabic or Persian curses at Jules, undoubtedly involving various bodily parts of a camel. Jules flung a rear door open and pressed his way into the backseat.
“You stupid fatee-di-oot! You almost make me hit you!”
“Shut up and drive, Ayatollah. I’m a fellow cabby. Show me some respect. I’m not some asshole tourist.”
“Where you go, huh?”
“Gimme a second. Just drive toward the French Quarter, okay? I’ll tell ya in a minute.”
The driver screeched his tires as he accelerated down Esplanade, eager to get Jules to wherever it was Jules was going and get him out of the cab. Jules pondered his options. He was on a roll. Should he go straight to the auto impoundment lot and steal back his Cadillac? Only problem was, the lot was sure to be padlocked, and Jules couldn’t be certain of smart-talking his way inside. His newfound skill wouldn’t get the watchman to unlock the gate. He’d better spend a few days practicing the hypnosis. His Caddy wouldn’t be going anywhere.
“Head for Montegut Street,” Jules said.
They were turning off Esplanade onto North Rampart Street when a pair of speeding fire trucks ran the light, scattering a group of tourists and forcing the driver to pull halfway onto the sidewalk to avoid getting clipped. “Whoa! Son-of-bitch! Must be some mighty big fire they chasing after, you think?”
Jules watched the fire trucks disappear down North Rampart, turning onto St. Claude Avenue with sirens blaring. “Naww. It’s probably the mayor’s fuckin‘ cat stuck up a tree.”
The sense of triumph he’d felt so strongly only ten minutes ago was already beginning to fade. Sure, he’d gotten his pants and taxi certificate back from the cops. But now what? His weight-loss plans had crashed and burned like the bloated carcass of theHindenburg. Fanging white victims was as hard as it ever was. His damn laughing-gas setup was better at getting Jules caught than it was at catching him a meal. And there was still that fucking Malice X to consider.
Malice X.Just thinking the hated name was enough to make the last droplets of Jules’s good mood evaporate. Him and his army. Shit. Who’s to say the bastard evenhad an army? It could be all bluff. A pile of bullshit. He said he’d been having Jules followed, right? He’d bragged about knowing of Bessie, Jules’s “little hot chocolate snack” from last week. Well, learning about that certainly didn’t take a private army. Malice X could’ve hired some low-rent shamus to follow Jules around for a few days, just to make it seem like he had eyes everywhere.
This line of thinking began raising Jules’s spirits from the mire. New Orleans was a big city. No matter how many rent-a-snoops Malice X hired (and how much money could the shit-nosed little punk have, anyway?), there was no way in hell they could keep Jules under observation all the time. The city was full of tasty black potential victims, more than enough to go around. If Jules wanted to enjoy his share, all he needed to do was be careful and cover his tracks. That’s all.
Tasty black victims. The thought was enough to get his mouth watering. Last night’s mugger had been scrumptious, almost as delicious as Bessie had been. Blood so rich, so loaded with cholesterol and fatty lipids… draining that malevolent lardo, especially after so many days without a fresh kill, had shot Jules to the moon. He chuckled to himself; he’d been like a Bourbon Street drunk after his meal. He couldn’t remember walking home again and climbing into his coffin. He couldn’t even remember how he’d disposed of the body. The end of last night was a smudged blur, but a damn delicious one.
Jules spotted the entrance to the alleyway where he’d enjoyed last night’s meal. The sight made his fuzzy memories come more into focus. Whathad he done with that corpse? Plenty of victims to go around… all he needed to do was be careful… cover his tracks-Oh. No.
He started to sweat. Jules remembered now-he remembered draining his lured-in assailant of blood, then plunging the mugger’s own switchblade into the base of his skull (at least he’d been with it enough to dothat). But the memories got worse. He’d been too satiated, too inebriated to roll the body several blocks into the river. And dragging it to the railroad tracks, waiting for a train to pause, and loading the bloodless corpse into a freight car hadn’t even occurred to his foggy brain.
He’d been lazy. Sloppy and lazy. He’d left the body in a corner of the alleyway, covered it with a mildewed awning torn off an abandoned shotgun house, then covered the awning with trash he’d found lying in the gutters. He’d planned to return the next night and properly dispose of the corpse. But by the time he’d woken up earlier tonight, he’d completely forgotten the need to finish cleaning up after himself.
The cabby weaved around a pair of dogs chasing each other across St. Claude Avenue. Jules watched them sniff each other. Dogs. The neighborhood was full of stray dogs. They would’ve found the body by now. And if dogs had discovered the body, then people wouldn’t be far behind. People who might call cops. Cops meant crime reporters. Crime reporters meant newspaper stories, which meant the whole damn city would know. Including Malice X.
They were next to the alleyway now. Maybe he still had a chance to fix his boneheaded mistake. “Hey. Let me off here.”
The cabby’s dark eyes questioned him from the rearview mirror. “This not Montegut Street.”
“I changed my fuckin‘ mind, okay?”
The cabby jammed on his brakes, screeching the cab to a ragged halt. “This a bad neighborhood, mister. But it your ass, huh?”
Jules threw the man a five-dollar bill from his newly retrieved wallet and stumbled out onto the curb. The cab roared away in a shower of gravel and flattened malt liquor cans. Another fire truck raced past, sirens echoing off clapboard buildings. The sound made Jules’s spine quiver.
Heart pounding, Jules entered the alleyway. He didn’t have to walk far to confirm his dreaded suspicions.
Shit.
The far end of the alley was roped off with yellow plastic police barriers. The body was gone. Its place on the filthy asphalt was marked with a chalk outline that looked ludicrously like a plump kindergarten child’s self-portrait.
Shit, shit, shit!
He had to get home. He had to figure this thing out, figure all the angles. His shirt clung to his fleshy sides like damp toilet paper. Looking down, he saw that his jacket had two huge crescent-shaped maroon stains under its sleeves. He had to have time to think. Was that so much to ask, time to think?
He walked quickly out of the alleyway. Off to the south, in the direction of the river, low clouds reflected a dull orange glow.(The fire?) He had to get home.(Please don’t let it be my house.) Mother would tell him what to do. He’d stand in his living room and stare at her portrait and after a couple of minutes the answers to everything would pop into his head. Mother knew all the angles. She was smart, even smarter than Maureen.
Oh please oh please don’t let it be my house.
Sirens pierced the air, growing louder the closer Jules came to the levee. He found himself running. His great belly sloshed up and down like a water bed in an earthquake. The gray sky ahead of him flashed with drifting sparks. Faster. He’d fix it. He’d fix everything. His heart beat like a crazed metronome. Like Gene Krupa’s right hand. Like a jackhammer made of scared meat.
He turned the corner onto Montegut Street, wheezing, praying to Varney and Jesus and Moses and Mary and any other deity he could think of that some crackhead had torched the abandoned Wilson place. Or the old Giusseppe house. Or that little shithole of a bar that the cops had closed down four times since last Christmas.
He should’ve saved the energy. His house and everything in it, including Jules’s graffiti- and urine-stained coffin, were engulfed in lurid orange flames.