“I concede.”
“I’m looking into the guy my grandma is marrying. He seems sketchy. He drinks pig’s blood. According to this, he’s dead.” I showed him the death certificate. “And he’s been married several times to women who don’t quite make it past their first anniversary. He’s not registered on any of the official undead databases, but according to the chapel that handled his burial, he went to his grave intact, so it’s possible he’s a vampire.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier just to ask him whether he’s one of us?” Dick asked, looking over Wilbur’s coroner’s report.
“I would, but my grandma Ruthie seems to be actively avoiding me. She doesn’t come to Mama’s house if she knows I’m going to be there. She screens my calls. She won’t let me near Wilbur, but I don’t know if it’s because he’s trying to hide something or she’s afraid of me embarrassing her. There’s no legitimate address listed for this guy, and the last three homes he shared with the corpse brides have been sold. I went to his grave to see if there was anything abnormal about it. It seemed fine. I wasn’t about to try to dig him up and see if the coffin was empty, because that’s how horror movies start. Dick, are you even listening to me?”
“Huh,” Dick said, looking over Wilbur’s death report. “Sorry, no. This is weird.”
“Weird ha-ha? Or weird our territory weird?”
Dick turned the paperwork to get a better look. “Well, the nurse who did the CPR on him, Jay Lemuels, I know him. He’s one of us.”
“Where can we find Jay?” I asked.
Dick checked the grandfather clock on the wall. “This time of night, probably Club Rainn.
It’s a vampire bar. Good blood, bad sound system.”
Dick jangled the keys out of his pocket.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We’re going,” he told me. “The night is young, and we’re immortal, and there are unanswered questions afoot. If that doesn’t make a case for a couple of beers and a ridiculously high cover charge, Stretch, I don’t know what does.”
“The last time I went out on the town with you, I ended up a suspect in Walter’s murder.”
“I’ll be there to keep an eye on you.”
“I don’t know if that will keep me out of trouble or just get me into it more efficiently.”
“Come on,” he said. “It’s Karaoke Night.”
“OK, but you have to sing one Kenny Rogers song in a falsetto,” I said, poking him in the chest.
“I will sing,” he said, tossing me my jacket. “But only because my version of ‘The Gambler’ is both inspirational and erotic.”
“Gross.”
We climbed into Dick’s beat-up transportation, which smelled suspiciously of burnt rope.
There were dozens of empty blood bottles on the floor and what might have been counterfeit Gap jeans. I turned back to him. “If we get pulled over, am I going to have to tell the nice policeman that I’ve never met you before and I have no idea how those stolen car stereos got into the trunk?”
“I make no apologies for how I make my living, so to speak,” Dick said. “I am simply a businessman, a servant to supply and demand.”
“As long as someone else pays for the supply, you can meet the demand.”
We continued this philosophical discussion of the entrepreneurial spirit until we pulled into the parking lot of Club Rainn. From the exterior, the club was pretty nondescript, aside from not having windows or a sign. Club Rainn offered all-the-undead-can-drink for free to attract vampires, like shooting fish in a barrel. The humans were the cash cows that kept this place going. As soon as we hit the door, the overpowering smell of blood practically knocked me to my knees. Desperation, fear, arousal. The sour, stale scent of need.
It was the sort of place Chris Hansen was always exposing on Dateline, where sad humans offer themselves up as midnight snacks to vampires without dignity. These were basically overgrown teenagers in too much makeup, too much leather. In fact, they’d look like total doofuses if the lights were on.
The DJ played only two records, Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral and the Blade soundtrack. It was incongruous with the decor, which was early American bordello. Red flocked wallpaper, dark ornately carved furniture, uncomfortably stylized red velvet couches. To be honest, it looked like River Oaks before Aunt Jettie got hold of it. Besides the hurricane-lamp sconces, the only wall decorations were oil paintings of historical figures who were supposedly vampires, from Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Bathory to Mercy Brown.
“I take it Gabriel has never brought you here?” Dick asked, taking in my horrified expression. “He probably thinks it blasphemous or unpatriotic or one of those terms that basically means he’s a tight-ass with no sense of humor.”
“You know that you’re not going to get me to play along when you say something like that,” I told him. “You say you’re interested in Andrea and I’m just a friend. You’ve even been getting along—well, tolerating Gabriel’s presence. Why are you still making those comments about Gabriel?”
Dick mulled that over for a moment. “Force of habit. What the—” Dick was interrupted as a pale, lanky man with a shock of badly dyed black curly hair knelt before me and kissed my sandaled feet. Unfortunately, the sandals were pretty old, so I can only imagine how funky that must have been.
“Um, can I help you?” I asked, finally resorting to kicking him slightly to get him off my foot.
He peered up at me. “You are a Lonely One, are you not? A Night Childe?”
“I’m not exactly burning up the social scene, but I wouldn’t classify myself as lonely. It’s not as if I have a bunch of cats or something.”
A similarly pasty girl with stringy platinum hair and smudged kohl around her eyes joined him at my feet. Dick snickered, but covered it by taking a swig of beer. “We wish to drink at the fount of your wisdom,” the blonde whispered.
“Show us the way,” Floppy Black Hair intoned.
“Jason—” Floppy Black Hair objected. “My name is Bowan Ravenswood, ancient one.”
“Your name is Jason Turner, and we went to Vacation Bible School together.” I pulled my foot out of his grip once again.
“Let me—”
“Remove your hand, or that will be the last time you know the touch of a woman.”
His smile was feverish. “I would be happy to have you initiate me.”
“Jason, go home, or I’ll have my mama call your mama.”
I grimaced at Dick as the pasty pair slinked away.
“Did you set that up?” I demanded. “Is that like the vampire version of the TGI Friday’s wait staff singing ‘Happy Birthday’?”
Dick looked completely innocent for the first time since I’d met him. “No, that was totally spontaneous.”
“Your lack of guile upsets me,” I said, watching as Jason approached a more receptivelooking Lonely One. I shook my head.
As another whey-faced youth approached with beseeching eyes, I held up a hand and told him “No.” I took a long sip of my drink and closed my eyes.
Sensing female distress, the bartender, a tall brunet with heavily lined brown eyes and a gold ankh stud in his ear, replaced my drink with a flourish and winked at me. “So, what brings you here tonight, besides karaoke?”
Dick cleared his throat, drawing the barkeep’s unsettling attention from me. “We’re looking for Jay.”
“He still owe you money?” the brunet asked. “I don’t want any trouble, not with this crowd in here.”