Joe Pitt 2 - No Dominion (6 page)

She hands me the cigarette.

--Here, take this. I gotta go help this asshole.

She crosses over to the guy who's been waiting for his drink. I stare at the cigarette she
was smoking. She comes back, plucks it from my fingers, puts it to her lips, then pulls it
away and hands it back to me.

--Sorry. Didn't mean to blow up on you.

I take a drag from the smoke.

--What can I do?

She tucks some loose hair behind her ear.

--Honestly. There is something.

--What?

--Do you know your blood type?

--Um.

I take another drag.

--No. I guess not.

--Well, if you could find out that would be cool.

--What's up?

--The doctor. He's says I should start, this is so gruesome, he says I should start laying
in a supply. For later. If I need transfusions. I can't save my own obviously, so I need
to find donors. I'll get credits or something in the blood bank. So if you could find out.
And then, if you're a match.

She laughs.

--If you're a match maybe you could give me some of your blood. Man, that's about the most
fucked up thing I've ever had to ask.

She looks at me.

--You OK, Joe?

--Yeah. I'm fine.

The infected population is pretty stable. And it's that way for a couple reasons. One of
the reasons is that it's hard to infect anyone. It's not just a matter of a couple bites
on the neck. Somehow your infected bodily fluids need to mingle with someone else's bodily
fluids. The amount of mingling is up for debate. But seeing as how the Vyrus can't survive
outside the human body, it's kind of tricky to get it from one person to another. It's
also not clear if it exists in any fluids other than blood. Not that I've done a lot of
research into this stuff. My education stopped when I was about twelve. Biochemistry's not
my strong suit. I'm just getting by on the introductory lectures I got from Terry way back
when. But I'm not special in my ignorance. Nobody has done any real research into this
stuff. Way I understand it, researching a virus under the best of circumstances is a
pretty tough proposition. But when the facilities at your disposal aren't much more than a
high school chemistry set, you're doomed to operating in the dark.

Not that people don't try.

The Coalition took a crack at it. They got their fingers into a very big pie called Horde
Bio Tech, Inc. Took a shot at taking over the whole deal. Wanted to use their labs to
start cracking the Vyrus. Didn't work out for them. That was at least partly my fault. OK,
mostly my fault. That's why me and the Coalition don't get along so well anymore. That's
why Predo has shifted me from his barely tolerated list to his
torture-maim-and-kill-on-sight list. Anyway, they got as close as anyone's gotten to
having a chance to really dig into this thing. The Coalition Secretariat has built up some
big piles of money over the decades, centuries, whatever. Money like that creates cracks.
And they have become very adept over the years at working their fingers into those cracks
and widening them. Once again, that's the way Terry tells it. And I got no better way of
knowing. But that kind of brings up the second reason why Vampyres aren't cropping up like
mushrooms: The Coalition doesn't want them to.

The Coalition operates on a charter that is the exact opposite of the Society's: They want
to keep the Vyrus under wraps. They've been around for a long time, long enough to have a
historical perspective of sorts, and they've already decided that no one is ever going to
accept us as anything vaguely resembling normal. It's pretty much the only thing I agree
with them about. So while their grip on Manhattan may have slipped since the sixties, they
still draw some lines, and one of the biggest is about keeping the numbers down. Not that
they need to convince anyone. We all get it. This is a pretty delicate ecosystem here.
It's an island for fuck sake; the food supply, as it were, can only support so many
predators. But in this case, the problem isn't that the prey might be hunted to
extinction. The problem is that when you get right down to it, we're not predators, we're
parasites.
And we are vastly outnumbered by the true masters of the territory. So it's in all our
interests to keep the numbers as they are.

And that's why I know Philip is an asswipe.

I think about what an asswipe Philip is while I walk to my place. I think about Philip and
all this other crap because the alternative is to think about Evie. The fact that she's
not getting better. The fact that she may be getting much worse. And, yeah, the fact that
she's hoping I'll be able to donate some of my blood to help her if she gets really bad
down the road.

Philip. Think about Philip.

At my place, I duck downstairs and grab the emergency cash. I didn't need it at Hodown,
but at Blackie's everyone needs cash. I stand there for a second and look at the bed,
still messed from last night. Evie didn't want to come over tonight. Not after I told her
I had to go take care of some business and didn't know when I'd be home. Not the kind of
thing a girl wants to hear from her guy the same day she finds out her terminal illness
has taken a turn for the worse. Not the kind of thing I wanted to tell her. But I need to
knock out this job for Terry, need to get the monkey off my back. I don't take care of
that, I'm not gonna be any help to her anyhow. And I want to, I want to help.

I go in the closet. It's not blood I need this time. It's a gun. I unlock the gun safe and
take out the .32 snub. I check that it's loaded and tuck it into the back of my pants. I
don't have any reason to think I'll need it, but it's late, and I'm irritable, and I might
want to pistol-whip Philip with it. Him or this Count clown.

I lock up and go to Blackie's.

I push the button next to the anonymous door on 13th. I stand there, knowing someone
inside is peeping at me to see if I look OK. The door opens. It's Dominick.

--Hey, Dom.

--Hey, bud.

He glances up and down the street, checking to see that no cops are nearby, then holds the
door wide for me.

--C'mon in.

Blackie's is a pit. It was probably once the super's apartment for this building, now it's
as scummy an after-hours joint as you're likely to find. It's 4 a.m. and the place has
just opened. Lucky me, I'm one of the first in. There's only the one tiny room, but
Blackie managed to crowd it with the bar, a few tables, a couple couches, a pool table and
an old-school jukebox that plays real 45s. It takes me two seconds to look over the four
or five losers in the place and see that none of them are Philip. I go to the bar and
order a beer and a bourbon on the rocks. The beer is a can of Bud that comes out of an
Igloo cooler at the end of the bar. The bourbon comes out of a bottle that says Maker's
Mark, but it ain't. I give the bartender a twenty and she gives me back six and asks me if
I need anything else. The anything else being a dime bag of coke that costs twenty-five
bucks and wouldn't get me high even if I didn't have the Vyrus. I pass. With nothing else
to do, I do the usual: sit out of the way, drink and smoke.

An hour passes. The place fills up, but it never gets loud. There are only two rules in
Blackie's: no loud voices and no cursing. The loud voices I get, there are occupied
apartments right above us. The cursing is Blackie's thing. Guess it makes him feel better
about running a shitty after-hours coke den. A couple people try to sit at my table and
coke-rap my ear off. I stare them down and they leave. Blackie himself shows up at some
point: a potbellied black guy in his late fifties sporting ostrich skin boots, a black
cowboy hat, and ropes of gold chain draped around his neck. He takes his stool at the end
of the bar.

Blackie came to fame back in the day when he opened the first topless club in the East
Village. He ran whores and did a brisk business in hijacked booze out the back. He also
owned a piece of five or six other bars scattered around the neighborhood. That was then.
He lost the club years ago and it was made into a rock venue. His whores left him. The
other joints he sold off piecemeal. Now this place is all that's left of his empire. And
it probably makes more money than everything else put together ever did. He knows me from
when I used to bounce at Roadhouse. He'd come in and pass me a heavy roll of C-notes and a
tiny .25 automatic with pearl handles. I'd hang onto that shit for him 'til he left, the
cash in case someone tried to rob him, the gun because he didn't want to shoot no one if
they tried to rob him. I'd pass it back to him at the end of the night and he'd peel off
one of the hundreds and hand it to me.

I eye him as he chats with the bartender, looking him over to see if he still carries that
bankroll. There's a baseball-sized lump inside his black Levi's jacket. Take that off him
and my money problems are all solved. He catches me looking, shows me a couple gold teeth,
touches his index finger to the brim of his hat and tells the bartender to buy me a round.
I nod my head and forget about robbing him.

I drink the free drinks and inhale more Luckys. The place chokes with smoke, a James Brown
tune whispers from the juke, everybody does key-bumps of shitty coke or just cuts lines
right on the peeling Formica tops of the tables. A light by the door flashes from time to
time and Dominick takes a look out the peephole and either lets in the person on the
stoop, or doesn't. I take a look at my watch. Fucking Philip. Boy is cruising for a
bruising.

I get up, collect my cigarettes, lighter and jacket. I give Blackie another nod and head
for the door. Dominick comes over to let me out. Just as he's about to check the peephole
and make sure a cop car isn't sitting outside, the light flashes. He peeks and shakes his
head.

--Hang on a sec, let me get rid of this guy.

He opens the door and Philip tries to dart in.

--Hey, Dominick, hey.

Dominick puts a hand in the middle of his chest.

--Uh-uh.

--Uh-uh? What uh-uh?

--Uh-uh you ain't comin' in.

--Why? Why the fuck not?

--Cuz ya can't follow the rules. You talk too loud and you curse and you ain't coming in.

--What the fuck are you talking about I don't follow the fucking rules!?!

Dominick starts to close the door.

I tap him on the shoulder.

--It's OK, he's with me.

Philip sees me for the first time.

--Hey, oh, hey, Joe. You still here? Thought you might have left by now. Getting close to
sunup, you know.

He winks at me.

--Sunup.
You
know.

Dominick looks at me.

--You sure you wanna vouch for him?

--Yeah, let him in.

He holds the door and Philip comes in.

--Yeah, Joe's my pal, he'll fuckin' vouch for me.

--Watch your mouth, Phil.

--Sure, yeah.

Dominick still has the door open.

--So you goin' out?

Philip shows me sad eyes.

--You leavin' now, Joe? Too bad. Wanted to buy you a drink or somethin'. Take care and all.

I nod at Dominick.

--No thanks, Dom, I'll stick around a little.

He sighs and closes the door. Guy opens and closes the door from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. and
tells people to keep it down and not to curse. Think he'd like his job a little more.

I catch Phil at the bar.

--So, Phil.

--Oh, Joe, hey. Decided to stay? Sure that's a good idea? Like I say, getting light soon.
Know how you hate to be going home when the sun's up and all.

--Yeah, thanks for the concern. I'll stick around a little longer.

The bartender comes over. I order another round for myself. Phil stands there and waits,
but I don't order one for him and he finally gives in and asks for a cup of water. Two
bucks, the cheapest thing you can get here. The bartender takes a plastic cup over to the
Igloo and pulls the little drain plug at the bottom of the ice chest, filling the cup with
melted icewater. Philip looks at it.

--That sanitary?

The bartender plucks the dollar bill and four quarters from Phil's palm and tosses them in
the cashbox.

--Like you care.

Phil picks a flake of something black out of the water.

--Jeez, what the fuck's his problem?

Blackie looks at him and clears his throat.

I lead Phil to the table I was occupying.

--Watch your mouth.

--Yeah, yeah, I know. Language, language.

We sit.

He stares into his cup, making sure there are no other contaminants floating around.

--Two bucks for some water, you'd think they'd at least give you a bottle or something.

--Phil.

He looks up.

--Yeah?

--Where's my guy?

He finds another particle in the water and chases it around with his finger.

--Your guy?

--The one you were supposed to hook me up with.

He shows me a speck stuck to the tip of his index finger.

--What's that look like to you?

I grab his finger.

--Phil, where's The Count?

He pulls his finger free and points it over my shoulder.

--He's right there, man. The Count's right there.

I look at the guys playing pool.

--The one taking his shot.

I look at the one taking his shot: twenty to twenty-five, skinny, mop of blond hair,
little fringe of blond goatee, and a faded brown Count Chocula T-shirt.

Philip wipes the speck from his finger onto the thigh of his jeans.

--I mean, jeez, how'd you miss the guy? Told you he's called The Count.

Philip makes the introductions.

--Hey, hey, Count. This is my man Joe. Joe, this is The Count.

The Count flips his fingers at me, not offering to shake.

--Hey, Joe. 'S up?

--Wanted to have a word.

He looks over his shoulder at the guy racking the balls on the pool table.

--I got another game.

--I can wait.