No Rest for the Wicked (12 page)

“What's your problem, puta?”

His dark brown eyes went wide and innocent. And he stepped away from me, hands raised in surrender, then sped up next to Betsy and interlaced his arm with hers.

Nancy fell in next to Drew. “You're not”—she gestured—“like them?”

Drew's gaze seemed locked on Betsy's arm looped through Caballo's. “No.”

“Then why?”

“I'm writing a thesis,” he said.

“A thesis?” asked Nancy.

“UCLA graduate school,” said Drew, eyes still on Betsy and Caballo. “Postdoctoral paper on urban culture. Competition for grant money is intense, but I've been awarded enough in the past year to continue my research.”

We'd reached the van. Nancy paused with her hand half-raised toward the handle on the back door. “You're telling me that the University of California is aware of these…creatures?”

“No, just my thesis advisor,” said Drew. “And the head of the program. And probably the grant association.”

They'd reached the van and Nancy looked down at him. Her expression was indescribable.

“There's a charitable organization studying vampirism,” she stated.

“Only in Southern California,” Drew corrected her. “The program in San Francisco is more interested in the financial impact on real estate.”

Nancy seemed to need to lean against the van. “Heh,” she said.

Nancy banged on the door of the van, and when it didn't open, she spoke into the walkie-talkie. “We're outside,” she said, sounding testy. “Password? Dammit, I don't know of any…”

The feds just love that spy stuff, you know.

Then the door swung open, and a man with a heavy face and hair trimmed too short above his long ears leaned out laughing.

Nancy didn't look amused. She looked like she was used to it.

* * *

The typical van came supplied with two typical federal agents.

In matching gray shirts and black zip-up FBI jackets, they sat hunched before equipment with gigantic black headphones encasing their ears so they looked like federal Mickey Mouses.

“Richardson,” said the one who had opened the door for us. He had the look of a man who had spent his life sitting in that very same chair, a roll of fat pushing out of his shirt just above his belt, and a toothpick permanently riding his lower lip. He lifted up one headphone long enough to hear all our names, then turned back to three monitors that featured a wavering, staticky field of gray.

“Selkey.” He was the younger of the two, and his face had less discipline. The way he rolled his eyes at Nancy and the way both men endured her instructions with barely hidden disdain told me being assigned on a stakeout with Nancy “Mulder” Dickes was akin to being given the desk job in Ojai. Their buddies had probably been ribbing them about it all day.

They were introduced to Peter and dutifully shook his hand without flinching, so I could only assume that they didn't know Peter was on leave. Typical agency as well. The bureau's copious red tape and paranoia often led to information disconnect.

Drew sat down and immediately bonded with Selkey via a lot of tech gobblespeak. Soon they were excitedly chatting away and typing information into a computer.

While the geeks tracked down the location of the party we'd be attending, Peter and Caballo and I tried to relax on the foldout chairs provided. Caballo's long legs seemed to occupy the entire walk space, and he purposely shoved his calf against mine repeatedly.

I saw Peter's gaze go to this intersection, but a kind of firm resolve lifted his chin, and he gave Caballo a brave smile. “I've heard a lot about you.”

“All bad, I'll bet.” Caballo grinned and ran his tongue across his exposed canines.

“Adam tells me you hail from Chicago.”

“After my brother died, I didn't have anything to keep me there,” said Caballo. “I always wanted to visit Hollywood.” A greenish glint lit the depths of his big brown eyes. “You want to ask me about it, don't you? About the time I spent with your boyfriend?”

Peter's brows lowered. If I were Caballo, I wouldn't be smiling quite that widely. Peter had a mean left hook. Vampiric strength or no, it would sting.

But Peter merely folded his hands together and said, “That's all in the past, isn't it?”

“Is it?”

Peter's eyes flinched. “I'm sorry to hear about your brother,” he said.

“Are you? Are you
really
?”

I had no clue why Peter was keeping that polite smile pasted on his face, but I figured in about thirty seconds the veneer was going to shatter and he'd be planting his fist in Caballo's nose. So, I jumped up and grabbed Caballo's upper arm, half lifting him out of his seat. “Let's have a smoke outside,” I said.

* * *

“Why are you being such a shit?” I asked Caballo.

There was a small party at the end of the alley now. Some skels had started a fire in a trash bin and thrown down various cardboard boxes to keep the wet from seeping through their blankets and bags of rags. They passed what looked to be, from this distance, a bottle.

I walked Caballo by his elbow well out of earshot of both the van and the winos.

“What's your beef with Peter?”

“Don't know what you mean, dog,” said Caballo. He flicked a spent cigarette into the gutter. “Tell me the truth. Does your friend really understand what you are now?”

“What? Of course.”

“Really? Does he know you can smell him? Does he know you dream of how he'd taste?”

I didn't deny it. Caballo knew better. “It doesn't matter.”

“Of course it does. Somebody should set him straight, man.”

“Is that some kind of threat? Do you really want to throw down with me, Caballo?”

“Damn. Cool it, dog.” Caballo rolled his shoulders and tossed his curls just a bit. “But it'll end in tears, Adam. You listen to me.”

I ground out my cigarette beneath a booted toe. “Stay the fuck out of it, Caballo.”

He sighed as he followed me back to the van. “Just seems such a waste.”

Peter's gaze went from Caballo to me and back again when we reentered. He had that flat, emotionless expression that was Peter being guarded, and it occurred to me that he might be hypothesizing whether or not Caballo and I had had time to do something besides smoke out there in that alley. The way Caballo was strutting and preening, he sure as hell wanted Peter to think that.

Betsy waved her hand in front of her face. “You stink of cigarettes,” she said.

Since Her Majesty liberally doused herself in patchouli oil, I figured she was no one to talk.

“I used to smoke,” said Richardson, drawing the toothpick from his lips. “But it was hell on stakeouts. Stuck in a van for hours with the cravings.”

“It's a filthy habit,” said Caballo, giving my whole body the once-over. “But I don't want to give it up.”

“Smoking's a hell of a habit to quit,” said Peter, trying to be sociable. He was trying so hard he creaked.

Caballo looked me up and down, and he licked his teeth. “That too.”

Peter's face shut as tight as a bank vault. “Your friend says he knows the building where the party is taking place,” he said coolly. “We'd like to put a wire on one of you and park a few blocks away.”

Drew seemed to have bonded with Selkey. They were sharing geek talk, and Drew had the agent's headset clasped to one ear. He looked up and said, “No wires. They can tell.”

“Really?” Nancy looked at me.

No
, but I figured Drew had his reasons for making up this little fairy tale. “We'll engage the GPS on our phones and be in constant communication anyway,” I told her.

“We'll plant a bug in your phone,” Peter said to Drew. “Your friend was just explaining how these parties work,” he told the room. I noted that he hadn't looked directly at me yet.

“The locations are secret until the last minute. You have to follow the signs across town and then you need to have the password which you get from a friend of a friend.”

“And still every dealer in town seems able to find them,” said Peter drily.

“They can smell a junkie a mile off,” I opined.

He glanced at me and away again. “You sure about this?” he said to Drew. Drew was a civilian and the only human involved, so Peter, naturally, was concerned about him. “We can call the whole thing off if you have second thoughts.”

“I want to do this,” said Drew.

“We'll expect you to phone in every hour within a couple of minutes,” said Nancy. “You miss a call, we come in. Are your phones charged up?”

We suited up and Caballo and I took off to bring our bikes around, picking up Drew, who was noticeably edgy. I figured not everyone knew the little geek like I did, but Drew had traveled with vampires for a year now, and I'd never seen him as wired or on edge as he was now. And he smelled funny. A tinny fearful smell that was unfamiliar.

“You
sure
you're okay with this, man?” I asked him as he climbed on the bike behind me.

“I can't wait,” he said.

Peter walked up to me as I was sorting out my helmet. I noticed that the cold still had quite a grip on him. His eyes were swollen, nose red, and he looked exhausted. “Be careful.”

I pretended Drew wasn't there for the moment. “Nothing's happening with Caballo, you know.”

“I didn't ask,” he said.

“I wanted you to know.”

He gaze dropped and he rubbed at his nose. When he looked up again the guarded expression had fallen away, and his eyes had that light in them. I swear nobody in my life has ever looked at me the way Peter does.

“We'll nail this guy in time for breakfast,” I told him. “Which you are going to serve me in bed.”

He grinned. “You got it.”

I wanted to kiss him all of a sudden, but that was just too much of a
Gone with the Wind
moment for yours truly, so I stomped on the clutch and got the beast going instead. Drew barely got his hands around me before I swung out and down the alley. I heard Caballo's Kawasaki whining like a rocket behind me as I went.

“Are you sure this is the place?”

We'd pulled into a parking lot behind what looked like a mundane and boring poured concrete two-story office building two blocks from where the surveillance van was parked. It had black glass windows and Anglo names stenciled onto the curbs of the reserved spaces. It was utterly quiet. Only the few suburbanite cars and too-healthy, too-young kids walking toward us indicated anything unusual was going on.

“This is it.” Drew checked his hair in my bike's mirrors.

I watched him enviously. “Do I have helmet hair?”

His face twisted in a rare expression of affection. “No, dude, you look great.”

Caballo came striding over. He wore a sleeveless muscle T with a logo across it that would glow in black light. His hair fell in its Jheri-curl-like ringlets to his shoulders. Square diamonds in each earlobe flashed when he shook his head. Rolling, round, brown shoulders, hands resting on a belt that was laden with chains and graffittied with a leaping tiger.

He gave me a leer. “Like what you see?”

Who wouldn't? I looked away and surprised an expression on Drew's face, directed toward Caballo, of unmasked malevolence. He spun around and waved an arm, leading us, his black duster kicking out as he walked, around the side of the building and across a parking lot.

A few people were gathered in the corners of the wide lot. Triads of men of various ethnicities sat on the fenders of pimped cars with the air and patience of drug dealers waiting for customers. At the other end of the lot, light flowed from opened fire doors, sentried on either side by two beefy guys with flashlights, badges, and guns securely holstered under their jackets. Their attitude was so distinct, I had no doubt they were off-duty LAPD hired as security.

As we approached, their gazes razed each one of us. One of them shone a flashlight directly into my face. “You carrying a weapon?”

Not if you didn't count what I hid in my mouth. “Nope.”

“Drugs? Booze? You high?”

I was motioned through a metal detector, and a small stamp in the shape of a blue cloud was pressed into the top of my hand. An enormous black man with wrists as thick as my arm scanned the paper tickets Drew had acquired online.

From where I stood I could feel more than hear the music coming through the floor.

We followed hastily scribbled signs that had been pasted to the walls, and the volume of the music increased as we descended a level of metal stairs and were scanned again before being allowed through two fire doors there.

Entering the room was like immersion in the atmosphere of an alien planet.

The music didn't just assault my ears; it infused my body, the rhythm thumping from inside out. Every pore of my skin filled with sound. The light was a fractured rainbow. Yellow, pink, blue, and white beams swept the crowd, highlighting the silhouettes of heads bopping up and down. Hands, heads, and shirts glowed and left trails of neon color. Beside me, Drew did something to his collar, and a cycling circle of lights dashed around his neck.

He looked up at me and smiled, and his teeth and the whites of his eyes glowed with a bluish tinge.

I scanned the room. Thousands of people bobbed to the music, some dancing with fever, most flowing across the floor, as we did, following some invisible current. I saw the beginning of one such flow across an elevated platform, the large pink head of a cartoon mouse rhythmically bopping above the heads of people.

Drew brought out his phone and began typing madly.

he sed hed find me

I texted back a thumbs-up.

Per our sort-of plan, Caballo and I separated so we covered Drew's right and left flank, both keeping our senses honed for vampiric presence. The idea was to let Drew make contact and even solicit vampire services, then sweep in and nab the perps before they could carry out the buy, like setting up a drug bust, only a little more dangerous. With the bug in his phone we'd

be able to find him in a matter of seconds if he disappeared into the crowd, but it still made me edgy to have him walking more than an arm's length from me.

Unfortunately, unlike drug dealers, the vampires would know we were blood and be very suspicious if they perceived us to be hovering too closely to their mark, so I had to settle for watching Drew's flashing collar from ten feet away, the dot of his GPS blinking on my cell phone when I occasionally drew it from my pocket and checked.