No Rest for the Wicked (13 page)

I could smell marijuana and the sticky sweet taint of crack and heroin. The meth-heads were easy to spot, but it seemed most of the revelers were on E, the symptoms of which were unmistakable.

“Oh my God, I'm sorry.” A young girl with black-light pink hair careened into me. She turned, sort of dancing, sort of just hopping up and down from foot to foot. Not quite on the music beat and a little faster. “I had an energy drink but I spilled it I know I shouldn't drink those things they're full of caffeine but I have to have my Coca-Cola for breakfast, just like my father, so maybe that's why he liked Cokes too you know Coca-Cola did you ever see that commercial the one where they say it's the real thing but then he quit it when he met… This water tastes funny.” She stopped to take a breath, and then slugged another swallow of water back before saying, “Do you think someone put something in it?”

“Yes.” I snatched it from her hand.

“Hey…” I heard her protesting from behind me as I kept pressing through the crowd. I couldn't see Caballo, and I feared I'd completely lost Drew until I worked my way around a group of dancing kids and saw the flashing lights of his collar. He was standing with his head bowed while a very young girl shouted up at him.

He was only a couple of inches taller than her, but there was still something mature and protective about the way he smiled down at her, his stance. I suddenly saw Drew as these children might. Many of them looked barely old enough to get into a club, and Drew was definitely in his late twenties. They were scattered and distracted and ephemeral as falling glitter, and Drew was stolid and mature and steady. He looked up. Spotted me. Gave me that cautious half smile of his. Then turned back to the girl.

Caballo appeared, bopping out of the shadows, a glow on his skin from exertion and a small train of adoring fans already fanned out behind him. He bopped by me, pretending not to look at me and shouting as if to someone else. “Anything?”

I shook my head. “Not a whiff.”

And then I felt it. Like a cold front at my left elbow. A scent of meat. A prickling up my spine and the sure sense of being surveyed by a predator, like in the big cat room at the zoo. I turned on my heel and looked into his eyes.

“Don't look now,” I said to myself. But Caballo was at my elbow and he heard me.

“Don't have to, you're losing your face, man.”

The bulging in my eyes that signaled the change in my irises. I blinked and lowered my head and brought out my cell phone, finding Caballo's number with one thumb.

tall blond smoking pipe
, I typed laboriously.

Caballo was kissing a young woman when the text landed in his phone. He pulled it out, arm still slung over her shoulder, and glanced at the message, then turned his head casually to survey the room, catching the tall blond with the entourage in his visual sweep. Then he texted and a second later my phone recorded a message received. One word.

hot

It wasn't the word that had popped into my head when I'd seen the guy. I circled Caballo, watching Drew from the corner of my eye and spying on our blood brother over the heads of the dancing kids. He had a Scandinavian look, light blue eyes hooded under a heavy brow with thick white blond eyebrows. A long, hooked nose and thin lips wrapped around the stem of an old mahogany bowl pipe. He wore a navy blue knit sweater that was too long in the sleeves and at the hip for any heterosexual in Los Angeles to dare wear. Though I imagined our friend could wear anything he wanted without worrying about the slings and arrows of rumor. He stood in the midst of a milling group of about fifty kids, all of whom seemed blissfully unaware that they circled an animal that could drain any one of them in minutes.

From the midst of the kids a figure stepped up next to our friend. He wore a beige trench coat and an impossibly out-of-place white, collared shirt with a broad navy-and-red-striped tie.

His balding pate shone in the lights that swept the room, and it wasn't until he looked up at his pal and smiled that I recognized him as one of us.

He was the one who seemed focused on Drew. I saw him wending his way closer, bringing out his phone as he did so.

“Contact,” I shouted into the air. Caballo didn't look at me, but he nodded.

I'd been too avid in my scrutiny. The blond turned his head and cast me a keen look. He'd spotted me. I brought out my phone and typed.

been made, backing off

I got myself into a weaving, bopping, congalike dancing line and let myself be led further away from Drew and the smaller vampire. As the line circled round, I could see Caballo's head, his eyes cast down as he talked to someone, his body posture canted to the right where I could see Drew's flashing collar. He was now engaged in conversation with the small clerklike man and the tall blond.

The blond said something to his companion and moved away. I allowed myself to dance close to him again and then turn to confront him directly. He stopped and removed the pipe stem from his mouth. I saw his nostrils widen. Then a tilt of his head, considering. A starving vampire is like a live electrical cable, hopping and spitting and liable to sting anything that dares come near it. I knew I was as peaceful, plump, and sleek as a fat tick.

So was my fair-haired friend.

He removed the pipe stem from his mouth and shouted, “This is a private venue.”

“I bought my ticket like anybody else,” I yelled. “I'm Snake.”

He eyed me for a moment before saying, “Nicolas.” He stuck out his hand so I had to take it. His grip was firm and cold and he pulled me closer to say, “We don't want to feed here.”

“We don't?” I surveyed the mass of dancing kids. “I do.”

“No. You don't.” His grip tightened and his smile became more a baring of teeth, fangs glowing blue in the black lights. And then just as quickly it became a smile again and he released my hand, slapped me in a friendly way on the shoulder, and said, “You want to freelance, I suggest Union Station. Plenty of free-range meals down there.”

“Got it,” I said. “I'll give that a try.”

“Good man.” He slapped my shoulder again and inserted the pipe between his teeth. “Well, have a good time.” A smile. “Remember, this is a no-eat zone.”

And he was gone. Slipped into the crowd in that smoky, insubstantial way that makes you shake your head and blink like you aren't sure you just saw what you thought you saw.

I cast a quick look at Caballo and saw him nod with a dip and a swoop of one shoulder as he disappeared into the mob, tailing Nicolas.

The little balding guy, I saw, was still talking to Drew. I bopped my way between the teenagers and moved in close to them. Then I brought out my phone and texted a message to Peter.

Made contact.

Seconds later he responded.

Don't forget to call in
. I swear, sometimes he reminds me of my mother.

I circled back to where Drew stood, his head lowered, watching me from beneath the sweep of his shaggy bangs.

The guy he was talking to looked like he would have been more at home in an office cubicle. “W-w-where do you want to talk?” he shouted in a wavery voice that barely lifted above the music and hubbub.

“Someplace quieter!” yelled Drew.

The guy nodded eagerly and gestured for Drew to follow him.

* * *

I trailed Drew and his hookup through the throbbing, bobbing, dancing bodies. A couple of times, I caught a glimpse of Caballo, who was staying fixed on Nicolas—who was obviously also trailing Drew and his buddy. If Caballo or I lost eye contact, we'd text our location and find each other again. Occasionally an anxious text would come through from Peter, and once my phone emitted the warning tones that indicated my GPS had been engaged by a distant device.

Drew and his friend worked themselves into a smaller, quieter room near the back of the club.

Black-light paper, pricked with a thousand holes that emitted bluish laser beams of light, fell loosely at one corner and I saw the circling lights of Drew's collar for a brief instant before he stepped behind the false wall.

Nicolas and Caballo were nowhere in sight.

where r u?
I texted Caballo.

Big Daddy on stairs
, said a text from Caballo.
made me. we r talking.

While Caballo, hopefully, kept Nicolas occupied, I came around the other side of the partition and ducked back before Drew's little clerk could see me. They were just to the other side of the partition I stood near, and I could hear them like they were speaking to me.

“Hey, Mitchell,” shouted Drew. The music was still pretty loud, and he had to yell.

“Where'd you get that water?”

Mitchell's stutter rose above the sound. “C-call me M-mitch.”

“Sure, Mitch. You can call me Dune.”

“D-d-dune? That's not your online sig.”

“No, man. It's my rave name. That's a sick tie. I dig it.”

On the stairs above the two men, I saw Caballo's feet, clad in his distinctive sneakers. A text message appeared on my phone.

What's happening?
It was from Peter.
Checkin time is in one minute.

Drew engaged mark. Do not contact
, I texted back.

Caballo's sneakers moved, and I saw a hand holding a cell phone swing into view.

“You party, man?” Drew was asking. I couldn't hear Mitch's reply, but Drew shouted, “Cool,” and I saw him, arm around the smaller man, moving toward the steps on which Caballo stood.

Heads up
, I texted Caballo. I saw the sneakers move out of my field of vision.

Drew and Mitch began ascending the stairs, and I worked my way around the dancing kids, trying to stay out of sight as much as possible.

N back on main floor
said a text from Caballo.
will follow.

By the time Drew and Mitch reached the landing, Caballo had backed off. Drew and Mitch had preceded me up the stairs, then taken a hard left and gone down an upstairs hallway.

The second floor looked more like an office. Beige carpet. Beige walls. Prints of copies of nondescript art on the walls. I followed their voices until they rounded a corner and stopped. I reached into my pocket and silenced my cell phone, then pressed myself against the wall, listening.

There was the expected silence, peppered with the sounds of plastic wrap and the
click
and
hiss
of a lighter and a pipe being lit. After a minute, Drew's voice, with the choked-back sound of a man speaking around a lungful of smoke.

“Wow, this is bubba kush, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“How much did it cost you?”

“N-n-nothing. My friend has it.”

Another long inhale. The
click click click
of a lighter. Somebody exhaled. “Nice friend,”

said Drew. “Could I meet him?”

The smell of the pot was filling the hallway.

“Are you a cop?” asked Mitch.

Drew laughed. I think in all the time I'd known him, I'd never heard the little geek laugh.

“No way, man. I hate cops.”

“I didn't think so,” said Mitch. “You look too cool to be a cop. You've got c-c-cool hair, you know.”

“Thanks, dude.”

There was another pause filled with the sounds and smell of marijuana consumption. I was beginning to worry that Drew was getting too high to be careful. And then I heard him say, “Whoa, man. I like you but I don't swing that way.”

A silence. I was tense and ready to jump and I heard Mitch say, “S-sorry. I thought…”

“No big. I'm just straight, man.”

“Too b-bad,” said Mitch.

That oddly incongruous laugh of Drew's again. “Yeah. Sometimes I wish I was gay. Seems easier.”

“It isn't.”

I leaned against the wall, silently willing Drew to get back to the subject at hand. See, that's the trouble with drugs.

As if he heard my silent plea, though, the little geek cleared his throat and said, “So, in the forum you said you could help me out?”

And then a bomb went off downstairs.

At least it sounded like a bomb. There was a roar, a bark of the speakers followed by a deafening silence, and then what sounded like five thousand kids screaming and yelling.

I just had time to retreat into a niche near the stairway before Mitch and Drew came around the corner at a run, both looking freaked out and stoned. They didn't even notice me, almost falling over each other going down the stairs toward the racket, me close on their heels. What we found at the bottom was a madhouse.

Thousands of kids pushed like a solid heaving entity toward each of the three exits, their arms, legs, and open mouths seeming part of one animal.

At least ten gigantic men wearing white shirts and badges and wielding clubs, trying to herd them like they were cattle, beating and throwing anyone who didn't immediately do as he or she was told. Various boys and girls sat or lay on the ground, bleeding. At each of the three entrances, children were piled like cords of wood, screaming, clawing, and stepping on each other.

I ran to the pile and began lifting kids off each other. I saw Drew about five feet away doing the same.

“What happened?” I shouted at a guard.

“Found a body in the girls' room,” he yelled into my face.

“You call the cops?”

“I am the cops, douche bag. Now get out of the way.”

I worked my way around to the women's restroom he had indicated. One of the security guards stood at the entrance, holding a club at the ready. He pointed it at me. “Back up.”

“Sure,” I said, and I put my fist in his face.

While he lay on the ground trying to figure out what mule had kicked him, I ran into the bathroom and looked around.

She was tiny, brunette. Couldn't have been more than nineteen. Wearing a tight black knit dress and black-light beads wrapped around her neck, which was a bloody mess. I spent a second checking for signs of life. Or unlife. Then I scampered the hell out of there before the man I'd punched came to.

In a stairwell I dialed Peter's number.

“What the hell is going on in there?” he yelled into the phone.

“We've got a problem,” I said. “Somebody drained a kid in the bathroom.”