No Rest for the Wicked (20 page)

The only way out of there was through him, so I charged. Fortunately for me, he was fat and bloated and I was hungry and motivated. I got the upper hand fairly quickly. I sidestepped, gave him a kick, and bolted through the door and down the hallway to the gaping window. I could hear big feet thundering behind me.

I kicked away the plywood and jumped.

I landed in glass, rats, and trash three stories below. Coming down hard and awkwardly, I did something vile to my leg and hobbled as fast as I could along the breezeway, where a small, partially bald man in a frumpy business suit appeared at one end.

“Um…” he said.

I ran right over him. Got three yards away before I realized who he was and spun around.

“Mitch?”

He stared at me but picked himself up. “C-c-c-ome with me,” he said.

I could hear voices and feet at the end of the breezeway. They couldn't see me yet, but they seemed pretty sure they knew where I was. Ahead of me I could hear another crowd gathering.

“Sure.”

Mitch sank to the ground and seemed to disappear into the foundation. Following him, I found a narrow window that I could barely squeeze through. I dropped into a dank basement with a couple inches of water seepage on the floor. It stank like a sewer.

Barely pausing to make sure I was still with him, Mitch splashed across the room like he knew where he was going. I followed him past rows of shelves filled with bottles marked BLEACH and AMMONIA CLEANER. He found a metal ladder and climbed it, pushed at a trapdoor in the ceiling, and disappeared through the hole. I followed him and exited onto dirt.

The streetlights shone down on me. I rolled over, looked around, and saw that we were in an empty lot next to the building.

“D-d-drug dealers had a tunnel here before they blew up the house cooking drugs,” said Mitch, standing and dusting dirt off his slacks.

“Why are you helping me?”

“Aren't you Drew's friend? He said you'd come looking for him.”

I wanted to grab him and shake him, but I refrained. “Do you know where he is?”

Mitch pointed to the top floor of the building we'd just escaped. “He's up there. Waiting.”

I felt a leaden knowing in my belly, but I asked anyway. “Waiting for what?”

Mitch blinked at me. “To rise.”

* * *

I handled the news in the mature adult fashion you've come to expect of me.

The destruction of the house by the meth lab had still left sufficient debris for me to throw, stomp on, and repeatedly punch until my knuckles were raw.

Then I turned on the bloodsucking cubicle worker. “YOU!” I roared.

“No, it wasn't me…” Mitch scampered backward as I stomped toward him. “I s-s-s-swear!

Th-th-they d-d-d-on't let me…eeeeep!” I'd lifted him by that fat striped tie and held him nose to nose.

I was breathing through my nostrils like a dragon. “You set him up.”

“I didn't. He c-c-called me.”

It was what I'd suspected. “If I find out otherwise…”

“You won't,” said Mitch with enough assurance to convince me, and I let him slide from my grip and fall to the ground.

“Goddamn stupid little geek,” I wailed, launching myself into another temper tantrum.

“Keep it down,” Mitch whined, looking anxiously again toward the building.

Reason was seeping in, along with a murderous desire for revenge. I controlled myself, barely, and sat down on the crumbled remains of the former home's front steps. “I'm going to personally dust every one of those motherfuckers.”

“Why?” said Mitch. He maintained a safe distance about ten feet away from me. “He wanted it.”

“He didn't know any better,” I said.

“He did,” said Mitch. He wrung his hands anxiously, but he spoke seriously and with sincerity. “He said he did it for Betsy.”

“Stupid little geek,” I repeated quietly.

“I d-d-don't think he's stupid. I admire him.” Mitch crept toward me cautiously. “He's b-b-brilliant, you know?”

I sighed and buried my head in my hands.

“And they'll take good care of him. He's the only one who understands that code Justin Lake gave us.”

I raised my head slowly. “
What
?”

“Th-th-th…” Mitch swallowed. “He didn't tell you.”

“I'm going to kill him,” I declared.

“Yeah,” breathed Mitch, uncomfortably. “He said you'd say that.”

I stood slowly, feeling ridiculously old for an immortal being. I wanted to go home, wherever that was. I wanted Peter.

Mitch wrung his hands again. “It'll be hours, probably. You want to wait in my room?”

“Sure.”

Mitch had apparently been given a place to live a few buildings down.

We climbed a rank stairwell. That smell of rats and feces was dominant. But when he pushed open a fire door at the top, the smell of blood rolled through and made my mouth water.

Mitch inhaled deeply. “Home sweet home,” he said.

A tiny room with a bed and a sofa. No windows, but then that's a plus for the likes of me.

Makes you real estate professionals raise your eyebrows and think, doesn't it? A whole new market for rooms
without
a view. It reeked of cigarette smoke and the stale smell of a man with BO. But I've smelled worse.

A refrigerator with nothing in it but water and lemons.

“Lemons?”

“I like the taste,” he said, tossing magazines and other debris off the couch. “If you bite down on them really hard it feels good. Give it a try.”

I'll try anything once. It's one of my faults. I took a big fat lemon out of the cooler, let my fangs drop down, and bit into it.

The tart hit my gum line at the same time the pressure on my teeth set my reflex sucking mechanism to drawing in the sour liquid. It was like those lemon drops that you can't stop sucking on. Plus, it felt really good to bite down. I hadn't realized how much I craved that sensation.

He was watching me with those washed-out brown eyes of his. “Good?”

I forced myself to release the fruit. Problem was, the sucking triggered the hunger. For blood and for other things. My dick was raging in my jeans and my mouth was salivating for blood. I eyed my host with a little more than random lust.

Mitch looked nervous.

I've resisted more luscious things than skinny stock clerks, though. And under better circumstances. So I just sat down on the couch. The Formica coffee table in front of me was covered with well-thumbed gay magazines.

Mitch fretted a bit. “It's not so bad, you know. They're a reputable organization.”

“You did this on purpose too,” I said.

“Yeah, I didn't just pick this up from some punk on the street. I researched them online.”

“Online.”

“Yes, of course.” He laughed, nervously. “It's not Consumer Guide, of course, but one can find forums online if one looks.”

I thought of my wantstobeavampire. “I guess you can find anything online if you look.”

Another nervous laugh. “Right.”

“So what made you pick these guys?”

He shrugged. “P-p-proximity. The only other group that seemed at all reputable is in Russia. These guys guarantee training and placement. They d-d-don't just drain you and d-d-dump you. And they had an end of the year special, so I f-f-figured. Why the hell n-n-not.”

“They train you to kill the homeless, don't they?”

“Nobody misses them.” Mitch shrugged like they were cheap toys he'd lifted from a Chinatown sidewalk vendor. “It's recommended.”

“A woman in there told me they have an eighty percent effectiveness rate. That true?”

Mitch's gaze dropped from mine to the porn on his coffee table. His skin went pink.

“They lie to them, don't they Mitch?”

“M-m-most of them would die anyway.”

“Were you dying?”

“Liver disease. Can you believe it? It wasn't fair, you know.” He studied his soft hands. “I hadn't
done
anything with my life, yet. I was, I don't know, too scared to try. And then it was all over. I signed over my IRA and left my estate to the corporation in my will and…it was easy, actually.”

“What happens with the ones who don't make it?”

He studied his cuticles. “They find places to leave their bodies. Around town.”

“Lake was killed on the street, though,” I pointed out. “And it looks like he tried to defend himself.”

“Ah, yeah…” When Mitch attempted to feign innocence he looked guiltier than ever.

“What happened to him, Mitch?” I growled.

“Um, yeah, Nicolas said Lake changed his mind. He r-r-reneged on the contract. You know. That's not true, is it?”

I'd been in a sort of shock, I suppose, but this brought me to my senses. I dug my phone out of my pocket and dialed Peter's number.

I'd almost forgotten how pissed off I was with Peter until Nancy's Buick Skylark came trundling down the cracked concrete driveway near Mitch's building.

“You sleep in that suit, don't you, Dickes?” I said, opening her door for her.

“We found Emily Guadalupe,” she said. “Exsanguinated via a neck wound and dumped in Griffith Park.”

Peter pulled himself out of the passenger side and leaned heavily on the door. He looked like day-old oatmeal: gray and pasty. “We could have saved her,” he said.

Nancy saw my expression. “I tried to take him back to Kaiser,” she said, low.

“Stop talking about me,” commanded Peter, listing sideways like a leaky boat. “I'm fine.”

“You're a stubborn ass,” I told him. “And it looks like these people chose to die of vampire bite. Emily's death isn't on you.”

He bent his head. His hair was getting long again and shone white in the streetlights. “I'm sorry about Drew.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“So what's our next move?” asked Nancy. “What have you got?”

I considered my words for a moment. As soon as I told them the empty factory not only contained vampires and recently murdered people hoping to become vampires, but live human beings being slowly bled out, Peter would call the SWAT squad and LAPD black vans would surround the place in a few minutes.

So why hesitate
? you're asking me now. Assisted suicide is a crime, isn't it? I can't answer you, except that the image of those family photos on the woman's little bedside table were haunting me.

I want to see my kids grow up. They need me.

“I've got a witness who will tell you a vampire ordered the hit on Justin Lake. Orville Suits too, probably. Emily Guadalupe and Jessica Bramson more than likely committed assisted suicide in an attempt to become vampires.”

“What pathetic fools,” said Peter.

“There's more people in there right now. I don't know how many. Trying to pull off the same deal,” I told them.

“Jesus Christ.” Sure enough, Peter pulled out his phone and started talking to dispatch.

“What about the code?” asked Nancy.

“They've got it. I don't know what they plan on doing with it.”

“We can't just rush the place. They'd have time to hide it again,” said Peter. “I've called for silent backup. What about your people, Adam?”

What about them? I'd been trying to reach Betsy and Caballo for hours now. I still had Caballo's phone and wasn't surprised that he wasn't answering the toss-away the FBI had lent him. He could have lost it or even turned it off. But Betsy was like any other teenage girl with a cell phone. She carried it everywhere, decorated it with little necklaces, and would have died, in a manner of speaking, rather than lose it.

Betsy was ignoring me. I was sure of it. Which meant she was up to something. Which gave me a feeling of such foreboding it was almost nauseating.

“I don't know,” I admitted. “But Mitch might be able to get me back in there if you can tell me what we should be looking for.”

Now Nancy brought out her phone. “Richardson has a CITAC connection.”

While they chatted away, I brought Mitch out to meet them. Introductions all around. Peter had a lot of questions for Mitch, who seemed quite happy to blab everything he knew. I strolled to the corner while they talked, and watched the building in question.

It was after moonset. The darkest hour of the night. And the young vampires were emerging from the building in tentative groups of two and three, stalking the indigents who slept in the doorways.

“Let's do this thing,” I said.

* * *

Mitch appeared to have no qualms whatsoever about betraying the people with whom he had been so recently affiliated.

“D'you think I could work undercover?” he whispered to me. “I always thought I'd make a great corporate spy.”

Hell of it was, I considered unhappily, he'd make a great operative. Who would suspect a lump of a clerk of espionage?

“I wouldn't know,” I whispered to him.

Mitch had led me through a breach in the back wall to a closet that was redolent with the smell of sickness, probably coming from the mops and buckets stacked in its corners.

“You could maybe hook me up?”

I had a persistent bad taste in my mouth, and it wasn't just the result of the stench around us.

“Shut up. Somebody'll hear us,” I hissed back.

We were pressed against the door there, listening for the footsteps of the retreating guards.

“
Security here is a joke
,” Mitch had said. “
At Microsoft you couldn't even go to the
bathroom without swiping your ID
.”

I'd never worked at Microsoft, so I had no basis for comparison, but I thought the security in the building was pretty damned sufficient. One hulking monster or another stomped by our closet every twenty minutes or so. Happily none of them seemed to smell Mitch and me there. Of course, even I had trouble distinguishing odors on the first floor of the building. Besides the dominant scent of chalk, there were so many unwashed undead and barrels of trash it was hard to distinguish one smell from another.

“Okay, this way,” whispered Mitch, and we eased our way out of the closet and down a hallway. Even as we approached the offices at the end of it, I could hear the hum of machines and smell the plastic gas of new computers in a warm room.

From the corner where we crouched, I could hear several individuals inside the room.