No Rest for the Wicked (3 page)

Caballo and I had shared a few sweaty moments on a mattress, but I was a one-man monster these days. Caballo, on the other hand, seemed to be sampling the entire population of Los Angeles, male and female.
Sampling
in a sexual way only, if I were to believe him. Like me, Caballo was bagging it—our term for drinking the artificial blood we were provided. Or tainted blood that occasionally fell down from the blood banks.

I had my reasons for choosing not to kill. One of them was still over there, supervising the crime scene. I didn't know all of Caballo's reasons, and I hadn't asked.

I climbed aboard behind him. “Somebody had dinner in the men's room of the Chinese.

Must have been
a person of note
, because Peter's crew is on the case.”

“Damn, bro, I'm sorry,” said Caballo. He'd leaned over his rocket, and I was obliged to do so as well. I felt rather than saw his grin when he gave his hips the subtlest shove and encountered my raging hard-on.

“Shut up,” I growled.

“You're a martyr, Adam,” shouted Caballo, cranking the throttle.

He probably couldn't hear my reply over the scream of the bike. Just as well.

* * *

Caballo swung down the alley near Peter's, where I'd left my Harley. He stopped and I hopped off.

“Okay, you can leave me here,” I told him.

“If I don't bring you to the meeting, Betsy'll tear my head off.” He meant that literally.

“And we got some O neg that fell off a truck this morning.”

I weighed the odds of Peter making it back home that night and added in the factor of fresh O. I knew Peter kept a supply of artificial blood, but nothing beat organic. Just the thought of it made me salivate and tipped the scale definitely in Caballo's favor. “Fine, wait here while I wheel her out.”

Caballo waited, smirking a little bit, while I trotted down the alleyway, ducked in next to one of the garages, and fetched my bike from under a tarp Peter kept there for the purpose. I rolled her back down the alley and got the bitch going again. She'd been having some trouble lately. Burning through oil like a motherfucker. Something's up with her pipes, I think.

“When you going to give up on that old horse?” he asked, petting his Kawasaki ZX-10R

Ninja.

I climbed on and kicked the clutch again. She belched and filled the night with a roar that was mythological in its power. “They'll bury me on her,” I shouted at him.

Caballo's face acquired a peculiar expression. It took me a second to hear my own words.

Oh. Yeah.

Fuck.

* * *

Before we exited from the alley into the street, I checked my phone for messages.

It's one of those new iPhones, and I always feel like a pretentious Valley brat when I pull it out of my pocket. But Peter gave it to me. And it's got this cool game on it called Minesweeper.

I've killed many a long, lonely hour in my little cave playing that game.

I didn't really expect a call from Peter for hours, but I dialed and said to the voice mail, “I'm on the road. Do you want me to meet you at your place?” Please, God, I thought as I sent the message and pocketed the phone.

Caballo turned his helmet-encased head toward me. “You ready?” he asked.

* * *

Caballo and I cruised east on the 10, hopped onto the 101, and got off at Third Street. Our motors were better than horns. Motorists heard us coming and edged warily to the side as we threaded the needle and came out in Chinatown in just a few minutes.

We parked our bikes outside the Empress Parlor. Caballo liked to irritate me by calling the place headquarters, like we're characters in some Batman movie or something.

The Empress Parlor is a well-known dim sum restaurant. The former owner had been running a numbers business out of it as well. He'd ended as most Chinatown bosses did, his bloated corpse clogging a pipe in the LA River. The new owner was nervous about the bad chi he'd possibly inherited, and only too happy to have a little extra security located upstairs. Betsy had been shrewd enough to hack out a deal with him.

Above the massive main dining room that crawled with tourists and waitstaff from four p.m. to eight p.m. Monday through Friday and ten a.m. to ten p.m. weekends, there was a wide, windowless attic, invisible from the street and only accessible by ladder or the service elevator.

The numbers racket had required a lot of electronics, so when we'd moved in, it was already fitted with power strips and supported electrical sockets throughout. Perfect for a group of people with unusual needs. Like no windows and lots of electricity for our computers and refrigeration units. Long as you didn't mind the smell of fish, which seemed to have penetrated the walls.

Caballo and I went through the roof access, an easy ten-foot jump, and the handsome young Asian man, sitting at the row of desks against one wall, barely flinched when our feet hit the floor.

“Betsy's fit to be tied,” said Drew, without looking up. He sat in front of an array of monitors, long fingers of his left hand flying over a fat keypad, right hand slamming an electronic mouse mercilessly on the hard desktop. He spared a quick, sweeping glance in our direction, and his dark eyes narrowed. “What the hell took so long?”

Drew, a self-styled vampire groupie, was human. At least I assumed he was. Sometimes when I'd watch him staring into those monitors, the colors and images flashing across his black eyes, I'd start to imagine that he was a robot.

He'd been compiling information on bloodsuckers longer than I'd been one and seemed to know more about us than we did ourselves. Still, he was always looking for new info and he'd

been bugging me for months to be a participant in some new study of his. This seemed to involve answering a hell of a lot of personal questions. Personal questions are not my forte, so to speak.

So I'd been avoiding Drew more than usual. Guess I'd hurt the little nerd's feelings, because now he was pouting and shooting dirty looks at me.

“Had to pick up my ride,” I said. “Where is the Queen of the Night anyway?”

Drew jerked his head toward a closed door that led into a suite of rooms Betsy sometimes used as an apartment. “She found another one,” he said.

Caballo cursed mildly.

I went straight to one of the three large chrome refrigerators and opened it. A row of neatly labeled blood bags filled the shelves. I removed the top two and tossed one to Caballo, who raised it and ripped a hole in it with a smooth flash of his incisors, his face transforming fluidly to demonic as he did so. I was only halfway through my own bag when he'd finished and pulled another out of the refrigerator.

I've had an intimate relationship with a few narcotics in my day, but nothing compared to the rush I got off fresh blood. Caballo and I both reclined on a nearby sofa, sucking O like starving baby goats sucking at the teat. The sugary sweetness flooded my body, brain, and aching dick.

I swam up from the bliss to find Caballo's hand on my groin.

“Take that back before I break it,” I said.

He removed his hand, a good-natured grin on his face. “You don't do somethin' about that soon, it's gonna fall off, dog.”

I hoped not.

Drew watched us with a bored expression. “Betsy said there's a new outbreak?” he asked.

“What makes you two think that?”

Drew had taken it upon himself to monitor the spread of vampires throughout Los Angeles.

It was part of his whole research project. Hell of a hobby for a computer geek, if you ask me, but we'd been finding it useful.

“Who said anything about an outbreak? Adam found a stiff up on Sunset,” said Caballo.

He tossed his empty blood bag into a biohazard bin and strode across the room to Drew's

computer array, swinging a long leg over a chair and sliding in next to him. “In the Chinese.” He looked up at the monitor, where cartoon zombies stumbled into a field of mushrooms. Drew appeared to be controlling their demolition.

“That far west?” said Drew. Barely pausing, he reached over to another keyboard and tapped out a code. Now on the monitor next to the one on which he played his game, a map of Los Angeles appeared. He tapped another key, and the map zoomed in on the Hollywood area.

Small red dots were scattered across it. I knew each dot represented a suspected vampire kill.

Each dot had a date on it. There were distinct cluster areas. I'd been a homicide detective out of the Hollywood Station and I recognized the heavy activity zones as the same ones where most of the robberies and assaults occurred, the darker, less glamorous dumps and dives frequented by less affluent locals. When Drew keyed a new dot on the Chinese, it was noticeably much farther west on Sunset than any of the others.

“We've never recorded a draining near there,” said Drew, going back to his game. “You sure about what you saw?”

“There's no mistake,” I told him. “And whoever did it bled him dry.”

“Newbie,” said Drew. He slammed the mouse a few times, and a row of zombies on screen rolled their eyes before their heads blew off.

Experienced vampires don't kill just to eat. If you've been around awhile, you learn it's better to leave your victim alive. That way there's less dead bodies lying around the city, causing consternation amongst the PD, and you may be able to revisit the trough, so to speak, when your snack has had time to create more plasma. Believe it or not, there are people out there who enjoy the sensation of a dangerous creature sucking at their neck.

When I put it like that it doesn't sound half bad to me, either.

But I digress. Complete draining was the action of a newly turned vampire. One who hadn't learned the self-control necessary for survival.

“Neat job for a newbie,” I told him. “No mess, no backwash. I didn't see one drop of blood spilled. Stiff might have gotten a round into him, too.”

“Or her,” said Betsy, coming in from the other room. Or, I should say, making her entrance. All three males turned their heads. Even me, if for no other reason than to admire the boots. Thigh-high, supple black leather jobbies with about ten buckles down each side and three-

inch soles. Kick-ass queen of the vampire enclave boots. Which, I guess, was appropriate. Not that our ragtag little band constituted a real enclave.

In life, Betsy had been a skinny, five-two, coke-addicted street rat with a cheap goth style and a motorcycle gang boyfriend who'd turned her purely by accident and lived to regret it. She'd become a kind of undead vigilante. Caballo and I helped her because it was easier than arguing with her. Drew had signed on as a means of collecting data on us and to impress Betsy, with whom he was hopelessly besotted.

She turned back toward the doorway from which she'd emerged and made a beckoning gesture. “C'mon, sweetie. Don't be afraid.”

What came through the door then had Caballo rolling his eyes and hissing a curse. A skinny boy, looked about twelve, with an overgrown mop of dirty brown hair and half-luminous, half-human eyes. His canines were fully exposed, yet the look of fear and wide-eyed innocence were unmistakable. Probably didn't even know what had happened to him yet.

“Where'd you find
him
?” Caballo growled.

Betsy shot him a look. “Be nice. This is Frank. Frank woke up down on Broadway, near Union Station.”

“Hi, Frank,” we all said just like good boys at an NA meeting. Frank blinked a few times and licked his lips. From twenty paces I could see him shaking. Probably a combination of fear and hunger. Imagine waking up and seeing Betsy leaning over you. Imagine that vision feeding you blood from a sippy cup. Yeah. Frank was having a very bad day.

“Somebody is picking up runaways as they come in from out of town,” said Betsy.

“I'm not a runaway,” protested Frank in a voice that cracked. “I'm eighteen,” he told all of us.

“Yeah? What year were you born?” I asked.

His lips opened and closed, and he licked them, blinking, while his poor stupefied brain tried to do the math. “Uhmmm…”

I thought momentarily of the horror of being stuck for all eternity in puberty. Poor kid.

“Don't worry,” said Caballo. “Nobody here is going to call Social Services on you.” He gave him the once-over, his gaze tasting every inch.

“He's just a kid,” I hissed, low.

“Not anymore, he isn't,” said Caballo, eyes glinting.

“
Puta
.”

“
Pinche
.”

“Stop it,” said Betsy. She indicated a chair for Frank, who sat obediently. “Don't listen to them,” she said. “So what's this about a stiff near the Chinese?”

“New guy in town, maybe,” I said.

Betsy lit a cigarette, long black talons flicking as she pocketed the lighter. She set her skinny butt down on the table next to Drew's keyboard and said, “Don't always assume it's a man.”

“He was left in the
men's
room,” I pointed out.

“Plenty of times I've used the boys' when the line to the girls' was too long.”

I imagined a strapping young female vampire, exsanguinated body hefted daintily on one shoulder, finding the line to the ladies' too long and marching over to the men's room. Unnoticed and unremarked. Sometimes Betsy's thought processes, if you could call them that, scared me.

“Well, it didn't happen in the men's room,” I said. “That was just the dump site. There was a trail of blood heading toward a side alley.”

Her kohl-lined eyes rolled toward me. “Maybe your stiff was getting a blow.”

“He still had his pants on.” I shrugged. “And a gun in his hand.” Last I heard, one didn't pull a gun on whoever was sucking one off. Of course it'd been so long, maybe things had changed.

Drew had gone back to his video game. He slammed the mouse a couple of times and said, “There was a rave near there last night. Maybe culled him from the party.”

Caballo sighed. “We'll have to track him down.”

Betsy nodded agreement. “Before he eats a tourist.”

Which brings us to the scary truth, boys and girls. The computer geek, the former Crip, the goth streetwalker, and yours truly are the Good Guys. We are all that stands between you citizens of Los Angeles and the ravenous evil dead.