Suckers (19 page)

Wiping his mouth again, he nodded. His hand came back clean. He took a quick look in the mirror, making sure he didn’t have blood smeared on his face. “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”

“Thanks, guy.” Ray unfolded his wallet, handed Vin some bills. “Get yourself something to eat. The fries here are good.”

“So that’s it?” the skinny guy asked.

“Unless you want to donate to the cause too.”

“Unh-uh. I’m not good with needles.”

“Well that’s it, then. Thanks again.”

“Thanks,” Dan said before following Moss out the restroom door. They headed straight out the front doors and into the parking lot while Vin and his friend lingered inside, probably debating whether to stay and eat.

On the way to the car, Dan said, “I’ll drive.”

“You sure?”

“I feel good.”

“What I like to hear.” Ray tossed him the keys.

As he cranked the engine, Dan said, “How about you, Moss?” He flicked his gaze to the rearview. “You doing okay?”

“A restaurant bathroom is a stupid fucking place to do this.”

Dan nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking.”

In the morning, with the motel room’s curtains blocking the sunlight and Moss snoring on one of the two double beds, Dan fished the bottle of blood out of the bag and cranked the cap off.

“Already?” Ray asked, coming out of the bathroom.

“I don’t need it, but I wouldn’t mind bringing myself back up to normal levels again.” The hum in the base of his skull was a mosquito, almost not worth worrying about. The hangover from the cheap wine they’d killed after leaving Vin and his friend, however, ramped down his tolerance for even mosquitos. Sniffing at the opening, he wrinkled his nose and turned his face away. “Maybe it’s too early for this shit.” After another quick sniff, he fastened the cap back on.

The smell of stale cigarettes lingered. Had Ray lit a few while they were toasted? He couldn’t remember for sure.

Maybe.

Maybe he remembered Ray leaning against the wall beside the window. Maybe the window’d been cracked a couple inches.

The smell made him kind of green. “I think I just need to spend some time with my head between my knees.” He shuffled past Ray, into the bathroom, where the tile floor was cool under his toes. Brushing his teeth, he decided the headache was just a hangover, not the usual harbinger of hell. He pulled himself upright and got into the shower to let steaming water pound the back of his neck.

When he came back out with wet hair and yesterday’s jeans hanging from his hips, Ray had the laptop they’d brought open on the bed, rubbing his mouth while he read the screen. Already he looked a little better. Pinker-cheeked. More fleshed out. Maybe it was the light.

When Dan fished a t-shirt from the floor, Ray looked up. “Got a few more possibilities in the works.”

“Yeah? Where’d Moss go?” Dan asked.

“Out in the parking lot calling Deb.”

Dan pulled the shirt on. “Anything look good?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe.” He hunched and typed, one finger from each hand. “Maybe.”

They got back on the road after lunch—soup, crackers, and ginger ale for Dan. He felt marginally better after eating.

Moss tried his wife again from the back seat; he’d missed her earlier. Dan let his eyes slip shut and gave in to the drone of the road as Moss made things up about their so-called acoustic tour of indie record stores, just the three of them. “Uneventful,” Moss said. “Not a big crowd, but a good one at least.”

Dan felt like shit, but it was an existential shit feeling, not a physical one.

From Providence they headed west. The next stop was just over the New York border, a town on the Hudson. The three-and-a-half-hour drive put them there a little past four in the afternoon. Nothing to do but check into the motel and sit around.

Moss turned on the TV.

Ray said, “Fuck this,” around an unlit cigarette, pocketed one of the keycards, and went outside to smoke.

Dan, sitting on the end of one of the beds, dropped backward, laying his hands one on top of the other on his chest.

“You hear that?” Moss said.

“Huh?”

“Gonna rain tonight.”

Dan stared at the ceiling.

A
thump
against the windows brought him up quickly.

Moss said, “What the—?” He swept open the curtain.

Ray grinned from the other side before turning and dropping his back against the window.

“Don’t open it,” Dan said. “It’ll just let smoke in.”

Moss rapped with two knuckles and raised his voice to say, “Gonna rain tonight.”

Ray shrugged, made an
And?
face.

The talk show on TV had a celebrity doctor going on about fatty acids. Her voice made the bones in Dan’s head hurt. He massaged his temples.

Moss checked his kit, setting aside what they’d need this evening and repacking it so those items were on top—alcohol swab, disposable needle, the rubber tourniquet.

Dan uncapped the bottle from the night before and chugged the last of it down before rinsing it out and leaving it on the bathroom counter.

The three of them headed out to find pizza. This time dinner and donations would be in separate locations, which Dan was a-okay with. When they slid into a booth at a Frank’s Pizza, he could relax and actually eat something.

“I hope this goes better than last night,” Moss said around a wad of his veggie slice.

“I don’t think it went so badly,” Ray said.

Moss raised his eyebrows.

Ray shrugged. “We got what we came for, didn’t get caught.”

“What’s the deal with this one again?” Dan asked, already wearing his sunglasses, enjoying the anonymity of them. Of knowing no one was going to look in his eyes and see he had a problem. That he was coming apart.

“How are you doing?” Ray nudged a wadded-up, sauce-stained napkin under the edge of his plate.

“All right.” The low-key humming was staying low key. The last vestiges of his hangover was gone too.

Ray nodded.

They paid their bill and went out into the dark, Moss getting behind the wheel this time. Ray rode shotgun with Google Maps, his face lit by the glow of its screen.

Twenty minutes later they pulled up in front of a consignment shop called Skeletons from the Closet.

“Used clothes for goths,” Ray said.

Black and purple crowded the window, lace and velvet, crosses and crystals. A foghorn announced their arrival. Three young women hung around a sticker-covered counter at the back, turning their attention toward the front as Moss, Ray, and Dan made their way through the racks of clothes.

“Which of you’s Esmerelda?” Ray said.

The corner of a scarlet mouth twitched. A thin black eyebrow rose slowly upward. One of the other girls laughed, her cheeks flushing as she turned her face away.

“Well, Esmy,” said the third girl, sizing the men up. “What do you make of this?”

Esmy tilted her head, looking Ray up and down, then Dan, that eyebrow holding its arch. She seemed to have dismissed Moss in his nurse’s smock with barely a glance—not even the battered Doc Martens or the dice tattooed on his knuckles made her question whether he might be the vampire.

It didn’t take her long to rule Ray out too.

Fastening her gaze on Dan’s sunglasses, she said, “So you’re the so-called blood-sucker.”

He lifted his eyebrows. Her lips twitched at the corner again.

“What do you think, girls?” she said.

The one in front of the counter had regained her composure enough to size them up, with a little less pizazz than Esmy had. “You know who you look like?” she said to Ray.

“Not that fucking guy from Two Tons of Dirt,” Ray said. “If I hear that one more—”

Fuck.
Ray
.

“Who? No. That guy from The Dead Weather.” To her friends she said, “Delia has posters of him
all over
her walls. What’s that guy’s name from Dead Weather, Leigh?”

Leigh shrugged.

Moss raised the orange bag in the air. “Do you have a place in the back where we can do this?”

Esmy nodded. “He’s coming back there too, right?” Crooking a finger in Dan’s direction.

“Yep,” Moss said. “This way?”

“I’ll hang back out here,” Ray said. “Yell if you need anything. You girls ever seen a vampire in real life before?”

“No,” the Dead Weather girl said, “and I’m not convinced I have now, either.”

The desk in the back of the store was piled under with paperwork and slips of clothing. A cheap, hollow door sat ajar just next to it, leading to a bathroom. Esmy swiveled the desk chair around and said to Moss, “Will this do?”

Moss looked at the dim bulb in the ceiling. “Can you get more light back here? I kind of need to see.”

Esmy pushed open the bathroom door and turned on the light inside. “How about this?” The walls, toilet, sink, and even the linoleum floor were white, the latter flecked with charcoal. It was miles brighter than the office.

“That’ll work.” Moss set his bag on the sink and unzipped it.

“I’m not sure I want money for this.” Esmy floated closer to Dan, just outside the bathroom door. Her glossy dark hair was parted in the middle, the ends curling toward her jaw. She lifted a slender hand to brush her thumb over Dan’s lower lip. A bracelet made of lace and antique beads slipped down her arm. Her skin was paler than his by several shades.

He felt she was doing a much better job of exuding a vampiric air than he had so far managed.

She said, “You’re warm.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“Ready?” Moss asked, leaning in the doorway.

“Well.” She smoothed her short skirt. “I guess I am.” She started to turn away, then swung back. “I definitely do not want
money
for this. I want you, in there”—she pointed a scarlet fingernail toward the bathroom—“after this is done. Or I’m not doing it.”

She was so close. He traced his thumb slowly along her lower lip. The pink tip of a tongue tasted his skin. She pulled back and smiled.

After some fortifying blood, he thought he could manage that.

“All right,” she said to Moss. “Let’s get this over with. You’ve done this before, yeah?”

“You bet. Sorry about making you sit on a toilet.”

“No, it’s fine.”

Moss grasped the edge of the door and gave Dan a raised eyebrow.

Dan nodded.

Quietly, he pushed it shut.

Dan’s jeans were a little tight in the crotch. He turned away, studying the floor, or what he could see of it through the dark glasses. Seconds accumulated into minutes. Ray’s voice and the voices of the other girls filtered through the wall. He paced, slowly, stopping every now and then to read a paper on the desk or touch a clipping pinned to the wall. Tucked under an invoice might be a hand-penned poem. Tacked behind a labor notice might be a charcoal sketch of a willowy gothic lady whose curve-hugging gown ended in tentacles where her feet should have been.

The shop, from what he gathered, actually belonged to Esmerelda.

Every now and then a laugh—Ray’s—or a giggle (the girl in front of the counter, Dan thought) made its way into the back. He wondered if Ray was going to get lucky tonight too. Be a shame if he didn’t; on the other hand, Moss was straight up about being faithful to his wife, so there’d be a twinge of guilt, the two of them having a great time while Moss sighed, watching the news, wishing Ray and Dan would go to hell.

Dan leaned toward the bathroom door. A murmur from Moss filtered through. He pictured Esmy sitting on the toilet, watching the blood run from her vein down the tube, into the bottle. Moss was probably staring at the one-pint mark. As quickly as Dan had downed Vin’s blood, they’d decided they needed to up their take to Red Cross levels—though he still hoped Ray’s theory was right, that switching up donors would make the blood last longer. He pictured Moss lifting his gaze every so often to make sure everything was going as planned, then sliding the needle out of her arm, pressing a cotton ball over the puncture wound.

“Hold that there awhile,” Moss said.

Dan stepped back.

“How long’s ‘a while’?” Esmy said.

He took a few deep breaths, actually looking forward to this as Moss said, “Ten minutes,” and Esmy said, “Can I use a Band-Aid?”

“Sure.”

A few swallows—top himself off—and he’d be good to go. He was horny as fuck. How long had it been? He couldn’t remember the last time. The tour was a whole other life.

The door swung open. Moss emerged with his bag. “All yours.”

A bottle of blood sat on the sink, cap on. Esmy was on her feet, applying a Band-Aid to the crook of her elbow, over the cotton. She glanced his way.

Moss, behind him, said, “Get what you need, and I’ll put the rest on ice.”