The Vampire's Seduction (3 page)

Jack

I rolled down the window of the wrecker and let the cool wind whip my face, flooring the accelerator and wishing the rig was as fast as my ’65 Corvette convertible 327. I cranked up the radio tuned to classic country. Merle Haggard was turning twenty-one in prison, doing life without parole. Life. What a concept.

I was towing a car that a client had left broken down on the side of the road a few miles outside of town. He’d already hightailed it back to hearth and home, having called a friend on his cell phone for a ride. I didn’t blame him. You never know what kind of monsters you might meet up with while stranded alone on a dark night outside of town. Especially a town as alive with supernatural shenanigans as Savannah.

I leaned my head back, wishing for even more wind in my hair. Like a lot of southern good ol’ boys, you could say I have the need for speed. I reckon I’d be on the NASCAR circuit by now if I could show my face in the light of day. Instead, I have to be content with amateur night, racing by the light of the moon on the dirt tracks of southeast Georgia and the blacktop roads on the outskirts of Savannah. I’m somewhat of a legend among the shrimpers and river rats who have lived for generations in shacks dotting the edges of the piney woods. They think I’m a spook and the ’Vette is a ghost car.

Who can blame ’em? Their daddies and granddaddies have passed stories about me down through the years. Before there were cars, they’d see me dressed all in black, with silver spurs, riding a huge black horse. The horse’s tack was studded with Mexican silver, and the way it flashed in the moonlight scared the very devil out of anyone unlucky enough to be traveling the roads at night. Nowadays they see me blaze by ’em on four of Goodyear’s finest as they fish by lantern light along the intercoastal waterways. They don’t bother to call the cops, though. The cops couldn’t catch me during the years when I made a fortune running moonshine whiskey—and they can’t catch me now.

Almost on cue, I heard a siren coming up behind me. Dammit! If I’d been in my ’Vette, I could have left ’em eating dust. Cussin’ a blue streak, I pulled over onto the sandy shoulder and waited.

“Evenin’, Jackie,” came a honey-coated voice, and I relaxed and let it flow over me.

Officer Consuela Jones of the Savannah PD came to stand beside me. She played a flashlight across my face as if she didn’t know full well who I was. I squinted and hoped she didn’t notice the very unhuman way my pupils turn to oblong slits in bright light.

I’d known Connie since she first came to Savannah. Met her one night when she showed up to work the accident site where I’d wrecked one of my other convertibles. I’d swerved to avoid hitting an alligator out on the road to Tybee, rolled a few times, and been thrown from the car. She got there before the paramedics and was so convinced I was dead, because of the unhealthy angle my neck was in, that she didn’t even check me for a pulse. Lucky Jack. Fact is I
never
have a pulse, and it would have been hard to explain why once I came around. As it was, explaining how I snapped my neck back into place had been dicey. I’m usually not so careless, but I had my back to her when I sat up. In the weirdness of the moment, I hadn’t sensed any humans around, so unbeknownst to me, she saw me grab my head and straighten my neck. Kinda like you’d fix a finger you jammed during a pickup basketball game.

I realized she was there only when I heard her gasp. When she asked me how I’d done that, I told her I got the idea from that
Lethal Weapon
movie where Mel Gibson fixes his own dislocated shoulder. She wasn’t convinced and has had her eye on me ever since. She knows I’m
different,
but she can’t quite put her finger on what the difference is. Since she works the night shift, she drops by the garage now and then to check up on me, and sometimes just to hang out. I like to think we’ve become friends, although I still hold out hope for hotter and closer, if you know what I mean.

I’d ask her out, but I can tell she doesn’t trust me. She knows something is up with me, something abnormal. I don’t think she knows that something’s up with her, too, though. It’s weird how I can’t sense or smell her humanness, like on the night I first met her. And yet she doesn’t exactly smell like a shapeshifter either. Maybe she’s a half-breed of some kind. Whatever the mix, she doesn’t realize she isn’t 100 percent human. It’s probably just as well. It’s strange that she works only at night. There’s got to be a reason for that, but around these parts it’s always best not to trade too many questions.

That night she looked particularly fine, wearing her long black hair in a braid down her back. And, as always, she looked damn good in that uniform, especially the fitted shirt. A standard service revolver rested in its usual place on her right hip and her badge winked a silvery blue in the flashing lights of the patrol car. A woman of authority. Be still my inhuman heart.

“If it isn’t my favorite patrolwoman.”

“Sweet talk will get you nowhere with the law.” She gave me a lazy smile and a slow, sexy blink, showing thick lashes. “I’m going to have to write you a speeding ticket.” She took a pen out of her breast pocket and leisurely moistened a forefinger to flip to a new sheet in her ticket book.

I gave her a wink. “Are you sure you don’t want to frisk me?”

She leaned her head down as she wrote, thinking I couldn’t see her grin underneath the patent leather bill of her hat. “That won’t be necessary.”

“Strip search?”

“I wouldn’t dream of violating your civil rights.”

“I meant you.”

“Careful, I might run you in for sexual harassment.”

“I thought that was a civil matter.”

She tore off the ticket and reached into the cab to tuck it into my shirt pocket, tickling my chest a little through the fabric with the finger she’d licked. “Oh, I’m sure I could find something to charge you with. Drive safely, Mr. McShane.” With that she turned her back and treated me to the sight of her walking away. I laughed and pulled back onto the blacktop. She could put a charge in me anytime.

Human females are kind of troublesome, but feminine vampires are nonexistent from what I can gather, so hey, what’s a boy to do? The human variety think I’m the ultimate commitmentphobe. It’s ironic because if things were different, I wouldn’t mind settling down. But with my little . . . affliction, long-term relationships are out of the question. It’s hard enough keeping my true nature secret from the outside world. I could never manage to hide the truth and nothing but the truth while living with a woman.
Don’t mind me honey, I sleep all day and prowl all night. Not to mention drinking blood and never getting old.
So my relationships are always short and sweet. Intense (probably because I know they won’t last), passionate, even—but brief. Maybe that’s why I haven’t pushed things with Connie. I’m afraid if I started seeing her, I’d never want to stop. I guess I’ll just have to stay a love-’em-and-leave-’em guy with the kind of women who don’t expect till death do us part.

A one-woman man in an undead womanizer’s body. Ain’t love grand?

Ten minutes later, I pulled the wrecker into the garage and hopped out. Rennie was rummaging in the cabinet over the coffeepot.

“Jack, there’s no more coffee.”

“Look in that grocery bag by the sink.”

My partner at Midnight Mechanics, Rennie, wears Coke bottle–thick glasses that are always so smeared with grease I wonder how he sees anything. He’s short, buzz-cut, and barrel-chested, and he can rebuild an engine in nothing flat. At the moment he was in the middle of a game of poker with some of the regulars.

“The regulars” is what Rennie calls them, and they’re a collection of oddballs—not even close to regular as far as I can tell—who for some reason enjoy hanging out at an all-night garage. I wonder about them sometimes—what they do for a living, where they go in the daytime, and, well, just what they
are
exactly. But none of them ask me any questions, like why can I lift a car by its front end without a jack, so I return the courtesy. I guess that’s why they feel comfortable hanging out at the shop, where there’s almost always a pot of coffee on and a card game under way. I know for a fact that some of them aren’t altogether human. I can smell a shapeshifter at twenty paces. Like Rufus, who never comes around when the moon is full, and Jerry, whose ears look a little too pointy whenever he takes off his Braves cap to scratch his bristly head. Exactly what kind of shapeshifters are they? Who knows and who cares? As long as they don’t try to eat the customers, who am I to judge?

Even though I’m a loner, I don’t mind a little company now and then. Especially company who can tell me what’s going on in the city after the lights in the windows of the mansions along the squares have gone out. After the gentry have tucked themselves into their antique four-posters and asked God to deliver them from evil. From the likes of me.

A vampire can never be too careful. When I walked into the garage, a wormy-looking slip of a fellow named Otis was sitting down at the card table next to Huey. Huey detailed cars and acted as a general go-fer around the place. I wouldn’t say he was simpleminded exactly, but he wasn’t blessed with an overabundance of brain cells either. While he might be at a loss when it came to ciphering up a bill, he was a cheerful, pleasant soul who greeted each customer with a smile and a greasy handshake, and they liked him.

Otis flinched a little as I sat beside him and motioned Rennie to deal me in. Otis never looks directly at me, but always just a bit off to one side. I think he’s a little afraid of me. In fact, there are about three or four regulars who won’t come into the shop if I happen to be the only one there. Can’t say as I blame them. Us guys who are not rightly human always seem to know a weirdo when we see one. Or smell one.

“I detailed both hearses from the funeral home today,” Huey announced while studying his hand. “It was kind of weird.”

“Why’s that, Hugh-man?” I held up two fingers and Rennie slid me two cards.

“Because that’s what they ride dead people in,” Huey said. “Dead people creep me out.”

Rufus, who’d just taken a sip of coffee, nearly choked, spraying it all over his cards. The others were trying really hard not to look at me. The corner of Rennie’s mouth twitched. “I reckon we’re all going to die one day, Huey,” he said. “I reckon we’ll all take our last ride in one of those long, hatchback Cadillacs.”

Speak for yourself, I thought.

“I just want to be buried in my car,” Huey said, brightening. His face was so shiny with grease, I could almost see the reflection of his poker hand in it.

“You go and die,” Otis said, as he took a pouch of Red Man out of his pocket and stuffed a wad of shredded tobacco into his cheek, “we’ll see to it that you and that car get buried together.” He wore greasy Dickies and a work shirt with a patch that said
BUD
. No telling who the hell Bud was. “You know that antiques warehouse down by the river?” he asked around his chaw.

That antiques warehouse belonged to William. I wondered what William’s business had to do with Huey riding off to glory land in a Chevy Corsica.

“ ’Bout an hour ago they tugged a boat into the docks and the warehouse guys were runnin’ around screamin’ at one another. I thought I heard one of ’em, well, you know how when you overhear a conversation and just a word now and then jumps out at you?”

“What was the word, Otis?” I asked warily. He spat a stream of tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup through the space between his front teeth.

“Um, ‘coffin.’ ” he said. “You think someone wanted to get buried on their boat? Kinda like Huey here?”

This got my attention. That would be William’s boat. Running and screaming and talk of coffins. I folded my cards—only had a pair of eights anyway—and went to call the warehouse. What the hell could be going on?

On the sixth ring someone finally picked up. “Jack. Praise Jesus, you’re there.”

“Praise Jesus” was not a sentiment I was used to hearing in the same sentence with my name. I recognized the voice of one of William’s warehousemen, Al Richardson. What he told me next made my blood run even colder than usual. “I’ll find him,” I said, and hung up. I muttered to Rennie that I’d be back soon, jumped into my ragtop Corvette parked in the last bay, and put it in gear. I had to find William fast because all hell had just broken loose. Literally.

I’m usually easier to find than William, seeing as how his tastes in nightlife activities are a mite more peculiar than mine and he completely refuses the whole concept of a cell phone. It’s not in his DNA to be available to anyone—no matter what the so-called emergency. Seems like I’m always chasing him ’round town for something.

And William ain’t easy to chase down. He could be at a black tie charity event, rubbing elbows with the high society folks, or he could be stalking a pretty art school coed who’d wake up the next morning on a stone bench in Colonial Cemetery, pale and wan, with a couple hours’ gap in her short-term memory.

Among his many enterprises, William has a sweet little import business involving antiques bought for a song from down-on-their-luck European aristocrats. William turns around and sells the items to the new-moneyed here in Savannah—those social climbers who don’t have any expensive old family heirlooms of their own, since most of them only acquired pots to piss in relatively recently.

But the antiques business is just a cover for the really important European cargo—vampires. I have no idea why they leave their castles and châteaus in Europe to come over here, but there seems to be a pretty steady stream of old, rich vampires that William brings over in his yacht, always one at a time. Vamps don’t always mix well with one another. And you don’t want some pissing contest about who’s older and richer to turn into a full-fledged vamp war at sea. The crew is nervous enough dealing with one coffin at a time.

The imports have to be rich to afford what William charges them. These Old World vamps go first class all the way. It’s like a Carnival cruise for carnivores. William provides all the conveniences, complete with hot and cold running blood. Hell, they might even play shuffleboard in the moonlight for all I know.