Vamp-Hire (13 page)

He whispered too low for Nick to hear. She
nodded once, twice, pulled back and said, “He did what?”

For a second, Nick’s stomach clenched, the
sore spot of his belly becoming more pronounced and focused before
he realized she was really asking what the man had said. He
whispered something else and she nodded one final time.

“Good work,” she said to him. “Now here’s a
treat for you. Let’s go over to 2-7.” She peeked in at Nick and
said, “Be with you in a minute.” The vamp took the offered
chocolate, removing any doubt from Nick’s mind as to what he was,
and stepped out of the car. His arms raised above Nick’s view from
inside the car and a moment later the wrapper fell to the
ground.

She’d called it a treat like he was some sort
of crime-sniffing dog, all but rubbing his head and telling him
what a good boy he was. The most offensive part had been the man
not objecting to it. That probably had something to do with the
general nothingness about him. It hadn’t been just his eyes, the
man hadn’t smelled like anything or had any kind of feel about him.
Nick had even felt a heat coming off of P—vamps did have a pulse
and thus produced body heat. It was even a little bit more than
that that had been absent from the man. Nick had heard people say
before how they could feel someone in a darkened room even if they
couldn’t see anyone. Nick had felt that too, except he could sense
exactly where the person was even if he couldn’t see him or her
with his highly defined night vision. They’d devised a game to test
his and others’ five-and-a-halfth sense as they’d called it at the
Center and Nick had never guessed wrong.

Sitting next to that man had been the same as
sitting in the car alone. The word ‘sterile’ came to mind and it
was fitting. The man left no physical trace and no mental one,
either. He was the closest thing to a ghost Nick hoped ever to be
near.

Had they made him that way? Or was that a
result of whatever virus they shared in common? Nick had known a
few vamps with Skills (the more he thought or said the word, the
more okay it seemed—did it really offend some people?) but had no
clue to what extent they could range.

Well, not until now.

He didn’t count the levitation thing because
that hadn’t been intentional and Nick had no clue if it were even
repeatable. Plus, he wasn’t fully ready to accept it had actually
happened to begin with.

Whatever the man had done to or with Nick had
been real and the officer’s statement after so much silence had
been confirmation enough. They’d used that vamp as some sort of lie
detector, not even needing Nick to speak in order to suss out
whatever had happened inside the Pig.

He could give a general description of the
other person. Shouldn’t they have at least asked him for
formality’s sake what had gone on? That vamp couldn’t have plucked
everything out of his brain.

Right?

Nick looked in the back seat of the other
cruiser. Dwight was still sitting there, his head turned in Nick’s
direction as he was locking eyes with the police vamp. Dwight’s
eyes, from Nick’s vantage point, were just as empty. His whole body
jerked several times like someone was touching a live wire to his
bare skin.

After about three minutes it stopped. Officer
Finn had her back to Nick and she stepped in front of the open
door, breaking his line of sight for a moment as she bent to listen
to whatever the vamp had to say. He couldn’t have said more than a
couple of words, if he spoke actual words, that was. For all Nick
knew, he used some kind of English shorthand. Maybe one or two
syllables could stand in for entire sentences.

He put it out of his mind. It wouldn’t help
him get out of this cruiser any faster. Eventually, another officer
opened the car door.

“Okay, we’re gonna let you go,” a burly cop
said. Nick didn’t care to read his name tag. He’d been sitting on
his butt for the greater part of two hours and he was hungry. He
took the handcuffs off, handed Nick a card and a pen along with his
bag. “Write your name and number on there in case we need to get in
contact.” Nick scribbled his name and number and wished he’d
thought to give them fake contact info. How would they know?

The officer took the card and pen back and
walked away. Nick felt like there should have been something more
formal, but he was already out of the stream of the processing of
this crime scene. Maybe he should count himself as lucky. Officers
and what he guessed were detectives and lab techs milled about.
Nobody was paying attention to him. It seemed like a lot of people
for a simple robbery, even with someone getting hurt.

He turned into the small crowd that had
gathered. It probably would have been a larger gathering had it
been after work hours. He dug out his phone from his bag and
checked his call log. He’d call Lucky after. Nick saw he’d gotten a
call from Lucky and that he’d called back. The first call had
lasted thirty-three seconds, the second a little more than two
minutes.

So it was safe to assume they’d checked
through his phone. He didn’t know, hoping this wasn’t going to
result in a complication between him and Phoebe. Another kink in
the works was the last thing they needed. He wondered why they
hadn’t called her, maybe they hadn’t had enough time before that
vamp had cleared him.

He called Lucky again. The phone picked up
mid-first ring.

“Hello?” Lucky said in a too-cheery a
tone.

“Lucky, it’s me.”

“Lucky for you. I almost tossed this phone.”
He knew Lucky wasn’t on the up-and-up so far as how he made his
living and realized the police calling him wasn’t a happy occasion.
“Where are you?”

“About thirty feet away from the Big Pig. A
couple people tried to rob the place while I was in it.”

“Figures. I kept telling management to get
those cameras fixed. What they take?”

“Money, I guess. One of them took a couple of
candy bars.”

“Well, now that somebody’s going to jail I
guess those fixes will be coming soon.”

“What do you mean?” Nick hadn’t told him
anyone had been arrested.

“Not keeping security measures up-to-date is
a pretty serious offense. Punishable by fines and prison time. Add
to that the Big Pig being federally owned puts the screws to the
manager even more.”

Nick didn’t really care about that end of it.
He was still tender from the baton.

“The kid who was working got hurt pretty bad.
They took him away in an ambulance.”

“That’s a shame. Kip is pretty cool. I hope
he’s all right.”

Nick wanted to ask how he knew who was
working, and figured that Lucky could have known the schedule.
“They caught one of them, but I think the guy’s a vegetable or
something now.”

“Really? That’s weird.”

“I think it might have something to do with
his partner being a vamp. She got away.”

Nick had hoped Lucky knew something that
might illuminate that for him a little. Lucky didn’t respond.

“Hey, look, do you need a place to stay
tonight?”

“Yeah. I was actually about to ask you.”

“Okay, well you can. Get in.”

Nick was just about to ask what he meant when
a black two-door Pontiac Grand Prix pulled to a stop and the
passenger door swung open. Nick walked across the narrow strip of
grass and climbed into the car. When Nick had last seen Lucky they
had been walking. He wondered whose car this was.

“My friend let me use his car,” he said as if
hearing Nick’s thoughts.

There was that friend again. Nick wondered if
it was supposed to be the same one who let Lucky house sit. The one
who came home and didn’t seem to know who he was. “I’m staying at a
place near here.”

Nick didn’t ask about the place. The less he
knew, the more deniability he had.

Once they made it to the ‘place’, a second
floor apartment with a fully stocked refrigerator, flat screen
television with basic cable and two furnished bedrooms, Nick gave
him the rundown of the first part of his day.

“Murder, huh?” Lucky said. “I’m not
surprised.”

“What do you mean?” Nick wanted to feel
offended at the comment considering the murderer in question was
more than likely a vamp like him.

“Well, look at us, man. I mean mankind. We’re
barely on our feet right now. There’s every likelihood that if you
don’t get caught in the act on any crime, you won’t get caught.
There’s probably a dozen more like it every day. As thin and as
spread out as all resources are, especially public safety, crime is
at an all-time high. It’s the Wild, Wild West out there, you
know?”

Nick shrugged.

“The real question is why they’re doing
something so elaborate. I mean, you go to some off-label
super-secret military facility with all kinds of crazy security and
they have you examine the body? I mean, think about it—the
coroner’s office is still open. They could have taken her down
there. And why is the military even involved?”

Lucky had said a mouthful. All things Nick
hadn’t thought to ask Dolph. He wondered if there was anything on
the dead woman on the news. Nick turned the TV to Channel 2. The
news was almost always on now. Save for a paltry few reality shows
it was the only original programming around. Everything else was
old stuff from before the Conflict; Mash, Seinfeld, The Simpsons,
anything that didn’t remind people of the world around them unless
it was a report on the world around them.

The pretty reporter was in the middle of a
story on President Carver. Apparently, he’d announced the beginning
of some big initiative to take place somewhere in Arizona. Even
though mankind had won, there were still loyalists to vampires.
They went by many different names—Renfieldians, Morrisites,
Irvinians, the Sons of Nosferatu to name a few. The initiative was
to be called Operation Sun Sweep and the reporter said that all
people in the little town of Clarkdale, a town of fewer than three
thousand people, had been advised to approach the western border by
4 PM Friday with nothing but the clothes they wore or face
on-the-spot execution.

The reporter read the story, and the screen
transitioned to b-roll of a montage of the president giving fiery
speeches. Nick recognized the one from Hart Plaza in downtown
Detroit. He’d been in a coma at the time, the speech being given
along the final leg of the Conflict, just before mankind had broken
the back of the vampire uprising.

They watched the rest of the news in relative
silence, commenting here and there on what the anchorwoman told
them was going on in the world. No news of a dead woman. Nick had
assumed she’d been local. It would have been odd for the military
to truck a dead body up from Ohio even if they did have something
they were hiding. There was no news of any dead people. Nick had
seen his share of violence since he’d been out and always avoided
it. A woman being mugged, a couple of teens being beaten by several
other teens, a man walking up to a small crowd of people and firing
into them. He hadn’t watched the news often and wondered if this
was how the news typically was. The stories they had heard about
were life-saving pets, a mudslide in California, some gunmen who’d
been caught holding up a bank, and the President announcing
Operation Sun Sweep.

“Is it always this way?” Nick asked. “The
news, I mean.”

Lucky turned to him. “What, doesn’t it make
you feel safe?”

Nick met his eyes, realizing the sarcasm in
his question. “No. It seems… I dunno, fake.”

“The government learned a long time ago the
value of a news system engineered to report on what they are told
to. It helps to anaesthetize the people.”

“Anaesthetize us from what?”

“The truth.” Lucky grabbed the remote and
thumbed off the TV, a look of disgust on his face. “Whatever that
is. The Conflict put a hard reset on society, man. And we’re barely
past being cave dwellers. So tell me more about this woman. The
dead one.”

Nick shrugged. “What’s to tell?”

Lucky shook his head. “Like I told you,
people die every day. Unless they have a warehouse full of corpses
you didn’t see in there, there had to be something particular about
her they wanted someone like you to see.”

Nick thought about it. Sure, she’d looked
familiar to him because of the dream. “Oh, I dreamed about her, I
think.”

Lucky sat up.

“I saw her walk out of a house and across the
street… naked. In the dream, I mean. She walked right up to me—the
killer and he—”

“Gave her the hickey to end all hickeys.”

“Yeah.” Lucky narrowed his eyes in thought.
Nick watched him a moment, wondering what was going on in there.
There was so much the man played close to the vest.

“I’ve heard of this. Well, something like it,
maybe. Urban legend type stuff, so don’t take any of it as gospel.
But I heard vampires had this ability—well, not all, but some—to
call people.” He stared at Nick for a moment as if waiting for him
to respond. Nick stared back. “Anyway, this call thing, once a
vampire had tuned into your head, he could make you do practically
anything, operate you like a puppet on remote control. He’d be
vulnerable at the time, but once he had control of you it would be
like you were in the passenger seat of your own body. It sounds
crazy, I know.”

“It does.” It had rung true, bringing back
more of the dream to him. He could remember something in his
ear—the killer’s—moving like… like antennas or something. He’d felt
the woman and knew where she had been without seeing or hearing
her. “I think you may be on to something.”

Nick explained his newly remembered
details.

“The vampires are all dead, though,” Lucky
said.

“Says who?”

Lucky smiled and tapped his temple. “Now
you’re thinking. The question is, if this guy is a for real
vampire, where in the world is he hiding? I mean, I’ve seen a few
up close and they got faces that would make their mommas sick.”