Vamp-Hire (15 page)

Lucky seemed lost in thought a moment.

“I got somewhere to be. Stay by your phone,
I’m going to call you later.” He turned to leave then turned back.
“Oh, I almost forgot.” He dug into his jacket pocket and tossed a
beat up white envelope on Nick’s lap. “That’s your money from the
other night, minus my fifteen percent. I’m going to meet a lady
about another job. You still in?”

“I thought you did that yesterday?”

“Yeah. That one didn’t pan out. A bunch of
gun freaks who want to shoot a vamp, see if he heals.”

“Lucky, how did you heal me after that guy
Earl shot me?”

Lucky paused a beat before answering. “I gave
you blood.”

He didn’t wait for Nick to say anything more,
closing the front door quietly behind him as he left. Nick wanted
to feel sick to his stomach, then he remembered how he’d felt so
energized after waking up.

He also remembered craving something other
than food when he’d gotten to Lucky’s place. It didn’t exactly
bolster his belief that he was human.

Nick wanted to get his mind off eating. At
least eating people. He dug out his cell and called Dolph. The idea
was to squeeze some cash out of him without coming off like a
blackmailer. He popped one of his pills and dry swallowed while the
line rang.

“Hello?” came the groggy old man’s voice.

“Dolph? Hey, it’s Nick. Did I catch you at a
bad time?”

“Wha-what time is it?” Nick looked around
until he spotted the time on the microwave.

“It’s 5:32.”

“In the morning? Why the hell are you calling
me now? Sunrise isn’t for another two hours.” Nick was surprised
Dolph’s just-woke-up voice had the exact same diesel engine quality
as his rest-of-the-day voice. He had figured the military man was
an early riser. This was not the voice of someone who did more by
sunrise than Nick could do all day.

“Sorry, I thought you’d be awake. Y’know,
being a colonel and all.”

“I’m retired,” he said. “That means I don’t
need to get up for anything anymore.”

“Well, should I call you back?”

The line went uncomfortably silent. “What do
you need?”

“I remembered something else. About that
dream with the killer? I could call Lieutenant Leonard and—”

“No, no. Tell me.”

He had him.

“Not over the phone. I’m not sure if it’s
safe.” Okay, he was definitely pouring it on some. “Maybe we can
meet up for breakfast or something?”

“Make it lunch. I need to see Bunny and Randy
off first.”

Nick remembered he still needed to speak to
Phoebe. Phoebe would probably prefer to drop the matter.

“How about a little Thai Delight?”

“What was that?”

“Thai? For lunch? I haven’t tried the place
before.”

“Oh. Sure. Be there at noon.”

The line went dead.

“Sheesh,” Nick said. He thought about calling
Phoebe now, but she was probably still asleep too. He didn’t want
to chance Dolph listening in on her conversation and realizing it
was him on the other end.

He figured he’d have some breakfast and get
cleaned up. He had no idea where Lucky had gotten off to so early.
As far as Nick knew, he didn’t have a permit to be out before
sunrise. Did the guy sleep? Nick estimated he’d been out for
somewhere around fifteen hours and that was twice now that he’d
fallen asleep in the same place as Lucky and the man had been awake
both before and after.

He thought about that dream again and the one
he’d had before. Nick might have even had others. He’d never had
anything like those that he could recall and wondered if that was
his Skill. They’d told all of them that they might develop certain
abilities soon, and after several months of bupkis, Nick had
supposed he was one of the ones who had been passed over. It was
odd how he’d dreamt about that woman’s murder and then been brought
to her corpse? There was no way he could have predicted that and he
chalked it up to one of life’s freaky coincidences.

Nick made his way to the bathroom and turned
on the shower. For a moment he considered a bath, then again the
tub was small and looked like it might not be comfortable. He
stepped out of the bathroom and opened a skinny door that turned
out to be the linen closet. He took out a drying towel and wash
cloth.

The bedroom door was next to the linen closet
and he opened it, surprised to see there was nothing spectacular
going on in here. Only a bed, a dresser with a television on top of
it, and all manner of men’s and women’s shoes lining the far
wall.

He shut the door and went back in the
bathroom, stripping and stepping in the shower with his underwear.
The clothes were borrowed and still wearable, though he’d have to
get working on a new wardrobe soon. His other three outfits were
starting to look worn and if he had any hope of an actual
nine-to-five he couldn’t look bummy for the interview.

He hoped this thing with Lucky panned out and
hoped even harder he could work something out with Dolph. Even
though he shouldn’t care, he did. It wasn’t about the woman or the
killer, he wanted his dreams to be an actual Skill, something he
could hone that was unique to him that would be useful to society.
Any vamp could be a good worker bee and if he had to, he’d be that.
However, if they were his hands at the cash register, or at the
line, or serving fast food, they were replaceable.

Nick wanted to matter somewhere.

He scrubbed his undies with the bar of soap,
letting his mind roam the possibilities. Maybe he might even be
nationally known—the famous vamp who caught killer vamps in his
sleep. And who knew? Maybe other Skills would follow. Nick had
known a few back at the Center. They’d been in their infancy so far
as their abilities. Nick had been a nil. Now he actually had
something and it was still a possibility he could have even
more.

He finished washing his body and stepped out
onto the rectangular rug. He stood in front of the mirror above the
sink, examining his face and upper torso. Other than being on the
thin side, Nick was ordinary in every way save for larger than
normal irises that were black as night. He tended not to look
people in the eye because it unsettled them and it made him
uncomfortable that his looks made other people uncomfortable.
Unless he got into a prolonged conversation with people, they
tended not to know he was a vamp.

Many of the others at the Center had been the
same way and he supposed there was a difference between his kind
and regular humans. He had a built-in, constant feeling of shame.
Perhaps that was why he got so angry when people said things about
how people like him weren’t like regular people, if they even
thought he was a person at all. On some deeper level, he didn’t
believe it. He walked and talked, but the fact that he had to be
trained to do mundane things like eating was evidence that there
was a line in the sand between people who had his genetic lineage
and regular old homo sapiens.

He had a skin tone that could have put him in
with any number of ethnicities from black to Indian, Italian to
Moroccan, Native American to simply tanned Caucasian. Truth be
told, he couldn’t remember which one he belonged to. The few
snatches of memory of his mother left him with the impression she’d
been white, while the lone image he had of his father was devoid of
any racial characteristics. Sure, he could picture the man’s face,
it was still incomplete, though, the telltale signs Nick was
looking for missing or obscured. His nose was thin and wide at the
same time, eyes wrinkled at the corners as if he were smiling, or
was he Asian, and was he dark-skinned or was it simply a trick of
the sunlight filtering in the window behind him?

There was so much essential to an
individual’s person-ness that he was missing. It made him feel like
he was free-floating, completely unattached to anything else. Even
his childhood home had been taken from him and having to roam from
place to place like some sort of nomad depressed him even
further.

Not wanting to dwell on it any more, Nick dug
out his toothbrush and brushed his teeth. He decided against making
himself breakfast naked, though the idea intrigued him. He still
thought of the possibility of the apartment’s proper residents
coming through the door unexpectedly and he’d have to explain why
he was in their home in addition to why he was completely nude.

He got dressed and made his way back to the
fridge. The thought of bacon appealed to him, the big plate of it
Lucky had made swam back to mind. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. The
closest thing he could find was sandwich meat. Nick scrambled two
eggs and put them on a slice of buttered toast. He boiled a pot of
water and poured a cup to go along with breakfast. One advantage to
taste buds that were mostly on the fritz, it didn’t matter if it
was tea, coffee, or plain old water; it all tasted the same.

His stomach grumbled when the food hit it. He
must have been hungry. Nick wished he’d had at least one of those
chocolate candy bars. The way that one piece Dolph had given him
had revved up his appetite still amazed him. Food had never tasted
so good. He needed money, of course, and he was also hoping the man
had more of that candy for him at lunch.

Nick finished and washed all his dishes in
the sink. He put everything in the dish rack to dry and checked the
time. 6:45. Still a lot of time before sunrise and an even longer
wait before he met up with Dolph. He needed something to do.

He plopped down on the couch and turned on
the TV. A gray cartoon cat chased around a brown cartoon mouse.
Nick thought a moment and remembered they were Tom and Jerry,
although he couldn’t remember which was which. He hadn’t seen them
in the Center, this was another memory from before, and he had no
tangible context for the circumstance in which he’d watched it.

The doctors at the Center had told him he
probably never would fully recover his memory. Whatever was in him
had preserved his body, perhaps even made it stronger, but it had
Swiss-cheesed his mind. There were simple things that Phoebe didn’t
understand that he didn’t know, like how to operate a microwave or
what an area code was, that she’d had to reteach him. Conversely,
there were complex things he shouldn’t have known, like how to
drive a car and how to tie a Windsor knot. Well, he could have been
a Boy Scout or something, but he’d been too young to drive when
he’d lapsed into the coma. He’d been twelve. Ten years in a coma
and in that space of time he’d gained skills he shouldn’t have
known and lost mundane things the average person took for granted.
Every day offered a new mystery to be solved.

Nick flipped through stations, looking for
the news. He settled on a channel where the pretty dark-haired
anchorwoman spoke Arabic. He was surprised he understood most of
what she was saying. There was nothing new, except for a feel-good
story or two, it was mostly the same as what he’d heard yesterday.
Nick turned off the TV and checked the time. 7:01.

He figured he could risk it. Cops were
probably more on the lookout in the early evening than right before
the sun came up. He needed to walk, to do something other than sit
around. Maybe if he could get his mind off the time it would pass
quicker and before he knew it, he’d be meeting up with Dolph.

Where to go? He certainly couldn’t go home
and had no interest in the Big Pig. Maybe he’d call Lucky and meet
up with him. No, that wouldn’t work. Lucky liked to meet potential
clients alone, had said Nick being there might cramp the sale. He
drummed his fingers and thought.

And then found himself waking, a phone
ringing somewhere nearby. He dragged himself away from sleep,
nodding a couple of times as his hand automatically reached for his
cell. He pressed the SEND button and slid it to his ear.

“I need your help,” a little voice said. “My
daddy is hurting my mommy.”

Nick’s sleep clouded-brain hadn’t registered
the words. “I’m sorry, who is this?”

“My name is Thomas Barker. I’m
five-and-a-half years old and I live at 478 Atkins Street. I’m not
supposed to talk to strangers, but they said you can help. If we
know each other we’re not strangers anymore.”

“Nice to meet you, Thomas. My name is Nick.”
The wheels in his head had begun turning, a little bit faster with
each second. “I do help people sometimes, but what you need to do
if your daddy is hurting your mommy is to call the police.”

“I can’t. My daddy is a ghost.”

The matter-of-factness of it woke Nick the
rest of the way up. He automatically didn’t believe Tommy in the
same way most adults didn’t believe the incredible things children
sometimes said. However, if vampires could exist who was to say
ghosts couldn’t?

“I’m sorry to hear about your daddy, Thomas.
I lost both my parents. Maybe you could ask your daddy to
stop.”

It sounded ridiculous the moment it came off
his lips. Either the boy was exaggerating and his not-dead daddy
was beating his mother, or his daddy really was dead and he felt
abandoned or something. Nick supposed there could be a third option
where the boy’s father actually was a ghost and really was
manifesting in some manner and attacking his mother, in which case
what he’d just said would have come off as insensitive even to a
five-and-a-half year old.

Thomas weeping on the other end of the phone
answered that question.

“Look, kid, I’m sorry. I don’t usually come
off as a jerk, I’m really an okay guy.”

“Won’t you help me? Pretty please?”

Nick felt something shift inside and wasn’t
comfortable where he was sitting. He stood and didn’t feel
comfortable on his feet. He walked around, feeling something at the
center of his back. This annoyed him because he knew why he felt
this way.

He was going to help Thomas regardless of
whether or not his father was dead.