Vamp-Hire (6 page)

Nick didn’t think he’d fainted, but it was
the closest idea he could concede to. He pulled away from his own
thoughts and forced himself to make eye contact with Earl and
Lucky, nodding at them.

He finished eating and pushed away from the
table. Surprisingly, they didn’t say anything to him about
finishing the rest of the food, looking at each other a moment as
if some sort of understanding were passing between them.

“You guys going to eat?” he asked, pointing
to the remaining food.

“No,” Lucky said. “I don’t eat
breakfast.”

“I already had grits and eggs.” Lucky elbowed
him in the ribs and he added, “I actually have to get goin’. Got to
go meet with somebody about… somethin’.” Earl was gone in less than
thirty seconds. “Hey, sorry ‘bout that arrow again,” he said before
he left.

Lucky began clearing the table. Nick stood
and stretched, the ache in his thigh spreading into a cold throb.
He was feeling a lot better than he had a few moments ago, though
nowhere near as full of energy as he had before that. He mentally
skipped over that weightless instant where he’d gone from there to
here, not wanting to get bogged down with things he couldn’t have
come close to explaining or understanding.

Nick didn’t know the time. It looked like it
was still morning by the slant of sunlight coming through the front
window. He thought he should have been groggy.

“How long was I out?” he asked.

“Four days,” Lucky said, scraping the last
plate out into the sink. He started the garbage disposal, rinsing
everything down with cold water.

Nick gently prodded at his thigh where he’d
been wounded. It still felt tender, though marginally less so than
when he’d been eating. It felt more like a bruise rather than a
spot where a hole had been.

“What do you mean four days?” he asked when
Lucky turned off the garbage disposal.

“Four days. No joke.” Lucky fixed him with a
stare then turned back to throwing away dishes. Perfectly good
dishes.

“What are you doing? Nick asked.

“Homeowners will be home soon. Got to get
everything cleaned up before we go.”

Nick thought it was odd to describe his
friends as homeowners. Plus the fact he was throwing away plates
was odd. He looked around and saw the boxes from the other night
and the paperwork spread on the table were gone. The whole place as
far as he could see was clean.

Lucky cinched the garbage bag and picked up a
backpack Nick hadn’t seen, sliding it onto his shoulder. The dishes
clacked together, bulging inside the plastic bag. He went into the
bedroom where Nick had been sleeping and came out with another bag
of trash a moment later. He herded Nick to the front door and they
were out. Lucky only stopped to deposit the garbage bags into a
giant bin at the side of the house.

“Where are we going?” Nick asked.

“I have a shift at the Big Pig in about an
hour and you need to get up close and personal with a shower.”

A car pulled into the driveway of the house
they had just left and a man and woman climbed out. They were
dressed like they were returning from business, both in suits. His
tie was missing and collar unbuttoned and she had her suit jacket
off. Lucky gave them a half salute and they looked half confused.
If Nick had been a guessing man he would have said they didn’t know
him at all.

“We can meet up for lunch if you don’t mind
hot dogs.”

The bacon was still sitting in the pit of
Nick’s stomach like a stone. The thought of adding more food on top
of it left him feeling nonplussed.

“Why are you in a hurry?” Nick asked, turning
around to watch the couple ascending the stairs to their front
door. The woman gave them one last glance once they were too far
away for Nick to make out the look on her face. “The Big Pig is a
twenty minute walk.”

“I got another job I might be lining up for
you. Minus my ten percent, of course. Speaking of which, where’s my
cut from the other night?”

“I never got it. Guns were shot at my head,
remember?”

“Oh, yeah. That wasn’t the deal.”

Nick looked at him as if to say ‘You’re
telling me’.

“Okay, so go over what happened again.”

Nick explained, leaving out the part about
his intense desire to eat her when actual contact was established
between them.

“She told me her husband was in the Conflict
and never got to kill anything. I was supposed to be a gift for the
both of them. And it was cool because I’m a vampire and I can’t die
unless I get staked or have my head chopped off.”

“But you’re not vampire.”

Nick repeated his look from before.

“You sure you don’t already know about the
job I’m working on?”

“How could I? You haven’t told me yet.”

“Right. You still in?”

Nick thought of the bills that he still
needed to cover and quickly nodded. “Yeah.”

“I’ll call the number I have for Nancy and
let you know when I see you later.” He slid the backpack off and
unzipped it, taking out Nick’s little duffle. “Your phone was dead
and I charged it. I didn’t turn it on, though.”

Nick took the bag and put the strap over his
shoulder. There was already heavy traffic on the road at whatever
hour this was. He and Lucky said goodbye, Nick remembering to ask
for his cell number at the last moment, and went their separate
ways.

He turned his phone on and saw it was Monday
morning, a little after eight.

“Wow, it really has been four days.”

Phoebe should have been at work and he hoped
that meant ‘Pop-Pop’ was busy finding something to do and he could
go home and sneak in a shower. Then his cell began chiming as
several text messages and voicemail alerts started popping up.

When he read the first text message, he began
to walk faster. By the time he’d listened to the second voicemail,
he was running.

When he and Phoebe had established their
living arrangement, the rules had been simple. After ten o’clock he
was not allowed upstairs. Conversely, she and Randy were not
allowed in the basement, though he suspected she was probably
afraid to go down there regardless of the time of day. If either of
them intended to have guests, they had to give at least a
twenty-four hour notice, which probably contributed to her agitated
state the other night when she’d asked him to leave; he hadn’t even
gotten one hour’s notice. Their last rule and probably most
important to Nick and currently being violated—had been no changes
to the house.

Nick spotted the scaffolding before turning
onto his street and then the three men actively ripping shingles
off the roof.

The men on the scaffold were pulling away the
vegetation that had attached itself to the siding and gotten the
chimney in a stranglehold. As he was passing by, he spotted a
rectangle of the concrete driveway broken up and removed. The slab
had already cracked from the root of a tree which had grown
underneath it and there were two men in the process of leveling the
dirt there.

All they were doing was making repairs,
repairs that he had to admit needed to be made. Still, it agitated
him. They were changing his home from how he had known it. His
house, despite its flaws, was comfortable, like a beat up old
shoe.

Worst of all was the big black Hummer parked
in the driveway. His mind flashed back to the Sesame Street skit
where the puppets would sing about one of these things not
belonging. He’d never seen such a huge vehicle before outside of a
semi-truck. It was so wide he didn’t think another car would have
been able to park in the driveway.

Nick had stopped without realizing, intending
to keep walking as if he were going down the street to some other
house. A heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder.

“Take those bricks around back, would
you?”

Nick turned to see a much older, taller man
half looking down at him. He seemed to be surveying the house, like
he owned it. This must have been Pop-Pop.

He didn’t know how the man had gotten the
impression he was the help and it seemed the perfect opportunity to
be near his actual home. Nick nodded, then headed toward the
wheelbarrow of bricks a dozen or so feet away. He dumped his duffle
bag on top of it, then grabbed the handles and began circling
around the house.

Once he was in back he found men around a
flattened section of bare land. They had begun putting in sections
of brick and what looked like the beginnings of a patio.

This further angered Nick even though he
could see once finished it would be very complimentary to the
house. He came to the realization he didn’t like change, although
he had such little memory of anything at all, just about everything
was change.

A sweaty olive-skinned man with a mop of
black hair and scruffy beard came up to him and nodded, digging
into the wheelbarrow with both hands and taking the bricks over to
one of the other men. It was unseasonably warm for this late in
autumn and a day primed for doing outside work.

Nick could have easily walked away unnoticed,
but he realized he wanted to be here. Even though the work upset
him, he felt it was important somehow to be a part of it. He pushed
the wheelbarrow over to the two men laying down brick and began
helping them. After an hour or so there was a huge walkable section
of patio and it would certainly look nice once it was
completed.

Someone came around and passed around bottles
of water and Nick did what some of the other men did, taking a deep
swig of water before pouring the rest of it over his head.

After a half hour or so someone else tapped
him on the shoulder and pointed over his head.

“Ed fell off the roof,” the man said. “I need
you up there more than down here.”

Nick turned for the nearest ladder and made
his way up. He picked up a claw hammer and studied what a man
nearby was doing, tearing off shingles and exposing the wood
underneath. After a moment he thought he had a basic idea of what
to do and followed suit.

They broke for lunch a few hours later, a man
coming by, tossing sandwiches and bottles of water to everyone.
Nick sat on the porch with three men who didn’t speak English and
ate his in silence. It didn’t taste like anything to him and he
suspected even if his taste buds were working properly it wouldn’t
have. The mouth-feel of bread and meat with what he supposed was
mustard was tolerable and his stomach didn’t object to it.

He spotted the tall, older guy who had
slapped him on the shoulder earlier, talking to someone and
pointing at the house. Based on Phoebe’s messages, she hadn’t
wanted any of this work done. She had been very apologetic in the
voicemail, respecting the agreement she and Nick had made. From the
very start he had pegged her for someone who always followed the
rules and thought that would make for easy going between them.

Nick didn’t blame her for any of the work
Pop-Pop had begun on the house, especially considering he was now
participating in it. He figured they would have to get into some
kind of conversation about what was going on. He hadn’t figured out
how that was going to happen yet.

Phoebe usually came home around six. He snuck
a peek at his phone and saw it was one-thirty. He hadn’t seen
anyone go in the house, but wondered if there was work going on
inside as well. He concentrated on the old man, trying to listen to
what he was saying. Surprisingly, he could.

“I need to have this all done by
five-thirty,” the older man was saying. “I want that egress window
done. These guys are done with lunch, get somebody in the basement
now.”

The other man nodded, then headed in Nick’s
direction.

“Necesito a alguien que trabaje en el
sótano.”

“Uhh,” Nick said. He was what people would
have described as olive-skinned and could have been easily mistaken
for a multitude of nationalities. Since he was sitting next to a
Mexican man, the man Pop-Pop had been speaking to must have assumed
they both were.

Nick’s porch partner stuffed the rest of his
sandwich in his mouth and shook his head. The man looked at
Nick.

“Ver Miguel abajo.”

Nick was about to tell him he didn’t speak
what sounded like Spanish when the words came to him. He needed
someone to go downstairs and to see Miguel.

“Sí,” Nick said. He remembered a brief flash
of sitting in a classroom and a teacher speaking American-accented
Spanish. “Me llamo Nick,” he said and held out his hand.

“Just get downstairs,” the man said and
walked away.

Nick made a show of finding the door to go
in. Once he was in the mudroom he stopped himself from taking off
his shoes. The workers inside would have kept theirs on. No shoes
in the house was a Phoebe rule.

He stepped into the house proper and looked
around. Nothing seemed different, but then they were working in the
basement.

The basement.

Nick’s bed was down there. Could her
grandfather already know? He took the stairs two at a time and
looked around the corner. The mattress was gone.

He wasn’t as angry about that as he had been
about seeing the work being done to the house. Maybe it was because
he had no positive memories with the makeshift bed. He was starving
for a connection to his past and seeing these men changing it was
upsetting to the paltry few memories he had still.

“They probably were squatters. Doubt whoever
owns the place even knows that bed was down here.” He turned and
looked at the man standing in the doorway. The man was older,
white-haired, hunched over like he had a bad back, and
broad-shouldered. “Come on,” he said waving Nick in with his
fingers.

Nick walked into a room he’d not been in
since being back home. Two blank shelves made out of doors were
pushed against the far wall. They probably had been the interior
doors before the hollow, faux wood white ones had been put in. The
shelves had been pushed to one side of the room and there was a big
‘X’ drawn on the outside wall.