Wicked Game (22 page)

Curious onlookers flow out of the cafe, past the outdoor tables, and onto the sidewalk. I make a note to investigate the price of a private security detail. Before leaving the “stage,” Shane plays a short set on the guitar, ending with “Ciara.”

July 12

Though perhaps only a hundred people can fit into Legal Grounds, today on the blogs approximately two thousand people claim to have seen Shane’s first show, making it proportionally the most inflated gathering since Woodstock.

Some reviews complain about his “eclectic” tastes,
how they didn’t know what to expect from one song to the next. One reviewer was pissed that Shane didn’t look enough like a vampire
or
a grunge-head, as if they expected him to show up in a full-length flannel cape.

July 15

We begin podcasting. Each DJ will do a weekly fifteen-minute interview about the music and culture of their Life Time, supplying anecdotes known only to those who lived in the Way Back.

To keep the casual listener’s interest, we’ll include a few details about life as a vampire—a small fraction of which are actually true.

July 22

The week two WVMP podcasts briefly appear on today’s Top 100 Most Downloaded list on one popular site. The T-shirts go back for a third, quadruple-size printing. Our Web site crashes under the load of too many visitors.

I get a whopping four hours of sleep in one night, the most I’ve had all month. I consider taking a sledgehammer to my alarm clock, if only I had time to buy a sledgehammer and the strength to lift it.

July 23

David notices my preternatural paleness. He orders me to spend tomorrow outside before I come down with a case of rickets.

July 24

I become one with the sun.

Lying on a lounge chair beside Lori’s pool, I inhale
motes of light and beams of heat. Sweat tickles my back as I convince each muscle in my body to forget about my job.

Lori creates a soothing background noise, telling me about SPIT’s efforts to help raise funds for the town to erect a Battle of Sherwood monument.

The battle’s details are a little fuzzy to me, but the basic gist is this: Some Union guy with a magnificent mustache led a charge against some Southern guy with a magnificent beard. The beard guy had the skinny on Union troop movements, but because of the scuffle in Sherwood, he didn’t get to Gettysburg in time to deliver the intelligence, so the Confederates didn’t know what they were getting into. And that’s why Martin Sheen lost the Civil War.

Or something like that.

“So what do you think?”

I realize she requires words from me. “Huh?”

“You’re not even listening, are you?”

“Sorry. I was thinking about the battle. Sad, all those guys dying.”

“It was two soldiers. Just two.”

“Oh. Good, then.”

“I was saying it would be cool if we could find one of their ghosts.” I hear her tear the wrapper of a bag of chips. “Or if we could make one.”

“Make a ghost?” I sit up and squint at her just as my cell phone rings. I open it to see an unfamiliar number on the caller ID. I slap it shut again, hushing the sound, and turn back to Lori. “You mean kill someone?”

“No, we get a vampire from Civil War times to pretend to be a ghost. Then when investigators ask them
questions only someone from that time would know, it’ll make it more believable.” She waves her scarlet barbecue chip. “So what do you think? Can you make it happen?”

I think it’s the nuttiest idea I’ve ever heard. Luckily I have a better reason for saying no. “None of our vamps are even close to that age.”

“What about others around here?”

I shake my head. “Even Gideon isn’t that old, and he wouldn’t cooperate, anyway. Besides, wouldn’t that be fraud?”

“Only in the short term.” She licks the red salt off her fingers. “It’d be like telling a lie to create a greater truth.”

“Do I know you?”

“It’s no different than what you’re doing with the vampires.”

I shake my head. “Lori, you should know by now not to use me as a role model.”

“Why not?”

The phone rings again. Needing to escape the conversation, I answer it.

“Hello, Ciara,” says Elizabeth. She pronounces it with three syllables—kee-
ahr
-ah—as if I’m Italian. “I wanted you to be the first to know. Due to the station’s recent success, I feel disinclined to sell it.”

“Really?” A surge of pride—or possibly heartburn— erupts beneath my ribs. “You’re giving Skywave the blow-off?”

Lori’s eyes widen, and she raises her arms in a silent
Score!

“Not exactly,” Elizabeth says. “The company has become more aggressive in their buyout efforts. They’re
offering me a tempting amount of money, but they want my decision sooner.”

“How soon?”

“I meet with them next Friday.”

I’m confused. “So what are you going to tell them?”

“It depends. Remember those end-of-August ad revenue goals I established?”

“Of course.” I’ve only built my entire summer around those numbers. “We’re right on target to reach them.”

“Not anymore. If you can reach those goals before my meeting, I won’t sell the station. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll have no choice. Their offer’s too good to turn down.”

She can’t mean what I think she means. “You want us to meet the end-of-August goals by next Friday?”

“Yes.”

“In ten days.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not fair.”

Elizabeth clicks her tongue. “Grow up, Ciara. It’s business. I have a very long future to think of.”

I sink back against the lounge chair, heat pounding my temples. “So we might have done all this work just so you can make more money?”

“Don’t worry. If I sell, I’ll make sure it trickles down to your friends. Some sort of pension arrangement should set them up nicely for a few years.”

“A few years? They’re immortal!” I check my surroundings to make sure no one heard that last part except Lori. “They need the station to keep from fading.”

“Then you make sure they don’t lose it.” She hangs up.

I slap the phone shut so hard, it flies out of my hand and skitters across the concrete.

Lori clears her throat. “That didn’t sound good.”

I stare at the clear blue sky as I bang my head against the back of the chair. I’ll give Franklin a few more minutes’ peace before I tell him we have to cram six weeks’ worth of work into ten days.

So much for being one with the sun.

“I’m considering violence,” I tell Shane as we wait in line at Legal Grounds. The crappy mandolin trio in the next room makes enough noise that no one will overhear us. “A tag team of Regina and Jim could scare the Skywave executives out of buying the station. A corpse-a-day-till-they-go-away campaign.” I hop a little on my toes. “What do you think?”

“I think you need sleep.”

“I need coffee.” I crane my neck to see the cash register. “What’s taking so long? Anyone who waits until they get to the counter to pick what they want should be sent to the end of the line.”

A gaggle of college-age girls drifts by. “Hi Shane!” they coo in unison. He offers them a friendly wave and smile. I sway enough to stumble into him.

“Sorry, so clumsy tonight. And tired.” I rest my head on his biceps until the girls have passed. Not that I feel possessive or anything.

“Like I said, you need sleep.”

“Not until the sales goals are met. Elizabeth’s meeting is in less than a week, and we’re not even halfway there. If she sells the station, Skywave’s juggernaut of soul-suckery will trample everything you and the other DJs have worked for.”

“Don’t worry.” He rubs the stiff part of my shoulder. “Sometimes just when things look hopeless, that’s when everything works out.”

“That doesn’t sound like something you’d say.”

“No, normally I’d say that when things seem hopeless, it just means you have no idea how much worse they’re about to get. But I’m trying to calm you down.” He rotates me toward the counter. “I recommend chamomile tea.”

I stagger forward and give the barista a shaky smile. “Gigante mocha, organic two-percent milk, one-and-a-half shots of coconut, no whipped cream. Please.” The last word comes out like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel.

Shane gets a black-no-sugar coffee, then I let him drive us back to the station so I can gulp my drink more quickly. He shifts gears like a natural, never racing the engine or coming close to a stall.

“After this is all over,” he says as we pull into the parking lot, “I want to take you out to dinner. Like a real date.”

“I hear people do those things.”

We get out of the car. “Maybe even a movie,” he says. “I hear they made a sequel to
Wayne’s World.”

I laugh, not caring whether he means it as a joke. “Wait, you left your coffee.” I bend over inside the car to reach it.

When I straighten up and turn around, Shane is looming
over me, fangs bared. His hand covers my mouth, cutting short my shriek.

A cold presence seeps across my skin, making me shiver. Oh God, all along it was Shane.

I squeeze the coffee cups in fear, sending hot liquid down the front of my shirt.

Then I realize he’s looking over my head into the woods. His nostrils flare and his jaw trembles. “Something’s out there,” he whispers, dropping his hand from my mouth.

“It’s what I felt before.”

Suddenly Shane jerks his head to look behind him, a moment before a spark of white light flashes from the other end of the parking lot, followed by a very human-sounding profanity.

A beastly growl rumbles deep in Shane’s throat. Footsteps pound away toward the back of the building. Shane takes off in swift and silent pursuit.

As I follow them, I hear the muffled sounds of a struggle, topped off by a metallic bang. Then Shane calls, “I got him.”

I tiptoe around the corner of the building and see Shane crouched next to the Dumpster, poring through a leather wallet. A dark-haired young man with a mustache lies crooked and motionless on the gravel beside him.

I step back. “You killed him.”

Shane glances at me. “Of course not. He hit his head. When he comes around, I want to know more about him than he knows about us.” He hands me the man’s digital camera. “See what pictures he has. I can’t make it work.”

I flip to the last image, which causes me to almost drop the camera. He must have taken it just before Shane
grabbed him, because there’s my dude, frozen in his fanged glory, reaching toward the lens with a red rage.

“You take a scary candid.” I delete it. The next few shots are of the station, time-stamped earlier this evening. “Who is this guy?”

“Name’s Travis Tucker, according to his driver’s license.” Shane stuffs it back into the wallet and rifles through the other cards. “He belongs to Triple A, the Olive Garden frequent diner club, and a fan club for—who the hell is Jeff Gordon?”

“This Travis Tucker’s been spying on the station for weeks.” I flip faster through the old photos. “Hey, that’s not a bad shot of me in my car. I’d keep it if it didn’t give me the heebie-jeebies.”

“I think I know why he’s spying on us.” Shane hands me an official-looking card. “Because it’s his job.”

The card features the colorful insignia of the State of Maryland, right above the words “Private Investigator.”

“Son of a bitch.” I squint at the fine print. “Probably shady. His license expired years ago.” I kneel beside Travis Tucker—if that is his real name—and sift through his jacket pockets, turning up a pair of sunglasses and a cell phone.

“Business cards.” Shane drops the wallet on the ground to shuffle through the stack. “Maybe one is his client.”

“Does he have any money?” Not that I would steal it.

Shane opens the billfold. “Thirteen bucks and a check.”

I try to access the cell phone’s contact list, but it’s password-protected.

“Uh-oh.” Shane hands me the check. “We’d better call the others.”

“Skywave is spying on us?”

Regina’s hair stands on end even more than usual. All the DJs except Monroe, who’s on the air, are gathered in the lounge to hear what happened.

“Where is this detective now?” Noah asks from the middle of the sofa, where he sits, arms crossed.

“In the Dumpster,” I say as I pace past him for the third time, “with a rock on the lid no human could move. We gagged him so he can’t scream when he wakes up.”

“Which should be any minute.” From his position near the door, Shane gives the clock a worried glance. “I hope.”

At the table, Regina exchanges pensive looks with Jim and Spencer. “It’s better if he doesn’t wake up,” she says quietly. “Or if he does, that he goes back to sleep forever.”

I turn to her, positive I heard wrong. “You want to kill him? In cold blood?”

“I bet it’ll be pretty warm.” Jim tilts back his chair, his bare feet propped against the edge of the card table. “Unless you already did him in.”

“We didn’t,” Shane snaps. “So let’s quit jaggin’ around and figure out what we’re really going to do about Travis.”

Regina shoves back her chair and stands up. “We have to get rid of him. It’s better that way.”

“Better for who?” Shane and I ask in unison. I’m glad he thinks they’re just as cracked as I do.

“Better for the station,” Regina replies, “better for all of us, but especially better for you.” She glares at Shane. “You could be charged with assault.”

“Assault is one thing,” I point out, “but first-degree murder is a whole other ball game.”

“Don’t worry.” Regina stretches her shoulders and neck. “You won’t have to watch. I’ll take care of it.”

“I want to help.” Jim gets up to join her. “I never killed someone on purpose before. Sounds like a trip.”

“‘A trip’?”
My hands form useless fists. “You people are sick!”

“Honey, we’re not people.” Spencer follows Jim and Regina toward the door. “You keep forgetting that.”

Shane blocks their exit. “Don’t do it.”

“You think that little leech,” Regina points back at me, “cares what happens to you? She’ll get off with a slap on the wrist as an accessory, and you’ll go to jail. A jail with windows.”