The countdown to the wedding was two weeks. It was a slow night in the shop, and I had just given up on sorting through any old boxes after a traumatic incident in which Dick had to kill a rather large spider for me. I swear that thing chased me onto that chair.
When Dick returned, I had put the spider’s box in the alley and opened up my file of notes for what Zeb had termed “Operation Undead Gigolo.”
“What are you doing?” Dick asked, peering over my shoulder. “Oh, honey, this is worse than I thought. Normal, well-adjusted girls do not spend Friday nights looking through autopsy reports.”
“When have you ever known me to be well adjusted or normal?” I asked.
“I concede.”
“I’m looking into the guy my grandma is marrying. He seems sketchy. He drinks pig’s blood. According to this, he’s dead.” I showed him the death certificate. “And he’s been married several times to women who don’t quite make it past their first anniversary. He’s not registered on any of the official undead databases, but according to the chapel that handled his burial, he went to his grave intact, so it’s possible he’s a vampire.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier just to ask him whether he’s one of us?” Dick asked, looking over Wilbur’s coroner’s report.
“I would, but my grandma Ruthie seems to be actively avoiding me. She doesn’t come to Mama’s house if she knows I’m going to be there. She screens my calls. She won’t let me near Wilbur, but I don’t know if it’s because he’s trying to hide something or she’s afraid of me embarrassing her. There’s no legitimate address listed for this guy, and the last three homes he shared with the corpse brides have been sold. I went to his grave to see if there was anything abnormal about it. It seemed fine. I wasn’t about to try to dig him up and see if the coffin was empty, because that’s how horror movies start. Dick, are you even listening to me?”
“Huh,” Dick said, looking over Wilbur’s death report. “Sorry, no. This is weird.”
“Weird ha-ha? Or weird our territory weird?”
Dick turned the paperwork to get a better look. “Well, the nurse who did the CPR on him, Jay Lemuels, I know him. He’s one of us.”
“Where can we find Jay?” I asked.
Dick checked the grandfather clock on the wall. “This time of night, probably Club Rainn. It’s a vampire bar. Good blood, bad sound system.”
Dick jangled the keys out of his pocket.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We’re going,” he told me. “The night is young, and we’re immortal, and there are unanswered questions afoot. If that doesn’t make a case for a couple of beers and a ridiculously high cover charge, Stretch, I don’t know what does.”
“The last time I went out on the town with you, I ended up a suspect in Walter’s murder.”
“I’ll be there to keep an eye on you.”
“I don’t know if that will keep me out of trouble or just get me into it more efficiently.”
“Come on,” he said. “It’s Karaoke Night.”
“OK, but you have to sing one Kenny Rogers song in a falsetto,” I said, poking him in the chest.
“I will sing,” he said, tossing me my jacket. “But only because my version of ‘The Gambler’ is both inspirational and erotic.”
“Gross.”
* * *
We climbed into Dick’s beat-up transportation, which smelled suspiciously of burnt rope. There were dozens of empty blood bottles on the floor and what might have been counterfeit Gap jeans. I turned back to him. “If we get pulled over, am I going to have to tell the nice policeman that I’ve never met you before and I have no idea how those stolen car stereos got into the trunk?”
“I make no apologies for how I make my living, so to speak,” Dick said. “I am simply a businessman, a servant to supply and demand.”
“As long as someone else pays for the supply, you can meet the demand.”
We continued this philosophical discussion of the entrepreneurial spirit until we pulled into the parking lot of Club Rainn. From the exterior, the club was pretty nondescript, aside from not having windows or a sign. Club Rainn offered all-the-undead-can-drink for free to attract vampires, like shooting fish in a barrel. The humans were the cash cows that kept this place going. As soon as we hit the door, the overpowering smell of blood practically knocked me to my knees. Desperation, fear, arousal. The sour, stale scent of need.
It was the sort of place Chris Hansen was always exposing on Dateline, where sad humans offer themselves up as midnight snacks to vampires without dignity. These were basically overgrown teenagers in too much makeup, too much leather. In fact, they’d look like total doofuses if the lights were on.
The DJ played only two records, Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral and the Blade soundtrack. It was incongruous with the decor, which was early American bordello. Red flocked wallpaper, dark ornately carved furniture, uncomfortably stylized red velvet couches. To be honest, it looked like River Oaks before Aunt Jettie got hold of it. Besides the hurricane-lamp sconces, the only wall decorations were oil paintings of historical figures who were supposedly vampires, from Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Bathory to Mercy Brown.