“Do you know what time it is?”
“Yes—sorry about that. I just got off work. Bartender.”
“Just a minute. I’ll get him.”
“Mind if I wait inside?”
After a brief, wary moment of waiting, the deadbolt clicked back, and the door opened. A gruff man in his forties stood aside and held the door. “Come on in.”
Rick did.
The living room was worn and sad, with threadbare furniture and carpets, stained walls, a musty air. A bulletin board listed rules, notices, want ads, warnings. The atmosphere was institutional, but this might have been the first real home some of these men had known. Halfway house, indeed.
“Stay right here,” the man said, and walked to a back hallway.
Rick waited, hands in pockets.
The doorman returned after a long wait, what would have been many beats of his heart, if it still beat. Behind him came a very old man, pulling a small oxygen tank on a cart behind him. Tubes led from it to his nose, and his every breath wheezed. Other than that, he had faded. He was smaller than the last time Rick had seen him, withered and sunken, skin like putty hanging off a stooped frame. Wearing a T-shirt and ratty, faded jeans, he looked sad, beaten. The scowl remained—Rick recognized that part of him.
The old man saw him and stopped. They were two ghosts staring at each other across the room.
“Hello, Blake,” Rick said.
“Who are you? You his grandson?”
Rick turned to the middle-aged doorman and stared until he caught the man’s gaze. “Would you mind leaving us alone for a minute?” He put quiet force into the suggestion. The man walked back into the hallway.
“Bill—Bill! Come back!” Blake’s sandpaper voice broke into coughing.
“I’m not his grandson,” Rick said.
“What is this?”
“Tell me about Helen, Blake.”
He coughed a laugh, as if he thought this was a joke. Rick just stared at him. He didn’t have to put any power in it. His standing there was enough. Blake’s jaw trembled.
“What about her? Huh? What about her!”
Rick grabbed the tube hanging at Blake’s chest and yanked, pulling it off his face. Blake stumbled back, his mouth open to show badly fitted dentures coming loose. Wrapping both hands in Blake’s shirt, Rick marched him into the wall, slamming him, slamming again, listening for the crack of breaking bone.
“You thought no one would know,” Rick whispered at him, face to face. “You thought no one would remember.” Blake sputtered, flailing weakly, ineffectually.
The front door crashed open. “Stop!”
Rick recognized the footfalls, voices, and the sounds of their breathing. Detective Hardin pounded in, flanked by two uniformed officers. Rick glanced over his shoulder—she was pointing a gun at him. Not that it mattered. He shoved his fists against Blake’s throat.
Blake was dying under his grip. Rick wouldn’t have to flex a muscle to kill him. He didn’t even feel an urge to take the man’s blood—it would be cool, sluggish, unappetizing. Rick would spit it back out in the man’s face. He could do it all with Hardin watching, because what could the detective really do in the end?
“Rick! Back away from him!”
Hardin fumbled in her jacket pocket and drew out a cross, a simple version, two bars of unadorned silver soldered together. Proof against vampires. Rick smiled.
Blake had to have known he wouldn’t get away with murdering Helen. What had he been thinking? What had he wanted, really? Rick looked at him: the wide, yellowing eyes, the sagging face, pockmarked and splashed with broken capillaries. He expected to see a death wish there, a determined fatalism. But Blake was afraid. Rick terrified him. The man, his body failing around him, didn’t want to die.
This made Rick want to strangle
him even more. To justify the man’s terror. But he let Blake go and backed away, leaving him to Hardin’s care.