A Passing Curse (2011) (9 page)

And then yesterday a brown wrapped box filled with twenty rounds of .357 magnum arrived Federal Express. The bullets were silver. No return address. More cop humor he speculated. He thought of ways to return the favor. He could melt the bullets down and send Reynolds a silver finger: Fuck you, Jack. Maybe something more subtle. He would think about it. In the meantime he was loading the revolver with the new shells, not really sure why.

It was time to carry the pistol. He was getting close. Hannah and Rupert Amos knew he was here, so Ajax knew.

Captain Carsabi had done a half-ass job of trying to get him to stay on the force, the basic requirement, but the Captain, in fact everyone, had been happy to see him retire. They’d thrown a nice little party, some strippers from Al’s, a few quarts of vodka, but no one was sorry he was leaving. No one needed the heat.

When he ran in place to cool down, a thud at the door made him jump.

Quickly, he had the door open, standing in the doorway half naked, holding the loaded pistol, and facing an empty walkway. A man waved and yelled from the delivery van across the street, “Welcome to town.”

He looked down and saw the skinny red and yellow phone book at his feet.

He brought the book inside and sat on the couch. The beer had gone flat. Recalling that Hannah Everret had mentioned a vampire store, he thumbed through the yellow pages. Under the heading, “Gothic”, he found it. “Cheevy’s - The latest in vampire and gothic apparel, including computer games and rare books.”

7

It was a short walk from his apartment to the seedy strip mall. The storefront letters, C-H-E-E-V-Y”-S, were painted red on heavy black paper, haphazardly taped to the inside of the window. The store was flanked by a dry cleaner’s and a pizza joint. Several flunkies of indeterminate age sat on a distant brick wall and shared a quart of wine.

He went inside. His pupils adjusted to the dim light. The store was maybe fifteen feet wide and fifty deep. An L-shaped counter started at the edge of the door. Dusty bookcases teetered to the fifteen-foot ceilings. Rows of clothing, mostly capes and black shirts, hung limply from racks. One group of shelves held jars of white and black face paint.

Three kids, their baseballs caps turned sideways, stood at the counter flipping through cards. “Here’s Charlie Kemperer. He cut off his mother’s head with an axe. No, No, take this - Felix Flanger, he cut off his psychiatrist’s dick with a bolo machete. Hey! What about this guy? Billy Fleshette used his sister’s head for batting practice, and put his brother’s head in the basketball hoop of the high school gym!”

“That’s been done before,” one of the said.

All that was missing, he thought, was fake mist and Bella Lugosi dragging around, maybe Vampira wearing a monocle above mass cleavage. The clerk wore a black velvet Three Musketeers hat and a green velour cape over a white ruffled shirt. Amazing.

“Do you have Cepu Van Dorian’s Annals of the Vampire?” he asked the clerk. It had been a popular book in the LA gothic stores. He noticed the boxy outline of a pistol butt, barely covered by the cape. Why was the clerk packing? Loaded with silver bullets? That would be cute.

The clerk looked up. The kids noticed him for the first time. “Vampires?” one of them asked. “Cheevy is nuts about vampires. He’s into bloodsuckers.”

Cheevy, the clerk and, apparently, the owner, shook his head. “I’ve got it on back order.” One of the brats slipped a card inside his pocket. Cheevy caught the last movement and knocked the kid’s cap off. “Eighty cents, chancre.”

The kid rubbed his head and whined. He put his cap back on slightly askew. “I was only joking, Cheevy.”

“Gimmee,” Cheevy said and when the kid handed him the card, he slapped the kid’s forearm hard enough to make him yelp. Reese was starting to dislike this Cheevy.

Cheevy turned to the other kids. His eyes were narrow and slightly yellow. “That’s already ten bucks you owe. Pay for what you got.”

“Hey,” one kid yelled and waved a card. “Here’s a Richard Lamb.”

“You can’t afford that one,” Cheevy said and grabbed the card. “Now who’s got the money? Pay up or get the fuck out.”

The kid who’d been hit reached into his jeans and handed over two crushed and grimy five-dollar bills. He yelled, “Asshole,” grabbed the Lamb card, and ran outside, his friends behind him.

The door whacked against the frame. Sun strobe lit the store.

“Little fuckers,” Cheevy said. He reached under the counter and brought out another card with Richard Lamb on the front. Cheevy looked at him and flipped the card over. Featured prominently on the back he saw himself dressed in Police Academy blue, the same picture from the tabloid. Had he ever looked that young? “Says here you could have driven a diesel truck through the hole you put in him,” Cheevy said and smiled. “You getting any money?”

“For what?”

“They got your picture circulating on thousands of cards is what,” Cheevy said as if it were stupid not to be making money off a kid’s fantasy card.

“Maybe I should sue.”

“Maybe you should.” Cheevy’s eyes got even tighter. “I don’t have Annals of the Vampire. You don’t seem like that’s what you’re interested in.”

Cheevy must have been expecting him, because he certainly was not surprised that Richard Lamb’s killer had just walked in. “Maybe you have something on Ajax Rasmussen?”

Without speaking, Cheevy turned and walked to the back of the store, his cape flowing behind him. He followed Cheevy through a door and into the back office. What had passed for small talk was over.

Cheevy sat behind a desk cluttered with wax skulls, a cloaked four-inch figurine of Dracula, a plastic werewolf. Pens, plastic cigarette lighters, and at least three daggers were piled on top of order forms, inventories, a bottle of Evian, and the torn pages of a book, nervously marked with hundreds of pentagrams in red ink. A chair covered in orange naugahyde sat in front of the desk. Cheevy arranged his cape to expose the big silver automatic. His ace in the hole was out of the hole. “Why Ajax?” he said.

“Maybe I’m working a case.”

Reese sat down.

“What kind of case?”

“Homicide.”

“Ajax killed someone?”

“That’s not possible?”

Cheevy pulled a cigarette from a black lacquer box. He scrambled through a pile of lighters, rasping the flints until he found one that worked. He took a few long drags. “Ajax doesn’t kill people. He’s a businessman. One of the richest guys in America and we’re partners.” Cheevy touched his chest as if to underscore the point that he was on equal footing with Ajax. “I’m his story consultant.”

“A book?”

“A computer game. A vampire game. This vampire invents an enzyme that doubles the shelf life of whole blood. He gets rich shipping the enzyme to Red Cross and hospital blood banks.”

“Isn’t that how Ajax made his fortune?”

“That got him started. Now he makes his money from collection centers in third world slums, Bolivia, Uganda, you name it. He gets the blood cheap, splits it into by-products, albumin and what not, ships it back to America and makes a killing.” Cheevy smiled, relishing this easy money, as if his association with Ajax made him successful, too. The perfect lackey. “Anyway, the vampire is tired of living. He’s a fifteen hundred year old burn-out case. He’s lonely. All his friends are dead. He’s - ”

“Discontent?”

Cheevy nodded. “Yeah, but before he dies, he wants to transform the regular world into a vampire world. So he sends a shipment of enzyme tainted with the vampire virus, his own blood, to his distribution company.”

“It sounds dramatic,” Reese said.

“Sure. But it won’t work.” Cheevy openly adjusted the pistol, his frilly cuffs looking odd against the chromed frame. A Colt .45 auto with pearl handles. A show gun. A gun for the inadequate, Reese thought, the phony tough. He really didn’t like this guy.

He took one of Cheevy’s cigarettes and lit it from a day-glo lighter sprouting devil’s horns. He blew out a cloud of smoke. He figured three seconds to slap him and take his gun. He slipped the lighter into his pocket. “Why not?”

“If you had a blood transfusion at the hospital, and the transfusion was infected with vampire blood, you wouldn’t become a vampire because all the human blood ain’t out of you yet.”

“And if you aren’t sucked dry?”

“You turn into a ghoul. Chewing people to death. Using axes and knives. Richard Lamb thought he was a ghoul. They have the Hunger like a real vampire, but they’re not undead, you can kill them. That’s why Lamb needed all the blood. The Hunger.”

“We never thought of that. Six detectives with over a hundred years of murder experience and we never thought of that. The Hunger.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t.”

“If a ghoul bit you?”

Cheevy laughed. “You’re wondering why you haven’t changed because of Lamb? I heard he got his choppers into you good. I heard he took a plug out of you and you’ve been looking into mirrors to make sure you’re still there?”

“I have been sensitive to light lately.”

“It’s all make believe is why. Just because I sell vampire crap, doesn’t mean I buy the bullshit that goes along with it.”

“Who’s the hero?”

“The hero?”

“You’re Ajax’s story consultant and since every story has a good guy and a bad guy and since I know who the bad guy is, I’m wondering who the hero is?”

“An LA cop suspects the vampire.”

“And stops him?”

“Dies trying,” Cheevy said.

“They don’t make stories like they used to,” Reese said, looking into Cheevy’s blandly smiling face. The banality of evil, someone had said. Probably Carsabi, who read way too much. Anyway, he’d heard enough and was sick of the way Cheevy was showing the gun. He’d made the first move into Ajax’s territory, now it was up to the billionaire. “It’s been nice talking to you,” he said and got up.

Cheevy frowned and came out of the chair as if to stop him. “Hang around. Maybe we can work a deal where you get something for killing Lamb.”

“Money for killing Lamb? I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Sure. You’re a celebrity. A real vampire killer. If you sign a release, I can put your story on my web site, kind of an eyewitness to Lamb’s death sort of thing. Maybe we can sell a book.” Cheevy was close. A hint of Lysol. “We’ll threaten the company that’s using your likeness with a lawsuit. I know the publisher.”

He put his left hand on Cheevy’s shoulder, steadied him, and with his right hand snatched the pistol. When Cheevy tried to grab it back, he smacked his hand with the barrel, hard enough to crack bone. A little payback for hitting the kid.

“Fuck,” Cheevy said and furiously rubbed his hand. “Jesus, fuck. What the fuck!”

He idly pointed the pistol at Cheevy’s forehead. “You shouldn’t carry a gun, especially not a loaded one. They have a habit of going off when you least expect it.”

Cheevy backed up, wall-eyed and nervous. “The fuck you talking about?”

He shook his head. He felt a lecture coming on. What was he doing? “People buy a firearm without knowing that the odds are 75 percent that if you get killed by a bullet, it’ll come from the weapon you just bought. Your wife uses it on you, one of your kids, or you do it yourself, but all for the same reason.”

Cheevy had his back to the wall, pressing into it. “What? What reason?” His voice was shrill, close to panic. A tear snaked down his cheek

“You’re sick of yourself or someone else is,” he said. “Hell of a thing.”

Cheevy kept rubbing his hand, eyes darting, looking for a way out. “What do you want? You aren’t a cop anymore. Why’d you hit me?”

“Mostly, I’m wondering why you didn’t act more surprised when I walked in. You almost acted like I was part of the script. Part of the vampire story.” He was, in a way. The hero who got killed was his guess. A challenging part.

Cheevy straightened a bit as if he’d suddenly discovered he had a spine. “Gimme the gun back. I have a permit for it. I’ll call the police. The real police.” He held out his hand.

“Where do you want it?” Reese thumbed back the hammer. “I can tell by your face it’s loaded. I wasn’t sure before. The heroes in the movies can tell if a pistol is loaded by its weight, but I never could.”

Cheevy, his courage evaporating, closed his eyes, as if that would keep a bullet out. “You motherfucker,” he said through clenched teeth. “You dirty motherfucker.”

“You know what I did to Richard Lamb? It’s easy for a cop to kill and get away with it. Especially kill an asshole like you.”

Cheevy kept shaking his head. The rim of his hat lay flat against the wall.

“What did Ajax want you to tell me?” He hit him on top of the hat with the barrel, not hard, hard enough to raise a lump, but Cheevy, expecting to be shot, was overly dramatic and ducked, wincing and barely stifling a cry.

“Are you crazy? He didn’t tell me shit.”

“Why did Ajax send Homer Wermels to Los Angeles?” He put the barrel under Cheevy’s chin and straightened him up. He pushed the barrel until Cheevy opened his eyes. He slapped him hard. Then a back hand with his fist closed. He took the hat off and slapped him with it twice then threw the hat on the floor.

“What? Homer?” Cheevy righteously scared. Stammering. “Ho-Hom-Homer?”

“Homer Wermels. You remember. The gardener?”

“The town geek?” Cheevy tried to move farther into the wall. He spoke though clenched teeth. The chrome barrel kept him from moving his jaw. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“What did Ajax want you to tell me?”

“Nothing. He didn’t care. He’s got nothing to hide. He said I might get a visitor. That’s all. You’re fucking whack.”

He certainly was not going to argue about that. He stepped back and thumbed the pistol’s magazine release, dropping the clip on the floor with a clatter. He shucked the round in the chamber, bouncing it off the wall. He pushed the take-down pin, removed the slide, and dropped the ejector spring and rod on the table. He shook the barrel loose, popped out the sear assembly. He dropped the frame on the pile of shiny metal and briskly rubbed his hands together as if he had just made a pie. He winked, stepped on Cheevy’s hat, twisted his foot, and walked out the door.