VAMPIRE MUSICIAN

The girl had been garotted. It was a very messy crime scene and policemen who had found it were keeping as clear of it as they reasonably could, which meant looking away, and breathing through their mouths instead of their noses. And not noticing that their shoes were covered with blood. Their wives or girlfriends would not be happy about that discovery.

The medical examiner would be arriving shortly to take the body away and house her with the others in the morgue. There had been six of them in the last two weeks, two of them found together, though I did not think they had been killed together. I did not even think that there was any intent in the two of them being found there, other than that it had been a convenient alley to take girls for murder; a dozen bodies could have been hidden under the garbage there, and not been found. The first had been killed three days earlier, and the second hadn’t suspected a thing from the smell of the alley, or so it seemed based on the lack of defensive wounds found on her.

I was asked to look into the case with number 3. I’m a retired cop, used to go by Hardy. Now it’s mostly Jack.

Funny thing that happens when you suddenly come into a load of money is that everyone changes around you while you stay the same. It hurts the head to think about it. I used to sit in those meetings where the mayor came to tell us how to do our jobs and I hated him as much as the rest of them. Now he’s a good friend of mine, has my number on speed dial like Batman.

He calls me in to look into special cases, sensitive ones where he wants to be able to tell people he’s making sure that something happens. He likes to pass my name out to the newspapers and make sure that I get a picture taken in there. Good for public relations.

Besides the fact that I’ve never met a journalist who could resist putting in my rags to riches story along with any quote they happen to twist out of all semblance to my actual words, I look better than most cops these days: clean-shaven, strong jaw, thick hair that I keep closely trimmed. I can afford to get a good haircut every month, and I have time to work out in the gym instead of rushing to and from work in a car while I’m stuffing a donut in my face. In short, I’m the poster boy for a good cop, even if I’m not a cop anymore. The cops actually hate me, most of them. Especially the ones who knew me while I was on the force. I made some very memorable screwups in my life.

And that’s the real reason I do what the mayor asks me to do. He’s not any smarter than he used to be and he still doesn’t know what he’s doing. But I’ve got penance to do, and I can’t quite bring myself to do it the old-fashioned way, being miserable and getting what I deserve. So I go about it this half-assed way. I do the cases I want to do, and I always make sure they are closed. It might take me years, but I do it.

Always.

I crouched over the girl, careful not to touch the floor or her. I know I should have been doing the CSI thing and looking over everything, but the truth was, I was only interested in her neck. Specifically, I was looking for bite marks.

That’s right. Vampires.

One of the reasons that I became so well known as an idiot on the force was because of my special hatred of vampires. Most policemen know very well that there are such creatures, but they are smart enough or discipline enough or something that they don’t go around writing it down on reports or talking to the press about it. People in their nice warm beds don’t want to think about stuff like that and they don’t want to hear it on the evening news.

It’s a long story with a lot of pit stops, but the short version is that my girlfriend was killed by a vampire when we first started dating. A vampire I made mad in the first place. He’s dead now, and that was what got me suspended and I never went back, though there was a year in between there before I inherited my fortune. A bad year when I spent most of my time either drinking or looking for vampires to kill. I got a few dozen of them, but they kept coming.

The thing is, not all of them kill. They’re content mostly to feed off of us. If they kill too many of us, then what happens? No more walking meat. They have to start living off of Grade B. So I try to let bygones be bygones when it comes to vampires these days. Except the killers.

The garotting is a neat trick. It makes it particularly difficult to look for the bite marks on the neck. The medical examiner caught it the third time, but I went back and looked at the other two bodies and found the signs there, too. Every one of them has been bitten by a vampire and then killed.

Which vampire is the real question for me. And how to make sure justice is served on him.

That’s what the mayor really likes about me. I not only make sure the job is done, but that it looks right and proper to the police. It requires a deftness that most cops care shit about, and I don’t blame them. I don’t care shit about it, either, but it’s the key to my entry into the locked room. I do it because it means I get to go after the vampires still, all legal like, and I don’t have to fill out any forms afterwards. I’m bad at forms.

I step back from the girl and look around the warehouse. Abandoned. Very chilly, in the middle of winter. Not the place of a romantic liaison. The girl isn’t a prostitute, though. She’s dressed more like a college student, what’s left of her clothing, that is. Worn jeans and boots that have done a lot of walking. There’s a sweater thrown on the ground closer to the door. She has longish brown hair tied back in a ponytail, and her face has a bit of makeup on it, but not much.

I’m not expecting to find the answer to the case by looking around. The police will find out who she is in a few days’ time. Missing person’s report, no doubt. She looks the kind of person who would have people notice she is missing. Some of the others weren’t as lucky, and are still waiting in the morgue for identification. But there’s no link between any of them that I’ve been able to detect. One a forty-year old successful lawyer. Another a dancer. A third a waitress at a seedy diner downtown by the train station. Two worked at department stores. And this one.

Random parts of society taken because they were there to be taken, no doubt. Vampires don’t seem to care very much about the blood they get to stay alive. They want it, and they want it now. A, B, O, negative or positive, rich or poor, male or female. It’s all the same, so long as it’s warm and thick. They’re not human. They’re animals, and they work by animal instinct. Yes, some of them can be wily. But it’s not because they’re thinking. They’re cautious. They’re the ones who have survived, so evolution gives them the edge. It works on an individual level because they live so long, see, not from one generation to the next.

Case in point: you know the joke about how long it would take a monkey given a typewriter to write the works of Shakespeare? Something on the order of a billion years? Well, have you ever heard of a vampire writing a play? A novel? A poem? Or even an I.O.U.? Have you heard of a vampire musician? Or a vampire painter?

Yeah, well, you’ve been had.

Vampires don’t do anything but eat and sleep. They can’t. They may look human to you and there may be some human writers who want to pretend they’re more than that, but it’s a sick, twisted way of making it romantic to be less than human.

“You got a lead?” asked the cop at the door.

I shook my head, like I always do. I don’t give away tricks for free. No magician does.

Outside, the press were starting to gather, a couple of cameras rolling with background voices explaining the location. Beautiful downtown Cherry City, California, too close to Los Angeles for my tastes, but there are reasons for everything, and vampires like the weather here in Cherry City as much as the humans do. The ones who aren’t big enough to keep themselves in style around the Hollywood crowd.

I would have liked to turn my back on them all and walk out of there, but that wasn’t what I did. So I put on a smile and waved at Julia, a reporter I knew from way back when, and in a couple of minutes, I was surrounded, microphones being shoved in my face and questions asked a mile a minute.

I answered them, too. In a calm, polite manner that was dignified and eloquent. Or at least reasonably intelligent. I spoke in full sentences and I didn’t let anyone know from my accent that I grew up in New Jersey. I explained that yes, there had been another murder, and yes, it was horrible. Yes, the police department and the mayor and I were all doing everything we could to find out how was committing these terrible crimes and yes, I thought that people were safe as long as they didn’t panic and do anything unreasonable.

Did I have any leads? Of course I did. I was working very hard on the case. Anything I’d like to share with the press? No, not at this time, thank you. Was I worried for my own safety? No, not at all. I trusted the police implicitly. I knew how hard they worked. I had been a policeman once myself.

And vampires?

The question took me by surprise, asked out in the open like that. I took a breath and looked taken aback. My eyes widened (I’ve looked at the tapes since then) and then I damped down on it. I made a short little laugh. I wasn’t interested in fairy tales, thank you very much.

More of the same. Sometimes I have trouble understanding why reporters will persist in asking the same questions that I’ve already answered a dozen times before, hoping for some new information.

I kept talking because that was my job, and also because it gave the ME a chance to get the body out of the warehouse and into the car without being stopped. Only a couple of policemen left when I finally said my goodbyes and headed home.

I was thinking about the girl’s eyes. She’d looked so peaceful. That was the way it was with vampires. We stare at them, our breath caught by the beauty, and then they bite. They more swiftly, the way a lion does, or a cougar. Immense speed and strength. Our only chance against them is our humanity, our thinking minds. Which that girl should have been developing, but they don’t teach vampire courses at the university. Just about everything else, but not that.

I had slowed down and lowered my window to punch in the code to my gate when I heard a rustle of branches in the bushes. I looked up in time to see a streak of human-shaped blackness leap toward me. I hit the window lever, but not fast enough. Its hand got in the crack and as I pressed the lever harder and harder, he slowly inched it down and down until the sound of the motor whirring stopped, and there was an eerie silence. I wasn’t breathing because I was afraid. And his breathing was so quiet that his pretty never heard it.

There’s no magic to killing vampires, no stakes, no holy water. They kill like any other animal. You stop their hearts or cut off enough parts and they die from blood loss. The hard part is that they don’t care about dying. It’s not something they think about, death. They’re not afraid like we are. They don’t have a sense of self and a desire to maintain their consciousness. When they are thirsty, they drink. That’s all.

I’d been close to vampires before. A lot of times. I’m always afraid. I don’t think I will ever get used to seeing them, looking into those empty eyes and seeing the almost-human face. Vampires are not dead. That is another fairy tale that humans like to believe, because it gives them so hope for an after-life.

Vampires are other than us, but they are born and grow and die just like we do. They are the part of us that is not human, the evolutionary track that led to a quick, simian form that can adjust to nearly any climate and eat nearly any provender. Are they the descendants of the Neanderthals, who also looked like us, or some other line of the race? I don’t know and there aren’t any scientists I know of working on the problem. Why would they? They’d be called freaks and the field research would be—difficult.

The window went slowly down.

I reached for the gun I carry with me. Casually, so as not to frighten him. Make him think I’m not a threat.

Him. It. I use them interchangeably, but don’t think that I was beginning to humanize him. I was not.

Some of the vampires grin when they have cornered their prey, but this one did not. He looked at me curiously, the strain of his effort clear on his face. He had a long scar down his face that cut across one eye. He might have been handsome otherwise. He was blonde and tall.

Then I lifted the gun and put it onto his cheek.

“Step back and leave me alone,” I said.

He put up his hands.

Vampires understand human speech a little, the way that dogs do, if given a command. I suspect they are reacting more to the tone of the command than the words, but it’s a small distinction. If they do understand words, what difference does that make?

But he did not take a step back.

“I will shoot you,” I said. The truth was, I was planning to shoot him anyway, but I wanted him to be away from the car so the blood didn’t splatter me and so that he didn’t have a chance to put his arms around my throat as he died.

I trusted my shooting. If I aimed for his eye, he would be dead in two seconds. But two seconds can be a long time if you’re being choked to death. Or bitten.

“Jack Hardy,” he said.

So he knew my name. It was bound to be something that vampires grunted about when they were together.

But I did not shoot him.

“I have information,” he said. “About the girl who was killed tonight.”

“You,” I said, and I shot him.

I tried to, anyway. He blurred to my left and I had guessed he would go right. I heard the bullet whiz into the trees and stick, and then he was on the hood of my car.

“I just want to talk,” he said.

“You’re a vampire,” I said. “And vampires want only one thing.”

“You underestimate me,” he said.

I noticed that he was not defending his whole species, only himself. And it intrigued me. I’d talked to vampires before, but never an extended conversation like this. He seemed to be forming sentences on his own. Seemed to, but that did not mean it was true. Perhaps he had been captured by a human and then trained for this precise moment. It seemed far-fetched, but not impossible.

“My favorite color is purple,” I said.

He blinked at me. “Black would be more flattering with your looks,” he deadpanned.

OK, one for him. But I wasn’t giving up a long-held notion so easily.

“You’re the one that I love, the one that I need,” I sang.

“Oooh, ooh, ooh,” he sang back, an octave lower.

So, he was a mutant. He could speak like a human could speak. That didn’t make him anything other than a vampire.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I want to give you some information about the girl who was killed tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because you will do something about it,” he said.

“And why should I believe that you care about that?”

“It’s not vampires,” he said.

I grunted. I thought about hitting my foot to the gas and trying to jerk him off. If I surprised him, it might work. But where would I go? The gate hadn’t opened and if I went backwards, I’d have a hard time steering. Plus my reaction time was longer than his. He might have punched through the windshield before I had moved more than two inches.

“It’s a human who’s trying to cover his tracks by pretending to be a vampire, then?” I said. If so, it was an elaborate game.

“It’s a human,” said the vampire.

“Who?”

He shook his head.

“You don’t know, but you know it’s a human? What, have you seen him? Perhaps you were at the crime scene tonight yourself, a curious passerby who had nothing to do with a very bloody murder?” I said sardonically.

“I know who it is,” said the vampire. “But I will not tell you the name.”

“What?”

“If I told you, you would try to prove the truth one way or another. You would expose yourself, and he would catch you.”

“But by not telling me the name you protect me from him?”

“He won’t expect you to be looking for him unless you do it openly. The whole world knows how much you hate vampires.”

“So it’s a setup for me personally?” I asked.

He said nothing.

“And why do you care so much if I serve justice on one more vampire, so long as it is not yourself?”

I thought he would not answer again, but after a long moment, he slid off the hood of the car and then turned back, “I care about the truth,” he said.

Before I could respond, he had disappeared into the bushes once more, and I could not see a sign of him. He might have stayed there, lurking, watching me, or he might have run ten miles by the time I put my gun away and punched in the numbers to the gate once more.

I pressed the window lever button and drove inside the gate, then waited there for it to close behind me. I could hear my own breathing amplified by the glass in the car, and by the darkness of the night. I should have killed him, I thought. A vampire is a vampire.

It was another hour before I drove my car into the garage and went into my sumptuous house and ate a meal kept hot for me by my cook, and went to bed.

I did not dream of vampires, but of songs. Sixties music, and the Beatles, and John Denver. All her favorites, as she used to sing them in that sweet, teasing soprano.

In the morning, I watched the local news on three different stations, useless exercise. Then I listened to the radio. Almost as useless, but there was the question about the vampire, then a fake expert on vampires on who quoted “statistics” in the county on vampire killings, claiming that more than three hundred people had been killed in the last year alone, which was ridiculous. CNN had a short clip on the case and an expert on serial killers.

He said that the killer would be a young man in his twenties or thirties. (Almost all serial killers are, it’s not that hard to guess accurately there.) He said he would be very intelligent and a sociopath. (Again, obvious, since if he were obviously insane, he would have been spotted already.) Also, that he hated women.

All of the victims had been women.

Vampires didn’t care about their prey that much. True, they killed more women than men, but that was simply because women were easier to kill than men. They fought less and were weaker to begin with. Vampires tended not to victimize the sick or the elderly, as would predators in the wild, but that was simply because they were not generally out in the open and easily available.

Could the killer be a human?

But then why the bite marks that almost no one knew about but me?

I was not about to trust a vampire’s advice, even if he was an unusually articulate one. Intelligent, even. Possibly musical.

On the other hand, I wasn’t going to ignore the fact that there were certain things that made less sense for a vampire killer than for a human one. The mayor hired me to serve justice, and though I had never done so with a human before, there was a first time for everything. I didn’t like the idea of killing a human, but I didn’t like the idea of a serial killer being allowed to continue a spree, either. And maybe there are humans who are not so human, either. Vampires are not the only animals who look like humans.

The next morning, I went to see the ME. He had noticed the bite marks this time, and she’d certainly bled out. Whether it had been from being bitten first and then garotted soon afterwards or the reverse, he couldn’t be sure. He was one of the smart people. He’d seen too many vampire deaths in his time. He believed in the truth. He didn’t like talking about it. No one did, and he didn’t write it on his report. He hid it in words like “exsanguination.”

After that, I went to the police station. I wish that it could be simpler, that I could talk directly to the cops on the beat, but that’s not the way it works for someone like me. I had to talk to the chief, who would relay what information he wanted me to have, and then he’d laugh about me behind my back with the rest of them when I was gone. A moment of bonding and there weren’t many of those, so how could I begrudge him it?

In this particular instance, maybe it was for the best. I wanted to see if he’d been covering things up and to get a gauge of why he might do such a thing, if there were a human involved. But I had to do it delicately.

“Tell the mayor I sent my greetings,” said Tanner.

“I will.” I sat there. Always better to let him offer information than to try to get it. Asking told too much.

“So, how long do you think it will be before this case has been resolved?”

“Isn’t that what people are supposed to ask you?”

“Not in this case.”

“I don’t have enough specifics.”

“And how many girls are going to die before you do?”

“You think I should just go in and start taking out every vampire I see?”

“I can’t see the damage in that. It just saves us from investigations in the future for the same thing, doesn’t it? The older they are, the worse they get.”

That wasn’t quite the way it worked, but it was close enough. “Think of how bad it would look if PETA got wind of that. Mass vampire slayings for the purpose of prevention of deaths in the future?”

PETA had recently started to show interest in vampires and there were a few cases of them funding lawyers for court cases, when it went that way, which wasn’t often. Vampires didn’t like to be captured and would do almost anything to avoid it, including dying. PETA’s idea was that if they were animals, they should be treated like animals. Humanely euthanized if necessary. Registered. Neutered and spayed to prevent an outbreak in the population. And that humans should be the ones to make concessions. Like offering them fresh meat in abundance, since that was all that they wanted.

“So you’re saying you’re not planning to do a thing, is that it? What is the mayor paying you for your expertise in this? Whatever it is, I’m not sure he’s getting a bargain.”

In fact, the mayor paid me nothing, but that was neither here nor there. He’d offered me a case-by-case fee and I’d turned him down. It was pitiful compared to my net worth and it was more than any real cop would get paid. I couldn’t bear to ask for more but it hurt my pride to take less.

“You want to lodge a complaint?”

“I think I am lodging a complaint. Right now. With you.” Tanner wasn’t a tall man, but he had a neck like an elephant and it bulged with veins at the moment. He looked as if his blood pressure could have knocked me over all on its own.

“You were a pain in the ass when you worked for me but at least you were useful. You cared about something. You cared about the city and about people. Now what’s become of you?” he asked.

“Gone soft,” I said.

“Damn right. Get out of my office. I might have to officially cooperate, but I’m done with it now. I’ll send you anything written as soon as possible.”

Which meant about ten weeks from now, after which he would detail all of the detours the paperwork had gone through.

Well, I’d pissed a man off for the day, a man I used to have some respect for. I could count it a good day now, and sleep well tonight.

“Thank you for your time,” I said.

“Asshole,” he said, as he banged the door closed behind me.

Great guy. I smiled to myself and whistled a bit of Mozart on the way down the stairs. One thing I knew was that Tanner believed it was a vampire. He wasn’t a man who had a poker face. He was an honest guy and he looked honest, which was why he was the chief, but hadn’t bothered to try to go any farther than that. Running for mayor, for instance, was a job for a man who knew how to lie.

And that was the next man on my list. My boss, you might say. And maybe you think that I should be careful about what I say to a man who could fire me as easily as he could refuse to requisition toilet paper for the city buildings, but remember what I said about not getting paid? Sure, he could fire me. I wouldn’t like that, because it gave me something to do with my life that mattered. On the other hand, he would have to explain to the press why he’d done it, and that would not be any fun. Because I’m good at my job. The press like me. And they’d make him look a fool if he didn’t have some hard evidence against me.

So I was confident when I went into the municipal building and walked up to the mayor’s office and gave my name to his secretary. She was a homely girl, the kind of girl the mayor’s wife would have approved for the position. She wore the right clothes and the right makeup, but underneath, she had a face that was flat and her features were too big except for her eyes.

“He’s booked for the day,” she said. That’s what she’s paid to say to just about everyone. I knew the drill.

“I’ll wait,” I said and as soon as she turned her back, I walked in.

She knew I was going to do it the minute I walked in. I’d always done it before, and it had never got her into any trouble. The mayor knew it was all my fault.

He was on the phone, but as soon as he saw me, he cut it off.

“Hey, Will. Thanks for taking the time to see me.”

“You have any leads?”

“I’m working on it,” I said. “Working hard.” I’m sure I looked like I was working hard, sitting with one leg crossed over the other.

“This is a publication relations nightmare. You need to do something about it now.”

“I’ve got a couple of informers who are going to see what they can find out.”

“Two days,” he said. “I need it done in two days.”

“I don’t have a timetable on this. I want to make sure that I get the right vamp.”

“Get any vamp, Jack. Get ten vamps. I want some bodies to show.”

“You know I don’t do that,” I said. I didn’t show bodies. I just took care of the problems. I had an image to protect, and it wasn’t as a man who was associated with a lot of blood and guts. That was for the vamps.

But I noticed the mayor was very tense. His eyes kept darting away from mine. And he wasn’t pressing me to stop the killings, like Tanner had been. Maybe my first impression of the mayor, when I thought he was a greedy fuck who liked to hear himself talk and didn’t care shit about truth, justice or the American Way, hadn’t been that far off.

On the other hand, I’d been willing to put up with him as long as he did what I wanted him to do. So I couldn’t believe he was the mastermind behind this. This was a man who wouldn’t wash his own hands if they got his own blood on them. He’d hold them out, close his eyes so he wouldn’t faint, and then use money to make everything go away.

“I’m not sure they’re all from the same vampire,” I said. “It could be several different perps.”

“Fine. I don’t care. Just bring me someone to blame.”

“You want them alive, then?”

He blanched, and I saw a drop of sweat fall from his hair onto his nose. Not the sort of thing that he ordinarily allowed to happen. The man put anti-perspirant up and down his back, around his collar and on his upper lip. It took a lot to get past that.

“God, no,” he said. “We don’t want to give them any chance for publicity.”

Because vamps were such publicity hounds. “You know,” I said. “Some vamps can actually talk. Some of them seem to have a semblance of intelligence. I wonder what they would say in their own defense, if they had a chance. Would it be anything like those PETA idiots?”

“Kill them,” he said. His face was blank now. He’d had time to realize he had to hide whatever it was he knew from me. And that meant that there was no hope that haranguing him would get me what I wanted to know. Maybe if I hit him in the nose and made him bleed all over himself—but that wasn’t my style. Not with humans, anyway.

“Right. Thanks for your advice. I’ll keep it in mind.” I left his office with a wave at Amy, who seemed more thoughtful than usual.

I could have gone home and been thoughtful myself.

Instead, I hung around the municipal building, in the lobby of the main floor. I waited to see who might be coming to see the mayor next. I was thinking it might be someone who was involved in this. It might even be the man he was talking to the phone on, which he cut off so abruptly when I arrived.

This is the difference between humans and vamps. Vamps don’t lie in wait. They don’t plan to kill people. They don’t have the patience for it, and they don’t have the ability to think about the future that way. They have no self-restraint. You might say they’re like children who can’t wait for Christmas morning and open all the presents early, and ruin the surprise for themselves. Except children have a chance to grow up. Vamps aren’t going to get any better.

About twenty minutes later, a man showed up at the elevator. He came in wearing a long wool coat and a nice, Italian suit. Not as nice as I put on, when I wanted to dress up, but nothing to sneer at. He was balding and had braces on his teeth, the kind that don’t show up on an adult unless you look really closely, invisible or something like that. It tells you a lot about a person when you notice a detail like that. His teeth weren’t noticeably out of alignment, as far as I could tell. He could be at the end of his treatment, of course. Or he could be the most vain bastard you’ve ever met.

I thought the latter. See, I’d met him before. At a charity event. One of the ones that you have to go to be seen, but that has no apparent use. The charity is a ridiculous one, to help people who wouldn’t need help if they would be sensible about life. I know it’s really arrogant of me to say something like that, considering how I came into my money. But I wasn’t asking people to help me before that. I wasn’t doing well, but I paid for my spot on the park bench on my own.

Anyway, his name was Torrence. He had a lot of money and he liked to show it around. Unlike those of us with class who have a lot of money and like to show it around—discreetly. He looked me up and down and then decided he’d let me shake his hand. He treated the hired help at the event like crap. I heard a couple of them talking afterwards, about the way he’d shouted at the coat clerk, claiming she’d taken money out of his pocket.

I waited until he’d gone up. And then I went back up myself.

I slipped behind Amy and put my hand on her mouth. “You’re going to go to the ladies room right now, understand? You didn’t see me and that’s why you didn’t stop me or alert him that I’m here. OK?”

She nodded.

I let her go and waited for her to scream.

Good Amy. She didn’t. She hurried away, and remembered to get her purse. I was going to have to remember that about her. A woman who didn’t scream and who had the presence of mind to remember her purse. She didn’t have to be a looker for me to admire her for that. There are some things that matter more than others when you’ve been rich for a while. Anyone can buy a pretty face, it turns out, and have liposuction and boobs. A mind isn’t for sale.

I kicked the door open. How’s that for style? Torrence was handing over a check to the mayor when he looked up at me. There was on his face an expression I have never seen before and which I hope never to see again. It was the look of a dog in a man’s eyes. Not a vamp’s look, because there was cunning in it. Knowledge, maybe even some guilt. But not enough.

I knew it was him right then, though it took a few days to get the evidence against him. The mayor helped, once he had my promise that I would not implicate him in any of it. It serves me to have the mayor know that it is he who is dependent on me and not the other way around. And if there ever comes a better man who runs for the job, believe me, he will have my support.

But for now, there’s a man in jail who deserves to be there. He will be pleading insanity, or so I here. He found a way to make himself a set of teeth that were hollow, so he could suck blood out of his victims. He offered them cash to be part of a study he was doing, and then he took them back to his own home to become a vampire. They were nearly dead when he threw them back in his car and took them to the place he’d chosen to dump them. That was when he garotted them, because he’s such a swell guy. He thought it would be so messy that it would be linked to some low life. Or a real vamp.

If there were any vamps in prison, I’d wish that he met one of them on a dark night. I might even find that some of my money went to the cause.

But vamps don’t go to prison, and they don’t care about money if they do.

And I suspect that even vamps have better taste than to eat a man like that.

I had just finished talking to the press outside the mayor’s office. Key to the city and all that, the mayor’s best friend, him giving me a friendly, manly kiss on the cheek while the cameras whirred and thanking me for my service.

That was when I saw him again.

He was waiting for me by my car. Something about the car, I don’t know. Vamps don’t drive cars. Takes too much thinking.

But this one seemed fascinated by the thing. He had his hand on the hood like it was a woman’s breast. I must say, that hadn’t been far from my mind when I bought the thing. A delicate engineering marvel, but the man who had designed the body had been an artist.

I didn’t like the idea that this vamp and I had something in common.

He nodded to me.

“I hope you’re not going to say that I owe you. I don’t owe you and I don’t plan on paying you back except with death,” I said to him.

He met my eyes with that vampire gaze of his and I do not know how much time passed then.

“You have a name?” I asked, as he walked away.

“Vampires don’t have names,” he said. “No more than any other animal.”

“But if I wanted to—” I stopped.

“If you wanted to find me again? To threaten me or kill me?”

“Or to ask you a question,” I said.

“And why would you wish to do that?”

“If I did,” I said.

“They call me the musician,” he said. And he whistled the same bit of Mozart to me that I’d whistled before.

A chill ran down my spine, because I wondered if he had heard me, the other time. If he had been following me for the past several days, and what it would mean if he had.

But worse still was the thought that he hadn’t.

The vampire musician, I thought of him as. And I didn’t whistle Mozart for a long time afterwards. Bach is much more musical, don’t you agree?

And human.