The photograph was a different matter. She might even have agreed to let him take it, if he'd asked first. It was obvious how he'd done it. Drew owned one of those little digital cameras the size of a credit card. Didn't make any noise, didn't need a flash. The picture quality was mediocre, but it did take a photograph. He came, he shot the pic while her eyes were closed, and he put the camera behind him on the desk or stuck it in his shirt pocket. It wouldn't have taken but a couple of seconds.
E-mailing it to the guys was the betrayal beyond retrieval.
“Let's go to bed,” Drew said.
“It's not late,” Gretchen replied. “Have one more.”
“Ehhh ...”
“Come on, have a nightcap with me.”
“If I agree?” Drew bargaining as usual.
“Handjob.”
“Okay,” he said. Then added, “While rimming me.”
“Of course,” she said, taking his glass.
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Gretchen must have slept well, because she woke up the next morning feeling rested and refreshed. Drew was still asleep when she slipped out of bed, his breathing a low rumble. She went to the window and looked outside. The air was full of snow, snow falling thickly and heavily in huge fluffy flakes. It looked so beautiful; it reminded Gretchen of times she had played outside as a child while the snow was falling, gleefully running around and catching flakes on her tongue.
She went into the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. It was a few minutes before noon. Well, they had been up kind of late.
That decisive day a few weeks ago, she knew immediately that she was going to leave Drew. But her anger was so great that it wouldn't let her just throw some things in her car and drive away. He had more than that coming to him, and for all she knew, he might not even be that upset if she did bolt. No, Gretchen realized that she had to think and plan. The pain she felt demanded its own form of articulation, one that would take time.
I know why I'm doing this to you,
she thought.
But I still don't know why you did that to me.
Because that is who you are? Is that all?
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Drew stumbled out of the bedroom around two-thirty that afternoon. He felt dizzy, he said. He complained of a stomachache. He couldn't get down one sip of coffee. Gretchen sat him down on the couch, but he was so drowsy he soon stretched out on it. She propped him up with a couple of pillows and tucked a light blanket around him.
“Honey, I don't feel so good.”
She smiled. “You have a first-rate hangover, is all.”
“Yeah, I guess. Jesus, I'm hurting.”
“I'll get you a glass of sparkling water. It might help settle your stomach a little, and you're probably dehydrated anyhow.”
“Okay,” he said weakly.
She turned the television on for him and placed the remote in his hand. When she returned with the water a minute later, Drew was shaking his head listlessly.
“What's the matter?”
“Picture's kinda blurry and jumpy.”
Gretchen laughed gently. “
You're
the one who's blurry and jumpy, is what I'm thinking.”
Drew looked toward the window. The units on the other side of the courtyard were completely hidden by the tremendous snowfall in progress. He seemed to want to say something but couldn't find the strength. He put his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes.
“You want to sleep some more?” Gretchen asked.
“No. I'm just resting.”
“Okay. If you need me, I'll be in the kitchen tidying up.”
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She picked up the bottle of Latvian vodka. Wow, Drew had consumed about two-thirds of it. With her encouragement, of course. She put the bottle back in the liquor cabinet, where it belonged. She took Drew's tumbler and washed it thoroughly in warm soapy water. She then rinsed it and set it on a paper towel on the counter, to dry in the air. She took a jar from the collection of spices at the back of the counter. It had contained thyme, but she'd thrown the thyme away last week, and now the only thing inside the jar was about a quarter-inch of clear liquid. Gretchen poured that down the drain, and washed and rinsed the jar. She dried it with another paper towel and put it with the other empty bottles and cans in the recycling bin by the kitchen door. She dropped the plastic cap in the trash basket beneath the sink.
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The only time Drew got up over the next eight hours was to go to the bathroom. He reeled and lurched as he moved, and Gretchen had to help him get there and back.
“I'm soooo sick... .”
“Maybe you should get some food inside you.”
“Noooo ...”
“Drew, you have to have something.”
“A little more water.”
“Okay.”
She brought him another glass of San Pellegrino.
“I still can't follow the TV,” he said. “I, like, move my eyes, and it hurts inside my head.”
“You had a lot to drink last night. I was surprised when I looked at the bottle on the counter and saw how much was gone.”
“Yeah, but ... never this bad.”
“Just close your eyes and rest. That's the best thing.”
He wasn't feeling any better at eleven that night, when Gretchen helped him back into bed. He appeared to fall asleep almost immediately. She stayed with him for a while, sitting on her side of the bed. His body moved restlessly, and he let out a groan every couple of minutes.
Gretchen was tired. She went into the living room and stretched out on the sofa. She pulled the spare blanket around her.
She went over it in her mind yet again. Had she done it correctly? Had she measured accurately? Were her calculations right? Would it work? She'd done her research well, or so she hoped. Something that would soon disappear in the body without leaving a trace. Leaving only permanent damage. It had to be easy to acquire from any number of ordinary retail outlets, with no way to connect her to its purchase.
Yes, there was such a thing. Now it was just a question of exactly how extensive and permanent the damage was.
She wouldn't leave him right away; that would look bad. Gretchen knew she had to stay for a while and take care of him. Besides, she had a lot of things to do and preparations to make before she could leave. Find a new place to live, for starters. But she also knew that it wouldn't be long; a couple of weeks? A month or so? She still had a life ahead of her. It wasn't here, and it wasn't with Drew.
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She woke early on Sunday morning. The snow was still falling steadily outside, and it was at least two feet deep against the kitchen storm door. She turned on the TV to get the latest report. The storm was stalled over the area and would continue to dump snow until early afternoon.
Gretchen thought it was beautiful.
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Sudden sounds of Drew thrashing around in the bedroom, his voice frantic. She rushed to the door and saw him half-standing, holding on to the bed for support. He'd knocked the clock radio off the nightstand. He had a wild, vacant expression on his face, his eyes darting back and forth.
Methyl alcohol.
“Gretchen! I can't see!”
Good. The damage done.
“I'm right here.”
His face turned toward her, but she stepped a couple of yards to the side. “No, I'm here.”
“I can't see you. Justâblurry shapes.”
It will get worse.
She moved again. “Drew, I'm right here.”
His head swiveled, his eyes scanning uselessly.
“You have to get me to the hospital. Right now!”
“Honey, that's impossible. There's more than two feet of snow on the ground, and it's still falling. The roads are closed, and the plows won't be out until late this afternoon. If you're not feeling better tonight or tomâ”
“Gretchen!” he screamed.
She stepped toward Drew, to help him back into bed.
“I'M BLIND!”
Gretchen smiled at him as she took his arm.
I hear you. I get the picture.
Nocturnal Invasions A Cal McDonald Mystery
Steve Niles
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I
've been called a lot of things in my life, but sexy is not among them. I've heard junkie, bum, crazy person, and fucking lunatic, but never sexy, not even from the few lovers I've had.
I mean, I got a body covered with bumps, bruises, and contusions almost twenty-fourâseven. Not the kind of thing you want to cuddle with, ya know.
My name is Cal McDonald. I'm a private detective, and I deal with the weird shit, the macabre, and the bizarre.
I don't have the best luck with women. I had a steady a couple months back, but she bolted. Her name was Sabrina. I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss her.
I was in bed on a Saturday, trying to remember what I did the night before. My head pounded like a hammer, and my stomach gurgled. I'd blacked out. Again.
My knuckles were bruised and bloody. In the caked, dried blood I found a blond hair. My hair is dark. I also found a tooth fragment lodged in a flap of broken skin on my left fist.
So I'd been in a fight. No big deal.
What bugged me was the wet spot on my crotch and the acute soreness that radiated from down under. If I didn't know better, I'd say I'd been fighting and fucking the night before, and, lucky me, my mind was a blank. All I had was a hair, a tooth fragment, and a sticky wet mess in my pants.
I knew myself well enough to know the injuries and the sex were not related. I don't mix the two, and I don't like people who do. I'd most likely beaten the shit out of a dude and then somehow hooked up with a woman before or after. The two might not even be related.
I hate hangover mysteries, and this one was a fucking ball-breaker. Literally.
As I stood there in the living room, holding open my waistband and staring down the front of my pants, Mo'Lock, my best ghoul and partner, appeared at the door, staring at me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
I knew I was busted, so I went along. “Checking out my junk,” I said back. “What the fuck does it look like?”
Mo'Lock was of the ghoul variety, the living dead, but, luckily for all of us, the kind of walking dead that doesn't need anything from humans.
Except for Mo. I guess he needed me as a friend. We'd been partners a long time. Almost ten years. He'd even dragged his dead-ass from DC to LA when I sort of moved without telling anyone.
I was about to close the top of my pants when I noticed something else. There was blood beneath my boxers as well. I panicked and pulled them open wider. There was a soup of bodily fluids inside. I recognized semen and vaginal fluid, but there was also blood.
And the rest of the tooth was there too, embedded right in the side of my sore-ass nut sack. I reached down and took the fragment out. It was slightly larger than the other piece.
The ghoul stepped over and watched as I placed the second tooth fragment next to the other. They fit and almost made a whole tooth.
I looked at the ghoul. He looked down my pants.
“You have any idea where I was last night?” I asked the dead man, closing my pants.
The ghoul shook his head. “I saw you early in the evening. You were quite inebriated, and you were
not
alone.”
Okay, great. This is the info I was looking for. Super.
Mo'Lock held up his hand before I got all excited, “You were walking with a vampire.”
Man, I must have been wasted.
“What'd she look like? Any bloodsucker we know?”
“She was unknown to me.”
Then it hit me. Vampire. Broken tooth. Sex. Blood. What the fuck had I gotten myself into?
I bolted for the shower like a jackrabbit down its hole. I used the hottest water I could and checked every inch of my body.
I seemed okay. Even the nut-sack wound was minor, and also the only source of the blood.
I checked my neck. There were a couple scratches, but nothing new or too deep. I checked my arms and wrist and ankles. I didn't find any fang marks anywhere. I even had the fucking ghoul come in and look my back over.
“You are covered with scratches,” he said somberly.
“Do they look infected?”
“I sense no evil coming from them,” the ghoul said. “If these are the wounds made by a Nosferatu, I believe you have escaped the infection.”
I stared at the ghoul. “How about a simple âno'?”
Then I kicked him out of the bathroom.
I washed off and checked my parts for any further damage. Besides the usual and pre-existing wounds, I seemed to have escaped with a scraped sack and a scratched-up back.
Evidently I'd had the best sex of my life, and I didn't have a clue who with, other than the fact that it may have been with an undead woman.
After the shower, I went through my clothing, looking for clues. I found zero dollars in my wallet, which was par for the course. No numbers or anything I hadn't had the day before.
The whole time I sat on the couch rifling through my stuff, the ghoul stood at the front window and stared out, down to the streets of Koreatown below.
I'd slept most of the day. It was already turning to night again. Good. The last thing my throbbing head needed was sunlight.
I found what I was looking for in the pocket of the jacket I'd worn the night before. Inside the left pocket was a book of matches from a bar. It was called the Fang Club.
Then it all started coming back to me, and I really started feeling sick.
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The night before had started innocently enough, with a gram of brick hash and a bottle of pills. I smoked and swallowed and chased it all with a bottle of whiskey.
By nine o'clock I was already trashed.
At nine-thirty the phone rang.
Like a fucking idiot, I answered.
“Is this Cal McDonald?” the female voice on the other end asked.
I made some sort of grunting sound, made myself laugh, and choked an affirmative response along the lines of “Yeah.”
Her name was Nichole Harris, and she was calling me because her husband, Chad, had disappeared a few nights before, after he called from a bar called the Fang Club. She thought, you know, maybe something happened to him and wanted to see if I'd look into it.
I gave her my rates. She agreed. I said I'd check out the club.
I figured good ol' Chad had probably met a girl and left his wife. I doubted even vampires were dumb enough to hang out at a place called the Fang Club, let alone hunt at one. I laid my bets on Chad having a chubby for goth girls and ditching the wife.
That was my theory, anyway.
I know I went to the club. It was in North Hollywood. Just a dump of a place with walls painted black and purple and filled with eighty-pound boys and girls made up to look spooky.
The music was perfect for a night of brooding and sneering. I doubt if anybody in the bar had ever dealt with the true undead, or they wouldn't be pretending to be one.
I sat at the bar, asked the bartender about Chad, and pounded back a few. After that, I woke up home with a scratched-up back, a sticky wet mess in my drawers, and a busted sack.
I stared at the matchbook, all black with white fangs and a touch of red on the tips, and tried to piece together the rest, but it just wasn't there.
Mo'Lock finally turned from the window and spoke to me. “Did you check your car?”
“I parked it out front,” I said, concerned. “Is it gone?”
The dead man shook his head. “No. It is still there, but I've seen you park better.”
I walked to the window and looked down. I'd parked in front of the apartment all right, on the sidewalk right outside the door to the stairs. I must've just drove up and poured out.
I went down and moved the car. It had a couple tickets and a boot on it. The ghoul ripped the boot off with a single yank, breaking the metal like it was plastic, and then I moved the car to a proper parking spot and checked it out.
The ghoul stood by as I inspected the car. In the front was the usual mess, but the backseat was clear. It was usually covered with papers and garbage. Shit.
There was a wet spot right in the center of the seat. It was mostly dried from the daylight but moist enough to still be sticky in the cracks of the seat. I cautiously smelled the sticky on my fingertips. There was no odor whatsoever. Very odd.
Evidently I'd had sex with an odorless vampire.
Mo'Lock was standing off to the side. The sun hadn't fully gone down, and, even though the light didn't hurt him, he preferred the shadows like any self-respecting ghoul would.
“Did you see me come home last night?” I asked him.
“I was inside the office. You came through the door,” he rumbled, “and said nothing to me before you passed out on the couch.”
“Wait, I thought you said you saw me with someone.”
The ghoul hesitated. “That was earlier.”
“Oh.”
I nodded. Figured.
I had no other option than to retrace my steps of the previous night. After a quick replenishing of drugs and alcohol, I got back in the Nova and peeled for North Hollywood.
By the time I was cruising over the hill, past the Hollywood Bowl, the sun was down. It was late February, and the nights were dry, with a cool breeze coming in from the coast.
It was one of those evenings where the city looked peaceful. You'd never suspect that within the hills and valleys dwelled some of the most heinous evil that walked the earth. And besides the entertainment people, there were also killers and monsters of all kinds.
On the other side of the hill was the Valley, a huge spread as flat as it is crowded. It was a grim place. I lived there before my home was leveled by a creature made of the pieces of murdered weightlifters. I'd only been in the Koreatown office/apartment for a couple months.
The Fang Club was on Magnolia Avenue about a block up from where it crossed with Cahuenga Boulevard.
It was a plain stucco building painted black, with no windows and only a single door inside. That's where the sign was: a poorly painted copy of the graphic on the matchbook.
Outside the door stood a muscle-bound kid with black eyeliner and a spankin' new Misfits T-shirt. He stood with his arms crossed so he could tuck his hands underneath and make his arms look bigger.
I parked the car across the street and smoked a few before heading inside. It was still early. I figured I had time to get my buzz on good and tight before scoping the creepy club.
As I sat there, several groups of people came up. Most of them were dressed in standard goth garb, all black, purple, and red vinyl and leather. The hair styles varied. Most had normal day-hair greased up to look like a widow's peak, and the women had lots of attachments, or whatever they call them.
Most of them looked like kids in their twenties out for a good time, posing and wishing they were dead. Every tenth or so person would arrive solo, and some of these folks looked older.
I saw several women walk by whom I couldn't keep my eyes off of, and I found my attraction to them disturbing. I hunted vampires.
I found it damn annoying that I got heated up seeing women who essentially dressed like vampires, or at least what people think they look like.
Actually it was pretty close. Real vampires and vampires of legend are pretty similar. They like to dress up and play it all dramatic and fancy-pants. I really fuckin' hate vampires.
But, and this is a big-ass but, I had to admit there was a certain allure to the women bloodsuckers. There was something about them that was so sensual. Maybe it was how dangerous they were, that they could make you cum and drain you of your life at the same time.
I'd killed every vampire I'd ever come across, with few exceptions. Men, women, children, it didn't matter. They have to be killed.
I try to never engage, and I certainly never touched any. They are, despite the romantic notions people have formed, disgusting, rotten, dirty, infected creatures that spread disease and misery wherever they go.
But yet, yeah, the women bloodsuckers are kind of hot.
I dunno. Maybe I just like black.
After a couple smokes laced with hippie-nip, I pounded back a fifth and got out of the car. It was past ten. I figured I must have hit the place around the same time the night before.
As I crossed the street, the hulk in the Misfits shirt spotted me and did a double take. Real quick, but I saw it. He either recognized me or hated me on sight. Either one didn't feel too promising as I stepped up to the door.