Nice Girls Don't Live Forever (13 page)

“Well, maybe we should go out and buy some tickets,” Dick said.

“Don’t humor the cranky vampire. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I just meet a nice guy and go home with him? Why do I have all these weird hang-ups about feelings and meaning and making sure I have this intuitive bell going off in my head before I can let someone into my pants? You know, even when Gabriel and I had sex for the first time—”

“I don’t know if I want to hear this,” Dick said, shaking his head.

“I had to be all angry and ‘out of control.’ I couldn’t just get lost in the moment. I needed an excuse, which is ridiculous, because there’s no reason
not
to want to have sex with Gabriel. I mean, he has an
amazing
body—”

“What part of ‘drinking and not talking’ did I not make clear?” Dick demanded.

The band kicked into “Benny and the Jets.” A skinny, pimpled vampire and two of his buddies appeared behind Dick and tapped him on the shoulder. “Dick, I want to talk to you.”

Dick looked thrilled for the interruption. “Todd, thank God. What can I do for you?”

“I want my money back for those Springsteen tickets,” Todd demanded, his Adam’s apple bobbing indignantly.

Using a patient, paternal voice, Dick said, “Now, Todd, I gave you a good deal on those tickets. I didn’t even charge a handling fee. You couldn’t get a price that good from Ticketmaster.”

“Those tickets were to a concert two years ago!” Todd shouted, a cue for his companions to put on their mean faces and look intimidating. I rolled my eyes and took a swig of water, which did nothing for my thirst, blood-or liquor-wise.

“They were collector’s items!” Dick shouted back. “It’s not my fault you didn’t look on the tickets to check the date. I never told you they were for a concert
this
year.”

“Well, you sure the hell didn’t tell me they weren’t!” Todd whined. “I took a girl all the way to Memphis for that concert. There was nothing there! Marcy was convinced I was trying to trick her into something. I felt like an asshole!”

“But Todd,” Dick said, giving Todd what could be construed as a sympathetic headshake, “you
are
an asshole.”

A lot of things seemed to happen at once. One of Todd’s friends took a swing at Dick, missing and pinning me against the bar as he fell. I reached into my purse, feeling for the little keychain canister of vampire mace Gabriel had given me for Christmas, but couldn’t find it. It wasn’t attached to my keys or caught loose in the lining. Crap. I thought about stepping out of the way and letting Dick handle this, but then Todd smashed a pilsner over Dick’s head. I yelled, “Hey! What the hell are you doing?” and shoved Todd back. The smaller of Todd’s buddies gave me an admirable upward right hook to the jaw, knocking me back on my butt.

Have I mentioned that most male vampires have no compunctions about hitting girl vampires?

I scrambled to my feet, picked the Girl Hitter up, and slammed him to the floor. Todd spun me on my heel and punched me in the eye.

Ow.

The dance-floor crowd was now circled around the ruckus, cheering Dick on as he kicked Todd in the kneecap and hit him in the throat with a pool cue. The taller of Todd’s friends smashed
another
pilsner and the tequila bottle over Dick’s head, so I kicked him in the crotch and felt a vicious little thrill when he howled and toppled over.

As Todd turned and advanced on me, I grabbed a chair, sidestepped him, and broke it over his back on “B-b-b-benny” and knocked him to the floor on “the Jets.”

“Outside, Dick, now!” Norm yelled, apparently hitting his limit in terms of broken bar paraphernalia. Dick grabbed a pool cue and chased the three of them out of the bar. I felt I had no choice but to follow, along with most of the patrons in the bar. The gentleman with the spanking-new crotch injury elected to get into his car rather than suffer further humiliation.

Todd was getting winded, and his other friend was whining about something in his face being broken.

“Just give me my money, and we’ll call it a night,” Todd wheezed.

“I’ll tell you what, you get in your car and get the hell out of here, and I’ll keep my girl here from kicking you in the goods, too.” Dick smirked. “She’s done it before. She’ll do it again.”

Todd look one look at my size-nine boots. I smiled, my fangs fully extended over my lip. Todd ran for it. The crowd groaned in disappointment and dispersed.

After I handed over cash to cover the broken stools and pitchers, a more forgiving Norm allowed us back into the bar to press ice to our rapidly healing faces.

“You should know better,” Norm told Dick.

“Hey, Jane threw just as many punches as I did!” Dick cried.

Norm shook his head. “She was hitting in self-defense. You started it.”

“Todd hit me first. Besides, how was I supposed to know he was dumb enough to head all the way to Memphis without even looking at the stupid tickets? I thought he would have figured it out weeks ago.”

Norm pointed a fatherly finger at Dick. “You know what I mean. If you didn’t do your back-alley deals at my bar, I wouldn’t have all that many fights. Why did you even come tonight, anyway? You knew Todd would come looking for you, and you know he loves Cover Band Night.”

“I forgot all about it,” Dick said, avoiding eye contact with me. Norm muttered something under his breath and turned his back to help another customer.

I stared at Dick, who busied himself pouring the remaining ice from his face pack into my water glass and stretching his freshly healed jaw. “Dick, what’s the third thing?”

Dick stared at me, his face blank. “Did you get a concussion, Stretch?”

“The third thing that men do to get over a break-up. Drinking, not talking about your feelings, and then what?” I said, growing suspicious. “It’s fighting, isn’t it? You set this up.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dick said, still not making eye contact.

“You set this up,” I repeated, poking him in the sides.

“Yes,” he mumbled in the tone of a little boy who’d burnt his Mother’s Day breakfast in bed. He smirked. “I didn’t arrange for him to hassle me, but I figured, you’re sad, you’re angry, you didn’t get to hit anything the other night. Todd was going to be there anyway, so why not let you get some stuff out of your system? I always feel better after a good cathartic tussle.”

“You did all this for me?” I laughed.

He shrugged. “You feel better, right?”

I thought about it for a second and realized that I did. That beating the tar out of a Bruce Springsteen fan with poor attention to detail had made me feel better than all the liquor and ice cream and Bette Midler in the world. “I sort of love you, Dick.”

“While my heart and all my other parts belong to a certain adorable redhead, I love you, too, Stretch,” he said, giving my shoulder a brief squeeze. “You’re the sister I never really wanted.”

“Nice.”

7

When you’re having relationship problems, channel your energy into productive projects. Join a charitable group, or volunteer with an animal shelter or a soup kitchen. (It’s best to avoid the temptation of blood drives.)

—Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less
Destructive Relationships

Once I decided not to let moping take over my life, it was a lot easier to get up and going in the evenings.

I cleaned the house from top to bottom, something I’d neglected during the busy months before the shop opened. I did a total inventory of the valuables to make sure Jenny and Grandma Ruthie hadn’t managed to sneak into the house while I was out of town. I reorganized my library, and found about fifteen paperback copies of
Pride and Prejudice.
I also found a few titles that Mr. Wainwright had sent home with me from the shop to help me “acclimate to my new culture”:
Love Customs of the Were,
a few volumes on exotic were species, and
The Spectrum of Vampirism
. Mr. Wainwright loaned it to me the year before to help me find my way through the subtle levels of vampirism. Honestly, it’s like Scientology. I boxed them up and set them in Big Bertha’s trunk, so I’d remember to return them to the stock.

And finally, I packed up everything associated with Gabriel: the ticket stubs from our first movie date, the little platinum unicorn necklace he’d given me for Christmas, the travel guides I’d pored over before we left on our trip. I put them in a cardboard box and took them down to the root cellar. Maybe one day, I’d be strong enough to take them out again or even throw them away, but for the moment, I just wanted them out of sight.

In the wake of our repetitive bonding experiences, Andrea, Dick, and I developed a new schedule at the shop. Andrea and I would open, brew coffee, go through mail, and prepare orders for shipping for about an hour before customers started showing up. Andrea generally needed a nap around midnight, so Dick would show up and give me a hand until closing. In the interest of keeping Andrea from being completely nocturnal, she got Wednesdays off, and Dick helped me open. The routine was relaxed but organized enough to suit my compulsive librarian’s soul.

So, imagine our surprise when we arrived on a Wednesday night to find a man in wrinkled khakis sleeping against the front door of the shop. Sadly, it wasn’t all that odd to find a drunk sleeping it off in our doorway, so Dick rousted him with a few shoves to the shoulder, while I gathered the delivery parcel Rip Van Winkle was using as a pillow.

“You’re going to have to find some other place to rest your head.” Dick sighed, pulling at the man’s shirt. “Come on, buddy.”

Rip snorted and yawned. “Jane Jameson?”

“I told you not to put it on the door!” Dick exclaimed, pointing at the little sign that read, “Jane Jameson, Proprietor. You have enough problems without
giving
the crazies your name.”

“I’m looking for Jane Jameson,” the man said, yawning and scratching at two days’ worth of beard growth. “I’m Emery Mueller, Gilbert Wainwright’s nephew.”

As advertised, Mr. Wainwright’s nephew, Emery, was both milquetoast and mealy-mouthed. Emery was the son of Mr. Wainwright’s only sister, Margaret, who had moved to California in the 1960s and married a radio evangelist. Mr. Wainwright had only seen Emery on rare visits to the Hollow before Emery moved to Guatemala to teach English at a mountain seminary. He’d described Emery as an odd little boy who’d grown into an odd little man. And considering the level of oddity in Mr. Wainwright, that was saying something.

The cherry on this sundae of genetic improbability was that Emery and Mr. Wainwright also happened to be Dick’s descendants. Dick had watched over the Wainwright family, the illegitimate product of a prevampirism dalliance with a servant girl, for generations. He considered Mr. Wainwright to be the “pick of the litter,” stepping in to pay for his college tuition and proudly watching as Mr. Wainwright became one of the first Hollow boys to volunteer for duty in World War II. Dick was afraid that his less-than-upstanding connections might put the family at risk, so he’d only confessed to the relation the previous year, after Mr. Wainwright died. Watching those two bond, a vampire who appeared to be in his thirties giving fatherly advice to a ghost in his seventies, was as mind-boggling as it was touching.

Dick was obviously not as impressed with the latest branch of the Wainwright family tree. I thought living in South America was supposed to make you all tan and scruffy-sexy, like Harrison Ford. Emery just seemed pale and clammy, like gone-over cheese. He wore hornrimmed glasses and a permanently constipated expression. His skin was pitted with old acne scars, which might have remained unnoticed if not for his tendency to flush and blush at the slightest provocation. His hair and his eyes were the same color, which I can only describe as “dust.”

Ever since Emery had responded to Mr. Wainwright’s death with a telegram telling us to proceed with the funeral without him, Dick and I had a running bet about when Emery would show up. I guessed four months, Dick guessed six months, and Mr. Wainwright guessed a year. We still had no idea how we would collect a wager from a ghost.

“Four months!” I cried triumphantly to Dick, who slapped a twenty-dollar bill into my hand.

“Hi, Emery, I’m Jane,” I said to a clearly confused Emery. “This is my friend Dick.”

“You sent the e-mail.” Emery yawned. “To let me know about Uncle Gilbert.”

“Yes, several months ago,” I said, smiling in that overly sweet way only Dick knew was insincere. “Why don’t you come inside?”

“Oh, thank you. I drove that rental car all the way from Louisville without air conditioning. It was terrible,” he said, heaving himself off the ground.

My lips quirked involuntarily at his pronunciation of Louisville. Not because he had an accent or anything. One’s Kentucky street cred can be determined based on how one pronounces Louisville. Luh-vul, you’re from west Kentucky. Louie-ville, east Kentucky. Louisville, you’re from Illinois.

“I know it seems odd to show up unannounced at this time of night. And it’s so nice to meet you,” Emery simpered as we led him into the shop. “While I dearly love doing the Lord’s work, I’m so glad to be back here. I spent many hours as a child in the store, poring over the books.”