Suckers (22 page)

With a cold beer in hand, he shrugged out of his jacket and booted up his laptop.

The first thing he checked was their ads. Responses were going to Ray, not him, but at least he could make sure they were still there.

“Vampire in search of sustenance. Donate to the cause. This is a unique experience. Respond to learn more.”

Or: “I vant to dvink your BLOOD! Safe, sane, consensual NONSEXUAL blood play.” That one they might have to edit a bit.

“Do you believe in vampires? Here is your chance to come to the aid of one. Serious inquiries only. All blood types accepted.”

Dan chugged half the beer, then leaned back. Hoping one of these fucking ads would work, and soon.

The bees buzzed somewhere near the base of his spine.

He drowned them with the rest of the beer from his fridge, then got in bed and lay awake, making music in his head that he had no motivation to get up and play.

The phone rang as he was coming out of the bathroom. Sunlight cut angular through the kitchen window. He fished his phone from his jacket. “Yeah.”

“Did I wake you?” Ray said.

“Nah. I’m up.”

“Wanna come over? I’m working on some leads.”

“Yeah. Sure.” He yawned and blinked at the sunlight. “You want me to pick up some breakfast?”

“Anything but Dunkin’.”

Smiling at that, he said, “Sure.”

The slight headache was there, and the buzzing. Far away but not going away. He sat with Esmy’s bottle on the couch in his living room and contemplated it, trying to get a hold of himself so he’d take only what he absolutely needed, and not one drop more.

He sipped, his hand clenching hard to keep from dumping it all down his throat.

He sipped again.

Then he made himself march into the kitchen and put the bottle in the fridge.

The buzzing was more distant. The headache slipped from around his skull, leaving him reasonably all right again.

He got dressed and headed to Ray’s.

† † †

Ray walked out of the bathroom with a cigarette hanging between his lips. “How much you got left?”

Dan held up his thumb and forefinger, spread a little ways apart.

“How’re you doing?”

“All right.”

Ray held his gaze. “Straight up?”

“Yeah. I mean it. I’m good for now.” Barely. For now. The cat, though—he’d dreamed about that fucking cat last night. Dreamed it was sitting in his closet, watching him from the dark shadows. Twitching its tail every time his dreaming self tried to settle back into sleep. “Got anything promising yet?” he asked, following Ray into the living room, where Ray’s laptop rested on one of the easy chair’s flat arms. Ray steadied it with two fingers as he sat.

“I’ve got two possibilities, one maybe we can chase up as early as tomorrow. Tonight if I can talk them into it.”

“What about Moss?”

Ray squinted at the screen as he scrolled the browser. After a few seconds, Dan gave up on an answer. He set a cardboard tray of coffees on a battered paperback on quantum physics. “Do you actually read this stuff?”

“Hmm?”

He dropped the bag of Egg McMuffins beside the coffees, opened the top, and pulled one out for himself. He had to move a book on changing reality out of his way to sit on the couch. “So where are these possibilities?”

“Boston, both of them. B.U. kids, I think.”

“Do they know each other?”

“If they do, they haven’t said anything. And I haven’t mentioned I’m talking to someone else in the same area. One I’m not sure is gonna pan out. He keeps asking if he’s going to become a vampire.”

“Yeah, ’cause that’s such a great fucking deal.” Dan tore off a piece of the breakfast sandwich.

“Now, he don’t know no better,” Ray said. “Toss me one of those.”

“Do you think I could pass it on to people?” Dan asked.

“Like a cold?”

“I mean, you don’t have it, so it’s not air- or saliva-borne.”

“I guess we have yet to see if Esmy gets it from your other bodily fluids.”

“We used a condom.”

“Very smart.”

“Mostly because I don’t want to have a kid on top of being a blood-drinking freak.”

“Right,” Ray said. He sat back, unwrapping his sandwich.

Dan said, “Esmerelda wanted to taste my blood.”

Ray’s attention flicked up from the sandwich.

“I said I didn’t think it was a good idea,” Dan said.

Processing this latest bit of info, Ray nodded slowly.

“It was the first time I thought to wonder if my blood might be infected,” Dan said.

Ray gave it some thought before shrugging and taking another bite of the McMuffin.

“What about the other possibility?” Dan nodded at the computer.

“Uh, sleep deprived at this point. I’ve had them both up all night, emailing back and forth. I really want to do it tonight if I can talk them into it. On the other hand, you have to watch yourself. These guys can get you in a position of spending hours convincing them you’re what you say you are, only to decide you’re full of shit anyway. Waste of fucking time. You’ve gotta avoid that whole trap. Not to mention the complete fuckheads like the guy in Brattleboro.”

Dan watched him eat.

Eventually he launched into questions again—starting with the one that was most bugging him: “What about Moss? He’s not going to want to go out again already.”

“We’ll talk to him,” Ray said without looking. “I have an idea to solve that problem too.”

“I actually don’t
want
to keep taking him away from his family. We do that enough as it is.” Moss didn’t come with them overseas—they had a guy in Europe who jumped on the tour to replace him—but even just the North America dates took him away from home for big jumps of time.

He stood, wadding the sandwich wrapper in his fist, and went to the kitchen to throw it away—more to work off his nervousness than anything else. They weren’t going to get Moss. Moss was going to sit them down and go, “Look, guys, I hate to do this to you, but…” And who could blame him?

Back in the living room, he fetched one of Ray’s guitars and sat, checking the tuning, strumming it a bit, then picking out bits of the melody he’d had in his head all night.

“Something new?”

“Yeah. It’s all I’ve got of it so far.”

“I like it. Kind of melancholy, though.”

“I’m thinking of building it to chaos and then just—you know, done. Silence.”

“This guy’s not getting back to me any too quickly,” Ray said. “Fuck it.” He flipped the laptop shut and lifted his Gibson from beside the chair. “Run through that again?”

Head down, Dan nodded and started to play.

They spent two hours at it till Dan got up to take a leak and Ray sat back to enjoy a cigarette and check his messages.

“Bingo!” Dan heard him call.

“What?” he asked as he walked back in. “We’re on for tonight?”

“Ah, no. I don’t think that’s gonna work out.” As Ray scratched the back of his head, Dan found it a wonder he didn’t singe his hair with the lit end of the butt. Ray said, “But the other one’s definite for tomorrow. Guy calls himself deathly_black.”

“At least it’s not deathly_black76923.”

Ray wheezed out a laugh with a lungful of smoke.

“Tomorrow night,” Dan said. “Boston?”

“Yeah.”

“And Moss?”

“Gonna call him right now.” He stubbed his cigarette and got up to find his phone.

Dan settled back on the couch. Moss was going to say no. You could only push someone’s hospitality so far. Moss was going to say no, and he couldn’t blame him.

But man did that fuck them.
Him
.

Ray walked by, punching up Moss’s number. He was in the kitchen when he started talking. The back door rattled open, swung shut.

Dan slumped lower and said, “Fuck,” under his breath. Did they know anyone else who could do it?

Did they know another
way
they could do it?

He itched to jump up and use Ray’s laptop to look up…what? Blood Drawing for Dummies?

They could break into a blood bank.

Right.

The door opened. Ray headed for the bathroom instead of the living room. Fucker. Time crawled. The toilet flushed, and eventually Ray appeared in the doorway, towel-drying his hands.

“Well?” Dan asked.

Ray picked up what was left of his coffee. “He’s gonna come over in a bit for a half-hour or so.”

“For?”

Ray drank. Then he set the cup back down. Then he searched out his pack of cigarettes and found one still in it. He put it between his teeth and lit it.

Dan followed his every move, impatient. Wanting to say
For?
again, louder.
For? For?!

Finally Ray exhaled a cloud of smoke. “He’s gonna teach me how to do it.”

Dan watched him, open-mouthed. “Can you?”

“Can we use your arm? He also said we should get some oranges to practice on before we move on to fucking up your arm.”

Dan continued to stare.

“He said he’s not letting me anywhere near
his
arm, so it’s gotta be yours or mine,” Ray said. “And mine might be awkward. Plus we might need to use me, so I don’t want to fuck up my veins practicing.”

“Yeah, that’s fine.” Maybe. He looked at the coffee cups on the table, at the physics book—
Taking the Quantum Leap
. At envelopes full of bills, at picks and a machine head and a harmonica with a dent in it. “You think it’ll be okay?”

“You can chug it when we’re done. I know it’s not as good as outsourcing…”

“Right.”

Ray held the cigarette filter in front of his mouth as he watched Dan. Squinting through the smoke. “If you need more, I’ll donate,” he said.

It had been, what, five days since his last donation? The glow of the laptop screen wasn’t the only thing making him look pale and worn down.

Dan said, “Don’t worry about it. I still have Esmy’s at my place. And drinking my own’s not for nothing.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“How many times are you going to ask?”

“Hey, I’m just checking.” He closed the laptop. “Pass me that guitar. I think I got another idea. And you should run out and get some oranges.”

† † †

With a mesh bag of fruit sitting on the front seat, Dan pulled up behind a dispiritingly familiar car. It wasn’t Moss’s. He let out a long sigh before collecting the bag and heading upstairs.

They were in the living room, Ray in his chair with the laptop shut, Jamie on the couch.

“Hey,” Dan said. “Rehab over?”

“Over for me,” Jamie said.

Dan set the oranges on the coffee table and dropped onto the couch.

Jamie pushed his hair back from his eyes. “They got me all hyped up to do rehab while I was at detox, like that was gonna be the icing on the cake, but it’s— It didn’t do it for me.”

“So you left,” Dan said.

“What I needed was to get clean. I got clean. I’m still clean. How’ve you been?”

“Shit.” Dan leaned back. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“He’s been having a health problem,” Ray said.

Dan wasn’t sure he wanted Jamie to know—but of course he had to know. He was the other third of the band.

Jamie turned, bringing his knee up on the couch. “Seriously? What’s wrong?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Um, you remember when I was attacked in North Carolina?”

Jamie said nothing.

Ray said, “The bat.”

“Oh yeah. Shit. What happened?”

“I’ve been having some issues. Audio hallucinations, headaches, vision problems…”

“Have you been to a doctor?”

Ray said, “We’ve figured out how to fix it. For a while at least.”

Jamie looked from Dan to Ray to Dan again, and Ray said, “Never mind. Don’t worry about it.”

Dan let out a breath, but it left a tightness in his chest. On the one hand, he didn’t want to deal with Jamie knowing the truth of it. On the other—drug money for blood, right? But he did look clean: bright-eyed, fleshed out. “Where’re you staying now?” he asked.

“My parents,” Jamie said. “They’re cool with it as long as I’m clean.”

“Sounds fair.”

“What’s up with you anyway?” Jamie said to Ray. “How come you look like shit if he’s the one who’s sick?”

“Too much tobacco, too little sleep, too much worry.” He glanced at his fingers as he got ready to fire his lighter up again. “My nails are so chewed-down, I can’t get the tab on a can of soda up without using a butter knife.”