The Eye of the Moon (34 page)

Pedro hadn’t really got the point of his companion overemphasizing the
It’s piss
joke, so he picked up his tray of drinks and carried it over to the werewolves’ table and set it down. The hooker now had nowhere to sit because Pedro wanted his chair back, so she stood up and proposed a toast.

‘To Pedro, the new boss!’ she called out.

‘To Pedro!’ the others chimed in unison. There was a chorus of chinking glasses as they all toasted their leader. Their mood was buoyant and the drinks were free. What more could a werewolf or a hooker ask for?

Their cheeriness was soon drowned out, however, by the sound of Sanchez charging down the stairs. When he made it to the bottom he grabbed Sally’s arm as she was placing a drink down on the bar.

‘Hey, you see the girl from upstairs anywhere?’ he demanded, tugging hard on his employee’s arm.

‘No, why? She not upstairs?’ asked Sally.

‘No she ain’t.
Jesus, woman,
she’s gone. How the fuck did you miss her? She must have walked out this way? Aw, fuck!’ Sanchez was unable to hide the anger in his voice He was furious with the barmaid. She had been made well aware of how precious Jessica was. The beautiful woman upstairs wasn’t a secret Sanchez shared with many people. Unfortunately, Sally had wandered upstairs once and seen Jessica asleep, so he had been forced to divulge a little information about the woman he had secretly been in love with all these years. He also issued a simple instruction: never let anyone up there, and never let Jessica out without him knowing about it.

Before he could tear into his hapless employee, Sanchez
heard a voice that made his stomach flip and his blood run cold..

‘Hey, barmaid. Fill the glass.’

He looked over at the man sat at the bar. Now Sanchez hadn’t shit himself since he was a kid, but he very nearly lost control of his ass at the sight of the Bourbon Kid sitting in his bar with a glass of the gold stuff in front of him.
Holy-fuckin’-shit-I-don’t-need-this,
he thought in his terror.

Before Sanchez could speak, or even reach out to try to grab the glass of bourbon from where it sat on the bar, a glassful of warm piss was thrown in his face. It went in his eyes, mouth, nostrils and ears, and then began to drip down his nice white ‘FUCK OFF’ T-shirt.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been soaked in his own special brew, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. Karma had a habit of catching up with Sanchez at times like this. As the shock subsided he took a moment to wipe his eyes to try to rid himself of the stinging sensation that was now making him weep a little. Standing at the bar was one very angry wannabe werewolf rapper, with a furious snarl distorting his face.

‘You fuckin’ scumbag, Sanchez!’ Pedro was shouting. ‘That ain’t the first time that fuckin’ bitch has pulled that piss trick!’

The five other werewolves and the hooker remained at their table, fuming. Each had taken a swig of the piss in their glasses, and somehow each had managed to spit some of the foul liquid over whoever was sitting opposite them at the table. They were all trying to brush the stuff of their faces with their hands, spluttering and hawking as they tried to rid themselves of the taste.

Sally stepped back out of range of the angry werewolf. She clearly felt safer topping up the glass of bourbon on the bar than dealing with the angry figure of Pedro. For a moment the stunned Sanchez didn’t know where to look or what to say. Then he just blurted out the first thing that came into his head.

‘That’s the
Bourbon Kid!’
he yelled, pointing at his newest
customer.

Pedro turned sharply and looked at the Kid who was sitting at the bar. He still hadn’t pulled his hood over his head.

‘Don’t talk fuckin’ stupid, Sanchez, I know this guy, his name’s …’

Before he could finish his sentence the Kid sprang from his barstool and grabbed the thick black hair on the back of the rapper’s head. Then he smashed his face down on to the bartop.

CRACK! – The sound of Pedro’s nose breaking echoed around the bar. The Kid pulled his victim’s head back up. It was already slick with blood and his nose was no longer in the middle of his face.

ROAR! – A new sound. That of Pedro instinctively turning into a werewolf. Ready for a fight.

SMASH! – Face down on the bartop again.

And again.

And again.

This werewolf had taken great pleasure in the slaughter of Casper, an innocent whose brother had not been there to save him. He had to be made to pay. No quick death for this piece of filth. Seven times in succession the werewolf’s face was cracked down on to the bartop and hauled back up again. Each time it came back up it looked twice as bad as before. The seventh time the wolfman’s face hit the bartop it yielded a loud cracking noise as a set of huge fangs shattered and flew out of his mouth and over the bar.

The Bourbon Kid pulled Pedro’s battered wolf face back up from the counter one last time and dragged him a foot back from the bar, once more pulling him by the thick hair on his head. The werewolf was unsteady on his feet, utterly dazed by the savage speed of the attack, which had taken him completely by surprise. While he was still struggling to regain his senses, his attacker shaped his free hand into a half-clenched fist. Then, in one sudden move of unimaginable violence he plunged his sharp clawed fingers into the wolf’s
soft neck. They pierced the skin and flesh with horrible ease. An unpleasant squelching sound followed. The Kid’s hand wriggled and pulled at the wolf’s throat for a few brief seconds and then snapped back, leaving a gaping bloodied hole where the front of Pedro’s neck had been. In the Kid’s grip was a pulsating lump of bloodied gristle that had once been Pedro’s Adam’s apple.

For a few seconds he held the bloodied flesh out in front of the werewolf, allowing the dying eyes to stare at it as they slowly began to roll upwards in their sockets. After checking that Pedro’s pupils had disappeared up into his skull, the Kid released his grip on the dying body, and watched it crumple to the floor. He then tossed the bloody Adam’s apple nonchalantly over the bar, where it hit Sanchez in the face and slipped to the ground.

The five other werewolves and the hooker at the table in the middle of the barroom had remained motionless all through the attack, paralysed by the fear that had gripped them. All had desperately hoped that Pedro would fight back and triumph. Now, one look into the eyes of the Bourbon Kid as he turned slowly to face them was all it took to convince them how matters stood. None of them wanted to hang around, and they rapidly came to their senses, threw their chairs back and charged for the exit. Only the hooker remained seated, hoping to be left alone.

The wolves were not quick enough. The Kid produced a wooden-handled knife with a bright ten-inch blade from within his dark robe, raised it above his shoulder and then launched it at the partly open door. It effortlessly penetrated the open door, the tip coming out on the other side. The door was struck with such ferocity by the blade that it swung on its hinges and slammed shut, embedding the pointed end of the knife in the side of the door frame, thereby bolting the door shut and trappping everyone inside.
That blade is going to take some shifting,
Sanchez thought, his mind fixing on trifles at the moment of greatest danger.

The werewolves all stopped dead. Turning to face the bar,
they watched in open-mouthed horror as the Kid lifted his dark hood up over his head. He then pulled one of his trademark Skorpion automatic pistols from inside his robe, pointed it down at the lifeless bloodied mess of the body on the floor by his feet, and blasted a silver bullet through Pedro’s face. Gobbets of blood and matter sprayed everywhere, making splashing noises as they hit the walls. The Kid looked back up at his audience and focused his glare on them once more. All that was could be seen within the dark cowl were the whites of his eyes.

Fearing for their undead lives, the wolfmen began to back away. Their tormentor raised his free hand to indicate that they should remain still.

‘Bartender,’ he snarled in his unmistakable gravelly tone, without even looking over at Sanchez.

‘Yeah?’

‘Top up my drink while I redecorate your bar.’

Robert Swann wanted this mission over and done with, and he wanted to get his hands on Kacy. There were two things that could bring this case to a close. The first was if Dante found and identified the monk Peto. To Swann, that didn’t look like it was going to happen any time soon because Dante was too much of a loser. The second thing that might bring the case to an end would be if Dante was identified as an impostor by the vampires and killed as a result. One of those two things would happen tonight, Swann was convinced of it. As he pulled the syringe out of Dante’s arm after the usual early-evening injection of the blood-cooling serum, he took a long look at Kacy. She was gazing like a love-struck teenager at her moron boyfriend. Swann longed for the day when a woman might look at him like that. Especially a hot one, like Kacy. He had put on his smartest grey chino trousers and a clean black shirt after remembering how she had seemed to warm to him when he’d worn a suit the previous night.

‘Have a good night, buddy,’ he said to Dante as he took the empty syringe into the bathroom to clean and sterilize it.

Dante ignored Swann and pulled the sleeve on his black sweatshirt back down. He was sitting on the double bed in their room next to Kacy, with Roxanne Valdez hovering over them. She had relayed to Dante the whole story of the previous evening when Kacy and Swann had got drunk together over dinner. It hadn’t gone down well so Kacy wasn’t about to rile him further by dressing in anything sexy that might get Swann’s eyes popping out of his head. She had just thrown on a pair of jeans and a white sweatshirt. Dante tugged at the
sleeve of her shirt and pulled her towards, him planting a kiss on her lips.

‘This is all gonna be over tonight, babe, I can feel it,’ he said confidently. ‘I’m startin’ to get used to the feel of this serum and now that I’m well in with these vampire guys I can start askin’ a few more questions. I feel good about tonight.’

Kacy got to her knees on the bed and kissed him on the forehead.

‘I’ll stay up and wait for you. Be good.’

‘Love you, Kace.’

‘Love you too.’

Valdez stepped towards the couple on the bed. ‘C’mon now, Dante,’ she said. ‘No time like the present. The sooner you get going, the sooner you’ll find the monk. I’ve a good feeling about tonight, too. It’s Halloween and everyone will be drunker’n hell and in good spirits. So there’s a good chance the monk will make contact with you if he gets plasterered like everyone else.’

Dante kissed Kacy on the lips once again and got up from the bed. Roxanne tossed his sleeveless black leather Shades jacket over to him and he caught it on his way out of the room, slinging it over his shoulder as he went. He walked through the sitting room and into the hall. Reaching the front door of the apartment, he pulled it open and looked back at Kacy one last time. She was still sitting on the bed on her knees gazing lovingly back at him, so he gave her a quick sexy wink and stepped out into the corridor.

As Dante was closing the door behind him, Swann was coming back out of the bathroom with the sterilized syringe in his hand. ‘Gone has he?’ he asked, smiling broadly.

Kacy nodded back at him from the bed, a sad look spreading across her face at the thought of Dante out in the perilous world of the vampires once more. She would have looked a good deal sadder if she’d known what Swann was so happy about. When he had given Dante his nightly injection of the serum, he had actually filled the syringe with water instead of the blood coolant.

Swann wanted Dante out of the picture, and by injecting him with nothing more than water, he had ensured the vampires would finally recognize him for the impostor he was.