The Eye of the Moon (40 page)

De La Cruz, understandably, was in a state of abject panic. Not least because he still had no idea where the hell Benson had got to. His colleague had not been seen since early morning, when he had left headquarters without saying a word to anyone about where he was headed. On top of that was the small matter of the stories he was hearing about the Fawcett Inn, the Tapioca and the Nightjar. All had received an unwelcome visit from the Bourbon Kid. Massacres had taken place in each of them. The next stop for the hooded maniac would no doubt be police headquarters.

De La Cruz was extremely tempted to make a run for it, but he knew that would leave him on his own, looking over his shoulder for the rest of his days, waiting for a visit from the Grim Reaper. He was going to have to call in as many officers as he could and make a stand right there in the building. His main problem was that it was getting late, and the only cops that liked working the late shift were the ones who happened to be vampires. One such officer was the red-haired receptionist, Francis Bloem. He was doing his damnedest to find available colleagues of the undead kind to come and help protect De La Cruz (and Benson, if he showed his face again any time soon).

As it happened, Bloem was going nuts as he sat at his desk in reception. Trying to track down any available officers was proving all but impossible. Many of those he had tried to contact were no longer answering their cell phones or responding on the police networks. The reasons why weren’t exactly clear, but there was a distinct possibility that many of
them were unable to respond because they were dead. He was shifting uncomfortably in his chair, flicking through his own small black personal address book in the hope of getting some alternate contact details for any of his fellow officers, when De La Cruz came bounding over. It was obvious the detective was badly spooked. His smart red shirt was practically glued to him by the wet patches of sweat that made it look as though he’d taken a shower in his clothes.

‘You found anyone yet?’ he asked urgently, unable to hide the panic in his voice.

‘The only two guys who have responded to the call are Goose and Kenny, sir. They’re on their way here now,’ Bloem responded.

De La Cruz’s jaw dropped open. Only
two
officers available? And two absolute deadbeats, to boot. His disappointment was all too evident.

‘Goose and Kenny?’ he groaned.

‘Yessir.’

‘We are
so
fucked.’

‘I’ll keep trying to get hold of some of the other guys, sir, but no one seems to be responding. Reckon they know what’s coming and don’t want any part of it. Or they’re already dead.’

De La Cruz frowned and picked up a piece of foolscap-sized scrap paper from Bloem’s desk. It had a handwritten list of officers on it and all of them had crosses next to their names, with the exception of Goose and Kenny, who had ticks. What if Benson had decided to back away as well? Or had been killed? If the reports that were trickling through were true, then Hunter had just been given an absolute pounding at the merciless hands of the Bourbon Kid. So much for immortality. In spite of what they had come to believe, drinking blood from the golden chalice didn’t seem to be making too much difference. If the Kid got his hands on you, you were still fucked either way. Not good. Not good at all.
Damn you, Benson,
he thought.
You’d better not have bailed on me. Not now.

***

At that precise moment Randy Benson was standing at the reception desk in the local clinic just two miles down the road. The clinic had been reopened that evening at his request. Having closed at the normal time of 5 p.m. the key members of staff had been dragged back in, courtesy of Benson. They weren’t overly happy about it, either, but a police emergency warranted – indeed, demanded – their cooperation.

Benson had a book in his hands and was reading some details aloud from it to the woman at the reception desk. The nurse in question, Jolene Bird, scribbled down the numbers he read out to her. She was a little nervous at being in the presence of a senior member of the local police, and was struggling to hide it. With her free hand she fiddled constantly with her curly blonde hair, and when she wasn’t doing that she was adjusting her wing-framed blue spectacles. Anything to keep her hands busy. She’d worked at the clinic for a good twenty years, and she could recognize a serious visit from the police when she saw one. They were usually linked to a murder. This looked like one of those times. The mere knowledge that she could make a mistake that might result in a murder investigation being compromised made her seriously edgy.

‘Do you have the warrant with you, sir?’ she asked Benson, making only fleeting eye contact.

‘Sure,’ Benson smiled, in an attempt to put her at ease. He pulled a piece of yellow paper from the breast pocket on his shirt and handed it over the desk to her.

‘Great, thanks,’ Jolene smiled back nervously as she gratefully accepted the warrant. She proceeded to do her best to concentrate on its main points for a few moments to ensure it was all in order, then she folded it in half and placed it in a large pocket on the front of her long white coat.

‘This all appears to be in order,’ she said. ‘If you’d like to follow me I’ll take you down there now and fetch it for you.’ She opened a metal cupboard behind her, looked around inside it for several seconds, selected a key, which she pocketed, then closed the cupboard door and stood up.

Benson followed Nurse Bird through a set of double
doors and down a couple of corridors, staying a yard behind the whole time so that he could admire her neat little backside. If he’d needed to know the way back in an emergency he’d be in all kinds of trouble. He took little notice of where he was being led; keeping his eyes focused on the swivelling cheeks beneath the nurse’s white coat. She eventually led him down several flights of stairs to the basement, and by the time they arrived at a locked vault guarded by two bulky security men in blue uniforms, he still hadn’t been able to work out whether she was wearing any underwear.

The huge grey door to the vault in front of them had a sign above it which read ‘CRYOPRESERVATION CHAMBER’.

‘May we go in, please?’ Nurse Bird asked.

‘Sure thing, Jolene,’ said one of the guards. He turned and typed a six-digit code into a keypad on the wall behind him. Jolene then stepped forward and typed in a code of her own. Next, she looked into a retina-scanning device placed at head height just above the keypad. A white light flashed in the unit. The scanning software duly recognized the retina in front of it and the vault door hissed a little then automatically began to open outwards. It came open slowly, moving just a few inches before suddenly stopping. It was a thick steel door and the release of the locking mechanism was only powerful enough to nudge it open a little way. One of the two guards pulled it the rest of the way open and held it back, ushering the two visitors through it. Jolene Bird walked in first, followed by Benson.

‘Phew, it’s cold in here,’ the detective remarked. He wasn’t actually feeling the cold at all, but the bright white walls made the chamber look as though it should be cold. His own blood temperature was low enough for the cold not to bother him, but as he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt it seemed an appropriate comment to make in the circumstances.

‘Yes,’ smiled Nurse Bird. ‘We tend not to have the heating on down here.’ She reached into her pocket and withdrew the yellow paper.

Inside the cryopreservation chamber was a series of
long aisles flanked by numbered deposit boxes from floor to ceiling. To the left of the door as they entered was a six-runged stepladder, in case anyone should need to reach one of the deposit boxes high up. There were about thirty aisles stretching the length of the room. Each aisle was long enough and tall enough to hold approximately a thousand of the small metal-fronted boxes.

Once again the nurse led the way and Benson followed, past about ten aisles before they eventually stopped by one with the code 9N86 in black letters on the near face of the aisle. Jolene checked the piece of paper in her hand and confirmed to herself she had the right area, then she turned into the aisle and followed it down for about sixty feet. She came to a stop at box number 8447, which was situated just below head height on the left-hand side of the aisle.

From a side pocket in her lab coat she produced the key that she had brought with her from reception. Despite the cold having numbed her fingers she managed to insert it cleanly into the lock on the box, which was set just below the number. Once she was satisfied that she had pushed it in far enough she turned it easily to the right and a clicking sound followed, much to her relief.

‘To be honest, I doubt we would ever have needed this one anyway,’ she said, pulling the small door open and beginning to slide out the box behind it. ‘It’s such a rare blood type. We’ve never seen its kind before.’

She reached into the box and pulled out a one-pint plastic package of frozen blood, which she handed to Benson. He took a look at it and smiled at her once more.

‘Well, Archibald Somers was no ordinary guy, was he?’ he replied.

Peto took a drag on his cigarette and surveyed the carnage around them. The Nightjar was a spectacular, bloodied mess. There were limbs and other body parts strewn across the floor and wedged between tables and chairs, detached from their owners’ bodies by the Kid’s heavy dum-dum rounds. By now, quite a few decaying remains of vampires were already little more than dust and ash. Smoke and steam was rising from so many of the chunks of flesh on the floor that the place was beginning to look like an indoor swamp. Reflecting on what had gone before, Peto blew the smoke out from his lungs and turned his attention back to the man at the bar with him, the Bourbon Kid.

‘I gotta know. Did you kill Kyle? Or was that someone else?’ he asked. The Kid was sitting to Peto’s left, but with Dante in between the two of them, although it was obvious that it was the Kid that Peto was speaking to. On the counter stood three bourbon glasses, two of them empty and one still half full. Beside them were two glasses of beer, still almost full.

‘Who the fuck’s Kyle?’

‘He was my best friend. He got killed in the Tapioca during the last eclipse.’

Dante butted in.

‘I think Gene Simmons or Freddie Krueger shot Kyle. The cops just blamed our man here, probably because it was convenient.’

‘Yeah,’ said the Kid, shrugging as he took a drag of his own cigarette. ‘They’ve pinned hundreds of murders on me
that I can’t really take credit for. If you believe all you hear, I’m responsible for shooting everyone from Liberty Valance to Nice Guy Eddie.’

‘Who?’ asked Peto.

‘Doesn’t matter.’

Dante decided to speak up on a small matter that was bothering him somewhat.

‘You did just kill the guys from the Shades, though, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Weren’t they friends of yours?’

‘I don’t have friends.’

‘I can’t think why,’ Peto chipped in.

‘Believe it or not, it’s my choice.’

‘Sure.’

‘Look, dumbass, if I get close to someone, then that person is gonna get hunted down by vampires and werewolves and all kinds of other scum. I’ve had to distance myself from anyone I ever cared about. Seems I didn’t distance myself enough, though, because now my kid brother is dead. They killed him to get to me. Count yourselves lucky I don’t consider either of you two as friends, or you’d both be dead within a week.’

‘Your brother’s dead?’ Dante blurted it out.

‘Yeah. Killed by that Hunter fucker and four of his friends. Two more of ’em still have to suffer yet before my work is done. So you ask me if I was friends with some of these vampires and my answer is no. I hated every fuckin’ one of them. I been waitin’ for fucknuts over here to show up with the Eye of the Moon so I could get rid of this vampire blood that’s contaminatin’ my veins. Maybe then I could lead a normal life. And then –
and only then –
will I consider having friends.’

‘So you didn’t even like the other members of the Shades?’ Dante persisted, unnecessarily.