“How much do you need?” he asked. “I don’t want Marianne getting her filthy fingers on my loot, but I’m glad to give some to you.”

  He hit me in my greed. That’s a bad place. He ran the Lookout, which had to make him one of the richer Negroes in our unfair city. I still didn’t want to do it but, but …. I’ll set my price real high, so high he’ll tell me to forget about it. That’ll take care of that, I thought. What was going on down in the bottom of my mind? Pretty much what you’d guess, only the top part didn’t realize it.

  “Half a grand for me,” I said. “Another couple of hundred for his landlady. If she’s not in on the deal, it’s DOA.”

  Smalls didn’t even blink. “I can do that,” he said, and it came to me that I could have asked for twice as much and he would’ve answered the same way. I’ve been broke so long, what’s a little to a guy with money looks like a hell of a lot to me. He went on, “When will you need it? How do you want it?”

  And then I had to go ahead. I was in too deep to back down. Oh, I could have, but it was curtains for my job if I did. He’d blacken my name on the street, and nobody but nobody’d want anything to do with me after that. Some things, you don’t live down.

  Ever get stuck doing something that makes you hate yourself? Of course you have; everybody has. There I was, up that old, stinking creek without a paddle. I sighed. I lit an Old Gold to stall. “I’m not real thrilled about busting down the door and popping off flashbulbs,” I said.

  That worked as well as I might have known it would. Lamont Smalls knew he had me on the hook. He reeled me in: “I don’t care how you do it. It’s your trade; you work that out. All I care about is results.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll need some of the money up front.” I kept trying to spit out the hook.

  It kept not working. “I’ll bring you the payoff for the landlady tomorrow, and a hundred for yourself,” Smalls said. “You get the rest after you deliver.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You’ve done fine so far. I’m sure you’ll take care of this, too.” Smalls didn’t want the hook to hurt any more than it had to. He just didn’t want it coming loose. I bet he was fun to work for at the paper. He’d fire you and have you nodding along and going, Yeah, I sure do deserve that.

  Out he went, with the photos I’d already taken for him. And since I’d taken those, why wouldn’t I take these? No sensible reason. I don’t wanna is what a short-pants kid says. It wasn’t even noon yet. Lamont Smalls didn’t want his people smelling bourbon on his breath. I didn’t care. I took the bottle out of the drawer and hurt it some more.

  That afternoon was nothing but a waste of time. I put my feet up on the desk and dozed for a while. I had some whiskey in me, I wasn’t sleeping much at night, so why not? Old Man Mose on the couch gave me company. A couple of brainless, useless lumps, that was the two of us.

  Not as if the phone rang to bother him or me. I had more dough than I’d got my hands on in a while, but I still wasn’t drowning in business. I wasn’t working as hard as I should’ve on the business I did have, either. I might’ve gone down to the US Rubber factory to try to learn what had happened to Frank Jethroe. I might’ve tried harder to see what vepratoga was and why Rudolf Sebestyen wanted it.

  I might have, but I didn’t. I slacked off, the way dogfaces would when nobody was shooting at them right then. Tomorrow would be tomorrow. For now, I had my hat down over my eyes to keep the light out. Mose used his tail the same way.

  Wild Turkey doesn’t make a filling lunch. My growling belly was what got me moving again. An awful lot of places’ll sell you a bad dinner in that part of town. I got a hamburger and a plate of French fries at one of them. I’d had worse overseas, hardly ever since I came home. I got out of there as fast as I could.

  As soon as I was on the sidewalk again, I wondered, Okay, now what? I could have gone home, but I didn’t see the point. I’d just rattle around inside the apartment by myself. And I wouldn’t sleep, not for a long time. I could feel that. I’d bought it by napping before.

  So I mooched back to the office. The sun was down; it set earlier by the day. Something may happen, I told myself. What happened was, I fed Old Man Mose, gave him fresh water, and put clean sand in the catbox. That made him happy. Me? I was rolling along, running on cigarettes and greasy food. Sooner or later, I’d run down, maybe grab a little more shuteye the way I had earlier.

  If I put another dent in the Wild Turkey, that might make me sleepy. I tried it. Didn’t work. It made me stupid, though, the way whiskey does—stupid without knowing you’re stupid. Why else would I have called Dora Urban’s number then?

  She answered the phone herself, and recognized my voice right away. “Ah, Mister Mitchell!” she said. “You have news?”

  “No, not really.” I shook my head, as if she could see me through the telephone. “I want to talk to you, that’s all.” Talk was what I said. What I meant. What I thought I meant.

  “I am … not particularly hungry at the moment. I can come to your office, if you like.”

  I’d been in the office all day. Enough was too much. “Can I come see you?” I heard myself say. “In Vampire Village, I mean. I’ve got your number, but I don’t even have your address.”

  “I will give it to you,” she said after a brief pause, and did. I wrote it down. No more than a fifteen-minute walk from where I was. But she hadn’t finished. “Not many … living people would ask this. Coming here now means a certain amount of risk for you, you understand.”

  “Risk anywhere in LA after sunset,” I said. Oh, maybe not on the Westside or up in the Valley, or not so much. But in my part of town. Risk while the sun was shining, too. I’d been in VV after dark a few times. I was still breathing, still warm.

  “If you care to come, I shall not try to stop you,” she said. “I will see you. I hope I will see you.”

  Old Man Mose encouraged me as I put on my hat: “I knew you were nuts, but I didn’t think you were this nuts.”

  “Never can tell, can you?” I went out into the night. Mose could take care of himself. I tried to convince myself I could, too.

  You know right away when you walk into Vampire Village. It’s quiet there. Real quiet. Not many cars go by. The ones that do are all closed up tight, tight, tight. The live people who drive them don’t want anything asking them if it can come in. They’re afraid they might say yes.

  Another difference is, where I live there are as many churches as there are night clubs, and that’s saying something. One on every corner, half the time another one in the middle of the block. Not in VV. They don’t want to hear the Lord’s name there, not even a little bit.

  A punk with slicked-back hair walked past me. I couldn’t tell whether he had fangs or not. As long as he left me alone, I didn’t care. Something flittered past a streetlight. A real bat? A not so real bat? Whatever it was, it didn’t bother me.

  I found the street. The numbers got bigger as I walked down it, so I was going in the right direction. Some houses, some apartment buildings. I didn’t know what I was looking for. And then I did, because there stood Dora, in front of one of the apartment buildings.

  “It is good to see you,” she said seriously. “Did you have any trouble getting here?”

  “Nah.” I shook my head. The streetlights weren’t any brighter than they had to be, but they were bright enough. “You look nice.”

  “Thank you.” The way she said it told me how many, many times she’d heard it before. No doubt every guy who said it to her meant it. I know I did it.

  “What do folks do for fun around here?” I asked.

  “We can walk for a while, if you like,” she answered. “Nothing—no one—will trouble you as long as you are with me.”

  “That sounds all right,” I said, thinking, Finders keepers. Honor among thieves occurred to me, too, but that wasn’t right. She hadn’t stolen me. I was there because I wanted to be.

  A guy in one of the few cars going by tapped his horn when he got an eyeful of Dora. Well, I might have myself, if I were stupid and horny. The look she sent back …. He hit the gas so hard, his Plymouth farted smoke out the tailpipe as he sped up and got the hell out of there.

  I just got the side effects from that look, and it froze my marrow, too. Then she was all charming and old-world again, telling me, “You have more sense than that.”

  “I hope so!” I said, and added, “It would be hard to have less.”

  “Yes, it would,” she agreed. A moment later, she went on, “Something is troubling you? You said you wanted to talk.”

  I had said that, hadn’t I? I found I’d meant it. I told her about Lamont Smalls and Marianne Smalls and Jonas Schmitt. I didn’t name names, but I knew she’d realize who I was talking about. She’d been in Deacon’s with me, after all. She knew which people I’d been paying attention to.

  When I got to the part about the photos I’d already taken and the ones Lamont Smalls wanted me to take, she stopped short in front of a hedge full of white flowers that smelled kind of nasty, if you want to know the truth. “You intend to do this?” she asked. I thought better of you hung in the air, the same way that unpleasant scent did.

  “I’m not happy about it, either, but yeah, I guess I do.” Saying that showed me how not happy about it I was. All the same, I said, “I need the dough, and the guy needs the pictures so he can hang on to his own dough and not give it to his cheating wife.”

  “I understand how these things work,” she said. I bet she did! Before she became a vampire, in how many triangles had she been the hypotenuse? How much more would she have seen in all the years since, however many those were? She clicked her tongue between her teeth. I got a glimpse, a bare glimpse, of pointed canines. “I would not have thought you cared to involve yourself in them, though. It seems … none of your business.”

  “Divorce cases are always part of a detective’s business,” I said. “Not like I’ve never worked any before. I haven’t taken photos like that up till now, though. It’s … part of the filthy side of things.”

  “It is indeed. The ways live people find to steal one another’s small store of happiness never stop amazing me,” she said.

  I felt like an even bigger heel than I had when I told Lamont Smalls I’d do his dirty work for him. Then I remembered that her half brother’d been working out a way to rob the blood bank at County General before he went missing. Live people weren’t the only ones whose hands needed washing.

  That made me feel better, the way you do when you rush out the door without a shower and everybody on the Red Line smells bad. But you don’t feel better for long. They may be dirty, too, but that doesn’t make you clean.

  “Perhaps we should go back the way we came,” Dora said, which made me feel even better than I did before.

  “Whatever you want,” I said. “If you don’t want a rotten son of a gun like me looking for Sebestyen any more, either, all you’ve gotta do is say the word.”

  I brought her up short. I suppose I should’ve been proud of myself; that’s not easy for a live man to do with one of the undead. The way I was then, I hardly even cared. She started to answer, stopped, then started again: “No, thank you. I think you are doing as well as anyone is likely to.” She paused again. “I may have spoken too quickly. Do please forgive me.”

  And how often did a vampire say anything like that to a warm one? Once in a month of blue moons of Sundays. I waved her words aside. “Don’t worry about it. If I were happy with what I was doing, I wouldn’t have bent your ear about it. Thanks for listening.”

  “We do what we do, what we think we must do, not always what we know we should do,” she said. “This does not change, whether alive or undead.” She started walking again—ahead, not back. Something lifted inside me as I went with her. It wasn’t absolution, but maybe you could see that from there.

  A bigger street had shops mixed in with the houses. In most neighborhoods, they would’ve been closed and locked by that time. Not in Vampire Village. Clothing store, jeweler’s, secondhand bookshop, another secondhand bookshop (this one with a rack of out-of-town papers out front)—they all looked to be doing a brisk business.

  “Finding something new and worth reading is a rare joy for us, for whom time stretches long,” Dora said, seeing me peer at the second bookshop’s front window.

  “Sure. Makes sense,” I replied. But that wasn’t why I’d been looking there. I could see my own dim reflection in the plate glass. But hers? Nope. I might have been walking by myself.

  To remind myself she was really there, I took her hand. She felt cool—not cold, but cool. A live woman with cold hands would have seemed warmer. Well, Dora was what she was, the same way I was what I was. Sometimes, some ways, she could make like she was something else. So could I … up to that point.

  She didn’t pull away. “The further you go, the harder it gets to turn around,” she said.

  “That’s how things work, all right,” I said. We walked on.

  Pretty soon, we came to a bar. “Closing time at two a.m. is a nuisance for us. We are trying to get it changed, but we have not managed yet,” she said. “Still early, though. Do you want to go in?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “Bend forward a little,” she said. When I did, she leaned toward me and kissed me on the forehead. Her lips were cool, too. “I have marked you. Not so one of your kind can see—you don’t have lipstick on your skin. But my folk will know you are friends with me. They should not trouble you for a few days, till the sign wears off.”

  “Thanks.” She hadn’t said they will not trouble you, only they should not. I already knew vampires were no more reliable than anybody else. Nobody’s any more reliable than anybody else. That’s what’s wrong with the goddamn world. A big part of what’s wrong with it, anyway.

  I held the door open for her. She inclined her head as she went in before me, a countess acknowledging a courteous commoner. The joint smelled cleaner than most places: not much sour sweat, no puke at all. Another odor was in the air, though, one that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle up. With Dora by herself, I’d never noticed that smell, even if Old Man Mose had. But a bunch of vampires smelled like a bunch of vampires.

  They noticed me, too, the way people at a restaurant would notice if a giant medium-rare T-bone walked in. They didn’t try to take a bite out of me, you understand. Just the same, a few of ’em sure looked as if they wanted to. Maybe that was her protection working.

  We sat down at the bar. I’m pretty sure the guy behind it was another live one. He looked like a Jew. He was skinny and sallow, with haunted eyes. I wondered how long he’d been in the States, and what the fylfot boys had put him through before he got here. A good many Jews help keep an eye on Vampire Village while the sun’s up. Like black folks, they know what getting kicked in the teeth for what you are is all about.

  “What’ll it be?” he asked. Sure enough, his accent was thicker than Dora’s.

  “Bikavér,” she said. I didn’t know what that was, but it didn’t faze the bartender. After nodding, he looked a question at me.

  “Wild Turkey over ice,” I told him. He nodded again.

  The Bikavér turned out to be a deep red wine. As we touched glasses, Dora said, “In English, the name means ‘bull’s blood.’ ” I must have looked startled, because she smiled a little and added, “No, not like the Bloody Mary at Deacon’s. It is called that from the way it looks.”

  “Okay.” I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were the real stuff. I wouldn’t have been bothered, either, unless whoever’d had the blood before hadn’t wanted to lose it.

  Speaking of which …. Whether I had her protection, charm, whatever you want to call it, or not, I wasn’t going to get blotto in the middle of VV. I couldn’t think of a better way, well, to spring a leak.

  A fellow came up, looked at me, looked at Dora, and asked her, “Fattening him up? Or just slumming?” He had an accent, too, one that said he’d spent a long time in Atlanta or Birmingham or somewhere like that.

  “Get lost, Bedford,” she said. When he didn’t shove off right away, she tacked on something that sounded fierce even if it was consonants I couldn’t understand all mashed together. And she bared her teeth at Malachi. Even by vampire standards, they seemed longer and sharper than usual.

  He must’ve thought so, too, because he made himself scarce. Nobody else decided to bother us. I was impressed. “You have some clout around here, don’t you?” I said.

  “It could be. A little,” she answered. I didn’t push her, but I know sandbagging when I hear it.

  We had another drink. She let me sip the Bikavér. I don’t know anything about wine, but it tasted good to me. “From Hungary?” I asked. When she nodded, I went on, “You and your half brother should bring in more of that. You’d do better business than with, uh, the other stuff.”

  “We might, but that line of trade is tightly controlled. Very tightly.” Her slim, elegant fingers closed on the wineglass stem in a strangler’s grip.

  “Okay. You’ll know better than I do.” Since I’d never heard of Bikavér till we went in there, that had to be true.

  “Another?” she asked when we’d got to the bottom of our second ones.

  “Probably not a good idea,” I said. I hadn’t had enough to drink myself stupid, and I wanted to keep it that way. “I’d better head on back. Thanks for the company, though, and thanks for letting me talk before.”

  “What a friend does for a friend,” she said, which made me feel pretty damn good. I settled with the barman, and then we got up and left.

  When we stopped in front of her building, I kissed her. For a split second, when she put a hand on the back of my neck, I got reminded how strong she was. But only for that split second. She felt like a woman in my arms; not a real warm woman, but a woman, yes indeed.