Dora touched my arm. “That was nicely done,” she said.

  “Thanks, babe,” I answered, not thinking. She didn’t call me on it. Either she didn’t mind or she figured we had more important things to worry about. And we did.

  The room had no windows. I shone my flashlight around. The file cabinets against the walls had drawers with labels that started at UA and ran to ZY. On a hunch, I tried to open the drawer with the UP records. It was locked.

  So I went to work again. Most file-cabinet locks are little cheap ones, nothing next to the ones in doors. Most. Not this one. It was a bastard. A bastard and a half, if you want to be exact.

  I was just about to ask Dora for more help when the last pin rose. I muttered, “About time!” as I yanked the drawer open.

  Then I checked the names on the manila folders inside. I felt like shouting when the first one, instead of being for somebody with a handle like Upadsky, read Padden, N. The next one was for Padilla, J. After that came Paige, L. Then Palmisano, G. And I will be damned if the one after that didn’t have Jethroe, F. neatly on it, with a file number: 5149.

  I yanked it out of the drawer and showed it to Dora. “Got one!” I said. “I bet your half brother is in the next drawer down.”

  “We had better not take the time to find out,” she said. “Something is wrong. I felt it as soon as you took that one out.”

  Something was wrong about the whole place. I can’t tell you how she noticed anything worse all of a sudden, but she did. I didn’t argue with her, either. “We beat it?” I asked.

  “We beat it,” she agreed.

  Even when you hurry, you have to watch the details. I closed the drawer, so it wouldn’t be obvious what I’d been looking for. I closed and locked the door that said CLIENTS—U-Z. Dora was already heading for the back door. That probably saved my skin, because the zombie came at her instead of me.

  As I’d said to Izzy Berkowitz, zombies aren’t great fighters. They’re stupid and slow. But they don’t care what you do to them, or feel it. Once they get hold of somebody, they won’t let go for hell. An ordinary live person can’t do enough to make them stop. They keep doing things to a live person till he’s not a live person any more.

  When this one grabbed Dora, she bent his thumb back the way you’d break off a drumstick. I heard the snap. As soon as he didn’t have a good grip on her any more, she slammed him against the wall. Something else snapped then. He tried to stand up anyway, but it’s harder when one leg doesn’t work. She broke one of his arms over her knee, then the other one. He still wanted to keep fighting, but about all he could do was try to bite her kneecaps off.

  “Get past him!” she said urgently.

  And I did, even though the corridor was narrow. The zombie tried to grab me with the hand with the working thumb, but his ruined arm wouldn’t let him. I just hoped the sorcerous alarm wouldn’t loose more of them against us. We got out of there as fast as we could. I locked the back door, too.

  “They will know they had visitors,” Dora observed.

  “What? You think a wrecked zombie is a clue?” I said.

  “If this is humor, it is not good humor.”

  “Good humor is ice cream,” I said. She looked at me. I gave up. “Let’s go home,” I told her. And we did.

  ​XIV

  We had to wait a while for the bus that took us back to the closest Red Line stop; they don’t run so often in the middle of the night. If any more zombies had come after us, we might’ve been in trouble. But everything behind us stayed quiet. Whoever’d designed their alarm system had figured rousing one would be plenty. He hadn’t counted on a burglar having a vampire along for company.

  I couldn’t look at the folder before the bus pulled up, or after we got on. The lights were down low, and with reason. The only passenger on board with us was a wino snoring while she leaned against the window.

  She woke up when we got off, but only to give us an indignant stare: how had we appeared out of nowhere? We hadn’t, of course, but her muscatel-muddied mind couldn’t work that out before we disappeared again.

  Another wait in the dark till the trolley came up. Dora tapped the folder with a fingernail. “What do you hope to learn?” she asked.

  “How they got hold of him. Where they unloaded him—they must have, because I’m sure he wasn’t in that storeroom.” I shuddered. I never wanted to think of that storeroom again as long as I lived. I knew I would, too, of course, want to or not. “Maybe who’s in cahoots with them at US Rubber. Somebody is, that’s for sure.”

  “What will you do if the papers make it look as though he chose to become a zombie?” she said.

  I grimaced. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’ll do if it’s plain as plain he didn’t. I ought to take it to the police, but …”

  Dora let out a scornful snort, a noise that a vampire—especially a beautiful lady vampire—shouldn’t have been able to make. “But,” she agreed, a word that was a paragraph and a half all by itself.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. If US Rubber wasn’t working with the LAPD, Dewey, Beagle, & Howe was. I wondered who Elmer V. Jackson got his marching orders from. And I wondered how long it would be before I found out.

  A couple of cars went by. I couldn’t see inside them. Whoever was in them probably couldn’t see us, either, or anything the headlights didn’t paint. Then a solo beam higher off the ground announced the Red Line car. I put a dime in the fare box; Dora used two nickels. “Transfers, please,” I told the motorman.

  “You got ’em, suh.” The way he spoke, the way he eyed me, said he didn’t hear please every week. He eyed Dora, too, as any man might have. “Y’all’re out late.”

  “We were visiting friends,” she said. Her very precise English, and the accent that flavored it, made him start minding his own business again. Kind of a shame; she didn’t mean to do that.

  Half an hour later, we walked into her apartment. She started running a bath. I understood that; something unclean had laid hands on her. Of course she wanted to scrub it off. I would have, too.

  While she washed, I sat down on the sofa and looked at the Jethroe, F. folder. A slightly blurry photo said it did have to do with the Frank Jethroe I wanted to find. Somebody’d written a code on the back: 583 USR.

  That made my mouth fall open. The US Rubber people who were doing whatever the hell they were doing had sent 582 other people to be made into zombies or people who’d already been made into zombies to PERSONAL ASSISTANCE, PERSONAL ASSISTANTS? At least 582? How much turnover on their production lines did they have? Or were they dragging people in off the streets? That happened all the time in B movies. In real life, it wasn’t supposed to.

  After I reeled my lower jaw back up into place, I went through the papers that backed up the photograph. If I remembered straight, and I was sure I did, the date on the form was the day he’d stopped to take a leak before he got on the bus, then didn’t get on. Nobody’d seen him once he walked into the men’s room … nobody except the people who’d got him to the zombie dealership, I should say.

  Everything on the forms was neatly printed in block letters, the way a fifth grader might have done it. Did Frank Jethroe fill out paperwork like that? I had my doubts, but Clarice would be able to tell me one way or the other. Where the form asked the reason for seeking the process, Jethroe or whoever’d done the writing answered I OWE TOO MUCH DOUGH. From what his wife said, the family didn’t have killing debts. They might have scuffled to get by, but that isn’t the same thing.

  On the last line of the enrollment form’s back page were a thumbprint and a signature. It said Frank Jethroe, but no grown-up in the world writes that way. It was clear and legible and utterly without character, soul, personality—you choose the right name. Either somebody else did it on purpose, or he’d already been zombified when they stuck a pen in his hand. I knew how I’d guess.

  Except for the dark storeroom full of soulless, spiritless things, that signature scared me more than anything else about the whole night. I kept looking at it; I couldn’t stop myself. Every time I did, it got worse.

  I had to make myself go on to the form that said what happened to him. He’d been leased out to O’Flannery and Muldoon, one of the biggest road-building outfits in the county. He might be anywhere, anywhere at all.

  Then Dora walked out into the front room. She had on bedroom slippers, and nothing else from there on up. If that wasn’t a distraction, nothing ever would be. She smelled of soap and scented bath oil. “I know what you need,” she said.

  I slammed the folder closed and tossed it aside. “You bet I do!” I said, instead of Jesus Christ, do I ever! Then I asked, “How about you?”

  “Yes, some. I do not always think myself lucky for my state, but I do now,” she answered. “There are worse ways to be, and that is worth celebrating.”

  So we celebrated. By the time we finished, twilight warned that sunrise wasn’t far off. She got out of bed and went to her coffin to wait out the short winter day. Me? I put on pajamas. The apartment was always chilly, not that she cared.

  I woke up in the early afternoon, which was moving from strange toward normal. You work the graveyard shift these days, I thought as I flipped on the hot plate. I’m not real funny till I’ve had my coffee. I grabbed breakfast at a little diner on the edge of Vampire Village and went on up to my office.

  Old Man Mose gave me a sour stare when I came in. “You really are on cats’ time these days,” he said, so he couldn’t have been at his best, either. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who needed coffee.

  “Complain, complain, complain,” I said. I cleaned out his bowl at the sink in the little bathroom, then opened a can and plopped some fresh mashed tuna in there. He kept slaloming between my legs while I carried it over to where it goes, so I could trip over him and kill myself. I didn’t, quite. As soon as I put the food down, he slammed his face into it. I watched him for a few seconds. “How do you like me now?”

  “Jush fine,” he answered with his mouth full, and went back to making a pig of himself.

  I called Lamont Smalls. “What can I do for you today, Mister Mitchell?” he asked when the Lookout switchboard put me through. He sounded wary. He was probably wondering if I had something I could use to blackmail him.

  “I’ve come across a story you may want to use in your paper,” I answered. “I can show you what I’ve got if you want to come over and have a look at it.”

  “Why don’t you tell me now?” he said.

  “I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

  He thought for a little while. “I suppose I can get over there about half past four, if that’s all right with you.”

  “That’s fine,” I answered, and we said our goodbyes. He’d always been I’ll run right over! when I was getting him dirt on sweet, unfaithful Marianne. A story for the Lookout? That wasn’t so important.

  He knocked on the door when he said he would; I give him that. When he showed up, he looked the way he always did: smart, well dressed, successful, unhappy. I waved him to the sofa. As he sat, he asked, “What’s so hot you can’t talk about it on the telephone?”

  I told him the story of poor Frank Jethroe. After I told him, I showed him the file from the zombie dealership. “Look at these papers,” I said. “Are you going to tell me a grown man filled them out?”

  He studied them while he pulled at his lower lip and let it go back into place with a wet plop. I don’t think he knew he was doing it; it drove me nuts. “This is connected to US Rubber, you say? That big, weird factory where you think the Assyrians came down like the wolf on the fold?”

  “Their cohorts were gleaming in silver and gold.” Nobody’d out-Byron me.

  Only he did. “Purple and gold,” he corrected absently, and went on, “Can you nail this down tight?”

  “Not yet. I just found out a little while ago. But this was the day he went to the men’s room before he caught the next bus toward home. Only he didn’t catch it. Either he decided out of the blue, Hey, I’ll turn zombie, and went off and did it or somebody there did it to him.”

  Smalls flipped to the last form in the folder. “Not just US Rubber but US Rubber plus O’Flannery and Muldoon? That makes everything even better, doesn’t it?”

  “You run the Lookout. Are you on the lookout for stories or not? I promise you, he’s not the only black man this has happened to. People need to know.”

  “Yes. They do.” He touched the manila folder with the Jethroe, F. label. “Can I take this with me?”

  “No. Not yet. You don’t want to know what I went through to get it. But I’m only one guy.” I didn’t say a word about Dora, and didn’t intend to. “You’ve got reporters you can send out to see if this is real. Five gets you ten they don’t have to look real hard.”

  “That’s so.” He fished out a little notebook and wrote in it. Of course he would’ve been a reporter himself before he was an editor. When he finished, the notebook went back into that inside breast pocket. “Is it all right if they talk to you tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon. I have some things I need to do in the morning.” I didn’t tell him about the hours I was keeping, either.

  “Okay. You’ll hear from somebody then.” Out he went, doing that thing with his hand and his lip again. I’d given him something to think about, anyhow.

  I got to the office early the next day: not much past eleven. The telephone rang at a quarter to two. “Mitchell Investigating,” I said.

  “Hello, Mister Mitchell. Lamont Smalls here.” Not a reporter. The big man himself.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I … talked to a few people this morning. It … doesn’t look like we’ll be able to go ahead with this story. The risk is just too big.”

  “What kind of risk?”

  “A risk to the newspaper. The owner would not be happy with me if I put her property in jeopardy.” The lady who owned the Lookout was the widow of a brown man who’d made a fortune in insurance. Harder than winning the Irish Sweepstakes, but he did it. She was brown herself, only not very, and didn’t always like getting reminded about it.

  “You’d be doing a lot for the folks who read the rag if you let them know what’s going on around here,” I said.

  “I have to weigh the present against the future. You see a lot more crusading newspapermen in the movies than you do for real,” Smalls said. I believed him. It sure as hell worked the same way with detectives. He added, “I didn’t use your name at all. I just said I’d heard a few things.”

  “Thanks.” I meant it, though I knew his discretion wouldn’t do me any good. The people who mattered, the people with money, the people who told other people what to do, they’d know Lamont Smalls wasn’t asking about zombies because some hotshot reporter of his had stumbled over the story on his own. They’d know he’d got it from me. And they’d know that salamander hadn’t cooked me after all.

  I wondered what would do me any good. The only thing I could think of was locking up the whole LAPD, or at least the Vice Squad, and losing the key. That wouldn’t happen. I knew it wouldn’t, too. The old line, Who will watch the watchmen? Nobody watches the watchmen. When they realize nobody does …

  When they realize that, you’ve got the City of Angels, the way she is today. You can love it or you can hate it. The only way you can get away from it is to move out. I didn’t have the jack for that. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, either.

  I called Clarice Jethroe once I figured she was home. I guessed right. I’d almost rather have guessed wrong. This way, I had to tell her what had happened to her husband.

  “They can’t do that!” she explained when I got done.

  “They aren’t supposed to do that,” I said. “It’s not the same thing. I wish it were.”

  “What can you do? What can I do?” she asked.

  “I’ll go to O’Flannery and Muldoon’s headquarters tomorrow. I’ll see if I can find out where Frank is and whether they’ll turn him loose. If they do, the next thing is to find a wizard who can bring him back to being Frank Jethroe instead of a shovel that walks on two legs.”

  “And if they don’t?” Mrs. Jethroe knew the questions that needed asking, sure as hell.

  I sighed. “If they don’t, two choices I can see. One is just stealing him.”

  “He’s a man. You can’t steal a man!”

  We both had ancestors whose owners would have told her different. They thought abolitionists stole slaves. They thought slaves who ran away stole themselves. Mentioning that didn’t seem likely to make things better, though.

  Instead, I said, “I wouldn’t try it anyway. They’d have a pretty good idea where to look if he disappeared all of a sudden.”

  “Yeah, they would,” she said, her voice going dull. “What’s my other choice, Mister Mitchell?”

  “A lawyer,” I answered.

  She laughed the sour laugh of somebody who’d just heard somebody else say something really stupid. “I barely got the money to pay you. You know it, too. How’m I gonna afford one o’ them leeches?”

  “Maybe you can get somebody to take it on pro bono.” I realized I’d better explain that: “For nothing, because it’s the right thing to do and because you can’t afford to pay. Somebody who wants to make a splash for himself might want to tackle it.” I wondered if my own mouthpiece would do that. I doubted it. Wally Baker was a pretty damn fine lawyer, but he liked the good things in life. He liked them a lot.

  “I dunno,” Clarice Jethroe muttered, so low I could hardly hear her. I couldn’t pump her hopes up very high, because I didn’t know, either. She went on, “You go on out there tomorrow, like you said. Maybe the company’ll let him go on account of it’s the right thing to do.”