“The things she must have done!” I said.

  “She existed. When the hunger got to be too much, she fed. She mostly stayed away from live people otherwise. Live people are dangerous—they move about while we must lie quiet. The sun never struck her.” Dora paused. “It seems only yesterday that any live people thought my kind should be allowed to go on existing like other folk.”

  There are still black people alive who were born slaves. There were more of them when I was a kid. I met one or two—and paid no attention to them, because they were old and wrinkled and gray, and I was a kid. The vampire Dora was talking about wouldn’t have changed, not to look at, in those thousands of years.

  Somewhere, there might be a vampire who remembered the Neanderthals. There might be a vampire who was a Neanderthal.

  “It is good that here in America we do not always have to feel hunted. In America, and in a few other places,” Dora said. “But who can guess how long that will last? It may be one more passing thing.”

  When I was a kid, white men would march in KKK robes. They still thought we should be slaves. They mostly don’t do that any more, except in the South. Could they start again? You never can tell.

  Dora went on, “The years pile up. Some of us have ways to deal with that. For others, like my half brother, they grow too heavy to stand. It might happen twice as fast if we could bear up under the fire from heaven. It might not happen at all if we could fully join the daylight world. Or it might vary from one of us to another.”

  “Would you want to find out yourself if you could use the drug without turning into something like a zombie? You would, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. I said as much to the zsidó doctor when we talked on the telephone,” she answered. “It is exciting. But it is frightening at the same time. Any change that cannot be changed back is frightening when you risk regretting it forever.”

  When she said forever, she meant forever. If she found out she regretted going out by day and night, she’d still be regretting it when the wizards figured out how to put a man on the Moon. Or on Mars. Or on some planet going around Arcturus. Three score and ten meant nothing to her. Not a thing.

  I did go to the office for a little while, to make sure Old Man Mose didn’t starve to death and to remind him which side his canned mackerel was buttered on. As he dug into the glop, I said, “Beats the hell out of lizards and grasshoppers, doesn’t it?”

  He looked up at me as if he thought humans were stupid. Well, of course he thought humans were stupid—he was a cat. After he cleaned off his pink nose with his tongue, he said, “The stuff you give me tastes fine, sure. But it just sits there in the bowl. I don’t get to chase it down and kill it. Takes half the fun out of eating.”

  “If you say so,” I answered.

  “I do say so.” Mose sounded at least as regal as Dora did. Cats and vampires both have very high opinions of themselves. Cats and vampires are both convinced they’re entitled to have those opinions. Since they compare themselves to live people, who’s to say they’re wrong?

  Mose leaned down and started feeding his fuzzy face again. He drank some water from the other bowl. He used the catbox. He did cover up what he’d done there. He was good about that, as good as the average human is about flushing the people box. Not all cats are, God knows. Of course, not all humans are average or higher, either.

  Then he hopped up onto the sofa. I scratched the sides of his jaw and under his chin. He liked that; he rolled over onto his back so I could rub his tummy. I did, cautiously. He enjoys it, then all of a sudden he doesn’t and decides he has to murder my hand. I jerked it away before he could grab it with his front feet and use his back legs to rip its guts out.

  The exercise brought him back on to his stomach. He curled up and got ready to go to sleep. I went back to my desk. There’s always paperwork, and I’m always behind because I hate it even more than I hate canned spinach. Eating spinach is good for you—hey, ask Popeye. So is doing paperwork. I’ve heard that, anyway. I don’t really believe it.

  Only Old Man Mose didn’t go to sleep. He stuck up his head and stared at a stretch of wall near the door. His ears pointed that way, too. I didn’t see anything or hear anything. He might have spotted a little moth or a gnat. Or he might have been looking at nothing, or nothing a mere human could observe or comprehend.

  I didn’t see anything or hear anything … till I noticed some of the flowers on the wallpaper seemed not to be quite lined up with the rest, as if a patch of air between me and the wall had curdled. As Mose and I watched, the curdled patch moved.

  It was about as tall as a man. About as wide as a man, too. If a ghost wanted to visit, I couldn’t do much about it. Who was I gonna call? A priest? A rabbi, if it was what was left of somebody Jewish? Sure, it could read my files without opening drawers, but I didn’t have anything all that explosive in there.

  Besides, the more I looked, the more familiar the outline of that curdled patch seemed. I might have been imagining things (you do, with ghosts, a lot of the time), but I didn’t think so.

  “That you, Eb?” I asked.

  I imagined that the ghost turned its head toward me. Unless I didn’t. I might have imagined the long-dead Pinkerton man’s New England accent as he answered, “Ayuh. Ain’t nobody else.” How did he have a New England accent when he couldn’t really make a sound? I don’t know. I’m just a live guy. But he did.

  “What can I do for you?” I said. Ebenezer’d always been square with me. He was with Missing Individuals, though, and Missing Individuals was part of LAPD. So I had my reasons to be leery of trusting him too far.

  “I hear you found someone who’s been missing a while,” he said.

  “I do that for a living. Not a great living, but I do. Are you talking about Frank Jethroe or Rudolf Sebestyen?”

  “Jethroe won’t cause any more trouble. They threw enough money at him to keep him quiet. You had something to do with the big thing down at the tire factory, didn’t you?”

  “Who, me? I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. Yeah, Eb’d been square with me, but I wasn’t going to admit anything I didn’t have to. I did answer in a particular tone of voice, though. If he wanted to testify to that, I could always say he’d misunderstood me.

  I heard, mm, the ghost of a chuckle. I don’t know what else to call it. “Go ahead, play ’em close to your chest,” Eb said. “I would, in your shoes. But I came to call on account of Sebestyen. How’d you scrape him off the ash heap?”

  I told him the story. The worst I’d done was aid and abet absconding with a leased zombie, and I didn’t think that was enough to get the powers that be upset at me. Besides, Sebestyen wasn’t an ordinary zombie. Now he wasn’t an ordinary vampire, either.

  Eb understood that. “The way I hear it, he’s been runnin’ around in broad daylight today.”

  I nodded. “He sure has.”

  “That’s disgusting!” Old Man Mose exclaimed. “Vampires are bad enough at night. If I have to watch out for them all the time ….” He shuddered. He didn’t need to worry, or I didn’t think he did. I remembered what Dora’d said about how cat blood tasted.

  “How come he don’t go up like fiyawuhks?” Eb managed to say the last word as if it had no R’s at all instead of two.

  “I don’t know, but I think it’s because he had some of the drug that helped turn him into a zombie. You know—the drug I don’t want to name.” I wasn’t about to say vepratoga in my office. I didn’t want another visit from Elmer V. Jackson, or from whoever was minding the store for him while he stood trial. Oh, yeah, the LAPD—more fun than you can shake a stick at.

  “Huh! Ain’t that somethin’?” Ebenezer thought for a little while. “Reckon that stuff’d do the same thing for any old vampiyuh?” He might talk funny, but he could see what counted.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, but I can’t say for sure because I don’t know of any other vampires who’ve taken it,” I answered.

  “Huh,” Eb said again. “Talk about big things, though, that could be one all by its lonesome.”

  “I expect it could, yeah.” I didn’t want to talk about what Dora’d had to say there.

  “ ’Course, it would be a son of a whore like Sebestyen who got it. If he’s out day and night, he’ll make twice as big a stink as he could have before,” Eb said. I would’ve said son of a bitch instead of son of a whore. Aside from that, I agreed with the ghost straight down the line.

  “Well, now you know,” I told him.

  “Now I know,” he agreed. “Reckon I can disappear.” When a ghost says something like that, he means it, same as a vampire does. All the air in the office uncurdled. It was just me and Old Man Mose.

  “You know the strangest assortment of people,” the cat said.

  “I know you, for instance,” I said helpfully.

  “I’m not a people!” To show how offended he was, and to prove his point, Mose stuck one hind leg in the air and started licking his rear end.

  When I got back to Dora’s apartment, she wasn’t there. She didn’t leave a note to let me know where she was or anything; to her way of thinking, it was none of my business. Maybe she’d change her mind after she kept me around for a few years, or maybe she wouldn’t.

  Nothing I could do about it now. I sat down with a Saturday Evening Post. Somebody had a story in there about going to the Moon with rockets, not sorcery. I think it was pretty good—almost made you believe we could do that one of these years. But I had trouble paying attention to it. I was worrying about Dora. Her half brother was out there somewhere, and he wasn’t happy with her or with anything else in the world that wouldn’t let him finish.

  She came in a little past midnight. She didn’t bother opening the door—it was her place, and she could come and go as she pleased. “Hello, Jack. Did you tend to your conceited fluffball?” she said.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “I’m glad you’re back. Rudolf’s prowling around. Who knows what he’s liable to do?”

  “I can watch out for myself, believe me.” She sounded like a mother humoring a little kid.

  “How about when the White Fire’s shining?” I said. That sobered her. She wasn’t used to a vampire who could move around and do things during the day. Neither was anybody else. Eb had it right—Sebestyen could make twice as much trouble now as he ever had before. I went on, “I’ll take care of you the best I can, hon.”

  Dora drew herself up, the picture of affronted dignity. The idea that she’d need a live person, a mere miserable mortal, to defend her! But after a moment she got down off her high horse. “Thank you,” she said. “That is generous.” She was trying to tell me she was grateful, I think, but gratitude doesn’t come naturally to vampires.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. And then my mouth, living its own life, wild and free, tacked on, “I love you, you know.”

  Even if I hadn’t expected to come out with it, I meant it. Well, the way she flinched, I might’ve slapped her in the face. “We have talked of this before. You cannot! You must not!” she exclaimed.

  “How come? Not like we haven’t done the kinds of things people do when they’re falling in love.” I touched two particular scars on my neck. I had a bunch of little ones by then, but I knew which two those were. “Not like we haven’t done some things most people never think of, either.”

  If she weren’t a vampire, I swear she would have blushed. “You are not thinking of that,” she said. “You are thinking of what came afterwards.”

  What came afterwards was me, spectacularly. I shook my head anyhow. “No. The other was pretty special, too. Part of me is part of you now.”

  “You are quite mad,” she said. And maybe she’d remember me after all, even when I lay five hundred years in the grave. Jack Mitchell, yes. The one who was so crazy, he imagined he loved me.

  The grin I gave back probably looked a lot like the one I wore when one of the fylfot boys’ fancy machine guns started spitting death at my buddies and me. “Did you need so long to figure that out?” I asked.

  “Love is not something vampires are capable of,” she said, now as if to an idiot. “Pleasure, yes, but not love. I remember the difference …. I think I remember the difference.”

  “You may surprise yourself. Or you may do something so horrible, I won’t want to love you any more.”

  “You know as well as I do, the second is much more likely than the first.”

  “I’ll take my chances. And I’ll take care of your half brother if he decides to try something while the sun’s up.” You bet I’ll charge that pillbox, Sarge! During the war, guys really did charge those pillboxes. A lot of them bought a plot doing it, too. But, one by one, the pillboxes fell.

  She eyed me the way you’d look at a Chihuahua puppy that barked at a bullmastiff. But if all you had was a Chihuahua puppy, wouldn’t you do your best to get the most out of it? “You are foolish, but you are brave,” she said.

  “Must be love. You see? I told you.”

  You don’t find an exasperated vampire every day, but I did then. And Dora came up with a way to change the subject. It wasn’t a way that made me love her less, but it did make me shut up for a while. That seemed to suit her well enough.

  I wondered if she’d tell me again how pretty soon I’d meet a live woman I loved, and how then I’d want to pretend our fling never happened. She didn’t say a word. Then I realized she didn’t need to. She’d got to the point where I could hear her voice in my head whether she said anything out loud or not. Or I’d got myself there.

  But, even if I heard her voice in my head, I didn’t have to listen to it. And I damn well didn’t.

  The trials of all those corrupt cops filled the papers for weeks. The ones who hadn’t been taking dough from madams and prostitutes had been taking dough from gamblers. Sex and money—what else sold copies? All the juicy testimony got printed so all the righteous citizens could reach the proper stage of moral indignation. If even a quarter of it was true, those guys had earned long stretches in Folsom or San Quentin. And I had no doubt way more than a quarter of it was true. You don’t indict cops unless you’ve got the goods on them.

  That’s what I thought. God help me, I’d lived in Los Angeles all those years, and that’s still what I thought. My mama told me she didn’t raise dummies. If you felt a little earthquake when the verdicts started coming in, that was her, turning over in the grave at how stupid her only child turned out to be.

  Not guilty. Every damn one of them, not guilty. Not guilty, from Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson all the way up to the assistant chief of police. One by one, they walked out of courtrooms with big, fat smiles pasted on their big, fat faces.

  And, just to put a cherry on top, the honest cop who landed them in trouble when he talked to a grand jury without getting permission from the people it was looking at, you know what happened to him? He managed to beat the phony burglary rap, but he got charged with conduct unbecoming an officer and thrown off the LAPD anyway, that’s what.

  When I heard that, I swear I tried to drown myself in Wild Turkey. Before I got to the point where I couldn’t talk, I remember saying to Dora, “Well, they were right, the rotten, stinking sons of bitches.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked. She didn’t get upset about the whole scandal the way I did. The difference was, I went into it with hope. Fool that I was, I thought things might get better. She didn’t. She always figured the powerful people would take care of their own.

  On the evidence, she was right, too.

  But, before I hit the bourbon blackout, I had one spark of wit left. “What do I mean?” I said. “I’ll tell you what I mean. In the LAPD, telling the truth is conduct unbecoming an officer.”

  She nodded. I remember that. And she kissed my forehead with her cool lips. I remember that, too, and how she answered me: “Someone wise, I do not know who, once said, ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ Here we see this truth once more.”

  No good deed goes unpunished. That was the thought I took down to eighty-six-proof oblivion with me. That was the thought I woke up with, too, a long time later. And the way I felt when I did wake up let me see that truth once more, too.

  I had aspirins. I took … I don’t know how many I took. A lot. I poured cold water on my head. I made coffee, and drank too much. All that helped a little. None of it helped much. Nothing helps much with a hangover like the one I had.

  I was on my own, too. Dora’d long since gone into her coffin. The sun was bright, bright enough to hurt me almost as if I were a vampire myself. It shone impartially on the crooked cops who’d walked and on the honest cop who’d got canned. Stupid goddamn sun.

  Eventually, I took my courage in both hands and walked up to the little Mexican place near my old apartment building. I got a bowl of menudo. It soothed my sour stomach. Nothing did much for my head. The waitress watched the way I spooned it up. “You hurt yourself last night, Señor?” she asked sympathetically.

  “ ’Fraid so,” I said. “ ’Fraid so.”

  Dora didn’t laugh at me when she came to herself after sunset. She just asked, “How do you feel?”

  “I may live,” I said. I almost added, I may even want to, but I didn’t. I’d found out live people weren’t the only ones who wrestled with To be or not to be, that is the question. Instead, I found my own question: “You put me into bed, didn’t you?” I sure didn’t remember doing it myself, and we’d been talking in the front room. I thought so, anyhow.

  She nodded. “I thought you would be more comfortable there than on the floor.” That answered that.

  “Nice to know you care,” I said. She made a face at me. If she did care, she wasn’t about to admit it to a live person.

  Aspirins or coffee or menudo won’t cure a hangover, only blunt it a bit. Time eventually does. After a day or two, I resumed the uneven baritone of my ways. I found a reason to go downtown to check on something in the long, narrow strip of land between Vermont and Figueroa that connects the rest of LA to San Pedro and gives our unfair city a major port. I didn’t find what I needed to know, which was par for the course. I didn’t even get all that upset.