“Okay. We’ll split up and do that.”
“Are you crazy?” I demanded, a smidge too loud. “Don’t you ever watch any horror movies?”
“They can’t chase us both.”
“Yes they can. There’s two of them.”
“Look, they’ve called for backup,” she said, indicating the two men below. “They’re going to hang together until backup arrives. They won’t divide to chase us.”
She sounded pretty confident of this fact—confident enough to risk her life. So I replied, “Fine. I’ll go get the car.” I jacked a thumb to the west. “And I’ll pick you up …?”
“Down at the diner, as originally planned.” I detected an accusatory scowl, and ignored it. “Give me five minutes.”
“Five minutes?”
She reconsidered. “Three. And you’d better be there. What kind of car?”
“Dark blue pseudo-cop-car. Crown Vic.”
“Fantastic,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she meant it or if she was being bitchy.
“Three minutes,” I repeated.
“Three minutes,” she said back.
And on the count of three we each dove in a different direction and went leaping, scattering, splashing down off the roof.
I shudder to note that I was the one doing the splashing.
Barefoot and now stinking of something homeless people do in public, I hightailed it around the corner and down the block—without bothering to pretend like I was just an ordinary lady, dressed somewhat sluttily, barefoot, and running for her life from a rapist or carjacker or something. No way.
I ran full-tilt, bumping into the late-night (or early-morning) clubgoers hard enough to send them reeling, and then wondering what on earth had just shoved them. I moved fast enough that I probably looked like a blur—a conspicuous blur, to be certain—but I didn’t care. Whoever was on my tail already knew enough about me to cramp my night, and while I’m usually the very soul of discretion, every now and again a girl has to tear loose and run like the devil knows her name.
Because he does. And he has a serial number with which he’d like to replace it.
I reached the car approximately thirty seconds after I’d launched myself off the roof, and then I spent a rather fumbly, humiliating moment searching for my keys. I wasn’t carrying a bag so they had to be in one of my pockets and yes, they were. I dug them out and my hands were shaking. No longer a blur on a sidewalk, I was now a disheveled hussy quaking her way home on a jittery, shoeless walk of shame. Or so I imagined. And so I hoped I projected, because it wouldn’t draw a second glance in that neighborhood.
Finally I got the car open, and got myself inside it. I shoved the key into the ignition and started the thing with a sigh of relief. Then I wondered how much time had passed. Three minutes? Maybe? It wasn’t like we’d stopped to synchronize our watches or anything. We’d just nodded at each other and taken off, as if by pure synchronicity we’d meet up 180 seconds later.
I pulled out into the street, cutting off some asshole in a low-riding car with a racing stripe. The driver swore and honked and flipped me the bird and I flipped it right back as I gunned the gas and heaved my big-ass car out into the street.
The diner wasn’t far away. One block? Two blocks? A couple of blocks, yes—because I was parked on the other side of the Poppycock Review. But traffic was heavy and the only streetlight I hit between my starting point and my destination surely held me up longer than the three promised minutes. I tapped my bare, wet, grimy foot against the brake and muttered, “Come on,” as if my irritation could somehow bend the universe to my whims.
If only.
And just when I was working myself up to a neurotic frenzy wherein Sister Rose had been captured, or had vanished, or was lying dead in one of those foul-smelling puddles, a knock on the passenger window gave me a shock that would’ve stopped my heart if I’d still been alive.
She was there, slapping her hands against the window and saying, “Come on,” just like I’d been saying about the stoplight. Only I couldn’t call her “she” anymore. In three minutes (or four, or five, or however long it’d taken me), Sister Rose had morphed into Adrian deJesus, brother of Isabelle and wearer of clothes that looked suspiciously like they might’ve come off a federal agent. It was the fastest identity swap I’d ever had the pleasure of witnessing.
I pressed the button to unlock the car, and with a swift yank of the handle and a sliding leap that landed him in the passenger’s slot, he was inside. I locked the doors again.
The light turned green.
We rolled through it like the most ordinary of couples, doing the most ordinary drive home ever. I saw two long black cars pulling up to the block where the drag bar had all too recently been the scene of several murders (on my part), and the fleeing of one great drag queen (on Adrian’s part).
I made a point to quit looking in the rearview mirror as I drove.
8
I took him back to my place because hell, where else was I going to take him? We were in the same boat, and I couldn’t honestly see him flipping out and calling the feds to report me. Besides, he’d talked like he knew I was a vampire back at the drag bar, and in the car we were both too damn tense and silent to converse, so we didn’t, and I needed to warm him up or lighten him up or … or something. Whatever it took to get him talking, now that I had my pronouns sorted out.
I’d sorted them thusly: When he was dressed as a man, talking like a man, and looking like a man, as far as I was concerned he was a man. In ladywear, with full lady persona, she was a woman. And if he/she had any issue with my designations, he/she could take it up with me later, when no one was trying to kill or capture us and stuff us into the trunk of a long black car.
So he stood in my kitchen, leaning over the bar, his neck glistening with sweat—and a dusting of leftover glitter. That stuff really is the gift that keeps on giving.
We were both sullen and uncertain of how to begin speaking, but he was downing a glass of scotch he’d found under the sink and I was wrestling with a bottle of nice red wine, on the very verge of smashing it against the counter just to get at the sweet, sweet goodness inside.
The cork sprang free just in time to stop me. I grabbed a goblet and filled it up—damn the torpedoes and all that.
When I had a full glass in hand, and he had a mostly empty one before him on the counter, I said, “So.”
And he said, “So,” right back.
I gave up and said, “This is ridiculous. You know I’m a vampire, I know you know I’m a vampire, and we both know your little sister was part of a government project. Feel free to stop me when and if I’m wrong.”
He didn’t stop me.
“All right, then,” I continued. I was not exactly reassured by the illusion of control but I’d accept it in lieu of actual control, so I bullied the conversation forward. “She died, years ago. The military told you … they told you what? That she’d killed herself? That she’d merely passed away as part of some test or experiment?”
“Something like that.”
“And you bought it?” I asked, incredulous only because half a glass of red was breaking down the barriers between my brain and my mouth. And let’s be honest, those barriers aren’t exactly reinforced concrete under the best of circumstances.
He didn’t quite sneer, but the look he made wasn’t pretty. “Of course I didn’t buy it. But congratulations, you tracked me down. And while you were at it, you led them right to me, didn’t you?”
“No!” I objected instantly. “I have no idea how they found their way to you, but I’ve survived under the radar for nearly a century, thank you very much, and it was only when I stumbled over the trip wire of your sister’s project that anybody in any black suit and any shiny car ever had any specific interest in me, personally.”
“I find that difficult to believe,” he said.
To which I replied, “Yeah? Well I don’t give a shit. I don’t have anything to prove to you.” And
I didn’t tell him anything about Cheshire Red, or the half dozen international agencies that had wanted me for decades.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“What?”
“You,” he said pointedly, picking up the glass again and aiming it at me. “What are you doing here, if you don’t have anything to prove?”
“Oh, I’ve got work to do and things to prove, just not to you,” I insisted. “My investigation accidentally stumbled across you, which is not at all the same thing. I wandered into your circle by hunting down the military records for Project Bloodshot. In case you’re unaware, those records effectively vanished, years ago. But I bet you aren’t unaware. I bet you know exactly where they are, because I bet you’re the one who took them.”
His eyes simmered over the highball glass. He downed the last couple of drops and acted like he wanted more, but was too smart to ask for more—much less drink any more. He said, “Yeah. I took them.”
“I knew it!” I said, and it sounded sloppy. Which somehow didn’t stop me from finishing the glass of expensive old red. I was wound up tighter than an E-string, and I needed to get a grip on myself before dawn came up in a handful of hours. So I drank.
“I have no idea how you got so lucky,” he said. I liked the Spanish roll to his vowels, and I liked the hateful simmering. I wanted to piss him off more, and keep him talking. I wanted to pin him down and demand that he say, “My name is Inigo Montoya—you killed my father, prepare to die.” But I suspect that would’ve been deeply inappropriate in any number of ways. I told you, alcohol hits me hard and fast. I can’t help it if my mind wanders.
And hell, yours would’ve wandered, too, if you’d seen that body of his attired in fishnets and spangles. He was a good-looking man—maybe even more so than he was a good-looking woman. Good bone structure, that shiny blue-black hair with a faint, pretty wave … I wondered if he was gay, but I didn’t dare ask. Don’t ask me why; all I can say is that it was on the tip of my tongue and it took every ounce of remaining self-control to keep that query to myself.
Instead I told him, “I’m not lucky, I’m persistent.”
“And whose records do you want?”
“It wouldn’t matter if I told you. He isn’t mentioned by name, just a serial number.”
“All right.” He signaled to me that he wanted more scotch, twitching his finger my way as if I were a bartender. “Then what do you hope to find when you score those records?”
I serviced him anyway. I mean, you know. I topped off his drink, and let mine stay dry. And I figured that possibly, given the circumstances, honesty was the best policy. Veiled honesty, but honesty all the same. My inner choir girl sang.
“One of the other victims of the project is a client of mine. He needs his medical records.”
“Medical records? Can we really call them that?”
“I don’t see why not,” I all but snapped at him. “His body was experimented upon, and there are records of it. What else would you call it?”
“I don’t know. Necropsy?”
“Fuck you very much. Dead we may be, but still we bleed,” I said, trying to quote something and bombing it. I cleaned up my fumble with a lazy, “You know what I mean. You wouldn’t want someone cutting on your eyes either, I assume. Or”—I went for the heart of the matter as soon as I remembered where it was—“you wouldn’t want anyone doing it to your sister.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” he said with a flare of something hot and hateful.
“Then don’t begrudge my client his humanity either. Asshole,” I added.
He picked up his glass like he’d like to empty it further, or maybe whap me upside the head with it, but he did neither of these things. He sat it back down again and leaned against the counter, raising his hands to his face and rubbing his eyes. “It’s been so damn long,” he said. “She’s been gone all this time, and I’ve been invisible. And then you.” He shot me another napalm glare, but it surprised me by cooling into something more sorrowful. Mercurial, this one. I liked it. It was hot.
“I guess it doesn’t matter. If you didn’t lead them to me, someone else would have, eventually. Or I would’ve screwed up, or someone would’ve recognized me, somewhere.”
“Does that mean you aren’t mad at me?” I asked, just in case.
“I didn’t say that. But it was probably a question of when, not if. Hey,” he said suddenly, in a whole different tone. Then he began patting himself down, running his fingers inside the seams of his clothes. Only then I remembered—they weren’t his clothes. He told me, “I nicked these off one of the guys who was chasing us.”
“Like I didn’t figure that out.”
“I just wanted to make it clear that I didn’t mug any innocent bystander.” He grabbed his own ass and then, with a victorious flourish, produced a very slim wallet. It was not the world’s most promising wallet. It almost looked like a pair of leather credit cards bound together, which led me to guess what it actually was. An ID folder.
I sidled up to him, sneaking in close to look around his arm and over his shoulder. “What does it say?”
“It says I mugged Peter Desarme.” He brandished the badge so I could see it in all its glory. “CIA agent.”
“Wait. What?”
“That’s what it says,” he noted redundantly.
He let me swipe it out of his hand. I examined it up close and personal. It looked real. “I don’t get it.”
“What’s not to get?”
“I figured these were army guys. Or, high-ranking, suit-wearing … I don’t know. Men in Black. In my head I’d been calling them feebs. But CIA? That’s really out of left field.”
“There’s no good reason men in black can’t be CIA agents. And besides, it’s not that crazy,” he objected. “Project Bloodshot was closed. Maybe it was reopened as a civilian operation.”
“How do you know it’s closed? I mean how do you really know? We’re talking about the military. It’s a whole organization of left hands dedicated to not knowing what the right hands are doing.”
“You may be right, but I bet you’re not. Some asshole with money might’ve picked up where the army left off. It happens sometimes.”
“You can’t be serious.”
He said, “Think about it—all that money and research and effort, all dumped into something that winds up blacked out and shredded. It happens all the time. And every now and again, a private corporation will take an interest, and take another stab at it. They use whatever’s left of the military documentation to seed the new experiments, picking up where they left off. Sometimes they even look up the former researchers, engineers, and scientists. Anyone who took part in it.”
“Then where does the CIA come into it? Doesn’t the very presence of CIA operatives mean it’s not a civilian operation? Or …” I reconsidered my words. “Or at least that it’s a different kind of official operation?”
“Nah,” he said. “CIA guys are wild cards. They’re allowed to freelance, and a lot of them do.”
“Like mercenaries?” I asked.
“More or less. People are always talking about setting guidelines for what they can and can’t do, but nobody ever does. There’s plenty of … let’s say ‘conflict of interest’ going on where they’re concerned. But …” He shrugged. “There’s no regulation. So they moonlight wherever the money’s good.”
“Huh.” I handed the ID back to him, but only after noting for the record that Adrian deJesus and Peter Desarme bore no resemblance whatsoever, and we wouldn’t have any luck repurposing the official cards. “You learn something new every day.”
He said, “Yeah. I’m learning a bunch of new things today, for example.” Then he dropped his hands and slapped the wallet onto the counter. His gaze went back and forth between the floor and the scotch glass, respectively. Quietly he asked, “So let me see if I can learn one more thing, while we’re talking. Did you know my sister? Is there any chance of that?”
“No,” I said.
“But there’s a chance my client did. They were in the same program, anyway. Can you tell me a little about her? Something I can use to refresh his memory?” Or satisfy my own curiosity, as the case may be.
He sighed. “Isabelle ran away from home to go live with a boyfriend—a useless piece of shit she’d met someplace downtown. Our parents wouldn’t have it; they threw her out.”
“Can you throw somebody out who’s already moved out?”
“It was the principle of the thing,” he said. He tipped his finger at the glass and asked, “A little more? If you don’t mind.”
I didn’t mind. It was expensive scotch, but I never drank much of it anyway. I think that the bottle was a gift from Horace, received ages previously. Adrian was welcome to it—and all the more so if it loosened his tongue.
While he sipped, I asked, “She was your younger sister, I assume? Did you try to talk her out of it? Being big brother, and all?”
“Of course I tried. But she wouldn’t hear it, and I was already overseas by then—”
“Military,” I said, remembering what the PDF had said about the thief.
“Navy SEAL,” he specified. “I was wrapping up training far enough away from here that there was nothing I could do about it. Anyway, she started to dabble in drugs, and then the boyfriend died or disappeared—I’m not sure which. She tried to come home but our mother wasn’t having it. Momma gave Bella the line about how if she wanted to go be an adult, she could stay out there and be an adult.”
“Ouch. What’d she do then?” I was going for the sympathy play, and it wasn’t entirely a ploy. I honestly wanted to know about his sister—how she’d been turned, how she’d been captured, and how she’d died.
“Lived on the streets, I guess. Bounced in and out of shelters.”
“Dropped out of school?”
He nodded.
Well, that was one more paper trail I wouldn’t bother chasing.
“By the time I had leave to come home, the household was a war zone between my mother and my father. And Isabelle was nowhere to be found.”