I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (17 page)

“I mean, they never like called me
nigga
or nothing like that, but they’d axe me, boy, what’s
wrong wit’ jew?”

Boone rummaged around in his cut off shorts
and found the vial with the cocaine. He laid the vial on the
carpet, considering it from where he lay. He had enough to keep
himself up all night.

“Uh-huh, and
Busta
?”

“And Busta ‘cause, well, you keep poppin’ off
at da mouth, and I’m a bust you up, ya n’meen?”

Boone dumped the bag of CDs he’d bought at
Blind’s on his stomach. He looked through them. Big L. Diddy.
N.O.R.E. His solo album. Capone was in prison.

“Which brings me to this beef you got goin’
on between you and Gangster Khan.”

“Psssh, that—
beep
—why’d you hafta go
and bring that nigga’s name up now, yo?”

There was a bump in the other room. Boone
wasn’t alarmed. It was just Stash. The guy—Boone thought if you
could sex a ghost then Stash was most definitely male—had a way of
literally going bump in the night.

He reached over and pressed the message
button on his answering machine.

“You have one new message—”

“Nah, fo’ real, Busta, Khan goes after you
pretty hard on his new album,
The
Golden
Hoard
.”

“Tuesday, five fifteen P.M.”

“Yo-yo-yo, Neecy girl, let me tell you
somethin’, aight?”

“Hi, Boone. It’s Jennifer.”

His sister.

“Just calling to remind you about tomorrow
afternoon. The Metro North stops by us at 1:50. Leaves Grand
Central an hour before that. Derrick is going to pick you up at the
train station. The kids can’t wait to see you, okay?”

“Let me tell you a lil’ somethin’.”

“Bye, Boone.”

Click
.

“I ain’t got no beef wit’ a nigga less tha’
nigga wanna getta beef wit’ me, and that Gangsta Khan nigga, he got
like a mother—
beep
—’in Big Mac load ‘a beef, ya n’meen?”

Boone reached down for his bag of ye-yo but
it was gone. He looked across the room and it was resting on the
top shelf of the entertainment center.

“Stash!” he called out. The apparition had a
way of doing that sometimes, of moving things around. Thing was,
Stash always seemed to move the things Boone
really
wanted
somewhere where Boone would have to get up off his ass and go and
get them.

Shit
. Boone yawned again. He didn’t
want the coke that bad. He needed to get some sleep. Blind had said
it’d been cut once, but they must have cut it with ephedrine or
something because it was speedy, and he wasn’t going to catch any
sleep with that shit.

“I’m a bust that nigga’ yo. You hear me Khan?
I ain’t no L.L. and you ain’t—you ain’t Canibus, aight?”

“Whoa-whoa-whoa, hold up Nutz, what you
sayin’ here on K-E-A? You gonna bust him how?”

“I’m a bust him every which way conceivable
to a nigga. I’m a bust him on the microphone, leave him starin’ and
sh—
beep
—with his mouth open, like
wha
? Like
he
just
said
whut
?
He
just
said
whut
?”

Boone decided he’d take his vitamins, whack
off, and go to sleep.

He swung his legs off the futon, sat up,
stood and walked across to his entertainment center, opening it and
retrieving the paper bag he kept his gear stowed in.

“And him and his crew, dey want ta bring it
on the street? Oh, Neecy, we’s fo’ real then son, then we’s
talkin’—”

Boone shut the stereo. He liked hip hop just
fine but could do without the ghetto bullshit.

He placed the paper bag on the table and
looked out the window to the dark street below. Boone closed the
blinds on the window and returned to the entertainment center. He
turned on his television and VCR. He opened a cabinet and browsed
through his tapes, chose one, popped it in the VCR.

Returning to his chair at the table, the TV
screen went from blue to Stephanie Swallows in a thong bikini on a
lounge chair on some sunny deck somewhere. Boone had thought about
it before and thought it was California.

The woman was touching herself and talking
about her pussy.

Boone opened his bag and took out what he
needed. He tore open the packaging of a syringe and tossed it on
the floor.

He found the bottle of deca durabolin he was
currently drawing from and eyed it. About half empty. He had
more.

Boone had always been strong and big and bad
tempered. The gear only made him bigger and stronger and more ill
tempered.

He plunged the needle into the rubber stopper
and righted the vial. Boone pulled down on the plunger and watched
the thick, syrupy liquid slide down the walls of the syringe. Three
hundred milligrams every other day kept his joints correct.

Stephanie Swallows had rolled over onto her
stomach with her ass in the air and was showing off her butt plug
while she talked about how she really wished she had some cocks to
put in her mouth. Boone knew there’d be two guys showing up to
oblige her in about thirty seconds.

Stash was gone. Looking at the CDs on the
couch Boone saw the ghost had absconded with his Big L CD. What the
fuck a spirit wanted with a CD, Boone didn’t know. He was glad
Stash had sense enough to disappear whenever he was going to rub
one out.

When the syringe was filled, Boone tapped it,
watching the bubbles rise through the liquid. He pulled the syringe
from the stopper and capped the vial. He considered where he’d
inject.

Last time had been his ass cheek. Time before
that his left thigh. He was tired and just wanted to get some
sleep. He had too much in the syringe to put it in a biceps or
calf. He’d be all stiff and unable to move the muscle for a couple
of days if he did that.

“Oh yeah,” Swallows said on screen as the
lower halves of two performers walked on screen. Each man wore a
towel. The way she said it, Boone thought she sounded retarded or
twelve years old.

He pulled off his shirts and tapped his
shoulder. It’d do. Mark would tell him he needed to take a shower
first, or at least clean the area with an alcohol wipe. Mark would
have wanted him to change the needle on the syringe because drawing
the test would have dulled the point somewhat.

Boone plunged the syringe into his shoulder.
He pulled back on the plunger, saw a miniscule mist of blood enter
the chamber, then started depressing the plunger. He’d never got an
abscess and figured if he had it would have healed over fast
anyway. Boone rarely, if ever, caught so much as a cold. He knew
there was something up with his body, something different than
everybody else. That thing had attacked him that time, he should
have been dead. He wasn’t.

He’d gone and got a tattoo once when he was
seventeen. Dropped four hundred dollars on it. The next morning his
t-shirt was dirty where the ink had run but the tat had disappeared
from his arm. Just like that. What the fuck, right?

It was funny, thought Boone, that that woman
on his screen bobbing between two dicks was nothing but a lower
torso in some Manhattan loft now. Funny, but not
hah
-
hah
funny. Funny ironic, like he had been
crouching down there studying her remains and here she was, alive
and active on screen.

When the plunger stopped against the casing
Boone pulled the needle out of his shoulder and inspected the
injection site. There was a single drop of blood and that was it.
He capped the needle and left it on the table.

Standing, he found the box of tissues he kept
on the table and went back to the futon couch, unbuttoning his
shorts. The cammies pooled around his ankles.

Swallows was on her hands and knees between
the two men, one in her mouth, the other in her ass. Boone had seen
this video dozens of times. She’d switch positions in a minute or
so, sitting her ass down on one of the guys, and she’d get verbally
aggressive with the both of them, telling them to bang her ass
harder.

Boone sat on the couch and arranged his
tissues. He’d jerk off and crash. Clean up and put away his gear
when he woke up.

“Fuck me, baby.” Stephanie Swallows cursed
over the low hum of Boone’s air conditioner. “Fuck my tight ass
with that big dick baby!”

When Santa Anna woke, his head was already
beginning to pound. It took him a few moments to realize where he
was. He wasn’t in his cell, with another man snoring above him, on
a block with dozens of other men snoring and farting, dreaming and
scheming.

He was in his house, on his couch.

Christ
. He was thirsty.

Santa Anna wondered how he’d gotten home. The
last thing he remembered was drinking at the club, drinking with
that kid. That
fucking
kid. What did Frank see in him?

Santa Anna got up and walked as delicately as
he could through the dark to his kitchen. Tanji would be upstairs
with the kids, asleep in their bedroom. He got a glass from the
cabinet above the counter and let the water on the sink run.

Madison had asked him if it was good to be
home. Was it good to be home? It was
great
to be home. But
now that he was home, he had work to do. He’d been away from his
wife and children for a long time. All that time, a male presence
had been absent from Carter and Deanna’s life. That bothered him.
Children needed their daddy in their lives, to show them what was
right and what was wrong.

The job this morning, it had felt
good
. Good to be back doing what he liked doing, what he was
good at. It had felt right. That thing with the vamp walking in the
daytime, that was bizarre, but it had been a dark, rainy morning
and there would be time to think about that.

tap
tap

Earning. Santa Anna sipped his water and
thought about it. Deanna would be ready to go to college in a few
more years. He needed to work as much as he could, get as much as
he could while he could. And not get caught again. Never again.

A branch was tapping at a window somewhere in
his house.

Santa Anna thought about his life. It had
been a series of compromises. His own parents had raised him to
walk the straight and narrow and he’d compromised that vision to
provide for Tanji and the kids. When he’d been arrested he could
have talked and given them Frank and Bowie or the others, but he
hadn’t. He’d compromised and kept his mouth shut and in exchange
for being away from his woman and his babies they’d been provided
for and taken care of. And when he was in prison, he’d compromised.
He didn’t like to think about that though.

tap

Santa Anna looked around the kitchen and
almost screamed. There was a man standing outside the kitchen’s
sliding door to the deck. The man was tapping on the glass of the
door with the long, sharp nail of one finger and smiling, a ghastly
grin devoid of warmth or merriment. Santa Anna had seen the smile
before, and he knew the thing outside his house in the middle of
the night was no man.

He thought about the gun in his bedroom. He
had silver bullets in it.

The thing outside held up its hand and waved.
It looked amused.

Fuck
. How had it found him? If it knew
where he lived, who else knew?

The thing was beckoning with its index
finger, inviting Santa Anna to come closer to the sliding door.

Shit
. Santa Anna thought about it. He
had no choice. He set the glass on the counter and crossed the
kitchen to the sliding door.

“What do you want?” he called out to it.

The thing held a finger up to its lips,
enjoining silence. It was deathly pale and gaunt.

Santa Anna unlocked the sliding door and slid
it open. The thing outside made no move to step into his house. It
couldn’t unless he asked it in.

Santa Anna stepped out onto his deck, into
the night. He closed the door behind him.

“Carter.” The thing on his deck was almost as
tall as Santa Anna. “It’s been a long time.”

“Not long enough.” Santa Anna spoke honestly,
thinking of Tanji and his babies. Their bedrooms were on the other
side of the house, so he wasn’t worried they’d hear any of the
conversation out here. “What are you doing here, Enfermo?”

“Not happy to see me?” the look on the
vampire’s face feigned disappointment.

“No, not at all.”

It was smiling again. “Not going to ask me
when I got out? Not going to ask me how I found you?”

“Yeah, I’ll ask you how you found me.”
Carter’s tone was belligerent but he knew it meant nothing, not in
the position he was in.

Enfermo raised his hand and in the moonlight
Santa Anna saw a shotgun shell between its thumb and forefinger.
Enfermo nodded and tossed the shell into the air. Instinctively,
Santa Anna took his eyes off the vampire and snatched it up in his
hand before it could begin its descent to the deck.

Santa Anna puzzled over the shell, and then
he realized where it had come from. The car. This morning. His
prints would be on it. Damn.

“We need to talk.” Enfermo had moved, real
quick like vampires could. It was between Santa Anna and his
sliding door now. “You and I.”

“About?”

“About a couple of things.” The vampire
licked its lips and Santa Anna involuntarily reached up to his
neck.

“Eddie, when are you going to settle down,
get married and give me some grandkids?”

Bowie’s mother was younger than she looked,
heavy set with thick ankles. Life had been rough on her. First a
husband, then a son.

“I already got the perfect gal, ma.” Bowie
squinted against the sunlight filtering into the kitchen. It was
only a quarter past noon and his mother was already busy in the
kitchen, preparing their lunch, planning their dinners. The woman
could cook.