Red Eye - 02 (8 page)

He quickened his pace, intending to accost her. She, at the same time, slowed. It was dawning on her that she had been wrongfooted. Her quarry was nowhere to be seen. He’d vanished somehow, somewhere. Belatedly, she realised he must have dived into the grocery store she’d just passed. She turned...

...and there he was, a few paces behind, heading towards her with purpose.

Her face registered shock and annoyance.

Redlaw squared his shoulders.

“Right, miss,” he said, reaching out to grab her shoulder, “that’s quite enough of that. Who are you and why are you—?”

He heard a sound like a cricket’s chirrup, felt a stab of pain in his belly, and next thing he knew, he was flat out in the snow, his muscles useless, his limbs twitching spastically.

The woman loomed over him. She had a stun gun in one gloved hand, a can of pepper spray in the other. She pointed the latter in his face.

“Okay, buster,” she said. “No funny business. Try anything stupid and I’ll put another three million volts through you. You even blink wrong, and I’ll Mace you ’til your eyeballs bleed. Get me?”

Redlaw nodded feebly.

“Good. Then answer this. Are you or are you not John fucking Redlaw?”

CHAPTER

SIX

T
INA
C
HECKLEY DIDN’T
want much out of life. Just fame, wealth and the adoration of millions. The things everybody lusted after and strove for, and she wanted them as badly as anyone, and what you desired, you deserved, right? That was the American Dream, wasn’t it? To become rich and rewarded. And by wishing hard enough, working hard enough, you could make it real.

She didn’t want to be a celebrity for celebrity’s sake, like a talent contest winner or a reality show star, none of that fake shit. She didn’t want to be lobbed into the public eye by the opinions of a panel of judges or by couch potato zombies voting with their fat backsides. Jeez, give her some credit, why don’t you? Tina wanted to get to the top on her own merits, by the sweat of her brow. That, too, counted in her favour in the overall cosmic scheme of things. Made her worthier of the prize.

She was finding the struggle a lot harder than she’d thought, however. The ladder to success was a hell of a lot taller and slipperier than she’d expected. In fact, Tina was having trouble even getting her foot on the bottom rung.

She had graduated two years ago with deep debts and high hopes. Her waste-of-space parents had claimed they couldn’t pay for college tuition, meaning they hadn’t saved up and couldn’t be bothered to get off their butts and arrange finance. She’d failed to qualify for a scholarship, either, her grades not being high enough and her parents’ income not being low enough. So she had funded her education herself through food stamps, a student loan and a fistful of maxed-out credit cards which she now was busy repaying with a string of soul-sapping McJobs. Majoring in journalism, minoring in media studies, she had prepared herself for the game. Tina Checkley was going to be a TV news icon, nothing less. She was going to kick down doors and ask the awkward questions and take no bullshit from anyone, not from the hardest-bitten crooks, not from the squirrelliest politicians. She was going to crusade on hot-button topics and stand up for the rights of the little people: Diane Sawyer, Wonder Woman and Gandhi rolled into one. The world would know about Tina Checkley and sing her praises, not because of who she was, but because of what she said and did and who she helped.

At college—State University of New York, not what you might call an Ivy League institution—Tina had earned herself the nickname “Tick.” She embraced it, even though it was never really intended as a compliment. She had a habit of latching onto people and using them for whatever she could get from them. Boys with money, professors who might be able to give her extra credit, anyone who appeared to have contacts that would be advantageous to her out in the world. Tina shamelessly threw herself at these people and clung to them until she had sucked them dry. It was the only way to get ahead when you came from nowhere—also known as Randallstown, Maryland—and had nothing. And a tick was tenacious. It was a thriving species. A tick was a coper and a survivor.

So yes, maybe there were a couple of trust-fund guys she’d slept with who hadn’t strictly speaking been single at the time and whose girlfriends had then scrawled venomous comments about her on the walls of the women’s restroom. And maybe her fling with that Eng. Lit. teacher during her sophomore year had been ill-advised—but then the bastard had said he had a friend who worked at CNN, and how could she have known that he was lying? In the final analysis, you did what you had to, and college wasn’t a popularity contest, no matter what some of the snootier co-eds might think. College was a bear pit, a scrimmage, Thunderdome, Darwin in action. Like high school but with fewer handguns and slightly better dope. You got through it not by making friends, but by defeating enemies.

Degree in the bag, BlackBerry stuffed with useful phone numbers and email addresses, Tina had set to work finding herself a job. Every TV station in the state had received a copy of her résumé and a DVD showreel of to-camera pieces she’d taped while at SUNY, with a follow-up call coming less than a day later, and a further follow-up call the day after that. But the news departments at the big networks just weren’t hiring. It was bounce after bounce after bounce.
Sorry. It’s the economy. Advertising revenues are in the dumper. We’re not taking on any new staff. In fact, we’re laying off. Try again in a year’s time, maybe
. Same from the locals. Even the top-of-the-dial cable channels.

At this point Tina had begun to take it personally. It must be her. Something about her. She was overeager, or not compliant enough, too confrontational, too forceful. Or could it be that her thin dark hair and slightly pinched Italianate looks—thanks for those, Grandma DiBonnaventura—didn’t conform to onscreen bimbo standards?

So she’d lowered her sights and tried radio, but it was a similar story there. She’d offered to intern for free, fetch the coffee, anything. No dice. She’d even approached NPR, for fuck’s sake. That was how desperate she was. Still no dice.

Well, screw that. It was the internet age. The old order changeth. You didn’t have to claw your way up through the ranks any more. You could leapfrog the entire queue just by getting yourself out there in cyberspace and becoming a big noise among the geeks and trolls. The road up the mountain was long and winding, but online there lay a shortcut, like a ski lift to success.

So she’d invested in some new equipment: a hi-def camcorder with a 240-gigabyte drive, some editing suite software for her PC. To pay for this she had come to an arrangement with the landlord of her fourth-floor walkup in Astoria, with its scenic view of the jetliners landing and taking off at LaGuardia. Once a week Mr Constantinopoulos was entitled to visit her in her apartment and watch her undress and take a shower. In return, that week’s rent was forfeit. “Throw in a pair of panties from your laundry hamper, maybe a jogging bra as well,” Mr Constantinopoulos had said, “and you got yourself a deal.”

It wasn’t so bad. All she had to do was ignore him, make like he wasn’t there, while he sat on the end of her bed, staring at her with his fried-egg eyes and wheezing asthmatically as he jerked off inside his baggy sweatpants. She even got a weird kick out of it. Her power over him. The look of intense, furious worship on his face that lasted at least until he came. She mightn’t be the best-looking woman on the planet, but she knew she had a decent figure, a good pair of tits (and a genuine vote of thanks was due to bosomy Grandma DiBonnaventura for
them
). This must be how a stripper or a lap dancer felt, able to command total male submission simply by being in a state of undress. The feminists could go fuck themselves. If you’d got it, girl, work it.

All set up to launch herself online, Tina had only one problem. She needed a subject. If she was going to start making short filmed reports and posting them on YouTube or wherever, they needed to be dazzling, daring, juicy; if possible, controversial. They needed to grab attention. She couldn’t go around doing pieces on lost dogs or flashers in public parks or sacked derivatives traders living on handouts and soup-kitchen meals. To make a name for herself, it had to be something edgy and now. Something people hadn’t seen before and hadn’t known they wanted to see.

The answer was obvious, really.

Vampires.

What else?

Vampires were it. Vampires were offbeat and on-trend. Vampires were the one thing guaranteed to grab an online audience. Footage of vampires always garnered huge hit totals. The stuff coming in from Europe was a ratings winner every time. America wanted to know about vampires, it wanted to learn about them, it was intrigued by them. America didn’t have any of its own, at least none that it would admit to. They
were
here. Everyone knew that. There just weren’t enough of them here to make most American citizens feel that they had to worry about them. The government had expressed concern, but Joe Public, though uneasy, was still basically undecided.

Well, Tina “Tick” Checkley would make Joe Public worry about vampires. She’d rub people’s noses in vampires. She’d show them the truth. And then everyone would sit up and take notice.

Of the vampires, naturally.

But also of her.

T
INA WAS NOW
in an East Village basement bar, nursing a Jägerbomb which the man on the stool next to her had grudgingly consented to pay for.

He himself was nursing a black coffee and a sore patch on his abdomen where her stun gun’s charge electrodes had made contact.

And while they sat uneasily side by side, surrounded by a half-dozen hardcore barflies and the trebly warbling of Céline Dion, Tina gave John Redlaw a potted version of her story, minus all the unpleasant bits—the unsuitable hook-ups, the naked ambition, the Greek landlord beating his kebab over her every week. A sanitised edition of the life of Tina Checkley so far, in which she came across as the plucky, redoubtable heroine, beset by circumstances but still battling on.

“The moment I saw you outside St Magnus’s, I recognised you. Not many people over here would, but then I’m not many people. I took one look at you and I thought, what the fuck, I know that guy, that’s John Redlaw. ’Cause I’ve seen stuff from Great Britain, video clips, BBC reports, phone footage, all of it. You guys have got serious vampire issues over there, but I guess you know that already; but you see, I’m into all that. Vampires are my business. You could, I suppose, call me a vampire hunter. Only I don’t actually
hunt
them as such. Stalker, maybe.”

Redlaw said nothing, merely sipped his coffee. Tina took his silence as an invitation to carry on.

“I stalk them because I’m fascinated by them, but also, you know, because it’s my job. I’m a communicator. I communicate things. Communicating’s my thing. And people in America, they really need to be educated about vampires, because like it or not, we’ve got vampires, and the way it’s going, judging by the situation in Europe, we’re only going to have a whole lot more of them in the coming years. The President keeps saying it’s under control, he has a lid on it, he doesn’t think it’s a pressing matter. But hey, this is an election year, of
course
he’s going to say that. If he ’fessed up and said, you know, ‘Arrrgh, vampires’”—she waved her hands either side of her head in a parody of panic—“then the opposition candidates would jump on him and call him weak and chicken. Instead of what they’re saying now, which is he’s sticking his head in the sand and hoping it’ll all go away, which isn’t so bad as being chicken, is it? Not politically. Am I talking too much?”

Redlaw shrugged. He was being polite. Was he being polite?

“So anyways, I’m out to spread the word about vampires, the truth, because someone’s got to, right? I’ve made it my mission. The mainstream media aren’t doing their bit on that front, not really. There’ve been a couple of HBO documentaries, a searing exposé on Fox, but mostly it’s like a war we haven’t got any soldiers in. You know, it ain’t happening here, it’s happening somewhere else, so screw it, nothing to do with us, let’s watch
Dancing With The Stars
instead. Only, it
is
to do with us, or it will be soon enough. The vampires—you people call them Sunless, don’t you? You’ve found a nice, what’s the word, euphemism for them. That’s so typically British. Like ‘I’m just popping off to the loo,’ when what you mean is you want to take a crap. I’ve never been to England but I imagine you’re all tipping your hats to each other and making ‘cuppas’ for each other all day long. I’d like to go there. See what it’s like. So you work for the Sunless Housing And Dispersal Executive, right?”