Summer 2007 (17 page)

“The interesting question. You said you summoned us.”

“Yes.”

“How? And to what purpose?”

“Ah,” Jackie said, and dropped the cigarette in his ash
tray before he reached for the creamer. “That’s what makes the question so
interesting, you see. I’m not exactly sure. But I have a couple of propositions
to make, if you like.” He locked gazes with the American. Neither looked down.

The mug was burning the American’s fingers. He lifted
them to his lips and blew on them, and laughed at the back of his throat. “I
don’t suppose you play chess.”

Jackie smiled hard. He was missing a tooth far back in
his mouth. “Only for money, my friend.”

#

Tribute faces the music. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

Half an hour before dawn, I found my way back to the
room I’d rented at the Motel 6 just off the strip. It had enormous windows, but
the black-out drapes reached floor to ceiling, and I made sure to overlap them
and pin them in place with the chair. One of the consequences of what I am is
that I can make out the patterns on the hotel bedspread and carpeting, even in
the dark.

The bed was that spongy texture only hotel mattresses
have. I squared my shoes underneath, lay down on it and pulled the pillow over
my face. It was a little bigger than King-sized, no matter what they called it;
I could have laid three of me down side by side.

I couldn’t sleep.

By sunrise, I was ravenous.

Sycorax and the poisoning had taken it out of me in more
ways than the metaphorical, and I would need something that night if I was
going to keep passing for a mortal. And feeding–

Isn’t quite what the romantic fancies of novelists and
poets and moviemakers would make it. The stable of willing paramours, the
idyllic pleasures of the feast–

No.

It’s not like that at all.

It didn’t matter when I was with Sycorax. I took what
she told me when she told me and tried to put it off as long as I could, and I
mostly pretended I couldn’t hear Jesse. Especially when he asked me to have him
exorcised, to let him go.

But things were different now that I was on my own. I
found I had qualms.

In addition to my qualms, I had questions. Like Angel
and Stewart, and why Angel was out of her city. And why they were with each
other, and not with their own partners. And what was
wrong
with Stewart.

I rolled over in the dark behind drawn curtains, keeping
a healthy distance from the scalding brightness that glowed faintly around the
edges of the blackout curtains and contemplating whether coming to Vegas had
been such a good idea. It didn’t have to be here. I knew that.

But I wanted it to be here. Vegas had changed even more
than I had; I barely recognized the place. But we’d been traveling for the
better part of three decades and it wasn’t like I could just go home to Tupelo.
I haven’t got much good to say about Sycorax, bless her black little heart, but
twenty-five years with her filled in the gaps in a public school education
pretty well. And besides. Las Vegas was a place where I could perform, and
nobody would find it strange that they never saw me out in the sunshine.

I could
pass.

There’s nothing more pathetic than an insomniac vampire.

I sat up in bed, reached for the remote, and turned the
television on.

Maybe forty minutes later, the corridor door opened. I’d
heard the footsteps pause in front of it, but I didn’t get off the bed, even
though it didn’t sound like a chambermaid. They usually don’t wear military
boots.

Once he opened the door, I caught the scent of leather
and sweat and nicotine and the blood under his skin, and then I didn’t need to
turn. The black-haired kid in the suit and Doc Martens slipped inside and shut
the door behind himself. “King,” he said, smart enough to stay in the narrow
corridor with the bathroom on one side and the closet on the other and to keep
his back to the door, “we’ve got to talk.”

“How did you find me?” Not bothering to disguise my
voice for once. Even though he had to be expecting it, he startled: fresh salt
sharp in the cool musty air. His flickering heart kicked up a notch.

“I got lucky,” he said, layers of irony lacing his voice.
Something there I’d have to tease out someday. I didn’t turn to look directly,
but I saw him move out of the corner of my eye. He jerked his chin at the
television. “You gonna shoot that?”

“Nah,” I answered, thumb on the mute button. “It’s too
much of a pain in the ass when you haven’t got a road manager to fill out the
paperwork for you, and besides, I haven’t got a gun. My next question is
supposed to be how you got through the locked door, but that’s easy.
So–how’d you recognize me?”

The hurt in his voice was thick and evidently
artificial. “You don’t remember me, King?”

“I go by Tribute, these days.” I left the remote on the
bed when I stood up, rug fibers catching on my socks, and tightened the covers
before turning to have a look at him. Just a mortal boy, but it would be cocky
to let him get in between me and the window in daylight. “The King–that’s
somebody else. Where should I remember you from?”

“Vegas,” he said, stepping forward so the bathroom light
would fall across his face. One eye was covered by the eyepatch. The other one
sparkled in a way I’d seen too much of lately. I squinted at the face,
though–the eyepatch stood out, and there was no telling what color his
hair was under a couple of gallons of Gothic black. He looked a bit like Dean
Martin, maybe–a much skinnier Dean, with higher cheekbones and a thinner
nose–and when I pictured him with shaggy dark brown hair or a slicked DA,
I nodded.

There are always people around the entertainment
business whose role is never made particularly clear. They’re attached to
somebody, or they know somebody, or somebody owes them a lot of favors or a lot
of money. They’re glad handers and compromisers and the sort of people who
throw parties that nobody dares miss. I’d seen this kid before, all right, and
I’d thought at the time he was one of those people. A good-looking little
pansy, nice enough, better conversationalist than me.

But he hadn’t aged a day in thirty years, and
gold-and-white streetlights shimmered behind his unpatched eye. Yeah. I knew
his name. “Jackie.”

“You
do
remember.” He folded his arms and stepped
back, leaning, the crease in his trousers pulling tight as he kicked one foot
up and braced the sole against the door.

“Yeah,” I say. “I think I gave you a Cadillac.”

A quick look down, and he scratched his ear. “It wound
up welded to a stand at the 15 and Jones a few years back, being used as a
billboard. They painted it pink. Perfect symbol of Las Vegas, if you ask me.”

“Yeah. Perfect. I didn’t know you were Vegas, Jackie.”

“Would you have treated me any different if you did?”

“At the time, I’d never heard that cities had genii and
I didn’t believe in vampires or werewolves, so probably not.” He didn’t look
down and his heart didn’t skip when I smiled, and I smiled wide enough that
even human eyes would catch the way my front upper teeth hooked over the bottom
row. “You’re here to run me out of town.”

His breathing quickened, just a touch. The lines beside
his eyes deepened. I almost heard the incidental music shift tempo, a little
bit faster, a little bit louder. “I came to ask what you thought you were doing
here.”

“Just moving from Memphis to the Luxor,” I said. He gave
me the blankest look ever, and I sighed. No use wasting any jokes about the
underworld on him either; he wouldn’t get any more use out of them than I would
have back in 1962. “Just looking for a place to stay out of the sun for a
while.”

“It seems unfair somehow that you didn’t need my
permission to be here.”

“Walking into a city isn’t like walking into somebody’s
house–”

“Las Vegas
is
my house. And don’t you forget it,
King–”

“–it’s more like walking into somebody’s hotel
room.” As dryly as I could pull off, and to his credit, he tipped his head to
the left, acknowledging the hit. Hah. I wondered if I would have been that
clever in the old days, if I’d given myself half a chance.

Probably not. As Ted Williams once said, if you don’t
think too good, it’s best if you don’t think too much.

“Touché,” Jackie said. “We still have a problem, King.
What are we going to do about you?”

“I’ve got no interest in hunting your city out, kid.”

“I’ve got no intention of letting you hunt my city at
all, King. And I’m older than you. I just aged better, is all.”

What was his word?
Touche
. “Most people did. But
that’s all behind us now, isn’t it? Tell me something, Jackie–”

I let it hang but he didn’t jump in again, and he didn’t
uncross his arms. I wondered if he had a stake up his sleeve. Rowan and garlic,
and a cross of silver threaded on a chain around his neck. There was no
shortage of crossroads near here to bury the body under. My lip twitched up; I
wondered if I could go on down to one and sell my soul for the power to sing
the blues, the way old Robert Johnson was supposed to have done.

He was looking at me smiling, and I looked right back.
“–what can you think of that belongs in Vegas more than me?”

He didn’t blink. “Sunrise, King. I’ll give you tonight
to set your affairs in order and to get out of town. For old time’s sake, I’ll
give you tonight. I’d head for Salt Lake. Not a lot of myth brewing up there,
and those boys don’t keep a very good eye on their town.”

“Mormons taste like shit,” I said when he hesitated. His
lip curled, but I didn’t manage to crack him up.

“You can’t stay here. I’ve got too much on my plate
right now to even think about having a vampire in town.”

I’m embarrassed to admit it took that long for the penny
to drop. I should have listened a little better to old Ted. “Your full plate,
Jackie….”

He nodded, his one eye gleaming in the shadows, his gaze
locked on mine.

“Has that got anything to do with why your other half is
running around Las Vegas with a genius from LA?”

Touche, indeed. His heart kicked, and I smelled the cold
sweat on his skin as he came toward me. Too smart to walk out into the room,
but he was just out of arm’s reach when he stopped. “What do you know about
Stewart, King?”

“Call me Tribute,” I said for the second time. “Give me
your parole, Jackie, and I’ll give you mine, and come sit down and we’ll crack
open the minibar, and I’ll tell you.”

“Your parole?” Incredulous: his rising eyebrows shifted
the eyepatch enough to show a pale thread of untanned skin on his cheek.
“You’re going to promise me you won’t hunt in Vegas? I don’t really
think–”

“Don’t be dense. Of course I can’t promise that.” I
stepped back, away. Closer to the window, but careful of the white-hot glow
that still limned the edge of the curtain. “But I won’t take any of yours, and
I won’t take anybody you’ll miss.”

He was watching, measuring, but I had the advantage. I
could smell the eagerness on him, the need to know trembling on his skin. It
smelled like a win.

I held my peace, humming a few bars of a Big Mama
Thornton standard as I swung an armchair around, where it wouldn’t be too close
to the light.

He stepped into the room. “What do you know about
Stewart?”

“It’s not much, baby.”

“I’ll take it.”

“I can stay?”

He stopped. His lips twisted, and he turned away to
inspect the rack of bottles on top of the minibar. “Bit early for the hard
stuff.”

“Did you get any sleep last night?”

“This is Vegas. Baby. Nobody sleeps.” He waited for me
to look. His decision hung on the air around him like the smell of blood,
delicious and thick. He’d have liked to have hit me; his frustration was
metallic, harsh. “How do I know you’re not jerking my chain?”

“If you don’t like my peaches, Jackie–”

“It’s not shaking your tree that concerns me.” He picked
a mini and cracked the seal, a sharp, limited sound. The scent of bourbon
filled the hotel room and I sneezed. “All right,” he said, and knocked the
whole bottle back without bothering to dump it in a glass. He put it down and
stepped away; I tidied it against the others. “Screw it. Tell me what you know,
King, and I’ll tell you if you can stay.”

#

The Assassin and the ghosts of Gods. Los Angeles.
Summer, 2002.

It had been a long time indeed since blood–with or
without the trappings of authority–had bothered the assassin. He wouldn’t
flinch from the blood of a cop.

Not even the need to do it eye to eye, and hand to hand.

The assassin climbed the steps two at a time, the carpet
sticky beneath his shoes where it wasn’t threadbare. He paused at the landing
and looked up, caught the eye of Angel, in a red pleather skirt, descending.
Her hips swayed as she danced over worn treads to the industrial strains of
Object 775. The music, loosely so termed, blasted from a chopped Honda Civic
parked under a partially burned-out sign visible through the rain-streaked
window on the landing. The window was stuck halfway open. The sign read
Gilbert
Hotel.