Summer 2007 (20 page)

His partner’s hand was on his shoulder. He leaned back
against it, frowning. “Let me hear it.”

“The power plant at Chornobyl–the nuclear
plant–you know it?”

“The site had been chosen, but construction had not been
started yet, the last I knew.” The Russian dropped his chin, already knowing
what the ghost of Elvis would say. His degree was in physics; he knew better
than most that the proposed Soviet nuclear plants were an unsafe design. “There
was an explosion.”

“In 1986.”

“Of course there was,” he said, and looked up, something
that didn’t feel like a smile twisting his lips. “It’s the history of Ukraine,
my friend. If it weren’t ideologically questionable, I’d wonder if there were a
curse.” He turned on his heel and stalked back toward the maimed statue of
Lenin, the
precieux
faux-Russian bar–he recognized the chandelier,
now that he thought about it; he’d seen it in one embassy or another–and,
most importantly, the promised vodka locker.

His partner, still visibly rattled by the news that
Bobby Kennedy had been shot, was right beside him. He needed the steadying hand
on his elbow more than he cared to admit. “I thought we weren’t eating in the
tacky nightclub.”

“We’re not,” the Russian said, crisply. “We’re
drinking.”

There was Ukrainian vodka on the menu, and they served
it both in martini glasses and in samplers of shots frozen into blocks of
red-dyed ice. The bar itself had a strip of ice like a hockey rink down the
center, and the walls were cluttered with peeling propaganda posters. Coupled with
dim lighting, the effect was overwhelmingly claustrophobic, but the Russian’s
partner leaned against the bar on his left-hand side and the stranger in the
trenchcoat leaned on his right, and there was a certain comfort to be had
drinking silently between acquaintances while the decapitated head of Vladimir
Ilyich glowered down at him from its high shelf in the glassed-in freezer
behind the bar.

The Russian toasted it silently with his second martini
glass full of Zlatogor and breathed out through his teeth. He didn’t need to
talk; his partner spoke for him. “Did Jack send you looking for us? To bring
us…up to speed?”

“Jack sent me looking for his boyfriend. Look, what do I
call you guys?”

The Russian and the American exchanged glances and
shrugged. “What do we call you?” the American asked.

“Tribute.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Baby, you know that already.” Tribute smiled and
swirled the vodka in his shot glass. He put it back on the ice without touching
it to his lips and squared his cocktail napkin precisely. The Russian swallowed
vodka hard, watching the curvaceous brunette bartender as she slunk from one
end of the ice-topped surface to the other.

“So how come you look so much like the Suicide King?”
Tribute asked, after the Russian had finished his second drink.

“Suicide King?”

“Jackie’s boyfriend. The Suicide King. Jackie calls him
Stewart. Jackie’s the knave of spades, if you hadn’t caught on.”

“The one-eyed jack. Yes, of course. And his partner then
would have to be the King of Hearts.” The Russian glanced up as he spoke, then
glanced down as Tribute pushed the untouched shot glass toward him. “Boyfriend,
you say? I suppose that’s something else that’s changed.” He took the shot
glass with a sigh. “I do not know. Do you have any more bombshells to drop on
my head?”

“Not at the moment. Although I’m looking forward to your
reaction to President Ronald Reagan.”

Tribute had timed it perfectly. The American choked
hard, flinching as fiery alcohol bathed his sinuses. He grabbed a napkin and
covered the lower half of his face. “Currently?”

“No, back in the eighties. You all are just too much
fun.”

The American winced, set his napkin down, and sipped his
drink again. “So who shot RFK?”

“Supposedly, a fellow named Sirhan Sirhan, but there are
conspiracy theories about that, just like JFK.” Tribute shrugged, drawing
circles on the ice with his thumb. A passing matron turned to blink at his
profile, shook her head, and kept on walking. The Russian ordered another
drink.

“My friend here thinks Oswald did JFK all by himself,”
the American said, angling his head to include the silent Russian. The Russian
snorted and looked down. “Why did you come looking for us?”

“I didn’t,” Tribute said, swiveling his chair to catch
the American’s eye. “I was looking for Angel. Apparently, given that people
were talking about two guys dressed funny and asking the same questions I was,
so were you.”

The Russian glanced down at the munchie menu to hide his
smile. If Tribute had found them, then perhaps the assassin would too. He
blinked at the card stock in his hand. “Russian nachos? What on Earth?”

“Blame Julia Child.”

“I love Julia Child. On PBS.” The American was laughing
at him, but it didn’t matter. The American never had believed he could cook. “I
suppose she’s dead as well?”

Tribute smiled as he shook his head this time. “Still
going strong.”

Odd, how that little bit of continuity eased the
congealed twist of worry in the Russian’s chest. “What does she have to do with
Mexicanized Russian food?”

Tribute shrugged. “Fusion cuisine. The world’s gotten a
lot smaller since your day.”

“Our day?” The Russian recognized that tone in his
partner’s voice. The American was still working on his first martini. “I’d have
guessed our day was your day too. Aren’t you a, what did Jackie call us, a
media ghost as well? ‘Cause you’d be, what, seventy or so?”

Tribute turned to them and grinned; the Russian almost
startled back into the American’s arms at the glitter of white inhuman teeth.
“I died in 1977. And I’m sixty-seven, for what it’s worth.”

“Wampyr,” the Russian said. “Well, well.”

Tribute’s eyebrow rose. “You’re taking it well.”

“We’ve met your kind before.”

“Twice,” the American added, and the Russian turned his
back on the vampire–a foolish thing to do, but ten ounces of eighty-proof
vodka on an empty stomach after twelve hours in the heat perhaps had dulled his
instincts–and shook his head.

“Only once,” he argued. “The other one we never actually
met.”

“I was thinking of the fellow with the bats–”

“–random madman. Not a real supernatural being.”

Tribute laughed, drawing their attention back. “That’s
refreshing. The next thing people usually say is that I’ve changed. When they
actually get to live long enough to figure out who I am, I mean.”

The cold glitter of the vampire’s eyes arrested whatever
the Russian might have said in reply. Carefully, he pushed his martini glass
back an inch, using just his fingertips, and then steepled those fingertips
against those of the other hand. “But you aren’t that person, are you? You’re
something else.”

“A predator,” Tribute supplied.

“A predator who remembers being that man.”

The vampire snorted and picked at the ice of the bartop
with his thumbnail some more. He’d worn a little groove, although it didn’t
melt where he touched it. “If you can call the person I remember being a man.”
He shook his head and cleared his throat. “So the One-eyed Jack’s got you all
looking for Angel too. Spreading his resources out a bit, I suppose. Look, I’m
supposed to lead him to her–” The sharp-nailed hand splayed flat on the
bar, as if he meant to stab between the fingers with a knife. A human’s hand
would have blanched in places and reddened in others, from the pressure.
Tribute’s stayed bland white, porcelain. “–I can lead you as well. After
I get some business of my own out of the way.”

The American leaned forward, clearing his throat. “Why
are you helping Jack?”

“The likes of me?”

Vodka was making the Russian’s head swim. He needed to
eat. And not Russian Nachos. “Yes.”

“Boy’s got to live some place.” The vampire’s shoulders
moved under the black leather coat, which draped in folds soft as cashmere. The
dark blond hair drifted down into his eyes. “I like Las Vegas. I want to stay.
I have to earn that from Jack.”

“You’re buying your way in.”

Tribute showed the tips of his eyeteeth again as he
stood. “Besides,” he said, “I’ve met Los Angeles. One city like her is enough,
don’t you think?”

“Where are you going?” The Russian reached out to lay a
hand on Tribute’s wrist. The vampire suffered the touch; his flesh was cold, as
stiff as wax.

“Hunting,” Tribute said, one word full of potent venom.
He stepped back, a sharply folded fifty-dollar bill appearing on the bar where
he’d been sitting. “Drinks are on me. I’ll catch you later, little spies; you
don’t want to come.”

The coat didn’t swirl as he glided toward the door and
was gone. The Russian glanced at the American and waggled his eyebrows in a
passable imitation of their superior. “Jackie’s
boyfriend
?”

The American reached out, took the Russian’s martini off
the bar, and knocked the whole thing back in a gulp. “Times change,” he said
wryly, when his face unpuckered. “You think Tribute’s told Jackie his partner’s
alive? Or do you think the Genius of Las Vegas is lying to us?”

“I think it’s going to take a lot of sushi to fuel the
thinking process,” the Russian answered. “Do you suppose our money’s any good
here?”

The American smoothed Tribute’s bill against the ice.
“Better than his money would be there,” he said, and tapped President Grant on
the nose. “Come on,” he said, steadying the Russian as the Russian pushed
himself to his feet. “Let’s see if we can get ourselves shot in a restaurant.”

“Don’t forget our guardian angels,” the Russian
answered, casting a mysterious glance skyward.

“I never forget them. I just prefer not to make them
work too hard.”

#

The Assassin and the lady sowing the dragon’s heart. Las
Vegas. Summer, 2002.

The assassin sat in a straight-back chair, polishing his
shoes, while the genius of Las Vegas pressed his face into the pillow beside
Angel’s thigh and tugged ineffectually against the handcuff locking his right
wrist to the bedframe. Angel stroked his hair; he turned further away.

“No.” Flatly, with an edge that told the assassin that
the Suicide King was closer to his right mind than he’d been in days. Consent
had to be given, and so he was no longer under the influence of the narcotics
and witchcraft Angel had been using to keep him pliant.

“Come on, baby,” Angel said, as the assassin slipped his
foot into a gleaming loafer. “You have to eat your soup.”

“Or what? I’ll starve to death?” He snorted and rolled
onto his back, using the short chain to haul himself up against the headboard.
He sat beside Angel, his thin shoulders squared and his jaw working. He leaned
away from her and she curled toward him like a mother coaxing a nauseated
child. “If you want me to eat somebody’s heart, why don’t you start with your
own?”

The assassin stood, making sure his suitcoat hung flat
over his pistol. He buttoned both buttons and smoothed his lapels with a flick
of his thumbs, checking the look in the mirror. He’d picked up a bit of Las
Vegas sun, bronzing his cheekbones. Angel lifted her head, careful to keep the
mug of broth in her hand out of reach of the Suicide King. “What do you think
you’re doing? I need you here–”

“You’re not going to get him to drink that tonight,” the
assassin said, finger-combing his hair. “We need bargaining power. Offer him
his partner’s life.”

Stewart blanched.

The assassin blew Angel a kiss. “And in the meantime,
love, I have people to kill.”

She climbed off the bed and came across to him, leaving
the mug on the dark wood desk beside an industrial-looking beige telephone. She
lifted her chin and stared up at him, challenging; he kissed her for real this
time, ignoring the Suicide King’s snort of disgust. “Come home safe,” she said,
and laid a possessive hand on his upper arm. “I’d hate to have to find another
partner with your qualifications.”

“Never fear. And be careful of the poof while I’m gone,
Angel.” He winked. “You do look good enough to eat.”

#

Tribute and his cross to bear. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

Before I went to kill anybody, I took a walk through the
Neon Boneyard. Las Vegas is a city without a history, but the history it
doesn’t have was piled up here, baking under the unforgiving sun. It wasn’t the
old Las Vegas, of course–not the Vegas I lived in–but it was an
echoing ghost of it, acres of boot-marked hardpan and a hodgepodge of metal and
glass radiating the heat of the day back into the desert night. Cooling plastic
ticked; signs were piled by signs, big ones, medium-sized ones–some of
them two or three times taller than me. Familiar names: Sam Boyd’s, the Silver
Slipper, Joe’s Longhorn, all fenced around with green-laced chain link, like
the damned things might spook and stampede. I stopped by Aladdin’s silver lamp,
which sat in a protective sort of bay formed by the curve of the Gold Nugget
sign, and cocked my head back to look up at it. Funny how it looked so dated,
thirty-odd years later. Quaint, that’s the word I want.