The Vampire Sextette Read online

  rose in the sky.

  She wondered if she should stick close to the girl, keep her out of trouble.

  Why? She couldn't protect everyone. She barely knew Nico, probably had nothing

  in common with her.

  She remembered Moondoggie. And all the other dead, the ones she hadn't

  been able to help, hadn't tried to help, hadn't known about in time.

  This girl really was none of her business.

  "What's that?" said Nico, head darting. There was a noise from beyond the

  fence at the end of the garden.

  Dominating the next property was a three-storey wooden mansion, California

  cheesecake. Nico might have called it old. Now Geneviève's attention was drawn

  to it, her night eyes saw how strange the place was. A rusted-out pickup truck was

  on cinderblocks in the yard, with a pile of ragged auto tires next to it. The

  windshield was smashed out, and dried streaks—which any vampire would have

  scented as human blood, even after ten years—marked the hood.

  "Who lives there?" Geneviève asked.

  "In-bred backwoods brood," said Nico. "Orson says they struck it rich down

  in Texas, and moved to Beverly Hills. You know: swimming pools, movie

  stars…"

  "Oil?"

  "Chili sauce recipe. Have you heard of Sawyer's Sauce?" Geneviève hadn't. "I

  guess not. I've not taken solid foods since I turned, though if I don't feed for a

  night or two I get this terrible phantom craving for those really shitty White Castle

  burgers. I suppose that if you don't get to the market, you don't know the brand

  names."

  "The Sawyers brought Texas style with them," Geneviève observed. "That

  truck's a period piece."

  The back porch was hung with mobiles of bones and nail-impaled alarm

  clocks. She saw a napping chicken, stuffed inside a canary cage.

  "What's that noise?" Nico asked.

  There was a wasplike buzzing, muted. Geneviève scented burning gas. Her

  teeth were on edge.

  "Power tool," she said. "Funny time of the night for warm folks to be doing

  carpentry."

  "I don't think they're all entirely warm. I saw some gross Grandpaw peeping

  out the other night, face like dried leather, licking livery lips. If he isn't undead, he's

  certainly nothing like alive."

  There was a stench in the air. Spoiled meat.

  "Come on, let's snoop around," said Nico, springing up. She vaulted over the

  low fence dividing the properties and crept across the yard like a four-legged crab.

  Geneviève thought that was unwise, but followed, standing upright and keeping

  to shadows.

  This really was none of her business.

  Nico was on the porch now, looking at the mobiles. Geneviève wasn't sure

  whether it was primitive art or voodoo. Some of the stick-and-bone dangles were

  roughly man-shaped.

  "Come away," she said.

  "Not just yet."

  Nico examined the back door. It hung open, an impenetrable dark beyond. The

  buzzing was still coming from inside the ramshackle house.

  Geneviève knew sudden death was near, walking like a man.

  She called to Nico, more urgently.

  Something small and fast came, not from inside the house but from the flatbed

  of the abandoned truck. The shape cartwheeled across the yard to the porch and

  collided purposefully with Nico. A length of wood pierced the vampire girl's thin

  chest. A look, more of surprise than pain or horror, froze on her face.

  Geneviève felt the thrust in her own heart, then the silence in her mind. Nico

  was gone, in an instant.

  "How do you like your stake, ma'am?"

  It was Barbie. Only someone truly witless would think stake puns the height of

  repartee.

  This time, Geneviève wouldn't let her get away.

  "Just the time of night for a little leech-on-a-spit," said the Slayer, lifting Nico's

  deadweight so that her legs dangled. "This really should be you, Frenchie. By the

  way, I don't think you've met Simon's brother, Sidney. Frenchie, Sidney. Sidney,

  hellbitch creature of the night fit only to be impaled and left to rot in the light of the

  sun. That's the formalities out of the way."

  She threw Nico away, sliding the dead girl off Sidney the Stake. The newborn,

  mould already on her still-startled face, flopped off the porch and fell to the yard.

  Geneviève was still shocked by the passing, almost turned to ice. Nico had

  been in her mind, just barely and with tiny fingers, and her death was a wrench.

  She thought her skull might be leaking.

  "They don't cotton much to trespassers down Texas way," said Barbie, in a

  bad cowboy accent. "Nor in Beverly Hills, neither."

  Geneviève doubted the Sawyers knew Barbie was here.

  "Next time, the Overlooker says I can do you, too. I'm wishing and hoping and

  praying you ignore the warning. You'd look so fine on the end of a pole,

  Frenchie."

  An engine revved, like a signal. Barbie was bounding away, with deerlike

  elegance.

  Geneviève followed.

  She rounded the corner of the Sawyer house and saw Barbie climbing into a

  sleek black Jaguar. In the driver's seat was a man wearing a tweed hunting jacket

  with matching bondage hood. He glanced backwards as he drove off.

  The sports car had vanity plates: OVRLKER1.

  Gravel flew as the car sped off down the drive.

  "What's all this consarned ruckus?" shouted someone from the house.

  Geneviève turned and saw an American gothic family group on the porch.

  Blotch-faced teenage boy, bosomy but slack-eyed girl in a polka-dot dress, stern

  patriarch in a dusty black suit, and hulking elder son in a stained apron and crude

  leather mask. Only the elder generation was missing, and Geneviève was sure they

  were up in rocking chairs on the third storey, peeking through the slatted blinds.

  "That a dead'n'?" asked the patriarch, nodding at Nico.

  She conceded that it was.

  " True dead'n'?"

  "Yes," she said, throat catching.

  "What a shame and a waste," said Mr. Sawyer, in a tone that made Geneviève

  think he wasn't referring to a life but to flesh and blood that was highly salable.

  "Shall I call the sheriff, Paw?" asked the girl.

  Mr. Sawyer nodded gravely.

  Geneviève knew what was coming next.

  "… there's just one thing I don't understand, miss."

  "Lieutenant, if there were 'just one thing' I didn't understand, I'd be a very

  happy old lady. At the moment, I can't think of 'just one thing' I do understand."

  The detective smiled craggily.

  "You're a vampire, miss. Like this dead girl, this, ah, Nico. That's right, isn't

  it?"

  She admitted it. Orson Welles had lent her a crow-black umbrella which she

  was using as a parasol.

  "And this Barbie, who again nobody else saw, was, ah, a living person?"

  "Warm."

  "Warm, yes. That's the expression. That's what you call us."

  "It's not offensive."

  "That's not how I take it, miss. No, it's that aren't vampires supposed to be

  faster than a warm person, harder to catch hold of in a tussle?"

  "Nico was a newborn, and weakened. She'd lost some blood."

  "That's one for the books."

  "Not any more."

  The detective scratched h
is head, lit cigar end dangerously near his hair. "So I

  hear. It's called 'drac' on the streets. I have friends on the Narco Squad. They say

  it's a worse blight than heroin, and it's not illegal yet."

  "Where is this going, Lieutenant?"

  He shut his notebook and pinned her with his eye.

  "You could have, ah, taken Miss Nico? If you got into a fight with her?"

  "I didn't."

  "But you could have."

  "I could have killed the Kennedys and Sanford White, but I didn't."

  "Those are closed cases, as far as I'm concerned. This is open."

  "I gave you the plate number."

  "Yes, miss. OVRLKER1. A Jaguar."

  "Even if it's a fake plate, there can't be that many English sports cars in Los

  Angeles."

  "There are, ah, one thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two registered

  Jaguars. Luxury vehicles are popular in this city, in some parts of it. Not all the

  same model."

  "I don't know the model. I don't follow cars. I just know it was a Jaguar. It had

  the cat on the bonnet, the hood."

  "Bonnet? That's the English expression, isn't it?"

  "I lived in England for a long time."

  With an Englishman. The detective's sharpness reminded her of Charles, with a

  witness or a suspect.

  Suspect.

  He had rattled the number of Jaguars in Greater Los Angeles off the top of his

  head, with no glance at the prop notebook. Gears were turning in his head.

  "It was a black car," she said. "That should make it easier to find."

  "Most automobiles look black at night. Even red ones."

  "Not to me, Lieutenant."

  Uniforms were off, grilling the Sawyers. Someone was even talking with

  Welles, who had let slip that Geneviève was working for him. Since the client had

  himself blown confidentiality, she was in an awkward position; Welles still didn't

  want it known what exactly she was doing for him.

  "I think we can let you go now, miss," said the detective.

  She had been on the point of presenting him her wrists for the cuffs.

  "There isn't 'just one more thing' you want to ask?"

  "No. I'm done. Unless there's anything you want to say."

  She didn't think so.

  "Then you can go. Thank you, miss."

  She turned away, knowing it would come, like a hand on her shoulder or

  around her heart.

  "There is one thing, though. Not a question. More like a circumstance,

  something that has to be raised. I'm afraid I owe you an apology."

  She turned back.

  "It's just that I had to check you out, you know. Run you through the books.

  As a witness, yesterday. Purely routine."

  Her umbrella seemed heavier.

  "I may have got you in trouble with the state licensing board. They had all your

  details correctly, but it seems that every time anyone looked at your license

  renewal application, they misread the date. As a European, you don't write an

  open four. It's easy to mistake a four for a nine. They thought you were born in

  1916. Wondered when you'd be retiring, in fact. Had you down as a game old

  girl."

  "Lieutenant, I am a game old girl."

  "They didn't pull your license, exactly. This is really embarrassing, and I'm

  truly sorry to have been the cause of it, but they want to, ah, review your

  circumstances. There aren't any other vampires licensed as private investigators in

  the state of California, and there's no decision on whether a legally dead person

  can hold a license."

  "I never died. I'm not legally dead."

  "They're trying to get your paperwork from, ah, France."

  She looked up at the sky, momentarily hoping to burn out her eyes. Even if her

  original records existed, they'd be so old as to be protected historical documents.

  Photostats would not be coming over the wire from her homeland.

  "Again, miss, I'm truly sorry."

  She just wanted to get inside her trailer and sleep the day away.

  "Do you have your license with you?"

  "In the car," she said, dully.

  "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to surrender it," said the detective.

  "And that until the legalities are settled, you cease to operate as a private

  investigator in the state of California."

  At sunset, she woke to another limbo, with one of her rare headaches. She was

  used to knowing what she was doing tonight, and the next night, if not specifically

  then at least generally. Now, she wasn't sure what she could do.

  Geneviève wasn't a detective any more, not legally. Welles had not paid her

  off, but if she continued working on John Alucard for him she'd be breaking the

  law. Not a particularly important one, in her opinion… but vampires lived in such a

  twilight world that it was best to pay taxes on time and not park in towaway zones.

  After all, this was what happened when she drew attention to herself.

  She had two other ongoing investigations, neither promising. She should make

  contact with her clients, a law firm and an Orange County mother, and explain the

  situation. In both cases, she hadn't turned up any results and so would not in all

  conscience be able to charge a fee. She didn't even have that much Welles could

  use.

  Money would start to be a problem around Valentine's Day. The licensing

  board might have sorted it out by then.

  (in some alternate universe)

  She should call Beth Davenport, her lawyer, to start filing appeals and lodging

  complaints. That would cost, but anything else was just giving up.

  Two people were truly dead. That bothered her, too.

  She sat at her tiny desk, by a slatted window, considering her telephone. She

  had forgotten to switch her answering machine on before turning in, and any calls

  that might have come today were lost. She had never done that before.

  Should she rerecord her outgoing message, stating that she was (temporarily?)

  out of business? The longer she was off the bus, the harder it would be to get

  back.

  On TV, suspended cops, disbarred private eyes, and innocent men on the run

  never dropped the case. And this was Southern California, where the TV came

  from.

  She decided to compromise. She wouldn't work Alucard, which was what

  Welles had been paying her for. But, as a concerned—indeed, involved—citizen,

  no law said she couldn't use her talents unpaid to go after the Slayer.

  Since this was a police case, word of her status should have filtered down to

  her LAPD contacts but might not yet have reached outlying agencies. She called

  Officer Baker, a contact in the Highway Patrol, and wheedled a little to get him to

  run a license plate for her.

  OVRLKERl.

  The callback came within minutes, excellent service she admitted was well

  worth a supper and cocktails one of these nights. Baker teased her a while about

  that, then came over.

  Amazingly, the plate was for a Jaguar. The car was registered in the name of

  Ernest Ralph Gorse, to an address in a town up the coast, Shadow Bay. The only

  other forthcoming details were that Gorse was a British subject—not citizen, of

  course—and held down a job as a high-school librarian.

  The Overlooker? A school librarian and a cheerleader might seem different

  species, but they swa
m in the same tank.

  She thanked Baker and rang off.

  If it was that easy, she could let the cops handle it. The Lieutenant was

  certainly sharp enough to run a Gorse down and scout around to see if a Barbie

  popped up. Even if the detective hadn't believed her, he would have been obliged

  to run the plate, to puncture her story. Now he was obliged to check it out.

  But wasn't it all too easy?

  Since when did librarians drive Jaguars?

  It had the air of a trap.

  She was where the Lieutenant must have been seven hours ago. She wouldn't

  put the crumpled detective on her list of favourite people, but didn't want to hear

  he'd run into another of the Sharp brothers. Apart from the loss of a fine public

  servant who was doubtless also an exemplary husband, it was quite likely that if

  the cop sizing her up for two murders showed up dead, she would be even more

  suitable for framing.

  Shadow Bay wasn't more than an hour away.

  Welles's final Dracula project came together in 1981, just as the

  movies were gripped by a big vampire craze. Controversial and slowbuilding, and shut out of all but technical Oscars, Coppola's Dracula

  proved there was a substantial audience for vampire subjects. This was

  the film era of Werner Herzog's Renfield, Jeder fur Sich und die

  Vampir Gegen Alle, a retelling of the story from the point of the flyeating lunatic (Klaus Kinski); of Tony Scott's The Hunger, with

  Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as New York art patrons Miriam

  and John Blaylock, at the centre of a famous murder case defended by

  Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver); of John Landis's Scream, Macula,

  Scream, with Eddie Murphy as Dracula's African -get Prince

  Mamuwalde, searching for his lost bride (Vanity) in New York—best

  remembered for a plagiarism lawsuit by screenwriter Pat Hobby that

  forced Paramount to open its books to the auditors; of Richard

  Attenborough's bloated, mammoth, Oscar-scooping Varney, with

  Anthony Hopkins as Sir Francis Varney, the vampire Viceroy

  overthrown by the Second

  Indian Mutiny; of Brian DePalma's remake of Scarface, an explicit

  attack on the Transylvania Movement, with Al Pacino as Tony Sylvana,

  a Ceausescu cast-out rising in the booming drac trade and finally taken

  down by a Vatican army led by James Woods.

  Slightly ahead of all this activity, Welles began shooting quietly,