Charlaine Harris - Crimes by Moonlight

I knew who these poor dead wretches were. And I knew why, at least roughly why, Chief Dolbert was delivering them.

When at last the doors on the panel truck were shut, the chief and Bolo headed back into the building. That pleased me-I was afraid the chief would take off into the rainy, thunderous night, and I didn’t want him to.

I wanted him around.

Not long after they had disappeared into the building, I went in after them.

And into hell.

It was a blindingly well-illuminated hell, a white and silver hell, resembling a hospital operating room but much larger, a hell dominated by the silver of surgical instruments, a hell where the walls were lined with knobs and dials and meters and gizmos, a hell dominated by naked corpses on metal autopsy-type tables, their empty eyes staring at the bright overhead lighting.

And the sensual satan who ruled over this hell, Victoria Riddle, who was back in her lab coat now, hair tucked in a bun, was filling Chief Dolbert’s open palm with greenbacks.

But where was Bolo?

I glanced behind me, and there he was, tucked behind the door, standing like a cigar-store Indian awaiting his mistress’s next command, only she didn’t have to give this command: Bolo knew enough to reach out for this intruder, his hands clawed, his eyes bulging to where the whites showed all around, his mouth open in a soundless snarl.

“Stop!” I told the looming figure, as he threw his shadow over me like a blue blanket.

But he didn’t stop.

And when I blew the top of his bald head off, splashing the white wall behind him with the colors of the inside of his head, red and gray and white, making another abstract painting only without a frame, that didn’t stop him, either, didn’t stop him from falling on top of me, and by the time I had pushed his massive dead weight off of me, his fat corpse emptying ooze out the top of his bald, blown-off skull, I had another fat bastard to deal with, a live one: the chief of the Hopeful Police Department, his revolver pointed down at me.

“Drop it,” he said.

He should have just shot me, because I took advantage of his taking time to say that and shot him in the head, and the gun in his hand was useless now, since his brain could no longer send it signals, and he toppled back on top of one of the corpses, sharing its silver tray, staring up at the ceiling, the red hole in his forehead like an extra expressionless eye.

“You fool,” she said, the lovely face lengthening into a contorted, ugly mask, green eyes wild behind the glasses.

“I decided I wasn’t thirsty after all,” I said, as I weaved my way between the corpses on their metal slabs.

“You don’t understand! This is serious research! This will benefit humanity…”

“I understand you were paying the chief for fresh cadavers,” I said. “With him in charge of the state’s potter’s field, you had no shortage of dead guinea pigs. But what I don’t understand is, why kill Bill and George Wilson, when you had access to all these riches?”

And I gestured to the deceased indigents around us.

Her face eased back into beauty; her scientific mind had told her, apparently, that her best bet now was to try to reason with me. Calmly. Coolly.

I was close enough to her to kiss her, only I didn’t feel much like kissing her and, anyway, the.45 I was aiming at her belly would have been in the way of an embrace.

“George Wilson tried to blackmail me,” she said. “Bill… Bill just wouldn’t cooperate. He said he was going to the authorities.”

“About your ghoulish arrangement with the chief, you mean?”

She nodded. Then earnestness coated her voice: “Mike, I was only trying to help Bill and George-and mankind. Don’t you see? I wanted to make them whole again!”

“Oh my God,” I said, getting it. “Bill was a live guinea pig, wasn’t he? Wilson, too…”

“That’s not how I’d express it, exactly, but yes…”

“You wanted to make them living Frankenstein monsters… you wanted to sew the limbs of the dead on ’em…”

Her eyes lit up with enthusiasm and hope. And madness. “Yes! Yes! I learned in South America of voodoo techniques that reanimated the dead into so-called ‘zombies.’ The scientific community was sure to reject such mumbo jumbo and deny the world this wonder, and I have been forced to seek the truth with my mixture of the so-called supernatural and renegade science. With the correct tissue matches and my own research into electrochemical transplant techniques-”

That was when the lights went out.

God’s electricity had killed man’s electricity, and the cannon roar aftermath of the thunderbolt wasn’t enough to hide the sound of her scurrying in the dark among the trays of the dead, trying to escape, heading for that door onto the garage.

I went after her, but she had knowledge of the layout of the place, and I didn’t, I kept bumping into bodies, and then she screamed.

Just for a split second.

A hard whump had interrupted the scream, and before I even had time to wonder what the hell had happened, the lights came back on, and there she was.

On her back, on the floor, her head resting against the metal under-bar of one of the dead-body trays, only resting wasn’t really the word, since she’d hit hard enough to crack open her skull and a widening puddle of red was forming below her head as she, too, stared up at the ceiling with wide-open eyes, just another corpse in a roomful of corpses. Bolo’s dead body, where I’d pushed his dead weight off of me, was-as was fitting-at his mistress’s feet.

I had to smile.

Bolo may not have had many brains in that chrome dome of his, but he’d had enough to slip her up.

Sergeant MacAullif was less than pleased. That wasn’t surprising. Less than pleased was his default position, the attitude he usually affected whenever I walked into his office. Which was hardly fair. I’d done him a favor once, and he’d gotten me out of a tight jam now and then, and when you added it all up, it wasn’t like we’d hurt each other much. Except the time he threw me up against my car, or the time he tried to push me through a wall. If the truth be known, I think his ritual expression of disgust was no more than that, a ritual expression, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, except that everything was fine, everything was normal, everything was par for the course. If MacAullif ever seemed glad to see me, I’d be worried.

Only this time he had cause.

“A vampire?” MacAullif said.

There is no way I can do justice to the skepticism, sarcasm, and mistrust with which MacAullif managed to imbue the word.

“That’s right.”

“You want me to find a vampire?”

“I’d be relieved if you could. I’m afraid he might be dead.”

“Aren’t vampires already dead?”

“Good point. I see you’re up on vampires. That will help.”

“I’m not up on vampires,” MacAullif said through clenched teeth. “I was ridiculing the notion.”

“I noticed.”

“What are you really here for?”

“I’m a private investigator. I don’t have the resources of the police department.”

MacAullif sighed. “Oh, hell.”

“Can you trace a guy for me?”

“Is he a vampire?”

“I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might subject me to ridicule.”

“Who is this vampire?”

“Morris Feldman.”

“Not Valmont? Or Count Gootsagoo? Or whatever?”

“Sorry.”

“Who is he? Aside from the obvious.”

“That’s what I’d like to determine.”

“What makes you think he’s dead?”

“His girlfriend hasn’t heard from him.”

“You think someone killed him?”