Christopher Moore - Bite Me

Rivera turned it in the air, trying not to cringe when he saw the pattern of the rips in the cloth.

Father Jaime said, “I see these guys every day, and they’re always wearing the same thing. It’s not like they have a closet full of clothes to choose from. If that jacket is here, then Warren is running around in the cold, or something happened to him.”

“And you haven’t seen him?” asked Cavuto.

“No one has. And I could tell you stories for most of the rest of these clothes, too. And the fact that clothing is even being turned in means that there’s lot of it out there. Street people don’t have a lot, but they won’t take what they can’t carry. That means that this is just what people couldn’t carry. Everyone in that dining room is looking for a friend he’s lost.”

Rivera put down the jacket and picked up a pair of work pants, not shredded, but covered in the dust and spattered with blood. “You said that you can link these clothes to people you know?”

“Yes, that’s what I told the uniformed cop first thing this morning. I know these people, Alphonse, and they’re gone.”

Rivera smiled to himself at the priest using his first name. Father Jaime was twenty years Rivera’s junior, but he still spoke to him like he was a kid sometimes. Being called “Father” all the time goes to their head.

“Other than being homeless, did these people have anything in common? What I mean is, were they sick?”

“Sick? Everyone on the street has something.”

“I mean terminal. That you know of, were they very sick? Cancer? The virus?” When the old vampire had been taking victims, it turned out that nearly every one of them had been terminally ill and would have died soon anyway.

“No. There’s no connection other than they were all on the street and they’re all gone.”

Cavuto grimaced and turned away. He started riffling through the clothing, tossing it around as if looking for a lost sock.

“Look, Father, can you make us a list of the people these clothes belong to. And add anything you can remember about them. Then I can start looking for them in the hospitals and jail.”

“I only know street names.”

“That’s okay. Do your best. Anything you can remember.” Rivera handed him a card. “Call me directly if anything else comes up, would you? Unless there’s something in progress, calling the uniforms will just put unnecessary steps in the investigation.”

“Sure, sure,” said Father Jaime, pocketing the card. “What do you think is going on?”

Rivera looked at his partner, who didn’t look up from a dusty pair of shoes he was examining.

“I’m sure there’s some explanation. I don’t know of any citywide relocation of the homeless, but it’s happened before. They don’t always tell us.”

Father Jaime looked at Rivera with those priest’s eyes, those guilt-shooting eyes that Rivera always imagined were on the other side of the confessional. “Inspector, we serve four to five hundred breakfasts a day here.”

“I know, Father. You do great work.”

“We served a hundred and ten today. That’s it. Those in line now will be it for today.”

“We’ll do our best, Father.”

They moved back through the dining room without looking anyone in the eye. Back in the car, Cavuto said, “Those clothes were shredded by claws.”

“I know.”

“They’re not just hunting the sick.”

“No,” Rivera said. “They’re taking anyone on the street. I’m guessing anyone who gets caught out alone.”

“Some of those people in the cafeteria saw something. I could tell. We should come back and talk to some of them when the priest and his volunteers aren’t around.”

“No need, really, is there?” Rivera was scratching out numbers on his notepad.

“They’ll talk to the paper,” Cavuto said, pulling in behind a cable car on Powell Street, then sighing and resolving himself to move at nineteenth-century speed for a few blocks as they made their way up Nob Hill.

“Well, first it will be covered as amusing stuff that crazy street people say, then someone is going to notice the bloody clothes and it’s all going to come out.” Rivera added another figure, then scribbled something with a flourish.

“It doesn’t have to come back to us,” Cavuto said hopefully. “I mean, it’s not really our fault.”

“Doesn’t matter if we get blamed,” said Rivera. “It’s our responsibility.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that we’re going to be defending the City against a horde of vampire cats.”

“Now that you said it, it’s real.” Cavuto was whining a little.

I’m going to call that Wong kid and see if he has my UV jacket done.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah,” Rivera said. “If you go by Father Jaime’s example, they’ve eaten about three-quarters of the Tenderloin’s homeless in, let’s call it a week. If you figure maybe three thousand street people in the City, you’re talking about twenty-two hundred dead already. Someone’s going to notice.”

“That’s what you were calculating?”

“No, I was trying to figure out if we had enough money to open the bookstore.”

That had been the plan. Early retirement, then sell rare books out of a quaint little shop on Russian Hill. Learn to golf.

“We don’t,” Rivera said. He started to dial Foo Dog when his phone chirped, a sound it hadn’t made before.

“The fuck was that?” asked Cavuto.

“Text message,” said Rivera.

“You know how to text?”

“No. We’re going to Chinatown.”

“A little early for eggrolls, isn’t it?”

“The message is from Troy Lee.”

“The Chinese kid from the Safeway crew? I don’t want to deal with those guys.”

“It’s one word.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“CATS.”

“Did I not ask you not to tell me?”

“The basketball court off Washington,” Rivera said.

“Have that Wong kid make me one of those sunlight jackets. Fifty long.”

“You get that many lights on you they’ll have you flying over stadiums playing Goodyear ads on your sides.”

They called it Wine Country. What it was, in fact, was an area south of Market Street, adjacent to the Tenderloin, where liquor stores sold a high volume, yet small variety, of fortified wines like Thunderbird, Richard’s Wild Irish Rose, and MD 20-20 (known in the wine world as Mad Dog, for the propensity of its drinkers to urinate publicly and turn around three times before passing out on the sidewalk). While Wine Country was technically the SOMA, or the “fashionable” South of Market Street neighborhood, it had yet to draw the young professional crowd that sprayed everything with a shiny coat of latte and money, as had its waterfront neighbor. No, Wine Country consisted mainly of run-down apartments, sleazy residence hotels, deeply skeezy porn theaters, and old industrial buildings, which now housed mini-storage units. Oh, and a huge Federal Building that looked like it was being molested by a giant steel pterodactyl, but evidently that was just the government trying to get away from their standard bomb shelter architecture to something more aesthetically appealing, especially if you liked Godzilla porn.

It was in the shadow of that architectural abomination that the Emperor had taken his search for the alpha vampire cat. He and the men didn’t spend much time in Wine Country, as he had lost a decade in a bottle somewhere and had since forsworn the grape. But it was his city, and he knew it like the cat-scratch scars on Bummer’s muzzle.

“Steadfast, gents, steadfast,” said the Emperor, throwing his shoulder against a Dumpster behind a hundred-year-old brick building. Bummer and Lazarus had commenced low, rumbling growls since they’d come into the alley, as if there were tiny semi-trucks idling in their chests. They were close.