Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

“Will I be able to change into a bat, like in the movies?”

“Sure!”

She kissed him again. “What is it like, to fly over a city on your own wings? Is it beautiful?”

Jules tried to remember the last time he’d actually flown. Who had been president then? Kennedy? But he remembered how New Orleans had looked from the air, the lights of the river-embraced city twinkling like an enormous crescent-shaped Christmas display. “Yeah, it was beautiful, baby.”

A knock on the door interrupted Jules’s reverie. Veronika got up and opened the door. “Oh, isn’t this wonderful looking!” She ushered in the waiter, who carefully steered his cart heaped with steaming platters of fruit-covered pancakes, eggs over easy, hash brown potatoes, and strawberries drowned in cream.

She tipped the waiter lavishly, then attacked the strawberries and cream, balancing two of the plump berries on her spoon at a time. “Dessert should comefirst, I always say!” She turned those liquid eyes on him again. “Oh, Jules, can you imagine howsweet all this will make me taste? All those months they had me studying you, learning your habits, they had no idea I was developing the biggestcrush on you.” She ate the last of the strawberries, then lifted the bowl to her lips and drank the remaining cream. “ Mmmm… simplydelicious. I used to lie in my bed at the compound and fantasize about you all night long.”

It was all Jules could do to keep himself from ravishing her right then, drinking in her sex and then gulping down her blood. But through an extraordinary exertion of will, he reminded himself that the whole point of tonight’s adventure was to gather information.

“You, uh, you said earlier that your handlers found out it was me who did in those twenty-three boobs across the river. You got any idea how they was able to pin it on me?”

“Oh, do wehave to talk about thisnow?” She pouted briefly, then dug into the tall stack of blueberry-and baked-apple-covered pancakes. “Oh,all right. If it’ll make you happy. They did some kind of tests on that goop you left on the floor. They were able to separate out your saliva, then genetically match it against some kind of tissue sample of yours.”

Tissue sample?What kind of sample could the government have? He hadn’t been in a hospital since before World War I. He certainly hadn’t donated any blood for the past eighty years or so. Doc Landrieu? Sure, the doc had poked and prodded him to satisfy his medical curiosity, but Jules couldn’t believe his ex-boss would’ve betrayed him.

A more recent recollection hit him.The baby teeth. The missing vampire baby teeth. Sure. It made sense. Who knew how long they’d been missing? If it was the teeth, that meant they’d been ferried to the feds either by Maureen or by her ex-lover-boy. Had Maureen asked him about the missing teeth to throw suspicion off herself? He didn’t want to think it. But it was possible.

“Babe, you said those guys in your agency were teachin‘ you all about my habits and my likes and dislikes. You got any idea where they came by that kinda information? It’s not like I ever put it on a Web site or nothin’.”

“Oh, don’t worry about allthat!” she said brightly. “Once you turn me into a vampire, we’ll move down to Mexico together. The agency won’t bother with you once you’re out of the country.”

Mexico?Everyone and their brother wanted him to move south of the border! “Just humor me and answer my question, huh?”

“Ohh-kay. I was never privy to what all the higher-ups had their noses into. But I think I remember somebody telling me once that your case came to the agency’s attention when somebody from local government called in some favors from the FBI. The FBI realized this was out of their depth, so they referred it to my agency.”

“‘Local government’? You mean from New Orleans City Hall?”

“I guess. I think it was somebody pretty high up. An alderman or somebody.”

Who had connections at City Hall? Not Maureen; although with all the Mardi Gras balls she used to attend, it was conceivable that she might have some political connections. Doc Landrieu was well connected throughout the local political community-local politics had been his life. But Jules still refused to believe that his old patron had turned against him.

That left Malice X. What kind of connections could a drug-dealing, ex-gang-member vampire have at City Hall? Wait-that big black binder he’d grabbed from Elisha Raddeaux’s heroin lab had listed some of the mayor’s top aides as clients!

“Oh, here’s something else I remember,” Veronika said. “My handler mentioned that he had a local contact regarding your case. Some guy he’d meet up with at this bar on Wednesday nights.”

Jules could barely contain his eagerness. “You remember the name of this bar?”

She forked another load of sugar-coated pancakes into her pretty mouth. “Umm… it had a funny name. Hit-Me-Up. No, that wasn’t it. Hit-and-Go, maybe?”

“The Hit ‘N’ Run Club?”

“That sounds right. Yeah, I think that was it.”

Bingo!Wednesday night was tomorrow night. Now he and Doodlebug would take the fight to Malice X instead of waiting for him to catch up to Jules. The element of surprise would be in Jules’s pocket, for once, instead of pressing against his throat.

“That’s fuckin‘great, baby!” He reached his arms around her ample form and kissed her lustily on the side of her neck.

She grinned at him and wiped a blob of syrup from the corner of her mouth. “Let me give you something better to get you all hot and bothered. Tell you what. For every bite of breakfast I eat, I’ll take off one article of clothing. And when I’m all out of articles of clothing, it’ll be time foryour breakfast.”

How fortune could turn on a dime! Only hours ago he was covered in sweat, sitting on a cold concrete floor, enduring a browbeating from Maureen. “Baby, that’s a better deal than the Pilgrims gettin‘ Manhattan for a handful of beads!”

As the eggs disappeared into her mouth, the shoes and socks came off her feet. A croissant accounted for her blouse and linen jacket. The last bites of pancake were traded for her skirt and the colorful silk scarf adorning her neck.

Finally, all that was left on her body were her bra and panties. All that was left on her plate was half a grapefruit. Smiling wickedly, she plunged her spoon into the moist, pink fruit.

“Wait!” Jules cried, bestirring himself from his erotic haze. “Don’t eat that!”

“Why not?”

“It’s too sour. It might sour up your blood.”

“But Ilove grapefruit! And I still have my underwear to take off.”

“Let me worry about your underwear. Just forget about that grapefruit, huh?”

“You big meanie!” She giggled as she fell into his waiting arms, then engulfed his mouth with a kiss.

A minute later, he almost wished hehad let her eat the damn grapefruit, just so she would’ve taken off the damn bra herself. Why the hell did lingerie manufacturers make their products so incredibly complicated? The clasps on this thing would’ve bedeviled a tag team of Edison, Einstein, and Joe DiMaggio. Finally, he got it loose. The resulting plunge into infinite softness immediately made him forget about his momentary frustration.

Sothis was the payoff. Ever since he’d been a little boy, Jules had suspected that the bad things in the universe were balanced out by good things, or vice versa. Just not necessarily of equal magnitude. Most of his life he’d spent dreading the coming deluge of shit that would follow some tiny, insignificant good thing like finding a quarter on the street. But this time,this time, the deluge of shit had comefirst. And if the universe played by its own rules, that meant the balancing payback had to be even bigger and better. Tonight, he was making love to a gorgeous young woman whose fondest wish was to become his vampire queen. Tomorrow night, he and Doodlebug would squish his mortal enemy like the sewer-crawling cockroach he was.