Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

Jules slowly circled halfway around the brick pile of the Broad Street Pumping Station, part of a massive drainage system designed to suck accumulated rainwater off the streets and flush it into Lake Pontchartrain. From the look of the clouds overhead, the system would have its work cut out for it tonight. He had to admit Doodlebug’s analogy made a certain amount of sense. “So me and Malice X, we’re Cain and Abel. What the hell do you want me to do about it?”

“There’s only one thing youcan do. Kill him before he kills you.”

Jules pulled over into a bottle-strewn empty lot that, until a few years earlier, had been the Bohn Ford Used Car Lot. He shoved the transmission into park. “Before we go another block, I wanna ask you something. For somebody who lived in a monastery and wears a dress, you come off as onehelluva bloodthirsty sonofabitch. What’s the deal, Doodlebug? Who’s the real you?”

Jules turned off the radio. The Lincoln’s roughly idling motor made the dashboard rattle as he waited for his friend to answer. Doodlebug sighed. “Do you remember what I told you about the monks’ initiation test for new vampires? The choice between the meditation staff and the blood?”

“Yeah. The ones who picked the blood ended up as puddles of red goop.”

“That’s right.” The rain began falling again. It hit the windshield in fat splatty droplets, bursting against the glass like watery kamikazes. “They barely tolerated me. The monks. They let me stay and learn because I was useful to them. My fangs and blood thirst gave them the potential for fresh initiates. They were never rude or unkind. But they let me know, in very subtle ways, that I was among the fallen. That in this life, debased by my surrender to the blood lust, I have no chance of redemption. They taught me to hope that, if I diligently study the paths of discipline, I might make the right choice during my next incarnation as a vampire.”

Nextincarnation? In all his long decades as a vampire, Jules had never once thought about what might come after. “Jeez… that sounds even more hard-assed than Catholicism.”

Doodlebug managed a grim smile. “Perhaps. So, my friend, maybe you see why I don’t share your view that ending a vampire’s existence is wrong. With the exception of that small group of monks on their mountaintop, all of us vampires are tainted by having drunk the blood of our fellow creatures. All of us are fallen. By ending a vampire’s endless life of blood drinking, I may free a fallen soul for a second chance to achieve true and pure immortality.”

“Whoa whoawhoa!” Jules whacked his steering wheel in frustration.Again Doodlebug was twisting the rules of vampirism into crazy knots! “Just before, you was tellin‘ me I have to kill Malice X before he kills me, right? And now you’re sayin’ it would be agood thing if I got killed? Ain’t that a contradiction of terms?”

Doodlebug smiled. “You’re swifter on the uptake than I sometimes give you credit for. But don’t worry-this isn’t some plot on my part to get you killed. I want you to have the best shot possible at doing ‘the vampire thing’ right on your next go-around, and we haven’t finished your training.” He patted Jules’s shoulder reassuringly. “Besides, there’s no telling what sort of person you might be reborn as… and I have to admit to a certain fondness for the imperfect-but-charming vampire you are now.”

Jules’s head stopped swimming. As convoluted as his friend’s reasoning was, it made a bit more sense to him now. “Well… okay, then.” He shifted the transmission lever back into drive. “But one more thing-we’re at least gonnatry my original plan, right? Before we do anything more drastic?”

“Your problem demands your solution. I only advise. You’re the boss, Jules.”

He didn’t detect any sarcasm or ambiguity in his partner’s voice. Jules pulled out of the empty lot and turned onto Washington Avenue, heading for Central City and Club Hit ‘N’ Run.

He passed a large white-columned building that he remembered as the Broadmoor Cinema. Now it was the Rhodes Funeral Home. Jules glanced at the long black Cadillac hearses lined up in front, and a frightening thought occurred to him.

Doodlebug had said he didn’t want Jules to die, not yet. But would his friend, ashamed of his own fallenness, thirsting for a second chance, welcome hisown death in the coming battle?

Jules performed a slow drive-by past Club Hit ‘N’ Run. He circled the block, searching for some sign that their quarry was inside. The club occupied both halves of a shotgun double house on Melpomene Street, half a block off Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. As he scanned the trash-strewn streets for Malice X’s Cadillac limousine, Jules’s mind wandered to the days when Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard had been called Dryades Street. Back then, before World War II, it had been home to numerous Jewish businesses. Jules recalled the bearded men, wearing their funny little black skullcaps, who had run the bakeries, shoe stores, and tailor shops, all open on Sunday but closed on Saturday. By the early 1970s, when the street was renamed for a local civil rights activist, the bearded men in their skullcaps were long gone. Now the area was an economic fringe zone, an incubator for gangsters and petty criminals, avoided by tourists and middle-class locals like a radioactive crater. Jules had actually done a good business there over the past couple decades; most Central City residents didn’t own cars, at least not reliable ones, and he was one of the few cabdrivers willing to respond to calls from the neighborhood.

The sight of a familiar long, black, custom-built Seville jarred Jules back to the present. “There she blows,” he said, pointing to an alleyway off Melpomene Street, across the street from the club, four storefronts closer to the river. The brightly polished limousine had been backed into the alleyway, mostly out of sight of the street. A pair of orange barricades had been placed at the mouth of the alley, presumably to prevent any other cars from parking in front of the limousine and blocking it in.

“It’s a good setup for us,” Jules said. “He’s gotta go back in that alleyway sometime tonight to get his car. I didn’t see any rear exit; the back of the alley is blocked by that gardening supplies warehouse on Baronne. Once he’s in there, we can trap him and any bodyguards real easy.”

“Maybe it’stoo good a setup,” Doodlebug replied. “Didn’t you see that guard lounging by the side of the car? The car’s windows are tinted-there could be half a dozen more guards waiting inside.”

“Then we’ll just have to take care of them, won’t we? Remember ‘The Case of the Skull-Faced Nazis’? How many crummy guards did we have to polish offthat time? Compared to that, this’ll be a cakewalk.”

“Whatever you say, Jules.” Doodlebug didn’t sound convinced.

Jules turned the corner onto Baronne. “Hey-while we’re in uniform, it’s ‘Hooded Terror,’ ‘Terror,’ or ‘H.T.’ ”

“Oh, yes… it’svital that we protect our secret identities. How could I forget?”

A pair of large, grayish brown German shepherds chased each other across the street, forcing Jules to slam on the Lincoln’s brakes. “Shit! Fuckin‘ dogs got a death wish! Damn mutts ain’t got no collars, neither.” Muttering to himself about the dearth of dogcatchers in New Orleans, he parked along the curb while he still had a few shreds of asbestos left on his brake drums.

“Well, H.T., how do you propose getting that guard out of the way?”

“Simplicity itself, my dear D.B.,” Jules said, regaining his composure as he cut the motor. “Once you take off that mask, you can pass for a civilian real easily, considerin‘ the kooky way women dress nowadays. So here’s what you’ll do, see? All you gotta do is waltz up to that guard like some ditzy, airhead tourist who’s lost her way; boy, Iwish we had a Hurricane glass! Anyway, you distract the guard-show a little leg, and bounce those little titties of yours around. Use your imagination; I don’t wanna think about it much. Get him to turn away from the mouth of the alleyway. Then I’ll come in with a plank or a pipe and whack him over the head.”