Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

Sure, he’d put the doc off at the time. Having just escaped from five nights of hell in Baton Rouge, Jules had been in no frame of mind to even consider leaving New Orleans again. But that was then, and this was most definitely now. Going off with Doc Landrieu was the perfect solution. Even if Argentina had its own indigenous vampires, Jules wouldn’t have to worry about turf battles, because he and Doc Landrieu would be harvesting their own supply of blood in a nonintrusive, completely private fashion. They wouldn’t be stealing resources from anybody.

He stood on the desolate sidewalk and thought about it some more. Hooking up with the doctor would ensure Jules a constant supply of those miraculous antidiabetes pills; a good thing, especially since he was down to his last two or three. After a year or two of their working together, the doctor could probably come up with a cure for him, making the pills unnecessary. Argentina wasn’t New Orleans, but it would be all right.

Jules crossed the street to his car with a renewed sense of purpose. Maybe he’d bombed in St. Joseph’s, but salvation was only a ten-minute drive away.

The Mid-City side street next to the Jewish cemetery was silent and empty of people when Jules pulled up in front of Doc Landrieu’s house. No Night Out Against Crime block parties were going on in the neighborhood. The street lamp on the corner was out, leaving the otherwise well-tended block in uncustomary gloom.

In contrast, Jules’s mood was bright as the midday sun in Buenos Aires. He’d decided on the drive over that he would invite Maureen to fly south with him. Relief and happiness had swelled his heart with a sense of forgiveness; he was sure they could work out their differences in the big open spaces of Argentina, freed from the pressure-cooker atmosphere of New Orleans. And wouldn’t Doc Landrieu be thrilled to remove not one buttwo vampires from his home city!

Brimming with eager anticipation, Jules rang the doorbell. While waiting for Doc Landrieu to come to the door, he continued grinning like a kid who’d just won a shiny ten-speed bicycle. But Doc Landrieu didn’t come. Jules rang the bell again. The house remained dark.

He checked the driveway. Doc Landrieu’s car was there. Maybe he was down in his workshop and hadn’t heard the bell? Jules squeezed past the doctor’s car and circled to the back of the house. No lights shone through the narrow windows of the basement workshop.

Maybe the doctor had gone to bed early. That had to be it. He was a heavy sleeper, perhaps, and the bell wasn’t loud enough to wake him. Or maybe the bell was busted. Sure. It could be any of those things.

Whatever the deal was, Jules sure couldn’t wait for morning to talk with his ex-boss. It was kind of rude to wake the old man up if he was sleeping, but considering how eager Doc Landrieu had been to take Jules away from New Orleans, surely the doctor wouldn’t get too miffed over missing a few hours of shut-eye.

With his vampiric strength, Jules was certain he could knock a heck of a lot louder than any doorbell. Hoping he wouldn’t crack the door’s fresh coat of forest-green paint, he rapped the stout wood panels.

Yielding to his assault, the door swung open.

Jules was frozen with surprise. He hadn’t hit itthat hard. Not hard enough to bust the lock. Not even hard enough to dislodge the latch. Someone had left the door only partially shut.

Jules pushed the door the rest of the way open. “Doc Landrieu? Hey, Doc? It’s Jules Duchon.”

The house was quiet. Jules’s fingers fumbled along the wall until they located the light switch. The front parlor was unoccupied, but seemingly undisturbed. The big-screen television and stereo set were still where he remembered them. So the house hadn’t been burglarized. Maybe the doc was getting forgetful in his advanced age?

“Doc?” he called, louder than before. “It’s Jules. Hate to wake you, pal. But I decided to take you up on your offer.”

Still no response. Jules walked deeper into the parlor. Behind the sofa, between the edge of an expensive Persian rug and the hallway leading to the study and the kitchen, he found a brass floor lamp. It had tipped over and fallen onto the hardwood floor. Shattered pieces of colorful Tiffany glass were scattered across the polished teak.

Jules felt his heart sink. His boots crunched bits of broken glass. Dreading what he might find, he checked the kitchen, then the study, turning on lights as he went. He climbed the stairs, fear making his heart pound more unbearably than exertion ever had. The three upstairs bedrooms were empty and mute, betraying no traces of violence.

There was only one place left for him to check. He descended the stairs to the first-floor basement, where Doc Landrieu had his workshop and lab. Halfway down the stairs, the odor hit him. Jules’s last, brittle hopes disintegrated. After eighty-plus years in the vampire business, he knew the stench of decaying flesh all too well.

He found Doc Landrieu stretched out on his main worktable. His clothing and loose folds of his skin had been pinned to the table with long, skinny nails, as though he were a beetle on a high school biology dissecting tray. Broken lengths of glass tubing, tubing that the doctor had used for distilling his compounds, projected from his corpse like the quills of a porcupine.

Transfixed by this desecration of a man who had been his friend and mentor, Jules stumbled closer to the table. The unfrozen part of his mind noted that the fragments of glass tubing had not been driven into the doctor’s body haphazardly. The entry points had been chosen very carefully, sited to intersect with major veins and arteries. Dried residue of blood marked the inside of each hollow piece of glass.

Straws. That’s what the glass tubes had been. His killers had sucked Doc Landrieu dry, like a shared ice cream soda.

Something had been forced into the doctor’s mouth. Something dark brown and roughly egg shaped. Half of it still protruded from his dead, blue lips. Jules stared at it. It was a coconut. A small, painted coconut. It didn’t make sense. Not until Jules pulled it from his friend’s mouth and saw what was painted on it.

It was a Zulu coconut. Not a true Zulu coconut, but a close facsimile of that most prized throw from New Orleans’s oldest black Mardi Gras krewe. It was painted just like a real Zulu coconut, a dark smiling face with white rings around its eyes and mouth. The only difference from the authentic article was that this Zulu coconut had fangs.

Jules had seen many dead bodies during his long sojourn on earth. Hundreds of them. But apart from his brief viewing of his mother’s lifeless body before he had consigned her plain pine coffin to the damp earth of the paupers’ cemetery, Jules had never seen a friend’s corpse before.

Doc Landrieu’s grotesquely disrespected body expanded until it filled Jules’s entire field of vision. Staring into this horrible abyss, he saw his own future. He had three antidiabetes pills left; they were jangling in a little plastic pill bottle in his pocket. When they were gone, he would degenerate back into the arthritic, breathless, almost immobile hulk he’d been five weeks before. He would be a sitting duck. They would catch him without even breaking a sweat. They wouldn’t be satisfied with simply killing him. He would be humiliated. He would be disgraced. He would be put on display.

His fleshless skull would be mounted on a spear, a painted coconut jammed between its jaws.

Jules hadn’t been back to his old place of employment in years. He pushed open the heavy, art-deco doors that led into the morgue’s examination rooms, and the overwhelming odor of formaldehyde sent thirty years of memories cascading through his weary brain. He’d never had any reason to come back here after he’d retired; with all the changeovers in city administrations, none of the staff working there now would even remember him. With one important exception. One employee would still remember Jules, and after Doc Landrieu’s demise, only he could prevent Jules from becoming a helpless, crippled target.