Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

He walked to the side of the main room closest to Convention Center Boulevard. Just as he’d been told, there was the private elevator, flanked by two tuxedoed guards. Guards, not doormen; doormen didn’t sport holsters and squared-off bulges beneath their suit jackets.

Jules approached the guard on the left. Both of the men were white; Jules wondered whether Malice X got a little charge out of lording it over white employees. “I’m Jules Duchon. I got business with your boss downstairs.”

“Ah, yes. The fat man. We were told to expect you.” The guard pressed the elevator’s call button. A few seconds later, the door swished open. “Don’t forget to press theDOWN button once you’re inside. It’s the one with the little red arrow that points to the floor.”

“Thanks, wise guy.” Jules flipped him a nickel before entering the elevator. “Here’s a tip for your trouble.”

The elevator was trimmed in tufted red velvet. “Looks like the coffin I could never afford,” Jules muttered to himself. The doors opened onto a shockingly large space, a high-ceilinged cavern where no cavern had any right to be. Jules felt like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger, who’d descended to the South Pole and discovered dinosaurs instead of glaciers.

“So this is where they dug it,” Jules said softly, wonderingly. “The tunnel to nowhere.” He thought back to the time, decades ago, when Canal Street had been snarled with earthmoving machines. More than thirty years had passed since the demise of the ill-conceived Riverfront Expressway project, a spur of highway that would’ve cut the French Quarter off from the Mississippi and permanently shadowed Cafй Du Monde with six lanes of elevated traffic. While a group of dedicated preservationists had fought the project in court and in Congress, the road builders had pressed forward, digging a massive tunnel beneath the International Trade Mart, a twenty-story riverfront monolith that stood in the path of the planned highway.

Then, against all expectations, the preservationists won their fight. The highway was canceled. But the tunnel endured. Its entrances were closed off; it didn’t make sense to fill in the hole that remained, but no one could come up with a use for it. Over the years, everyone forgot it was there.

Almost everyone. The man who became Malice X hadn’t even been born when the tunnel was first dug, but someone older than he had remembered the big hole by the river. Someone who realized that, with enough money invested, the hole would make an ideal sunproof lair for vampires.

The black vampire had certainly invested his wages of sin impressively. In the center of the tunnel was a Greek Revival mansion that wouldn’t have appeared out of place on St. Charles Avenue. A glassed-in garden and courtyard, a third as big as a football field, filled the space between the mansion’s two rear wings. A small fleet of tricked-out luxury cars and sport-utility vehicles was parked next to a gated access tunnel at the cavern’s far end. Most unusual of all, however, was what covered the cavern’s ceiling-a canopy of glittering stars and bright planets. Jules hadn’t seen such a glorious night sky within the city limits since before the widespread adoption of electric lights.

Jules stared upward, slack-jawed, as a meteor shower highlighted the faux sky. “Impressed?” Malice X’s wry, scornful voice boomed from hidden loudspeakers. “It’s a shame you won’t be around to see our beautiful sunrise,” the electronic voice continued while Jules searched futilely for its owner. “But it’s the sunsets, man-that’s when my light dude really earns his keep.”

“I didn’t come for no IMAX show,” Jules grumbled in the direction of the house. “You gonna show your face, mother-killer, or do I have to tear your place apart lookin‘ for you?”

“ ‘Muthah-killer’? For a sec there, I thought you might shock me and cuss me somethin‘ more colorful. You sound like a man in a hurry. Relax. I’ll make things as simple as possible. To find me, just follow yo’ heart’s desire.”

A series of pencil-thin beams of light illuminated dozens of beignets lying on the cobblestones. The sugar-laden squares of fried dough formed a winding pathway that led around the side of the mansion. He’d better enjoy his little jokes about my weight, Jules thought.Bastard won’t be making them much longer. As he followed the path of beignets, the spotlights stayed a few yards ahead of him. The path ended at the doorway to the glassed-in courtyard.

Jules opened the door, made of crimson stained glass, and stepped into the spacious garden. They were all there, standing behind the flowers and neatly trimmed hedges that enclosed a central square of immaculate lawn. He recognized about half the dark gray faces that stared him down. The toughs who’d surrounded him and Doodlebug in the alley outside Club Hit ‘N’ Run, who’d nearly killed him outside Maureen’s house. Cowboy Hat was there, still sporting his distinctive western wear and the chip on his shoulder. Even Malice X’s sister was there, glaring at Jules evilly. She spat sharply into a hedge as he closed the door behind him.

Jules didn’t look at her for long. He quickly locked eyes with the man he’d come to close accounts with. Malice X sat in an ornate wicker porch swing, squeezed comfortably between a pair of adoring, buxom women vampires. In contrast to the rest of Malice’s entourage, they paid Jules no attention at all, contenting themselves with running their long-nailed fingers across their master’s broad biceps and nearly bare chest.

“Welcome to my ‘humble abode,’ Jules,” Malice X said, smiling a Cheshire cat grin. “Welcome to Palace X.” He kept his arms snugly around his companions, leaving himself insouciantly vulnerable to any sort of projectile weapon Jules might’ve sneaked in under his coat. “All those priests at Jesuit High, man, they kept tellin‘ me I hadda go to college to make somethin’ of myself, tobe somebody. What thefuck did they know, huh? You know where all this comes from? Smarts, man. I came up with a good product, I marketed it right, and then I stashed my profits away in tech stocks. The joint upstairs? It wouldn’texist without me. Those yo-yos who wanted to build the world’s biggest casino, they couldn’t get their ducks in a row. Couldn’t line up the financing, didn’t have the pull with the local politicos. I could, and I did. I was their-what’d they call it? Oh, yeah. Their ‘white knight.’Heh.

“And you know what? I accomplished all this in less than a decade as a vampire. Less thanten years. How long’ve you been a bloodsuckah, Jules? Eighty years? A hundred? And what’s been the peak of your success? Tempting fat-ass old bag ladies into a cab even more broken down than they were?”

“You done bragging?” Jules asked flatly.

“No.” Malice X smiled again. “I’m not. Had yourself a good time with that chippie from the Strategic Helium Reserve?”

Jules was careful not to let any emotion play across his face. “So you were behind that, too. You ain’t tellin‘ me anything I haven’t already figured.”

“But yougotta admit it was slick-one vampire siccin‘ the vampire hunters on another. You know why I did it? Not because I thought I couldn’t do the job on you myself. I pulled the feds’ strings because I could. Because it waseasy. I had all these bigwigs at City Hall eatin’ outta my hand, beggin‘ me for their next dose of Horse-X. They had connections, and their connections had connections. I wanted to see what the feds had. What kinda antivampire doohickies they could come up with. And if I could find that out and make your life miserable at the same time-hey, Inever pass up a two-fer.”

“Yeah? Well here’s a two-fer for you. I left your fed dame lookin‘ like a sap, and I’ll do the same to you.”