MaryJanice Davidson: Dead Over Heels

“What’ve you got against the Hilton corporation?” I cried. “Besides them, you know, spawning Paris and all.”

“Isn’t that more than enough?”

“ I’ve had more than enough,” Jessica snapped.

“Check, please!”

We’d barely gotten down the block when we saw the flashing lights and crowd. “Uh-oh,” Nick said. “Crime scene.”

“The perfect end to a perfect evening,” Sinclair muttered.

“You guys stay here. I’m gonna check it out.”

“You’re a little out of your jurisdiction!” I called after him. “Like, by two thousand miles!”

“Fifteen hundred,” Sinclair and Jessica said in unison.

“You know, now that he’s gone, how much longer are you going to let him torture us?”

“I’m sorry,” Jessica said at once. “I guess this is turning out to be a pretty crummy idea. I just thought—I don’t know what I thought.” She cleared her throat. “You, uh, will mention to the staff not to snack on us, right?”

“There’s an old vampire saying,” I told her. “Don’t shit where you eat.”

“Ah, yes, that old vampire saying,” Sinclair said, smiling for the first time since the waiter took our order.

We chitchatted for another minute or two, and then Nick came trotting back. “There’s a dead kid in that alley,” he said, almost snarling. “And if he’s more than thirteen I’ll eat the candles on his last birthday cake. So which one of you two dead assholes just couldn’t wait for a little snack? Huh? Or did you team up on the poor kid? Did you—”

I slapped him. The sound was almost inaudible with all the background noise. One thing about New York I’d never get used to. All the noise. “That is enough, Nicholas J. Berry! You know Goddamned well I wouldn’t do that and neither would Sinclair. I know you’re pissed at us and I understand that, but there’s pissed and there’s ugly, and I’ve had enough of your ugliness. You don’t want to be here? Get the fuck lost. If you are going to be here, watch your fucking mouth.”

He didn’t say another word all night.

He couldn’t,” Jessica said the next night. “His jaw was numb for hours afterward. No feeling at all. I tried to talk him into going to the E.R. but he wouldn’t do it. I was afraid you’d broken his jaw. But you just bruised the hell out of it.”

“Oh my God,” I said, appalled. I’d only been awake for about twenty minutes and she dropped this on me. “I didn’t mean to hurt him! That much.”

She shrugged. “He didn’t exactly not have it coming. It’s so hard to defend your boyfriend when he’s being an unreasonable dick.”

Tell me about it , I almost said, but managed to bite my tongue in time. Instead I yawned and jumped out of the bed.

“I don’t know why you bothered to pack clothes at all,” my friend snarked, eyeing my naked form.

“Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but it is my honeymoon.”

“Where’s Sinclair?”

“Dunno. But I’m betting he’s conducting a private investigation about the dead kid. You know we’d never, and I know we’d never, but victims like that make us all look bad. Although I love how Nick gets all high and mighty, pretending ordinary humans don’t pull this shit every damn d—” I closed my mouth with a snap; I’d almost broken Rule Number One: Do Not Shit On Your Best Friend’s Honey.

She was nice enough to ignore my blunder. “And what’s this shoe doing sticking out of the wall?”

I ignored that . “How’d you get in here, anyway?”

“Huh? Oh. Sinclair let me have his spare key. Said he didn’t need one.”

“He did?” Of course he did. He didn’t have a problem with Jessica. “You’ll, uh, keep that tidbit to yourself, right?”

She gave me a look of such scorn, my eyebrows nearly scorched.

“O- kay , don’t look at me like that.” I yawned and scratched. “I guess I better get dressed.”

“Please,” Jessica begged. “And leave your armpit alone; you look like an ape when you do that. A tall, blond, vampiric ape.”

“I cannot believe the shit I’ve had to eat, and I’ve only been awake for five minutes! Leave that alone,” I added, because Jessica was tugging at the shoe in the wall.

“It won’t budge,” she gasped. “What did you do?”

“Some things will never be told.” I opened the door, put a firm hand in the middle of her back, and pushed. “Later, gator.”

The door had no sooner shut when it opened, and my husband (would I ever get tired of that phrase? prob’ly not) stood in the doorway.

“Ready for our big day?” I asked.

“I’d rather,” he replied, eyeing me up and down, “stay in tonight and discuss world politics while chewing on your labia.”

“That’s . . . sweet. But you promised.”

He sighed, which was unnecessary for a vampire. I guess his old habits died hard, too. “Let me see the list again.”

This was a stall technique, since I knew full well he remembered all the stuff I wanted to do. Still, I obligingly dug in my purse and extracted an index card, on which I’d scrawled all the tourist-type things I wanted to do today: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty . . . like that.

Sinclair never changed expression, but the farther down the list he went, the farther the left corner of his mouth turned down. Meanwhile, I was rapidly dressing in a bra, panties, linen walking shorts, a cherry red sweater, and a pair of René Caovilla walking sandals.

“You look like a gladiator in those,” was his only comment as he handed my list back.

“I am a gladiator. Now let’s go!”

“Must we take the subway?” he whined. “We have a private car at our disposal, thanks to Jessica’s finely honed sense of guilt.”

“It’s all part of the definitive New York experience,” I said, “so yes.”

“So is getting mugged,” he muttered, courteously holding the door open for me.

“Don’t tease. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Something cool to tell my mom.”

“Awesome,” he replied tonelessly, and followed me out.

Wow! It’s a good thing I’m dead, or I’d be exhausted .” “As opposed to simply bored out of your charming little mind.”

“Oh, shut up. How could we not go up in the building King Kong climbed with Naomi Watts?”

“But darling, he didn’t actually climb—”

“Stop it, you’re ruining the whole thing!”

“The remake, the original, or the evening?”

“You’re so talented, you’re wrecking all three. Now, what’s next?”

“Thankfully, we have completed your interminable list of chores—”

“Five things!”

“—and can now return to the hotel where we will be insulted and threatened by Detective Berry.”

We walked on in silence for a moment while I thought about that.

“You can’t really blame him for being scared, can you?” I asked quietly.

There was another long pause, and finally Sinclair forced out a reluctant, “No.”

“We essentially raped his brain, you know.”

No comment from the king of the vampires.

“Just sayin’.”

Still no comment. I decided to drop the subject. For the time being.

We were walking hand in hand down Broadway and I still couldn’t get over the noise. It sounded like noon, and it was nearly midnight! But on the flip side, the cool thing about NYC is that everything was open, practically all the time. We’d had no trouble knocking off my list, even though back in Minnesota, everything would have been closed by nine at the latest. Seven, in winter.