Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

But I don’t mean to confuse the issue; Luna was a prostitute first, had a real fucked-up family. Not that all prosties do, that’s a cliché. Plenty of them do it just because that’s how they’re built. But with Luna, the cliché was true. The dad broke the older brother’s arm when he found out he was visiting Luna in the basement, but not because it was wrong; because he was jealous. Dad was visiting Luna in the bath. The only people who know where she goes are me and Cvetko; she always lets us know where she’s going in case she gets arrested and can’t get away. I can’t much imagine the scenario in which she wouldn’t be able to get away, but the idea of waking up in a cell scares her senseless, so she drops off a piece of wide-ruled notebook paper with the neighborhood she intends to prowl Flair-markered in so we’ll know what precinct to bail her out of should she not turn up by four A.M. or so. Of course, this has never happened. The one time she almost got arrested, a john flashed a badge at her and she was so startled she punched him in the mouth rather than charm her way out of it; she hit him so hard she heard one of his teeth hit the window. Backup cop was a lady, pulled a gun. Luna was still freaked-out, showing her fangs, so the cop panicked and shot Luna, shot her right in the forehead. That stunned her, it takes a second to get the brain going again, but lady cop was stunned, too. First time she’d used a gun on something three-dimensional that bled. By the time she stopped making a goldfish mouth and went for the radio, Luna was back in business. She sprained the lady cop’s wrist taking the gun from her, threw it in a trash can, and, blinking her own blood out of her eyes, told the cop, “This didn’t happen. Go home!” She went home. The male cop was still conscious, so Luna charmed him, too, told him to ram his El Camino into a fire hydrant and forget her face. He did. Case closed.

The notebook paper tonight said,

TIMES

I kinda had a crush on Luna when she moved in down the tunnel. Okay, I never completely lost it. Okay, I never lost it at all. She was pretty in that Goldie Hawn way; the other Times Square girls hated her because few of them looked as good as she did when she put on makeup, but they knew better than to fuck with her and so did the pimps. Clayton brought her here from Milwaukee, I don’t think she’d been a vampire long, she never said much about that. He was old, though, like I said. He’d been doing this since Mark Twain was barefoot Sammy chasing Missouri grasshoppers; he got night fever and went sunbathing. More about night fever and Luna later. Luna was Cvetko’s business. Billy was mine.

I went up into the tunnel not far from Union Square, waited for a train. I was wearing a black leather jacket, lambskin, really suave, but when the train went by I turned my back, tucked my head, and squared my shoulders. People don’t think rectangular shapes are people, it’s a ninja trick. Okay, so I had a paisley purple-and-blue scarf on, I loved that scarf, but nobody would know what they were looking at should they see that flamboyant little jab of color, not in the split second they might see me from the train window. I timed it so I turned with the train as it went by me, switching from ninja to torero, letting it glance off me a little and leaping up onto the platform just behind it, turning my landing into a kind of a groovy little dance step. Anybody who caught sight of me would think I had been there all along and they just hadn’t noticed; nobody jumps up on a subway platform in midgroove and keeps walking all funky and casual. Nobody but Joey Peacock. That’s not ninja stuff, or maybe it is, but I like to think I’m the originator. Did I mention I had numchuks? I was pretty good with them, too. Though that’s Korean, I think, not Japanese. Ninjas use sais and shurikens . That means throwing stars. I had been practicing with those, too.

I made my way through the station, momentarily confused by the blizzard of smells and colors and all the bright light. I kicked a mashed-up half hot dog out of my way, then immediately regretted it because I was wearing my nice zip-up ankle boots. I grabbed a piece of the New York Post and wiped off the little bit of mustard and relish, close enough to the 14th Street entrance now to hear Billy. He was playing “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” by Bill Withers. Billy has a taste for the ironic. I like Billy. Even though he got Luna. They were splitsville now, but he definitely got her. You know what I mean when I say got her, right? Yeah, I thought so. Billy got everybody.

Anybody else walking up on Billy Bang would have thought he was just a particularly good busker, one of those world-shakers you just know is only stopping underground for a little spare change and a laugh on his way to a recording contract in L.A. or Nashville. Billy was a black guy, mostly, maybe some Puerto Rican. He played his steel guitar like something he stole from angels and he was going to wring one more song out of it before they came to confiscate it. He was a handsome vampire; it was hard not to envy him, twenty-eight forever, wearing only a suede vest on his trunk even in this cold, mirrored sunglasses over his eyes, an ironic cowboy hat on, a foxtail hanging off his fret. Tight jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots. You get the idea. Only Billy wasn’t a world-shaker, he was a bloodsucker, and he would never get to Nashville or L.A. because his gig in the tunnels was just too sweet and the blood was too easy to leave behind. Billy was still passionate about music, you could hear it, but it was his second love and always would be.

I walked up to Billy behind a fat lady so he wouldn’t see me at first. She bent down to put a quarter in his guitar case and I popped around her side like a tugboat around a freighter, shaking my hand slowly and O’ing my mouth as if to say Big Spender! Billy smiled just a little, finishing “Ain’t No Sunshine” and tipping his hat for the loose semicircle of listeners, who clapped and came up with another couple of bucks between them before slouching off to their unguessable destinations.

“Joey Peacock! My man!” he said, flashing fangs only I could see, closing his guitar case and giving me some kind of soul handshake I never properly learned my half of. “What’s shakin’?”

“Town meeting,” I said. I told him when and where.

“What’s up her skirt now?”

“Kid vampires.”

“Up her skirt?”

“For all I know. But definitely on the cars. Hunting.”

I told him what I saw and a big smile crept onto his face. He peeked over the sunglasses, showing his big brown eyes.

“You wouldn’t be fuckin’ with Billy Bang now, would you?”

“Scout’s honor,” I said.

He shrugged.

“So, we kick their little asses and make it clear they ain’t welcome. Can’t be huntin’ on the cars where everybody can see. Don’t need no new tenants downstairs, neither.”

“Makes sense.”

“We really havin’ a town powwow over this? This sounds like light work.”

“Yep. But you didn’t see them.”

“Well, that’s a good thing for them.”

Now a slightly chubby part-Asian-looking fellow stood staring at us, holding a Slurpee cup. Denim jacket. Poker visor, don’t ask me why.

“What. May I do. For you?” Billy said, putting on his fake-ass cordial DJ voice without actually looking at him.

“Are you done? Your set?”

“Did you see me close my guitar case?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Then, my good sir, I am done. My set.”

The guy was shy. This was hard for him and Billy wasn’t making it any easier.