John Steakley - Vampire$

But barely, dragging myself back into Mexico about thirty feet downstream, gasping and whimpering and shivering from the cold. I got on my knees on the bank and searched around for the tree and when I found it I started laughing again immediately.

Felix, dead asleep and drooping from the branches sunk deep into his leather jacket, was still holding the empty tequila bottle. And then I saw something else that made me stare. And think.

Underneath that jacket, my smuggler had a very professional-looking shoulder holster and inside it a nine-millimeter Browning. A couple of times during the raucous night before I had thought longingly of the arsenal back in my motel room and knew damn well I might have used it if I had had it — if only to warn them off.

But Felix had been armed all along and had never, I knew instinctively, thought to use it.

Not once.

Jack Crow stood at the baggage claim in Dallas — Fort Worth International Airport gazing longingly at the bank of pay phones and rattling the change in his pocket.

It was probably too late to call the people he had in mind. Too late at night, too late in his career. And he didn’t much want to get involved with them again. What was that old joke? One of the three Big Lies? “Hi! I’m from the Government. I’m here to help you!”

But still, nobody could find someone like the old crowd. And God knows they were fair to me. Just let me walk away from it all.

He stood where he was, undecided, idly watching the others gather the bags. Annabelle and Davette stood chatting amiably on the edge of the activity, picking up all sorts of looks from the other passengers. Crow didn’t blame them. Damn few women looked like Annabelle at her age. And come to think of it, fewer looked like Davette at any age. She was really something to see.

Then he noticed something odd.

“Davette? Where are your bags?” he asked, innocently enough but absolutely everyone turned and looked at him and Davette blushed to her dress line and Annabelle trotted over to him wearing her “Hush!” look.

Oh, God, he thought. What have I done now?

Well! If he’d just be quiet for a minute, she’d tell him. It seems this dear sweet little girl has had a falling-out with her family. She, Annabelle, hadn’t gotten all the details yet but it was some sort of major blowup and the poor girl is just desperate and she needs this story and I know she probably won’t get it printed, Jack! But that’s not the point! The point is: she’s lost and alone and away from her family and she’s going to stay with us for a while, doing her job as a reporter — I’m sure she’s a dandy little reporter, she’s so smart — and then we’ll worry about the rest of it later.

Please? Please, Jack?

For me?

Jack absolutely hated it. He hated the whole bit — the girl, the sob story, the responsibility, Annabelle’s tone. But what the hell was he going to do? Annabelle had yet to be wrong about someone, and besides, what could he do anyway? He hated it. He just hated it.

He looked down at her pleading eyes. He was a foot taller and one hundred pounds heavier and one day, when he grew up, he was going to stand up to her.

He just nodded and slunk his ass away toward the taxis.

Shit.

Davette, visibly tense, watched him pass by. She turned to Annabelle.

“Is it all right?” she asked.

“Of course it is, dear.”

Davette relaxed somewhat. “He agreed?”

Annabelle stopped and looked at the younger woman. She laughed. “You sweet thing,” she said, patting Davette’s cheek. “Did you get the impression I was asking him?”

The young night clerk at the Adolphus Hotel, Dallas’s rejuvenated downtown palace, had no better luck than Crow. Annabelle was terribly sorry they hadn’t made reservations but it’s just that they always stayed at the Adolphus — it was like their second home and one hardly makes reservations at one’s home, does one? Ha ha ha.

And the next thing the poor young man knew, Team Crow had its pair of connecting suites and Davette had her single on the same floor.

Everyone was starving to death so they ordered down for… How many of us are there? Six?… for eight steaks and big baked potatoes with everything on them and tossed salad and asparagus and a round of drinks, make that two rounds, and a half dozen bottles of Mondavi red… No. That’s eight steaks and six bottles of wine. Whaddya think we are? Alcoholics? Right. Thank you.

Davette further endeared herself to everyone by falling asleep twice. Once after her first drink and again at the table during the meal. Annabelle clucked and had the men carry her, still sleeping, into her room. The poor girl had been both exhausted and starving and, No thank you very much, Cherry Cat. I can undress her myself.

The next morning Jack Crow declared a holiday. It didn’t apply to Carl Joplin, who was going to be busy setting up his workshop and getting ready to make silver bullets and it didn’t apply to Annabelle, who was going to be busy screaming at movers and temporary servants, at least during the day, but everyone else could play.

And they did. Jack and Cat and Adam and Davette did Dallas in a big way for the next couple of weeks. The others joined them at night for dinner, but during the day they got silly on their own. They went to movies and amusement parks and go-cart tracks. They bowled. They golfed. They played tennis, hard, every day to stay in shape. They lunched, huge lunches lasting three hours and costing as many hundreds of dollars. They ran up an enormous tab at the hotel (everyone still slept there), paid it, ran up another, paid that.

In the meantime the house was getting ready; the vehicles arrived from California in time for Jack to get a DWI. He stood there, furious, while a twenty-year-old policeman dressed him down, quite rightly, for driving across a cemetery at three o’clock in the morning scouting picnic spots for the next afternoon. Jack was forced to renew his old acquaintances downtown before he really wanted to think about such things. The lieutenant he spoke to knew (unofficially) who he was and what he did and got him off but lectured him some more.

Jack shut up and took it and leased a limo the next morning.

In the meantime, all had their-own little chores. Davette went shopping with Annabelle once it was discovered she had only what she had been wearing. Cat chased and caught several women, at least two of whom had a sense of humor. Adam went to mass every morning.

And Jack made his phone call to the nation’s capital.

They were surprised to hear from him but not entirely distant. They said they would see what they could do. Two weeks later they called him back and gave him an address. He thanked them, hung up, checked the address in the yellow pages, nodded to himself.

During the whole two weeks they never once mentioned their jobs. Nobody said the word: vampire. Jack even stopped jumping whenever the phone rang.

He shouldn’t have.

The silver had arrived from Rome through the local see. The bishop was a new man who knew nothing about Team Crow or, for that matter, his parishioners. Persuaded by his aide that anyone with enough clout to receive a package from the Vatican through diplomatic channels was worth knowing, he grudgingly consented to share his sumptuous evening feast with Crow & Co.

It took less than fifteen minutes in his presence for Team Crow to know all the important facts about this man. He was cold. He was haughty. He was better than his flock, more cultured, more intelligently pious, more… how shall one put it? More aristocratic.

The bishop was an idiot.

He was also Carl Joplin’s meat. Carl’s and Cat’s. The two of them took rich delight in infuriating the man, pretending all the while to be unaware at how offended he was by their every gesture and semicrude remark. They had descended to triple entendres when the bishop had absolutely had enough.