Kaiser gave up staring at his trembling workman and turned to Joe: 'I hope you're more useful than he is.' He grinned. 'You're willing to talk with me, aren't you? Tell me things? Or are you determined to keep secrets?'
'Fine, we can have a talk. Anytime. Would you like to make an appointment?'
Kaiser only grinned. 'Maybe we should have our talk sooner rather than later.' He ruminated. 'Yes, let's do that. But I have a few things to do up here, I'll have to ask you to wait downstairs for me for a few minutes. Lila will walk you down.'
Joe didn't ask downstairs where. He was sure that all was going to be made clear to him. Before he and Lila were allowed to depart, Kaiser muttered something privately to the gray-eyed woman, as if giving her special instructions of some kind.
Once she'd received her orders, the woman turned to Joe, put out a hand, and exerted effortless inhuman strength, turning Joe around with a grip on his shoulder as if he were no bigger than a small child. She smiled up at him as she turned him around. Joe knew better than to take it personally. With Lila just behind him, he was marched back to the otherwise still-deserted service stairway and down nine flights of concrete steps to eighty- nine, a residential level.
The corridor here looked just like the one on Uncle Matthew's floor. They encountered no one in the hall. Joe's escort stopped him suddenly, with an effortless tug on his arm, in front of an apartment door. Then Lila took out a key and opened the door and gestured Joe inside.
The place was laid out a little differently from the apartment of Matthew Maule, and was sparsely and plainly furnished. One other person was in the living room, a young woman wearing an army surplus field jacket, open over a dirty-looking shirt. Her jeans were worn, her bare feet grimy. She looked up sharply as Joe and his escort entered, and then relaxed. She was a breather.
'I'll be staying here for a while, dear,' Lila said to her in a surprisingly sweet voice. 'If you've got anything to do elsewhere, go right ahead'
The young woman seemed about to get up from her seat on the sofa, then changed her mind. 'I'm waiting for Val,' she said 'You can go ahead whatever you want.'
Lila nodded, apparently satisfied. Joe looked around. He wasn't being invited to sit down. There seemed to be no one else in the apartment, though of course he couldn't see all the rooms.
Casually he started strolling. He liked very much the idea of putting at least a little distance between himself and Lila. His guardian was just standing in the living room, in that untiring way they had. Might as well look the place over a little, if possible, and then—
His stroll had brought him partway down a hall, to a spot from which he could look in through an open bedroom door, past a bed with rumpled sheets and blankets, to an open bathroom door beyond And in the bathroom was what looked like—
Joe stopped, his mouth suddenly dry. He turned to look back at Lila. Lila, leaning against the front door in a somewhat masculine pose, arms folded, was smiling pleasantly at Joe.
Loosening his topcoat, Joe moved on into the untenanted bedroom and into the bathroom beyond.
It was the waitress, he had no doubt of that from Angie's and John's description. Red hair, shapely body, naked now. It was hard to tell, under present conditions, about her age. Her limbs were bound with twine, all tied up compactly close to her body in a kind of tumbler's knot, her body suspended head downward over the green-tiled bathtub. Plaster and tile had been knocked in patches from the walls and ceiling, to find a solid purchase for the heavy bolts that had been driven in to give solid support for the chains that held a human body's weight.
Joe was almost sure with his first good look at the discolored face, the half-open eyes, the needle bite wounds on the throat and elsewhere that she was already dead, though a very faint trail of saliva still drooled from the distended lips of her open mouth. The string of clear saliva went trailing down into an indescribable puddle in the tub, where the stopper of the drain was closed, so that the tub had caught and preserved the considerable volume of vomit, blood, and perhaps other fluids that had drained from the woman's body since she was hung up like this.
Joe put out his left hand, and had just time to feel the coldness of Elizabeth Wiswell's shoulder, before a warning voice sounded just behind him.
'Don't touch!'
He turned to see Lila, who had moved a couple of rooms closer, almost twinkling at him. Joe leaned against the doorframe, fighting down a sudden urge to vomit. Briefly he allowed himself to close his eyes.
'And don't throw up in the tub. That would ruin things. We have a kind of experiment going there,' the vampire said behind him.
'Who is she?' asked Joe, though he was certain that he knew.
'Just a little thing. A thing that wouldn't do what we wanted it to do.'
Joe thought he heard a tiny sound, a faint choking too inhuman to be called a moan, from the body over the tub.
Vaguely disbelieving, he turned his head in that direction. 'Elizabeth?'
The tiny sound was not repeated.
'Come out of there,' ordered Lila. Joe looked at her, standing five feet away in the bathroom doorway. She added: 'I want to show you something, little man-thing. I may even let you have some fun.'
Joe stayed where he was. He reached inside his sportcoat and drew a .38 from under his left arm. It was an old-fashioned-looking weapon, dull metal that had been around for some years. On the few occasions when he'd needed it, it had always been dependable.
Lila smiled tolerantly. Of course none of them had even bothered to search him.
'You have a lot to learn,' she murmured, smiling prettily, 'if you think that bullets are going to hurt us. Now you're not going to have any fun. Pain instead. Pain such as you've never—'
Joe gritted his teeth and shot the vampire twice, aiming as best he could for a button on her blouse that lay just between her breasts.
He imagined that he could see how one of the lead-cored wooden slugs nicked the little button before it went on to tear splintering into the exotic bone and flesh behind it. The double impact lifted the solid body of the woman from her feet and hurled her back. Her gray-eyed, attractive face registering a look of intense surprise, she fell onto the rumpled bed.
Joe took a step forward, revolver ready. He stood for a long moment in the bathroom doorway, watching the sprawled body beginning to undergo grotesque alterations.
The young woman, the breather, from the living room, was standing in the bedroom doorway looking in. 'What is it? I heard—' Then she stopped, staring at the bed.
Her paralyzed pause gave Joe time to reach her before she could turn and run. He grabbed her by the arms and shoulders, and she tried to bite him. He slugged her ruthlessly, revolver barrel across the back of the head.
In another moment he was dragging the stunned breather into a closet, closing the door, and bringing a chair to wedge it shut.
Then he looked back at the bed. In much less than a minute, the true death had overtaken Lila. Her face was shriveling, collapsing on the collapsing skull behind it, like a time-lapse sequence of a Halloween pumpkin in decay. The well-dressed woman's corpse was diminishing rapidly in size, and now even as Joe watched, it disappeared completely. Last to go was the clothing, but at last it went, and then everything, everything that had been directly attached to the form, was gone. He'd seen it happen that way before, to one of
Moving quickly back into the bathroom, he looked once more at the woman suspended above the tub. With the fingers of his left hand he rolled back an eyelid and touched the ball beneath. No doubt about it now, she was as dead as anyone he'd ever seen.
Wasting not a second, but moving with extreme care, Joe moved to the front door of the apartment. He eased it open, then, revolver still in hand, held ready under his folded topcoat, he tiptoed out into the corridor, closing the door softly behind him.
He took the opposite direction from the one by which he'd been brought here. He wasn't going to try to take the rest of them, not now, not alone; that would be crazy. At least two of them were on the maintenance floor upstairs, and he had only four shots left. Even in daylight two vampires together were at least one too many. He wouldn't have tried to take one if he'd been given any choice about it.
