home the paycheck, which is pretty fat because of all that overtime.
Once I make First, I'm gonna dial it back a bit, start spending more time at home with my wife and kid. That's what I tell myself, anyway.
So I come home late one Saturday night (weekends are busy times for cops) and my daughter Christine is out with friends, and my wife is in bed, and that's all normal except when I go up there I find Rita isn't breathing.
I call 911, then do CPR until they get there, and the am bulance guys are pretty quick, but none of it makes any difference. They pronounce her about ten minutes after we get to the hospital.
Once I can think again, there are two questions burning in my mind: 'How?' and 'Why?' I start by demanding a copy of the autopsy report and I finally get one – but it's not brought to me by a doctor, but by another guy from the job. His name's Terrana and he says he works in Super natural Crimes. In my department we used to make jokes about Supernatural Crimes.
I've seen plenty of autopsy reports, and I try to close my feelings off and treat this one like its about somebody who doesn't matter to me. That works until I get to the part where it says 'exsanguination.'
I look at Terrana. 'She bled out? That's bullshit – there wasn't a fucking drop of blood on her or on the bed. Not a drop.'
'I know,' Terrana says to me. He's got one of those slow, measured voices that reminds me of funeral directors. 'But there's more than one way somebody can bleed to death.'
I stare at him and I think about what unit he's with and the little light comes on in my head, finally. 'Vampire? You saying a vampire killed Rita?'
He just looks at me, which is all the answer I need.
'Wait a second,' I tell him. 'There were no marks on her neck. I'd have seen 'em, count on that.'
'That biting on the neck stuff is kind of a cliche spread by the movies, Stan. Sure, it happens sometimes, especially when it's involuntary, such as in cases of surprise vampire attack. But there's lots of veins and arteries all over the body that a vampire can make use of.'
'Terrana, will you talk English and stop with the rid dles? Please? You're saying a vampire killed her but that she wasn't attacked? What the hell does that mean?'
'It means it may have been consensual,' he says.
I feel my hands form into fists, seemingly of their own accord. 'You're telling me she let some fucking blood sucker…?'
'The M.E. did find fang marks, Stan. And you're right, her neck was clean. He found the the inside of her thigh, high up, near the… uh, there's a big artery that runs through there, the femoral artery.'
'So the blood-sucking bastard raped her with his fangs, the fucking-'
'I'm sorry, Stan, but the M.E. doesn't think there was force involved. If you read the rest of the report, you'll see that there was no evidence of other trauma, and that there was more than one set of fang marks. Some of them were… old.'
I run my hand over my face, maybe trying to wipe away the expression that I knew was stamped there. Then I have a thought. 'So he snuck in, night after night, like in Drac ula. He kept attacking her in her sleep until she-'
'Stan, that book was written before we knew very much about vampires. Stoker got a lot of it right, but there were quite a few things he got wrong.'
'Like what?'
'Vampires can't sneak into a house like cat burglars, Stan. Nobody knows why, but they have to be invited in.'
A few days later, I apply for the transfer. It works its way through the system, and a week later I get approval. So I go through the special training, then start work as a detec tive in Supernatural Crimes. And in my time away from the job, I hunt the bloodsucker who had seduced and killed my wife.
It takes me eight months. Eight long months of research, cultivating informants, reading old arrest reports, trading favors with other cops, intimidating and cajoling and brib ing members of the local vamp community.
Eight months. And then I find him.
But it isn't that simple anymore, because by then, I've got a bigger problem to deal with. My need for revenge is now mixed with fear – fear for my daughter, Christine.
Anton Kinski's got a job. Most vamps do, I'd learned. Since the undead had made themselves known, along with the rest of the supes, they were able to stop living in graveyards and the basements of abandoned houses. But rent and decent clothes cost money, so Anton has found work (night shift, of course) as a pleater at a small gar ment factory.
He's a good worker, is Anton. Puts in his time, rarely misses a night (vamps don't call in sick) and pretty much keeps to himself. When he's not off seducing and murdering women, he's got a pretty boring life, or whatever it is that vamps have.
Until the day he wakes up at sunset to find me leaning over him, the sharp point of my wooden stake resting lightly against his chest. My other hand is holding a mallet, and I make sure he sees that, too, along with the silver crucifix hanging on a chain around my neck.
'You don't know how much I want to pound this stake clear through your body, Anton,' I tell him, my voice thick and tight. 'And if you so much as twitch, that's exactly what I'm gonna do.'
Nothing moves but his eyes, which search my face and see there the truth of what I'd just told him.
His lips barely move when he finally speaks, and his voice is barely loud enough to hear. 'Who – who are you?'
'I'm the husband of Rita Markowski, the woman you killed last fall. Remember, Anton? There can't have been so many of them since then that you don't remember Rita.'
He closes his eyes for a few secs. Then he opens them and says, 'I don't suppose it will matter if I tell you it was an accident – carelessness, really, on my part.'
'No difference, Anton. None at all.'
His head moves about an eighth of an inch in a nod. 'So, why are we talking? You want to gloat a while before you stake me?'
'No, Anton. It tears my guts out to say it, but I need you.'
He looks a question at me.
'You didn't turn Rita – didn't make her… one of you.'
'Like I said – accident. Got… carried away.'
'But you know how to do it.'
'Sure, of course,' Anton says. 'I've done it before.'
'Is it true, what I've heard? You have to exchange blood with the victim before she dies? Is that how it's done?'
'Yeah, pretty much.' He swallows. 'That it? You want… me to turn you?'
He winces as the stake's point presses harder into his chest. 'Don't push your fucking luck, Anton. I'd no more become one of you leeches than I'd volunteer to work in a concentration camp.'
'What, then?'
'My daughter. I want… I want you to turn my daughter.'
Christine's admitted to me that she'd been concealing the symptoms – the weakness, night sweats, joint pain – for as long as she could. She didn't want to be a bother, she said – meaning, I guess, that she saw I was half- crazy with grief and she didn't want to push me the rest of the way. And I guess she also thought that some of it was just her body's way of dealing with the shock of Rita's death.
But when the lumps appeared in her armpits, she'd re alized that something more serious was going on. By then, of course, it was too late.
The docs did everything the book says – radiation, chemo, even some experimental medicines. Then one day her pri mary physician took me into that little room they have at the hospital, just off the intensive care unit. As soon as I sat down, I figured this was the room where doctors give you the Bad News. I was right, too.
I'd suspended my off-hours search for Rita's killer when Christine was hospitalized. But the night they gave me the Bad News, I went back to it. If possible, I pushed even harder than before – and it paid off.
That's how I find myself kneeling over a vampire and telling him that he's going to buy continued existence by making my only child a bloodsucking leech just like him.
