I nodded agreement as he flipped open his phone then pressed it to his ear and said, “Yeah, Storm.”
Wendy appeared at almost the same instant, carrying plates and the carafe of coffee. Settling the hot globe on the table, she shuffled one of the oblong dishes out of the crook of her arm and slid it in front of Ben then placed the other in front of me. Reaching into a pouch on her apron, she pulled out a bottle of aspirin and set it on the table as she topped off our mugs.
“I’ll be right back with your biscuits and gravy,” she told me quietly. “Oh, and by the way, Chuck said since you’ve got to put up with Storm, breakfast is on the house this morning.”
“Tell him I said thanks,” I whispered with a smile.
“…Okay, and you’re sure?” Ben was saying. “Yeah… Uh-huh… Yeah… I’m not so sure I wanna do that…” He glanced up at me for an instant then looked away. “Yeah… I know… But, who… Uh-huh… Okay… I’ll see what I can do, but I ain’t makin’ any guarantees… Yeah… Okay, so when is that? Yeah… Okay… No, I’m throwin’ down some breakfast over at Chuck’s… Yeah… Prob’ly half hour, maybe forty-five minutes… Yeah…okay, see ya’ then.”
“Problem?” I asked as I watched him fold the phone and tuck it away.
“No. Not really,” he replied.
I wasn’t convinced, but then again, I knew better than to pressure him about that sort of thing. Odds are it was work related anyway, so I definitely didn’t need to hear it. Instead of pursuing the topic, I shrugged and reached for the peppershaker, but as I did, a sharp twinge erupted on the side of my neck once again. I pulled my hand back and reached up to massage it as I had done before.
“Neck again?” my friend asked.
“Yeah,” I said, wincing. “I must have really seriously pinched a nerve or something.”
“Maybe you should have it looked at,” he said, while liberally salting the mound of food in front of him.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Or then again, maybe it’s somethin’ else,” he suggested, a mildly cryptic tone in his voice.
“What do you mean?” I asked, shooting him a puzzled look.
He slid the saltshaker toward me then reached for the aspirin. “Ya’ might wanna salt your coffee again.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Sure you don’t wanna salt your coffee?”
“Ben…”
He shrugged. “Okay, don’t blame me, I tried… So I know you say you’re retired and all, but lemme ask ya’ somethin’. Whaddaya know about vampires?”
CHAPTER 5:
“I get it,” I replied, voice flat and clearly humorless. “My neck hurts. Vampires. Witches. Very funny for a Halloween joke. Too bad it’s March and not October.”
Ben shrugged as he tossed back the aspirin. After taking a swig of his coffee, he picked up his fork and said, “Yeah, well tell that to the girl I watched the coroner stuff in a body bag a few hours ago.”
I stared back at him without saying another word. He, however, now appeared to be ignoring me in favor of the “coronary on a plate” in front of him. Of course, what he appeared to be doing and what was actual fact weren’t always the same thing, and I knew that, so I waited in silence.
After swallowing a bite, without looking up he repeated the preamble to his question, “Like I said, Kemosabe, don’t blame me. I handed ya’ the goddammed salt.”
“So you think your homicide case is why my neck hurts?”
He shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe.”
“It hurts because I slept on it wrong,” I replied with heavy emphasis on each word.
Unfortunately, I had a feeling what I said was for my own benefit as much as his. There was a familiar peculiarity about the pain that I had been purposely ignoring since its onset, one that transcended the boundaries of the physical. Now, of all things, I had a gnawing bother erupting in the pit of my stomach that definitely wasn’t a mere attack of hunger pangs.
“Whatever you say,” he grunted, not even bothering to try hiding the fact that he didn’t believe me.
“Come on, Ben… Even if I’m wrong, you aren’t seriously saying that you think a vampire killed this woman, are you?” I asked.
“Didn’t say that,” he replied. “But you’re the one holdin’ your neck.”
Out of reflex, I dropped my hand to my side, even though the pain had become sharper and more pronounced. “Dammit, Ben. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just two and two, Row,” he said with a shrug. “That call was a status on the prelim from the medical examiner. I got an unidentified, very dead young woman with a hole in ‘er neck and most of ‘er blood gone, but no blood at the scene. Now I got the king of the friggin’ Twilight Zone -namely you-sittin’ across from me holdin’ onto his neck. Gimme a break… Do ya’ really think I’m not gonna at least ask?”
“Fine, but that really isn’t the point,” I replied. “Be serious. You know as well as I do vampires don’t exist. Metaphorical vampires, as in people who prey on others, yes… I’ll even give you psychic vampires because I’ve actually dealt with a couple of them myself… But, even then it’s still a metaphorical term. In the literal Count Dracula, undead, blood sucking sense of the word, they simply don’t exist.”
He held up his free hand and shook his index finger as he narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, but what about the wingnuts that think they’re vampires?”
“That’s a whole bizarre subculture in and of itself, and I really don’t know what to tell you there. It’s definitely not my thing.”
“Okay, just wonderin’. They touched on some stuff about ‘em in a seminar I was at last year. The brainiac givin’ the lecture said there was a crossover with Pagans and the occult and all that jazz, so I thought ya’ might know somethin’.”
“Paganism in general attracts all sorts of people, and it definitely gets its share of the Goth crowd, so it wouldn’t surprise me to get some of them as well. But as to the vampire types, I’m pretty sure the operative phrase there is think they are, Ben. Because that’s all it is. They aren’t really vampires.”
“You don’t want to say that to them,” a familiar voice offered.
We both looked up to see our waitress as she was sliding a plate of biscuits smothered in gravy onto the table next to me.
I shook my head and apologized, “Sorry, Wendy. I didn’t realize I was being that loud.”
“You weren’t. I’ve got really good hearing,” she said then pointed to the lunch counter a few feet away. “Besides, I was just right over there.”
Ben waved his fork absently. “So you actually know somethin’ about these freaks?”
“A little.” She shrugged. “Not a lot. I mean, it’s way too weird for me, but someone a friend of mine knows is heavily into the whole scene.”
“You serious?”
“Yeah,” she said with a nod.
“So this person actually thinks…” he began as he settled the fork on his plate then reached over to his jacket and rummaged around for his notebook.
Reading the unspoken question in his hesitant pause, Wendy answered, “She.”
“Thanks… So she thinks she’s a vampire?” he finished.
“Yeah,” she said with a nod. “And, she’s pretty serious about it too. The first time I met her she was really offended that I thought she was joking.”
“So, what, she just walked up and said, ‘Hi, I’m a vampire’?”
“Not right away, or in those exact words, but yeah, it was almost something like that. She brought it up while we were chatting. She told me she was ‘out of the coffin’ and just went from there.”
“Out of the…” Ben muttered and shook his head as he scribbled. “Jeezus, you gotta be kiddin’ me.”
“That’s apparently what they call it,” Wendy told him. “You know, like out of the closet.”
“Yeah, I get it,” he replied. “I just… never mind… So she just up and told you she was a vampire?”
She continued, “Yeah. She called herself a sang vamp.”
