tender and it would be yellow and purple come morning.
Well, she thought, she could just add it to the cut on her hand and the shovel wound on her shoulder, and call it a night’s work.
“Listen, somebody else can take the pictures,” Clara said. “I’ll take you home, now.”
Caxton nodded but she wasn’t quite finished with Bitumen Hollow. “Who is he?”
she asked.
“The assistant manager of the bookstore,” Clara told her. “He calmed down once we got him out of the sewer. As far as we can tell he’s the only one in the entire town who made it.” She frowned in anger. “He says he doesn’t remember how he got down in that sewer. The deputies are with him right now, working the virtual Identikit on the sheriff’s laptop.”
There had been no ID on the vampire they’d killed. What if they got a facial recognition match on one of the others? It could be a good break, just the kind they needed. “I need whatever they find sent right to my PDA, okay?” she said.
“Yeah, sure,” Clara told her. “I’ll send you the full report and all my pictures if you have the bandwidth.”
Caxton nodded. The state police were testing out new handhelds that had more memory and better wireless internet connections than the laptops in the patrol cars.
“I can handle it. Now,” she said, scratching her nose, “let’s get me out of here.”
“I’ll just sign out with the sheriff.” Clara dashed off and left Caxton there to nurse her new bruise. When she returned she’d taken off her tie and undone the top button of her uniform shirt. “Come on,” she said. “You can sleep in the car.”
23.
She couldn’t sleep in the car. Clara’s car was a rebuilt police Crown Victoria like almost every other police car in the world. It was a lot like Caxton’s own patrol car.
It was designed to provide a cop with all the information she needed to do her job—the dashboard was studded with instrumentation: the readout for a radar gun, the ubiquitous mounted laptop for checking license plates, the video recorder that monitored everything that happened both inside the car and from the perspective of its front bumper. The various radios squawked and muttered at random intervals.
The seat couldn’t recline because of the bulletproof partition immediately behind Caxton’s head to protect the driver and front-seat passenger from anyone in the rear compartment. The car was a workplace, not a bedroom. After trying to relax for fifteen minutes she grabbed handfuls of her hair and pulled, too frustrated to even speak.
Clara glanced over at her. “I know what you need,” she said, and took the next exit. She pulled into the lot of a one story building with white Christmas lights strung up under its eaves. A little tavern, bright, cheery light leaking from all its windows, the muffled sound of a jukebox playing some bad country song lingering in the air around it. They went inside and grabbed a couple of bar stools and Clara ordered them Coronas with extra lime. “There’s no way you’re going to sleep now. You’re wound up as tight as a spring.”
Caxton knew it was true. She didn’t particularly want the beer, though she didn’t refuse it. She wasn’t much of a drinker—she was a morning person, really, and had never managed to close out a bar in her life. Yet with the cold wet bottle in her hand and the taste of the lime on her lips she realized she’d been missing something for a long time, the easy, friendly good humor that comes from sitting in a bar with friendly people around you. She probably hadn’t been in a place like this since she’d met Deanna.
A fifty inch plasma screen sat at the far end of the bar playing a football game.
Caxton didn’t watch much television, either, and the bright light and constant motion kept drawing her eye. She didn’t care whatsoever about football but the bland normalcy of it was kind of nice.
Slowly her shoulders slid down away from her neck. Slowly her posture let up a little and she slumped forward on the bar stool. “This,” she said, “is not so bad.”
“Hey, look,” Clara said, and pointed at the television. The local station had cut away to a news report. It was just ten o’clock. They were leading with video shot out in the woods, with lots of strobing lights and a reporter who kept looking back at the camera with wide eyes and a tightly pursed mouth. Caxton had no idea what was going on until she saw her own face, looking pale and ghostly as it swam up out of darkness to be flooded with video camera lights. “Turn the sound on, will you?”
Clara asked the bartender.
“I don’t remember any cameras,” Caxton said, realizing that she was looking at the scene of the vampire kill. The aftermath, anyway.
“—still haven’t been allowed to see the body, I have to say,” the reporter droned,
“there’s a real sense of secrecy here as if the Marshals Service is covering something up. We have no information on the alleged vampire yet, even twenty-four hours later.
Authorities haven’t even released his name.”
Twenty-four hours? Had it really been only one day? Caxton put a hand over her mouth. On the television screen her emotionless face kept turning away from the light. She had a vague memory of being annoyed by a light, but she hadn’t realized at all that the media were there while she was being debriefed. The fight with the vampire had shocked her so much she must have been in a daze.
“A source in the Pennsylvania State Police gave us an interview this afternoon under condition that we didn’t reveal his identity. He says the alleged vampire was not given any kind of warning or any chance to surrender to authorities. Diane, there’s sure to be a lot more to this story in the coming days.”
“Thanks, Arturo,” the anchorwoman said. She looked calm and unfazed. “Stay tuned for lots more coverage of—”
“That what you wanted to hear?” the bartender asked. When Clara nodded he muted the sound again and switched over to a reality show about lingerie models working in a butcher’s shop.
“Wow, you’re going to be a celebrity, you know that?” Clara asked. “Every news station in the country is going to want an interview.”
“Assuming I survive the next few days,” Caxton said, under her breath.
“What?” Clara asked. When Caxton didn’t reiterate she shook her head. “Wow.
So what was the vampire like?”
“Pale. Big. Toothy,” the trooper answered.
“I was so obsessed with vampires when I was in high school. My friends and I would put on capes and fake fangs and make little movies of us hypnotizing each other with our best sexy looks. Man, I looked pretty good as a vampire.”
“I doubt it,” Caxton said. Clara’s eyebrows went up in what could have turned into real offense. “Don’t get me wrong. I bet you looked great. But not if you looked like a vampire. They’re bald as cue balls, for one thing. And those pointy little fangs?
Believe me, you don’t want to see the reality.”
Clara slapped the bar. “Vampires are, too, sexy,” she announced, her tone jaunty.
“Stop trying to ruin my schoolgirl fantasy! I don’t mind if they’re bald. I say, as long as we’re here in this bar, everything about vampires is sexy. Very, very sexy.”
Caxton smiled in spite of herself. “Oh yeah?” she asked.
“Hells yeah!” She reached over and grabbed Caxton by the bicep. “And big tough vampire hunters are even sexier!” They both laughed. That felt good, that comfortable, friendly laugh. “Don’t you think she’s sexy?” she demanded from the bartender. Her hand lingered on Caxton’s arm. It just sat there, doing nothing objectionable. Clara didn’t even look at her, just sucked at her beer bottle, but she didn’t take her hand away.
“I’d do her,” the bartender said, but he was watching the lingerie models make sausage in a big industrial meat grinder.
“I’ll be right back,” Caxton said, pulling away as she slid off her stool. Clara’s hand moved to the bar. Caxton ran back to the ladies’ room, where she threw some water on her face. Wow, she thought. Wow. The hand on her arm hadn’t just been warm. It had been hot, physically hot. She knew it was just an illusion, but wow. She hadn’t felt like that in a very long time. She missed feeling like that. She missed it a lot.
