Dead Over Heels

Chapter 9

Wow! It’s a good thing I’m dead, or I’d be exhausted.” “As opposed to simply bored out of your charming little mind.”

“Oh, shut up. How could we not go up in the building King Kong climbed with Naomi Watts?”

“But darling, he didn’t actually climb—”

“Stop it, you’re ruining the whole thing!”

“The remake, the original, or the evening?”

“You’re so talented, you’re wrecking all three. Now, what’s next?”

“Thankfully, we have completed your interminable list of chores—”

“Five things!”

“—and can now return to the hotel where we will be insulted and threatened by Detective Berry.”

We walked on in silence for a moment while I thought about that.

“You can’t really blame him for being scared, can you?” I asked quietly.

There was another long pause, and finally Sinclair forced out a reluctant, “No.”

“We essentially raped his brain, you know.”

No comment from the king of the vampires.

“Just sayin’.”

Still no comment. I decided to drop the subject. For the time being.

We were walking hand in hand down Broadway and I still couldn’t get over the noise. It sounded like noon, and it was nearly midnight! But on the flip side, the cool thing about NYC is that everything was open, practically all the time. We’d had no trouble knocking off my list, even though back in Minnesota, everything would have been closed by nine at the latest. Seven, in winter.

“Spare change?” the zillionth homeless guy asked us, and I smiled at him and gave him a dollar. Sinclair disapproved of this, being a self-made man, but what the hell. I was a rich woman now; legally half of his was mine, and I could do what I liked with my one dollar bills.

But—this was weird—I could hear the homeless guy fall into step behind us. Did he want more? Because that was just being greedy. It was one thing to be out of work and ask people for money, but to—

I felt something sharp and pointy against the back of my neck.

“Alley, now, fuckers!”

“Which one?” I asked, which I thought was a pretty reasonable question, but he just dug the knife in a little more, pissing me off, and nudged me to the right.

“Rings, wallet, purse,” he chanted, once we were off busy Broadway. Obviously a professional.

“I can’t believe it!” I gasped.

“I can,” Sinclair said with his usual air of morbid disdain. “And if he keeps jabbing you with that pin, I’ll be forced to make him eat it.”

“We’re being mugged! We saw the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Met, Ellis Island, and the Central Park Zoo, and now we’re finishing the day like real tourists!”

“I hate zoos.”

“What kind of a communist psycho hates zoos?”

“I’ll never get the smell of monkey out of my trousers.”

“Rings, wallet, purse, now, fuckers!”

“I can’t wait to tell my mom!”

“About my trousers?”

“Are you people fucking deaf?” Another jab. Sinclair snarled, but so quietly only I could hear him. “This is a robbery and you gotta give me your shit!”

“Oh, I know what this is,” I assured him. I whipped around, faster than he could track, and snatched the knife out of his hand. I bent the blade with my thumb until it was useless as a weapon, then handed it back to him. This was really for his own safety, as God knew what Sinclair would have done to him.

He stared at it, then stared at me, then turned to run. I thrust my ankle between his and he hit the street.

“You know, I haven’t had a bite since we got here,” I said. “I mean, besides you.”

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

We fell on him.

Chapter 10

You’ve got an alibi,” Nick grumped at dinner the next night. It was early—about seven thirty—which was good, because I had places to be, and couldn’t suck down my drinks fast enough.

“Besides our word?” Sinclair asked mildly. He’d given up any semblance of politeness and had brought the paper to dinner, which he was carefully reading. Although we’d been talking for ten minutes, this was the first time Sinclair had spoken up.

“Yeah. Coroner placed the kid’s time of death between ten and eleven that night—”

“While the four of us were having dinner,” I finished.

“Well, duh, Nick,” Jessica said kindly. “You must have known it was a fresh crime scene. Betsy and Sinclair didn’t have time to ditch us, kill a child, and return to the table to argue over dessert.”

“Mmmff,” Nick grunted.

“Yes, an intelligent, unbiased professional would have known that,” Sinclair said to the paper.

Astonishingly, Nick didn’t rise to the bait. A crisis of conscience, maybe?

“Do you think it was someone here at the hotel?” I asked, almost whispering.

Nick sent me a look of sizzling scorn; I almost wanted to duck. “Of course.”

“I doubt it,” Sinclair replied absently.

“Come on! If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it’s a fucking duck.”

“I have no idea what ducks have to do with your crime scene.”

Nick leaned forward, his blonde hair flopping into his eyes. He pushed it back impatiently and said, “I mean, right around the corner from a hotel run by vampires, with vampire guests, a kid gets killed—by a vampire—and you’re saying it’s got nothing to do with this place?”

“I would be surprised. As Betsy said, vampires don’t shit where they eat.”

“The smart ones, anyway.”

“I’d actually agree with her”—he nearly gagged as he said it—“but what if it’s a message?”

“You mean like a note? Except left on the body of a kid?” I felt my gorge rise.

“Yeah. A message for the king and queen. They knew you were coming, right?”

“Of course,” Sinclair said carefully. He’d actually laid the paper down.

“So, maybe someone in here is trying to impress you. Pay tribute. Whatever.”

“They pay tribute with blood oranges, not ritual sacrifice.”

“And they oughta know killing a kid is the last thing that will impress us,” I snapped.

“Will they?” Nick asked quietly. “Your predecessors were pretty bloodthirsty, right? And aren’t you having some trouble being taken seriously by the teeming hordes of the undead?”

“I wish you wouldn’t put it like that,” I grumbled, downing my Cosmo (hey, we were in New York) in a hurry.

“All they know is that there’s a new sheriff in town. My bet is that they’re trying to impress you or freak you out. Either way, he—or she—or they—killed that kid to get to you two.”

“So what do you suggest we do, Detective Berry?”