Vampire$

The deputy pulled himself up off the splintered remains of the desk chair and peeked over the desk in shock. He couldn’t believe this was happening to him.

It was.

Crow didn’t hurt him. He just dribbled him about the office floor long enough to make him start to cry. Then he put him in the cell.

From the middle desk drawer he took an army Colt and an extra clip. He looked longingly at the telephone, wanting desperately to talk to Cat. But there was no way of telling who would answer the phone at the motel. Hell, he hadn’t heard from the rest of his team the whole time he’d been in the slammer. There should have been the usual effort to get him… Then he remembered his braying at Cat about not needing help. But surely Cat hadn’t listened. On the other hand, Cherry Cat had the most infuriating habit of obeying him at the worst conceivable times. Damn.

He forgot the idea of calling. Best just get the hell away from the damn police station. He stuck the automatic down deep in his belt and headed to the door. He gave the deputy a little salute. “See ya, Homer. It’s been real.”

“How,” whimpered the deputy like the blob he was, “did you know my name was Homer?”

Crow laughed and eyed the heavens. “There is a God,” he whispered to himself. “And He’s got a sense of humor.”

Then he dropped all other thoughts. He keyed off the lights in the room, took a deep breath, and put his hand on the door.

“All right,” he hissed, “rock and roll, dammit!” and jerked it open.

On the sidewalk outside the jail stood every cop in the world.

It was not Jack’s best moment.

“Stop him, please!” cried a man Crow recognized as Banker Foster, and the cops surged forward en masse. Crow thought about the automatic in his belt, thought about the odds of winning, about the idea of shooting any policeman under any circumstances, muttered “Shit,” and lifted his arms over his head.

“No! No!” shouted the mayor, elbowing his way through the eager constables, “not him! ” He grabbed Crow by the upper arm and tugged on it like a child. “Mr. Crow, stop him! ” he pleaded and turned and pointed across the street to the town square.

The crowd parted with the gesture and Crow could see, at last, his team. They had the crane set up on its highest elevation clamped onto their longest pike, which ran straight down from the starry sky into the chest of a vampire writhing and hissing on the base of the statue of the town’s founder.

Anthony, standing on the hood of the Jeep, had his arm poised meaningfully in the air ready to signal the crane operator, who was even now taking out the slack in the cable.

“Let him go!” roared Anthony, “or we’ll start your troubles all over again!”

Crow eyed the “vampire” as it spat and arched and wondered idly why they never recognized Cat in gray makeup. Then he turned to the mayor and said, “Well, what’s it gonna be? Do we get paid or not?”

“Really, Mr. Crow!” spouted Banker Foster, “there was never a question about paying your fee, as such. It was just that the expenses seemed somewhat—”

“Foster, you are such a goddamn bore,” Crow drawled. He turned to the mayor. “Yes or no?”

“Yes” was decided upon. The procession made its way across the square to the bank. Anthony walked side by side with Crow, but every other member of the team — especially the crane operator and the still-writhing (and now silently giggling) Cat — stayed firmly in place. Crow noticed that there really weren’t as many cops as he had at first thought. Perhaps a half-dozen or so counting state troopers and the sheriff’s real deputies. The rest were the same crowd present at the mansion all afternoon.

There was some trouble at the bank door, it being ten o’clock at night. Banker Foster claimed he had no keys on his person and suggested they all wait until the next morning and while he chattered away about the door Sheriff Ortega kicked it in with a size-thirteen Tony Lama. It wasn’t so much the kick that won Crow’s heart but the mischievous grin on Ortega’s face while he was doing it.

The vault itself, time lock and all, was a different problem but one Crow & Co. had met before. “You got a cashier’s check machine, don’t you?” Anthony asked bluntly. So the check was made out and Crow endorsed it and gave it to gray-faced Cat amidst a surprising amount of good-natured laughter — especially from the cops — and Cat drove away to mail it from any other nearby township.

Though Jack Crow was something less than a PR wizard, neither was he a complete fool. “Party time,” he announced gaily, being sure to invite each and every one of the city fathers and cops present. Most accepted. The liquor store owner was persuaded by Ortega’s dead-eyed smile to give Jack credit. The “store,” as befitted a dry county in a God-fearing state, had no sign but was amply stocked. By now everyone was getting into the spirit of the thing. It took only twenty minutes to overload the Jeep with everybody helping.

“To the motel! — hoa!” cried wagonmaster Ortega, waving a bottle of bourbon from the window of his patrol car — Chevy pickup.

“Rock and roll!” chirped the little mayor who then blushed while everyone else laughed and cheered.

And the party began.

Chapter 3

The crossbow bolt through the Dr Pepper machine aroused the motel manager from his bed to find Crow and Sheriff Ortega — arms around shoulders, swaying gently in unison — outside his office.

“We wuz outta change,” said Ortega. The sheriff was being helpful.

“I can vouch for him on tha’ one,” added Crow, and they grinned at each other and pounded backs.

The manager simply stared. This (to be kind) bizarre sight of two giants grinning down at him — and worse, nodding so fiercely at him out of synch it looked like a pair of paddling heads — it was all too much. The manager went back to his bed and pulled his pillow down over his ears.

There were equally valid excuses for most of the other destruction. High spirits could be blamed for some of it, true enough. And carelessness. But most of the sheer carnage was entirely unavoidable due to the very nature of competitive sports at this, the Championship level. The list of events included Spin the Coffee Table, Pike Vaulting and the ever-popular Ash Tray Rug Hockey. All of this being merely ancillary to the main event: Drinking Yourself Blind While Waiting for The Goddamn Whores to Show Up, which, as everyone knows, is strenuous enough by definition and only becomes uglier the longer it takes.

All in all they did $5,000 worth of damage to the motel.

It was a lot of fun.

The party started out with about two dozen members, counting Team Crow, the locals, and the cops. It later swelled to about fifty or so. But by 3 A.M. it was back down to the twenty or so serious-minded. Father Hernandez turned out to be hilariously funny. He sang dirty limericks in Spanish and English. Most thought that a little weird. But it turned out that Hernandez had once been a real father, as in husband, with two little girls and a red-haired wife — all of whom had died of bubonic plague, of all things, twenty years before in northwestern Mexico.

Everybody got real misty about that and drank to their passing, and each man present agreed privately to stop calling him “Nutless.”

They got a lot more depressed when a towheaded kid named, no shit, Bambi, who had wandered into the party some hours earlier from who knows where, started to cry about Hernandez’s lost family. This pissed Crow off. He was already in a bad mood on account of the sheriff’s badge and gun. Actually he liked wearing the badge pretty much. It was shiny and made him feel official and all and reminded him of which pocket his cigarettes were in. But the gun was one of these forty-four magnum artillery types two inches longer than his waist and every time he sat down the barrel would dig him in the balls causing him to yelp and leap to his feet to rub ’em and that only reminded him that the whores still weren’t there and on and on and on.

So this crying Bambi was too much on top of everything else. He cleared everybody off of the suite’s main sofa with one swipe of the back of his hand and unzipped the cover off the largest cushion. Then he stepped over and picked up the sobbing Bambi by both ears and tried to zip him up inside.