Vampire$

Crow went back outside and spoke to Cat, who stood on the jailhouse sidewalk talking to the deputy. A few feet away Felix sat quietly on the curb, smoking.

“I’m off to do my bit,” Jack told Cat. “Wait a few minutes, then start pouring the blood.”

“Right,” said Cat.

Crow looked at the deputy’s patrol car, parked a few steps away.

“Mind if I borrow that a sec?” he asked.

The deputy looked surprised, then shrugged. “Okay,” he offered uncertainly.

Crow nodded, climbed into the car, and pulled away without another word.

“What does he mean by doing ‘his bit’?” Kirk wanted to know.

Cat smiled. “He always goes off just before we move to be alone.”

“To focus his concentration,” finished Kirk, nodding.

Cat’s grin was wry. “Or swallow his fear,” he suggested and then smiled even wider when he saw the deputy’s pale look.

Felix, sitting on the curb smoking his sixty-third cigarette of the day, made no comment. Between his feet he had arranged his last five smokes in a ragged line. He had just stomped out the sixth on the asphalt and added it to the row when Jack Crow suddenly reappeared in the patrol car.

“Something wrong?” asked Cat.

Jack shook his head. He made no attempt to get out of the car, just sat there behind the wheel and stared at Felix.

Eventually, the gunman looked up and met his eyes.

“Get in,” ordered Crow, gesturing toward the front passenger door.

Felix eyed him a beat, then stood up. He started toward the car, stopped, went back, and scattered his row of cigarettes. Then he got in and the two of them drove away.

Jack drove in silence for half a dozen blocks to Cleburne City Park. There was a swimming pool, some tennis courts, three baseball diamonds. Jack parked the patrol car next to a beautifully preserved antique locomotive painted jet black and surrounded by a chain-link fence. He turned off the engine and sat there for several seconds in silence.

Felix lit a cigarette and waited for Crow to speak. Now what? he thought.

At last Jack moved. He lit a smoke of his own, turned on the seat to face Felix, and with a smile said, “You know, Felix, you’re going to die today.”

Felix stared stone at the other man’s smiling eyes. He didn’t know whether to be scared or offended or…

“So am I,” Crow continued. “That’s the way it is. We took on this job and it’s a never-ending goddamned deal and there are too many vampires and not enough of us and they’re gonna get us… so we’re gonna make ’em pay.

“Understand?”

Felix sure as shit did not understand. Any of it. Was this Crow’s idea of some kinda joke or what?

But what it was was Jack Crow’s notion of Style.

“That’s the only thing that counts, Felix. We aren’t gonna get rid of all the evil in the world. We’re not gonna get all the assassins or crack dealers or child molesters.

“And you and I aren’t gonna get all the fucking vampires. Sooner or later, they’re gonna get us. We die, the earth keeps turning, and not trying just means we keep alive just a little longer and there’s a lot more dead people saved from having all their blood ripped out but we still end up dying, Felix, you and me. There’s no way out of that. And the earth will have plenty of turns left that we won’t see no matter how long we live and so some stupid fools look at this and they don’t see any point and that’s because the dumbshits think it’s a matter of keeping score.

“It isn’t, Gunman. The secret isn’t the score or the final result because there ain’t no final anything!

“What there is… is Style.”

There was more of the same. Jack talked some talk about samurai warriors and how they considered themselves dead when they first took up the mantle of service so that nothing could later intimidate them away from their duty.

And there were some other examples and Felix…

Felix said not a word the entire time. He simply sat there staring at Crow, not even smoking, until Jack wound down.

“…just the Style, Felix. Nothing else. So they’re gonna get us. So what? It’s the Style that matters. Follow me?”

And when Felix spoke his voice was a harsh rasping crackle: “Crow, don’t you ever spout that kind of crap at me again! Not ever. Do you hear me?”

And Jack thought, My God, I think the sonuvabitch is gonna shoot me if I don’t agree!

And he said, “Okay, Felix.”

Felix turned away and stared unseeing at the huge black locomotive.

'Now can we go back?”

Jack nodded, started the car, and drove away.

Thinking: Sheeeyit! What did I turn over here?

And then thinking: God, I blew that one. He wasn’t anywhere near ready for that.

A few seconds later Jack sneaked a quick glance to his right. Felix still stared stone.

God! I hope I haven’t frozen up my damned gunman again. We’ve got to have him on this one. We go in there and they come busting up and he doesn’t shoot…?

And then he thought: Fuck it! Nothing I can do about it now. If I blew it, I blew it. Forget it. Shouldn’t have brought him along. Shoulda come out here alone like I always do, so, Okay, forget he’s here, Jack, oh Great Stupid Leader. Forget it. Do your bit. Deep breaths. Deep breaths and forget Felix and go through those pictures, do ’em now, paint those pictures, because if you can’t see it now, if you can’t visualize success now, then you sure as shit won’t know what to do at the split second…

And he began to do it. He steered the car with automatic pilot, seeing not the streets of Cleburne, Texas, through the windshield, but victory.

He set the aquarium filled with pig’s blood in the elevator. Laced with speed and coke and rat poison and all the rest of it. Wouldn’t kill ’em but, like the flare on that goon, it just had to be a little distracting to suddenly come on to twenty or so LSD trips at once. Sure, it would smell funny. The fiends would know there was something wrong with it but they could see it! That’s why he’d had Cat get an aquarium, so they could not only smell the blood, they could see it through the glass. Just too damn tempting to resist. Plunging their rotten fangs into it like bobbing for apples and then all that poison and dope starts hitting ’em and then the elevator takes them up and by the time the doors open they’re gonna be so stoned and sore and weirded out…

The crossbow cable pulls ’em out too fast for ’em to stop it, stoned as they are. The cable is attached to the Blazer because the winch is too slow to take a chance and I’ll just whistle to Carl on the radio and he’ll hit the gas and that fiend will be out of that elevator and through the doors and burning before it knows what hit it.

Sure as hell!

Shit! We might not even need a gunman!

But they did. And right then they didn’t really have one.

Felix, sitting beside the oblivious Jack Crow, had begun to rock and tremble like a molten volcano.

Chapter 17

He sat there on the tailgate of the Blazer and watched them take care of last minute details and he hated