Still, I had my own preferences, though they tended to be negative. I preferred to avoid the blood of the physically ill, including that of long-term drug users. A body ravaged by drug abuse is just as unpalatable as one ravaged by viral or bacterial infection. There wasn’t any objective reason for my preference, since, as far as I knew, I was immune to human diseases. My reasons were purely psychological. I just liked to drink healthy blood.
I also tried to avoid feeding on kids under five or six years old, or on people over 60, or so. There was always an element of risk in killing humans. With few exceptions, people were always accounted for; if not by family and friends, then by the bureaucracies. When someone dies, someone else notices. If the death raises questions, someone always looks for answers. They may not look very hard or very long, but they still look. I avoided the young ones because there wasn’t enough blood in their little bodies to justify the risk. It was more prudent to feed on larger bodies, getting a full nutritional return for the effort invested and the risk involved.
As for the old folks, I figured once a human reaches 60, they’ve earned the right to drag it out as long as they either choose to or can. They’ve fought a good fight against an unbeatable adversary in a battle that was lost from the beginning. As long as the old and gray weren’t the only solution to my immediate dietary needs, I preferred to let them go their own distance.
Not feeding on small children was a matter of common sense, an attempt to minimize the chance of undesirable repercussions. My attitude toward the elderly was less obviously pragmatic. On the face of it, it was a curiously sentimental policy for a predator. But there was more to it than that. It grew out of a desire to invest the world with value. It was another of my many attempts to make the world meaningful by drawing lines around my own actions. I wanted to acknowledge that some things were better than others, and I wanted to respect the difference. At one level, I knew my distinctions were arbitrary. I really wasn’t different in kind from a vampire who, for whatever idiosyncratic perversity, only drank the blood of twelve-year-old girls. We were both making arbitrary distinctions. And we were both trying to invest the world with value. We both needed to choose between the better and the worse, even if our choices were based on our own aberrations.
•
About fifteen minutes later, Karla came back to my booth and sat across from me.
“I guess you’re not in the mood tonight?” she said, pointing to my untouched drink.
I responded by sliding the glass to the back edge of the table. We sat looking at each other. Beneath the pierced eyebrow, the multiple earrings, the tattoo of a goldfish on her neck, and the garish eye shadow, Karla was a classic Italian beauty: black hair, brown eyes, olive skin, with unusually symmetrical facial features. None of which had any real bearing on anything that concerned me.
“So, let’s chat,” she said.
I wanted to accomplish two things: to convince her to take the job, and at the same time, I wanted her to understand that she would be making a serious decision, with serious repercussions if she broke the rules of her employment. Unfortunately, those two things worked against each other. If I gave her an accurate picture of the penalty for breaking the rules, I would eliminate any chance of her accepting the job. In the end, there was nothing to do but try.
“My name is Shake,” I said, offering her my hand.
“Karla Lambretti,” she responded, shaking my hand briefly and giving it a good squeeze. “That’s an unusual name. Are you one of those oil sheiks?”
“It’s Shake, as in, ‘shake, rattle, and roll.’”
“Shake, rattle, and roll,” she repeated. “Wow, I haven’t heard that in a while.”
“A little before your time, I guess. How about, ‘shake your booty.’”
“I get the picture. So, what’s this business matter you want to chat about?”
“Unfortunately,” I began, “there isn’t any way to make this sound entirely plausible, so I’ll just explain the situation, and we’ll see what you think.”
“It sounds like I’m not going to believe you.”
“You might not. But I’m not that concerned about whether you believe me. What I’m hoping is that you’ll accept my offer, anyway.”
“I’ve only got fifteen minutes,” she said. “So whatever it is, you might want to get to the point.”
“Let’s start with the why. As luck would have it, I’ve been graced with a rather rare medical condition.”
“Is it contagious?” she interrupted, leaning back.
“Not at all. It’s genetic. It isn’t especially debilitating, but it has one very inconvenient side effect: an extreme sensitivity to sunlight.”
“You mean,” she interrupted, “you’re like a vampire, or something?”
“Nothing that fantastic. I’m more like a square peg.”
“A square peg?” she asked.
I nodded. “You know, the square peg that won’t fit into a round hole. In my case, the round hole is a normal life lived in the light of day. I have to stay indoors during the day and handle my affairs at night. For the most part, this isn’t a problem. But occasionally things come up that have to be done during normal business hours. I’m looking for someone I can depend on to handle those for me.”
“You want me to run errands for you?” she asked, her face clouding slightly.
“That would be part of the job, yes. I also need a chauffeur. I don’t drive.”
“Why not just take a cab? They work 24/7. Too expensive?”
“I’m not trying to cut expenses,” I said, wishing
