Wishing to spare Mio, the vigilantes waited for her to make one of those periodic trips. On a sunny August afternoon, about two hundred villagers surrounded and set fire to their house. Midori was sleeping in a specially darkened upstairs room. The house, old and made entirely of wood, was quickly engulfed in flames. According to what Mio was later told by witnesses, Midori had thrown a blanket over herself and run out of the house into the sunlight. Once outside, she found herself surrounded by angry villagers armed with long spikes and other weapons. Having escaped the fire, she was now exposed to the even more deadly sun. She tried to get through the mob and make a break for the surrounding woods, but in the confusion she couldn’t find a way through. Desperate to get out of the sun, she retreated back into the burning house.
Vampires don’t die easily. Her screams could be heard for so long that many of the villagers fell into a kind of mass hysteria, screaming and wailing, terrified that Midori might emerge from the flames and take vengeance on them.
Midori’s fate exemplified an ever-present danger. Over time, there is a tendency to become complacent, a natural tendency to tempt fate by pushing your luck. The more you get away with, the more you feel you can get away with. But sooner or later, your carelessness catches up with you. When it does, you pay the price in one lump sum, at the point where you’ve gone too far. You get away with it until you don’t, and then it’s too late. Vampires are not, in fact, immortal. Caught in the wrong circumstances, we are much weaker and more vulnerable than humans. Which was a large part of why I cultivated a life of quiet anonymity, why I was so cautious about moderating and disguising my culinary activities. My vampire blood may not have pulsed in rhythm with my domesticity—prudence, discretion, patience, and the like, may be rather tepid virtues, more appropriate for a work-a-day family man than for a vampire—but the routines gave my life a certain stability that was preferable to the alternatives.
Chapter 9
As Richardson had said, Danny Weiss was in the phone book. He lived on Cummins Drive, near the Lighthouse Golf Course. There were a lot of new homes being built in the general area, but most of the older houses were small and rather run down.
I wasn’t comfortable yet involving Karla in anything too potentially compromising, and since I had no idea what might transpire during my visit with Danny, I decided to ride my bike. I liked riding a bicycle. I could make good time without drawing attention to myself. A cyclist doing twenty-five miles per hour is well within the realm of human expectation. Also, a bike was fairly easy to hide if I needed to leave it somewhere.
A little after midnight, I rode through town, crossed the river at the old I Street Bridge, and made my way to Cummins Drive. There were two cars in Danny’s driveway: a late model BMW and a classic Ford Mustang. A faint glow from inside suggested lights further back in the house. The street was quiet, so I leaned my bike against the side of his house, behind some shrubs.
The backyard was fenced with the ubiquitous six-foot redwood. Twin gates shared the space between Danny’s and his neighbor’s house. I put my hands on top of Danny’s gate, jumped, swung my feet over the top and landed quietly on the other side. Of course, there was a dog—drug dealer standard issue—a big male Doberman. It came around the corner of the house, alert and pointy-eared, snorting with fearless disdain. It paused for about half a second and then charged. Two strides and it was airborne with unquestionably carnivorous intent. I let its head get a couple of feet from my face before I snapped my right hand up and grabbed it by the throat. The dog’s forward movement stopped like it had hit a wall, but the momentum carried its tail end forward. I side-stepped and let the momentum flip the dog belly up, then slammed the back of its head down hard onto the concrete walkway. So much for fearless disdain.
I walked around to the back of the house. A roofed patio with a sliding glass door gave entry to a dimly lit family room. The right side of the room was occupied by a makeshift entertainment center: a wide-screen TV and stereo components flanked by two massive speakers. Danny’s neighbors must have loved him. On the left side of the family room, instead of a family, a young girl slouched unconscious on the sofa. A guy, Danny no doubt, was kneeling in front of her knees, in the process of removing her panties.
The door wasn’t locked. I slid it open quietly and stepped inside. “Are you familiar with the term, ‘consenting adult’?”
The guy spun around so fast he lost his balance and ended up on his butt between the girl’s knees.
“Because I don’t think she qualifies as either,” I added.
The coffee table, pushed aside, was littered with drug paraphernalia. The guy’s eyes flicked over the tabletop, reflexively evaluating the extent of incrimination, then moved to the open back door.
“Your puppy is napping,” I said.
Danny stared at me, but with unfocused eyes, like he was trying to remember something useful from all those hours he’d spent imagining how he would handle an intruder.
“Take a breath, Danny, before you pass out.”
Saying his name brought him back into focus. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
An ottoman sat against the wall, next to a bookcase. I walked over and casually examined some of the titles before sitting down. I had my back to Danny while I was looking at the books,
