She actually had a point. My last directive was made in 1957 and it was to allocate a portion of my money toward the purchase of U.S. tech stock. This was after I’d gotten drunk with an English mathematician who spent the evening prattling on about the Manhattan Project. About ninety percent of what he told me was top secret, but he was really, really drunk. I think I even told the Swiss to pick up some IBM stock. I don’t remember. (I was mad drunk myself when I made the call.) It wasn’t the first time I made a snap decision like that, and while this one may have worked out okay—provided I actually made that phone call and wasn’t imagining the whole thing—most of them didn’t. For example, I once put a load of money down on commercial zeppelin travel. And don’t even get me started about perpetual motion machines.
“I wish I were rich,” Brenda said wistfully.
“You will be,” I said.
“Yeah? Can you see the future?”
What have the other vampires been saying about me? “No. But if you want to be rich, you can. It’s just a matter of patience and discipline and finding a bank that’s open at night. You’ll figure it out.” I picked up the cash. “No, I don’t think I need a car. But I definitely need to do some shopping, and maybe a shower and a shave. You don’t happen to know where the nearest Y is, do you?”
Brenda did me one better. It turned out there was a community bathroom, with a real shower, down the hall from her almost-apartment. It was perhaps the filthiest place I’d spent time in since nineteenth century London, but it did have hot water and a mirror. An hour later I emerged into Chinatown, clean-shaven and less odorous, although my clothes were still as crappy as ever, hence the need to shop. My plan was to hit the nearest big bank, set up an account for myself here in the States, transfer some money into it and live the high life for a little while, or at least until winter was over. But to do that I had to show up dressed somewhat better than a guy who just woke up in a gutter somewhere.
I headed for the nearest subway station, my bag over my shoulder and my coat tightly wrapped. (It wasn’t a whole lot warmer than it had been the night before. Why couldn’t I winter in the tropics?)
My path to the train took me past a news vendor who looked nearly as cold as I was. Ordinarily I pass newsstands without pausing to examine headlines, because only rarely do any of them make sense to me. The last time I sat down to read a paper was in 1992.
But on this particular day something made me look up. Don’t know what it was. Fate, I suppose. And this time the first headline I saw did mean something to me.
STUDENTS BRUTALLY SLAIN, it read.
It was about Gary and Nate.
I skimmed the first two paragraphs, just enough to discover that I was a prime suspect.
Chapter 7
According to the full story—I went and bought the paper—Nate and Gary were assaulted with a blunt object. This told me hardly anything, as there are a whole mess of blunt objects one could use to kill a person, starting with an automobile and working down. (I didn’t think they were run over in their living room but you get my point.) The place was also ransacked, and the police were speculating that robbery might have been a motive. And then there was this sentence, “Police are looking for a local drifter who may have spent some time in the victims’ apartment.”
That wasn’t much, but I knew tomorrow it would be “a drifter named Adam” and the day after that, one of Gary and Nate’s party friends would cough up a description and I’d be looking at a composite sketch of my face on the front page. They’d say it was just for questioning, but I didn’t have one of the most well developed alibis on the planet. If you start digging deep enough into any of the names on my passport, you’ll quickly find that none are genuine. And Adam isn’t even one of those names. That couldn’t help. Worst of all, the only person who could possibly prove I wasn’t in the apartment when they were killed, was a teenage vampire hooker.
In my favor, I was probably the only “drifter” in town with twenty grand on hand to work with, so I could get out of Boston pretty fast and be done with it whenever I wanted to. It was a much better option than jail. (Astonishingly, I’d managed to avoid long-term imprisonment for most of my life. Good thing. Can you imagine me under a life sentence?)
But there was a nagging little voice in the back of my head that wanted to know who had killed Gary and Nate. I hate that little voice. It always gets me in trouble.
So, I stuck with my original plan, which was to get to Newbury Street and shop for a decent set of clothes, plus a few other goodies, like a watch. For good measure, I stopped in a hair salon. When I returned to Brenda’s hole in the wall a few hours later she almost didn’t recognize me.
“You’re bald!”
“What do you think?” I asked. “Do you like it?”
“It’s… I don’t know…” she circled around me, examining the damage. I’d also gotten my ear pierced. With the Armani suit thrown in, I looked like a pimp.
“Hang on.” I slipped on a pair of Ray-Bans. “Now?”
“Yeaaah, that’s better. Jesus, you look completely different.”
“That’s what I was shooting for.”
“What, are you on the lam now?”
I thrust the newspaper into her hands. “Apparently, yes.” She read the article while I explained who the mysterious drifter was.
“You didn’t do this, though, right?” she asked. I guess this is a polite question to ask when you’re a vampire.
“Of course not.”
“Had to ask.”
“Well, I didn’t,” I repeated.
“Okay,” she said. “I wouldn’t have minded, you know. I think if you were, like this big killer or something… that’d be sorta sexy, actually.”
I snatched the paper from her. “Boy, did you make the right career choice.”
“Hooking?”
“Bloodsucking.” I dropped my new leather satchel onto the bed (the duffel didn’t work with the suit) and zipped it open.
“What is that smell?” Brenda of the hypersensitive nose asked.
I pulled out the bag of goods. “Oh, sorry about that. It’s diced garlic.” Garlic doesn’t fend off vampires, by
