Crimes by Moonlight Page 3

  “Do you have a plan of action, then?” he said.

  “Yes, my sheriff.”

  “Good luck. Oh, by the way.”

  Every vampire froze.

  “You must bring them back alive,” Cedric said. “I know you want to have fun with them. In fact, I’d planned to ask you to bring me one to play with. But I’ve gotten a phone call from the chief of police, who said ... and I think this is interesting ... that some of his officers told him they’d been running across vampires in unexpected places, asking unexpected questions, and he certainly hoped we weren’t taking any vigilante action of our own, since the whole Rhodes police department is anxious to bring the Fellowship terrorists to justice.”

  None of the vampires cast guilty looks at each other—they were all much too seasoned for that.

  “Of course we were planning to kill them,” Dahlia said. “What else?”

  “I’m afraid you must alter your plan,” Cedric told her, using his “sympathetic but firm” voice that carried so well. “Think of how wonderful it will look, a picture of you handing over the culprits to the police. Think of how people will say that we’ve honored our commitment to refrain from taking human blood—even the blood of our enemies.”

  Dahlia looked mutinous. “Cedric, we’d anticipated . . .”

  “Having a good old-fashioned party,” he said. “I regret that, too. But when you find these murderers, they go to police headquarters. Undrained and intact.”

  And, in turn, every head nodded.

  Five teams of two vamps each had been dispatched to the five tunnel accesses closest to Fellowship headquarters. Dahlia thought it possible the bombers had blasted or cut through some of the more recent walls. She would have done so if she’d been planning on using the tunnels as a refuge.

  These teams were armed with shotguns. None of them were happy about it. Most vampires (especially the older ones) thought carrying a gun implied a certain lack of confidence in one’s own lethality.

  Dahlia divided the rest of the Rhodes vamps into two parties. Each would enter the tunnels about a mile away from Fellowship headquarters, one from the east and one from the west. That way, the hunting party could descend without alerting their prey. A couple of cars took Dahlia’s party (Taffy headed the other one) to the east entrance she’d selected. This access happened to lie below a restaurant that had opened before World War I.

  The Cappelini’s Ristorante staff was used to parties trailing through on the “Old Rhodes” tour, but they were taken aback when the eight o’clock tour party consisted wholly of bloodsuckers. Dahlia hung back. Though she was tiny and pretty, she was also unmistakably menacing. Lakeisha beamed her perky smile, tipped heavily, and the atmosphere relaxed.

  The party, which consisted of Dahlia, Lakeisha, and three male vamps (Roscoe, Parnell, and Jonathan) all passed through a door the teenage tour guide had unlocked. They descended the stairs into the Cappelini basement. The very nervous young woman pointed out how various things were stored, talked about when the building had been erected, and revealed how many pounds of pasta the restaurant had served since it had opened its doors. Though the vampires gave her polite attention, she was visibly nervous as she prepared to enter the old tunnels.

  She unlocked yet another door, this one a very old wooden slab. Greeted by a rush of cool air, the party descended a very narrow flight of stairs, then a steep and twisting ramp, and came to yet another door, much lower than modern doors and heavily locked. Their guide unlocked the last door, keeping up her patter the whole time, though with an effort. She flipped a light switch, and the tunnel appeared, running straight for about ten yards before turning to veer right.

  Lakeisha said, “Let me ask you a question.” Relieved, the girl looked at the cute dark-skinned vampire inquiringly. Lakeisha said, “See how big my eyes are?” The next minute, the girl was under. “Sit on the floor here and wait until we come back,” Lakeisha said, and the girl smiled and nodded agreeably.

  The vampires were all used to enclosed spaces, and they all had excellent vision. Dahlia barely seemed to touch the ground as she began to move forward. At first, two of them could walk abreast. After the jog to the right, the old tunnel narrowed.

  The walls were brick, plastered here and there. Every now and then the narrow space widened into a storeroom, littered with old signs, broken chairs, all sorts of debris discarded from the businesses above. From time to time a ghostly door, sometimes with glass panels still intact, offered access to an underground saloon or whorehouse that hadn’t seen a customer in seventy years.

  “This is great,” Roscoe said. Though Dahlia didn’t reply, she agreed completely.

  They didn’t meet any other tours, because Cedric had booked them all. For two hours, the vampires owned the tunnels below old Rhodes.

  Dahlia brought the party to a halt when she figured they were two blocks away from Field Street. She whispered: “You heard Cedric. No killing. If they resist, you can break a bone.” Despite the embargo, they were all tense with anticipation. It had been a long time since a worthy battle had come their way. This was a good moment to be a vampire. With a sharp nod, Dahlia turned and raced down the last section of tunnel.

  IN the end, the conquering of the Fellowship bombers was almost anticlimactic. There were only seven conspirators below the Fellowship headquarters. Of those, two had been too close to their own handiwork and had been injured by flying debris from the Pyramid. Only three men resisted with any determination, and Taffy, who got to the group seconds before Dahlia, had subdued the largest of these with no trouble at all by kicking him in the ribs. Jonathan and Roscoe took care of the others.

  Rather than herd their hostages back to Cappelini’s, Dahlia decided to surface at the closest access point. Lakeisha used her cell phone to call the two vampires guarding that spot, their signal to alert the police that there were prisoners to deliver.

  Instead of feeling triumphant, Dahlia found herself doubtful. Surely there should have been more Fellowship people in hiding?

  “Wait!” she called at the first flight of stairs. She turned. Taffy, right behind her, was carrying the man whose ribs she’d broken. He was groaning, the noise irritating her. To make sure a rib didn’t puncture the human’s lung, Taffy was carrying the man in front of her. Dahlia looked into his unshaven face.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, and the man began to recite some membership number the Fellowship had allotted him.

  “That’s even more irritating than the pain noises,” she said. “Shut up, asshole.”

  He cut himself off in mid-number.

  The practical Lakeisha extracted a wallet from his pants. “This particular asshole is named Nick DeLeo.”

  “Ever talked to a vampire before, Nick?”

  “I don’t deal with hell spawn,” the man said.

  “I was not spawned by hell. I met with something much older than myself in Crete, more years ago than you can imagine. I will still be here when your children are dust, if anyone deigns to breed with you.” That seemed doubtful to Dahlia. “Where are the others?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell you that,” he said. It was hard for him to look formidable when a woman was carrying him, and he gave up the attempt when Dahlia came even closer. He flinched.

  “Yes,” Dahlia said with some satisfaction. “I’m truly frightening. You can hardly imagine the pain I’ll cause you, if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

  “Don’t tell him, Ni—aaargh!” A scream effectively ended another hostage’s exhortation.

  “Oh, Roscoe, is he hurt?” Dahlia asked with patently false concern.

  “Hard to lend his buddy moral support with a broken jaw,” Roscoe said. “Oops.”

  Dahlia smiled down at Nick. “I have ripped people apart with my bare hands. And I enjoyed it, too.”

  Nick believed Dahlia. “The others have gone to get the firefighters who fished the vamps out of the Pyramid,” he said. “It’s easier to get the firefighters; they�
�re not armed. Three of us are going to each station around here that responded. They’re going to shoot until their weapons are empty except for one bullet, and then they’ll kill themselves. Holy martyrs to the cause.”

  “That’s a terrible plan,” Lakeisha said. “You think this will discourage people from helping vampires? Make them want to join your stupid Fellowship? The slaughter of public servants?”

  “We have a new goal,” Dahlia said. “We deposit these losers with the police. We go to the places they’re going to attack. They have a head start on us, so let’s be quick.”

  Up the stairs they swarmed, to be met by media galore. The police knew a good photo op, too. As soon as possible, Dahlia and her nest mates faded away into the shadows. The others had their own assignments, but Dahlia herself ran full tilt toward the corner of Almond and Lincoln.

  Four of the Pyramid conspirators were converging on the Thirty-four Company.

  At least the big doors were shut. The firefighters inside were cooking, sleeping, playing video games—until the first rifle shot whistled through the upstairs window, missing one of their drivers by a hair. Then shots were pouring into the station from all directions. There was screaming and cursing and panic.

  Until, one by one, the rifles stopped firing.

  The newspaper photographers would have liked to take a picture of the four Fellowship members piled in a heap on the concrete in front of the station with Dahlia standing on top of them. But Dahlia was too clever for that. Instead, the next day’s paper had a wonderful picture of tiny Dahlia in her black leather jumpsuit in the center of a huddle of firefighters, hoisted up on the shoulder of Captain Ted Fortescue.

  Any tendency the fire company might have to rhapsodize sentimentally over Dahlia’s one-woman antiterrorist action was dampened when they got a good look at the broken bones and bloody injuries the five foot nothing vampire had inflicted—though all four gunmen were alive, at least for a while.

  The newspapers were happy with their pictures, the firefighters were happy to be alive and mostly uninjured, the Fellowship fanatics were secretly glad to be out of the tunnels and to anticipate reiterating their inane credo at their trials, Cedric was happy that his vampires had obeyed his direction, and the vampires felt they had at least made a beginning on their revenge for the Pyramid bombing.

  Happiest of all was Melponeus the half demon, because he and Dahlia celebrated the victory until Melponeus had to crawl back to his demon brethren with weak knees and a silly grin.

  As for Dahlia, she developed a strange new habit. She felt she had established a relationship with the men and women of Company Number Thirty-four.

  She began to drop in from time to time. By her third visit, the humans were matter-of-fact about her presence. Ted Fortescue absentmindedly offered her some chili instead of the Red Stuff they’d started keeping at the back of the refrigerator.

  When the city council of Rhodes voted to give Dahlia a special commendation for her defense of the firehouse, everyone from the Thirty-four Company attended.

  “I feel like they’re my pets,” Dahlia confided to Taffy.

  Taffy wisely hid her smile.

  And when one of the shooters was released on a technicality, and every firefighter in the Thirty-four sounded off about it while Dahlia was there learning how to play Grand Theft Auto, none of the firefighters were surprised when the shooter vanished twenty-four hours later.

  “Dahlia’s like, our mascot,” said one firefighter to Ted Fortescue.

  “She’ll be around a lot longer than we are,” Ted Fortescue said. “Especially if you ever say anything like that where she can hear you.”

  But no one was foolish enough for that.

  Hixton

  By WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER

  A couple of miles outside the little town of Citadel, Wisconsin, the gravel road dropped into a tree-shaded hollow, and beyond that lay marshland. As soon as he cleared the trees, D‘Angelo saw the cabin. It sat back from the road a full quarter mile. The turnoff was marked by a wood-burned sign that read “Hams. Smoked and Honey Cured.” He drove his new ’53 Studebaker Starliner down a narrow dirt causeway between sinister-looking pools of dark water full of cattails gone brown. The high ground where the cabin stood also held a sturdy barn, an animal pen, and a large garden plot littered with stubble from a recent harvest. In the backyard, a young woman paused in hanging the wash and watched him come. The sheets on the line hung heavy in the still air, white against the gray of the overcast sky and the brown of the marsh reeds and the black of the water. An old man sat in a rocker on the front porch. When D’Angelo got out of the Studebaker, he saw that the old man’s lap was crossed by the barrel of a shotgun.

  “Far enough,” the old man said before D’Angelo had even taken a step.

  “Greet all your customers this way?”

  “Until I’m sure they’re customers.”

  “A wonder you sell anything.”

  “No wonder once you taste the product. You a customer?”

  “What do I look like?”

  “A man who answers a question with a question.”

  D’Angelo smiled. “Heard in town that you make the best hams this side of the Mississippi.”

  “Any side of the Mississippi, mister.”

  “You smoke the hams yourself?”

  The old man gave a brief wave toward a smokehouse in a far corner of the yard. “Right over there. What’s your pleasure? Hickory smoked or honey cured?”

  “Hickory smoked’ll do.”

  The old man nodded but didn’t move. He studied D’Angelo carefully. “Wherebouts you from? Cuz you’re not from around here.”

  “You neither,” D’Angelo said.

  “We’re talking about you right now.” The old man’s grip tightened on the shotgun.

  “Nebraska,” D’Angelo said. “Place called Hixton.”

  “Hixton?” The old man leaned forward. “Son, it’s not ham you came for. What do you want?”

  “Just to talk.”

  “About what?

  “Five missing boys in Hixton.”

  “Hixton was a long time ago and far away from here.”

  “Then there’s no harm in talking.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Martin.”

  “That a last name?”

  “Last name’s D’Angelo. And you’re Albert German.”

  “Why you want to know about Hixton?”

  “I’m a newspaper reporter, Mr. Gorman. I’m working on a story.”

  “No one cares about Hixton. Too long ago.” He was more than seventy, with a face parched by the sun. The squint of his eyes may also have been due to the sun, but D’Angelo thought not. “Ah, what the hell,” Gorman finally said, and beckoned his visitor forward.

  There was another chair on the porch. D’Angelo took it, wondering if it was where the young woman sat with the old man.

  “How’d you find me?” Gorman asked.

  “It’s what I do. Find people. Find things. Find the truth.”

  “The truth?” Gorman laughed, a sound as parched as his face. “People don’t want the truth. If they looked straight at the truth, it’d scorch their eyeballs right off their skulls.”

  Several swine trotted out from a small structure inside the pen D’Angelo had seen on his approach. The animals came to the fence and stuck their pink snouts between the rails. Beyond the pen lay the marsh, which stretched away in all directions under the dismal sky.

  D’Angelo said, “It would be difficult for someone to come at you without being seen.”

  “Damn near impossible,” Gorman agreed.

  “Twenty years ago, you left Hixton in a great hurry. What were you afraid of, Mr. Gorman? And what are you afraid of still?”

  Through that squint of his eyes, the old man studied the marsh. He finally said, “What do you know about Hixton?”

  This is what D’Angelo knew and what he told Gorman.

  In the fall of 1933, a teenage boy
named Lester Bennett attended a dance held in the gymnasium at Hixton Senior High School. He’d gone without a date. A shy boy, he hadn’t danced with anyone. He’d left alone and had never made it home.

  Two months later another boy, Skip Grogan, age sixteen, went out at 4:00 a.m. to do his morning newspaper route. He was a quiet but conscientious kid. No friends to speak of. An only child, and his mother doted on him. He delivered half the papers that morning, from State Street to Main, but delivered nothing after that. Like Lester Bennett, he simply vanished.

  In February a kid named Jason Weller went for a hayride sponsored by the Kiwanis Club. He was an awkward kid who reluctantly accompanied his cousin, a girl in need of a date. They nestled in the hay of the wagon with lots of other teenagers. Afterward, they drank hot chocolate and ate sugar donuts around a bonfire. Then he walked his cousin home under a full moon, said good night, and was never seen again.

  The people of Hixton were understandably upset. They raised a hue and cry and demanded to know why the authorities didn’t have a clue about the missing boys. The local police asked for the help of a state investigator. Albert Gorman was sent in answer.

  “Sorry sons of bitches, those local cops,” Gorman said. “I took one look at their case notes and knew the only way they’d get their man was if he walked into the office, confessed, took the key, and locked himself in a cell.”

  “Did you think you’d have better luck?” D’Angelo asked.

  “Luck? Wasn’t any luck to it. Solving a crime is simply the steady elimination of possibilities.”

  “What were the possibilities?”

  Gorman rocked back in his chair. He lifted the shotgun from his lap and leaned it against the cabin wall, still within easy reach. He folded his hands over his belly, which had probably once been hard and flat but with time had grown doughy. He wore a white shirt open at the collar, the thinner white of an undershirt visible beneath. His khakis were spotless and pressed to a sharp crease. His boots were black and shined. D’Angelo wondered if it was the young woman in the backyard who took such good care of him.