Blood Groove (8 page)

Leslie was younger than Danielle, although she looked older; hell,
everyone
looked older than Danielle. Physically she was a tall black girl with slender hips, sizable Afro, and an attitude to match. Since she worked with the children of poverty, neglect, and violence, she needed confidence to spare. She was proud that in five years on the force she’d never had to draw her weapon in the line of duty.

They sat in a booth in the back of the restaurant, where the light from the wall-sized aquarium was almost bright enough for them to see the food on their plates. A barge drifted by outside the wide window that overlooked the river, its running lights flashing slow and even. Danielle had wolfed down her club sandwich almost immediately, and now flipped through the stack of files Leslie had brought, pausing only for swallows of coffee. They were typical cases for Leslie, stories of runaways, gangs, drugs, prostitution, suicide, and homicide, all committed by individuals the legal system considered “juveniles.” Leslie watched her friend’s face go from astonishment to horror to almost sick amusement as she turned the pages.

“Christ, Leslie, this is incredible,” Danielle said at last. “I mean, I had no idea these things were this widespread in Memphis. New York, Chicago, yeah, but here? No way.”

“Way,” Leslie said flatly.

Danielle closed the last file and lit a cigarette. “How many of these kids live to be eighteen?”

Leslie tossed a strand of wavy hair from her face with the same hand that held her fork. “We beat the national average.”

“Where do they
come
from?”

Leslie stopped in mid-bite. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

Leslie looked at her in disbelief. “You cut up dead people all day, and yet maintain your naiveté. Someone should do a study of you.”

Danielle sighed smoke from her nostrils. “Humor me.”

Leslie sighed. “All right. Most of the colored kids come from right here in Memphis. Minority poverty breeds delinquents like stagnant water does skeeters. The white kids come from all over, especially the little podunk towns, usually to escape abuse, sometimes just for a change of scenery. There’s still that hippie ethos at work, and the whole decadent big-city thing.” She chewed and swallowed her bite of salad. “They may be under eighteen, but more of them know exactly what they’re doing than you might think.”

Leslie paused and studied Danielle. “You look tired, you know that?”

“So do you.”

“Yeah, but a good night’s sleep will fix
me
right up. I know you, Danielle. You don’t think like most people do anyway, and I bet you’ve been lying awake at night worrying about that Crealey kid, thinking about what it’ll do to that precious reputation of yours.” When Danielle started to reply, Leslie cut her off with, “And I’ve studied psychology, so don’t mess with me.”

Danielle took another drag on her cigarette and scowled. “Okay, smart gal. What is it you want to tell me?”

She leaned across the table and spoke quietly. “I know
you’ve got some sort of plan worked up, so you might as well let me in on it.”

Danielle looked out at the river, the lights of the bridge into Arkansas twinkling in the distance. “What do you know about the Crealey case?”

“He was found dead downtown. You said he bled to death, but you couldn’t figure out how. No evidence of foul play.”

She nodded, wincing inside at all the implications of her inadequacy. She gestured with her cigarette as she spoke. “That’s about it. And I’ve been going over it and over it, and I’m convinced I looked for every possible cause. And
that
means the cause is something I didn’t know to look for, which means it’s new.”

“New,” Leslie repeated flatly. Then her eyes opened wider. “A new disease?” she whispered.

Danielle shook her head. “Maybe. If I could’ve held on to the body longer, I might’ve found out. But the boy didn’t
look
sick, except for the fact that he was dead. The more I go over it, the more I think it’s a new drug.”

“Drug,” Leslie repeated.

Danielle nodded. “I don’t know if it’s an upper, downer, hallucinogen, or what, but I think one of the side effects may be the complete and total breakdown of blood, and its absorption into the surrounding tissue.”

“That’s pretty weird.”

“Of course it is. The whole idea of taking drugs is weird, if you ask me.”

Leslie scowled at Danielle as she blew out a puff of smoke. “Uh-huh,” she said ironically.

Danielle laughed. “Come on, you know what I mean.”

“I know I sympathize with these kids’ desire to get away from the world. Watergate, the energy crisis, the situation in the Middle East, the Russians, black versus white . . . it’s a
terrible time to be young. You see no hope for the future, so why not have a good time now?”

“That’s a cop-out,” Danielle snapped. She actually knew very little of what was happening in the outside world; current events only interested her when people died from them. “And immaterial to this. Have you busted any kids with any new drugs, or run across rumors about something you haven’t heard of before?”

She shook her head. “No, and believe me, I’d have heard of it if anyone else in the department had. Juvie is a gossipy bunch, and sometimes they still forget I’m on staff and not one of the cleaning crew, so they’ll talk about anything around me.”

“Then maybe we’re lucky. Maybe this is the first one, and we can catch it before it spreads.”

“ ‘We.’ ”

Danielle scowled, annoyed. “This is your problem as much as mine.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“First I want to talk to some of the kids. On the street, as they say. I was hoping you could help me with that.”

Leslie snorted. “There’s no such place as ‘the street,’ you’ve been watching too many cop shows. And if we go down to any of the regular hangouts, we won’t find anyone who’ll talk to us about drugs. They all know me.”

“And none of them trust you?”

“The ones that
do
trust me aren’t down there anymore, they’re in schools or halfway houses or jobs.”

Danielle twirled her lighter absently. “Well . . . what if I go alone?”

Leslie stared at her. “Then you’ll get raped, and killed. Probably in that order, but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

Danielle stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “I have to do it, Les. I have to
know
. If I can confirm my suspicion on
this, maybe even get a sample, then we can get the word out before it gets out of hand.”

“The ‘word’?” Leslie repeated. “Danny, you sound so earnest, you’re like a public service ad. Do you even remember what it was like to be a kid? ‘The word’ comes from ‘the Man,’ and he’s over thirty, white, still thinks we should be in Viet Nam and that black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. They won’t listen to ‘the word.’ ”

Danielle sighed, defeated, and shook her head. “Then we may be scraping dozens of them off the street.”

“Yeah, well, we should’ve thought of that before we criminalized marijuana and bombed Cambodia. I’m sorry, but I can’t condone sending my best friend off to buy illegal drugs. Promise me you won’t go. Please.”

Danielle nodded, keeping the crushed expression. But it was an act. Leslie’s political leanings were coloring her professional opinion; Danielle doubted more than a fraction of the kids Leslie dealt with could even tell you who was president, let alone how he got that way. They were kids being kids, in an unsupervised and potentially deadly environment.

Besides, she already had her plan. She’d spotted the same street names over and over in Leslie’s reports, and now knew where to find her answers. The risk to her safety was a distant second to the damage her pride might suffer if she
didn’t
go. They finished dinner in peace, giggling over Leslie’s active dating life and forgetting all about kids on the street.

F
AUVETTE FOUND HER
victim easily, less than five miles from the warehouse: a small-town boy passed out in the bed of his pickup behind a redneck bar at the city limits. Set back from the road in a line of auto dealers, pawnshops, and diners, the place was dangerous enough to be popular and safe enough to be crowded, even near dawn, with enough drunken good ole boys that no one would miss this one. Traffic on the road was light, and none of the other businesses that lined the highway showed any sign of life.

She climbed over the tailgate so stealthily the worn suspension made no sound. The boy lay on his back, mouth open, snoring. His pants were around his knees, although she couldn’t tell if it was for sex or urination. She didn’t care. Normally she would have taken only a little blood, but now that she acknowledged it, her need overwhelmed her. This boy would die.

She crawled beside him and stretched out, draping one leg over his. She felt his erection flutter and then jut up against the fabric of his white jockey shorts. Still unconscious, he moaned and tossed his head, his drunken dreams now filled with ultra-vivid sexual fantasies.

She brushed the hair back from his face. He had a wispy mustache and pimples on his neck. His lips were full, almost girlish. He moaned again, and she traced one ragged fingernail around his mouth.

She latched on to his wrist first, taking the blood from his pulsing artery, and chewed the wound to obliterate any sign of her teeth marks. As the warm salty liquid flowed into her, she felt queasy, like a starving man given a chocolate sundae. Then her system adjusted as she drank, absorbing the blood where it was most needed. The thump from the bar’s jukebox mirrored the boy’s heartbeats at first, as if the music felt his life pulsing into her.

“Oh, baby,” she sighed, and got to her knees. He was already bone pale in the security light. Her arms went under him and lifted him in a mock lovers’ embrace, and she shifted her bite to his jugular. She let the blood pool in her mouth, the liquid forming a seal between her lips and his neck. Then she drank voraciously.

At the last moment his eyes fluttered open. He was too weak to speak or scream, but he managed to raise one hand to her face. His dying fingers caressed her cheek, touched the place where her lips met his flesh, then fell limp. His heart gave out three beats later.

Fauvette lowered him gently to the truck bed, then dug her fingers into his neck and ripped out the chunk of flesh with incriminating teeth marks. She tossed it into the weeds, where the raccoons and possums waited. Then she drove her index finger straight through his sternum into his heart, puncturing the organ as surely as any wooden stake. Without an intact heart to revive, the boy would never rise to prowl the night.

She leaned back against the fender, gasping with satiation. Her head cleared as well and she realized how near the brink of real, true death she’d been. The gray powder Toddy
gave her had completely deadened the desire for blood, even after she’d lost some of her own, which usually triggered gargantuan bloodlust. Where the hell had he gotten it? And what was it? She still had the bag stashed at the warehouse, but hadn’t touched it since that night. It numbed even the desire to consume more of the powder itself. But that was okay: one dose had almost killed her. Apparently it
had
killed Toddy.

She looked down at the white-faced corpse. Mosquitoes hovered over it, their instincts confused by the smell of blood coming from the rapidly cooling body. Inside the bar someone let out a tremendous “Yeeeeee-HAH!” The boy was probably not old enough to legally drink alcohol, and this might have been his first night out in the big city. Marriage, career, children, all those dreams were gone. His parents would never applaud with pride as he graduated, never hold grandchildren on their laps. She took that from them, took their joy, their hope.

The blood in her stomach churned at this realization. She had not asked to become this dark monster, but neither had she made any effort to end it, and her one real attempt—the gray powder—had, once its numbing effect faded, left her so ravenous that she’d had to kill this boy instead of merely feeding on him. She felt guilt, and shame, and remorse.

Then she vomited most of the fresh blood back onto the corpse.

Her insides wrenched in agony; part of her tried to hang on to the precious fluid, while the rest worked to get rid of it.
I’m a monster, I’m a maggot, I’m a disease
, her conscience screamed. But somewhere in the back of this cacophony, her true voice protested:
These are not your thoughts, you are what you are, you do not pity yourself
. And then the two voices merged into a miasma she could not filter. She leaned over the side and sobbed.

Finally the immediate anguish passed, leaving her weaker and more depressed than before. With great effort she climbed awkwardly out of the truck and stumbled into the weeds, headed toward the warehouse. Dawn was less than an hour away.

From the roof of the bar where he sat on one of the humming air-conditioning units, Rudolfo Zginski watched Fauvette stagger off. He tracked her until he was certain she lived at the big, abandoned warehouse in the distance. He’d be waiting when she emerged the next night, and follow her until he caught her alone. He sent out a call to the local “children of the night,” and immediately four lean, rather decrepit coyotes and a feral German shepherd emerged from the field behind the bar. They silently scrambled into the truck bed, claws loud against the metal, and began devouring the softer parts of Fauvette’s victim. What they would leave would give no hint of a vampire.

He leaped from the roof to the bed of another pickup, his step so light the vehicle barely moved, then bounded over four more cars to hit the ground in a pool of shadow beneath a broken streetlamp. He moved onto the sidewalk and drifted down the road, unseen, unheard, no more than a darker whisper of shadow in the night. He’d accomplished one of the things he set out to do: find another vampire. Now it was time for the second thing.

   Upon leaving the morgue after his resurrection, Zginski found himself in a maze of corridors all reeking of blood, flesh, and antiseptic. He met another man dressed in identical scrubs and jacket, and mimicked his professional nod as they passed. When he reached the main lobby, he saw that the building belonged to a university, and found himself suddenly among a crowd of young people all rushing about
to reach their next class. Someone bumped into him and said, “ ’Scuse me, Doc.”