I did the search as fast as I could. The stench of dried blood was sickening. Like spoiled food mixed with feces. There was plenty of that, too. The bartender had let go of a pantload when I blasted twin holes in his skull.
In a closet I found stuff near enough to my size for an acceptable change of clothes. Cotton shirt, khakis, sneakers and a leather bomber jacket. It would do until I could buy a new suit for club hopping. I took a last look around the place before turning the locks. Blood on the walls, floor and ceiling. Bullet holes in walls. Fingerprints everywhere, including mine. I wouldn’t be seeing Brooklyn for a while.
Out in the street I walked the block, pressing the tab on the key remote I found in one of the big men’s pockets. I walked to one corner then back to the other. A horn hooted somewhere. Around the corner an electric blue SUV was pulled to the curb. The lights blinked and it hooted again when I pressed the tab. There were parking tickets under the wiper. I tore them free and threw them to the street.
The car was a beast and roared to life like one. Monster woofers in the rear made the whole car shiver when some minor chord hip-hop masterpiece came blasting from the speakers. I cut the music off and pulled out onto the street to start the ride back to Manhattan.
I left it parked with two wheels up on the curb of a narrow alley in East Village. A quick search turned up a cut down shotgun under one seat and a stun gun under another. I pressed the toggle on the stun gun. A humming and crackling bar of blue electricity arced between the contact points. I left the shotgun and pocketed the Taser. Leaving the SUV unlocked and the keys in the ignition, I walked south toward a club on Broome that I hadn’t been to in a while. It was frequented by college kids and my borrowed clothes would fit right in.
I was hungry again.
• 38 •
There’s a limit to what money can buy. Real money, cash, is almost worthless in so many places. In a world afraid of its own shadow, it’s nearly impossible do anything significant without a credit card and photo ID. Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my existence sleeping on rafters or in abandoned trucks, I’d need both.
First I’d need a new identity. The hardest part of that was a driver’s license or any other kind of identification that involved a photograph. A picture of a backdrop was not going to get it done. I wished that I’d kept a photo of myself from before. There was my portrait on the Handley-Barker website unless they took it down. But that unctuous smile and three-quarter view against a background of maple trees was all wrong for an official photo.
I searched through the collection of wallets I’d collected for a driver’s license that had a picture of someone close enough in appearance to me that I could pass for them. That brings up another problem I was having. I had a bagful of stolen stuff. Cash, watches, jewelry and wallets. Along with that a baggie with enough soporifics to put the whole city in a trance. And the little man’s revolver and extra ammunition. I couldn’t keep carrying that around with me everywhere and I couldn’t keep checking it in clubs along with my coat. Only a matter of time before a check girl either called the cops or took off with what amounted to two years’ salary.
I’m not sure what a check girl at a club makes but it has to be in the neighborhood of forty kay with tips. That’s what my ever-growing roll, or rolls, had grown to. I could live a lot more comfortably, and a lot more securely, on a wad like that for quite a while. Especially when you consider what I saved by never eating.
One of the pieces of ID I had was a passport for a guy from the Netherlands. That wouldn’t matter. I only needed the photo. His face was roughly the shape of mine but his hair was darker. He had a goatee but that wasn’t happening. I shaved once after the night this all started and never saw evidence of facial hair again. Still, that might even help with the disguise. He was two inches taller than me but who notices things like that? It’s not like I was planning any international travel.
Cruising the clubs I met plenty of sketchy people. It wasn’t hard, after a few questions, to find someone to help me become a new me. That’s how I found Tariq. He was Iraqi or Iranian or what does it matter? He spoke with a North Jersey accent as thick as Travolta’s.
“You need a social. That’s five hundred. You need a credit card to match your ID. I can get you a legit one, no problem,” he said.
“An actual credit card?” I said.
We were in his Audi, cruising down FDR, the lights of apartment towers looming along the bank above us. Row after row of high rise hives.
“Yeah. The real thing. You use it, the bills come, you pay them. When you don’t want to pay them no more? Fuck it. No way they can dun someone doesn’t exist, am I right?”
I nodded.
“We can go to a place I know. Take your picture. That’s another hundred.”
“No picture. Use this,” I said. I handed over the passport. He held it open against the steering wheel.
“This you?” he said.
“No.”
“Looks like you.”
“That’s the idea.”
“His hair’s darker.”
“I plan on dyeing mine.”
“This guy ain’t dead, is he? This ain’t gonna come back and bite my ass?”
“He’s very much alive. Back home in Holland by now.”
At least he was alive when I left him in the back of a cab two weeks before. He was my appetizer, the first taste of an evening. I was seeing him home after he’d taken sick at an Irish bar off Fifth. We’d shared a pitcher of microbrew I’d dosed.
“You know, a passport’s easier to fake than a driver’s license. Fucked up, huh? Cheaper too.”
“Then let’s go with that. I really only need it for staying in hotels,” I said.
“You know the Greek diner at Lex and 51st?”
“I can find it.”
“Meet me there around this time Thursday. Let me have five hundred now. I’ll have what you need.”
I peeled off enough fifties. He folded them inside the Dutch passport and squirreled that away inside the last Members Only jacket in the known world.
“Where you want me to drop you? I got a thing on Long Island,” he said.
“14th is coming up. I’ll get out there.”
“Thursday. Round this time. Greek place on Lex,” he said as a goodbye before turning around to head back onto the drive.
I made my way west toward clubland. The thirst had me in its grip.
• 39 •
The Bolivar was no one’s idea of a luxury hotel. To me it was heaven after months of living like a bum, sleeping anywhere that I knew would remain sunless during the daytime hours.
The rooms were closets and the staff was made up of an extended family of Pakistanis. One surlier than the next. The sheets were changed daily if I wanted but I rarely wanted. There was a stout in-room safe for my loot. And the room was as dark as a tomb with a single window facing a narrow airshaft. The sun rarely reached farther than the sill from the opening five stories above. Shades and thick draperies in an ornate damask pattern shut even that out. For privacy a Do Not Disturb sign in eight languages hung from the doorknob as a permanent fixture. And the occasional twenty slipped to the desk clerk kept the maid from knocking on the door during daytime hours.
The owner/manager was Mr. Khan, and I arranged for a monthly rate charged to my brand new Amex card in the name of Allen Townsend. The same name was on my passport which had me as a native of Ottawa, Canada. The monthly Amex bills were sent to a box I held at a place that kept my hours called Going Postal on Houston. I could pay the bill in cash at an ATM.
Located off Union Square, the Bolivar was central to my hunting grounds with the subway handy if I felt like spreading out a little. Having a secure place to sleep took a lot of pressure off. That’s not to say that I could relax. I was still an addict, the hunger is what drove me. There was no room for pleasure or distraction in this life I was leading. The best I could do was satisfaction, to quench the thirst. But when the sleep wore off and t
he night came down, I was on the hunt again.
I had it knocked. I was set. I was living as well as I could, given the restrictions and conditions forced on me. A place to coop. More than enough cash to cover my, by Manhattan standards, meager expenses. And more cash added to the pile by the high rollers I ran into at the clubs. Even if simple embarrassment didn’t stop them from going to the cops, I wasn’t in much danger. I was invisible to surveillance cameras. There was no recorded evidence to back up anyone’s statement. I was a ghost. Smoke.
It all went smooth like that for two or three months.
Summer was coming on and I decided it was past time I traveled out to Brooklyn again. New clubs. New faces. Fresh blood. I slipped on a new silk suit over a cotton pullover and cabbed over to a hot new place with a Bollywood theme.
A new club brought the densest crowd. Lots of Anglos mixed with an Asian crowd and all dancing to a Sufi beat played by a DJ in a booth that sat in the lap of a three-story papier-mâché statue of Ganesh. You know the one. Hindu god who looks like a big gay elephant. I made a wedge of my hands to wriggle through the five-deep mob at the longer of two bars. I scanned the crowd, looking for anyone who might already be way past the legal limit.
I sensed a movement to my right. Some cross words from a dark man in a white suit aimed at someone I couldn’t see yet. He stepped aside with a muttered curse to allow a slender woman to take her place at the bar close by me. I didn’t pay attention at first.
A hand laid atop mine where it rested on the curve of leather upholstery that ran along the bar top. I knew those fingers, ghostly white in the garish light of the strobes set in the ceiling. I turned to her to ask if she wanted a drink. She looked much the same. Of course she did. Her hair was longer now with blunt cut bangs and a streak of white dyed above a brow. Her smile was more of a knowing smirk than an expression of pleasure, judging me with those coal black eyes.
Roxanne would never change.
• 40 •
We took a booth away from the noise. She tinkled the ice in the drink I bought her and eyed me with a tilted smile.
“I hardly recognize you,” she said.
“The hair? I needed to match the guy in my photo ID,” I said.
“Non, mon petit. It’s more than that. You have adapted. You are one of us now.”
“Not like I had a choice. You ran off and left me.”
“I did not get far.”
“They caught you? The guys who killed that cop? Why do you still have your head?”
“I paid a price.” She pulled her hair aside to show me where her left ear had been cut. Rough white skin surrounded her ear canal.
“They let you live?”
“On their terms. So long as I behave I can be a part of the Order. I was away too long. The life of a rogue is tiring.”
“This sounds like you’re here to recruit me. The Order? Is this that Vikram guy?”
She reached out and took my hand.
“You have drawn attention to yourself. You have stayed too long in one place.”
“I’ve been playing it careful. No one’s looking for me.”
“You are wrong, mon petit. Those four men you killed. The police are very interested.”
“I haven’t seen it mentioned in the news.”
“They do not know what we know. You left fingerprints. The fingerprints of a man who was pronounced dead almost a year ago. A man whose body was stolen. You killed that morgue attendant. They are beginning to connect these events.”
“I’ll move on then,” I said. It was a lie. I had no intention of leaving my current set-up.
“It may be too late for that,” she said. Her eyes shifted to look past me.
I turned to see two men, big men, separate themselves from the crowd at the edge of the dance floor. Leather jackets, mean faces and something European, darkly Mediterranean, about them. They came straight for us. I started to rise. Roxanne’s grip on my hand tightened. Her long nails dug deep into the flesh. I tried to yank away to slide from the booth. She pulled harder to trap me against the table. Then the two big men had their hands on me.
They worked together to haul me free and carry me through the packed horde of party animals. We were out in the street with each taking an arm to carry me, feet dangling, into the summer night. Roxanne followed. A valet pulled a Lincoln up to meet us at the curb. One of the big guys pitched me in the back seat and joined me, a huge hand with a firm grip on the back of my neck. The other big guy slid behind the wheel. Roxanne rode shotgun. We pulled from the curb with a jerk and were into traffic inside a second.
The guy with a vise grip on me held me pushed down onto the seat. My face was pressed into the leather. I could hear traffic and road noise but couldn’t see where we were going.
“I am curious, mon petit,” Roxanne said.
“Do we need to talk?” I said. I had to speak from the corner of my mouth, my nose mashed to the seat.
“It is a bit of a long drive.”
“Fuck you.” The hand pressed harder, sealing my mouth closed.
“You only feed from men. Is that intentional? Instinctual? Were you a homosexual in life? I never got that impression.”
I muttered into the leather. I’d fed off a few girls. Never kept score. Never thought about it.
“It was not a conscious decision, was it? Perhaps there is enough of the male in you to see feeding as a conquest. A matter of domination.”
The metallic flick of a lighter. The car filled with the smell of a cigarette. I heard her inhale sharply.
“Or is it that you are still the gentleman? Deferring to la femme? Still seeing women as the weaker gender? Something to be protected rather than preyed on?”
I could hear the shoosh-shoosh sound of tires on metal grating. We were on a bridge now. Jersey or Connecticut. Not back to Manhattan.
“A part of you refuses to surrender to your new nature, to fully become what you are. You resist becoming a monster. Feeding on the weak and helpless. That’s how you see us, non? Monsters.”
Truck traffic. Big wheels thundering by, blocking out the light through the car windows.
“It is all nature. We are part of nature. Like bacteria or mold. The lion does not hunt the strongest of a herd of zebra. The lion goes after the weak, the slow, the old. In the same way that we prey on the unwanted, the forgotten. Humanity has its discarded people. They are our prey.”
The big car canted as it went into a long curving section of road. An exit ramp. We were over the river and coming off the bridge.
“But you have decided that you are some sort of gourmet. You decided that you will feed on more privileged fare. You left behind victims who had a place in society. That was bound to be noticed. Some of your prey overcame their embarrassment of being drugged and bled. They found police who would believe their mad stories. Especially as more and more were telling the same story.”
The lights coming through the windows were less and less frequent until there were no lights at all. The car was rolling through darkness. No sound from outside except the wind rushing by.
“I liked you. You were clever. Too clever, as it turns out. Je suis désolé, mon petit.”
She was sorry.
• 41 •
The road surface under us got rougher and the ride along with it. I could hear something brushing the sides of the car. We were deep in tall grass. The car slewed to a stop. The doors at the front opened. The car rocked as Roxanne and the driver stepped outside. My minder took a new grip on my left arm and lifted me upright. The door by him swung open. My hand dug in my pocket for the revolver.
I pulled it and stuck it in the face of the guy who held me. I squeezed the trigger twice, shooting out both of his eyes. Two bloodless holes in his face looked like gouges in wet dough. He released my neck, howling in rage. I kicked out at him with both feet to send him sprawling to the ground. The revolver in my fist, I fired three more shots through the open door. There was a grunt then another as bullets
found meat. I had a handle on the door and rolled out on the other side to thrash upright in grass as high as my chest.
Then I ran.
With the car at my back I ran full out through the grass. I was somewhere out in the wilds of New Jersey. It could have been the savannas of Africa if not for the shadow of the Pulaski Skyway blotting out the stars a mile off. There were lights on some kind of smoke stack on the horizon. And a conga line of passenger jets thrummed overhead on their way to a landing on a runway at Newark.
I could hear voices. Roxanne’s above the others. Doors slammed and the Lincoln roared to life.
My shoes slapped through mud and then ankle deep water. I pitched the empty revolver away and headed deeper into the marshy ground, ducked low in the grass.
The lights of the Lincoln washed over me ahead of the engine roar. I ran on, bent low, jinking to my right out of the harsh glare of the high beams. The water was up to my calves now.
I heard a clunk behind me followed by the whine of spinning wheels. The Lincoln was stuck. The beam from its lights shimmied back and forth across the top of the grass stalks as the big car fought to free itself.
I kept on, not looking back. I could hear Roxanne’s voice rise to a shriek as she called after me. She stood on top of the stalled car shouting phrases I never learned in high school French. She was a lioness roaring out her rage and frustration at the prey that got away.
The miles of marshlands led to a river. I crossed it by walking the river bed to the other side. A chain link fence surrounded a yard of oil storage tanks. There were ribbons of pink streaking the sky. No time to feed. I needed to find a place out of the light.
I spent the day asleep in a cargo container abandoned alongside a rail siding. I woke up hungry. I hadn’t fed the night before. I was miles from anywhere and followed the rail tracks toward the glimmer of the city reflected from the dark clouds above. It began to rain as if to enhance my mood. It would explain my wet clothes anyway.