I had a few minutes before the police would arrive, so I knelt down next to the kid and went through his pockets. I found some change and a lizard-skin wallet. Expensive, I thought, just like the kid’s clothes. Inside the wallet I found five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills and a Screen Actors Guild card with the name Jimmy Logan on it.
So the kid was an actor. It made sense. He did a great impersonation of a vampire. I picked up his wrist to see if he was actually dead and noticed a blue mark on the back of his hand. It looked like a stamp, but it was smeared and I couldn’t make it out.
I heard the sirens and the sound of cars pulling up out front. I had to make a choice, and fast. I could have dropped things right there – given the cops their affidavit, signed it, then gone home. I chose to go to work instead.
The kid wasn’t a client, but I was curious. I couldn’t figure out how he had gotten into the restaurant if he was a vampire. The sunlight should have killed him outright. And while my impromptu stake had immobilized him, couldn’t a vampire regenerate if it was removed? If you wanted to kill a vampire completely and totally, you had to take it a couple steps beyond the old stake in the heart. You had to cut off its head and burn it and the body in separate piles. Then you had to scatter the ashes.
I didn’t have time for any of that. As I was standing up the police came bursting in, waving their guns and telling me to get down, get the fuck down. I saw how things must have looked, but didn’t bother to say anything in my defence. There had been enough witnesses to the attack that things would get sorted out eventually.
A few minutes later, they had put their guns away and stopped looking at me like I was Charles Starkweather. It didn’t take long for them to figure out that I wasn’t a mass murderer. I owed it to the guy dressed in the style I thought of as “standard-issue MiB” – black suit, black tie, black sunglasses. He stood in the corner, subtle as an ink-stain on a white shirt. I watched him out of the corner of my eye while I was questioned by a detective named Vincent.
“You’re a dick?” he asked.
“That’s what my ex-wife tells me.”
“I mean, you’re a private eye?”
“That’s right.”
“You got a license?”
I showed it to him.
“You here on business?”
“Sort of. I was having lunch with my ex-wife.”
Vincent raised a questioning eyebrow.
“We don’t exactly hate each other, but when we get together these days, it feels like business.”
He jotted that down like it was important.
“And you saw the suspect before he...” He gestured vaguely.
“Yeah,” I said. “He was sitting at the next table.”
“Was he with anyone?”
“No.”
“Do you think he was waiting for someone?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
The detective wrote in his notebook.
“What did he have?”
“What?”
“What did he order?”
“Steak.”
He gave me a hard look.
“It was a tuna melt, actually.”
Once the detective was finished with me, I was steered toward the man in the corner. He said his name was Agent Keel. He didn’t show me any identification, but I figured he was with Paranormal Intelligence.
“So you’re the hero,” he said, taking a cigarette out of an onyx case. He didn’t offer me one.
“I think if I was a hero, those two people would still be alive.”
Keel shrugged, as if the debate of what made a hero didn’t interest him one way or the other.
“You don’t see vampires out in the day very often, do you, Mr. Renn?”
“I’ve never seen a vampire at all. Not in person. Not before today.”
“What did you think?” he inquired.
“Excuse me?”
“Seeing your first vampire? I’m curious to hear your thoughts.”
“My thoughts? Are you a psychiatrist?”
“No, but I have a side interest in the human response to first contact with supernatural entities.”
“What, like a hobby?”
Keel nodded. “I also build ships in bottles.”
“Listen, I’m having a pretty shitty day. I need you playing mind games with me like I need-”
“A wooden chair leg in the heart?”
“I was going to say a hole in the head.”
Keel tapped his cigarette, allowing the ashes to fall to the floor, then he looked over his shoulder at the dead kid. “You knew right where to get him,” he said. “It was a good shot. I know STAR guys who couldn’t have done that with a crossbow, much less an improvised stake. You could teach them a thing or two.”
“Thank you,” I said in a dead voice.
“But you didn’t finish the job.” He dropped his half-smoked cigarette and stepped on it with an impeccably shined shoe. “Why is that?”
Taking a deep breath, I said, “I reacted out of instinct. I was trying to protect my ex-wife. I wasn’t thinking straight. Straight enough to immobilize the kid, I guess, but not enough to... to finish him.”
Keel nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Can I go now?”
“Do you have any plans to leave the city in the near future?”
“No,” I said, “but I’m seriously considering the idea now.”
“We may need to call you in for further questioning.”
I gave him one of my business cards. He looked at it, then passed me one of his own.