Vampires (13 page)

“Yes.”

“Do they know what has to be done if we can't cut it?”

“They know.”

“Okay, deputy. Let's do it.”

The Team piled warily out of the three vehicles at Jack's signal and stood on the sidewalk in front of the jail assembling their equipment. The police said nothing to anyone except the deputy and that was so low no one else heard what was said.

But they didn't try to arrest anyone. Or even slow them down. And they did appear to be on guard.

“Looks like we got a break,” whispered Cat to Crow.

Crow nodded. “Looks like,” he whispered back. "Quite a kid, that deputy.

“You're not thinking about recruiting him, are you bwana?” Cat asked wickedly.

Jack's face was blank. “Don't need to. He'll volunteer. If... you know.”

“Yeah,” growled Cat sourly. “I know. If we live long enough to be volunteered to.”

“Right. Now, Kirk and I will go inside and get the rest of the stuff we need.”

“You want us to start pouring the blood?”

“Wait till we get back. Deputy?”

The deputy stepped away from the two policemen he had spoken to.

“Ready?” asked Jack.

“Ready,” said the deputy. And with a nod to the policemen, went inside and arrested everyone m sight.

There were only four. Two at the booking counter, one in the back sitting behind a desk staring dully at a typewriter, and the last drinking thirstily from the water fountain.

All were pale, dead eyed, weak...

And owned.

It was there in their faces, in their posture, in the resigned, almost relieved, manner in which they stood there and allowed themselves to be handcuffed. The only thing that could be thought of as some form of resistance came from one of the two standing at the booking desk, a pale fair-haired man of about thirty named Dan, who made a frantic lunge for a jury-rigged red button stuck to the wail with masking tape.

Jack snatched the other man's wrist away from the alarm in midair and felt the bones in Dan's arm bend under the pressure of his grip. Dan yelped and groaned so sharply, Jack instinctively let loose of him and saw a deep purple bruise in the shape of his gloved fingers already forming on the wrist.

“Good Lord!” whispered Kirk.

Jack looked at him over Dan, who had crumpled to the floor holding his arm. “You see it, too?”

“Hell, yeah, I see it!” cried Kirk. “What the hell's the matter with him?”

“Offhand, I'd say it was loss of blood.”

It was about then that Dan began to sob.

Soon the other two were also crying, deep tortured heaves that shook their shoulders painfully.

It hurt to watch it. Jack had been planning to get whoever was inside outdoors and into the squad car and out of the way as soon as possible, but this was just too good a chance to let by.

The fact was that Jack had never, in all his battles, actually met someone he knew to be under the influence of vampires. He knew there were always two or three suicides in the places where the Team had done its job. And he figured those were the ones who couldn't bear to live with the shame of what they'd been made to do.

But he'd never actually seen it. He looked down at the four, now huddled together and weeping. He could feel their shame. They reeked of it. And how they wept! It was the totally unleashed, uninhibited weeping of children, red-eyed, runny-nosed, and moaning.

No. It was too good a chance to pass up. He hated to do it. But he had to question them.

He paused, took a deep breath, and knelt down beside the one he'd grabbed away from the alarm button, Dan. The bruise on his wrist was now multicolored and swelling. He cradled it tenderly on his other forearm.

“I'm sorry about that,” he said tenderly.

But Dan just sobbed some more and shook his head as if to say he deserved it.

Part of Jack wanted to grab this man and shake him, this grown man crying like a baby. But the rest of him knew better. These four really couldn't help it.

Supernatural.

“How many are down there?” he asked Dan. Dan looked at him, uncomprehending. “How many?” “Yeah. Downstairs. In the jail. How many?” “How many. . . masters?”

Jack gritted his teeth but managed to keep his tone gentle. “Yeah. How many masters?”

The oldest of the bunch, the guy who had been sitting in front of the typewriter when Jack and the deputy had come through, shook himself and leaned forward. He held up three fingers.

Like a child.

“Three!” he whined.

Damn! thought Jack. He had been prepared for more than one. But goddammit, three?

Damn!

The other slaves began nodding. One of them, the kid who had been drinking from the fountain, held up three of his fingers and nodded fiercely.

And when he did his collar was pulled away from his throat and Jack saw the bite.

The deputy saw it, too, and gasped. Jack reached over to Dan, the closest one to him, and pulled his collar out and there it was.

“Jesus!” whispered Kirk.

It looked like the bit of a spider. But one impossibly large, impossibly vicious. Impossibly thirsty.

The two puncture marks were just over an inch apart, with overlapping black and yellow rings swollen out from their centers. The bites were recent, deep, and horribly infected.

Loss of blood, Jack had said.

Now he thought: loss of soul...

“They're. . .” gushed Dan and his gaze was plaintive, with a terrible yearning. “They're.. . They're so beautiful!”

And all four of them began to weep again. Weep and nod and huddle together and Jack couldn't stand it anymore. He stood up and grabbed two of them by the upper arms and led them outside. The deputy brought out the other two.

Jack said nothing to the wary stares of the six flak-jacketed patrolmen on the sidewalk except: “These men aren't to be harmed. Just keep 'em out of the way.”

The patrolman who seemed to be their leader glanced first at Deputy Thompson for his nod of confirmation before taking the prisoners in tow and depositing them in the backs of two police cars.

Carl appeared beside Jack. “You were right?” he asked, though it wasn't really a question.

Jack sighed. “Yeah. They're in there. Three of 'em, looks like.”

Cat whistled. “Three? Holy shit!”

Felix was there, too. “Is that a lot?” the gunman wanted to know.

“That's the most so far,” offered Adam from off to one side.

Cat looked sharply at him, then relaxed. “Yeah. I keep forgetting you're our historian.”

Adam smiled. “Not anymore.”

Cat smiled back. “Guess not.”

“We'll be back in a second,” Jack informed them, and then he and the deputy went back inside, past the front desk, down a corridor, into another corridor, and down to the end of it to a vault door with a sign on it that said: “Johnson County Sheriff Property Room.” While Kirk went to work on the combination, Jack started to light a cigarette.

“I wouldn't,” advised the deputy as he swung the vault open.

The chemical stench from inside the property room all but staggered Crow. He looked at the deputy.

“Ether,” Kirk explained. “We get a lot of speed labs in this part of Texas.”

''Oh.''

Kirk was waving the air with his hat. “It usually airs out in a couple of secs,” he explained. It seemed to, anyway. Though Jack wasn't sure it wasn't

just his sense of smell numbing out.

In any case, they went inside and got to work. The evidence was found in thick, tightly sealed manila envelopes with names and case numbers on the outside. Kirk only read them long enough to see what was inside before tearing them open. Jack emptied one of the envelopes onto the floor and filled it with the stuff the deputy handed him.

They took one hundred and sixty tablets of “purple microdot” and thirty more hits of “Blotter” LSD. They took two and one half ounces of pure, uncut cocaine, three ounces, eighty-four grams, of PCP. They took three grams of raw brown Mexican heroin. They took six ounces, one hundred sixty-eight grams, of milk-white methamphetamifle crystal. They took it all outside to where Cat and Carl had the jugs of pig's blood and the aquarium set up on a little wheeled table. On the grass alongside slumped the various sacks of poison from Prather's Feed & Seed. The balloons of various colors looked like water balloons now except for the rich smell of gasoline that wafted from them. Next to the balloons were the tear-gas grenades and the gas masks all ready to go.

Jack looked at his watch. Three hours and fifteen minutes to sundown.

“Okay,” he said to Carl, “can you rig the elevator now?”

“Yep,” Carl nodded and picked up his tool box. The two went back inside.

When Carl saw the elevator doors facing the front entrance he stopped and smiled. “My God, that deputy was right. I never would have believed it.”

Jack nodded. “Lucky.”

It was, in fact, incredibly lucky. Team Crow had known the cells were in the basement and they had known the only way to reach them was by a single elevator. But it wasn't until Deputy Thompson had drawn his little sketch of the jail that they had known the route to the elevator was so short and clear. Crow had cringed at the thought of trying to winch a full-fledged master vampire around corners and up stairs into the sunlight with the damn thing trying to rip the crossbow free every step of the way.

But this was a straight shot. It was less than thirty feet from the elevator door to the sunshine, and the passageway was wide and free of obstacle.

Now all they had to do was get the fiends to get in the elevator.

He joined Carl, who stood fussing over an antique electrical box on the wall beside the elevator doors. He had wires running from the maze to a black metal box with a half dozen toggle switches on top.

Carl looked up from his work. “Okay, I think I've got you all set.”

Jack frowned. “You 'think' you do?”

Carl shrugged. “Jack, this elevator's older than I am. I wouldn't count on it being too responsive.”

“What can I count on?”

“Well, this switch starts it up. This one down. This one stops it. Anywhere. Between floors. Whatever you want. This one opens the doors. This one closes them. Again, anywhere you want.”

Jack nodded. “Okay. Label 'em.”

Carl groaned. “You can't remember that much?”

Jack looked at him. “I don't want to have to remember. I want to be able to know.”

Carl sighed. “Yes, bwana,” he said and set about doing it.

Crow went back outside and spoke to Cat, who stood on the jailhouse sidewalk talking to the deputy. A few feet away Felix sat quietly on the curb, smoking.

“I'm off to do my bit,” Jack told Cat. “Wait a few minutes, then start pouring the blood.”

“Right,” said Cat.

Crow looked at the deputy's patrol car, parked a few steps away.

“Mind if I borrow that a sec?” he asked.

The deputy looked surprised, then shrugged. “Okay,” he offered uncertainly.

Crow nodded, climbed into the car, and pulled away without another word.

“What does he mean by doing 'his bit'?” Kirk wanted to know.

Cat smiled. “He always goes off just before we move to be alone.”

“To focus his concentration,” finished Kirk, nodding.

Cat's grin was wry. “Or swallow his fear,” he suggested and then smiled even wider when he saw the deputy's pale look.

Felix, sitting on the curb smoking his sixty-third cigarette of the day, made no comment. Between his feet he had arranged his last five smokes in a ragged line. He had just stomped out the sixth on the asphalt and added it to the row when Jack Crow suddenly reappeared in the patrol car.

“Something wrong?” asked Cat.

Jack shook his head. He made no attempt to get out of the car, just sat there behind the wheel and stared at Felix.

Eventually, the gunman looked up and met his eyes.

“Get in,” ordered Crow, gesturing toward the front passenger door.

Felix eyed him a beat, then stood up. He started toward the car, stopped, went back, and scattered his row of cigarettes. Then he got in and the two of them drove away.

Jack drove in silence for half a dozen blocks to Cleburne City Park. There was a swimming pool, some tennis courts, three baseball diamonds. Jack parked the patrol car next to a beautifully preserved antique locomotive painted jet black and surrounded by a chain-link fence. He turned off the engine and sat there for several seconds in silence.

Felix lit a cigarette and waited for Crow to speak. Now what? he thought.

At last Jack moved. He lit a smoke of his own, turned on the seat to face Felix, and with a smile said, “You know, Felix, you're going to die today.”

Felix stared stone at the other man's smiling eyes. He didn't know whether to be scared or offended or.

“So am I,” Crow continued. "That's the way it is. We took on this job and it's a never-ending goddamned deal and there are too many vampires and not enough of us and they're gonna get us... so we're gonna make 'em pay.

“Understand?”

Felix sure as shit did not understand. Any of it. Was this Crow's idea of some kinda joke or what?

But what it was was Jack Crow's notion of Style.

"That's the only thing that counts, Felix. We aren't gonna get rid of all the evil in the world. We're not gonna get all the assassins or crack dealers or child molesters.

"And you and I aren't gonna get all the fucking vampires. Sooner or later, they're gonna get us. We die, the earth keeps turning, and not trying just means we keep alive just a little longer and there's a lot more dead people saved from having all their blood ripped out but we still end up dying, Felix, you and me. There's no way out of that. And the earth will have plenty of turns left that we won't see no matter how long we live and so some stupid fools look at this and they don't see any point and that's because the dumbshits think it's a matter of keeping score.

"It isn't, Gunman. The secret isn't the score or the final result because there ain't no final anything!

“What there is . . . is Style.”

There was more of the same. Jack talked some talk about samurai warriors and how they considered themselves dead when they first took up the mantle of service so that nothing could later intimidate them away from their duty.