What to Buy for the Vamp Who Has Everything (2 page)

“Don’t. Bite.”

He rears back. First, he has a look of absolute shock, then he winces and shivers, and then his body just takes care of it for him, and he’s coming inside the condom. Yeah, we still use condoms. Nobody’s been too clear about how this thing is transmitted and the new Adam, the one that gives a damn, wants to be safe.

Later, he’s cleaning up, and he says, too quietly, “I’d never do that.”

“I know.” But it’s useless and I’ve ruined the mood, such as it was. So I may as well bring out the files I’ve brought.

He reads over them for a while and then he says. “I knew this Lopez character down in South Central.”

“Yeah, I thought you might have run into him.”

He turns the file over, thoughtfully. We had a drive-by last week. Couple bystanders. A kid and the young father of a family of two, in addition to the sorry piece of crap gangbanger they were after. We know Lopez called it, if he didn’t pull the trigger himself. We know because he told people he was gonna just last week. And because ballistics pulled the bullets from the same gun out of another corpse a couple months ago. We couldn’t make that one stick neither. Eyewitness suddenly contracted early onset Alzheimer’s.

We all know LA is a bad place, ’specially down in Compton. But a douchebag getting away with four homicides in one year is just completely unacceptable.

What to Buy for the Vamp Who Has Everything

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Now that he’s dead, Adam’s all ethical and shit. He’ll think about this for a long time, I know. But if I hear that Lopez just disappeared and then, maybe his corpse comes bobbing up in the LA river, drained of blood, well, I’ll know what happened.

Now Adam’s just sitting at his little table and he’s got that withdrawn look he gets sometimes. I’ll admit that that’s the look that really scares me. It’s that look that makes me afraid to come back here sometimes. Afraid I’ll find myself sliding in a pile of dust or something. Or maybe just standing in the empty room, looking around, getting that feeling you get when a room has been empty for a long time. And the person who was here is never coming back.

Sometimes he looks at me like that. Like he’s never coming back.

“Adam?”

“Yeah?” And he’s making himself smile at me and it doesn’t help much, except I appreciate him making the effort.

“So. You know, Christmas.”

And now I can’t even describe his expression. Stunned, I guess. And a little cornered, maybe. Like a man who’s forgotten an anniversary only he didn’t even know he HAD an anniversary to forget.

“I have the day off,” I tell him. It’s one of the perks of the Shield. One of the few. If you need a fucking day off, you go ahead and you take it.

“I can’t…”

“What? There’s no law against it, is there? This is fucking America, man. Everybody has a right to celebrate Christmas.” I can’t help it, I want to spend my holiday with him. He’s my man…or…whatever the hell he is. He’s mine and I want to sit with him on Christmas and make merry.

“I don’t know.”

8 A. M. Riley

“Well, I do. I’m coming here and we’re…we’re going out is what we’re doing. Going down to Pershing Square and ice skate or something.”

“Ice skate?” He’s laughing at me now.

“What, you can’t skate?” It’s good to see him laughing. “Okay, well then maybe we’ll just go have a beer or something but it’s fucking Christmas, man.”

“Okay. Okay, Peter. Whatever you say.”

“That’s right.” I nod. That’s settled then. “So, what do you want?”

“Want?”

“For a present, you dope. What do you want for a Christmas present?”

This, for some reason, is even more shocking to him than Christmas. He actually stands up and goes to a shadowy part of the big room and just stands there. “I don’t need anything.”

Right. What does a guy who lives in a sub-basement and sucks blood for sustenance need? Besides, you know, a life?

“I have everything I need, I keep telling you,” he says.

Everything a not-vampire needs to be miserable I guess. The guy’s got nothing and he wants nothing. He’s got some idea he doesn’t deserve it. He’s never said so, but it’s so fucking obvious. And this is another reason I hate the dark periods. Sometimes Adam decides he doesn’t even deserve sex, which leaves yours truly jonesing worse than those junkies up on the street.

“Well, I’m going to have to pick something out for you on my own then.”

He’s drifting in and out of shadow. Disturbed and fluttery like he gets. So I know better and I change the subject.

* * * * *

What to Buy for the Vamp Who Has Everything

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Later I think about it and maybe it’s because I’m a stubborn dick or maybe it’s something more. But suddenly I just make up my mind. I’m going to get Adam something special for Christmas. Something perfect. But what do you get someone like that?

* * * * *

Christmas day should dawn white and peaceful. The sound of kid’s feet on the stairs, the squeals of delight, right? And then later, the church bells, the singing. The turkey and the football.

I was woken by sirens and two seconds later my cell phone rings.

“Yeah?”

“Pete? It’s Lenny. We gotta problem, man.”

I grab the clock. It’s five a.m. “What’s going on?”

“Yeah, Freeway, he’s down on 124th and he hears that Omar’s making a list.”

Freeway’s Lenny’s CI. You know even a snitch doesn’t call you at the crack of Christmas morning, unless something serious is going on.

“Omar’s in jail.”

“No he ain’t. He got some crack addict whore of his to step forward and alibi him.

Freeway says Omar’s got a warehouse full of assault rifles.”

I’m out of bed and pulling my pants on with both hands while still on the phone. I can hear Lenny starting up his car. Lenny’s got a wife and a couple little kids and he’s still running out of the house at five a.m. on Christmas morning because some homicidal gangbanger down in South Central’s decided to declare war.

* * * * *

It’s a good thing we’ve got citizens that fall out on the side of right, more often than not. ’Cause if a coupla them hadn’t, we’d be scraping more bodies off the pavement than the two unfortunate Bloods we’ve ended up with.

10 A. M. Riley

As it happened, two whole precincts and a S.W.A.T. squad were swarming down Martin Luther King Street by dawn. Add to that some local vigilante ‘Mothers Against Gangs’

or something, and Omar, he tried something but it didn’t go far.

And now there’s nothing left but the crying, as they say. And about twenty miles of forms.

I’m not out until after six p.m. and it’s only then I remember that it’s Christmas. And, oh Christ, I get a quick visual of Adam sitting in that dark sub-basement all alone and I’m in my car and calling him and tearing down Vermont Street. Of course he doesn’t pick up. Calls from me don’t constitute a proper ‘police emergency.’

The streets are emptier than after Armageddon at the corner of Fountain and Vine. I park in the loading zone, pop my police vehicle sticker on the rear-view mirror so nobody gives me a ticket, and then I dig everything out of the trunk of the car.

“Sorry I’m late, man,” I call as I clomp down the last level of stairs. “Took me all day to chop down this tree.” It’s a little joke, seeing as the tree is about three feet and out of K-mart and obviously fake.

The room is pitch black. “Adam?” I leave my stuff at the door and go across to the light.

He’s not here, but, besides a little disappointment, I don’t let it bother me. It’s not like he’s got a curfew or something. I put up the tree and plug in the lights and put the packages under the tree. Then I pop open one of the beers I brought and wait.

Hour later and I’m starting to worry. I’ve called the mobile twice now. “Hey, bro. You forget me?” I say to the voice mail. I start poking around the room, looking for a clue to his whereabouts and I see the mobile sitting there on a box, turned off. Goddammit, Adam. I pop open a couple more beers and pretty soon I’ve drunk the whole six pack and my thoughts are starting to go something like this:

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1. He forgot. You’d think nobody could forget Christmas, but Adam’s living in another reality, so to speak. That’s one of the reasons I gave him that phone. So he could occasionally check the date and time.

2. He’s split. What I misinterpreted as Adam weirded out by Christmas and all things normal and human was really Adam weirded out by boyfriend suddenly wanting too much intimacy. I actually hope this is the case because the other thought is: 3. He’s dust.

And now I’m thinking I should have brought two six packs of Millers instead of the one. Because I need a drink.

So when I hear big feet coming down the stairs, I’m so relieved, and a little buzzed, too, I’ll admit, that I don’t exercise the caution that any rookie just out of the academy would have had, and I go running out into the stairwell in my stocking feet, and I’m all, “Adam, where the…”

Good thing is the guy coming down those stairs didn’t expect to see me anymore than I expected to see him. So by the time he recovers enough to swing his gun around and point it at me, I’m back in the room.

He doesn’t turn around and run back up the stairs, but then I don’t expect him to.

Because in that second I was looking up at him, I recognized him. And as I slide down the wall and try to bury myself behind the boxes and cabinets and other trash in the corner, I’m pretty worried.

That face has been showing up at every roll call in every precinct near Hollywood for the past several weeks. We actually kind of thought he’d found a way north but Georgio Perez is still very much alive and well and hiding out in Hollywood. Where he cut a number of young men up pretty badly before leaving them for dead in various alleys and parking lots.

All those FBI and special bulletins must have made the little sociopath pretty nervous, because we’ve had no info that he’s got himself a gun.

12 A. M. Riley

From behind the stack of boxes, I hear his footsteps over there by the table. The light in the room swings back and forth, like he’s taken a swipe at it. I am unarmed, completely without any resources, and Georgio is walking around the room systematically kicking chairs and boxes aside. I figure I’ve got one chance and that’s to jump him, and that’s not much of a chance. From what I’ve seen of his crime scenes, I figure talking to the guy won’t work.

Then, like the superhero he is, Adam comes crashing down the stairs. Yeah, Georgio plants a slug in him, but that just makes Adam mad, and pretty soon Georgio is screaming and begging while Adam drags him up the stairs. I hear the thump thump thump of it. Then I hear the screaming just stop.

Adam comes trotting back down; he’s got barely a hair ruffled. “Oh, Peter.”

“I’m fine,” I tell him. I’m shaking all over but, you know, whatever.

“Yeah, thanks for keeping him in the room.” There’s blood seeping through Adam’s shirt and he dabs at it with one finger, like it’s jam. “I saw him down on LaBrea and I chased him all the way back.” He frowns. “You should have let me take care of him. You could have been shot.”

If I weren’t so relieved to see him, I’d smack him.

Adam jerks a thumb towards the ceiling. “I handcuffed him to the railing up top.

Where’s my cell phone? I’ll call it in.”

Of course, Adam wouldn’t kill him. Maybe bruise him up a bit. Maybe tap him for a pint, but it’s one of Adam’s rules not to kill the humans.

“That’s okay, I’ll do it,” I tell him. It’s more complicated when he does, because the investigation stays open. It’s been weird a few times filling out reports about looking for the anonymous citizen while I’m sitting next to said anonymous citizen and he’s got his hand down my pants.

Now Adam’s got that peaceful look he gets from the sucking of blood and the shedding of it. In a couple hours, the rush will wear off and he’ll hit the valley of his high. I don’t want What to Buy for the Vamp Who Has Everything

13

to leave him like that, but I’ve got to take care of the problem upstairs, so I go off and do that.

A cruiser shows up right away. Perez is babbling like a lunatic about Adam, but he’s such a nutcase nobody listens, and the boys carry him off. I’ll be filling out forms all day tomorrow, but for now I go back to the sub-basement.

Adam’s frowning at the tree when I come back down.

“I drank all the beer, man,” I tell him. “Sorry.”

I sit down on the sofa, kind of hard. Unlike Adam, the adrenaline has turned my legs into rubber. I let myself kind of lean sideways and he puts an arm around me and that’s when I let myself feel the relief.

He leans over and his mouth is warm and happy and that just feels so good I let go of everything for a few minutes.

“Are those presents?” he asks, smiling into my eyes.

“Yep.” I rally and gesture towards them. “Open ’em, go ahead.”

With a look at me, he hops off the sofa and fetches the three little items. I can’t wrap worth beans but it’s okay because he just shreds the paper anyway.

“Nice.” It’s a complete box of Tabasco sauce. I ordered some stuff on the Internet that’s supposed to be the hottest, or at least in the top ten.

“Catch the name.”

He turns the bottle and reads the label. It’s a measure of his good mood that he actually laughs out loud. “Death” and “After Death”.

He likes the book, too. Lately Adam’s had an interest in history. It’s weird to see him curled up at an end of the sofa frowning and scratching his head, nose in a book, but it’s all part of this new Adam. As he opens it and reads the table of contents, I have one of those passing disturbing thoughts. The sort of thought more up Adam’s alley than mine. Maybe he’s thinking he’s gonna be reading about himself one day.

“There’s a card, too,” I say, watching him closely as he opens it.

14 A. M. Riley

He just thinks it’s a Christmas card and I see when he realizes what it is. I see it hit him and then sink in. It sinks in deep; I can see it traverse every layer.

He doesn’t say anything, just nods and puts the card back in the envelope. I hope I haven’t blown it.