He told the Emperor about the destruction of his car, about his subsequent meeting of Wong One, of his cramped, filthy quarters, and ended his story with the mystery of the flowers on his bed.
The Emperor sighed sympathetically and scratched his scruffy graying beard. "I'm afraid that I am unable to assist you with your accommodation problem; the men and I are fortunate enough to count the entire City as our home. But I may have a lead on a job for you, and perhaps a clue to the conundrum of the flowers."
The Emperor paused and motioned for Tommy to move closer. Tommy crouched down and cocked an ear to the Emperor. "Yes?"
"I've seen him," the Emperor whispered. "It's a vampire."
Tommy recoiled as if he'd been spit on. "A vampire florist?"
"Well, once you accept the vampire part, the florist part is a pretty easy leap, don't you think?"
Chapter 5
Undead and Somewhat Slightly Dazed
French people were fucking in the room next door; Jody could hear every groan, giggle, and bed spring squeak. In the room above, a television spewed game-show prattle: "I'll take Bestiality for five hundred, Alex."
Jody pulled a pillow over her head.
It wasn't exactly like waking up. There was no slow skate from dreamland to reality, no pleasant dawning of consciousness in the cozy twilight of sleepiness. No, it was as if someone had just switched on the world, full volume, like a clock radio playing reality's top forty irritating hits.
"Criminal Presidents for a hundred, Alex."
Jody flipped onto her back and stared at the ceiling. I always thought that sex and game shows ended at death, she thought. They always say "Rest in peace," don't they?
"Vas — y plus fort, mon petit cochon d'amour!"*
* "Do it harder, my little love pig!"
She wanted to complain to someone, anyone. She hated waking up alone — and going to sleep alone, for that matter. She had lived with ten different men in five years. Serial monogamy. It was a problem she had been getting around to working on before she died.
She crawled out of bed and opened the rubber-lined motel draperies. Light from streetlights and neon signs filled the room.
Now what?
Normally she would go to the bathroom. But she didn't feel the need to.
I haven't peed in two days. I may never pee again.
She went into the bathroom and sat on the stool to test her theory. Nothing. She unwrapped one of the plastic glasses, filled it with water and gulped it down. Her stomach lurched and she vomited the water in a stream against the mirror.
Okay, no water. A shower? Change clothes and go out on the town? To do what? Hunt?
She recoiled at the thought.
Am I going to have to kill people? Oh my God, Kurt. What if he changes? What if he already has?
She dressed quickly in her clothes from the night before, grabbed her flight bag and the room key and left the room. She waved to the night clerk as she passed the motel office and he winked and waved back. A hundred bucks had made them friends.
She walked around the corner and up Chestnut, resisting the urge to break into a run. Outside her building she paused and focused on the apartment window. The lights were on, and with concentration she could hear Kurt talking on the phone.
"Yeah, the crazy bitch knocked me out with a potted plant. No, threw it at me. I was two hours late for work. I don't know, she said something about being attacked. She hasn't been to work for a couple of days. No, she doesn't have a key; I had to buzz her in…"
So I didn't kill him. He didn't change or he wouldn't have been able to go to work at all in the daylight. He sounds fine. Pissed, but fine. I wonder if I just apologize and explain what happened…
"No," Kurt said into the phone. "I took her name off the mailbox. I don't really care, she didn't fit the image I'm trying to build anyway. I was thinking about asking out Susan Badistone: Stanford, family money, Republican. I know, but that's why God made implants…"
Jody turned and walked back to the motel. She stopped in the office and paid the clerk for two more days, then went to her room, sat down on the bed and tried to cry. No tears would come.
In another time she would have called a girlfriend and spent the evening on the phone being comforted. She would have eaten a half gallon of ice cream and stayed up all night thinking about what she was going to do with her life. In the morning she would have called in sick to work, then called her mother in Carmel to borrow enough money for a deposit on a new apartment. But that was another time, when she had still been a person.
The little confidence that she had felt the night before was gone. Now she was just confused and afraid. She tried to remember everything she had ever seen or heard about vampires. It wasn't much. She didn't like scary books or movies. Much of what she could remember didn't seem true. She didn't have to sleep in a coffin, that was obvious. But it was also obvious that she couldn't go out in the daylight. She didn't have to kill every night, and if she did bite someone, he or she didn't necessarily have to turn into a vampire — an asshole, maybe, but not a vampire. But then again, Kurt had been an asshole before, so how could you tell? Why had she turned? She was going to have to get to a library.
She thought, I've got to get my car back. And I need a new apartment. It's just a matter of time before a maid comes in during the day and burns me to a crisp. I need someone who can move around during the day. I need a friend.
She had lost her address book with her purse, but it didn't really matter. All of her friends were currently in relationships, and although any of them would offer sympathy about her breakup with Kurt, they were too self-involved to be of any real help. She and her friends were only close when they were single.
I need a man.
The thought depressed her.
Why does it always come to that? I'm a modern woman. I can open jars and kill spiders on my own. I can balance a checkbook and check the oil in my car. I can support myself. Then again, maybe not. How am I going to support myself?
She threw her flight bag on the bed and pulled out the white bakery bag full of money and emptied it on the bed. She counted the bills in one stack, then counted the stacks. There were thirty-five stacks of twenty one-hundred dollar bills. Minus the five hundred she had spent on the hoteclass="underline" almost seventy thousand dollars. She felt a sudden and deep-seated urge to go shopping.
Whoever had attacked her had known she would need money. It hadn't been an accident that she had turned. And it probably hadn't been an accident that he had left her hand in the sunlight to burn. How else would she have known to go to ground before sunup? But if he wanted to help her, wanted her to survive, why didn't he just tell her what she was supposed to do?
She gathered up the money and was stuffing it back in the flight bag when the phone rang. She looked at it, watched the orange light strobing in rhythm to the bell. No one knew where she was. It must be the front desk. After four rings she picked up.
Before she could say hello, a gravelly calm male voice said, "By the way, you're not immortal. You can still be killed."
There was a click and Jody hung up the phone.
He said, be killed, not you can still die. Be killed.
She grabbed her bag and ran out into the night.
Chapter 6
The Animals
The daytime people called them the Animals. The store manager had come into work one morning to find one of them hanging, half-naked, from the giant red S of the Safeway sign and the rest of them drunk on the roof, pelting him with Campfire marshmallows. The manager yelled at them and called them Animals. They cheered and toasted him by spraying beer on each other.