I hoped that last sentence didn’t turn out to be a lie. I didn’t know what, if anything, Christine had going on with my partner, but I still didn’t relish the idea of telling her Karl wouldn’t be coming around anymore – ever.
Apart from a shower and quick change of clothes in the locker room, I spent most of the day at the station house. But as the sun finally lowered over the city, I was in another part of town, standing behind my parked Toyota Lycan, with the trunk key in my hand – waiting.
Today’s Times-Tribune and Weatherwitch.com both agreed – sunset was scheduled for 6.07. I checked my watch – it was coming up on 6.00. Of course, the jury was still out on whether vampires rise and sleep at meteorological dawn and dusk, or whether they’re obeying some other, more fundamental, impulse.
6.04: No sounds or stirring from inside my trunk, where Karl Renfer slept. Whether his current state was going to last a couple more minutes or go on forever was the question that had my guts feeling like a tightly clenched fist.
6.06: I found myself wondering what kind of funeral Karl would have wanted, and pulled my mind away from that thought as quick as I’d yank my hand from a hot stove. I’m not one of those nitwits who think the “power of positive thinking” ever changed one goddamn thing, but I was not going to stand here and think about Karl being dead forever. I was not going to do that.
6. 07: Full dark now – at least, it seemed that way to me. The interior of the trunk remained as quiet as the grave, a metaphor I banished from my mind the instant it showed up. I thought about Rachel and wondered what she was doing right now – as if I didn’t know. Wherever she was, she had the face of a clock or watch in view. She’d probably be trying not to stare at it, to distract her mind with other stuff – and failing, just as I was.
6.08: I was going to have to tell Rachel, eventually. After all, I’d promised. “Call me, either way,” she’d said. McGuire would want to know, too. I wondered how long I should wait before deciding to make the call that both of them were dreading. It seemed that I should–
“Hey – what the fuck is going on here?”
That pissed-off voice came from inside my trunk, and it was the voice of Karl Renfer – loud, and clear, and alive. Well, undead, anyway.
“Just a second, Karl!” I yelled. I nearly pounded my fists on the trunk lid in relief, but had enough sense to realize that Karl might misinterpret the sound, not knowing where he was. “Everything’s fine – just give me a second!” I started patting my pockets for the car keys, then realized that they’d been in my left hand the whole time.
I finally got the Lycan’s trunk open, and the light came on to reveal the body bag, bent at a sharp right angle. We’d had to bend Karl at the waist in order to get him into my trunk, which isn’t exactly roomy. Most Toyotas are compact cars, unless you want to spring for the Hexus, which is the luxury model, and I’ve never had that kind of money.
I could see slight movement from inside the body bag. Karl could have torn his way out of that thing in about a second, but I’d asked him to wait, and that’s what he was doing.
I grabbed the tab of the big zipper and yanked it down all the way to reveal my partner, who was looking a whole lot better than when I’d zipped him in there six hours earlier. For one thing, his eyes were open.
He blinked at me a couple of times. “What the fuck, Stan?”
“I’ll explain in a second,” I said. “But first, let’s get you out of there.”
It took a little while to get him straightened out and completely free of the bag, but finally Karl was standing on the sidewalk next to my car, making a futile effort at brushing out the wrinkles his suit had developed during the day. He gave up after a few seconds and raised his head to look around.
“Hey, we’re in front of my building,” he said.
“I figured once you were out of there, you might want a change of clothes, maybe a shower and something to eat.” Like any self-respecting vampire, Karl had a supply of blood in his fridge.
“You figured right,” he said. “But what the hell was I doing in… oh.”
“Remember what happened now?”
He slowly ran a hand through his hair, which was pretty mussed up from getting in and out of the body bag. “I’d just used some Influence to slip what’s-his-name, Slattery, a question, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I remember he answered, something about helter-skelter. Then all the PP guys walked out in a huff. I went over near the door, hoping for another shot at Slattery when he passed, but then his pet gorilla started waving a cross at me.”
“How’d you feel, when he did that?”
Karl made a face. “At first, it was the same as always – I saw the cross and had the urge to be someplace else – fast. But then the stuff I’ve been working on with Doc Watson came back to me. I used one of the relaxation techniques he’d had me practicing, and, shit – it worked. I was able to look at the cross, and then…” Karl shook his head in wonderment.
“And then you took it away from him, remember? You grabbed his wrist, made him let go of the cross, and then you caught it. You held it in your hand, Karl.”
He lifted his right hand and stared at it, turning it back and forth as if checking for damage. “Shit,” he said again. “No burns, nothing.”
“Guess Doc Watson was right, after all,” I said, and we just stood there for a minute, grinning at each other like a couple of idiots.
Karl’s grin slowly faded, then he said, “That’s the last thing I remember – holding the cross.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said. “You kind of flaked out on us after that.”
I told him what had happened, and explained how he’d ended up in a body bag inside my trunk for the last five hours or so.
“And you drove here just before sunset,” he said.
“Yep.”
“You must’ve been pretty confident that I was OK.”
“Of course I was,” I said. “Never doubted it for a minute.” He looked at me for a second or two, not speaking, then gave me half a smile. Vampires are good at detecting lies, but the one I’d just told didn’t seem to bother him very much.
Karl made a head gesture toward his apartment building. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “You can bring me up to speed while I clean up a little and get into some fresh clothes.”
“Good idea,” I said. As we headed up the sidewalk toward his building’s front door, I pulled out my phone. “But I’ve got a couple of calls I need to make first.”
What with one thing and another, we were over an hour late reporting for our shift. But McGuire didn’t seem inclined to dock us for the time.
“Good to see you, Detective,” he said to Karl as we walked in. “I was pleased to learn that I won’t have to dig my dress uniform out of the closet again just yet. It was a little tight, the last police funeral I attended, and I haven’t lost any weight since then.”
Fucking McGuire – sentimental, as always.
“Sorry I flaked out on you, boss,” Karl said as we sat down. “But at least we got something good out of Slattery. It wasn’t a wasted effort.”
McGuire twitched one side of his mouth. “Depends on what you mean by ‘good’. It was interesting – I’ll say that much. The only problem we’ve got now is what the hell to do about it.”
“I don’t guess it would do Slattery’s campaign much good if word got out about his thoughts on helter-skelter,” I said.
“I dunno,” Karl said. “There’s folks in this town who’d think that was a reason to vote for the son of a bitch.”
“But there’s plenty who wouldn’t,” I said. “Supes, especially.”
“I think you can assume that Slattery’s already lost the supe vote, Stan,” Karl told me. “He wrote us off a long time ago.”
“Anyway, there’s no video of him saying it,” McGuire said. “Nothing for the media to run with.”