He shoves the humidor into his jacket.
– A common-enough trope. Am I entirely responsible for putting the idea in her head? Please. Popular vampire fiction is rife with such relationships. It is a rampant cliché of the genre. What is Dracula if not the story of an undead’s hopeless love for a mortal?
He cuts the air with the edge of his hand.
– Can I be solely to blame that she took it quite so to heart?
The storefronts along Greenwich flick past the window. I stick a finger under my eyepatch and scratch the scar.
– You’re her dad.
He looks at me.
– What has that to do with it?
I bare my teeth as a cramp ripples through my belly, exhale as it passes.
– I don’t really know, Chub, but it seems daddies have a bit of an impact on their daughters. Or so I’ve heard. Could just be a rumor.
He rubs his forehead.
– Yes, yes, of course, yes. These things start early and run deep. Of course.
He wipes his mouth.
– But the past is prologue. And I was saying?
I cough on something in my throat. Maybe a loose piece of my throat, I can’t say.
– Percy. Why the hell did you get me involved?
He looks at the roof of the car.
– Percy said I should.
I groan.
Chubby shakes his head.
– When I first called, the children were actually with him. I was prepared to go uptown and attempt to speak some form of reason to them. Ferry them to an underground location somewhere away from Manhattan while the troubles here sorted out. I am not without resources. I could have found means to keep Ben supplied. And the baby, whatever its needs may turn out to be. I was to go and fetch them myself.
He lifts his hands from his knees, drops them.
– At the last moment Percy called and told me it had become more complicated. The children had run off. Delilah had been disillusioned by what she found in both Percy and the Hood. She was talking about shelter in the dragon’s very den. Well, that was clear enough. Still, I said I could go myself. But Percy said he’d heard troublesome rumors about the Cure house. Unsafe.
He scrunches the material of his slacks.
– He told me to send you.
He looks over at me.
– Honestly, Joe, I had no idea where to find you. I doubt it would have occurred to me to look for you at all. But Percy said it needed a tough hand. Said you were the fit for the job. And I could hardly argue.
– How’d he know where to find me?
– I can’t say for certain. He said he knew someone keeping tabs on you down there. You mentioned someone watching us when we were in the tunnel. Perhaps?
I think about the old man of the underground. I think about Percy. Enclave and Enclave.
– Yeah, that fits.
He pats his ‘fro.
– Still, I told him I didn’t think you’d help.
He looks out the side window.
– And he mentioned a girl. Sketched a few details. Gave me a name. Mentioned Enclave.
He turns to me, tears, trembling chins.
– Joe, if it hadn’t been my daughter, Joe. If it hadn’t. I would never have. Not just because I have more sense than to cross you. But because. I wouldn’t want to lie to a man about something like that. Not a man I know. Not a friend. Joe.
He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.
– Just. My daughter. That’s why.
He catches a sob, huffs it out.
– I didn’t want to cause you all this trouble.
He draws a loose shape in the air with his fingers.
– I’m sorry, Joe.
I look out the windshield. We’re coming up on Gansevroot. I move my feet around, making sure I can still do that. Legs seem to work. Arms. My brain keeps drifting in and out of fog banks. But that’s hardly new. I could keep myself clear, I’d never have fallen for this deal.
Too late now. I was reeled in, cut open, gutted, and there’s nothing left but the grill. No reason not to just put myself on it. It’s only fire. And you can only burn once.
I stick my head a little farther out the window.
I point.
He sees it, taps Dallas.
– Here.
Dallas wheels us around the corner of Little West Twelfth Street.
– You sure, Joe?
I lean against the door.
– Make those calls, Chubs.
– Of course.
I pull the door handle.
– I’m glad you got to see your daughter, Chubby.
He nods, half laughs.
– Yes. Precious minutes.
I push the door open an inch.
– See you around.
– See you, Joe.
Dallas cuts the wheel, rubber breaking traction on the cobbles as he makes his U-turn, and I tumble myself from the car, rolling off the momentum until I rest in the gutter, watching Chubby’s Riviera whip around the corner back onto Greenwich and out of sight.
Alone again. I close my eye to enjoy it for a second.
Got any regrets?
The thing you did? The thing you passed on doing?
I never played that game much. I take something back here, take a little extra there, next thing you know I’m watching one set of bodies rising from their graves, and another set going into the ground. Been a long time since I did anything that mattered when it didn’t involve dying for someone. Some folks I’ve been happy to put away. Some I’ve been OK with seeing them get another day or two. Most I don’t having feelings one way or the other. So why go back and tinker with things that can’t be changed anyhow.
But, sure, I got regrets.
Most all of them are tangled up with this lady. Got one in particular that sits on me. Like to get it off.
Means opening my eye and crawling out of this gutter and finding out if she’ll talk to me long enough to hear what I got to say.
Thought of it, it almost makes me wish I was back in the basement with the monsters. I was scared then, but it was just my life I had to lose.
• • •
– Oh, man, you OK, man?
I open my eye and look at the club kids, boy and girl, matching androgyny to go with their matching homburg hats plastered with Gucci logos and matching bug-eye pink-tint sunglasses and matching loops of fluorescing plastic around their wrists and necks.
– Oh, man, G, they laid a pounding on you.
One of them holds up a camera and snaps a picture.
– I’m putting this on my page.
She looks at me.
– That cool with you?
The other one is dialing.
– Hang on. 911 on the way.
– Give me a cigarette.
He stops dialing.
– G, you probably don’t want to smoke messed up like that.
The girl is crouching next to me, holding her phone at arm’s length so it gets us both in frame.
– Could kill you, a cigarette right now.
– Yeah, a cigarette could kill anyone. Jam a lit cigarette in someone’s eye, it could leak infected pus back into their brain and they could go crazy and die eating their own shit.
They both stare at me.
I put out my hand.
The girl hands me a cigarette, pinching it between finger and thumb, holding it as far from herself as possible. I take it and put it in my mouth.
– Light.
The boy finds a Bic in his pocket and lights me.
– Now fuck off. They do.
It’s a fucking American Spirit Light. Tastes like my ass. I tear off the filter and it tastes like half my ass.
I get out of the gutter and pull the piece from under my jacket and drag myself up the steps of the Enclave warehouse loading dock and, dispensing with a polite knock, I grab the handle on the outside and pull the big white door open, rolling it to the side in its tracks, and I step inside.
Grateful again to Predo for the fingers he left me. Index and middle. The smoking fingers. Letting me take the butt from my mouth and carry it comfortably. Leaving my other hand free for the gun.