Gilbert Odin, the alien impostor, was dead.
And I had to find the one who killed him.
Chapter
2
I had a dead alien on my hands and twenty thousand in hundred-dollar bills. I could ditch Odin and take the money, but his final words had hooked me.
“Save the Earth women.”
Given Odin’s extraterrestrial origins, the ray gun, and the mysterious gruesomeness of his death, I knew he wasn’t asking that I save the Earth women from bad hair days. Someone had killed Odin to get him out of the way.
I’d come from my home in Denver, Colorado, to southern Florida. I was on vacation and after a different mystery. Over the last few months I had collected random pages from a manuscript called The Undead Kama Sutra.
My sole vampire client had mentioned the manuscript in passing. He said the myth was that this Kama Sutra could adjust a vampire’s psychic energy and turbocharge our supernatural recuperative powers. I hear a lot of crazy things in my business, and blew it off. Later the vampire brought fourteen grainy photocopied pages of the manuscript. He told me they’d been copied from a private collection in London. Or Frankfurt. He wasn’t sure.
This Kama Sutra showed vampires in various poses, acrobatic couplings with other vampires or humans. The captions were handwritten in English, with additional notes scribbled in Greek and Sanskrit.
I found other references to this particular Kama Sutra on the Internet, either posted on blogs or in academic treatises. What piqued my interest, besides the interesting erotic and graphic drawings, were the allusions that sex in these poses was psychically therapeutic. But the captions were incomplete, and from what I deduced, the trick was performing sex using the proper technique in the right sequence and for the correct duration. Each cycle of poses referenced a chakra and the ailment it was meant to cure.
We vampires know how disturbances in our psychic energy field can alter our health and humor. The disturbance that most got to us was keeping a daylight schedule, and the usual remedy for the “sunlight blahs” was an extended nap in a coffin.
An entry in one blog mentioned the name of someone researching this Kama Sutra: Carmen Arellano. I knew a Carmen Arellano; she was the head of the Denver nidus, Latin for “nest.” Figures: if anyone was studying an erotic manuscript, it would be her.
The blog went on to say that this Carmen was in Florida, and the last I heard from the Carmen I knew was that she was also in Florida.
I had called her and voice mail picked up. Carmen’s message said she was in Key West working on her “tan.” I’d bet a cooler full of arterial type-A negative that these two Carmens were the same vampire. I left word to expect me and began my road trip to Florida in my Cadillac.
Was it possible that sex was psychic therapy? I couldn’t dismiss the idea as ancient bunk.
An impossible story? Hell, I’m a vampire and am sitting shivah with a visitor from another planet. Tell me again what’s impossible. If this preternatural Kama Sutra was authentic, it was worth exploring to make it easier for us vampires to exist in a more crowded and suspicious human world.
Now I had two mysteries to solve. This one and Odin’s.
I gathered Odin and all of his loose parts into the center of the bedcovers. I bundled him and folded the edges of the blanket to keep his blood from leaving a trail.
His funk stuck to my clothes and I doubted I could get them smelling fresh again. What would his stink do to the trunk of my Cadillac? I extended a talon and cut the thick plastic cover off the mattress. Standard issue for a business that rented rooms in fifteen-minute increments. I wrapped him in the clear plastic. Later I’d cinch the cover tight with duct tape. That should do it for now, since I wasn’t going to keep him in the trunk of my car longer than tonight.
The two Benjamins I left on the dresser should pay for the room and the bedcovers. I put on my sunglasses to hide my eyes, though wearing sunglasses or contacts prevented me from using vampire vision.
Odin’s corpse had deteriorated enough that I could carry him under one arm. I palmed the blaster with my other hand and shoved the gun into the front of my trousers. This weapon might come in handy, especially since I’d left all my firepower back in my desk in Denver.
Outside, the second shift of hookers prowled the curb alongside North Tamiami Trail, the main drag in this part of Sarasota. They strutted on stiletto heels around discarded hip flasks and bottles of malt liquor.
I carried Odin down the stairs. The plastic wrap slipped loose and something dribbled from the bundle. Four of his toes bounced like grapes against the steps. I swept them with my foot into a patch of weeds under the balcony. Good thing it wasn’t something from between his legs. After folding his corpse into the trunk of my Cadillac, I secured the plastic bundle with a roll of duct tape I had stashed next to the spare tire.
None of the hookers showed any interest. Considering this neighborhood, a whale could fall out of the sky and flatten the motel, but no one would admit to seeing a thing.
I drove off and stopped a few blocks away to examine the envelope with the money. What did the numbers on the front mean?
A phone? Radio frequency? Internet address?
Odin had said, “Take me here.”
So these numbers must be a place. Were they map coordinates?
I got a road map, checked the margins, and read the tic marks for latitude and longitude. If these were coordinates, the spot was three miles west of Bradenton Beach in the Gulf of Mexico.
The map didn’t show any islands out there, only water. Would I be taking Odin to meet a boat? I’d check it out. If no one showed up, I could dump him into the water.
I flipped the envelope over, took out the money, and looked inside. No other instructions. So when was Odin to be delivered?
My call then. Tonight. Before he stinks up my car.
I stopped in a local sporting goods store, bought their cheapest GPS unit, and headed toward the beach. The clouds settled low and reflected the amber haze of the street lamps. A drizzle misted my windshield. Drops splashed against my car and became heavier by the minute. By the time I crossed from Cortes to Bradenton Beach, the downpour had chased everyone indoors. I parked close to the marina on the eastern side of the island, facing Sarasota Bay.
I carried Odin to the beach and left him along the water’s edge. From the deserted marina, I borrowed a Wave Runner, and returned to fetch the body.
I draped the bundle over the rear of the seat, secured his body with bungee cords, and fastened the GPS to the handlebars with duct tape. To use my night vision, I removed my sunglasses. Heading south around the island, under the bridge, then west through the wet gloom into the Gulf of Mexico, I followed the direction indicators to the coordinates I had programmed into the GPS.
The rain felt hard as ball bearings and stung my skin. My hair lay plastered against my forehead. My soggy clothes flapped from my limbs. The chill was uncomfortable and made me look forward to a hot cup of coffee and A-negative. Behind me, the glow of civilization faded on the eastern horizon. The distance marker on the GPS counted the meters to the coordinates.
One thousand. One hundred. Fifty. Twenty-five.
I rolled the throttle to idle.
The Wave Runner drifted forward.
Ten meters. Five meters. At zero, the arrow turned into an X.
The Wave Runner stopped and bobbed on the waves. I gave Odin’s corpse a mule kick. “Get up. We’re here.”