Blood Oranges (9781101594858) (7 page)

“I heard he's down in Cranston these days,” Mr. B said. “Delivers pizzas on the side. Didn't that used to be your neck of the woods, Cranston?”

Okay. Stop. Right about here I should probably explain a little bit about Bobby Ng, Demon Hunter. That's what the asshole called himself. He even had these embossed business cards printed up, and that's what they said. Bobby Ng was half Chinese, half Portuguese, and generally he used to run around stirring shit up that needed to be left alone. He was aces at not letting sleeping dogs lie. Styled himself all things dark and spooky—an exorcist (he was even ordained by some church or another), parapsychologist, occultist, palm reader, practitioner of witchcraft and voodoo, UFOlogist, a magician with ties to the Illuminati, an escape artist, a Rosicrucian, clairvoyant, and all-around psychic, but was, at best, a sort of cut-rate Van Helsing. Oh, he also claimed to have a fourth-degree black belt in tae kwon do and to be the Worshipful Master of a super-secret Masonic Lodge somewhere in Massachusetts. Fall River, I think he said. Mostly, though, I think he'd just spent too much time watching
Scooby-Doo
and Peter Cushing films. If there's a douche bag hall of fame, I hope to hell Bobby Ng has a bronze plaque front and center.

And
everyone
—the nasties included—had a Bobby Ng story or three. Mr. B, he had about thirty of them. I'm pretty sure the only reason Ng was still alive back then was that he was either too goddamn funny to kill, or not worth the trouble. This isn't to say he was exactly harmless, mind you, because lots of times an inconvenience can turn into a shitstorm—as was the case with Alice Cregan—but still he lived. Maybe some people are too stupid to die, or maybe it's just that even the damned need comic relief.

Once, and this was a year or so after the whole mess with the Bride was over and done with, Mean Mr. B dragged me to a local demon brothel and bookie joint (with which I was already familiar, as you shall see) over on Federal Hill. Neither of us was there to get our freak on with Hell's outcasts or place a bet on the next Red Sox game. Mr. B, he had some business or another with the proprietor, this utter skank of a succubus who went by the moniker Madam Calamity. Her real name was Drusneth, but I'm not supposed to know that. You know how demons are about their real names. The walls of her parlor were upholstered with a gaudy combination of human skin and orange crushed velvet, and the legs of all the furniture were made of shin bones and barbed wire. You can't make this stuff up. Well, no . . . I guess you can. Bunches of people get paid to make this kind of shit up. So, strike that.

Point is, Madam Calamity had this great Bobby Ng story, which she told us right after her and Mr. B had concluded whatever eldritch transaction had brought us to that house of exceptionally ill repute and he'd called me into her office, because he was of the opinion that I just
had
to meet old Drusneth. Seems holier-than-thou Bobby Ng wasn't as pure as he let on, and he suffered from a horn fetish. Seriously, to hear this mistress of the night tell it, antelopes gave the guy a hard-on. She said he'd once gone to jail and had to do a month of community service for whacking off in front of the gazelles at the Roger Williams Park Zoo. Anyway, he'd had this crazy-ass plan to storm the brothel and banish the whores back down to Hades or Sheol or wherever (and the bookies too, I guess). Then, he was gonna torch the place, bless the whole block, and sow the scorched ground with salt. Bobby's plans can get pretty elaborate.

But
then
he got a look at one of the girls, and to hear Drusneth tell it, no demoness was ever possessed of a better rack. Of horns, I mean. Nothing was said of her tits. Not that I recall. So, Bobby Ng falls for her—or at least he fell for her pointy parts. Which leads to him trying to sneak in and buy an hour of her time, only nobody south of Boston or north of Brooklyn hasn't heard about the jerk. His face is pretty much seared into the minds (or analogous organs) of everyone in the lower half of New England. At least, anyone who runs in these particular circles.

So, the guys at the door, they make him right off, but Drusneth, she wants to see how this scene's gonna play out. The goat-headed kid (sorry, pun unintended) named Agoston, he's told to go ahead and lead Bobby upstairs same as any other trick. Ng gets naked, and the whore lets him feel her horns up for ten or fifteen minutes, then they get around to the fucking part and hilarity ensues when he discovers what she has between her legs. I'm not gonna go there. No need for the gory details. But, by the time all was said and done, he needed twenty fucking stitches. Madam Calamity said one of the bouncers drove him to the emergency room, after she placed a geas on him, preventing Bobby from ever telling a living soul what had happened. She said “living soul,” so I'm guessing he was free to tell all the vampires and ghosts he wanted, fat lot of good
that
would do him.

Back to Babe's on the Sunnyside and Mr. B.

“Yeah,” I said. “I spent some time in Cranston.”

“You have my sympathies,” he replied and reached into his jacket. He pulled out a blood orange and began peeling it. Anytime he was drinking—and that was almost every time I saw him—he'd finish up with citrus. Claimed it protected him from hangovers, the big dose of vitamin C and all. Might be a tangerine or a lime or, if he'd really tied one on, even a whole pink grapefruit. But that night in the bar it was a blood orange.

“Very fucking funny,” I said.

“What?” he asked, trying to sound innocent and probably failing on purpose. He continued to peel the fruit, exposing the wet crimson flesh.

“The orange, that's what.”

“You want half?” he asked, tearing it in two. “I'll share, if you do.”

“Creep.”

“One day, Miss Quinn, we're going to have a talk about your manners. A polite ‘No thank you, Barlow. I'm not in the mood for half of your delicious orange' would have sufficed.”

“Never saw you eating a blood orange before,” I said, and glanced back at the bar. The place was emptying out.

“There was a special at Whole Foods. The world doesn't revolve around you, dear, not even after the Bride's spot of mischief at your expense.”

I tried not to watch as he ate the orange, and I tried even harder not to think how much the juice reminded me of the woman's throat I'd torn open a couple of hours earlier.

“Okay, so I save Bobby Ng's ass six months ago by killing Mercy Brown's special lady friend. Only Mercy can't tell time, what with being dead and all, so out of the blue she saves me from a werewolf—sort of, but not really—and then, exacting her revenge, she turns me. But it's not
only
about vengeance. It also has something to do with a debt she owes—fuck only knows to who or to what—and by making me a vampire—”

“—who's also a werewolf—” Mr. B interjected, then popped another section of orange into his mouth.

“Yeah—fuck you—who's also a werewolf, by doing that, she's breaking some unspeakable bloodsucker taboo, and this matters how?”

“Oh. I haven't a goddamn clue. Not the foggiest. But don't forget she also called you her
pet
.”

“When she said that, I half expected I was about to wind up in a cage or boarded at a kennel or something.”

“She didn't even have the decency to give you a collar and tags, or see to it you were vaccinated for rabies.”

“You are so not funny,” I said, picked up a strip of orange peel, and threw it at him. He didn't even flinch, just brushed it off his right shoulder.

“Really? I think I'm a scream,” he said and bit off the last bloodred section.

Not much else to say about that night at the bar. He finished his orange right as Jack the Bartender was shooing people out the front door. The bartenders, they never shoo Mean Mr. B. But he never keeps them waiting, either. So, a minute past two a.m., we're standing on the sidewalk outside Babe's on the Sunnyside. I'm watching Jack wipe down the bar and tables with a soppy gray rag. Mr. B, he lights a cigarette, the Nat Shermans he smokes, cigarettes in all the colors of the rainbow. He offers me one, and then lights it for me. There's a chill in the air, and I wonder for the first time if vampires are supposed to feel the cold.

“So, dear,” he says, smoke leaking from his nostrils, “here's where we part company for the evening.”

“Wait. There's something else she told me.”

“Who?”

“Mercy Brown. The goddamn Bride. Who do you think?”

“I wouldn't want to be presumptuous.” Mr. B takes another drag off his cigarette; then he asks me, “So, what, pray tell, was this something else she said, this something else that has me standing on the sidewalk outside a closed bar instead of walking home to the comfort of my bed?”

“Can you stop being a jerk for like two minutes?”

“Not bloody likely.”

I tapped ash onto the cement at my feet and watched Jack, still busy with his bar rag.

“She said I was a weapon. That she was making me to be a weapon.”

Mr. B seemed to consider this a moment. I only
say
considered, because who the hell ever knows what's going through his head. But he chewed at his lip in a thoughtful way, so I figured it was a safe enough bet that he was considering what I'd said.

“So, you're her vengeance for the death of Cregan, and also you're the breaking of a taboo,
and
you're her pet, but you're also a weapon that she's fashioning. That's quite a bit of multitasking, wouldn't you say? The all-purpose werepire.”

“Werepire?”

“Would you prefer vampwolf, dear? By the way, there's blood in your hair. You should really do something about that.”

“You're not even going to
try
to give me advice?”

He chewed his lip some more, smoked his Nat Sherman, and finally said, “Lay low. Keep your head down. You'll need to feed every couple of nights, but, of course, you already know that. Don't make messes you can't clean up. I'll ask around, hit up the usual suspects, see if I can find out what machinations the Bride might recently have set in motion. How's that?”

“Shitty,” I muttered.

“Best I can do, kiddo. At least for the time being.”

“And the loup thing?”

“I have heard it said that a devotion to Saint Hubertus has been known to keep the symptoms in check. Patron saint of hunters or some such. Did you know . . . no, I bet you don't . . . did you know that the Jägermeister logo—the stag with the cross above its antlers—is a reference to Saint Hubertus? Also, don't eat the neighbors' cat, or any of the neighbors, for that matter. Draws attention.”

I sighed, dropped the rest of my cigarette to the sidewalk, and ground it out beneath the heel of my sneaker.

“I'm going home,” I said, with as much disgust as I could muster.

“As well you should. Ta. I'll be in touch.”

So, he left me standing there, and I watched Jack until he noticed me watching him, then headed back to my own place. Which, by the way, was an apartment down on the south end of Gano Street (coincidentally, not too far from the rusty bridge and the ditch I woke up in that night). First floor of an old house, and it must have been nice once upon a time, before the fifty years of frat boys and other assorted college students. It had shag carpet the color of vomit, and the paint was peeling off the walls like scaly patches off a shedding reptile. Still, better than abandoned warehouses and couch-surfing, right? Sometimes, the hot water was even hot. And it was easy enough to avoid the hole in the kitchen floor. The rats, I just thought of them as roommates.

It occurs to me I haven't explained
why
Mr. B showed up that day, bearing gifts of heroin and a free apartment. It's not all that complicated, but it did take me about a month to get him to confess his motives. You live on the streets a few years, you learn to be suspicious of any act of goodwill. There are almost always strings attached, so it's a question of weighing the pros against the cons. Just how badly are those strings gonna cut you? Actually, sometimes the strings, they're more like piano wire than strings, if we're talking string in the twine sense. Anyway, I'd had my fingers sliced enough times that I was wary, but not so wary that I was about to turn down free smack and a cleanish place to live. So, dude sets me up, assures me he's on the level, and no, he's not looking for sex, not unless I decide to grow a dick.

But I knew there was more to it than a random act of kindness (to quote the bumper stickers), and one night at Babe's I popped the question. I'd already taken to meeting him there. It seemed to make him happy, and he'd buy me beer and talk about vamps and loups and ghouls and shit. And things I'd never even heard of. I learned there was this whole fucking underworld, and I don't mean the Mafia. I mean the things that hide
beneath
the Mafia, and would have the La Cosa Nostra bosses quaking in their shiny Italian croc-skin shoes. Where was I? Oh, right. Popping the question. So, what's in this for you? Or something of the sort.

Mean Mr. B, he stirred his Cape Cod and smiled, and at first I figured he'd find a perfectly good reason not to answer the question. Or maybe he'd act offended, knowing I'd apologize and drop it for fear of losing such a sacchariferous deal. But that's not how it went. He had one of his boys that night, a cross-dressing piece of arm candy whose name I've long since forgotten. Also, I should note, the aforementioned burly blue-collar types, who were Babe's bread and butter, never even blinked an eye at his boys. Not even at the drag queens and transvestites. Working guys, they drank their beers and watched the ballgames playing on the widescreen TV behind the bar and minded their own business. But, I was saying, I was thinking Mr. B's not about to come clean, when he sends the pretty boy off to powder his nose.