Bloodshot (28 page)

Yeah, there was a House running Atlanta. A big one. The biggest in the South, and one of the biggest vampire Houses, period. I swallowed. “Sure.”

“Only one House? Or several Houses?” He drummed his fingers on the shovel.

“Watch it, mister.”

“I want to know,” he said, and it was clear that he wanted to know before he planned to do any digging.

I flailed, throwing my hands up in a shrug and almost dropping my own digging implement before catching it quickly again. “You want to know what? That there’s a House? I just told you that, and I’ll tell you this, too: You don’t want to go messing with it. That’s a big fat bees’ nest, right there. You poke it with a stick and you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

“Okay, I won’t go poking with a stick,” he said drolly, and I only assumed that this meant he’d poke it with a Glock, given half a chance.

“I’m
serious,
” I stressed.

“You must be. You haven’t said anything about having a House of your own. Do you?”

“What?” I stalled ineffectually.

“Do you belong to a House? You haven’t mentioned one, and your … 
home
”—he said it like he was using the word loosely—“is a lone-wolf bachelor pad if I ever saw one. You live alone, you work alone. You don’t belong to a House. Am I right?”

“Fine, you’re right. I don’t. But I used to, and my reasons for
jumping ship were many, varied, and valid. Houses work for plenty of vampires, but they don’t work for me. I don’t … um … play well with others.”

“Are there rules?”

“Of course there are rules.”

“Restrictions?”

“Those too.”

“Oaths of loyalty?”

“Now you’re just stabbing in the dark,” I accused. “A House is all that shit and more. Under the best of circumstances, it’s a family. It’s your backup. On paper it’s very Three Musketeers—one for all, all for one, blah blah
blah
. In real life, it’s just like belonging to the mob. Sometimes it works for you, and sometimes it works against you. It depends on who’s in charge and how willing you are to follow rules.”

“So, the Atlanta House. Is it a bad one? Bad vampires in charge, bad rules?”

He didn’t know the half of it. I told him the truth without telling him anything. “I’ve never been part of the Atlanta House. I’m not from around here, okay? I’ve never tangled with them, and I don’t care to. Largely because, as you’ve so astutely noticed, I don’t have any House of my own to back me up.”

“But you must know
something
about it.”

Well, yeah. I knew that the Barrington House of Atlanta was not the House with which you wanted to fuck—and if his little sister had been brought on board there, she should’ve been in pretty secure company. If the House had turned her over for … for what, medical experimentation? Like in that Monty Python movie? Then she’d probably done something to royally piss somebody off.

Vampires tend to take care of problem members “in House” you might say. They don’t outsource their problem people. They
find other ways to make examples out of them. Unless the times, they were a-changing.

So I decided to tell him, “Look, I know what you’re thinking.”

“You do?”

“I’m psychic. A little.” May as well stick to the truth while it was convenient. The rest was easy to guess. “You’re thinking that if there’s some organizational structure in place, you can infiltrate it or at least learn enough to navigate it. And you’re wrong. The Atlanta House”—I made a point not to tell him its name—“isn’t just bulletproof. It’s
nuke
-proof. You’ll have better luck fighting Uncle Sam, and your corpse will be more readily identifiable when he’s done with you.”

“What about you?”

“Me? If you think I’m going to go around ringing doorbells, looking to find out what happened to your sister, you’ve got another think coming.”

“What if I could pay you?”

“You can’t,” I said flatly.

He asked, “How do you know? Name a price.”

“There isn’t enough money.”

“In a drag queen’s stash?”

“
In the world,
” I specified. “Now are we going to dig up your sister here, or what?”

Adrian scowled, and shivered.

It was cold out there in Memorial Lawn. Not as cold as Minnesota, but cold enough that I was uncomfortable. They don’t tell you that about Georgia. They tell you it’s all peaches and sunshine, but it isn’t. It’s a sauna in the summer and, come winter, it’s cold enough to freeze. Cold enough to snow, sometimes. But I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen that on any of their tourism brochures.

Adrian hoisted the shovel up high and straight, and drove it down into the grass in front of the headstone. I did likewise. Together
in the near-perfect dark, we swung and shoved, grunting and flinging dirt over our shoulders, onto the graves nearby. Every now and again one of us would hit a rock or a particularly tough root, and the steel shovels would chime like church bells—pinging loud and clear in the emptiness.

The whole time we worked, no one drove by on the road where we’d left the Cherokee. And even though I kept one eye on that road the whole time, I never saw a single person come or go, as if the cemetery and all its surroundings were truly abandoned, and forgotten, or avoided.

Finally, after fully four feet of mud, worms, and rocks as big as frogs, my shovel scraped up against something decidedly un-dirt-like.

I stopped. I tapped at the something and Adrian did likewise, probing at the mass with the tip of the shovel and prying out a corner on his side of the corpseless grave.

With some wiggling, cursing, and further excavation, we were able to pop it up out of its spot and onto the grass. I looked for a place to sit that wasn’t covered with loose dirt, but gave up and sat down on a little heap of it. Adrian came to sit beside me. He held the box on his lap and picked at the latches.

The box wasn’t terribly interesting; it was just a metal jobbie that he’d put inside a very thick plastic bag to keep the rust and rot off. The bag had mostly held up and the box was mostly intact, though threads of rust ate the corners and the latches. One of them broke off in his hand. The other took only a small tug to release.

Adrian had thoughtfully wrapped the interior contents in plastic, too, so they looked pretty good. Some of the edges were curling, and some of the pages were turning the color of an old photograph, but everything appeared intact.

Impatiently, I took the lump out of the box and set it in my own lap, peeling the plastic away even more. “Is this everything?” I asked.

“It’s everything I took. And if you want the truth, I don’t even know what most of it means,” he confessed. “It’s coded, like most of the paperwork they filed on me, too.”

And there was Ian’s serial number.

Right there, in black and white, 636-44-895. I dragged my finger down the page and stopped on it, then kept skimming. “It’s too dark to read much out here, right now,” I observed. Technically I could see it well enough to read, but Adrian was right and everything was coded anyway. I wanted to take the docs back to my condo and examine them in the comfort of my own home, with the help of my own artificial lighting.

“You promised,” Adrian said softly.

“What?”

“You promised you’ll use these to help your friend, or your client, or whatever he is. And you’ll try to shut the program down. That’s what you promised. Did you mean it, or did you only say it so I’d take you here?”

“Oh, I
meant it
. This—” I said, indicating the paperwork, the program, and everything that was wrapped up with it. “It horrifies me. Do you know what they were doing, here? In these tallies?”

“Not really.”

“They were classifying people like your sister, and my client, and
me
 … as animals—and treating the documentation like this was all some experiment on apes. Some of the subjects didn’t survive. One of the ones who
did
survive is maimed for life.” I climbed to my feet, and used the plastic-wrapped papers to swat dirt off my pants. “Worse, really. He’s maimed for afterlife. And whatever you believe and however you feel about what your sister became, she was a person, and she could still feel pain. She could still be
killed
. And she deserved better.”

Adrian was still holding the empty box, at least until he gazed back down at the hole and tossed the container back inside it. He
didn’t respond to anything I’d said, which was maybe a little uncool, but he was having a moment there so I didn’t disturb him. All he said was, “We should fill this in.”

“Why?”

“Because a freshly dug grave in a graveyard is less suspicious than an empty one that somebody dug up. Are we trying to cover our tracks here, or what?”

He had me there. I sighed.

I put the bundle down on top of Isabelle’s headstone and retrieved my shovel once more. A fresh grave in an effectively abandoned cemetery was, in my estimation, only marginally less interesting to any passerby than an empty one, but Adrian was right. In the grand scheme of things, anyone who noticed would be less likely to call the cops if there wasn’t a gaping hole in the ground.

We weren’t grave robbers, after all. There’d never been a grave.

There’d only been a package of incriminating documents, left in memory of a girl who wasn’t even a girl anymore when she’d died.

Later that evening, back at the homestead and on the far side of a nice hot shower, I sat at the kitchen bar and busted out my laptop. I had a note from You-Know-Who.

Below his name he’d added an address. I demanded that Google Maps give me the satellite view of the location, because two can play at that game, that’s why.

Nothing interesting. A boring building in a respectable part of town. I’d file it away and do a better investigation on it later. I’d bought myself until next Monday, after all.

So I wrote a quick email back, pulling it right out of my ass. I hoped the offhanded nature of it came across as juvenile and enthusiastic, rather than floundering in the dark, trying to figure out what the asshole major wanted me to look for—and being careful not to give him anything to rouse his suspicions.

If I played this right, it could be perfect. I’d scored the assignment to investigate my own building. And who better than me to reassure him that there was nothing at all to see there?

Once that was sent off, I hung around and messed with the paperwork we’d dug out of Isabelle’s fake grave, since Adrian was still in the shower. The water was gushing noisily and the steam smelled like a lavender-and-rose-scented soap that once again reminded me that my temporary roommate was exceptionally secure in his masculinity.

While he bathed, I felt as if I almost had a modicum of privacy.

I threw away the plastic wrapper and used paper towels to take the edge off the dusty, funky, musty flakes of dirt that had accumulated over however many years the documents had been stashed underground. The paper still smelled like mold and tree fungus, and it was itchily dry to the touch, but it was mostly clean and I separated the sheets into piles according to my instinctive sense of what was useful and what wasn’t. Some of the cover sheets and filler pages could be discarded, for they were blank. Some of the rest were out of order, and needed rearranging.

Here and there I saw incriminating keywords. Jordan Roe. Holtzer Point. A fistful of serial numbers beginning with 636. Ian’s stood out most prominently, but only because I’d seen it before. The others could’ve belonged to anybody. Adrian hadn’t said which one indicated his sister. I skimmed for the kind of contextual information that could’ve pointed her out to me, but didn’t see much. The medical notes seemed either imprecise to me or entirely too precise—and outside my field of expertise.

So I was hanging out, staring at the sheets while Adrian took his shower, when another keyword leaped out and smacked me between the eyes. Literally, for a moment, I could not breathe. I said it aloud, in a feeble attempt to break the spell.

“Bruner.”

The man who’d sent a douchebag named Trevor into my storage facility. The man who wanted to hire
parcours
kids to perform
“reconnaissance” on me, or my stuff—or other vampires, and their stuff. Major Bruner, misogynist pig on the phone and sneaky military official in the office.

The man I’d just emailed, lying through my teeth and crossing my fingers.

I am absolutely certain that my heart stopped.

Then the shower stopped, and I knew my alone-time was drawing to a close.

Reaching for a drawer, I yanked it open and rifled around through the dried-up pens and broken pencils that accumulate in every single place where I ever spend more than a week at a time. I hadn’t been to my Atlanta condo in quite a while, as I admitted earlier. But still, the trappings of my neuroses were present—as distinctive as a fingerprint.