Darkside (9 page)

The boys follow, of course—they almost always do. Usually, one of them is the alpha dog, the others, onesies, twosies, almost never more than two, the perpetual followers. Not quite sure of what they're going to do next, but enjoying the scene. Everyone shining attitude, which goes pretty quick to sexual taunts: The girls are pros, sluts, whooers, ready to peddle their asses, and hey, the boys are game, right? They've each got two-bits. That'll do it, right, babe? Then the girls begin to ape the walk of working girls on the stroll, laughing at the following rubes, putting an element of challenge into it, but keeping thirty feet or so be
tween the boys and themselves, leading them, always leading them, toward the alley. Toward me. The girls flash some more leg, attend to a stocking, maybe rub each other on the ass a little, making sure the rubes are watching. That usually does it.

When they get to the alley, they turn on the boys and make vampire faces at them, hissing, showing teeth, looking ridiculous, of course, but setting up the play. By now, they've undone their tops a little, giving the village idiots an eyeful, then pretending to discover that they're exposing themselves, hissing some more, making witch signs, but grabbing at their clothes, maybe a little scared now as the big bad boys approach while the poor defenseless vamps retreat farther into the alley. Toward where I'm waiting.

“Who-ee! It's Draculady! Hey, Draculady, bite this. How 'bout it? Want to suck something? Here it is, witchy woman!” Grabbing at their crotches and laughing their asses off as they turn into the alley, their jeers and taunts becoming more explicit. They're aroused now, sensing the possibility that they can maybe get some. Hell, there's no one around. The girls have been flashing T and A for the past block, begging for it, really. There're three of them and just two weird-ass St. John's College bitches playing at being vampires or some other equally strange college-girl shit. The girls stop halfway down the alley, blank brick walls rising into the dark on either side. They back up to one of the walls, spread their arms out behind them, flat on the wall, breasts heaving in obvious excitement, moving their bodies. The boys are locked on now, alpha dog intent, responding to a raging short circuit between his brain and his crank, the followers eager but not sure who's going to do what.

Then the girls start chanting weird shit in unison: “Begone! Begone! Fie on the lot of you.” The boys, jeering again at the vampire act, approach in a loose semicircle. The girls let their slit skirts part just a little, showing off some more, but keep chanting. “Oooh, I'm so scared!” the alpha dog goes, rubbing his crotch again, letting them see
his action. “Don't bite me. Please, don't bite me!” Trying to laugh, but mostly focused on what they're showing them.

And then: I'm there. Behind them. In full fucking costume: black cavalryman boots that add about two inches to my height. Black midshipman uniform pants stuffed into the boots. White Ballanchino formal shirt with no collar. And the cape: this huge fucking cape, black outside, all red satin inside, sweeping down to the tops of my boots. My face painted dead white. Eyes circled in yellow-looking makeup. Teeth glistening with a little Vaseline. My very big teeth. My shaven head covered in a black rubber wet suit hood. I'm stretching up to damn near seven feet tall, arms wide under the cape, black rubber gloves on my hands. Sometimes I stick two extra-long white plastic fangs on my canine teeth.

The girls know the drill: They look behind the followers, put trembling hands to their mouths, open their clothes up just a little more. Alpha dog, he's on autotrack, can't tear his eyes away. But the followers? They see the girls looking over their shoulders, and they turn around to see whassup. Which is when I let out a sound like a king cobra, the hiss from Hell, causing their blurry, drunken eyes to get as big as saucers and their stupid mouths to drop open like turtles. At which point, I slam their slack-jawed heads together like the pair of cantaloupes they really are. As they go down, alpha dog, who hears the cobra bit, is turning around to check it out, tearing his eyes away from the girls at last, not seeing them lunge for him, grabbing his arms, pulling them behind and up, not even aware they're doing it because all he can see is my face, my painted, hooded death's-head face looming down at him, my eyes coming unhinged as I cross them ever so slightly and bare my glistening teeth, and then—here's the topper—I fucking roar.

He faints. They always do. Get the guy sober, he'd laugh at the thought of a vampire. But drunk? And after the girls
have set him up? It's pure fear, helped along by the girls doing their weird vampire shit. He turns around, suddenly he can't move, his buddies are flat on the ground, and he's looking up at the biggest human-shaped thing he's ever seen, which looks, sounds, and acts like every vampire nightmare he's had since he was a little kid, and it's right fucking there, fangs and all, right in his face!

They faint. And sometimes they leak a little. Yes, they do. The girls run, of course, bursting with laughter. I follow, but not before I do some things to the big man on campus. I usually don't really injure him, but he might just hurt a little—when he wakes up, of course. This last time, we took his buddies' pants down, arranged the two of them in the 69 position, and called the cops just for grins. But usually, we just fly out of there, running down the block behind the bar, back to the lair. A cop car saw us once, the guy driving so surprised when he got a look at me that he rear-ended a parked car, which gave us time to disappear through the St. John's campus and back to their shitty little apartment—excuse me, Goth lair. Must stay in character, we must. And when we get back there, guess who's really excited now? Heh-heh.

We've done it a couple times this year, all to different town slobs. You'd think the word would get around. On the other hand, I'd bet it's not like they want to talk about it, right? Like: Hey, man, listen to what happened to us last night. Like: You remember when we went after those Johnnie bitches in their vampire costume? And then…I don't think so.

I know, I know: One of these nights, the guy won't faint. Or it'll be some dude we've done before. But I'm ready for that, too. In fact, I'm getting more ready for that possibility every day, especially now that June week is approaching. Just between you and me, I'm planning a little solo op. Maybe go lurking in town on my own this time. Let a previous victim get a quick look. See if I can get him to chase me. See if I can get him to catch me down in my tunnels. See
what happens then. More good training for my next incarnation in the glorious Corps.

It's like I want to experience some maximum violence before I leave here. Maximum. Like what happened to that plebe. That was certainly extreme, don't you think?

As of Wednesday morning, Ev still hadn't heard back from Julie. All through his eight o'clock class, he'd been anxious to call Liz DeWinter to see if she'd heard anything. At the break, he tried her office, but she was already in court. Frustrated, he went down to talk to the HSS division director, Captain Donovan. Ev technically worked for Professor Welles, the chairman of his department, but Captain Donovan was the senior military officer. Growing increasingly anxious, Ev had felt he needed a military opinion, not a civilian one. But the captain had not been helpful. He'd heard about the incident, of course, and also about Julie's involvement. He'd been polite but firm: Let the Academy do its investigation. That way, we get the facts. Then we focus on any required actions. Ev expressed his concerns about the administration possibly using Julie as a scapegoat, but the captain had dismissed that notion. Let them do their investigation. It was the Navy way.

He'd gone back to his office to get ready for the next class, more uneasy than ever, and really wishing Julie would call. He was sitting at his desk, correcting some papers and chewing absently on some folded-up mystery meat, when Liz called.

“Talked to Julie,” she said. “Kind of anticlimactic. Her big meeting with the company officer turned out to be a non
event. He just wanted her to know that the visit from NCIS was a room inspection, quote, unquote.”

“Sounds to me like your presence has been a shot across their bows, then.”

“That was the point, Ev.”

“I talked to my boss this morning,” he said. “Checking to see what was filtering through the military network.”

“And?”

“And he said he'd heard there was an investigation, that Julie was involved, and that she had a lawyer.”

Liz thought about that for a moment. “That was quick. So, he's in a neutral corner?”

“He's a division director,” Ev said. “That makes him part of the Academy administration.”

“As opposed to being an ally of yours.”

“Well, he was friendly, and sympathetic. I think.”

“Okay. That brings me to something I need to say to you, and it goes along with what I told Julie last night when I dropped her off.
You
need to stop talking to people about this. I know I can't order you to do this, of course, but as Julie's attorney, I should be the primary interface with anyone in the Academy administration from here on out.”

He thought about it and then sighed. “Yeah, you're right. So anything I hear or find out about should come to you, then?”

“Yes. And don't go playing detective. The next step is up to them.”

“But she hasn't done anything!”

She ignored his protest. “We wait until they want to see her again.”

“I just hate not knowing,” Ev said. “Since Joanne died, Julie's well…well, more important.”

Then she surprised him. “Would you like to have dinner with me?” she asked.

“What? Why, sure. Uh, do you have a favorite place?”

“How about Maria's? Tonight. Say seven? Subject, of course, to any breaking developments over in the Yard.”

“Roger that. Seven it is. If you have to cancel, call my
home number. In the meantime, I'll keep away from Bancroft so they won't catch me looking in the windows of the interrogation cell.”

She laughed. “See you at seven, Ev.”

He checked his schedule. He had two more classes that afternoon, a fuller day than usual, which was probably for the best, considering his state of mind. He was surprised when Liz called him again just after three o'clock.

“Hey, counselor,” he said. “Change your mind about dinner already?”

“No. But have you heard anything more from Julie?”

“No,” he said, sitting up as he sensed the urgency in her voice. “Has something happened?”

She hesitated. “I need her to call me as soon as possible, Ev. I've left her a message to that effect, but she may contact you first.”

“What's going on, Liz?”

“There's a rumor circulating through law-enforcement circles that the midshipman suicide case isn't as clear-cut as everyone wants us to believe.”

He didn't understand. “What's that got to do with Julie?”

“Hopefully, nothing. And I've got to tell you, cops are the worst rumor mongers there are. Let's make a deal: no Dell case this evening, okay? I'll see you later.”

 

After dinner, they walked up the hill from the Colonial seaport area toward State Circle. Liz's eighteenth-century house was framed inside an iron-fenced compound just off State Circle. They entered a tree-lined, cobblestoned drive through two leaning stone columns that were engraved with the name Weems. Her house was three stories of ivy-covered Flemish lock brickwork outside, with glowing, if somewhat uneven, heart pine floors, plaster and lathe walls, leaded windows, ornate crown moldings and wainscoting, and sixteen-foot ceilings inside.

Liz left Ev in a living room furnished with what looked like period reproduction furniture and went out to the
kitchen to get the makings for the Rusty Nails they had talked about over coffee. He first sat down in a lovely Sheraton-period wing chair, which was downright uncomfortable, then moved over to the sofa. He felt apprehensive about being here, in this woman's house. They had enjoyed themselves once he'd overcome his own awkwardness. This was the first time he'd been out with anyone since Joanne had died, and he hadn't been sure what to think of it. Liz had put him at his ease with a steady flow of bright conversation, quick-witted jokes, and stories about clients. Once he'd relaxed a bit, he joined in with equally funny stories about midshipmen and their antics. He'd ended up talking about his own life toward the end of dinner—growing up in Annapolis, the pervasive influence of the Academy on life in the state capital, and the satisfaction of finally returning home after his time in the Navy.

He'd done twelve years in naval aviation before getting out, and then he'd gone to grad school out on the West Coast to get a Ph.D. A week after he'd successfully defended his dissertation, and while he was still shopping around for a faculty appointment, his father had had a heart attack and died. He and Joanne had come back to the East Coast with their eleven-year-old daughter to stay with his mother for a while, and then the appointment in the Academy's Political Science Department had opened up and they'd never left. Once he'd taken the Academy position, his mother, to his surprise, went into what seemed like a deliberate decline, becoming a semi-invalid. One night five years later, she turned her face to the wall and died.

He had explained to Liz that leaving the Navy after almost thirteen years had been Joanne's idea, although he knew the truth to be somewhat more complex. His father had been a strong and domineering man, and Ev's passage into the academy and naval service had been something of a foreordained matter, not really open for discussion. Not that Ev had objected, at least not until he had become a plebe and had all those romantic notions about midshipman life yelled out of him in the first twenty-four hours of plebe summer.
He'd met and married Joanne, a Merrill Lynch stockbroker, while doing an instructor tour in Pensacola, and then watched with chagrin as she underwent a similar experience once he had to return to the real Navy world of sea duty, with a lot of the romance being flattened by the stark fact that naval aviators mostly flew in the away direction. The truth was, he'd been as lonely as she had been when he was cooped up in the hot, crowded, constantly noisy steel catacombs underneath the flight deck. Life as a carrier aviator alternated between two extremes. There was the huge adrenaline rush of being flung off the end of the flight deck while strapped inside a cramped Plexiglas cocoon mounted over a pair of unruly rockets built by the lowest bidder. And then there was the seemingly endless, six-month blear of briefs, debriefs, alerts, training sessions, transits, crowded port visits, duty days, safety stand-downs, no-fly Sundays, punctuated occasionally by the jolt of seeing a squadron mate misjudge a landing and go over the angle in a rending screech of flaming metal into the always-waiting sea. Doing this while missing his new wife, their daughter's early years, and the luxury of life in America made it hard to ignore the fact that the next promotion would mean more deployments and more separation. Even when he had been on shore duty, he had detected a gradual hollowing out of their marriage, as each next deployment loomed ever closer and Joanne began to erect those walls that would support her once he left. Give her credit: She'd never issued any ultimatums, but he had been able to see the choice he would ultimately have to make.

It hadn't hurt that Joanne had some money. She'd stayed with Merrill Lynch during his active-duty career, and her money had paid off his parents' remaining mortgage when his father died and they'd moved into the house. They'd had eight years of a wonderfully normal life in Annapolis as he moved from probationary to tenured status on the faculty. Eight years of coming home every night, waking up in the same place every morning without the crash and bang of jets landing on the roof, or the rattling, scraping sounds of the ar
resting wires reeling into their greasy lairs to await the next trap, sharing the travails of bringing up just one teenager, actual family vacations over on the Atlantic beaches, the short, sharp spats they both recognized as episodes of cabin fever, the sad subsidence of his mother as she pined away for his father, the care of a home and yard and gardens, secure in the knowledge that he'd probably be around to see the results of his labors. In short, normal American life. He explained to Liz that if he'd never been in the Navy, he would never have appreciated the relative tranquility and productive purpose of his civilian existence.

On the other hand, he'd done nothing to stop his daughter, Julie, from falling under the same romantic delusions about the Academy. Absent his father's political connections, Julie had made it through the grueling admissions process pretty much on her own merits, although it didn't hurt her admissions package that Ev was an alumnus and faculty member. He remembered vividly her comment during parents' weekend, four years ago now, when she had described the downer from the huge victory of getting an appointment to spending the entire first night in Bancroft Hall learning how to stencil her plebe summer whites. He had experienced the very same feelings, and could still smell the stencil ink and hear the upperclassman screaming at him to wash his ink-stained hands, something he'd been trying to do for an hour.

And then Joanne died, he thought, pressing a hand on the smooth fabric of the sofa. Just like that, he realized, his eyes blinking. His whole life here, his normal, post-Navy, happy, real life, had begun with his father's sudden death. And then his mother's. And then Joanne's. Viewed one way, his ultimate homecoming to Annapolis had been a veritable chronology of death. This thought had been at the back of his mind during their entire dinner, and at times, Liz's bright conversation and upbeat attitude had cast a surreal haze around his own thoughts. Liz had skillfully urged him to open up, he realized now, offering small tidbits about her own past, her two ex-husbands, and the challenges of being
single at her age. He could not help but notice how other men in the crowded restaurant watched her smile and play with her hair and envied him sitting there, getting her full attention. Despite his emotional fragility, Liz had grown on him, filling his senses and attention. Even so, he'd felt like he was walking through a waking dream, not knowing quite what was coming next but increasingly willing to go forward and see.

Liz came back into the living room. She'd brought a tray with scotch, Drambuie, two snifters, a small sharp knife, a heavy spoon, an ice bucket, and a lemon. She put the tray on the coffee table, tapped a remote to ignite the gas fire in the fireplace, turned on one more table lamp, and sat down at the other end of the sofa. She was wearing a silk pantsuit, and she'd done something to her hair while out in the kitchen. Adjectives tumbled through his thoughts:
lovely, warm, smart, sexy, sweet.
He felt his cheeks warming just a little when he realized he was staring.

“We're in luck,” she announced, arranging the things on the tray. “I even had the lemon.”

He smiled but didn't say anything, suddenly not willing to trust his voice. A familiar feeling was gathering in his chest.

“So, a Rusty Nail,” she said. “One half scotch, one half Drambuie, which I think is scotch-based, and a twist of lemon peel, all over cracked ice. That how you remember it?”

“Yes,” he mumbled. “It's been awhile, though.” For everything, he thought. And then: I shouldn't have come here.

“I've found a lot of bartenders don't even know how to make one of these,” she said, cracking ice cubes against her palm with the back of the heavy spoon. “But they're supposed to be a lot more hangover-proof than most after-dinner drinks.” She cracked ice into each snifter, then sliced off a scrape of lemon peel and squeezed the rind side over the ice, filling the air with the pungent smell of citron. Then she poured equal measures of the liquors and passed one snifter over to him. “Here you go,” she said. “Long life.”

He tipped snifters with her and then they both sat there, holding their drinks, facing each other on the sofa, with the fireplace flickering nearby. He sampled the drink and pronounced it perfect.

“Thank you,” she said. “It's been a lovely evening. Thanks for dinner, even though it was supposed to be my treat.”

“Your company was treat enough, and it has been very nice,” he said. He tried to ignore the tightness in his chest, then found himself nodding absently as if to confirm what he'd just said. He looked into the fire.

Hey, look at her, he thought, not at the damned fire. He caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye as she crossed her legs slowly, letting the expensive silk rustle suggestively. He felt the skin on his face tighten just as his chest had, and he knew, just
knew,
he was going to lose it. It made him so damned mad, but he couldn't help it. He shouldn't have come back to her house; it was too soon, much too soon. And then the tears came, and he felt like a perfect goddamned fool as he put the drink down on the table, trying not to drop it or spill it, and lowered his chin while tears streamed down his face. In a moment, she was there, her perfume filling the air around his face. Her arm was around him and she was saying in her soft voice, “It's all right, all right, let it come. Don't be afraid, just let it come.” And then he folded into her and cried his heart out.