Immortality Is the Suck (10 page)

belonged to another friend of mine.”

“What if that someone wanted to return your friend's property?” I said.

Betsy sidled up to me. “People are going to notice if we stand in the street

talking,” she said. Aybie's gaze darted toward her and back toward me. Then he

waved the gun toward the open door in a way that made this less a request and

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A. M. Riley

more a command. I heard the soft click and glide as he gently uncocked the

.45. I felt every muscle in my body relax a little.

“Sure, I got time,” I said, and headed toward the door.

* * * * *

wide and low-ceilinged like many of these beach galleries. A poured concrete

floor full of cracks, gleaming white metal posts rising from it to the

ceiling,,Track lighting hung from the exposed metal beams and shone on three

walls where large, unframed canvasses depicted screaming humans painted, it

appeared, with a trowel.

“Have a seat,” said Aybie, and he waved the gun toward a mismatched

collection of molded plastic chairs in the corner. The paintings were all brown

and green. The floors gray, the walls and ceiling white. The chairs the only

smattering of color. I squeezed my ass into a tangerine-colored one and

checked out the other party in this little trio.

Skinny, dark-skinned, dark-haired. His jeans were denim and worn

through use not design. He had no discernible piercings and his hair hung in

glossy brown ringlets around a classically handsome face. Long, bulging thigh

muscles. A high butt. Under normal circumstances, I'd be more worried about

the .45 than whether or not one of my captors batted for the same team as I.

But nothing in the past twenty-four hours had even approached normal

circumstances, so there I was, letting my gaze travel up the kid's torso, licking

my lips when our eyes met.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Never mind.” I'd guess Midwest from the accent. I'd guess Crips from the

matching tats on his wrists. From the looks he occasionally shot Aybie, I'd

guess that his race and Aybie's affiliation with the black-hating Mexican Mafia

was an issue. Truthfully, it was a miracle that Aybie hadn't already put one of

those bullets into his apparent partner in crime. Who now went to a metal tool

Immortality is the Suck

61

cabinet sitting against the wall and opened drawers. He brought out a pair of

metal handcuffs—looked like LAPD issue—then came over and gestured for me

to put my hands behind my back.

When I hesitated, Aybie raised that .45 again. “It's messy but it gets the

job done,” he said. I put my hands behind my back and the black kid latched

and fitted them with expertise.

“So where is this Ozone?” I asked the room. “I've got other meetings

tonight, you know.”

“No you don't,” said Aybie.

“If you do, you're gonna have to cancel,” said Betsy.

“Okay,” I said. “Give me a phone and I'll call him.”

Aybie looked me up and down. There was something tactile about his

gaze. And not in a sexual way. “Sure. And you can invite him here. That could

be fun.”

The black kid grabbed a chair and sat down across from me. His eyes

roved from my toes to my face in a casually interested way. “You wanna fuck

while we're waiting?”

Betsy stopped plucking at her skirt, her head tilted toward us.

“Maybe,” I said. “What's your name?”

“The Mexican here calls me Caballo,” he said. And he grinned and spread

his legs so that promising bulge in his crotch showed. “You guess why.”

“Don't be a pig, Caballo,” said Aybie. “I thought you liked Betsy.”

“I do,” said Caballo, and his eyes rolled toward her. “We can all do it

together.”

Betsy's pale face dimpled when she smiled, showing pointed, catlike

canines. It was just a little disconcerting. “Okay.”

“Jesus!” exclaimed Aybie, the gun waving around in a nerve-wracking

manner. “You fucking niggers are disgusting.”

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“No, he's not,” said Betsy. She grinned at me, letting her tongue point out

a little. “We just fed and we're horny.”

“Fed?” I asked.

Aybie laughed. His laugh had a little giggle at the end of it that made me

think of Norman Bates. “Don't you know?” he said.

“Know what?”

“You're a vampire, man. Undead. Just like us.”

Betsy came around the counter toward me, squatted before me on those

platform boots. “He didn't know,” she said, tilting her head and looking up at

me through her mascara-coated eyelashes. And then she did something that

would flash into my mind's eye again and again over the coming days. Her face

morphed, changed. Eyes like a wolf's with yellow irises, cheekbones sharper.

Fangs. It was the face of the corpse I'd fought in the morgue.

I didn't react outwardly. I guess on some level I already knew, didn't I?

Betsy's face morphed back to the Goth chick I recognized. “Isn't it cool?”

“Sure,” I said. “Really cool. So what are a bunch of vampires doing in

Venice Beach? Shouldn't you be in Transylvania or something? Flying over

some old castle?” I tested the handcuffs with a little jerk of my hands.

Sometimes amateurs wouldn't make sure they were completely closed. The

wrist bracelets didn't loosen, but I thought I felt a little give, as if a link were

loose.

“He's funny,” said Betsy. She let her tongue touch her lip. She looked at

Caballo and they both smiled and looked back at me. “And he's hot.”

“You ain't kidding,” said Caballo. “We can do it without releasing the

handcuffs. Bring that mattress in here.”

I gave him a smile like I liked what he was thinking. “Who did this to me?”

Caballo stood. “Does it matter? Now you'll never die.”

“What do you mean?”

“You're immortal, man. An Evil Dead. You will live forever.”

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63

“'Less Ozone says I can dust him,” said Aybie from where he stood.

“Evil Dead? Dust?” I said. My eyes were level with Caballo's crotch and

that promising bulge just right of the zipper. I let my eyes travel up the expanse

of his shirt until I was looking into wicked dark eyes.

“You are a very stupid cop, aren't you?” said Caballo. He said it like he

liked that about me. With a big white smile on those pretty lips. Okay, I'm

handcuffed with a gun to my head and I'm seriously lusting after one of the

guys holding me captive. What the fuck is wrong with me? I steeled myself to

focus on the immediate problem.

“Who is this Ozone again?” I asked Betsy. “I think I should talk to him.”

The handcuffs gripped my wrists painfully but I jerked again and felt,

surprisingly, something snap back there. My arms almost flew out to my sides

as the cuffs separated. I was able to keep my arms in the same position,

smiling up at Caballo, who seemed as distracted by me as I was by him.

A digital tune played and Aybie flipped open a cell phone. “Yeah?” I saw

his gaze slide toward me and then away. “Sure. I can talk.” He strolled across

the room and into another room.

“Watch him,” he said to Caballo and Betsy, and disappeared into the other

room, speaking rapidly in a thickly accented Spanish.

I strained to hear his words, but Caballo rocked his chair nosily on the

floor and said, “He don't like you, man.”

“He doesn't like you either,” I told him. “What are you guys doing working

together?”

“It's the New World Order,” said Betsy. She had a tiny tube in one hand

and a tiny spoon in the other. She was either feeding soup to mice or snorting

coke.

Caballo rolled his eyes. “Sure, baby. It's all rainbows and butterflies.

You”—he pointed one long, well-manicured index finger at me—“would be a

shame to dust.”

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A. M. Riley

“You too, I think.” I licked my lips. It wasn't a ploy; I was thinking about

sucking on that finger. “So what are you doing in SoCal, man? You're not from

here.”

“I was in Chicago,” said Caballo, rolling his shoulders in an elegant shrug.

He stood, stretching long arms and cocking his head to one side with a funny

smile. “The winters suck there, man. And the Bloods, they killed my bro. I

decided to split.”

“And then he met Ozone,” said Betsy. She stuck the spoon in her nose

again and snorted hard. I was surprised to
not
feel a little tug of longing at the

sight.

“La Eme make the Bloods look like pussies,” I said.

Aybie came back into the room then, pocketing his cell phone. “That was

Ozone,” he said. “I told him what went down.”

Caballo read something in Aybie's expression. And then he and Betsy

exchanged looks. “Wait until later, Aybie.”

“He said do it now,” said Aybie.

The mood in the room changed, drifted from hot and horny to something

cool and steely. Caballo's smile disappeared and Betsy stood. “He didn't even

ask me.”

“He's the boss.” Aybie shrugged, coming around the counter. He stood

next to Caballo and regarded me with a little leer.

“Was that Ozone?” I asked, stalling for time. I braced my feet on either

side of the chair and leaned forward a little. I kept my hands pressed together

behind me so that one of them would have to look closely to see that the

handcuffs were broken.

With a feral expression, Aybie lifted the .45. I didn't have time to think it

through. The plastic chair hit the wall when I jumped, swung my metal-

encased wrist, and hit the .45 from Aybie's hand with one swing, then put my

fist into his face with the other.

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65

Aybie went down like one of those inflatable punching dolls. Betsy

screamed. And like one of those inflatable punching dolls, Aybie bounced back

up. About the time I felt Caballo's weight full on my back.

I spun, grabbing that thick hair with both hands and jerking my knee up

into his face. He sprawled while I turned to deal with Aybie, whose face,

beneath the blood I'd cause to spurt from his nose, was the fanged, yellow-eyed

monster Betsy had shown me earlier.

It must have been the blood, because I felt as if someone suddenly

cranked my engine into a higher gear.

I saw the flash of something metal in Aybie's hand. And then he moved in

a blur. I felt a bright white fire in my arm and looked down to see that Aybie

had shoved that knife in my arm up to the hilt so fast I hadn't even seen him

coming. The night lit up with pain and a desperate, primal anger that seemed

to give me the same intense clarity and drive of a chemical bump.

I kicked Aybie in the chest so hard I heard bones crack. Then, I spun in

time to plant a similar kick in Caballo's chest. The .45 had skittered into a near

corner; I went for it, and Betsy, who weighed maybe eighty pounds, suddenly

turned into some kind of wolverine, jumping on me as I bent down to pick up

the gun, and biting down on my arm.

Somebody kicked the gun out of my hands. I looked up and saw it was

Aybie, but he was obviously unsure what to do, as at this point Betsy was

draped over me, clawing my face. I jumped the indecisive Aybie, and we

wrestled on the floor for the gun. I won.

Betsy's claws were all over my face, so I grabbed her with one hand and

thwapped her against the cement wall. Hey, a dog bites you, you react on

instinct, right? She flopped to the ground, probably knocked out stone-cold.

Simultaneously, Caballo jumped me, knocking me back. He sat astride

me, poising a pointed stick just over my heart, but I heaved upward and

managed to tip him off. Just barely.

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A. M. Riley

Aybie seemed actually knocked out for the moment, but Betsy was up

again and on my back. She couldn't fight worth beans but what she could do

was claw and yank at my hair. And she could do it like some kind of hellbitch. I

grabbed her face and shoved her away while grabbing Caballo by the neck and

throwing him through the air with such force he appeared to actually leave the

ground for several feet before he slammed into the wall and slid, unconscious,

to the floor, followed by the painting his body had knocked loose.

I heard footsteps and turned to see Aybie coming at me with that wooden

stick raised like he was going to stab me with it. I raised a booted foot and

kicked him hard just before he made it to me. He staggered backward into one

of the columns, the stick hanging from his hand.

On the next attack, I used Caballo's momentum and speed to throw him

past me and straight at Aybie, who took that wooden stick full in the leg.

Then Aybie was busy screaming and writhing on the floor, blood pumping.