Samantha Moon: First Eight Novels, Plus One Novella (39 page)

“
I’ve seen your packets,” he said, shuddering. “Revolting.” He looked at me some more, his sandwich looking miniscule in his oversized hands. “So, then, is it safe to say that you go as long as you can without eating?”

“
Yes.”

“
And how long can you go without eating?”

“
Three or four days.”

“
And then you have to eat.”

I nodded, tilting the glass up to my lips, reveling in the purity of the blood, letting it coat my tongue, the roof of my mouth.

“Do you ever worry that you will go too long between meals, and find yourself so hungry that you might do something stupid?”

“
Like kill someone?” I asked.

“
That would be something stupid, yes.”

“
I’m not worried,” I said. “Not really. I’m generally always close to a source of blood. When I’m hungry enough, I just pop open a packet.”

“
There might come a day when you don’t have such a ready source of blood.”

“
Maybe,” I said. “But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

And with that, I finished the glass of blood. I brought it over to the sink and immediately washed it out. When I wasn’t hungry, the sight of blood made me want to vomit.

About that time, Kingsley stuffed the rest of his sandwich in his mouth, chewed a half dozen times—surely not enough to fully masticate such a large section of sandwich—and then swallowed it down like a whooping crane, tossing back his head.

We both sat back, looking at each other.

“We have a problem,” I said.

Kingsley nodded. “Is it that I’m too sexy?”

I didn’t feel like smiling. I felt like clawing his eyes out, if you wanted to know the truth. “You got Ira Lang out of jail the first time around,” I said.

“
Sure,” said Kingsley, shrugging. “And he didn’t even have to pay me.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
I was his court-appointed attorney.”

“
But I thought you were one of the most expensive defense attorneys around.”

“
I am. But sometimes when there are emergencies or the other attorneys are swamped, a judge will ask me to take over a case.”

“
So you took over the case.”

He winked. “Of course. You don’t say no to a judge.”

“But Ira tried to kill his wife,” I said. “And not just
tried
. The piece of shit did everything within his power to kill her.”

“
Right. And I got him out of jail,” said Kingsley evenly. “It’s what I do best.”

I searched for words, fought to control myself.

As I did so, Kingsley continued, “Look, Sam. Don’t take this so personally, okay? If it wasn’t me getting him out of jail, any other defense attorney worth his salt would have done the same. Ira had no previous record. He was a first time offender. He was ordered to stay away from his wife—”

“
And I am sure you are proud of yourself for getting him out.”

“
I did my job well.”

“
And how did you feel when you heard the news that he had gone after her again, but this time killing her father, who fought to protect her?”

“
It was unfortunate.”

“
And you couldn’t have seen that coming?”

“
I saw it coming.”

“
But you did nothing to stop it.”

“
It’s not my job to stop it, Sam. It was my job to get him out of jail.”

“
You’re an animal,” I said.

He folded his arms over his great chest. His black tee shirt was stretched to the max over his biceps and shoulders and pectorals and even his slightly-too-big gut. His deep voice remained calm; he never once took his eyes off me.

He said, “You are emotional because you have grown close to the victim.”

“
I am emotional because I let an animal put his hands on me.”

“
I seem to recall that you liked my hands on you.”

I stood abruptly. “I can’t talk to you right now.”

He stood, too, and grabbed hold of both my shoulders. He towered over me. His shaggy black hair hung down over over his face. He smelled of pastrami and good cologne. He had put the cologne on for me, I realized. He had wanted more tonight, perhaps to sleep with me. I shuddered at the thought.

“
Don’t go,” he said. “I’m not the enemy.”

“
No,” I said. “But you might as well be.”

He tightened his grip on my shoulders, but with one swipe of my hand, I easily knocked them off. Shaking, I turned and walked out of the kitchen.

“Don’t go,” he said after me.

I didn’t look back.

Chapter Thirty-seven

I sat on the same thick tree branch and watched the crime lord’s regal estate. Just a giant black raptor with a love for cute shoes.

The massive island home was ablaze with lights as Jerry Blum did his personal best to accelerate global warming. Activity had picked up since the last time I was here a few days ago. Now there were more guys with big guns, more beautiful women, and more cars coming and going. The cars looked armor plated. Once, a man and a woman strolled beneath the very tree I was perched in. The man lit a cigarette. The woman was wearing a blouse cut so low that I could see straight down it to her belly button. Probably a good thing neither of them thought to look up.

As I watched them, sitting motionless and squatting on the thick branch, I wondered if I emitted an odor of some sort. I had read years ago that Bigfoot sightings were often preceded first by a horrific stench. Well, I had showered just a few hours earlier, thank you very much. Granted, I had showered as a
human
. Either way, neither crinkled their noses and looked at each other and asked, “Do you smell a giant vampire bat?”

Again, probably a good thing.

The man finished his cigarette and mentioned something about being off in a few hours and why didn’t she come up to his room then? She said sure.

He nodded and flicked his cigarette away, and Mr. Romantic and Slutty McSlutbag drifted off over the grounds, to disappear in the controlled mayhem of the estate house. Something seemed to be up, but I didn’t know what. I caught snatches of conversation, but couldn’t piece anything together. Once I saw Jerry Blum himself, surrounded by a large entourage of men. Big men. Dark-haired men. They moved purposely through the house, and I watched them going from window to window, until they slipped deeper into the house and out of view.

Jerry was going to be hard to get alone. But I was a patient hulking monster.

As the wind picked up and the tree swayed slightly, I adjusted my clawed feet, stretched my wings a little, and hunkered down for the night.

Chapter Thirty-eight

I turned off Carbon Canyon Road, which wound through the Chino foothills, and onto a barely noticeable service road.

Stuart Young, my beautifully bald client who was sitting in the passenger seat next to me, looked over at me nervously. I grinned and winked at him.

“Um, you sure you know where you’re going?” he asked.

“
No clue,” I said.

“
Of course not,” he said good-naturedly. “Why should you? We’re only driving through the deep dark forest in the dark of night.”

“
Fun, isn’t it?”

I doubted we would get lost since there was only about a quarter mile of wilderness between the road and the grass-covered hill before us. Even a soccer mom could get her bearings here. We had been driving down the twisty Carbon Canyon Road, a road some think of as a sort of shortcut from Orange County to Riverside County, but, if you ask me, it’s just a more scenic way to fight even more dense traffic.

The van probably wasn’t made for dirt roads, but it handled this one well enough. We bounced and scraped through shrubbery until we came across a metal gate that consisted of two horizontal poles.

“
It looks locked,” said Stuart.

“
Hang on,” I said.

I put the van in park and hopped out, brushing aside a thorn covered branch with my bare hand. A thorn or two snagged my skin and drew blood. By the time I reached the gate, my hand was already healed.

Cool beans.

A thick chain was wrapped around a rusted pole driven deep into the ground. The chain was padlocked with a heavy-duty lock. I often wondered who carried keys to these random city and county locks. Somewhere out there was a guy standing in front of some obscure park gate with a big wad of keys and going crazy.

This lock was a big one, and heavy, too. As I picked it up, the chain clanked around it. I turned my back to Stuart. I hooked my finger inside the lock’s rusted loop and with one quick yank, I snapped the lock open.

“
We’re in luck,” I yelled, letting the lock drop. “It’s open.”

*  *  *

We were now in a clearing at the edge of a ravine, where a small river flowed twenty feet below. The gurgling sound of it was pleasant. The chirping of the birds was even more pleasant. Darkness was settling over what passed as woods in southern California, which amounted to a small grove of scraggly elderberry trees, deformed evergreens, beavertail cactus, and thick clumps of sagebrush and gooseberry, and other stuff that wasn’t taught in my junior college environmental biology course.

We were in a sort of clearing, surrounded by a wall of trees. My sixth sense told me that this place had been used before, for something else, for something physically painful, but I didn’t know what. My sixth sense was sketchy at best. Still, I heard the crack of something breaking, perhaps bone, and I heard the crash of a car. I walked over to the edge of the ravine and looked down. Sure enough, deep within the soft soil around the lip, I saw deep tire tracks. Someone, at sometime, had taken a nose-dive off the edge here and down into the river below.

I turned and faced Stuart. “This is where I will bring him.”

Stuart had walked to the center of the clearing, and was taking in the area, perhaps envisioning himself fighting a crime lord to the death in this very spot. Like gladiators in an arena.

“It’s a good place,” he said, nodding. He looked slightly sick.

A bluejay shot through the clearing, flashing through the shadows and half light, disappearing in the branch high overhead, reminding me of the old George Harrison song, “Blue Jay Way”, about fogs and L.A. and friends who had lost their way.

I stood in the clearing with a man who had lost his way, too, his life completely derailed by pain and grief and the burning need for revenge. He stared up into the darkening sky, which filled the scattered spaces above the tangle of trees. His bald head gleamed dully in the muted light.

We all lose our way,
I thought.
Some of us just for longer than others.

Perhaps even for all eternity.

“A part of me doesn’t believe you can get him here,” said Stuart, still looking up, his voice carrying up to the highest, twisted branches.

I said nothing.

“But another part of me believes you can. It’s a small part, granted, but it believes that you can somehow, someway, deliver Orange County’s biggest son-of-a-bitch to me.”

I was quiet, leaning my hip on the fender of the minivan, my hands folded under my chest. A small, hot wind blew through the clearing.

“So then I ask myself, ‘What will you do if he does show up? What will you do if Samantha Moon really can deliver him?’” He lowered his head and looked over at me, his face partially hidden in shadows. I could mostly see through shadows, but I doubted he could. I’m sure to him I was nothing more than a silhouette. A cute silhouette, granted. “But that’s the easy part, Sam. If you deliver him to me, I will hurt him. I will do everything within my power to make him feel the pain he has made me feel. But first I will play my wife’s last message to him. I want him to hear her voice. I want my wife’s voice to be the last thing that son-of-a-bitch hears.”

A single prop airplane flew low overhead, its engine droning steadily and peacefully. A bug alighted on my arm. A mosquito. Now there’s irony for you. I flicked it off before I inadvertently created a mutant strain of immortal mosquitoes, impervious to bug spray or squishing.

Stuart went on. “But I’m going to give him a fighting chance, more than he gave my wife, the fucking coward. I’m not sure what sort of fighting chance I will give him, but I will think of something.”

We were quiet. The woods itself wasn’t so quiet. Tree branches swished in the hot wind, and birds twittered and sung and squawked. A quiet hum of life and energy seemed to emanate from everywhere, a gentle combination of every little thing moving and breathing and existing. Sometimes a leaf crunched. Sometimes something fast and little scurried up a trunk. A bird or two flashed overhead, through the tangle of branches. Insects buzzed in and out of the faint, slanting half-light.