“Drop it,” he said.

He should have just shot me, because I took advantage of his taking time to say that and shot him in the head, and the gun in his hand was useless now, since his brain could no longer send it signals, and he toppled back on top of one of the corpses, sharing its silver tray, staring up at the ceiling, the red hole in his forehead like an extra expressionless eye.

“You fool,” she said, the lovely face lengthening into a contorted, ugly mask, green eyes wild behind the glasses.

“I decided I wasn’t thirsty after all,” I said, as I weaved my way between the corpses on their metal slabs.

“You don’t understand! This is serious research! This will benefit humanity…”

“I understand you were paying the chief for fresh cadavers,” I said. “With him in charge of the state’s potter’s field, you had no shortage of dead guinea pigs. But what I don’t understand is, why kill Bill and George Wilson, when you had access to all these riches?”

And I gestured to the deceased indigents around us.

Her face eased back into beauty; her scientific mind had told her, apparently, that her best bet now was to try to reason with me. Calmly. Coolly.

I was close enough to her to kiss her, only I didn’t feel much like kissing her and, anyway, the.45 I was aiming at her belly would have been in the way of an embrace.

“George Wilson tried to blackmail me,” she said. “Bill… Bill just wouldn’t cooperate. He said he was going to the authorities.”

“About your ghoulish arrangement with the chief, you mean?”

She nodded. Then earnestness coated her voice: “Mike, I was only trying to help Bill and George-and mankind. Don’t you see? I wanted to make them whole again!”

“Oh my God,” I said, getting it. “Bill was a live guinea pig, wasn’t he? Wilson, too…”

“That’s not how I’d express it, exactly, but yes…”

“You wanted to make them living Frankenstein monsters… you wanted to sew the limbs of the dead on ’em…”

Her eyes lit up with enthusiasm and hope. And madness. “Yes! Yes! I learned in South America of voodoo techniques that reanimated the dead into so-called ‘zombies.’ The scientific community was sure to reject such mumbo jumbo and deny the world this wonder, and I have been forced to seek the truth with my mixture of the so-called supernatural and renegade science. With the correct tissue matches and my own research into electrochemical transplant techniques-”

That was when the lights went out.

God’s electricity had killed man’s electricity, and the cannon roar aftermath of the thunderbolt wasn’t enough to hide the sound of her scurrying in the dark among the trays of the dead, trying to escape, heading for that door onto the garage.

I went after her, but she had knowledge of the layout of the place, and I didn’t, I kept bumping into bodies, and then she screamed.

Just for a split second.

A hard whump had interrupted the scream, and before I even had time to wonder what the hell had happened, the lights came back on, and there she was.

On her back, on the floor, her head resting against the metal under-bar of one of the dead-body trays, only resting wasn’t really the word, since she’d hit hard enough to crack open her skull and a widening puddle of red was forming below her head as she, too, stared up at the ceiling with wide-open eyes, just another corpse in a roomful of corpses. Bolo’s dead body, where I’d pushed his dead weight off of me, was-as was fitting-at his mistress’s feet.

I had to smile.

Bolo may not have had many brains in that chrome dome of his, but he’d had enough to slip her up.

Death of a Vampire by Parnell Hall

Sergeant MacAullif was less than pleased. That wasn’t surprising. Less than pleased was his default position, the attitude he usually affected whenever I walked into his office. Which was hardly fair. I’d done him a favor once, and he’d gotten me out of a tight jam now and then, and when you added it all up, it wasn’t like we’d hurt each other much. Except the time he threw me up against my car, or the time he tried to push me through a wall. If the truth be known, I think his ritual expression of disgust was no more than that, a ritual expression, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, except that everything was fine, everything was normal, everything was par for the course. If MacAullif ever seemed glad to see me, I’d be worried.

Only this time he had cause.

“A vampire?” MacAullif said.

There is no way I can do justice to the skepticism, sarcasm, and mistrust with which MacAullif managed to imbue the word.

“That’s right.”

“You want me to find a vampire?”

“I’d be relieved if you could. I’m afraid he might be dead.”

“Aren’t vampires already dead?”

“Good point. I see you’re up on vampires. That will help.”

“I’m not up on vampires,” MacAullif said through clenched teeth. “I was ridiculing the notion.”

“I noticed.”

“What are you really here for?”

“I’m a private investigator. I don’t have the resources of the police department.”

MacAullif sighed. “Oh, hell.”

“Can you trace a guy for me?”

“Is he a vampire?”

“I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might subject me to ridicule.”

“Who is this vampire?”

“Morris Feldman.”

“Not Valmont? Or Count Gootsagoo? Or whatever?”

“Sorry.”

“Who is he? Aside from the obvious.”

“That’s what I’d like to determine.”

“What makes you think he’s dead?”

“His girlfriend hasn’t heard from him.”

“You think someone killed him?”

“That’s a possibility.”

“How do you kill a vampire? Silver bullets?”

“That’s werewolves.”

“Cloves of garlic?”

“That’s French bread.”

“Come on. How do you kill a vampire?”

“Stake through the heart.”

“Of course.”

MacAullif opened his desk drawer and took out a cigar. His doctor made him give up cigars; still, he liked to play with them in times of stress. I’d seen him play with them a lot. “Who hired you?”

“The girlfriend.”

“Who’s she?”

“Debbie Dwyer.”

“Why does that name sound familiar?”

“She runs an escort service. You’ve probably patronized it.”

He leveled the cigar. “You want me to do this or not?”

“She’s a college student at Columbia University.”

“What’s she studying?”

“Pre-law.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Not at all.”

“How’d she get involved with a vampire?” MacAullif made a face. “Geez, I can’t believe I asked that question.”

“She’s a goth.”

“What?”

“You know. She wears that white and black makeup, looks like death warmed over.”

“From that you conclude she’s a goth?”

“Not a rough deduction.”

“It is with your track record. I think it’s safe to assume she’s something else entirely, and you misdiagnosed it. How’d you get mixed up with her?”

I flashed back to my first meeting. Which seemed somewhat appropriate when dealing with a vampire, not to be fettered with normal time constraints. Not that vampires can time travel. At least as far as I know. Even so.

It was almost a week since she had walked into my office. I was surprised to see her. First, because she looked like she did. Second, because I don’t get a lot of walk-in clients. The Stanley Hastings Detective Agency primarily services the law firm of Rosenberg and Stone. Richard Rosenberg is one of New York City ’s premier negligence lawyers. I’m his top investigator, which isn’t saying much. His cases are mostly trip-and-falls, someone suing the city of New York for having broken their leg on a pothole or a crack in the sidewalk. I stop by every morning to check my messages and pick up my mail, but most of the time my office is closed. So walk-in clients have a rather small window of opportunity.