Red Delicious(32)

"Dru, I'd have handed over my lady parts to get out of there. And I assure you, I treasure my lady parts."

"So what did you promise her?"

"What do you think? Same thing I've promised Amity and Berenice Maidstone. That I'd go turncoat and betray who-the-fuck-ever I needed to betray to help her get the dildo."

"You're a crude woman," Drusneth muttered.

"And like I said, you're a piano player in a whorehouse, but that's just a figure of speech."

If you're thinking, right about now, how my demeanor towards Drusneth had changed since I showed up unannounced asking if she'd seen Amity-how I was kowtowing before and now here I was, all up in her face and talking smack-let me just remind you of the shitstorm thrill ride I'd endured between that day and waking up half loup in a cage in her office. That sort of foolishness can totally wreck a person's manners.                       
       
           



       

"Belmont, you'd best put a leash on your mongrel before I do it again."

"And then what?" I asked her before B had a chance to respond one way or another. "Do you think, at this late date, that you're going to get anyone else who's wormed herself into the good graces of the Maidstones and Harpootlian? You can doubt my allegiances all you please. Makes no difference to me. But you go changing horses in the middle of the stream like that, jump back to square one, and you and I both know-"

"Enough," Mean Mr. B barked. "Enough, Quinn. We do as Drusneth says. We hold to the present course."

"Even though it's suicidal," I said.

"You let us worry about that," Drusneth told me. She'd picked a long stemmed ivory pipe up off her desk and had begun packing it with a ball of black-tar opium.

I stood up, staring at the body of the dead blue bogle. A shame he hadn't lived long enough I could have shot him twice.

"You'll forgive me if I tend to consider death wishes a somewhat personal choice," I said.

"From what I understand," Drusneth said, lighting her pipe with a greenish flame that appeared at the end of her left ring finger, "you have a stubborn habit of habit of seeking out your destruction every chance you get. Or am I wrong, Belmont?"

"I have my moments," I replied, answering for Mean Mr. B, before he had a chance.

"Go back to the Maidstones," he said. "If you need to feed, take care of that first. But then, you go back to them and when our cheeky twat Harpootlian grabs you again-"

"Yeah, got it. You'll be the first to know."

"Good little mutt." Drusneth grinned as opium smoke leaked from her mouth, coalescing into the perfect likeness of a Chinese dragon above her pretty, borrowed head.

"The unicorn is here somewhere," B all but whispered. "Were it not, she wouldn't be here."

I wanted to kick the corpse of Samuel the Rat Man. I restrained myself. "And if the dildo turns up?"

"Then you get it here, precious. Kill who you have to, but see that you-"

"Sure. I'll just whip out my trusty six-shooter and gun down Miss Thing From Another World before she knows what hit her. You betcha."

"By the way, Quinn, where are your false teeth?" asked B, and I told him I'd misplaced them somewhere or another. He hung his head and tsk-tsked.

"Go," said Drusneth, and she waved a hand at the door. So I went. I'd had ten times enough of the both of them. And yeah, after the Beast and what came after, after my ordeal behind bars, I was starving. Outside-I've neglected to mention this-it was late afternoon, almost sunset, so hunting and disposal would be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. And it would give me time to ponder my ever-more-sticky predicament.

• • •

You tell a story, any story, and you can spin it an infinite number of ways. Lots of people would say that's a load, that there's the lie and there's truth of the matter. Reliable narrators and unreliable ones. Black and white, no room for the infinite confusion of gray. Which just goes to show how lots of people don't know jack about truth, lies, facts, storytelling-all that and more. Anyway, all junkies lie, remember? Every word I say is a lie, and if you didn't catch the inherent fucking paradox there, you're not paying attention and should go back to the beginning, do not pass GO, do not collect two hundred dollars.

But I digress. Sort of.

Lots of people need to pretty up and romanticize the hunger, turn bloodlust into passion and a route to eternal love, so murder becomes a surrogate for sex, hot vampire love becomes socially acceptable necrophilia, and so forth. Well, fuck that noise. Death gets you wet or gives you a hard-on? That's your business, and if you want to trip the "Don't Fear the Reaper" road, cool. Just don't pretend it's something it ain't. Don't be a coward. Problem is, very few people-even the death fetishists-want to die, and thus they invent all sorts of sparkly fantasies to keep their fear at bay. Or at least make it more palatable. Some are happy enough with the Old Man in the Sky, but others, they make caring lovers of us uncaring monsters. I call it "fiend porn." And delusional. You call it what you like.

Most people are idiots.

Which makes things a lot easier for the nasties, me included.

And don't you dare take that as an insult. To me, you're food, and when's the last time you were impressed by the intelligence of a cabbage or a codfish?

See, what I do, as I said right back at the start of this tale, it isn't pretty. It isn't romantic. It isn't sweet Edward Cullen concerned for the fate of Bella Swan. It isn't Louis de Pointe du Lac getting by on poodles 'cause he just can't bring himself to be the death of another human being. If you gotta have a pop culture point of reference, it's more akin to something you'd see on the National Geographic Channel or Nature or whatnot, a lion ripping apart a wildebeest, a pack of hyenas gnawing at the carcass of a baby gazelle who couldn't keep up with the herd, a crocodile pulling out the intestines of a zebra while it's still alive and kicking and trying to cross some muddy river.

Sure, I could spin this story another way.

I could summarize the next bit, for example, something like this:

I fed once, taking a homeless teenager who was sleeping in the back of an abandoned body shop near the banks of the Seekonk River. I was gentle with him, and maybe that was guilt, but maybe it was just my lingering distaste for preying on the "dregs of society," to quote Mean Mr. B. The kid had an erection the whole time, and came about four heartbeats before he died.

I might as well tell you, "Jack the Ripper, that motherfucker did what he did, but damn, he (or she) sure was a merciful sort of bastard."

Or I could find any of a hundred thousand compromises. But I'm in the mood for something more closely approximating the facts of what happened after I strolled out of the brothel on Cranston. Yeah, all junkies are liars, those who drink blood and those who shoot heroin, but . . .

Right, so, after I left Drusneth and B, I walked and walked and walked all the way back across the river to College Hill, half-consciously following one of my usual routes, slipping between the pools of streetlight along the sidewalks with only the windows of sleeping houses eyeballing me. Despite the full moon, the bitter winter night was plenty dark enough for my purposes.

I spotted the kid sort of shuffling along Prospect Street, heading south with the bitter wind at his back, the collar of his leather jacket turned up, trying to shield his ears from the worst of it. He was maybe a hundred yards ahead of me, but it wasn't hard to catch up. I'm fast, quick like a bunny, and my feet can be as wicked silent as a cat's paws if I want them to be.

"Hey, dude. You got a light?" I asked him, taking out one of the Camels I'd bought at a gas station, just before crossing the Point Street Bridge. I didn't smile. I shivered, so he'd believe I was cold as him. He had brown hair, and that's about all I remember. I do not tend to memorize the faces of my food.

The guy turned around, and at first he just stared at me, surprised. After all, he hadn't heard anyone walking along behind him, right? Then he told me no, he didn't have a light, that he didn't smoke. I laughed, and if he noticed the piranha teeth or how my breath doesn't fog, he didn't let on that he had.                       
       
           



       

"Yeah," I said. "Seems like nobody smokes anymore. Jesus, I'm freezing my ass off. What about you?"

Ah, here's another detail I remember. He was wearing glasses, horn-rimmed, fake tortoiseshell. He furrowed his brow and squinted at me from behind the lenses. My stomach rumbled and my mouth watered.

Sometimes, by the way, I like to play with my food, make a game of it all, and that night I was definitely dragging the ritual out longer than necessary.

I pretended to have a violent coughing fit.

"You all right, man?" he asked me.

"Yeah," I replied. "I mean, except for this fucking cold night, I'm fine." But, sadly, I knew the jig was up. I could see the kid knew something wasn't kosher in Denmark, even if he didn't know it was time to start counting off what was left of his life in seconds, what with him standing there on death's doorstep and all.