I went upstairs and traded my detective outfit for a sweatshirt and jeans. Time was, I’d head off to sleep right after getting home from work, but lately I’ve got into the habit of unwinding for an hour before I go to bed. I have fewer nightmares that way.
I went into the spare bedroom and checked on my hamster, Quincey. His water bottle was mostly full, but the bowl was empty. I filled it with food pellets and put it back in his cage. That woke him up – hamsters are nocturnal, just like vampires and some cops I know. When he came over to the bowl, I rubbed his head with my index finger for a little while. He likes that.
Then I went to sleep – and had bad dreams anyway.
When Christine came upstairs, I was in the kitchen, eating some scrambled eggs. “Morning, honey,” I said.
“Good morning, Daddy.”
It wasn’t morning, but we’d agreed that starting the day with “Good evening” sounded stupid – especially when I said it using my Bela Lugosi imitation.
Christine wore the outfit she usually slept in – sweatpants and a T-shirt. Today the shirt said in front, “Thousands of vampires go to bed hungry.” As she went to the fridge, I saw that the back read, “Give generously when the vampire comes to your door window.”
She got at least a dozen different “vampire-centric” shirts, and I’d asked her once where she bought them. She’d given me a wink and said, “The Sharper Image catalog, of course.”
Christine got a bottle of Type A from the refrigerator, pried off the cap, and put it in the microwave to warm up. Then she sat down and poured the contents into the mug I’d put on the table for her, along with a placemat and napkin. Setting the table for a vampire is pretty uncomplicated, but I knew she appreciated the gesture.
“So how was work?” she asked, taking her first sip.
“Depends on what part you mean,” I said. “Do you wanna hear about how Karl and I almost got held up by elves, or about when it got really weird?”
Her eyes widened a little. “Goodness,” she said. “You mean I have to choose?”
“Naw, I’m having a sale tonight – two for the price of one.”
“Hmmm,” she said. “And what is the price?”
“Your opinion, when I’m done.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal, Sergeant. Go for it.”
So I told her about my shift, starting with when the two elves hit Jerry’s Diner. Eventually, I got around to the new street drug, Slide.
The look she gave me when I finished was as skeptical as McGuire’s had been – not that I blamed her.
“A drug that addicts supes…” She’d picked up that term from me and used it freely, even though some supernaturals consider it a slur. Christine knows I don’t mean anything by it.
“That’s what it looks like,” I said.
“I knew about the goblins and meth, of course,” she said with a frown. “I’m not likely to forget, after a bunch of them came over here to kill you a while back.”
“That’s over and done,” I said. “And anyway, things didn’t work out too well for the gobs that night.”
“Just as well,” she said. “Little green bastards.”
“I never thought it possible that other species of supes could become drug addicts,” I said. “But I trust the evidence of my own eyes.”
“I trust your eyes, too,” she said, “but, for gosh sake… So this stuff affects both elves and vampires?”
“The vampire angle’s just hearsay, for the moment. It came from that asshole Car, and I’m not sure I’d trust him if he said bats fly at night. But elves… yeah, I’d say that’s a certainty.”
She drained the mug and put it down. “Goblins and elves are both part of the faerie family. Think there’s a connection there? Some kind of genetic thing?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “And for the moment, guesses are all I’ve got.”
“I don’t imagine that state of affairs will continue for very long – now that Detective Sergeant Markowski is on the case.”
Some of that was kidding, but only some. Despite knowing me better than anyone alive – or undead – my vampire daughter seems to think I’m pretty cool. How many dads can say that?
“So,” I said, “I take it that this is the first time you’ve heard about this HG stuff?”
“Absolutely. There hasn’t been even a whisper. What’s HG stand for, again? Hemoglobin-something?”
“Hemoglobin-Plus, according to the elf.”
“Plus what?”
“That’s the mystery, or one of them. It must be something pretty potent, since hemoglobin all by itself isn’t addictive to anybody.”
“Well, it is to me,” she said.
“Fuck that. You’re talking about nourishment, honey. Calling blood addictive to vampires is like saying humans are addicted to food. I mean, in a literal sense I guess that’s true – without it, we’d die.”
“The ultimate withdrawal pang.”
“It’s still not the same,” I said.
She laughed softly.
I looked at her. “What?”
“Stan Markowski, once the scourge of the undead from Scranton to Shickshinny, defending vampirism. There was a time when you didn’t talk like that.”
I turned my head and looked out at the night that was pressing against the window. “There was a time when I didn’t know better.”
After finishing my eggs, I said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d ask around the… community about this HG shit when you have a chance.”
“I’ll be happy to,” she said. “But if somebody’s actually using this stuff, it’s pretty unlikely they’re gonna just admit it – at least to me.”
“Maybe not, but it could be somebody heard about another vampire getting hooked on this stuff. You know people like to gossip.”
“And vampires, like corporations, are people, too,” she said, giving me a toothy smile.
“Yeah,” I said, “but a lot more talkative.”
On the way to work, I passed a couple of new billboards that had gone up just since yesterday. One said “SLATTERY FOR MAYOR” and, underneath that, “The man for REAL change.” Three blocks farther on, another billboard reminded me that six of the eight people sitting on the City Council were up for reelection this year, too. But the ad wasn’t paid for by them, even though they were shown in it. The faces of all six were lined up in a row, each with a red X across it. Below that, in big red letters, it said, “THROW THE BUMS OUT!”
I thought that was strange, since I was pretty sure that four of the councilors running for re-election were Democrats and the other two were Republicans. Who would call members of their own party bums?
Then I got a little closer and saw the smaller print saying that the billboard was brought to us courtesy of the fine folks at the Patriot Party. Now it made sense.
The Patriot Party didn’t like anybody – except for fellow Patriots, that is. They were new on the local scene, and while I don’t usually pay much attention to politics, I knew that the Patriot Party combined fiscal conservatism with a social agenda that some people found kind of disturbing. They were backing Philip Slattery for the mayor’s seat, and supporting a whole slate of candidates for City Council.
Everybody wants lower taxes, including me. That’s just what the Patriots promised – I think they wanted to cut the property tax rate in half. That would make a lot of people happy, but the big drop in revenue which would require serious cuts in city services.
The Patriots were fine with that, especially if the services that got cut involved poor people, unwed mothers, or people with substance abuse problems. Supporters of the Patriot Party apparently believed that poor people deserved to be poor, unwed mothers were sluts, and drunks and druggies had brought their problems on themselves and shouldn’t expect taxpayers to help them cope.
The Patriots also weren’t real fond of gays, and they were especially down on supes. Their members contained quite a few Bible-thumpers, who had declared supes to be “abominations before the Lord”. They usually accompanied this claim with a bunch of quotes from the Old Testament – like the one from Exodus that says, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”