Mike stood behind a tree.
“I followed him around back,” Mike said. “He went up the fire escape on the back. Then he jumped on this veranda. He’s in the back apartment on the right side. Neil’s in the backyard, watching for him.”
Mike looked down at my ball bat. “That’s a nice complement,” he said. Then he showed me his handgun. “To this.”
“Why the hell did you bring that?”
“Are you kidding? You’re the one who said he killed Bob.”
That, I couldn’t argue with.
“All right,” I said, “but what happens when we catch him?”
“We tell him to lay off us,” Mike said.
“We need to go to the cops.”
“Oh, sure. Sure we do.” He shook his head. He looked as if he were dealing with a child. A very slow one. “Aaron, going to the cops now won’t bring Bob back. And it’s only going to get us in trouble.”
That’s when we heard the shout. It sounded like Neil.
Maybe five feet of rust-colored grass separated the yard from the alley that ran along the west side of the apartment house.
We ran down the alley, having to hop over an ancient drooping picket fence to reach the backyard where Neil lay sprawled, face down, next to a twenty-year-old Chevrolet that was tireless and up on blocks. Through the windshield, you could see the huge gouges in the seats where the rats had eaten their fill.
The backyard smelled of dog shit and car oil.
Neil was moaning. At least we knew he was alive.
“The sonofabitch,” he said, when we got him to his feet. “I moved over to the other side, back of the car there, so he wouldn’t see me if he tried to come down that fire escape. I didn’t figure there was another fire escape on the side of the building. He must’ve come around there and snuck up on me. He tried to kill me but I had this—”
In the moonlight, his wrist and the switchblade knife he held in his fingers were wet and dark with blood. “I got him a couple of times in the arm. Otherwise, I’d be dead.”
“We’re going up there,” Mike said.
“How about checking Neil first?” I said.
“I’m fine,” Neil said. “A little headache from where he caught me on the back of the neck.” He waved his bloody blade. “Good thing I had this.”
The landlord was on the first floor. He wore Bermuda shorts and no shirt. He looked eleven or twelve months pregnant with little male titties and enough coarse black hair to knit a sweater with. He had a plastic-tipped cigarillo in the left corner of his mouth.
“Yeah?”
“Two-F,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Who lives there?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody?”
“If you were the law, you’d show me a badge.”
“I’ll show you a badge,” Mike said, making a fist.
“Hey,” I said, playing good cop to his bad cop. “You just let me speak to this gentleman.”
The guy seemed to like my reference to him as a gentleman. It was probably the only flattering name he’d never been called.
“Sir, we saw somebody go up there.”
“Oh,” he said, “the vampires.”
“Vampires?”
He sucked down some cigarillo smoke. “That’s what we call ’em, the missus and me. They’re street people, winos and homeless and all like that. They know that sometimes some of these apartments ain’t rented for a while, so they sneak up there and spend the night.”
“You don’t stop them?”
“You think I’d get my head split open for something like that?”
“I guess that makes sense.” Then: “So nobody’s renting it now?”
“Nope, it ain’t been rented for three months. This fat broad lived there then. Man, did she smell. You know how fat people can smell sometimes? She sure smelled.” He wasn’t svelte.
Back on the front lawn, trying to wend my way between the mounds of dog shit, I said, “ ‘Vampires.’ Good name for them.”
“Yeah it is,” Neil said. “I just keep thinking of the one who died. His weird eyes.”
“Here we go again,” Mike said. “You two guys love to scare the shit out of each other, don’t you? They’re a couple of nickel-dime crooks, and that’s all they are.”
“All right if Mike and I stop and get some beer and then swing by your place?”
“Sure,” I said. “Just as long as Mike buys Bud and none of that generic crap.”
“Oh, I forgot,” Neil laughed. “He does do that when it’s his turn to buy, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I said, “he certainly does.”
I was never sure what time the call came. Darkness. The ringing phone seemed part of a dream from which I couldn’t escape. Somehow I managed to lift the receiver before the phone machine kicked in.
Silence. That special kind of silence.
Him. I had no doubt about it. The vampire, as the landlord had called him. The one who’d killed Bob. I didn’t say so much as hello. Just listened, angry, afraid, confused.
After a few minutes, he hung up.
Darkness again; deep darkness, the quarter moon in the sky a cold golden scimitar that could cleave a head from a neck.
v
About noon on Sunday, Jan called to tell me that she was staying a few days extra. The kids had discovered archery and there was a course at the Y they were taking and wouldn’t she please please please ask good old Dad if they could stay. I said sure.
I called Neil and Mike to remind them that at nine tonight we were going to pay a visit to that crumbling stucco apartment house again.
I spent an hour on the lawn. My neighbors shame me into it. Lawns aren’t anything I get excited about. But they sort of shame you into it. About halfway through, Byrnes, the chunky advertising man who lives next door, came over and clapped me on the back. He was apparently pleased that I was a real human being and taking a real human being’s interest in my lawn. As usual he wore an expensive T-shirt with one of his client products on it and a pair of Bermuda shorts. As usual he tried hard to be the kind of winsome neighbor you always had in sitcoms of the fifties. But I knew somebody who knew him. Byrnes had fired his number two man so he wouldn’t have to keep paying the man’s insurance. The man was unfortunately dying of cancer. Byrnes was typical of all the ad people I’d met. Pretty treacherous people who spent most of their time cheating clients out of their money and putting on awards banquets so they could convince themselves that advertising was actually an endeavor that was of consequence.
Around four, Hombre was on one of the cable channels so I had a few beers and watched Paul Newman doing the best acting of his career. At least that was my opinion.
I was just getting ready for the shower when the phone rang.
He didn’t say hello. He didn’t identify himself. “Tracy call you?”
It was Neil. Tracy was Mike’s wife. “Why should she call me?”
“He’s dead. Mike.”
“What?”
“You remember how he was always bitching about that elevator at work?”
Mike worked in a very old building. He made jokes about the antiquated elevators. But you could always tell the joke simply hid his fears. He’d gotten stuck innumerable times, and it was always stopping several feet short of the upcoming floor.
“He opened the door and the car wasn’t there. He fell eight floors.”
“Oh, God.”
“I don’t have to tell you who did it, do I?”
“Maybe it’s time—”
“I’m way ahead of you, Aaron. I’ll pick you up in half an hour. Then we go to the police. You agree?”