Not that people don’t try.
The Coalition took a crack at it. They got their fingers into a very big pie called Horde Bio Tech, Inc. Took a shot at taking over the whole deal. Wanted to use their labs to start cracking the Vyrus. Didn’t work out for them. That was at least partly my fault. OK, mostly my fault. That’s why me and the Coalition don’t get along so well anymore. That’s why Predo has shifted me from his barely tolerated list to his torture-maim-and-kill-on-sight list. Anyway, they got as close as anyone’s gotten to having a chance to really dig into this thing. The Coalition Secretariat has built up some big piles of money over the decades, centuries, whatever. Money like that creates cracks. And they have become very adept over the years at working their fingers into those cracks and widening them. Once again, that’s the way Terry tells it. And I got no better way of knowing. But that kind of brings up the second reason why Vampyres aren’t cropping up like mushrooms: The Coalition doesn’t want them to.
The Coalition operates on a charter that is the exact opposite of the Society’s: They want to keep the Vyrus under wraps. They’ve been around for a long time, long enough to have a historical perspective of sorts, and they’ve already decided that no one is ever going to accept us as anything vaguely resembling normal. It’s pretty much the only thing I agree with them about. So while their grip on Manhattan may have slipped since the sixties, they still draw some lines, and one of the biggest is about keeping the numbers down. Not that they need to convince anyone. We all get it. This is a pretty delicate ecosystem here. It’s an island for fuck sake; the food supply, as it were, can only support so many predators. But in this case, the problem isn’t that the prey might be hunted to extinction. The problem is that when you get right down to it, we’re not predators, we’re parasites. And we are vastly outnumbered by the true masters of the territory. So it’s in all our interests to keep the numbers as they are.
And that’s why I know Philip is an asswipe.
I think about what an asswipe Philip is while I walk to my place. I think about Philip and all this other crap because the alternative is to think about Evie. The fact that she’s not getting better. The fact that she may be getting much worse. And, yeah, the fact that she’s hoping I’ll be able to donate some of my blood to help her if she gets really bad down the road.
Philip. Think about Philip.
At my place, I duck downstairs and grab the emergency cash. I didn’t need it at Hodown, but at Blackie’s everyone needs cash. I stand there for a second and look at the bed, still messed from last night. Evie didn’t want to come over tonight. Not after I told her I had to go take care of some business and didn’t know when I’d be home. Not the kind of thing a girl wants to hear from her guy the same day she finds out her terminal illness has taken a turn for the worse. Not the kind of thing I wanted to tell her. But I need to knock out this job for Terry, need to get the monkey off my back. I don’t take care of that, I’m not gonna be any help to her anyhow. And I want to, I want to help.
I go in the closet. It’s not blood I need this time. It’s a gun. I unlock the gun safe and take out the.32 snub. I check that it’s loaded and tuck it into the back of my pants. I don’t have any reason to think I’ll need it, but it’s late, and I’m irritable, and I might want to pistol-whip Philip with it. Him or this Count clown.
I lock up and go to Blackie’s.
I push the button next to the anonymous door on 13th. I stand there, knowing someone inside is peeping at me to see if I look OK. The door opens. It’s Dominick.
– Hey, Dom.
– Hey, bud.
He glances up and down the street, checking to see that no cops are nearby, then holds the door wide for me.
– C’mon in.
Blackie’s is a pit. It was probably once the super’s apartment for this building, now it’s as scummy an after-hours joint as you’re likely to find. It’s 4 a.m. and the place has just opened. Lucky me, I’m one of the first in. There’s only the one tiny room, but Blackie managed to crowd it with the bar, a few tables, a couple couches, a pool table and an old-school jukebox that plays real 45s. It takes me two seconds to look over the four or five losers in the place and see that none of them are Philip. I go to the bar and order a beer and a bourbon on the rocks. The beer is a can of Bud that comes out of an Igloo cooler at the end of the bar. The bourbon comes out of a bottle that says Maker’s Mark, but it ain’t. I give the bartender a twenty and she gives me back six and asks me if I need anything else. The anything else being a dime bag of coke that costs twenty-five bucks and wouldn’t get me high even if I didn’t have the Vyrus. I pass. With nothing else to do, I do the usuaclass="underline" sit out of the way, drink and smoke.
An hour passes. The place fills up, but it never gets loud. There are only two rules in Blackie’s: no loud voices and no cursing. The loud voices I get, there are occupied apartments right above us. The cursing is Blackie’s thing. Guess it makes him feel better about running a shitty after-hours coke den. A couple people try to sit at my table and coke-rap my ear off. I stare them down and they leave. Blackie himself shows up at some point: a potbellied black guy in his late fifties sporting ostrich skin boots, a black cowboy hat, and ropes of gold chain draped around his neck. He takes his stool at the end of the bar.
Blackie came to fame back in the day when he opened the first topless club in the East Village. He ran whores and did a brisk business in hijacked booze out the back. He also owned a piece of five or six other bars scattered around the neighborhood. That was then. He lost the club years ago and it was made into a rock venue. His whores left him. The other joints he sold off piecemeal. Now this place is all that’s left of his empire. And it probably makes more money than everything else put together ever did. He knows me from when I used to bounce at Roadhouse. He’d come in and pass me a heavy roll of C-notes and a tiny.25 automatic with pearl handles. I’d hang onto that shit for him ’til he left, the cash in case someone tried to rob him, the gun because he didn’t want to shoot no one if they tried to rob him. I’d pass it back to him at the end of the night and he’d peel off one of the hundreds and hand it to me.
I eye him as he chats with the bartender, looking him over to see if he still carries that bankroll. There’s a baseball-sized lump inside his black Levi’s jacket. Take that off him and my money problems are all solved. He catches me looking, shows me a couple gold teeth, touches his index finger to the brim of his hat and tells the bartender to buy me a round. I nod my head and forget about robbing him.
I drink the free drinks and inhale more Luckys. The place chokes with smoke, a James Brown tune whispers from the juke, everybody does key-bumps of shitty coke or just cuts lines right on the peeling Formica tops of the tables. A light by the door flashes from time to time and Dominick takes a look out the peephole and either lets in the person on the stoop, or doesn’t. I take a look at my watch. Fucking Philip. Boy is cruising for a bruising.