Sex, Murder And A Double Latte

“You were in the shower,” he explained without bothering to move his eyes in her direction. “I know I came on a bit strong. When I’m in vampire mode I can be a little dramatic.”

“Understandable.” Not.

“I got one of your books this morning. I just started it.”

“Oh? Which one?”

“Your first one. Criminally Insane.”

“Always good to start at the beginning. I hope it’s not too ‘Jane Austen’ for you.”

“No, I’m sure I’ll like it.” He brought his hand up to stroke Dena’s back. “She and I have similar tastes. Although, as a general rule, I’m not all that into fiction.”

“But you do like books about vampires.”

“Yeah, but I’m not so sure they’re all fiction.”

“Well.” I tried to choose my words carefully. “Parts of many novels aren’t. The writers tend to use a lot of accurate historical references.”

“Yeah, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Come on, you read the books. You had to have stopped sometimes and said to yourself, ‘Man, these characters are so real—too real.’ It must have crossed your mind that some of those guys are really out there—that the immortals exist.”

“I’ll concede that some of the writers who wrote on the topic are talented enough to bring their characters to life on the page, but I’m pretty sure it stops there.”

“And why are you so sure of that? Because our current western Judeo-Christian ethic says so? You need to broaden your thinking, Sophie. Open your mind to the bizarre.”

I looked over at Dena. She had become very busy rearranging her glow-in-the-dark condom display. “Okay, Jason, for the sake of argument, let’s say there really are vampires. Does the fact that you are so involved with this—this vampire subculture mean that you want to become one of them?”

“I would be open to it. Vampires aren’t inherently bad. They drink blood because they have to in order to survive. We, on the other hand, slaughter chickens and cows because they taste good. So ask yourself, which one of us should be wearing the black cowboy hat?”

I had to admit I was moving from irritated to amused fairly quickly. I decided to dispense with the standard etiquette I would normally observe upon meeting a new acquaintance. I leaned against a display table and stuck a thumb through my belt loop. “You really are weird, you know that?”

“Yeah, but I got your attention, didn’t I? Crazy beats the shit out of boring.”

I laughed. I was beginning to like him. So he was schizophrenic, he still had a certain je ne sais quoi. “So what are your feelings on Santa Claus?”

“Sophie, I know you just stopped in briefly to say hello, and I wouldn’t want to keep you….” Dena took her attention away from the condoms long enough to stop an impending conversation about the existence of Rudolph.

Jason didn’t seem the least bit perturbed. It probably wasn’t a stretch that he had met up with other people who had difficulty accepting his creature-of-the-night theory. “Okay, I’ll get going. Dena, I’ll see you later, and Jason…it’s been interesting. Have a good lunch—or are you on a strictly liquid diet?”

“For now I’ll settle for sucking the juice out of a red grapefruit.”

He could laugh at himself. That was good. Dena rewarded him with a light kiss and then turned her triumphant smile on me. “I’ll see you later, Sophie. Oh, I almost forgot, I have to do inventory Sunday. Can we move movie night to Monday? I’ve already cleared it with Mary Ann.”

“No problemo, I’ll see you Monday.” I turned to leave.

“Hey, Sophie,” Jason called after me.

“Yeah?”

“You’d make an awesome vampire. Exotic features with supernaturally white skin…that would be cool.”

“Thanks, but I’m kind of digging the whole mortal thing right now. I’ll see you two later.”

I left the store and looked both ways down the sidewalk as I tried to remember where, exactly, I had parked. There was a man sporting a scarred face and a rather obtrusive gold chain peeking into the store window, clearly hesitant to enter.

“You should go in, it’s a good store,” I assured him.

Glazed eyes stared silently back at me. He used his finger to pick some food out of his teeth. Lovely. That was the problem with owning a sex shop. Most of Dena’s customers were fairly respectable, but at least once a day she had to deal with some heroin-loving scumbag looking for a public place to whack off. I considered going back in and warning Dena, but the man turned around and wandered off before I had a chance. Gross, but harmless. I left to find my car. If he did go back, Dena could handle it. After all, she was now being backed up by the power of the living dead.

By the next morning I was physically in much better shape than I had been twenty-four hours previous, but I was also intensely anxious and confused. I approached the mirror and turned from side to side, then turned my back to it and tried to do some kind of contortionist move with my neck so I could review every angle. In a half hour Anatoly would come to pick me up and I had just changed clothes for the eighth time. I was now wearing black boots, jeans, a black V-neck shirt and a leather jacket. “I don’t know, maybe this neckline is a little too low,” I mumbled to myself. I struck a couple of poses to ensure that my boobs would be contained in any position I might need to assume. “What do you think, Mr. Katz? Does it look like I’m trying too hard?”

Mr. Katz was busy making a nest out of a discarded wool sweater. I picked up the fitted gray turtleneck that I had tried on three tops earlier. “But what if he wants to kiss my neck?” Mr. Katz licked his fur suggestively. “I didn’t say I’d let him kiss my neck, but it would be closed minded of me to completely eliminate the possibility.” I looked in the mirror again. This was just going to have to do. My hair couldn’t take another shirt change.

There was a knock at the door. Mr. Katz lifted his head in alarm.

What kind of jerk shows up a half hour early for a first date? I didn’t even have my makeup on yet. I should have trusted my first impression of him. I had a date with the last living caveman.

The knock came again.

“All right, I’m coming.” I gave Mr. Katz a “why me?” look and headed for the entryway. “Which one of my idiot neighbors let you into the building anyway?” I asked before throwing open the door.

“Oops.” It was one of my idiot neighbors.

“Sophie, I didn’t know you had such a high opinion of us.” Theresa Conley wasn’t going to let that one slide. But then again, letting things slide wasn’t really her forte.

“I honestly didn’t mean it, Theresa. You just caught me at a bad time. You see, I was just talking to my cat and… You know what? Never mind. Fresh beginning. Hello, Theresa, what can I do for you?”

Theresa sucked in her cheeks in a manner that made me think of the fish I had had for dinner the night before. “I came because I’m trying to be a good neighbor. Not that you make that an easy task. Nonetheless, I feel it’s my duty to inform you that while looking for parking I saw your car, and it seems someone has broken into it.”

“Oh, God damn it!” This was the second time someone had broken into my car. “Did they break the window?”

Theresa smiled. “Driver’s side.”

“Damn it!”

“Well, I just thought I should tell you. And say hi to your cat for me.” Theresa left in a considerably better mood than she had arrived in.

I slammed the door and turned to see Mr. Katz looking at me questioningly. “I don’t have time for this. I have a date in—” I checked my watch “—twenty minutes.”

Mr. Katz swished his tail and headed back to the bedroom to see if he could do more damage to my sweater collection.

“Argh!” I grabbed my keys from the small table in the entryway. Something was missing. When I came home I always put the face to my CD player on the table next to the keys. Except when I forgot it in the car. If I tried a little harder, could I be a bigger idiot? Defeated, I went out to inspect the damage.

I had parked a little more than three blocks uphill from my apartment, somewhere around five o’clock the day before. I really needed to get an alarm system—although what were the chances I would hear it when I was parked ten miles away? Thanks to an inordinate number of SUVs blocking my line of sight, I wasn’t able to spot my car until I was less than ten yards from it.

I stopped breathing for a second. It was unlike Theresa to understate things, but even from a slight distance it was clear that my Acura hadn’t just been broken into, it had been vandalized. The hood and the trunk had been popped and remained open. When I got closer, I could see that the driver’s side window had indeed been broken, but the biggest damage was to the interior. Not only had they dumped everything out of the glove compartment, but they had also slashed up the interior of both the front and back seats and pulled the stuffing out in several places. There were slashes all over the floor, as well. Hesitant, I looked in the trunk and found that they had also slashed the carpeting in there, along with the spare tire. My hands started trembling and I gripped the top of the trunk to steady them. Who would do this? I pressed my lips together and went to the front of the car to see what else had been destroyed or taken. I forced myself to peek under the hood. The engine was intact.

Why was that? If the object was to cause as much damage as possible, shouldn’t they at least have cut a few wires or something? I peered through the broken glass to get a second look at the mess inside. My CD player was still there. Last I had checked, the main reason people broke into cars was to steal their stereos. My stereo wasn’t state-of-the-art but I was pretty sure it was theft-worthy.