AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh, come on, man,” Walter whined.
“I can keep breaking it,” Rich told him. “Now, do you have something to say to this lady?”
Even I was disturbed at the display of testosterone. “Really, this is just—oh, come on. What’s next? Screaming ‘Mercy is for the weak’?”
Rich actually shushed me, saying, “There’s a principle here.”
Walter mumbled something close to “I’m sorry.”
“What was that?” Rich combined the pain of a crooked arm with the indignity of a flicked ear. I could only hope the situation didn’t escalate to the dreaded purple nurple.
Walter shrieked, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
Rich smiled brightly at me. “Happy?”
“No!” I shook my head. “This is just wrong.”
Rich gave me a look telling me he knew that some small, petty part of me was enjoying this. He released a whining Walter, who rubbed his arm gingerly. “Walter, I want you to go home to your mama’s. Have a drink. And whatever you were planning to do with Norm’s money, don’t do it.”
Walter sneered at me, told Rich he hoped an important appendage rotted off, waited a beat, then took off running. Rich nodded to Walter’s retreating form. “That was Walter.”
Walter had problems, Rich told me. He was a living example that being a vampire made you stronger and faster but not necessarily smarter. Turned behind a bowling alley five years before, he still slept in his mom ’s basement and made a living selling pirated Knight Rider DVDs. It wasn’t much of a living, because he robbed the Cellar at least once every few months. Norm didn’t even bother locking the safe anymore.
I dusted the parking-lot remnants off my jeans, glaring up at him. “So, I’m supposed to feel sorry for the guy who treats Norm like a human piñata and tried to pulverize my skull?”
He shrugged again. “No, but he’s not very bright, so you can’t hold it against him.”
I winced as several parts of my head fused back together. “And yet I think I will, anyway.”
“I like you.” Rich grinned and bowed over my hand in a courtly manner. “Richard Cheney.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking his hand under his nose, making it much more difficult for him to kiss. “Wait, Richard Cheney, as in Dick Cheney? You’re a vampire named Dick Cheney? Somehow, that makes you seem more evil.”
“I was Dick Cheney first. I was Dick Cheney before he came along, and I’ll be Dick Cheney after he’s dead.”
“Sore subject?” I asked.
He nodded. I glanced back at the abandoned bar, its neon sign spattering forlornly against the gathering humidity. “What about the bar?”
Dick made a gesture somewhere between a nod and a slouch. “I’ll close it up. Norm gave me a key for nights like this.”
“How often are you here?”
He laughed. “You’d better get home now, Stretch. Sun’s coming up soon.”
“Not a hot date for years, and suddenly I’m man bait,” I muttered as I opened the car door. Andrea was still napping. I poked her rubbery, inanimate cheek and amused myself by giving her funny faces. “Entrée into the vampire world, my foot.”
As dawn pecked at my windows, I tucked a lightly snoring Andrea in on my couch and asked Jettie to wake her in time to change for work. I knew I would wake up bright and early if invisible hands were yanking the pillow out from under my head.
I took a long, hot shower. It was more than a little nauseating when the gravel was forced out of my healing knee wounds and plinked into the enameled metal tub. I also washed a half -pound of grit from my hair and pulled a seven -inch sliver of windshield glass out of my shoulder.
“That can’t be good,” I muttered, tossing it into the wicker wastebasket. Apathetic about my nudity and the complications it could pose if I were confronted by a ragtag team of stake-wielding teenagers, I hung a thick quilt over the window and collapsed into bed. My last coherent thought was that I’d never retrieved my purse from the Cellar.
According to Jettie, Andrea left for work the next morning wearing an old church outfit of mine, which probably added up to the worst-dressed workday of her life. When I called her cell phone, she was driving two counties over to a client’s house. Amused by my tales of parking-lot fisticuffs, she gave me the background on Dick.
Richard Allan Cheney lived in an old Airstream trailer out on Bend Road. Sort of blew those romantic castle -and-cape fantasies out of the water, didn’t it? Andrea said the mobile life suited Dick ’s restless spirit, to know that he could pick up and move any time he wanted. His only fear was a tornado coming along during the day and ripping the house off him.
Dick was an old friend of Gabriel’s, and when I say old, I mean 140-plus years. He was the last in a long line of dissolute men who were good with women and bad with fiscal responsibility. Dick’s parents died when he was eighteen, leaving him with a perfectly respectable house, a pitiful income, and the one servant the family hadn’t had to fire.
