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“What the hell?” I gaped. “What—”
I slid my fingers through the crook of the U. The blood smeared sticky and cold across my fingers. It was animal blood, something gamey, deer blood. Cringing, I swiped my fingers across my skirt, too shocked to worry about the stains it would leave.
I scanned the street for any sign of the vandal. There might as well have been tumbleweeds blowing across the asphalt.
Shock gave way to fear, fear to anger, then anger to shame. And when I realized that I was actually tearing up because someone wrote mean things about me on my car, I rolled right back to anger again. This was a nasty girl trick. This was high school stuff. My hands were shaking so badly it took several passes to try to pull my keys from my pocket.
And now I was driving around town in a car declaring that I was a bloodsucking whore. No one would notice that. I slumped low behind the wheel and drove on as many side streets as I could. Fortunately, there were very few people who needed to wash slanderous graffiti off their cars after ten P.M., so I had the Auto Spa all to myself.
As the remnants swirled red around the drain of the car-wash bay, I pondered the list of people who might have victimized Big Bertha. Unless Sandy had some sort of senior-citizen ninja skills, I doubted she’d be able to beat me back to my car, bloody it, and then get out of sight before I got there. Could it have been a friend of Walter ’s? A human who guessed my secret and was determined to out me whether I liked it or not?
The more I thought about it, the more pissed off I got. I was a grown woman, a vampire. People weren ’t supposed to be able to pull crap like this on me. By the time I turned the newly bathed Bertha onto my driveway, I’d gripped the steering wheel so tightly I’d warped it. Big Bertha now aimed slightly to the right no matter how I steered.
That was kind of an improvement.
I couldn’t burn Walter’s festering grab bag of personal effects. It seemed mean and petty, especially when you considered his fiery end. I decided to give the box to Dick. He was the only person I knew who had some sort of history with Walter and the only person I could think of who could unload so many Knight Rider DVDs.
I made absolutely no effort to look nice. Plain white T -shirt, fat jeans, no makeup. I was planning to go to one of Zeb ’s FFOTU meetings afterward, so I wanted to stand out as little as possible, anyway.
I knocked tentatively on the door, half hoping he wouldn ’t be home. I wasn’t in the mood for dirty charades. The door swung open, and out stepped a familiar, barely dressed blonde.
“Missy! Wow, you’re mostly naked,” I exclaimed.
“Hi, shug!” she said cheerfully. You’d think that someone with a “public sales persona” like Missy would be embarrassed to be caught in a position like this. But she soldiered through the situation as if she weren’t just wearing an old Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt and a smile.
“Hi. So, I guess the other night on the phone, when you mentioned you knew Dick, you meant that you knew Dick. Wow.
Awkward.”
“Jane?” Dick came up behind Missy, barefoot and buttoning ragged Levi ’s. He looked mildly embarrassed but not embarrassed enough to go put on a shirt. I just stared, unsure of what to say or where to look.
“Hi,” I said, settling for a long glance at the pull -tab wind chime dangling from Dick’s porch light. I intentionally hoisted a mental brick wall between my brain/ senses and whatever was going on in Dick’s and Missy’s heads. I did not need those visuals haunting me for the rest of my immortal life.
“What brings you over, Jane?” Missy cooed, smooching Dick’s neck. “Do I have competition for my sweet Dickie?”
“No!” I said, too emphatically. Dick was too occupied by Missy’s full-on oral assault to look offended.
I tried to hand the box over, but Missy wound herself around Dick like a strangling vine. A strangling vine with a butt you could bounce a quarter off. “I just wanted to drop this off for you. It’s Walter’s stuff—”
“Oh, honey, I heard about that awful mess,” Missy said, pulling herself away from nipping Dick’s Adam’s apple. “You just let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”
Pulling her tongue out of Dick’s ear would have been a nice start.
“Don’t you have a meeting to go to, baby?” he asked, untangling himself.
“Why, yes, the Undead Realtors Association is meeting tonight. I ’m the chapter president,” Missy told me. She laughed, tweaking Dick’s nipple. “Wait, are you trying to get rid of me so you can get to your next appointment? You ’d better watch yourself, Jane, we may have a little catfight over my Dickie.”
Missy laughed and disappeared into the trailer. Dick caught my apparently horrified expression and said, “She’s just messing with you. We’re not dating or anything. It’s not even what you would call a relationship. We’re just…” He looked away, avoiding eye contact. “You know, sometimes you just need a lukewarm body.”
“And there’s the Dick I know and…barely tolerate,” I said, as Missy opened the door. She was wearing another slick pink dress suit and fluffing her blond curls back into their “Junior League gone slightly slutty” style.
“Well, I’m off, shug,” she said, then leaned in for another tongue bath. She winked at me. “Jane, don’t forget. Monday.
Mojitos at my place. You promised you’d try. Y’all be good now.”
Did I use the word “promise”?
“I should be going, too,” I said, as Missy slid into her sporty little car. “I hope you find some use for that stuff.”
