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I wasn’t exactly unskilled in the fine art of carjacking, even under pressure. But that was with proper tools. I’d brought them along, just in case, but they were in the duffel along with everything else. I mentally added another tick beside Louis-Cesare’s debt as I feverishly worked to get the car started.
A bullet drilled into the seat just beside my left ear. I pulled my Glock, slammed another clip home and pressed it into Ray’s shaking hands. “Try not to shoot me or the car,” I told him, and crawled under the dashboard.
The vamps must have landed in a V formation around the car, because the bullets came from three directions at once. Ray returned fire wildly, and from the sound of things, he killed a bag of trash, the windshield of a car across the road and the streetlight overhead. I doubt he so much as winged the vamps, but they nonetheless backed off, waiting for him to run out of ammo. Bullets might not kill them, but no one likes getting shot. And I guess they didn’t think we were going anywhere.
It was a point of view I was starting to share, as I struggled to strip wires without the proper tools and without electrocuting myself. Then Ray started kicking me. I glanced up and saw him miming needing another clip. I shook my head. “They’re in the damn duffel!”
He kicked me again, just to be an ass, then began chucking things out of the hole in the roof. The car must have served as one of Chinatown’s infamous tailgate stores during the day, because the back held several cases of knockoff DVDs, fake Gucci handbags and a big box of glass bongs. Ray threw it all, as well as a large portion of the backseat, but it wasn’t enough. A vampire’s fist smashed through the windshield and grabbed him.
The vamp tried to pull Ray through the shattered window, but I grabbed his waistband and pulled back. Ray’s stylish khakis strained and then split down the middle like stripper wear, leaving each of us holding a leg and him in a pair of red satin boxers with Feeling Lucky? emblazoned across the crotch. “Not really,” I said, and punched the vamp in the face.
He staggered back, but the two others had figured out that we were out of ammo—of all kinds—and rushed forward. One of them reached through the hole in the top and grabbed Ray, by the arm this time. That left me struggling one-handed to break the lock on the steering column—with a knife, no less—while holding on to Ray by one hairy leg.
It would have been easier if he hadn’t been struggling like he was afraid he’d end up the same way as his pants. I kept getting kicked in the head, which did nothing for my concentration. And to make bad matters worse, the club doors banged open and more vamps poured out.
But instead of jumping us, they went for Cheung’s men. It looked like the boss had neglected to order Ray’s boys not to help him, and protecting their master is one of a vamp’s foremost priorities. Not that they were any match for the much more senior vamps, but they did manage to overwhelm one by sheer numbers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the one holding Ray.
I’d finally gotten the steering wheel unlocked, but I couldn’t start the damn engine and hold on to Ray at the same time. Then someone embedded a tire iron in the vamp’s head, sending him staggering backward. I started the car, and when the master launched himself at the windshield again, I ran him over.
Of course, that just pissed him off. I saw one of the other vamps run for a dark blue Mercedes coupe parked down the street. And Ray’s boys weren’t going to be able to delay them for long without getting shredded. “Buckle up,” I told Ray, and floored it.
I concentrated on putting some distance between us and the club, while he rooted around in the glove box. He threw a flashlight out the window, and did the same with a tire gauge. But a ballpoint pen he kept. I skidded around a corner onto Canal Street, and he started jabbing me in the leg with it. Hard.
“Give me that!” I tried to take it away from him, but he jerked it back and started waving it around. It took me a second to realize that he was making scribbling motions.
I got this weird idea and started looking for some paper, but there was none to be had. I did come up with an old map of the city, however, in a pocket behind the seat. I gave it to him to doodle on while I did my best to confuse our trail, hoping against hope that he’d manage to circle his missing piece’s location.
He stabbed at the paper with all the coordination of a two-year-old. He finally proffered his masterpiece when we stopped at a red light. The lines were wobbly and slanting, like a right- handed person trying to communicate with the left. But they were definitely words.
I snatched it out of his fingers and held it up to the windshield. I HATE YOU.
“You can write?” I stared at him incredulously. So much for expecting Mircea to give away trade secrets. “Then how about telling me where you are?”
Ray took the map back and painstakingly crafted another sentence around its margins. I DON’T
KNOW!
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You’ve got to be able to see something! A street sign, the name of a shop, anything!”
IT’S DARK.
“What the hell do you mean, it’s dark? You’re a vampire! You see at night!”
NOT IN A DUFFEL BAG!
“A duffel with a hole in it,” I reminded him impatiently. “Look around!”
AND SEE WHAT? I’M IN A TRUNK!
I frowned. “A car trunk? Are you moving?”
NO.
“Give me sounds, then. Smells, anything!”
THERE’S NO NOISE. AND ALL I SMELL ARE YOUR DIRTY SOCKS.
Great. There weren’t too many places that would be totally silent to a vampire’s ears, even a somewhat-mangled vampire. So they were in an enclosed garage, probably underground. And Manhattan only had about a thousand of those.
