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Gordy had been generous. For saving his life, since I’d been careless enough to explode a grenade meant for him, he sent over an army of carpenters and janitors to clean up my club and restore the office. A friendly guy from a furniture store called me one night and said I was to come over to take my pick of his stock; any friend of Gordy’s was his friend, too. He even sounded glad about it.
I didn’t protest, accepting it all as Gordy’s version of a modest thank-you gesture.
Foxtrot Joe, since he had tried to stop Desanctis, albeit for his own reasons, got to keep the money he’d skimmed but was told to quietly leave town and not come back. Emma wanted him to meet her parents; her dad had a tailor shop down in Springfield, and he was not averse to offering a job to his future son-in-law. Foxtrot was not averse to accepting it. He knew a little about bookkeeping.
Riordan slipped away when no one was looking, which was no surprise. The fact that Desanctis was missing his watch, wallet, and car keys might have had something to do with it. At some point, the flat tire on the snazzy Hudson had gotten fixed, for the car vanished from my parking lot, never to be seen again. Riordan continued driving a battered Ford, claiming with a grin to know nothing about the theft. He stopped by once to ask after Myrna, but I put him off.
He said he couldn’t fault me for keeping her to myself, describing her as a darlin’ little thing with dark hair. That’s all the detail I got, and I couldn’t ask for more or I’d have to tell him she was a ghost, and that was none of his business.
How was it that he’d seen her and I’d never had a glimpse? I’d done reading on the subject. Some people could see ghosts and others could not, and the ones who do don’t always know it isn’t a living person. Riordan might be psychically sensitive and unaware of it. There’s plenty of stories about the Irish having the inside track on that stuff.
Or maybe when it came to the psychical I was just color-blind. Or ghost-blind. Being a vampire gave me no edge, apparently, but it didn’t bother me much.
Desanctis . . . I never found out what happened to him, and that was fine with me. Gordy ran the dark side of his operation with an arctic-cold efficiency. There are
aspects of it I did not need or want to know about, which he respected. The missing money turned up, and how they got Desanctis to talk I also did not need or want to know about.
I sat behind my new desk, looked over the substantial receipt for the radio, and wondered if there was a way I could put it down as a business expense.
Just as I dropped the receipt into the file, the dance music ceased, there was a hiss of static, and then the voice of an announcer reading sports scores filled the air.
“Myrna,” I said to the apparently empty room, “you are the pip.”
P. N. Elrod has sold more than twenty novels and at least as many short stories, scripted comic books, and edited several collections, including My Big, Fat Supernatural Wedding and Strange Brew. She’s best known for the Vampire Files series, featuring undead gumshoe Jack Fleming, and would write books more quickly but for being hampered by an incurable chocolate addiction. More about her toothy titles may be found at www.vampwriter.com.
BEKNIGHTED
by DEIDRE KNIGHT
She’d nearly freed him on three separate occasions, coming so close that she could practically touch the mail of his armor. Even now, her fingertips trembled with the eager compulsion to feel its burnished surface. To see the gleam and shine of it as she sliced her knight free from the puzzle’s complex design.
A poor cut had ruined the piece’s geometry on the first occasion; a wrongly mounted image had felled them on the second. Most recently, he’d vanished from beneath her paintbrush as if never existing within the scene at all, victim of some misapplied hue or ill-timed flick of her artist’s hand.
Amateur mistakes, all.
That was before she’d solved her own riddle: that real gold was necessary for creating the intricate puzzle box this task required. Such rare, liquefied bullion wasn’t available on the open market, not without a permit from the Artistry Union. (And they couldn’t have just any puzzle maker freeing immortal captives, now, could they? Imagine the dangers to organized society!)
Unfortunately, permits from the labyrinthine, bureaucratic halls of the Union came down the pike only one way—by greasing the Artistry Czar’s palm with some serious coin. Money she definitely didn’t have. Heck, she didn’t even have enough in savings to impress the lowly Fiber Arts Subczar.
Anyway, the point wasn’t the ever-tangling administration of the U.S. government, but rather that she didn’t have the kind of bucks required to obtain usable Templar-grade gold. It was like realizing that a drowning man needed saving—but that first you’d have to use your Nikes to hop to Mars for a rope.
The only way to get her mitts on that gold, she’d finally realized, was to sell a bit of her own freedom in exchange for his. She would have to do what had always been unthinkable to her sleep-till-noon-and-work-when-you-feel-like-it mind-set. Acquire a patron.
Eerily enough, she landed one almost immediately once she committed to the decision. Spookily fast, given the creeping hands of Artistry Union time, where just filling out paperwork for basic requests could take months. The patron application, however, was apparently greased with hot wax, so slippery smooth that her new benefactor arrived at her door within twenty-four hours of her request. She’d landed the beneficent assistance of one Claude Edwards. Now that imperious name, she was certain, should belong to a governmental czar, if not to someone from the twisted corridors of history itself.
She’d been under his thrall since he’d appeared at her workshop almost two weeks ago, that bloodred velvet pouch dangling from his fingertips, swinging like a hypnotist’s pendulum. The tassel tangled in his grasp as if he were working a marionette, wheedling it back and forth in his magnetic hold. He’d stood there, with his smoky blue eyes and exotic skin, like some wise mage bearing gifts, as if one of him were enough to do the work of all three famed magi.
From the first, suggestive promises dripped from his tongue, as liquid and entrancing as true Templar gold would be, she was certain. “I have what you require,” was his opening seduction gambit. That haughty half-smile of white teeth against dusky skin was the second pearl. “I have in my grasp everything that you seek.”
She hadn’t mentioned specifics on the application.
“That’s saying a lot if you knew what I want, mister.” She folded her arms right beneath her breasts, knowing that her size D French bra would appreciate the added lift for effect. “I want a lot of things.”
“No desire should be too much for a woman of your talent,” he answered in a silky whisper. “Or beauty.” He bowed slightly, a sort of almost gesture that left you wondering if it had happened at all.
She slid her gaze up and down his expensively suited body. He had the lean look of a barely restrained panther, the kind that some jet-setting heiress would collar with diamonds. He was also the type of guy who would make a woman, particularly an artist, into another collectible, so she made sure to objectify him as a sort of preemptive strike.
She slid her gaze up and down his form once again. “Most of the things I want, sir, don’t come packaged in thousand-dollar suits. Or looking fine as you do. Just saying.”
