Blood Trade, page 10
“Shit! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Hmm.” He held his hands palms up as if he was weighing two things. “Have sex with a beautiful woman or talk about the time.”
“I wasted a whole night.”
“Look at it this way,” said Dominic. “You have a fresh start on today. Go take a shower and then dressed.”
She gave him a dirty look, but stepped quickly into the bathroom, and jumped in the shower. He followed and cleaned up at the sink with a washcloth. Reveling in the unusual sensations of unlimited hot water, Xochitl stayed in the shower until her fingers were all wrinkly. Even then, she was loath to get out. When she did, the door was closed and the room was so filled with steam that she had to open the door and let some out before she could find a towel.
Dominic waited, sitting fully dressed in the plush chair by the window. He watched her as she searched for the various pieces of her clothing and put them on. Hardest to find was her bra which was behind the night table.
“You could have found this for me,” she said.
“Yes,” he replied, watching her fasten it around her and then pull the straps over her shoulders.
When she had finished with her last article of clothing, her tie, she spotted the large manila envelope on the bed. It was supposedly important enough for him to come back to the room for. Opening it, she found half a dozen 8x10 reproductions of very old black and white photographs. The first one featured a man standing next to an old time car. Xochitl didn’t know anything about cars, but she recognized the man immediately. It was Israel, the vampire. He had shoulder length wavy hair and his trademark van dyke.
“When was this taken?”
“1926,” replied Dominic, standing up and walking over. He pointed at the car. “That’s a 1926 Pontiac Series 6. And you see who that is?”
“Yes. Israel, or Leopold Sansonne, as he was known then.”
“Wow,” said the FBI agent. “How long have you known his name? I just got that bit of information last night while you were asleep.”
Xochitl shrugged and flipped to the next picture. It was a group shot. It was three men she didn’t recognize along with the same vampire. The next one was more of the same. The fifth picture was Israel with an unknown dark-haired woman. It was pointless looking at any more of the photos. She didn’t know any of the people in them. She started to shove them back in the envelope, but quickly scanned the last two anyway. One of them stood out immediately and she grasped both edges, letting the rest of the 8x10s fall to the floor. This picture was of Israel standing in front of a café of some sort with a short woman. Wearing a knee length dress and a long string of pearls, she looked the part of a classic 1920s flapper. Though her blond hair was cut into a cute little bob, she was easily recognizable—Novelyne.
“I knew she knew him,” said Xochitl.
“You might have given me either of those tidbits.”
“I don’t…” She stopped and tugged on her lip ring with her tongue for a moment, trying to think of the right thing to say. She had almost said, “I don’t know you well enough to hand over that kind of information to you.” But that made her sound like a slut, because she apparently did know him well enough to jump into bed with him. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you.”
“I’d like to ask her some questions,” said Dominic. “Do you have a problem with that?”
“Not as long as I’m there.”
The left the hotel and picked up his Chevy from the parking garage. The trip to the agency office was relatively quick and quiet. Though she looked at him several times halfway hoping to catch his eye, his eyes were focused on the road. Parking on First Street, they climbed out of the vehicle. Xochitl started for the door, but noticed Dominic wasn’t following.
Turning around, she found him staring down the block. She followed his gaze toward the new sign in front of Robot Slut Tattoo Studio. It was about ten feet tall and six feet wide, mounted above the shop’s door, perpendicular to the building, and featured Xochitl kneeling in front of a white background, holding her breasts in her hands. The micro-bikini bottom she was wearing looked even smaller than it had felt. She stared at Dominic, daring him in her mind to say something, but he simply turned and followed her to the office.
It was still not even six, so Xochitl was not surprised that the closed sign was still up and the front door was locked. She turned the key and led the way in. They had just closed the door behind them when the Get Smart theme began playing from Dominic’s pocket. He whipped out his cell phone and answered it.
“Yes? Alright… Give me the information.”
Xochitl left him to his call and stepped through the door to the back room. The room was dark, but she could tell instinctively that it was empty. She walked up the narrow stairs to the two bedrooms and found both of them, as well as the bathroom empty. A brief pang of worry worked its way into her stomach—it was already light out—but she crunched it up inside of her. She pulled her underwear over her combat boots and slipped a new pair under her skirt, then took off the corset, tie, and shirt looking for something more comfortable. She was down to her bra when she saw Dominic in the doorway watching her.
“You could knock,” she said. “I’m not dressed.”
“You have about seventeen times as many clothes on as you do on the incredibly large sign outside.”
“Fuck you. You’re not my mother.”
“No,” he agreed. “A fact for which I’m sure we’re both better off.”
She slipped a black t-shirt over her head and was pleased that when he read the front of it, he actually blushed. The white lettering across the front read, “I am the evil that men do.” His blushing was all the more satisfying because it was far from being her nastiest shirt.
“I have to leave to go to L.A.” he said. “I’ve got a meeting in the morning, so they booked me a flight from McCarran at 8:45. I’ll probably be back late tomorrow or maybe early Thursday.”
“You don’t have to tell me your every move now,” said Xochitl, pushing past him and starting back down the steps. He followed.
When she reached the bottom of the staircase, she fumbled in the darkness for the lamp in the corner, pulling the chain to turn it on. Her arms instinctively went up in defense even though there was nobody in the room to attack her. Something much worse faced her. The box marked with the number 2 sat on its side against the wall, empty. Arrayed across the floor were its contents—desert fatigues, caps, a canteen, a helmet, knives, pieces of a couple of exploded IEDs, a burka, several ammo clips, and the .45 she had put away the day before. That wasn’t really it, though. It… it… the thing was… the THING was that her pictures were out. There, spread across the floor, the damned dirty floor, were the pictures—pictures of three soldiers, sometimes all together, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone, three soldiers—two men and a woman, in their fatigues: holding their M-4s pointed toward the air, kneeling over dead Taliban, walking through a market place; or in their undershirts; throwing a Frisbee, wrestling each other, or squeezing into a kiddy pool in the middle of the sand—pictures of three soldiers: a fair, muscular man with a blond crew cut; a lanky Hispanic man with even shorter hair; and a dark-eyed, well-muscled woman with a couple of prominent tattoos. Xochitl rushed forward and began gathering the pictures together from the floor. Then she did something she hadn’t done since the last time the pictures were out of the box—she fell on the floor, her body wracked in sobs.
She squeezed her eyes together to stop the tears pouring from them, but it didn’t work. She opened her mouth and wailed. She cried for all the pains that she had suffered since the last time she had looked at the pictures, and she cried for all the events that had almost destroyed her just after the pictures had been taken, but more than that, she cried for it… the thing… finding the pictures laid out right then, having the bandage ripped off her soul when she wasn’t ready for it.
“That fucking… vampire bitch!”
When Xochitl lifted her face up off the cold linoleum, she found that she was alone in the room. Pushing herself up to her knees, she started gathering the military clothing and gear together and putting them back in the box. She was almost finished when Dominic came down the stairs, looking for all the world as if he had only now decided to come downstairs, when he had been right behind her from the very first. He grabbed the metal trashcan that lay on its side against the wall and put it upside down beside her, using it as a seat.
“Do you know me well enough now?” he asked her.
Without looking up, she picked up one of the snapshots and handed it to him. A young soldier was heavily outfitted for combat. He was wearing full battle armor and a full pack, but his helmet was off, revealing a blond crew cut. He was hefting an M-4 mounted with an M203 grenade launcher.
“Keith, I presume.”
Xochitl nodded. She handed him another picture, still not looking up. The soldier in this picture was darkly tanned, all the more obvious because of the white t-shirt he wore with his khaki fatigue pants. His hair was cut as close as it could be without actually shaving it, but the dark outline of his hairline was still obvious. His face was smiling and his arms were straight up over his head, one of them holding a football. He didn’t see the man flying through the air just behind him. He must have been tackled one tenth of a second after the picture was snapped.
“Juan,” said Dominic.
Xochitl nodded again. Finally she rummaged through the pictures and handed a third to the FBI agent. It was clearly of her. Her hair was shorter, though not a lot shorter. She didn’t have a sleeve full of tattoos, only a small one on her bicep and the cross on her neck. She was posed on the hood of a Humvee, pin up style, wearing white military issue underwear and bra and a pair of combat boots.
“Right,” said Dominic. “Put away the rest of the pictures, and we’ll go get some breakfast. You can tell me the whole story while we eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Fine. Put your pictures away. Then we’ll go upstairs.”
“I’m not horny either.”
“Don’t inveigle.”
“That’s not even a real word,” she hissed at him.
He just got up and went out through the door to the outer office. She could hear him as he passed through the front door too. She gathered up the rest of the pictures, all those save the three he still had in his hands, and she put them into box number two with everything else. Then she pressed the lid back on and stacked it on top of the other two boxes. She had just finished when Dominic returned, now with an energy bar in hand, one bite already taken out of it.
“Upstairs,” he said. “I just want to hear the story.”
Xochitl trudged up the stairs. She felt like a death row prisoner making her way toward the electric chair. No, that wasn’t quite true. She’d faced death a half a dozen times this week and in not one of those incidents had she felt as fearful as she did right now. She sat down on the side of the bed and he sat down beside her. She waited silently while he finished his protein bar, then folded the wrapper carefully into fourths and put it into his pocket. He then shuffled through the pictures one after the other, stopping on the first one she had given him.
“So, Keith was your husband.”
“Yes.”
“Who was Juan?” he asked, as he slid Keith’s picture to the back of the stack.
“He was my best friend. We met at boot camp. We worked our way right through everything—MOS, ASVAB, RIP. We even ended up in the same company, though not the same platoon. We were… I don’t even know. It was like we shared parts of the same brain, or maybe it was our souls. We told each other everything. He was from L.A. His brothers were all gang bangers, but he wanted something different. I grew up with nothing, and wanted more. We were closer than brother and sister.”
“You knew him before Keith?”
“Yes. We were already assigned to the 75th, deployed to Afghanistan when we met Keith. He was on his third tour. He was a staff sergeant and Juan was on his fire team. He introduced us… Juan did. He and Keith got along almost as good as he did with me, but it was different—a guy thing. He loved Keith, because Keith was a fearless, crazy lunatic. All the guys loved that about him, and that he was really, really lucky. Three tours and not a scratch… at least until he met me.”
Dominic pulled the picture of Xochitl to the front.
“You look very young in this picture.”
“That was only two years ago. That doesn’t seem possible.”
“Time is funny like that,” he said, “especially in combat.”
“Juan introduced me to Keith and we hit it off. It wasn’t like it was with Juan. Keith and I became friends, but right from the start it was more of a chemistry thing. After about a week, we were fucking our brains out. I don’t even remember how it started, but we just went crazy. I guess we both had a lot of frustration and tension to work out. It became an every night thing, unless one of us was off base. He was leading patrols on this stupid fucking highway that NATO had built. All the Hajjis were afraid to use it because the Taliban kept planting IEDs all over it. That and they’d cut the nuts off any truck driver they caught. So Keith and Juan had to keep going out to clear it of explosives and pay the Hajjis a year’s wages to drive their trucks on it. In the meantime, I was having tea with the women in their houses, because the male soldiers weren’t allowed in. I’d try to convince them to see a doctor if they were sick, or send their daughters to school, or tell me where the Taliban were. Still, Keith and I found a lot of time to be together, and when we were, we were fucking like bunnies.”
“So when did you get married?”
“We had three days in Germany and we just did it on a whim. We’d been together for well over a year and Keith was crazy in love with me. It was a big no-no, but Keith was just about done with his tour, and he wasn’t going to stay in the army. He decided he was going back to Oklahoma and take over his dad’s garage. He said he would get settled in and be all ready when I got out.”
“You said he was crazy in love with you. Were you in love with him?”
“Yeah. Maybe not the same way, but I did love him. I just didn’t love him the way I loved Juan. While Keith was waiting to be shipped out, regimental shifted the platoons around. The Taliban finally seemed like they gave up on the highway, so they didn’t need the firepower patrolling it every day. They gave Keith a handful of other short-timers to show the flag. It was a supposedly safe duty by then. His old platoon, including Juan, got to tour the poppy fields. That wasn’t so safe, which pissed Keith off. But the point was, that I would be at the base with Keith, or I would be there with Juan.
“Then one day, Juan came back all jittery. He’d been shot in the chest twice, but his body armor had saved him. Scared the shit out of him though. I was trying to make him feel better and it just turned sexual. We’d never even kissed up until that point. As soon as it happened, we both felt bad, but we didn’t stop. We snuck around; because we knew what we were doing was wrong. We both loved Keith, and we were both cheating on him. I don’t know if he ever knew about it before. If I had just been fucking around on him, you know, with just anyone, he might not even have minded that much. Keith wasn’t very uptight or possessive. But Juan was too close. It wasn’t that I was having sex with Juan; it was that I was making love to him. I don’t know if he knew about it before that day. He’d been out. They weren’t even done with the patrol, but they had to come back in because one of the fucking Humvees started smoking. They came back to get another one, and he stuck his head in to say a quick “hi”, and there I was with Juan, on my knees like the dog I am…”
“You’re not a dog,” said Dominic.
“My husband saw me on my knees while another guy fucked me.”
“It was a mistake.”
“Yeah, it was a fucking huge mistake—the kind you can’t take back. I looked up just in time to see him turn away and go out the door. By the time I was able to jump up and get dressed, they were driving off. I went back inside and Juan was crying his eyes out. I didn’t know what to do and neither did he. So we got dressed and just sat there, waiting for Keith to come back… but he didn’t come back...”
Wrapping her arms around her head, Xochitl burst into tears again. Dominic put his arm around her, but she acted as if she didn’t feel it. Finally after a few minutes, her breathing returned to normal and she continued with her story.
“What we didn’t know at the time was that the Taliban had left the Highway because a group of Freddys had moved in. What you would call a crèche of vampires was preying on the road travelers. Keith’s team fell right into them. It wasn’t good enough just to kill our guys. They wanted to turn a few and use them to infiltrate the base. Nobody knew what had happened to the patrol. They never found any of the bodies or the vehicles. Juan and I just sat together looking at each other for three nights. We couldn’t even stand to talk to each other. But he would usually spend the night. We would lay there asleep in each other’s arms, fully clothed.
“It was on that fourth night when I woke up because Juan had moved. Then I felt something hot and wet spray across my face. I rolled over and found Keith, or what was left of him. He was… he was one of them. They turned him. I just looked at him for what seemed like hours, but must have been a few seconds. I don’t know what I realized first—that he had become a Freddy or that he had sliced Juan’s throat in his sleep—never even woke him up; he died in his sleep. When I did finally realize whatever I realized, I fought. We fought. He almost killed me. By the time it was over, I was sliced open in half a dozen places and I had sixteen broken bones. But I eventually managed to kill him… it… I never had a chance to reach my firearms… and I certainly didn’t have any tracer rounds with me… I did have my combat knife…”
