3
I laughed. There was no other choice. I could have sworn that Mr. Sutherland had just broken into my room wearing full-on Hefner PJs to tell me his wallet had been stolen. His wallet, which contained the credit card we were using to book hotel rooms and buy my meals, was missing. That was the height of fricking hilarity as far as I was concerned.
“Why are you laughing?” he demanded.
“Y-you’re wearing pajamas.” I giggled. “You’re not even going to sleep. You went to the trouble of packing pajamas, and you don’t—”
He glowered down at me. I realized that I was bent at the waist, hee-hawing like a fool, giving an agitated vampire a full down-to-the-navel view of my cleavage. I sobered and straightened, giving him an apologetic little smile.
“You’re sure it’s not in your room somewhere?” I asked carefully, wiping my eyes. “Or maybe in the car?”
“Do you think I would have knocked if I had not already turned my room upside-down looking for it?” he asked sarcastically.
I thought back to our run-in with Lanky and Heavy-Set. They’d had more than enough time to snake Mr. Sutherland’s wallet out of his pocket while they were wrestling around with him. Between the silver and the strange overtures, both of us had been pretty distracted. Had the whole “Good Samaritan Stooges” act been just that, an act? Had mugging my client been the point all along? Had they driven off, stunned and scared, only to pull into another parking lot and pretend to care whether another girl was being targeted as an easy mark?
I think that hurt my feelings a little bit.
“I’m sure it was in my jacket pocket when we were … out,” he said vehemently. Suddenly, an expression of indignant shock twisted his features. “I think those ruffians from the parking lot might have taken it!”
“You don’t say!” I groaned, scrubbing my hands over my face.
His expression was grim, and still somehow incredulous, when I tossed him my phone. “Call all of your credit-card companies to report the thefts. My phone has Internet access, so you can look up all of the customer-service numbers. They’ll probably require that you file a police report before they send replacement cards. If you call the police, wake me up, and I’ll give them a statement.”
“You’re going to sleep? Now?” he asked, frowning.
“Yes, unless you want to miss your deadline because I fell asleep at the wheel and crashed the car. You can stay up long enough to make your calls, leave my phone on the nightstand, then sleep through the day. Just make sure you crawl into the car cubby before sunset.”
“You make a surprisingly reasonable argument,” he grumbled. “I assume you’re going to call Miss Scanlon to report this?”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, in the least committal tone one could use without being struck down by lightning for lying. “Good night.”
I closed the door and bumped my forehead against the cold, unyielding metal. There was no way in hell I was calling Iris. Not only had I allowed a client to get assaulted, but now he’d been mugged, too? This was not how one repaid a favor from an old friend.
I snatched up my own bag and found that my wallet was intact. Beeline employees weren’t allowed to use our company “fleet” cards for anything except gas. A digital lock on the cards allowed use only at service stations. Iris said it kept clients from bulldozing us into covering our own meals and hotel fees with company funds. She’d been stiffed too many times by clients who welched once the receipts were submitted for reimbursement. Vampires hated receipts.
Mr. Sutherland and I would just have to survive on my meager plastic until we reached the Hollow. I had just enough room on my MasterCard to make it work. I could only hope that Iris would be so impressed with my creatively overcoming the obstacle that she didn’t offer me up to the vampires as a party snack.
I flopped down on the lumpy motel mattress and buried my face in the flat, flaccid pillow. “Why couldn’t he have just taken the train?”
Six A.M. came far too quickly. And I woke to find that any commiserating camaraderie I might have built with Mr. Sutherland the night before had evaporated with the sunrise. A note, neatly folded under my phone on the nightstand, managed to insult me in an impressively elegant script.
Dear Miss Puckett,
When you manage to rouse yourself, you will find that I am safely tucked away in the car.
I spoke to the police last night to file an incident report. There was no problem with the credibility of my statement, as the blundering duo we encountered have perpetrated this scheme before on couples undead and living—pretending to protect the female from assault while picking the male’s pocket.
“I knew it,” I muttered to myself.
Security video shows the rogues following you from what can loosely be termed a restaurant, so the police know whom they must take into custody. The officers need affidavits from both of us to prosecute the charges after we leave town. I gave mine last night. I took the liberty of writing a statement from your perspective, which will reflect the information given in my own. You will find that the handwriting matches the rather unique penmanship I found on a grocery list in your purse.
“What the—boundaries!” I gasped, hopping out of bed to retrieve my shoulder bag. The list in question was tucked under the purse strap. Apparently, I’d needed “tampons, Fiber One bars, and depilatory cream.”
“Kill me now.”
I glanced at the bottom of my bag and saw that my photo journal had been disturbed. The white ribbon I usually kept around it, a castoff from one of my mother’s Tiffany gift boxes, was tied into a pristine square knot that I couldn’t manage if my life depended on it.
“You asshole!” I hissed at the offending piece of paper. “You presumptuous, invasive vampire asshole!”
Sutherland had rifled through my stuff. He’d looked through the album of photos that I kept just for me, remembrances of moments in my life that I wanted to keep with me forever. He’d touched my things, touched my memories, without asking, because he thought being undead or being the client gave him the right.
I was going to be hitting the brakes without warning a lot today.
I gritted my teeth and continued to read, all the while muttering curses under my breath.
The officers asked that you sign the statement and bring it by the department offices before we leave town. Please make this a priority before any other errands.
To maintain our schedule, I expect that we will reach the Idaho state line by the time I rise. According to my almanac, the sun will set at 6:03 P.M. I expect the car to be stopped and a bottled Type A to be ready at that time.
We must reach Bozeman by the time we retire this evening, Miss Puckett. I will not accept excuses.
Drive safely.
CS
The initials were written with a pretty little flourish, which, after staring at it for a moment or two, I realized was an arrow, indicating I should flip the page over.
P.S. Please remember that the car is not to be driven faster than 65 miles per hour, as outlined on page 5 of the contract rider.
P.P.S. Please remember that you are not to open to the transport cubby at any time before sunset, as outlined on page 2 of the contract rider. The cubby door should not open unless the car comes to a complete stop.
P.P.P.S. Please remember that the car is to remain free of litter, crumbs, and extraneous personal items, as outlined on page 4 of the contract rider.
I would consider the wisdom of leaving the adjoining-room door unlocked—and exactly how long he had been in the room while I was sleeping—at a later time.
I rolled back onto the mattress, pressing my face into the pillow and groaning like a zombie on crank. Murdering a client while he slept was immoral, I supposed. But I didn’t like my chances if I tried while he was awake.
I rose from the thin hotel sheets, stiff and achy, stretching my arms over my head. In the two weeks I’d been home, prepping for this job, I hadn’t had time to find a decent yoga studio in Half-Moon Hollow—I wasn’t entirely sure there was a decent yoga studio in Half-Moon Hollow. But it was either take a beginner’s class in a church basement or try to stretch the knots out of my back on my own … and the last time I did that, I ended up with a puncture wound from a wrought-iron palm-tree sculpture.
Don’t ask.
I found the affidavit folded carefully on top of my purse. The narrative was scrawled in my own loopy half-cursive, half-block script. Mr. Sutherland’s statement was very similar to what actually happened, apparently omitting the part where I’d had to smack Lanky around to come to Mr. Sutherland’s aid. Whether that was an effort to prevent legal trouble for me or to protect his own pride, I had no idea. But it was harmless enough, and I signed it.
I repacked my bag, carefully checking over the room to make sure that I hadn’t left anything like my wallet or my reading glasses behind. I mapped the route to the local police department, confirmed that my phone was fully charged, and walked into the pink light of sunrise. I blinked rapidly, sliding classic Ray-Bans over the bridge of my nose. That was one thing I was going to have to get used to while working with vampires, the shock of daylight.
The sun rose slowly over the horizon, framing a rusty, rounded old pickup at the edge of the parking lot in just the right amount of golden, nostalgic light. My fingers itched for my camera, the lovely little high-powered Canon I’d used while working in Chicago. But, like the rest of my equipment, it had been sold off to keep the creditors at bay.
Three years before, I’d borrowed twenty-five thousand dollars from my parents to buy a share in my then-boss’s photography studio. While moonlighting as a waitress, I’d worked as an assistant and general peon to Anthony Figueroa for more than a year. He was known for edgy wedding photography, wild angles, sexy shots of the bride and groom getting frisky in their wedding attire, shooting the bride underwater in a copy of her gown. Brash, eccentric, and occasionally downright rude, Anthony saw himself as the bride’s last chance to rebel in an otherwise cookie-cutter affair planned by her mother. The business was growing by leaps and bounds, and my parents were impressed enough to loan me the money to buy into the studio.
Partnership with Anthony was supposed to give me time to shoot what he called my “artsy-fartsy” photos of the city I loved so much. But during my brief tenure as a professional photographer, I spent most of my time shooting stock photos for online services. If a bakery needed professional-quality photos of a cupcake for an ad but couldn’t afford a photo shoot, they could go online and buy a stock photo from an online broker. Once Anthony saw how much the services were willing to pay and how quickly I could crank the photos out, I spent weeks painstakingly lighting and shooting an apple, a stapler, women in various stages of frazzled distress. I think those were either for male-escort ads or housekeeping services. I never figured out which.
The monotony, the void of creativity, sort of sucked the fun out of photography for me. I never left the studio. I had to follow prescribed rules about resolution, composition, and color saturation. And when I took my usual long walks down to the river, I’d line up a shot of bridge architecture or a family laughing, and I’d be so worried about aperture and film speed that I’d lose the shot.
And then, in his creative wisdom, Anthony removed portions of a hundred-year-old window casing in St. Thomas Church to attach his precious strobe flashes, making it look as though the bride was caught in a Gothic lightning storm. The window casing was permanently damaged, and the studio was sued into bankruptcy by the bride’s family, the church, the local historical society, and the Catholic League. Also, we may have been excommunicated.
My investment capital, the equipment, our building—everything was liquidated to pay off our debts. So I owned 7 percent of exactly jack squat, but I owed my parents 5-percent interest on the loan. Anthony’s reputation, which was already hanging by a thread thanks to his scorched-earth policy when it came to other photographers, was ruined, as was mine by association. With no job prospects and the loan debt hanging over my head, my parents demanded that I “stop all of the foolishness and get a real job,” which meant working for the firm.
Let this be a lesson to you, kids. Don’t borrow money from your parents. It gets ugly.
Now I was left with my little portfolio of “artsy-fartsy” photos and my old first-generation digital camera. If my Canon had been a Porsche, my old camera was more along the lines of a Toyota Tercel. But I always kept it with me, buried in the bottom of my shoulder bag, in case the mood struck.
I took the old Nikon out of my bag, lined up the shot, and forced myself to forget exposure times or saturation. I just took a quick breath and snapped. I didn’t even bother checking the screen for the result. I just loaded my bags into the back of the car, noting that Mr. Sutherland’s luggage was already stacked neatly in the rack. I checked the cubby door and noted that the special “occupied” tag had been switched on. Like those handy little tabs on airplane lavatory doors, it could only be engaged from inside. It was meant to keep humans from opening the light-tight cubbies during the day, exposing the vampires to dangerous rays. In my case, there was the added bonus of knowing that I wasn’t driving off without my client.
After dropping the report off at the police department, I plugged that night’s approved motel’s address into my phone and prepared to drive at least eight hundred miles to make up for time we lost the night before. According to his calculations, it would take me three full days to drive the twenty-four hundred miles from his home to mine and give him a few hours to spare before his midnight deadline. I would be allowed a short break just before sunset to rest and eat, and then we would drive until eight or so. I was allowed exactly ten hours of “off time” per night, and we were expected to be on the road within an hour of sunrise.
Iris was convinced that people drove more safely during the day. And no one would suspect a vampire of driving around during the day in what looked like a badass soccer-mom vehicle.
Given Mr. Sutherland’s parking-lot experience, I guessed I couldn’t blame him for being a little paranoid. In 1999, this whole public vampirism thing left a lot of humans unsure of our place in the food chain, which could lead to ugly confrontations.
It was as if vampires had walked into the proverbial room, and the entire world stopped talking at once. The first year “postvampire” was a pretty dark chapter in terms of our collective history. The World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead formed to “formally interact with human governments and facilitate open, cordial communication.” In other words, they busted their way into the homes of presidents, prime ministers, and dictators around the world and told them, “Quit killing us off for giggles, or prepare for an ass whipping of biblical proportions.”
The American government issued mandatory after-dark curfews out of fear that vampires would retaliate en masse. So humans found ways to track vampires to their sleeping places during the day, making daytime vampire security a sought-after, ridiculously overpriced service.
Enter Iris Scanlon and her business, Beeline, a daytime concierge service for vampires. Beeline was part special-event coordinator, part concierge service, part personal organizer. Iris took care of all of the little details that vampires couldn’t see to without bursting into cinders or just didn’t want to deal with themselves. Picking up dry-cleaning, filing government paperwork, delivering blood, receiving deliveries of household items. The transport service was an experimental venture, and so far, it didn’t seem likely that Iris was going to be adding it to the menu of regular Beeline services.
I drove hypercarefully through the northeast corner of Oregon to Idaho, driving two miles under the limit and steering as if I was performing neurosurgery. But the drive was a productive one. I learned the words to three Nickelback songs, which meant that I could eventually make fun of three more Nickelback songs. I caught up on The Help, an audio book I’d been saving for a special occasion. My cell phone rang frequently, and I ignored it.
I drove without thinking, without planning. I just enjoyed the scenery and the music and the blissful solitude. I ate gummy worms and trail mix. I went through several of the playlists on the iPod I’d plugged into the stereo system. I loved creating a mood-setting list for every occasion, everything from the “You’ve Been Up for Far Too Long List,” which included a lot of peppy ’80s music, to the “Work the Pole List,” which I’d rather not go into.
I may or may not have made several stops along the way to take pictures of the mountains and a broken-down drive-in movie theater in the middle of nowhere. Yes, it was a calculated risk, but I had to enjoy something about this trip. I could feel my joints loosening when I held the camera. The pictures weren’t particularly good, certainly not good enough to include in my photo journal. I preferred to take shots with some people in them, but for now, it was a good workout, so to speak.
Other than spilling coffee down the front of my blouse, a minor injury sustained while locking a bathroom stall, and a brief run-in with an RV driver who didn’t seem to recognize “no passing” zones, the day went off without a hitch.
Just after sunset, as we left Idaho, I heard bumping around in the cubby. I pulled over on the lonely stretch of I-90 with my emergency flashers blinking and pulled out the warmed packet of blood that Mr. Sutherland had requested.
The evening was pleasant and mild. The blacktop radiated heat against my legs as I made my way around the car. There was no road noise, just the chirp of crickets and the wind over drying grass. I opened the back hatch of the car, just as the cubby door swung up.
Mr. Sutherland sat up as if he was on a hinge, in one smooth upward motion. His three-piece suit—dark charcoal gray with a faint pinstripe—was perfectly pressed. The only thing mussed about him was his hair, arranged in that flawlessly tousled, “recently laid” arrangement. The suit made me think of that Gary Oldman Dracula movie, which made me think of Keanu Reeves’s English accent, which made me giggle.
Hungry vampires were irritable vampires, so I choked it back, making an indelicate snorting noise, as I thrust the blood packet toward him. He took it, eyebrow raised at my display, and drained it immediately.
“Another?” I asked.
He shook his head, watching me carefully. “You don’t have to spoon-feed me. I’m not a newborn.”
“Good morning to you, too, sir,” I retorted with a little curtsey.
He gracefully slid out of the vehicle, straightening his cuffs, and stood over me. He scanned me from head to toe, that same frustrated expression clouding his eyes. His mouth bowed south. “You do realize that you’re supposed to drink the coffee, not bathe in it, yes?”
I glanced down. How did he know I’d dumped half a cup of coffee into my cleavage? I’d changed my stained blouse hours before on one of my scheduled bathroom stops. I sniffed my shirt and only detected the slightest scent of coffee, which was coming from … my bra. He was smelling my bra. Well, that was gross.
“Caffeine tightens the pores,” I retorted, rounding the car. “Are you planning to ride shotgun, or—” I watched as Mr. Sutherland slid into the backseat. “OK, then.”
He opened his atlas and checked our progress against the map. He frowned. Without looking up, he asked, “Did you submit the police report this morning?”
“Yes. That was a creepily accurate forgery of my handwriting, by the way.”
He ignored the compliment-slash-jibe. “Did you contact Miss Scanlon and let her know about our difficulties? Did she make arrangements for our travel expenses?”
I cleared my throat and nodded. “Mm-hmm.”
I glanced down at my phone, noting that while we were standing outside, I’d received another call from my mother. I grumbled, shoving it into my purse, and then turned the keys in the ignition.
“Miss Puckett.”
I looked up into the rearview mirror to see blue eyes glaring at me. I moved to put the car into gear, and the frown deepened.
His velvety voice was more insistent—and slightly pissed at being ignored. “Miss Puckett.”
I shoved the gearshift back into park. When I turned to face him, I was smiling so sweetly I feared my cheeks would crack. “Yes?”
He had his arm stretched across the backseat in a casual, “Nice to finally meet you, Mr. Bond” supervillain pose. The top of his light blue shirt was unbuttoned, revealing the perfectly symmetrical hollow of his throat. A sudden, compulsive urge to lick that narrow expanse of skin, framed by slender cords of muscle, overwhelmed my brain, and I had to grip the steering wheel to keep myself in the front seat.
Did they make Adam’s apple porn? Was that a thing? Would I be scarred for life if I Googled it? And if I couldn’t find any pictures, could I take my own? My camera was in the bottom of my bag—
And then I realized that I was staring at Mr. Sutherland’s throat cleavage … and he was clearly aware of this. I could tell by the curious lift of his eyebrow. My cheeks flamed, a rush of blood beneath my skin that shocked as much as it shamed. How could a stare—well, let’s be honest, it was a glare—be enough to make my panties spontaneously combust?
I cleared my throat, breaking contact with the blue orbs of sexy evil. “Is there some reason I shouldn’t be starting the car right now?”
He let his eyes narrow at the offending piece of paper on my dashboard.
I snatched it up. “What, this?”
His lip curled back into a grimace. “Yes, Miss Puckett. What is that?”
“That would be a hamburger wrapper.”
“Yes,” he purred. “And what do we know about hamburger wrappers?”
“Their contents are meaty and delicious?”
His lips twitched, as if he wanted to laugh but couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Litter, Miss Puckett. The car is to be free of litter.”
“Right, sorry,” I said, stuffing the offending paper into a paper sack. “Vampires have an aversion to human food, right? It smells spoiled to you?”
“No, I dislike the idea of riding around with your lunch leftovers for the rest of the evening.” He sniffed. I started the car and pulled onto the shoulder. He nodded slightly. “But yes, vampires lack the enzymes to digest solids, so our bodies instinctively reject human food. The smell is unappetizing. And if we ate so much as a slice of bread, violent vomiting would follow.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate, given our next stop.”
I CAN SEE YOUR HEADLIGHTS