Bloodsucking Fiends

Chapter 1 Death

Sundown painted purple across the great Pyramid while the Emperor enjoyed a steaming whiz against a dumpster in the alley below. A low fog worked its way up from the bay, snaked around columns and over concrete lions to wash against the towers where the West's money was moved. The financial district: an hour ago it ran with rivers of men in gray wool and women in heels; now the streets, built on sunken ships and gold-rush garbage, were deserted — quiet except for a foghorn that lowed across the bay like a lonesome cow.

The Emperor shook his scepter to clear the last few drops, shivered, then zipped up and turned to the royal hounds who waited at his heels. "The foghorn sounds especially sad this evening, don't you think?"

The smaller of the dogs, a Boston terrier, dipped his head and licked his chops.

"Bummer, you are so simple. My city is decaying before your eyes. The air is thick with poison, the children are shooting each other in the street, and now this plague, this horrible plague is killing my people by the thousands, and all you think about is food."

The Emperor nodded to the larger dog, a golden retriever.

"Lazarus knows the weight of our responsibility. Does one have to die to find dignity? I wonder."

Lazarus lowered his ears and growled. "Have I offended you, my friend?"

Bummer began growling and backing away from the dumpster. The Emperor turned to see the lid of the dumpster being slowly lifted by a pale hand. Bummer barked a warning. A figure stood up in the dumpster, his hair dark and wild and speckled with trash, skin white as bone. He vaulted out of the dumpster and hissed at the little dog, showing long white fangs. Bummer yelped and cowered behind the Emperor's leg.

"That will be quite enough of that," the Emperor commanded, puffing himself up and tucking his thumbs under the lapels of his worn overcoat.

The vampire brushed a bit of rotted lettuce from his black shirt and grinned. "I'll let you live," he said, his voice like a file on ancient rusted metal. "That's your punishment."

The Emperor's eyes went wide with terror, but he held his ground. The vampire laughed, then turned and walked away.

The Emperor felt a chill run up his neck as the vampire disappeared into the fog. He hung his head and thought, Not this. My city is dying of poison and plague and now this — this creature — stalks the streets. The responsibility is suffocating. Emperor or not, I am only a man. I am weak as water: an entire empire to save and right now I would sell my soul for a bucket of the Colonel's crispy-fried chicken. Ah, but I must be strong for the troops. It could be worse, I suppose. I could be the Emperor of Oakland.

"Chins up, boys," the Emperor said to his hounds. "If we are to battle this monster, we will need our strength. There is a bakery in North Beach that will presently be dumping the day-old. Let's be off." He shuffled away thinking, Nero fiddled while his empire went to ashes; I shall eat leathery pastries.

As the Emperor trudged up California Street, trying to balance the impotence of power with the promise of a powdered-sugar doughnut, Jody was leaving the Pyramid. She was twenty-six and pretty in a way that made men want to tuck her into flannel sheets and kiss her on the forehead before leaving the room; cute but not beautiful.

As she passed under the Pyramid's massive concrete buttresses she caught herself limping from a panty-hose injury. It didn't hurt, exactly, the run that striped the back of her leg from heel to knee, the result of a surly metal file drawer (Claims, X-Y-Z) that had leaped out and snagged her ankle; but she was limping nonetheless, from the psychological damage. She thought, My closet is starting to look like an ostrich hatchery. I've either got to start throwing out L'eggs eggs or get a tan on my legs and quit wearing nylons.

She'd never had a tan, couldn't get one, really. She was a milk-white, green-eyed redhead who burned and freckled with sun.

When she was half a block from her bus stop, the wind-driven fog won and Jody experienced total hair-spray failure. Neat waist-length waves frizzed to a wild red cape of curl and tangle. Great, she thought, once again I'll get home looking like Death eating a cracker. Kurt will be so pleased.

She pulled her jacket closer around her shoulders against the chill, tucked her briefcase under her breasts like a schoolgirl carrying books, and limped on. Ahead of her on the sidewalk she saw someone standing by the glass door of a brokerage office. Green light from the CRTs inside silhouetted him in the fog. She thought about crossing the street to avoid him, but she'd have to cross back again in a few feet to catch her bus.

She thought, I'm done working late. It's not worth it. No eye contact, that's the plan.

As she passed the man, she looked down at her running shoes (her heels were in her briefcase). That's it. Just a couple more steps…

A hand caught in her hair and jerked her off her feet, her briefcase went skittering across the sidewalk and she started to scream. Another hand clamped over her mouth and she was dragged off the street into an alley. She kicked and flailed, but he was too strong, immovable. The smell of rotten meat filled her nostrils and she gagged even while trying to scream. Her attacker spun her around and yanked on her hair, pulling her head back until she thought her neck would snap. Then she felt a sharp pain on the side of her throat and the strength to fight seemed to evaporate.

Across the alley she could see a soda can and an old Wall Street Journal, a wad of bubble gum stuck to the bricks, a "No Parking" sign: details, strangely slowed down and significant. Her vision began to tunnel dark, like an iris closing, and she thought, These will be the last things I see. The voice in her head was calm, resolved.

As everything went dark, her attacker slapped her across the face and she opened her eyes and saw the thin white face before her. He was speaking to her. "Drink," he said.

Something warm and wet was shoved into her mouth. She tasted warm iron and salt and gagged again. It's his arm. He's shoved his arm in my mouth and my teeth have broken. I'm tasting blood. "Drink!"

A hand clamped over her nose. She struggled, tried to breathe, tried to pull his arm out of her mouth to get air, sucked for air and nearly choked on blood. Suddenly she found herself sucking, drinking hungrily. When he tried to pull his arm away she clutched at it. He tore it from her mouth, twisted her around and bit her throat again. After a moment, she felt herself fall. The attacker was tearing at her clothes, but she had nothing left to fight with. She felt a roughness against the skin of her breasts and belly, then he was off her.

"You'll need that," he said, and his voice echoed in her head as if he had shouted down a canyon. "Now you can die."

Jody felt a remote sense of gratitude. With his permission, she gave up. Her heart slowed, lugged, and stopped.

Chapter 2 Death Warmed Over

She heard insects scurrying above her in the darkness, smelled burned flesh, and felt a heavy weight pressing down on her back. Oh my God, he's buried me alive.

Her face was pressed against something hard and cold — stone, she thought until she smelled the oil in the asphalt. Panic seized her and she struggled to get her hands under her. Her left hand lit up with pain as she pushed. There was a rattle and a deafening clang and she was standing. The dumpster that had been on her back lay overturned, spilling trash across the alley. She looked at it in disbelief. It must have weighed a ton. Fear and adrenaline, she thought.

Then she looked at her left hand and screamed. It was horribly burned, the top layer of skin black and cracked. She ran out of the alley looking for help, but the street was empty. I've got to get to a hospital, call the police.

She spotted a pay phone; a red chimney of heat rose from the lamp above it. She looked up and down the empty street. Above each streetlight she could see heat rising in red waves. She could hear the buzzing of the electric bus wires above her, the steady stream of the sewers running under the street. She could smell dead fish and diesel fuel in the fog, the decay of the Oakland mudflats across the bay, old French fries, cigarette butts, bread crusts and fetid pastrami from a nearby trash can, and the residual odor of Aramis wafting under the doors of the brokerage houses and banks. She could hear wisps of fog brushing against the buildings like wet velvet. It was as if her senses, like her strength, had been turned up by adrenaline.

She shook off the spectrum of sounds and smells and ran to the phone, holding her damaged hand by the wrist. As she moved, she felt a roughness inside her blouse against her skin. With her right hand she pulled at the silk, yanking it out of her skirt. Stacks of money fell out of her blouse to the sidewalk. She stopped and stared at the bound blocks of hundred-dollar bills lying at her feet.

She thought, There must be a hundred thousand dollars here. A man attacked me, choked me, bit my neck, burned my hand, then stuffed my shirt full of money and put a dumpster on me and now I can see heat and hear fog. I've won Satan's lottery.

She ran back to the alley, leaving the money on the sidewalk. With her good hand she riffled through the trash spilled from the dumpster until she found a paper bag. Then she returned to the sidewalk and loaded the money into the bag.

At the pay phone she had to do some juggling to get the phone off the hook and dialed without putting down the money and without using her injured hand. She pressed 911 and while she waited for it to ring she looked at the burn. Really, it looked worse than it felt. She tried to flex the hand and black skin cracked. Boy, that should hurt. It should gross me out too, she thought, but it doesn't. In fact, I don't really feel that bad, considering. I've been more sore after a game of racquetball with Kurt. Strange.

The receiver clicked and a woman's voice came on the line. "Hello, you've reached the number for San Francisco emergency services. If you are currently in danger, press one; if the danger has passed and you still need help, press two."

Jody pressed two.

"If you have been robbed, press one. If you've been in an accident, press two. If you've been assaulted, press three. If you are calling to report a fire, press four. If you've —"

Jody ran the choices through her head and pressed three.

"If you've been shot, press one. Stabbed, press two. Raped, press three. All other assaults, press four. If you'd like to hear these choices again, press five."

Jody meant to press four, but hit five instead. There was a series of clicks and the recorded voice came back on.

"Hello, you've reached the number for San Francisco emergency services. If you are currently in danger —"

Jody slammed the receiver down and it shattered in her hand, nearly knocking the phone off the pole. She jumped back and looked at the damage. Adrenaline, she thought.

I'll call Kurt. He can come get me and take me to the hospital. She looked around for another pay phone. There was one by her bus stop. When she reached it she realized that she didn't have any change. Her purse had been in her briefcase and her briefcase was gone. She tried to remember her calling card number, but she and Kurt had only moved in together a month ago and she hadn't memorized it yet. She picked up and dialed the operator. "I'd like to make a collect call from Jody." She gave the operator the number and waited while it rang. The machine picked up.

"It looks like no one is home," the operator said.

"He's screening his calls," Jody insisted. "Just tell him —"

"I'm sorry, we aren't allowed to leave messages."

Hanging up, Jody destroyed the phone; this time, on purpose.

She thought, Pounds of hundred-dollar bills and I can't make a damn phone call. And Kurt's screening his calls — I must be very late; you'd think he could pick up. If I wasn't so pissed off, I'd cry.

Her hand had stopped aching completely now, and when she looked at it again it seemed to have healed a bit. I'm getting loopy, she thought. Post-traumatic loopiness. And I'm hungry. I need medical attention, I need a good meal, I need a sympathetic cop, a glass of wine, a hot bath, a hug, my auto-teller card so I can deposit this cash. I need…

The 42 bus rounded the corner and Jody instinctively felt in her jacket pocket for her bus pass. It was still there. The bus stopped and the door opened. She flashed her pass at the driver as she boarded. He grunted. She sat in the first seat, facing three other passengers.

Jody had been riding the buses for five years, and occasionally, because of work or a late movie, she had to ride them at night. But tonight, with her hair frizzing wild and full of dirt, her nylons ripped, her suit wrinkled and stained — disheveled, disoriented, and desperate — she felt that she fit in for the first time. The psychos lit up at the sight of her.

"Parking space!" a woman in the back blurted out. Jody looked up.

"Parking space!" The woman wore a flowered housecoat and Mickey Mouse ears. She pointed out the window and shouted, "Parking space!"

Jody looked away, embarrassed. She understood, though. She owned a car, a fast little Honda hatchback, and since she had found a parking space outside her apartment a month ago, she had only moved it on Tuesday nights, when the street sweeper went by — and moved it back as soon as the sweeper had passed. Claim-jumping was a tradition in the City; you had to guard a space with your life. Jody had heard that there were parking spaces in Chinatown that had been in families for generations, watched over like the graves of honored ancestors, and protected by no little palm-greasing to the Chinese street gangs.

"Parking space!" the woman shouted.

Jody glanced across the aisle and committed eye contact with a scruffy bearded man in an overcoat. He grinned shyly, then slowly pulled aside the flap of his overcoat to reveal an impressive erection peeking out the port of his khakis.

Jody returned the grin and pulled her burned, blackened hand out of her jacket and held it up for him. Bested, he closed his overcoat, slouched in his seat and sulked. Jody was amazed that she'd done it.

Next to the bearded man sat a young woman who was furiously unknitting a sweater into a yarn bag, as if she would go until she got to the end of the yarn, then reknit the sweater. An old man in a tweed suit and a wool deerstalker sat next to the knitting woman, holding a walking stick between his knees. Every few seconds he let loose with a rattling coughing fit, then fought to get his breath back while he wiped his eyes with a silk handkerchief. He saw Jody looking at him and smiled apologetically.

"Just a cold," he said.

No, it's much worse than a cold, Jody thought. You're dying. How do I know that? I don't know how I know, but I know. She smiled at the old man, then turned to look out the window.

The bus was passing through North Beach now and the streets were full of sailors, punks, and tourists. Around each she could see a faint red aura and heat trails in the air as they moved. She shook her head to clear her vision, then looked at the people inside the bus. Yes, each of them had the aura, some brighter than others. Around the old man in tweeds there was a dark ring as well as the red heat aura. Jody rubbed her eyes and thought, I must have hit my head. I'm going to need a CAT scan and an EEG. It's going to cost a fortune. The company will hate it. Maybe I can process my own claim and push it through. Well, I'm definitely calling in sick for the rest of the week. And there's serious shopping to be done once I get finished at the hospital and the police station. Serious shopping. Besides, I won't be able to type for a while anyway.

She looked at her burned hand and thought again that it might have healed a bit. I'm still taking the week off, she thought.

The bus stopped at Fisherman's Wharf and Ghirardelli Square and groups of tourists in Day-Glo nylon shorts and Alcatraz sweatshirts boarded, chattering in French and German while tracing lines on street maps of the City. Jody could smell sweat and soap, the sea, boiled crab, chocolate and liquor, fried fish, onions, sourdough bread, hamburgers and car exhaust coming off the tourists. As hungry as she was, the odor of food nauseated her.

Feel free to shower during your visit to San Francisco, she thought.

The bus headed up Van Ness and Jody got up and pushed through the tourists to the exit door. A few blocks later the bus stopped at Chestnut Street and she looked over her shoulder before getting off. The woman in the Mickey Mouse ears was staring peacefully out the window. "Wow," Jody said. "Look at all those parking spaces."

As she stepped off the bus, Jody could hear the woman shouting, "Parking space! Parking space!"

Jody smiled. Now why did I do that?

Chapter 3 Oh Liquid Love

Snapshots at midnight: an obese woman with a stun gun curbing a poodle, an older gay couple power-walking in designer sweats, a college girl pedaling a mountain bike — trailing tresses of perm-fried hair and a blur of red heat; televisions buzzing inside hotels and homes, sounds of water heaters and washing machines, wind rattling sycamore leaves and whistling through fir trees, a rat leaving his nest in a palm tree — claws skittering down the trunk. Smells: fear sweat from the poodle woman, rose water, ocean, tree sap, ozone, oil, exhaust, and blood-hot and sweet like sugared iron.

It was only a three-block walk from the bus stop to the four-story building where she shared an apartment with Kurt, but to Jody it seemed like miles. It wasn't fatigue but fear that lengthened the distance. She thought she had lost her fear of the City long ago, but here it was again: over-the-shoulder glances between spun determination to look ahead and keep walking and not break into a run.

She crossed the street onto her block and saw Kurt's Jeep parked in front of the building. She looked for her Honda, but it was gone. Maybe Kurt had taken it, but why? She'd left him the key as a courtesy. He wasn't really supposed to use it. She didn't know him that well.

She looked at the building. The lights were on in her apartment. She concentrated on the bay window and could hear the sound of Louis Rukeyser punning his way through a week on Wall Street. Kurt liked to watch tapes of "Wall Street Week" before he went to bed at night. He said they relaxed him, but Jody suspected that he got some latent sexual thrill out of listening to balding money managers talking about moving millions. Oh well, if a rise in the Dow put a pup tent in his jammies, it was okay with her. The last guy she'd lived with had wanted her to pee on him.

As she started up the steps she caught some movement out of the corner of her eye. Someone had ducked behind a tree. She could see an elbow and the tip of a shoe behind the tree, even in the darkness, but something else frightened her. There was no heat aura. Not seeing it now was as disturbing as seeing it had been a few minutes ago: she'd come to expect it. Whoever was behind the tree was as cold as the tree itself.

She ran up the steps, pushed the buzzer, and waited forever for Kurt to answer.

"Yes," the intercom crackled.

"Kurt, it's me. I don't have my key. Buzz me in."

The lock buzzed and she was in. She looked back through the glass. The street was empty. The figure behind the tree was gone.

She ran up the four flights of steps to where Kurt was waiting at their apartment door. He was in jeans and an Oxford cloth shirt — an athletic, blond, thirty-year-old could-be model, who wanted, more than anything, to be a player on Wall Street. He took orders at a discount brokerage for salary and spent his days at a keyboard wearing a headset and suits he couldn't afford, watching other people's money pass him by. He was holding his hands behind his back to hide the Velcro wrist wraps he wore at night to minimize the pain from carpal tunnel syndrome. He wouldn't wear the wraps at work; carpal tunnel was just too blue-collar. At night he hid his hands like a kid with braces who is afraid to smile.

"Where have you been?" he asked, more angry than concerned. Jody wanted smiles and sympathy, not recrimination. Tears welled in her eyes.

"I was attacked tonight. Someone beat me up and stuffed me under a dumpster." She held her arms out for a hug. "They burned my hand," she wailed.

Kurt turned his back on her and walked back into the apartment. "And where were you last night? Where were you today? Your office called a dozen times today."

Jody followed him in. "Last night? What are you talking about?"

"They towed your car, you know. I couldn't find the key when the street sweeper came. You're going to have to pay to get it out of impound."

"Kurt, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm hungry and I'm scared and I need to go to the hospital. Someone attacked me, dammit!"

Kurt pretended to be organizing his videotapes. "If you didn't want a commitment, you shouldn't have agreed to move in with me. It's not like I don't get opportunities with women every day."

Her mother had told her: Never get involved with a man who's prettier than you are. "Kurt, look at this." Jody held up her burned hand. "Look!"

Kurt turned slowly and looked at her; the acid in his expression fizzled into horror. "How did you do that?"

"I don't know, I was knocked out. I think I have a head injury. My vision is… Everything looks weird. Now will you please help me?"

Kurt started walking in a tight circle around the coffee table, shaking his head. "I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do." He sat on the couch and began rocking.

Jody thought, This is the man who called the fire department when the toilet backed up, and I'm asking him for help. What was I thinking? Why am I attracted to weak men? What's wrong with me? Why doesn't my hand hurt? Should I eat something or go to the emergency room?

Kurt said, "This is horrible, I've got to get up early. I have a meeting at five." Now that he was in the familiar territory of self-interest, he stopped rocking and looked up. "You still haven't told me where you were last night!"

Near the door where Jody stood there was an antique oak hall tree. On the hall tree there was a black raku pot where lived a struggling philodendron, home for a colony of spider mites. As Jody snatched up the pot, she could hear the spider mites shifting in their tiny webs. As she drew back to throw, she saw Kurt blink, his eyelids moving slowly, like an electric garage door. She saw the pulse in his neck start to rise with a heartbeat as she let fly. The pot described a beeline across the room, trailing the plant behind it like a comet tail. Confused spider mites found themselves airborne. The bottom of the pot connected with Kurt's forehead, and Jody could see the pot bulge, then collapse in on itself. Pottery and potting soil showered the room; the plant folded against Kurt's head and Jody could hear each of the stems snapping. Kurt didn't have time to change expressions. He fell back on the couch, unconscious. The whole thing had taken a tenth of a second.

Jody moved to the couch and brushed potting soil out of Kurt's hair. There was a half-moon-shaped dent in his forehead that was filling with blood as she watched. Her stomach lurched and cramped so violently that she fell to her knees with the pain. She thought, My insides are caving in on themselves.

She heard Kurt's heart beating and the slow rasp of his breathing. At least I haven't killed him.

The smell of blood was thick in her nostrils, suffocatingly sweet. Another cramp doubled her over. She touched the wound on his forehead, then pulled back, her fingers dripping with blood. I'm not going to do this. I can't.

She licked her fingers and every muscle in her body sang with the rush. There was an intense pressure on the roof of her mouth, then a crackling noise inside her head, as if someone were ripping out the roots of her eyeteeth. She ran her tongue over the roof of her mouth and felt needlelike points pushing through the skin behind her canines: new teeth, growing.

I'm not doing this, she thought, as she climbed on top of Kurt and licked the blood from his forehead. The new teeth lengthened. A wave of electric pleasure rocketed through her and her mind went white with exhilaration.

In the back of her mind a small voice shouted "No!" over and over again as she bit into Kurt's throat and drank. She heard herself moaning with each beat of Kurt's heart. It was a machine-gun orgasm, dark chocolate, spring water in the desert, a hallelujah chorus and the cavalry coming to the rescue all at once. And all the while the little voice screamed no!

Finally she pulled herself away and rolled off onto the floor. She sat with her back to the couch, arms around her legs, her face pressed against her knees, ticking and twitching with tiny convulsions of pleasure. A dark warmth moved through her body, tingling as if she had just climbed out of a snowbank into a hot bath.

Slowly the warmth ran away, replaced by a heart-wrenching sadness — a feeling of loss so permanent and profound that she felt numbed by the weight of it.

I know this feeling, she thought. I've felt this before.

She turned and looked at Kurt and felt little relief to see that he was still breathing. There were no marks on his neck where she had bitten him. The wound on his forehead was clotting and scabbing over. The smell of blood was still strong but now it repulsed her, like the odor of empty wine bottles on a hangover morning.

She stood and walked to the bathroom, stripping her clothes off as she went. She turned on the shower, and while it ran worked down the remnants of her panty hose, noticing, without much surprise, that her burned hand had healed completely. She thought, I've changed. I will never be the same. The world has shifted. And with that thought the sadness returned. I've felt this before.

She stepped into the shower and let the scalding water run over her, not noting its feel, or sound, or the color of the heat and steam swirling in the dark bathroom. The first sob wrenched its way up from her chest, shaking her, opening the grief trail. She slid down the shower wall, sat on the water-warmed tiles and cried until the water ran cold. And she remembered: another shower in the dark when the world had changed.

She had been fifteen and not in love, but in love with the excitement of touching tongues and the rough feel of the boy's hand on her breast; in love with the idea of passion and too full of too-sweet wine, shoplifted by the boy from a 7-Eleven. His name was Steve Rizzoli (which didn't matter, except that she would always remember it) and he was two years older — a bit of a bad boy with his hash pipe and surfer smoothness. On a blanket in the Carmel dunes he coaxed her out of her jeans and did it to her. To her, not with her: she could have been dead, for her involvement. It was fast and awkward and empty except for the pain, which lingered and grew even after she walked home, cried in the shower, and lay in her room, wet hair spread over the pillow as she stared at the ceiling and grieved until dawn.

As she stepped out of the shower and began mechanically toweling off, she thought, I felt this before when I grieved for my virginity. What do I grieve for tonight? My humanity? That's it: I'm not human anymore, and I never will be again.

With that realization, events fell into place. She'd been gone two nights, not one. Her attacker had shoved her under the dumpster to protect her from the sun, but somehow her hand had been exposed and burned. She had slept through the day, and when she awoke the next evening, she was no longer human.

Vampire.

She didn't believe in vampires.

She looked at her feet on the bath mat. Her toes were straight as a baby's, as if they had never been bent and bunched by wearing shoes. The scars on her knees and elbows from childhood accidents were gone. She looked in the mirror and saw that the tiny lines beside her eyes were gone, as were her freckles. But her eyes were black, not a millimeter of iris showing. She shuddered, then realized that she was seeing all of this in total darkness, and flipped on the bathroom light. Her pupils contracted and her eyes were the same striking green that they had always been. She grabbed a handful of her hair and inspected the ends. None were split, none broken. She was — as far as she could allow herself to believe — perfect. A newborn at twenty-six.

I am a vampire. She allowed the thought to repeat and settle in her mind as she went to the bedroom and dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.

A vampire. A monster. But I don't feel like a monster.

As she walked back from the bedroom to the bathroom to dry her hair, she spotted Kurt lying on the couch. He was breathing rhythmically and a healthy aura of heat rose off his body. Jody felt a twinge of guilt, then pushed it aside.

Fuck him, I never really liked him anyway. Maybe I am a monster.

She turned on the curling iron that she used every morning to straighten her hair, then turned it off and threw it back on the vanity. Fuck that, too. Fuck curling irons and blow dryers and high heels and mascara and control-top panty hose. Fuck those human things.

She shook out her hair, grabbed her toothbrush and went back to the bedroom, where she packed a shoulder bag full of jeans and sweatshirts. She dug through Kurt's jewelry box until she found the spare keys to her Honda.

The clock radio by the bed read five o'clock in the morning. I don't have much time. I've got to find a place to stay, fast.

On her way out she paused by the couch and kissed Kurt on the forehead. "You're going to be late for your meeting," she said to him. He didn't move.

She grabbed the bag of money from the floor and stuffed it into her shoulder bag, then walked out. Outside, she looked up and down the street, then cursed. The Honda had been towed. She'd have to get it out of impound. But you could only do that during the day. Shit. It would be light soon. She thought of what the sun had done to her hand. I've got to find darkness.

She jogged down the street, feeling lighter on her feet than she ever had. At Van Ness she ran into a motel office and pounded on the bell until a sleepy-eyed clerk appeared behind the bulletproof window. She paid cash for two nights, then gave the clerk a hundred-dollar bill to ensure that she would not, under any circumstances, be disturbed.

Once in the room she locked the door, then braced a chair against it and got into bed.

Weariness came on her suddenly as first light broke pink over the City. She thought, I've got to get my car back. I've got to find a safe place to stay. Then I need to find out who did this to me. I have to know why. Why me? Why the money? Why? And I'm going to need help. I'm going to need someone who can move around in the day.

When the sun peeked over the horizon in the east, she fell into the sleep of the dead.

Chapter 4 Blooms and the City of Burned Clutches

C. Thomas Flood (Tommy to his friends) was just reaching red-line in a wet dream, when he was awakened by the scurry and chatter of the five Wongs. Geishas in garters scampered off to dreamland, unsatisfied, leaving him staring at the slats of the bunk above.

The room was little bigger than a walk-in closet. Bunks were stacked three high on either side of a narrow aisle where the five Wongs were competing for enough space to pull on their pants. Wong Two bent over Tommy's bunk, grinned apologetically, and said something in Cantonese.

"No problem," Tommy said. He rolled over on his side, careful not to scuff his morning erection on the wall, and pulled the blankets over his head.

He thought, Privacy is a wonderful thing. Like love, privacy is most manifest in its absence. I should write a story about that — and work in lots of geisha girls in garters and red pumps. The Crowded Tea House of Almond-Eyed Tramps, by C. Thomas Flood. I'll write that today, after I rent a post-office box and look for a job. Or maybe I should just stay here today and see who's leaving the flowers…

Tommy had found fresh flowers on his bed for four days running and they were beginning to bother him. It wasn't the flowers themselves that bothered him: gladiolas, red roses, and two mixed bouquets with big pink ribbons. He sort of liked flowers, in a masculine and totally non-sissy way, of course. And it didn't bother him that he didn't own a vase, or a table to set it on. He'd just trotted down the hall to the communal bathroom, removed the lid of the toilet tank, and plopped the flowers in. The added color provided a pleasant counterpoint to the bathroom's filth — until rats ate the blossoms. But that didn't bother him either. What bothered him was that he had been in the City for less than a week and didn't know anyone. So who had sent the flowers?

The five Wongs let loose with a barrage of bye-byes as they left the room. Wong Five pulled the door shut behind him.

Tommy thought, I've got to speak to Wong One about the accommodations.

Wong One wasn't one of the five Wongs with whom Tommy shared the room. Wong One was the landlord: older, wiser, and more sophisticated than Wongs Two through Six. Wong One spoke English, wore a threadbare suit thirty years out of style, and carried a cane with a brass dragon head. Tommy had met him on Columbus Avenue just after midnight, over the burning corpse of Rosinante, Tommy's 74 Volvo sedan.

"I killed her," Tommy said, watching black smoke roll out from under the hood.

"Too bad," Wong One said sympathetically, before continuing on his way.

"Excuse me," Tommy called after Wong. Tommy had just arrived from Indiana and had never been to a large city, so he did not recognize that Wong One had already stepped over the accepted metropolitan limit of involvement with a stranger.

Wong turned and leaned on his dragon-headed cane.

"Excuse me," Tommy repeated, "but I'm new in town — would you know where I can find a place to stay around here?"

Wong raised an eyebrow. "You have money?"

"A little."

Wong looked at Tommy, standing there next to his burning car with a suitcase and a typewriter case. He looked at Tommy's open, hopeful smile, his thin face and mop of dark hair, and the English word «victim» rose in his mind in twenty-point type — part of an item on page 3 of The Chronicle: "Victim Found in Tenderloin, Beaten to Death With Typewriter." Wong sighed heavily. He liked reading The Chronicle each day, and he didn't want to skip page 3 until the tragedy had passed.

"You come with me," he said.

Wong walked up Columbus into Chinatown. Tommy stumbled along behind, looking over his shoulder from time to time at the burning Volvo. "I really liked that car. I got five speeding tickets in that car. They're still in it."

"Too bad." Wong stopped at a battered metal door between a grocery store and a fish market. "You have fifty bucks?"

Tommy nodded and dug into the pocket of his jeans.

"Fifty bucks, one week," Wong said. "Two hundred fifty, one month."

"One week will be fine," Tommy said, peeling two twenties and a ten off a thinning roll of bills.

Wong opened the door and started up a narrow unlit staircase. Tommy bumped up the stairs behind him, nearly falling a couple of times. "My name is C. Thomas Flood. Well, actually that's the name I write under. People call me Tommy."

"Good," Wong said.

"And you are?" Tommy stopped at the top of the stairs and offered his hand to shake.

Wong looked at Tommy's hand. "Wong," he said.

Tommy bowed. Wong watched him, wondering what in the hell he was doing. Fifty bucks is fifty bucks, he thought.

"Bathroom down hall," Wong said, throwing open a door and throwing a light switch. Five sleepy Chinese men looked up from their bunks. "Tommy," Wong said, pointing to Tommy.

"Tommy," the Chinese men repeated in unison.

"This Wong," Wong said, pointing to the man on the bottom left bunk.

Tommy nodded. "Wong."

"This Wong. That Wong. Wong. Wong. Wong," Wong said, ticking off each man as if he were flipping beads on an abacus, which, mentally, he was: fifty bucks, fifty bucks, fifty bucks. He pointed to the empty bunk on the bottom right. "You sleep there. Bye-bye."

"Bye-bye," said the five Wongs.

Tommy said, "Excuse me, Mr. Wong…"

Wong turned.

"When is rent due? I'm going job hunting tomorrow, but I don't have a lot of cash."

"Tuesday and Sunday," Wong said. "Fifty bucks."

"But you said it was fifty dollars a week."

"Two fifty a month or fifty a week, due Tuesday and Sunday."

Wong walked away. Tommy stashed his duffel bag and typewriter under the bunk and crawled in. Before he could work up a good worry about his burning car, he was asleep. He had pushed the Volvo straight through from Incontinence, Indiana, to San Francisco, stopping only for fuel and bathroom breaks. He had watched the sun rise and set three times from behind the wheel — exhaustion finally caught him at the coast.

Tommy was descended from two generations of line workers at the Incontinence Forklift Company. When he announced at fourteen that he was going to be a writer, his father, Thomas Flood, Sr., accepted the news with the tolerant incredulity a parent usually reserved for monsters under the bed and imaginary friends. When Tommy took a job in a grocery store instead of the factory, his father breathed a small sigh of relief — at least it was a union shop, the boy would have benefits and retirement. It was only when Tommy bought the old Volvo, and rumors that he was a budding Communist began circulating through town, that Tom senior began to worry. Father Flood's paternal angst continued to grow with each night that he spent listening to his only son tapping the nights away on the Olivetti portable, until one Wednesday night he tied one on at the Starlight Lanes and spilled his guts to his bowling buddies.

"I found a copy of The New Yorker under the boy's mattress," he slurred through a five-pitcher Budweiser haze. "I've got to face it; my son's a pansy."

The rest of the Bill's Radiator Bowling Team members bowed their heads in sympathy, all secretly thanking God that the bullet had hit the next soldier in line and that their sons were all safely obsessed with small block Chevys and big tits. Harley Businsky, who had recently been promoted to minor godhood by bowling a three hundred, threw a bearlike arm around Tom's shoulders. "Maybe he's just a little mixed up," Harley offered. "Let's go talk to the boy."

When two triple-extra-large, electric-blue, embroidered bowling shirts burst into his room, full of two triple-extra-large, beer-oiled bowlers, Tommy went over backward in his chair.

"Hi, Dad," Tommy said from the floor.

"Son, we need to talk."

Over the next half hour the two men ran Tommy through the fatherly version of good-cop-bad-cop, or perhaps Joe McCarthy versus Santa Claus. Their interrogation determined that: Yes, Tommy did like girls and cars. No, he was not, nor had he ever been, a member of the Communist party. And yes, he was going to pursue a career as a writer, regardless of the lack of AFL–CIO affiliation.

Tommy tried to plead the case for a life in letters, but found his arguments ineffective (due in no small part to the fact that both his inquisitors thought that Hamlet was a small pork portion served with eggs). He was breaking a sweat and beginning to accept defeat when he fired a desperation shot.

"You know, somebody wrote Rambo?"

Thomas Flood, Sr., and Harley Businsky exchanged a look of horrified realization. They were rocked, shaken, crumbling.

Tommy pushed on. "And Patton — someone wrote Patton."

Tommy waited. The two men sat next to each other on his single bed, coughing and fidgeting and trying not to make eye contact with the boy. Everywhere they looked there were quotes carefully written in magic marker tacked on the walls; there were books, pens, and typing paper; there were poster-sized photos of authors. Ernest Hemingway stared down at them with a gleaming gaze that seemed to say, "You fuckers should have gone fishing."

Finally Harley said, "Well, if you're going to be a writer, you can't stay here."

"Pardon?" Tommy said.

"You got to go to a city and starve. I don't know a Kafka from a nuance, but I know that if you're going to be a writer, you got to starve. You won't be any damn good if you don't starve."

"I don't know, Harley," Tom Senior said, not sure that he liked the idea of his skinny son starving.

"Who bowled a three hundred last Wednesday, Tom?"

"You did."

"And I say the boy's got to go to the city and starve."

Tom Flood looked at Tommy as if the boy were standing on the trapdoor of the gallows. "You sure about this writer thing, son?"

Tommy nodded.

"Can I make you a sandwich?"

If not for a particularly seedy television docudrama about the bombing of the World Trade Center, Tommy might, indeed, have starved in New York, but Tom senior was not going to allow his son to be "blowed up by a bunch of towel-headed terrorists." And Tommy might have starved in Paris, if a cursory inspection of the Volvo had not revealed that it would not survive the dampness of the drive. So he ended up in San Francisco, and although he could use some breakfast, he was more worried about flowers than about food.

He thought, I should just stick around and see who's leaving the flowers. Catch them in the act.

But he had been unemployed for more than a week, and his midwestern work ethic forced him out of his bunk.

He wore his sneakers in the shower so his feet wouldn't have to come in contact with the floor, then dressed in his best shirt and job-hunting jeans, grabbed a notebook, and sloshed down the steps into Chinatown.

The sidewalk was awash with Asians — men and women moving doggedly past open markets selling live fish, barbecued meat, and thousands of vegetables that Tommy could put no name to. He passed one market where live snapping turtles, two feet across, were struggling to get out of plastic milk crates. In the next window, trays of duck feet and bills were arranged around smoked pig heads, while whole naked pheasants hung ripening above.

The air was heavy with the smells of pressed humanity, soy sauce, sesame oil, licorice, and car exhaust — always car exhaust. Tommy walked up Grant and crossed Broadway into North Beach, where the crush of people thinned out and the smells changed to a miasma of baking bread, garlic, oregano, and more exhaust. No matter where he went in the City, there was an odoriferous mix of food and vehicles, like the alchemic concoctions of some mad gourmet mechanic: Kung Pao Saab Turbo, Buick Skylark Carbonara, Sweet-and-Sour Metro Bus, Honda Bolognese with Burning Clutch Sauce.

Tommy was startled out of his olfactory reverie by a screeching war whoop. He looked up to see a Rollerblader in fluorescent pads and helmet closing on him at breakneck speed. An old man, who was sitting on the sidewalk ahead feeding croissants to his two dogs, looked up momentarily and threw a croissant across the sidewalk. The dogs shot after the treat, pulling their cotton-rope leashes tight. Tommy cringed. The Rollerblader hit the rope and went airborne, describing a ten-foot arc in the air before crashing in a violent tangle of padded limbs and wheels at Tommy's feet.

"Are you okay?"

Tommy offered a hand to the skater, who waved it away. "I'm fine." Blood was dripping from a scrape on his chin, his Day-Glo wraparound sunglasses were twisted on his face.

"Perhaps you should slow down on the sidewalks," the old man called.

The skater sat up and turned to the old man. "Oh, Your Majesty, I didn't know. I'm sorry."

"Safety first, son," the old man said with a smile.

"Yes, sir," the skater said. "I'll be more careful." He climbed to his feet and nodded to Tommy. "Sorry." He straightened his shades and skated slowly away.

Tommy stood staring at the old man, who had resumed feeding his dogs. "Your Majesty?"

"Or Your Imperial Highness," the Emperor said. "You're new to the City."

"Yes, but…"

A young woman in fishnet stockings and red satin hot pants, who was swinging by, paused by the Emperor and bowed slightly. "Morning, Highness," she said.

"Safety first, my child," the Emperor said.

She smiled and walked on. Tommy watched her until she turned the corner, then turned back to the old man.

"Welcome to my city," the Emperor said. "How are you doing so far?"

"I'm… I'm…" Tommy was confused. "Who are you?"

"Emperor of San Francisco, Protector of Mexico, at your service. Croissant?" The Emperor held open a white paper bag to Tommy, who shook his head.

"This impetuous fellow," the Emperor said, pointing to his Boston terrier, "is Bummer. A bit of a rascal, he, but the best bug-eyed rat dog in the City."

The little dog growled.

"And this," the Emperor continued, "is Lazarus, found dead on Geary Street after an unfortunate encounter with a French tour bus and snatched back from the brink by the mystical curative scent of a slightly used beef jerky."

The golden retriever offered his paw. Feeling stupid, Tommy took it and shook. "Pleased to meet you."

"And you are?" the Emperor asked.

"C. Thomas Flood."

"And the 'C' stands for?"

"Well, it doesn't really stand for anything. I'm a writer. I just added the 'C' to my pen name."

"And a fine affectation it is." The Emperor paused to gnaw the end of a croissant. "So, C, how is the City treating you so far?"

Tommy thought that he might have just been insulted, but he found he was enjoying talking to the old man. He hadn't had a conversation of more than a few words since he arrived in the City. "I like the City, but I'm having some problems."

He told the Emperor about the destruction of his car, about his subsequent meeting of Wong One, of his cramped, filthy quarters, and ended his story with the mystery of the flowers on his bed.

The Emperor sighed sympathetically and scratched his scruffy graying beard. "I'm afraid that I am unable to assist you with your accommodation problem; the men and I are fortunate enough to count the entire City as our home. But I may have a lead on a job for you, and perhaps a clue to the conundrum of the flowers."

The Emperor paused and motioned for Tommy to move closer. Tommy crouched down and cocked an ear to the Emperor. "Yes?"

"I've seen him," the Emperor whispered. "It's a vampire."

Tommy recoiled as if he'd been spit on. "A vampire florist?"

"Well, once you accept the vampire part, the florist part is a pretty easy leap, don't you think?"

Chapter 5 Undead and Somewhat Slightly Dazed

French people were fucking in the room next door; Jody could hear every groan, giggle, and bed spring squeak. In the room above, a television spewed game-show prattle: "I'll take Bestiality for five hundred, Alex."

Jody pulled a pillow over her head.

It wasn't exactly like waking up. There was no slow skate from dreamland to reality, no pleasant dawning of consciousness in the cozy twilight of sleepiness. No, it was as if someone had just switched on the world, full volume, like a clock radio playing reality's top forty irritating hits.

"Criminal Presidents for a hundred, Alex."

Jody flipped onto her back and stared at the ceiling. I always thought that sex and game shows ended at death, she thought. They always say "Rest in peace," don't they?

"Vas — y plus fort, mon petit cochon d'amour!"*

* "Do it harder, my little love pig!"

She wanted to complain to someone, anyone. She hated waking up alone — and going to sleep alone, for that matter. She had lived with ten different men in five years. Serial monogamy. It was a problem she had been getting around to working on before she died.

She crawled out of bed and opened the rubber-lined motel draperies. Light from streetlights and neon signs filled the room.

Now what?

Normally she would go to the bathroom. But she didn't feel the need to.

I haven't peed in two days. I may never pee again.

She went into the bathroom and sat on the stool to test her theory. Nothing. She unwrapped one of the plastic glasses, filled it with water and gulped it down. Her stomach lurched and she vomited the water in a stream against the mirror.

Okay, no water. A shower? Change clothes and go out on the town? To do what? Hunt?

She recoiled at the thought.

Am I going to have to kill people? Oh my God, Kurt. What if he changes? What if he already has?

She dressed quickly in her clothes from the night before, grabbed her flight bag and the room key and left the room. She waved to the night clerk as she passed the motel office and he winked and waved back. A hundred bucks had made them friends.

She walked around the corner and up Chestnut, resisting the urge to break into a run. Outside her building she paused and focused on the apartment window. The lights were on, and with concentration she could hear Kurt talking on the phone.

"Yeah, the crazy bitch knocked me out with a potted plant. No, threw it at me. I was two hours late for work. I don't know, she said something about being attacked. She hasn't been to work for a couple of days. No, she doesn't have a key; I had to buzz her in…"

So I didn't kill him. He didn't change or he wouldn't have been able to go to work at all in the daylight. He sounds fine. Pissed, but fine. I wonder if I just apologize and explain what happened…

"No," Kurt said into the phone. "I took her name off the mailbox. I don't really care, she didn't fit the image I'm trying to build anyway. I was thinking about asking out Susan Badistone: Stanford, family money, Republican. I know, but that's why God made implants…"

Jody turned and walked back to the motel. She stopped in the office and paid the clerk for two more days, then went to her room, sat down on the bed and tried to cry. No tears would come.

In another time she would have called a girlfriend and spent the evening on the phone being comforted. She would have eaten a half gallon of ice cream and stayed up all night thinking about what she was going to do with her life. In the morning she would have called in sick to work, then called her mother in Carmel to borrow enough money for a deposit on a new apartment. But that was another time, when she had still been a person.

The little confidence that she had felt the night before was gone. Now she was just confused and afraid. She tried to remember everything she had ever seen or heard about vampires. It wasn't much. She didn't like scary books or movies. Much of what she could remember didn't seem true. She didn't have to sleep in a coffin, that was obvious. But it was also obvious that she couldn't go out in the daylight. She didn't have to kill every night, and if she did bite someone, he or she didn't necessarily have to turn into a vampire — an asshole, maybe, but not a vampire. But then again, Kurt had been an asshole before, so how could you tell? Why had she turned? She was going to have to get to a library.

She thought, I've got to get my car back. And I need a new apartment. It's just a matter of time before a maid comes in during the day and burns me to a crisp. I need someone who can move around during the day. I need a friend.

She had lost her address book with her purse, but it didn't really matter. All of her friends were currently in relationships, and although any of them would offer sympathy about her breakup with Kurt, they were too self-involved to be of any real help. She and her friends were only close when they were single.

I need a man.

The thought depressed her.

Why does it always come to that? I'm a modern woman. I can open jars and kill spiders on my own. I can balance a checkbook and check the oil in my car. I can support myself. Then again, maybe not. How am I going to support myself?

She threw her flight bag on the bed and pulled out the white bakery bag full of money and emptied it on the bed. She counted the bills in one stack, then counted the stacks. There were thirty-five stacks of twenty one-hundred dollar bills. Minus the five hundred she had spent on the hotel: almost seventy thousand dollars. She felt a sudden and deep-seated urge to go shopping.

Whoever had attacked her had known she would need money. It hadn't been an accident that she had turned. And it probably hadn't been an accident that he had left her hand in the sunlight to burn. How else would she have known to go to ground before sunup? But if he wanted to help her, wanted her to survive, why didn't he just tell her what she was supposed to do?

She gathered up the money and was stuffing it back in the flight bag when the phone rang. She looked at it, watched the orange light strobing in rhythm to the bell. No one knew where she was. It must be the front desk. After four rings she picked up.

Before she could say hello, a gravelly calm male voice said, "By the way, you're not immortal. You can still be killed."

There was a click and Jody hung up the phone.

He said, be killed, not you can still die. Be killed.

She grabbed her bag and ran out into the night.

Chapter 6 The Animals

The daytime people called them the Animals. The store manager had come into work one morning to find one of them hanging, half-naked, from the giant red S of the Safeway sign and the rest of them drunk on the roof, pelting him with Campfire marshmallows. The manager yelled at them and called them Animals. They cheered and toasted him by spraying beer on each other.

There were seven of them now that their leader was gone. They wandered into the store around eleven and the manager informed them that they were getting a new crew chief: "This guy will whip you into shape — he's done it all, his application was four pages long."

Midnight found the Animals sitting on the registers at the front of the store, sharing worries over a case of Reddi Wip.

"Screw this hotshot from back East," said Simon McQueen, the oldest. "I'll throw my fifty cases an hour like always, and if he wants more, he can do it himself." Simon sucked a hit of nitrous oxide from the whipped cream can and croaked, "He won't last longer'n a fart on a hot skillet."

Simon was twenty-seven, muscular and as wiry-tense as a banjo string. He was pockmarked and sharp-featured, with a great mane of brown hair that he kept out of his face with a bandanna and a black Stetson, and he fancied himself a cowboy and a poet. He had never been within six-gun range of a horse or a book.

Jeff Murray, a has-been high school basketball star, pulled a can of whipped cream from the open case and said, "Why didn't they just promote one of us when Eddie left?"

"Because they don't know their ass from a hot rock," Simon said. "Can up," he added quickly.

"They probably did what they thought best," said Clint, a myopic, first trimester born-again Christian, who, having recently been forgiven for ten years of drug abuse, was eager to forgive others.

"Can up," Simon repeated to Jeff, who had upended the whipped cream can and was pushing the nozzle. Jeff inhaled a powerful stream of whipped cream that filled his mouth and throat, shot from his nostrils, and sent him into a blue-faced choking fit.

Drew, the crew's pot supplier and therefore medical officer, dealt Jeff a vicious blow in the solar plexus, causing the ex-power forward to expel a glob of whipped cream approximately the size of a small child. Jeff fell to the floor gasping. The glob landed safely on register 6.

"Works as good as the Heimlich maneuver" — Drew grinned — "without the unwanted intimacy."

"I told him to hold the can up," Simon said.

There was a tap on the glass at the front of the store and they all turned to see a skinny dark-haired kid in jeans and flannel waiting by the locked door. He wore a price gun low on his right hip.

"That would be our hotshot."

Simon went to unlock the door. Clint grabbed the case of whipped cream and shoved it under a register. The others ditched their cans where they could and stood by the registers as if awaiting inspection. They were sensing the end of an era; the Animals would be no more.

"Tom Flood," the new guy said, offering his hand to Simon.

Simon did not take his hand, but stared at it until the new guy withdrew it, embarrassed.

"I'm Sime; this is Drew." Simon waved the new guy in and locked the door behind him. "We'll get you a time card."

The new guy followed Simon to the office, pausing to look at the glob of whipped cream on register 6, then at Jeff, still gasping on the floor.

"Can up," the new guy said to Jeff.

Simon raised an eyebrow to the rest of the crew and led the new guy into the office. While he was digging in the drawers for a fresh time card, the new guy said, "So, Sime, do you bowl?"

Simon looked up and studied the new guy's face. This could be a trap. He stepped back and squared off like a gunfighter at high noon. "Yeah, I bowl."

"What do you use?"

"I like a twelve-pound Butterball."

"Net or no net?"

"No net," Simon said.

"Yeah, nets are for grannies. I like a fourteen-pound self-basting, myself." Tommy grinned at Simon.

Simon grinned back and offered his hand to shake. "Welcome aboard." He handed a time card to Tommy and led him out the office. Outside, the crew waited. "Dudes," Simon announced. "This is Tom Flood."

The crew fidgeted and eyed Tommy.

"He's a bowler."

The crew let out a collective sigh of relief. Simon introduced them each, tagging them each with what they did. "That's Jeff on the floor, cake-mix aisle, plays basketball. Drew, frozen food and budmaster. Troy Lee, glass aisle, kung-fu fighter." Troy Lee, short, muscular, wearing a black satin jacket, bowed slightly.

"Clint," Simon continued, "cereal and juices; he's buddies with God." Clint was tall and thin with curly black hair, thick horn-rims, and a goofy, if beatific, smile.

Simon pointed to a stout Mexican in a flannel shirt. "Gustavo does the floors and has forty kids."

"Cinco ninos," Gustavo corrected.

"Excuse the fuck out of me," Simon said. "Five kids." He moved down the line to a short, balding guy in corduroys. "Barry does soap and dog food. His hair fell out when he started scuba diving."

"Fuck you, Sime."

"Save your money, Barry." Simon moved on. "This dark-skinned fellow is Lash, dairy and non-foods. He says he's studying business at Frisco State, but he's really a gunrunner for the Bloods."

"And Simon wants to be Grand Dragon for the Klan," Lash said.

"Be good or I won't help you with your master's feces."

"Thesis," Lash corrected.

"Whatever."

"What do you do, Sime?" Tommy asked.

"I am on a quest for the perfect big-haired blonde. She must be a beautician and she must be named Arlene, Karlene, or Darlene. She must have a bust measurement exactly half that of her IQ and she must have seen Elvis sometime since his death. Have you seen her?"

"No, that's a pretty tall order."

Simon stepped up, nose to nose with Tommy. "Don't hold back, I'm offering a cash reward and videotape of her trying to drown me in body lotion."

"No, really, I can't help you."

"In that case, I work the can aisle."

"When's the truck due?"

"Half an hour: twelve-thirty."

"Then we've got time for a few frames."

There are no official rules for the sport of turkey bowling. Turkey bowling is not recognized by the NCAA or the Olympic Committee. There are no professional tournaments sponsored by the Poultry Farmers of America, and footwear companies do not manufacture turkey bowling shoes. Even the world's best turkey bowlers have not appeared on a Wheaties box or the «Tonight» show. In fact, until ESPN became desperate to fill in the late-night time slots between professional lawn darts and reruns of Australian-rules football, turkey bowling was a completely clandestine sport, relegated to the dark athletic basement of mailbox baseball and cow tipping. Despite this lack of official recognition, the fine and noble tradition of "skidding the buzzard" is practiced nightly by supermarket night crews all over the nation.

Clint was the official pinsetter for the Animals. Since there was always wagering, Clint's religion forbade his playing, but his participation, in some part, was required to ensure that he would not squeal to the management. He set ten-quart bottles of Ivory liquid in a triangle pattern at the end of the produce aisle. The meat case would act as a backstop.

The rest of the crew, having chosen their birds from the freezer case, were lined up at the far end of the aisle.

"You're up, Tom," Simon said. "Let's see what you got."

Tommy stepped forward and weighed the frozen turkey in his right hand-felt its frigid power singing against skin.

Strangely, the theme from Chariots of Fire began playing in his head.

He squinted and picked his target, then took his steps and sent the bird sliding down the aisle. A collective gasp rose from the crew as the fourteen-pound, self-basting, fresh-frozen projectile of wholesome savory goodness plowed into the soap bottles like a freight train into a chorus line of drunken grandmothers.

"Strike!" Clint shouted.

Simon winced.

Troy Lee said, "Nobody's that good. Nobody."

"Luck," Simon said.

Tommy suppressed a smile and stepped back from the line.

"Who's up?"

Simon stepped up and stared down the aisle, watching Clint set up the pins. A nervous tick jittered under his left eye.

Strangely, the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly began playing in his head.

The turkey was heavy in his hand. He could almost feel the giblets pulsing with tension — the Butterball version of the Tell-Tale Heart. He strode to the line, swinging the turkey back in a wide arc, then forward with an explosive yell. The turkey rocketed, airborne, three quarters of the way down the aisle before touching down and slamming through the soap bottles and into the base of the meat case, smashing metal and severing wires in a shower of sparks and smoke.

The store lights flickered and went out. The huge compressors that ran the store's refrigeration wound down like dying airliners. The smell of ozone and burned insulation filled the air. A moment of dark silence — the Animals stood motionless, sweating, as if waiting for the deadly sound of an approaching U-boat. Battery back-up modules switched on safety lights at the end of each aisle. The crew looked from Simon, who stood at the line with his mouth hanging open, to the turkey, sticking, blackened and burned, in the side of the meat case like an unexploded artillery shell.

They checked their watches: exactly six hours and forty-eight minutes to exact repairs and stock the shelves before the manager came in to open the store.

"Break time!" Tommy announced.

They sat on a row of grocery carts outside the store, their backs against the wall, smoking, eating, and, in the case of Simon, telling lies.

"This is nothing," Simon said. "When I was working a store in Idaho, we ran a forklift through the dairy case. Two hundred gallons of milk on the floor. Sucked it up in the Shop-Vac and had it back in the cartons ten minutes before opening and no one knew the difference."

Tommy was sitting next to Troy Lee, trying to get up the courage to ask a favor. For the first time since arriving in San Francisco, he felt as if he fit in somewhere and he didn't want to push his luck. Still, this was his crew now, even if he had padded his application a bit to get the job.

Tommy decided to dive in. "Troy, no offense, but do you speak Chinese?"

"Two dialects," Troy said around a mouthful of corn chips. "Why?"

"Well, I'm living in Chinatown. I kinda share a place with these five Chinese guys. No offense."

Troy clamped a hand over his mouth, as if appalled with Tommy's audacity. Then he jumped to his feet into a kung-fu stance, made a Bruce Lee chicken noise, and said, "Five Chinese guys living with you? A pasty-faced, round-eyed, barbarian pig dog?" Troy grinned and dug in the bag for another handful of chips. "No offense."

Tommy's face heated with embarrassment. "Sorry. I just wondered if — I mean, I need an interpreter. There's some weird shit going on at my place."

Troy vaulted back to his seat on the carts. "No problem, man. We'll go there in the morning when we get off — if we don't get fired."

"We won't get fired," Tommy said with confidence he didn't feel. "The union —"

"Jesus," Troy interrupted and grabbed Tommy's shoulder. "Check this out." He nodded toward Fort Mason at the edge of the parking lot. A woman was walking toward them. "She's out a little late," Troy said; then, to Simon, he shouted, "Sime, skirt alert."

"Bullshit," Simon said, checking his watch. Then he looked in the direction where Troy was pointing. A woman was, indeed, walking across the parking lot toward them. From what he could tell at that distance, she had a nice shape.

Simon climbed down from the carts and adjusted his black Stetson. "Stand back, boys, that redhead is down here for a reason, and I'm packing that reason right here." He patted his crotch and fell into an affected bow-legged gait toward the woman.

"Evening, darlin', you lost or just in search of excellence?"

Jeff, who was sitting beside Tommy opposite Troy, bent over and said, "Simon is the master. That guy gets more pussy than all of the Forty-Niners put together."

Tommy said, "Doesn't look like he's doing that well tonight."

They couldn't hear what Simon was saying to the woman, but it was obvious she didn't want to hear it. She tried to walk away from him, and Simon stepped in front of her. She moved in another direction and he cut her off, smiling and chattering the whole time.

"Leave me alone!" the girl shouted.

Tommy leaped off the carts and ran toward them. "Hey, Simon, lighten up."

Simon turned and the woman started away. "We're just getting acquainted," Simon said.

Tommy stopped and put his hand on Simon's shoulder. He lowered his voice as if sharing a secret. "Look, man, we've got a lot to do. I can't afford to lose you all night while you show this babe the meaning of life. I need your help, dude."

Simon looked at Tommy as if he'd just exposed himself. "Really?"

"Please."

Simon slapped Tommy on the back. "I'm on it." He turned back toward the store. "Break's over, dudes. We've got some wrenching to do."

Tommy watched him go, then broke into a run after the woman. "Excuse me!"

She turned and eyed him suspiciously, but waited for him to catch up to her. He slowed to a walk. As he approached her he was surprised at just how pretty she was. She looked a little like Maureen O'Hara in those old pirate movies. His writer's mind kicked in and he thought, This woman could break my heart. I could crash and burn on this woman. I could lose this woman, drink heavily, write profound poems, and die in the gutter of tuberculosis over this woman.

This was not an unusual reaction for Tommy. He had it often, mostly with girls who worked the drive-through windows at fast-food places. He would drive off with the smell of fries in his car and the bitter taste of unrequited love on his tongue. It was usually good for at least one short story.

He was a little breathless when he reached her. "I just wanted to apologize for Simon. He's — he's…"

"An asshole," she said.

"Well, yes. But —"

"It's okay," she said. "Thanks for coming to the rescue." She turned to walk away.

Tommy swallowed hard. This was why he had come to the City, wasn't it? To take a few risks? To live on the edge. Yes. "Excuse me," he said. She turned again. "You're really beautiful. I know that sounds like a line. It is a line. But — but it's true in your case. Thanks. 'Bye."

She was smiling now. "What's your name?"

"C. Thomas Flood."

"Do you work here every night?"

"I just started. But yes, I will be. Five nights a week. Graveyard shift."

"So you have your days free?"

"Yes, pretty much. Except when I'm writing."

"Do you have a girlfriend, C. Thomas Flood?"

Tommy swallowed hard again. "Uh, no."

"Do you know where Enrico's is on Broadway?"

"I can find it." He hoped he could find it.

"I'll meet you there tomorrow night, a half hour after sunset, okay?"

"Sure, I guess. I mean, sure. I mean, what time is that?"

"I don't know; I have to get an almanac."

"Okay then. Tomorrow evening then. Look, I've got to get back to work. We're sort of in the middle of a crisis."

She nodded and smiled.

He shuffled awkwardly, then walked away toward the store. Halfway across the parking lot he stopped. "Hey, I don't know your name."

"It's Jody."

"Nice meeting you, Jody."

"See you tomorrow, C. Thomas," she called.

Tommy waved. When he turned around again, the Animals were all staring at him, slowly shaking their heads. Simon glared, then turned abruptly and stormed into the store.

Chapter 7 Suitors

After enduring a reasonable amount of bitterness from the crew over using his position to make a move on the girl in the parking lot, Tommy was able to persuade them to get back to work. Simon, Drew, and Jeff performed some mechanical magic on the meat case with a hammer, some jumper cables, and a can of Bondo, and by morning everything was running as if greased by the gods. Tommy met the manager at the front door with a smile and a report that his first night had gone great. The best crew he had ever seen, he said.

He rode to Chinatown with Troy Lee. They found a parking place a few blocks from Tommy's room and walked the rest of the way. The sun was up only an hour, but already the merchants were open and the sidewalks crowded. Delivery trucks blocked the streets as they dropped off their loads of fresh fish, meat, and vegetables.

Walking through Chinatown with Troy Lee at his side, Tommy felt as if he were carrying a secret weapon.

"What's that stuff?" Tommy asked, pointing to a stack of celerylike stuff on a produce table.

"Bok choy — Chinese cabbage."

"And that?"

"Ginseng root. They say it's good for the wood."

Tommy stopped and pointed in the window of a herbalist. "That looks like hunks of deer antler."

"It is," Troy said. "It's used to make medicine."

As they passed the fish market Tommy pointed to the huge spiny turtles trying to escape their milk crates. "Do people eat those?"

"Sure, people who can afford them."

"This is like a foreign country."

"It is," Troy said. "Chinatown is a very closed community. I can't believe you live here. I'm Chinese and I've never even lived here."

"This is it," Tommy said, stopping at the door.

"So you want me to ask them about the flowers, and what else?"

"Well, about vampires."

"Give me a break."

"No, this guy I met, the Emperor, he said it could be vampires." Tommy led the way up the steps.

"He's bullshitting you, Tommy."

"He was the one that told me about the job at your store, and that turned out to be true."

Tommy opened the door and the five Wongs looked up from their bunks. "Bye-bye," they said.

"Bye-bye," Tommy said.

"Nice place," Troy said. "I'll bet the rent is a killer."

"Fifty bucks a week," Tommy said.

"Fifty bucks," the five Wongs said.

Troy motioned Tommy out of the room. "Give me a minute here."

Troy closed the door. Tommy waited in the hall, listening to the nasal, banjo sounds of the conversation between Troy and the five Wongs. After a few minutes Troy emerged from the room and motioned for Tommy to follow him back down to the street.

"What goes?" Tommy asked when they reached the sidewalk.

Troy turned to him; he seemed as if he was trying to keep from laughing. "These guys are just off the boat, man. It was kind of hard to understand them, they speak some regional dialect."

"So?"

"So, they're here illegally, smuggled over by pirates. They owe the pirates like thirty grand for the trip, and if they get caught and sent back to China, they still owe the money. That's like twenty years' wages in the provinces."

"So?" Tommy asked. "What's that got to do with the flowers?"

Troy snickered. "I'm getting to that. You see, they want to be citizens. If they become citizens, they can get better jobs and pay off the pirates faster. And they can't be sent back."

"And the flowers?"

"The Wongs are leaving the flowers. They're courting you."

"What!"

"They heard somewhere that in San Francisco men marry men. They figure that if they can get you to marry them, then they can be citizens and stay here. You've got secret admirers, dude."

Tommy was indignant. "They think I'm gay?"

"They don't know. I really don't think they care. They asked me to ask you for your hand in marriage." Troy finally lost control and started laughing.

"What did you tell them?"

"I told them I'd ask."

"You fucker."

"Well, I didn't want to tell them no without asking you. They said that they'd take good care of you."

"Go tell them I said no."

"You got something against Asians? Too good for us?"

"No, it's not that. I —"

"I'll tell them that you'll think about it. Look, I've got to get home and get some sleep. I'll see you at work tonight." Troy walked away.

"You're cleaning garbage cans tonight, Troy. I'm in charge, you know? You better not tell Simon and the guys."

"Whatever you say, Fearless Leader," Troy called over his shoulder.

Tommy stood on the sidewalk trying to think of a better threat.

A half block away Troy turned and yelled, "Hey, Tommy!"

"What?"

"You'll make a lovely bride."

Tommy, murder in his eyes, broke into a run after Troy Lee.

Sunset. Consciousness hit Jody like a bucket of cold water.

She thought, I miss waking up groggy and waiting for the coffee to brew. Waking up with your worries already in full stride just sucks.

What was I thinking? Giving myself only a half hour to get ready for a date? I have nothing to wear. I can't show up in a sweatshirt and jeans and ask this guy to move in with me. I don't even know anything about him. What if he's a drunk, or a woman beater, or a psycho killer? Don't those guys always work nights in grocery stores? The neighbors always say that: "He worked nights and kept to himself. Who would have thought that he stir-fried the paperboy?" He did say I was beautiful, though, and everybody has their faults. Who am I to judge? I'm a…

She didn't want to think about what she was.

Jody had thrown on her jeans and was furiously trying to put on what little make-up she had with her.

She thought, I can read small print in the dark, I can see heat coming off a hiding rat from a hundred yards, and I still can't put on mascara without poking myself in the eye.

She stepped back from the mirror and tried to fight the self-criticism — tried to look at herself objectively.

I look like a late-night TV plea for the fashion-impaired, she thought. This won't work.

She broke away from the mirror, then took one last look and primped her hair, then started out the door, then took one last look, then started out the door, then paused for a last look…

"No!" she said aloud. She ran out the door, down the steps, and to the bus stop on the corner, where she bounced from foot to foot as if waiting for the bathroom at a beer-drinking contest.

Tommy had spent the day trying to avoid the five Wongs. He watched the room until he was sure they had all left, then he sneaked in and grabbed some clean clothes, showered, dressed, and sneaked out. He took a bus to Levis Plaza, where he napped on a park bench while pigeons and seagulls scavenged around him. Late afternoon brought a cold wind off the bay that chilled him awake.

He walked up Sansome toward North Beach, trying to rub the crease out of the back of his head left by the bench slats. As he passed a group of teenagers who were posturing and panhandling at the curb, one pudgy boy shouted, "Sir, can you spare a quarter for some eyeliner?"

Tommy dug in the pocket of his jeans and handed the kid all of his change. No one had ever called him «sir» before.

"Oh, thank you, sir!" the kid gushed in a high feminine voice. He held the fistful of change up to the others as if he had just been handed the cure for cancer.

Tommy smiled and walked on. He figured that panhandlers had cost him about ten dollars a day since he had come to the City — ten dollars that he really couldn't afford. He didn't seem to be able to look away and walk on like everyone else. Maybe it was something you developed after a while. Maybe the constant assault of despair callused your compassion. A plea for money for food always made his stomach growl, and a quarter was a small price to pay to quiet it. The plea for eyeliner appealed to the writer part of him, the part that believed that creative thought was worth something.

Yesterday he had heard a tourist tell a homeless man to get a job.

"Pushing a shopping cart up and down these hills is a fucking job," the homeless guy had said. Tommy gave him a buck.

It was still light when Tommy reached Enrico's on Broadway. He paused momentarily and looked over the few customers who were eating on the patio by the street. Jody wasn't there. He stopped at the host's station and reserved a table outside for a half hour later.

"Is there a bookstore around here?" he asked.

The host, a thin, bearded man in his forties, with perfect anchorman-gray hair, raised an eyebrow, and with that small gesture made Tommy feel like scum. "City Lights is one block up on the corner of Columbus," the host said.

"Oh, that's right," Tommy said, batting himself on the forehead as if he'd just remembered. "I'll be back."

"We are giddy with anticipation," the host said. He spun curtly on one heel and walked away.

Tommy turned and started up Broadway until he was accosted by a barker outside a strip joint, a man in a red tailcoat with a top hat.

"Tits, slits, and clits. Come on in, sir. The show starts in five minutes."

"No, thanks. I have a dinner date in a few minutes."

"Bring the little lady back with you. This show can turn a maybe into a sure thing, son. We'll have her sitting in a puddle before you leave."

Tommy squirmed. "Maybe," he said. He hurried along until the barker two doors up, this one a buxom woman wearing leather and a ring in her nose, stopped him.

"The most beautiful girls in town, sir. All nude. All hot. Come on in."

"No, thanks. I have a dinner date in a few minutes."

"Bring her —"

"Maybe," Tommy said, walking on.

He was stopped three more times before he reached the end of the block, and each time he declined politely. He noticed that he was the only one who stopped. The other pedestrians just walked on, ignoring the barkers.

Back home, he thought, it's impolite to ignore someone who is speaking to you, especially if they call you "sir." I guess I'm going to have to learn City manners.

She had fifteen minutes before she was supposed to meet Tommy at Enrico's. Allowing for another bus ride and a short walk, she had about seven minutes to find an outfit. She walked into the Gap on the corner of Van Ness and Vallejo with a stack of hundred-dollar bills in her hand and announced, "I need help. Now!"

Ten salespeople, all young, all dressed in generic cotton casual, looked up from their conversations, spotted the money in her hand, and simultaneously stopped breathing — their brains shutting down bodily functions and rerouting the needed energy to calculate the projected commissions contained in Jody's cash. One by one they resumed breathing and marched toward her, a look of dazed hunger in their eyes: a pack of zombies from the perky, youthful version of The Night of the Living Dead.

"I wear a size four and I've got a date in fifteen minutes," Jody said. "Dress me."

They descended on her like an evil khaki wave.

Tommy sat at a patio table with only a low brick planter box between him and the sidewalk. To avoid the titty bar barkers, he had crossed the street eight times in the half block from City Lights Bookstore to Enrico's and he was a little jangled from dodging traffic. He ordered a cappuccino from a waiter who fawned over him like a mother hen, then stared in amazement when the waiter returned with a cup the size of a large soup bowl and a plate of brown crystalline cubes.

"These are raw sugar cubes, honey. So much better for you than that white poison."

Tommy picked up the soup spoon and reached for a sugar cube.

"No, no, no," the waiter scolded. "We use our demitasse spoon for our cappuccino." He pointed to a tiny spoon that rested in the saucer.

"Demitasse," Tommy repeated, feeling reckless. In Indiana the use of the word «demitasse» was tantamount to leaping out of the closet in scandalous flames. San Francisco was a great city! A great place to be a writer! And gay guys seemed like pretty nice people, once you got past their seeming obsession with Barbra Streisand music. Tommy smiled at the waiter. "Thanks, I may need a little help with the forks."

"Is she special?" the waiter asked.

"I think she's going to break my heart."

"How exciting!" the waiter gushed. "Then we'll make you look marvelous. Just remember, use from the outside first on the forks. The big spoon is for winding pasta. Is this your first date?"

Tommy nodded.

"Then order the raviolis — bite-size — no muss, no fuss. You'll look good eating them. And order for her, the rosemary chicken with roasted bell peppers and wild mushrooms in cream sauce — a beautiful dish. Tastes horrid, but on a first date she won't eat it anyway. You don't have time to run home and change, do you?"

The waiter looked at Tommy's flannel shirt as if it were a foul, dead animal.

"No, this is all I have clean."

"Oh well, it does have a certain Mr. Green Jeans charm, I guess."

Tommy caught a flash of red hair out of the corner of his eye and looked up to see Jody walking into the cafe. The waiter followed his gaze.

"Is that her?"

"Yes," Tommy said, waving to catch her attention. She spotted him, smiled, and approached the table.

Jody was dressed in a khaki skirt, a light-blue chambray blouse, light-blue leggings, and tan suede flats. She wore a woven leather belt, a green tartan scarf tied around her shoulders, silver earrings, bracelet, and necklace, and carried a suede backpack in place of her airline flight bag.

The waiter, keeping his gaze fixed on Jody, bent and whispered in Tommy's ear, "The flannel is fine, honey. I haven't seen anyone that over-accessorized since Batman." He stood and pulled the chair out for Jody. "Hi, we've been waiting for you."

Jody sat.

"My name is Frederick," the waiter said with a slight bow. "I'll be serving you this evening." He pinched the fabric of Jody's scarf. "Lovely tartan, dear. Sets off your eyes. I'll be back with some menus."

"Hi," Jody said to Tommy. "Have you been waiting long?"

"A little while, I wasn't sure of the time. I brought you something." He reached under the table and pulled a book out of a City Lights bag. "It's an almanac. You said you needed one."

"That's very sweet."

Tommy looked down and mimed an "Aw, shucks, it was nothing."

"So, do you live around here?" Jody asked.

"I'm sort of looking for a place."

"Really? Have you been in town long?"

"Less than a week. I came here to write. The grocery store is just a… just a…"

"Job," Jody finished for him.

"Right, just a job. What do you do?"

"I used to be a claims clerk at Transamerica. I'm looking for something else, now."

Frederick appeared at the table and opened two menus in front of them. "If you don't mind me saying," he said, "you two are just darling together. There's a Raggedy-Ann-and-Andy energy going between you two that is simply electric."

Frederick walked away.

Jody eyed Tommy over the menu. "Have we just been insulted?"

"I hear the rosemary chicken breast is wonderful," Tommy said.

Chapter 8 Dinner with the Vampire

"Is there something wrong with your food?"

"No, I'm just not very hungry."

"You're going to break my heart, aren't you?"

Chapter 9 He Knows If You've Been Bad or Good, So You'd Better…

For the few days he had been in San Francisco, because of the newness of it all, because of the mystery of the flowers and the worries of finding a job, Tommy had completely forgotten that he was horny. He had always been horny, and had accepted that he always would be horny. So when Jody sat down across from him and the tsunami of hormones washed over him, he was quite shocked that he had ever forgotten.

Through dinner he missed most of her small talk and bought all the polite lies she told about her eating habits because his mind was busy with a single obsessive thought: She must move that scarf so I can see her breasts.

When Tommy finished eating, Frederick came to the table. "Was there something wrong with your food?" he asked Jody.

"No, I'm just not very hungry."

Frederick winked at Tommy and took their plates. Jody sat back, unwrapped her scarf and threw it over the back of her chair. "What a nice night," she said.

Tommy ripped his gaze from the front of her blouse and pretended to look out over the street. "Yep," he said.

"You know, I've never asked a man out before."

"Me either," Tommy said.

He had decided that he would throw himself at her feet and beg. Please, please, please, take me home and have sex with me. You have no idea how badly I need it. I've only done it twice in my life and both times I was so drunk that I had to be told about it the next day. Please, for the love of God, end this suffering, fuck me now or kill me!

"Would you like a cappuccino?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Tommy, can I trust you? Can I be honest with you?"

"Sure."

"Look, I don't want to be too forward, but I think I have to be…"

"I knew it." He fell forward until his head hit the table, rattling the silverware. He spoke into the tablecloth. "You just broke up with a guy, and this date seemed like a good idea at the time, but you think that you're still in love with him. And I'm a really nice guy and you'll always be my friend. Right?"

"No. I wasn't going to say that."

"Oh, then you've just gotten out of a bad relationship and you're not ready to get into another one. You need to be alone for a while and find out what you really want. Right?"

"No…"

"Right," Tommy said into the tablecloth. "But things are moving a little too fast and maybe we should see other people for a while. I knew it. I knew you would break my —"

Jody whacked him on the back of the head with a soup spoon. "Ouch!" Tommy sat up, rubbing the rising lump. "Hey, that hurt."

"Are you okay?" she asked, holding the soup spoon at ready.

"That really hurt."

"Good." She put the spoon down. "I was going to say that I don't want to be too forward, but you and I both need a place to live, and I need some help with some things, and I like you, and I was wondering if you wanted to get a place together?"

Tommy stopped rubbing his head. "Now?"

"If you don't have other plans."

"But we haven't even, you know…"

"We can just be roommates if you'd like. And if you need to think it over, I'll understand, but I really need your help."

Tommy was stunned. No woman had ever said anything like that to him before. In just these few minutes she had come to trust him enough to lay herself open to total rejection. Women didn't do that, did they? Maybe she was nuts. Well, that would be okay; she could be Zelda to his F. Scott. Still, he felt as if he owed her some sort of confession that would leave him equally vulnerable.

"Five Chinese guys asked me to marry them today," he said.

Jody didn't know what to say, so she said, "Congratulations."

"I didn't accept."

"Thinking it over?"

"No, I wouldn't two-time you."

"That's sweet, but technically you'd be six-timing me."

Tommy smiled. "I like you, I really do."

"Then let's move in together."

Frederick appeared at the table. "Well, I can see things are going along just swimmingly between you two."

"Check, please," Jody said.

"Right away." Frederick headed back into the cafe in a bit of a snit.

Tommy said, "You're going to break my heart, aren't you?"

"Irreparably. Would you like to go for a walk?"

"Sure, I guess."

Frederick returned to the table with the check wallet. Jody pulled a wad of cash out of her backpack and handed him a hundred-dollar bill. As Tommy started to protest, standing to dig money out of his jeans pocket, Jody picked up her soup spoon and brandished it threateningly. "I'll get this." Tommy sat back down. To Frederick, Jody said, "Keep the change."

"Oh, you are too generous," Frederick gushed. He started backing away from the table in a half-bow.

"And, Frederick," Jody added, "Batman is far more over-accessorized than I am."

"I'm sorry you heard that," Frederick said. "An overdeveloped sense of fashion will be my downfall." He looked at Tommy. "You're right, she's going to break your heart."

"Have you seen Coit Tower?" she asked as they walked.

"From a distance."

"Let's go there. It's all lit up at night."

They walked for a while without talking. Jody walked on the inside and dealt with the barkers with a shake of her head and a wave of dismissal. To one barker she said, "Thanks, but we're going to put on our own show."

Tommy coughed and tripped over a crack in the sidewalk. He looked at her as if she'd just announced the Second Coming.

"I have to go to work at midnight," he said.

"You'll have to keep an eye on the time, then."

"Right. I will."

I can't believe I'm being this aggressive, Jody thought. I hear myself say these things and it's as if they're coming out of someone else's mouth. And he just agrees. I'd have become a tramp a long time ago if I'd known what a great sense of control it gives you.

They passed two tall women with enormous breasts and impossibly narrow hips unloading wigs, wads of sequins, and a boa constrictor from the back of a rusted-out Toyota. Shift change at the strip joints, Jody thought.

Tommy was riveted. Jody watched the heat rise in his face, just as it had when she caught him staring at her own breasts.

He's so open, like a little kid, Jody thought. A cute little neurotic kid. I was lucky to find him. Lucky, considering everything that has happened.

They turned on Kearny and Jody said, "So what do you think about my offer?"

"It sounds okay, if you're sure. But I won't get my first pay-check for a couple of weeks."

"Money isn't a problem. I'll pay."

"No, I couldn't…"

"Look Tommy, I meant it when I said I need your help. I'm busy all day. You will have to find the place and rent it. And I have a lot of other things that you'll have to do. For one, my car is in impound and someone has to get it out during the day. If it would make you feel better, I can pay you so you'll have the money."

"Is that why you asked me if I had my days free in the parking lot last night?"

"Yes."

"So it could have been anyone who worked the right hours?"

"Your buddy works the right hours, and I didn't ask him. No, I thought you were cute."

"I can't deal with that."

He walked along looking straight ahead, saying nothing. They had passed into a neighborhood of apartment houses with security bars on the windows and electric locks on the doors. Ahead, Jody saw waves of red heat signatures coming out of one dark doorway. They were too hot for one person and too cool to be a lightbulb. She focused and could hear men whispering. She suddenly remembered the phone call: "You're not immortal. You can still be killed."

"Let's cross the street, Tommy."

"Why?"

"Just come on." She grabbed his jacket and yanked him into the street. When they were on the opposite sidewalk, Tommy stopped and looked at her as if she had just hit him on the head with a spoon.

"What was that all about?"

She waved for him to be quiet. "Listen."

Someone behind them was laughing. Laughing loudly enough to be heard without Jody's acute hearing. They both turned and looked back. A thin man dressed in black was standing under a street lamp a block away.

"What's so funny?" Tommy asked.

Jody didn't answer. She was staring at something that wasn't there. There was no heat signature coming off the man in black.

"Let's go," Jody said, hurrying Tommy up the street. As they passed the doorway across the street, Jody looked over and flipped a middle finger to the three toughs that had been waiting to ambush them. You guys are nothing, she thought. Laughter from the man in black still rang in her ears.

It had been a long time since the vampire had heard the sound of his own laughter, and hearing it made him laugh all the louder. So the fledgling had found herself a minion. It had been a good idea to leave her hand partially exposed to the daylight. She had learned that lesson quickly. So many of them just wandered until daylight and burned to death, and he couldn't even enjoy the show unless he wanted to join them in perdition. This one was interesting: so reluctant to give herself to the blood.

They only seemed to have two instincts, the hunger and the hiding. And this one had controlled the hunger on her first feeding. She was almost too good. So many of them, if they lasted the first night, went mad trying to live with their new senses. One night and he had to send them to hell with a snap of the neck and a fare-thee-well. But not this one. She had made him laugh; afraid of a few mortals whom she could crush like insects.

Perhaps she was protecting her new servant. Perhaps he should kill the boy, just to watch her reaction. Perhaps, but not yet. Some other fly in her ointment then. Just to keep the game going.

It felt so good to laugh after so long.

Chapter 10 Walking, Talking, and Bumping in the Night

Coit Tower jutted out of Telegraph Hill like a giant phallus. Impressive as it was, all lit up and overlooking the City, it made Tommy feel nervous, inferior, and pressured to perform. She had as much as admitted that she was going to take him to bed — had even offered to solve the problem of the Wongs. She was a dream come true. It scared the hell out of him.

She took his hand and looked out over the City. "It's pretty, isn't it. We're lucky it's a clear night."

"Your hand is freezing," he said. He put his arm around her and pulled her close. God, I'm smooth, he thought, a complete stud. I'm making a move on an older woman — an older woman with money. Now what? My arm is lying on her shoulder like a dead fish. I'm a geek. If I could just turn my mind off until it's all over. Just get shit-faced and do it. No, not that. Not again.

Jody stiffened. She thought: I'm not cold. I haven't been cold since I changed, nor warm, for that matter. Kurt used to say I was always cold. How strange. I can see the heat around Tommy but there's none around me.

"Feel my forehead," she said to Tommy.

Tommy said, "Jody, we don't have to do this if you're not ready. I mean, maybe, like you said, we should just be roommates. I don't want to pressure you."

"No, feel my forehead and see if I have a fever."

"Oh." He put his hand on her forehead. "You're as cold as ice. Do you feel okay?"

Oh my God! How could I have been so stupid? She tore away from him and began pacing. The guy outside her apartment, the laughing man on Kearny Street, he had been cold. And so was she. How many vampires were out there that she hadn't seen?

"What's the matter?" Tommy asked. "Did I say something wrong?"

I've got to tell him, she thought. He's not going to trust me if I keep it from him.

She took his hand again. "Tommy, I think you ought to know. I'm not exactly what I seem to be."

He stepped back. "You're a guy, aren't you? I knew it. My dad warned me that this could happen here."

Maybe not, she thought.

"No, I'm not a guy."

"Are you sure?"

"Are you?"

"There's no need to get nasty."

"Well, how would you feel if I asked you if you were a girl?"

Tommy hung his head. "You're right. Sorry. But how would you feel if five Chinese women asked you to marry them? Things like that don't happen in Indiana. I can't even go back to my room."

"I can't either," she said.

"Why not?"

"Give me a minute to think, okay?"

She didn't want to go back to the motel on Van Ness again. The vampire knew she had been there. But he'd probably know even if she moved.

"Tommy, we need to get you a motel room."

"Jody, I'm getting mixed messages here."

"No, don't take it wrong. I don't want to send you back to that room with the Wongs. I think we should get you a room."

"I told you, I don't get paid —"

"My treat. It'll be an advance on your new job as my assistant."

Tommy sat down on the sidewalk and stared up at the lighted shaft of Coit Tower. He thought, I have no idea what I am supposed to be or what I'm supposed to do. First she wants me for my body, then she wants me as an employee, then she doesn't want me at all. I don't know whether I'm supposed to kiss her or fill out an application. I feel like one of those nervous little dogs from an electroshock test. Here's a bone, Spot. Zap! You didn't really want that, did you?

He said, "Whatever you want me to do, I'll do."

"Okay," Jody said. "Thanks." She bent and kissed him on the forehead.

I have no idea what I'm supposed to do, she thought. If we go to a motel and go to bed together, then he'll have to go to work, and when he comes back in the morning he'll come back to the room, open the door, and the sunlight will hit me. Bursting into flames is no way to impress someone on the first date. Separate rooms is the only way to go. He's going to get fed up and leave me like all the rest.

"Tommy, can you go get your stuff tomorrow?"

"Whatever you say."

"I can't explain now, but I might be in a little trouble and I have a lot of things to do. I need you to do a lot of things for me tomorrow. Can you do that after working all night?"

"Whatever you say," he said.

"I'm going to get you a room at my motel. I won't be around until tomorrow night. I'll meet you at the motel office at sunset. When you come back to the room in the morning, the papers for my car will be on the bed, okay?"

"Whatever you say." Tommy looked dazed. He stared into his lap.

"I'll give you money for an apartment. Try to find a place that's furnished. And no windows in the bedroom. Try to keep it under two thousand a month."

Tommy didn't look up. "Whatever you say."

I've taken over his mind, she thought. It's just like in the movies, when the vampire can control people's actions. I don't want that. I don't want to force him with my will. It's not fair. He was helpless enough, but now I've turned him into a zombie. I want help, but I don't want this. I wonder if there's enough of his mind left even to function, or if I've ruined him.

"Tommy," she said sternly, "I want you to climb to the top of the tower and jump off."

He looked up. "Are you out of your mind?"

She threw her arms around him, kissed him, and said, "Oh, I'm so glad I didn't turn you into a vegetable."

"I'll give you time," he said.

Jody stood outside the four-story apartment building on Chestnut, watching and listening. There were no lights on in Kurt's apartment. Already it had become Kurt's apartment, not hers, not theirs. The moment she asked Tommy out, she had transferred whatever dreams and delusions she attached to being a couple to Tommy. It was always that way for her. She didn't like to be alone.

She and Tommy had walked Telegraph Park talking about their past lives and avoiding the subject of a singular, future life until it was time for Tommy to go to work. Jody had called a cab from a pay phone and dropped Tommy off at the store with a kiss and a promise. "I'll see you tomorrow night."

It was only when she got out of the cab at the motel that she realized that the registration and pink slip for her car were still at Kurt's.

Why didn't I take a damn key when I left?

She toyed with the idea of ringing the bell, but the thought of looking Kurt in the eye after what she had done to him… No, she'd have to get in on her own. Going through the two fire doors and the security bolts wasn't an option.

The building was a pseudo-Victorian, the facade decorated with prefabricated bolt-on gingerbread. Jody tried to imagine herself climbing the front of the building and shuddered. To her relief, the side panels on the fourth-floor bay window were closed. No way in there.

There was a five-foot-wide alley between Kurt's building and the one next to it. The bedroom window was on that side. No gingerbread for handholds there.

She went to the alley and looked up. The bedroom window was open and the wall was as smooth as polished stone. She eyed the space between the two buildings. With her hands against one side and her feet against the other, she could spider her way up the wall. She'd seen guys climbing chimney crevices at Yosemite that way. Experienced climbers, with equipment. Not secretaries who avoided escalators for fear of breaking a heel.

She focused on the open window and listened. The sound of someone breathing deeply, sleeping. No, it was the sound of two people sleeping. "You bastard."

She leaped into the air and caught herself between the two buildings, six feet off the ground, her feet against one, hands against the other. She was amazed that she could do it, but it wasn't that hard. It wasn't hard at all. She tested her weight against the tension in her limbs and it felt solid. She held herself with one hand while she pulled her skirt up over her hips with the other, then she tried a tentative step up.

Hand, foot, hand, foot. When she paused to look down she was right under Kurt's window, forty feet off the ground, with only a garbage can and a stray cat to break her fall. She tried to catch her breath, then realized that she wasn't out of breath. She felt as if she could hold herself there for hours if she needed to. But the fear of falling pushed her on. You're not immortal. You can still be killed.

She pushed the screen loose from the window with her left hand, got a grip on the windowsill, then loosed the tension in her legs and swung down against Kurt's building. Hanging by one hand, she removed the screen with the other and lowered it to the floor inside, then pulled herself up to the windowsill, where she crouched and looked around the room. Two people were in the bed. She could see their heat signatures rising through the covers and being dissipated by the cold breeze coming through the window. No wonder I complained about the cold. She stepped into the room and waited to see if the sleepers stirred. Nothing.

She moved to the side of the bed and looked at the woman with almost scientific detachment. It was Susan Badistone. Jody had met her at Kurt's office picnic and had disliked her immediately. Her straight blond hair was spread over the pillow. Jody twisted a lock of her own curly red hair around her finger. So this is what he wanted. And that's an after-market nose if I've ever seen one. But it's all about appearances, isn't it, Kurt?

Jody grabbed the covers and lifted them far enough to look under. She's got the body of a twelve-year-old boy. Oh Kurt, you should have let her finish the surgery schedule before you brought her home.

She let the covers fall and Susan stirred. Jody backed away from the bed slowly. She had kept all of her papers in an expandable file under the sink in the bathroom. She went to the bathroom and palmed the cabinet open. The file was still there. She grabbed it and headed for the window.

"Who's there?" Kurt said. He sat up in bed and stared into the dark.

Jody ducked below the light coming in the window and watched him.

"I said, who's there?"

"What's a matter?" a groggy Susan said.

"I heard something."

"It's nothing, honey. You're just jumpy after what that horrible woman did to you."

I could snap her scrawny blond neck, Jody thought. Then, in thinking it, in knowing that she could actually do it, she was no longer angry. I'm not "that horrible woman," she thought. I'm a vampire, and no amount of plastic surgery, or breeding, or money will ever make you my equal. I am a god.

For the first time since the transformation Jody felt calm, comfortable in her own skin. She waited there in the dark until they fell asleep again, then she climbed out the window and replaced the screen. She stood on the window ledge and threw the expandable file on the roof, then leaped up, grabbed the gutter, and pulled herself onto the roof.

At the back of the building she found a steel ladder that went all the way to the ground. The climb between the two buildings had been completely unnecessary.

Okay, not a particularly smart god, but at least a god who has her original nose.

Chapter 11 Lather, Rinse, Repent

The Animals were humming the wedding march when Tommy walked in the store. Tommy was rattled from the cab ride from Telegraph Hill. Evidently the cabdriver, who had a nervous tic and the habit of screaming, "The fuckers!" at indeterminate intervals and for no particular reason, felt that if you weren't going to top a hill without all four wheels leaving the ground and land in a shower of sparks, you might as well not top it at all, and, in fact, should avoid it by taking a corner on two wheels and crushing your passengers against the doors. Tommy was sweat-soaked and a little nauseated.

"Here comes the bride," Troy Lee said.

"Fearless Leader," Simon said, "you look like you just left a three-toweler." Simon measured the success of any social event by the number of towels it took to clean up afterward. "Was a time in my life," Simon would say, "when I only owned one towel and I never had any fun."

"You're not still pissed at me?" Tommy asked.

"Hell, no," Simon said. "I had me a three-toweler myself tonight. Took two choir girls from Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt out in the truck and taught them the fine art of slurping tadpoles."

"That's disgusting."

"No, it ain't. I didn't kiss 'em afterward."

Tommy shook his head. "Is the truck in?"

"Only fourteen hundred cases," Drew said. "You'll have plenty of time to plan the wedding." He held out a stack of bride magazines to Tommy.

"No, thanks," Tommy said.

Drew chucked the magazines behind him and held out a can of whipped cream with his other hand. "Take the edge off?"

"No, thanks. Can you guys stack the truck? I've got some stuff I want to do."

"Sure enough," Simon said. "Let's go do it."

The crew headed to the stockroom. Clint stayed behind.

"Hey, Tommy," he said, his head down, looking embarrassed.

"Yeah?"

"A pallet of kosher food came in tonight. You know, getting ready for Hanukkah and everything. And it's supposed to be blessed by a rabbi."

"Yeah. So?"

"Well, I was wondering if I could say a few words over it. I mean, they're not washed in the Blood or anything, but Christ was Jewish. So…"

"Knock yourself out, Clint."

"Thanks," Clint said. Taken with the Spirit, he scurried off to the stockroom.

Tommy went to the news racks by the registers and gathered up an armload of women's magazines. Then, glancing over his shoulder to make sure that none of the Animals was watching, he took them into the office, locked the door, then sat down at the desk and began his research.

He was about to move in with a woman for the first time, and he didn't know a thing about women. Maybe Jody wasn't crazy. Maybe they were all that way and he was just ignorant. He flipped quickly through the tables of contents to get an overview of the female mind.

There was a pattern here. Cellulite, PMS, and men who don't commit were the enemies. Delightfully light desserts, marriage, and multiple orgasms were the allies.

Tommy felt like a spy, as if he should be microfilming the pages under a gooseneck lamp in some back room of a Bavarian castle stronghold, and any minute some woman in SS gear would burst in on him and tell him that she had ways of making him talk. Actually, that last part wouldn't be too bad.

Women seemed to have some collective plan, and most of it seemed to involve getting men to do stuff that they didn't want to do. He skimmed an article entitled: "Tan Lines: Sexy Contrast or Panda Bear Shame? — A Psychologist's View," then flipped to one entitled: "Men's Love for Sports Analogies: How to Use Vince Lombardi to Make Him Put the Seat Down." ("When one player falls in, the whole team gets a wet butt.") He read on: "When it's fourth and ten and Joe Montana decides to go for it, would his linemen tell him that they won't go to the store to get him tampons? I don't think so." And: "Of course Richard Petty doesn't want to wear a helmet, but he can't drive without protection either." By the time Tommy got to the warnings about never using Wilt Chamberlain or Martina Navratilova as examples, he was completely disenchanted. How could you deal with a creature as devious as woman?

He turned the page and his heart sank even further. "Can You Tell Him He's a Lousy Lay?: A Quiz."

Tommy thought, This is exactly the kind of thing that made me stay a virgin until I was eighteen.

1. It's the third date and you're about to have an intimate moment, but when he drops his shorts you notice he's less blessed than you expected. Do you:

A: Point and laugh.

B: Say, "Wow! A real man at last." Then turn and snicker to yourself.

C: Say, "Is that what they mean by microbiology?"

D: Just go ahead with it. He might be shamed into making a commitment. And what do you care if all your sons are nicknamed Peewee?

2. You decide to do the dread deed, and just as things are starting to get hot he comes, rolls over, and asks, "Was it good for you?" You:

A: Say, "God, yes! That was the best seventeen seconds of my life!"

B: Say, "Sure, as good as it gets for me with a man."

C: Put a Certs in your navel and say, "That's for you, Mr. Bunnyman. You can have it on your way back up, after the job is finished."

D: Smile and throw his car keys out the window.

3. After fumbling in the dark, he thinks he's found the spot. When you tell him that's not it, he forges ahead anyway. You:

A: Grab the lamp off the nightstand and beat him with it until he gets off you.

B: Grab the lamp off the nightstand and beat him to death with it.

C: Grab the lamp off the nightstand, turn it on, and say, "Would you look where you're at?"

D: Wait patiently until he finishes, wishing the whole time that you had a lamp on your nightstand.

The phone in the office rang. Tommy closed the magazine.

"Marina Safeway."

"Tommy, is that you?" Jody asked.

"Yeah, I have on my phone voice."

"Look, you're registered into room two-twelve at the Van Ness Motel — the corner of Chestnut and Van Ness. There's a key waiting for you in the office. The papers and keys for my car are on the bed. I left some papers for you to take to Transamerica and some money too. I'll meet you at the motel office a little after sunset."

"What room are you in?"

"I don't think I should say."

"Why? I'm not going to come in and jump you or anything."

"It's not that. I just want things to be right."

He took a deep breath. "Jody?"

"Yes."

"Is there a lamp on the nightstand in your room?"

"Sure, it's bolted down. Why?"

"No reason," Tommy said.

Suddenly, from the back of the store, the Stones belted out «Satisfaction» from a boom box cranked to distorted fuzz level. Tommy could hear the Animals chanting, "Kill the pig!" in the background.

"I've got to go," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow night."

"Okay. Tommy, I had a nice time tonight."

"Me too," he said. He hung up and thought: She's evil. Evil, evil, evil. I want to see her naked.

Jeff, the failed power forward, burst into the office. "The truck is stacked, dude. The ski boat is charged! We're talking luau in the produce aisle."

The Clark 250, self-propelled, professional floor-maintenance machine, is a miracle of janitorial design. Approximately the size of a small desk, the Clark 250 sports two rotating scrub disks at the front of the machine, as well as an onboard reservoir that distributes soap and water, and a squeegeed vacuum that sucks it up. It is propelled by two overpowered electric motors that will drive its gum-rubber tires over any flat surface, wet or dry. A single operator, walking behind the Clark 250, can, in less than an hour, scrub four thousand square feet of floor, and buff it to a shine in which he can see his soul, or so the brochure claims. What the brochure neglects to mention is that if the squeegee is retracted and the vacuum turned off, a single operator can slide along behind the Clark 250 on a river of soapy froth. The Animals called the machine the ski boat.

When Tommy came around the corner of aisle 14, he saw Simon, shirtless, wearing his cowboy hat, cooking weenies over thirty cans of Sterno on a stainless-steel rack that normally was used to display potato chips.

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning," Simon said, waving a barbecue fork. "It smells like victory."

"Cowabunga!" Drew screamed. He was sliding through two inches of soapsuds behind the ski boat, towing Lash toward a makeshift ramp by a length of clothesline. Lash hit the ramp, went airborne, and flipped in the air with a battle cry of "Workman's Comp!"

Tommy stepped aside as Lash landed on his chest and plowed a drift of suds with his face. Drew powered down the boat. "Eight-two," Barry shouted. "Nine-one," said Clint. "Nine-six," said Drew. "Quatro-uno," said Gustavo.

"A four-one from the Mexican judge," Simon said into his barbecue-fork microphone. "That's got to hurt his chances for getting into the finals, Bob."

Lash spit out a mouthful of soap and coughed. "The Mexican judges are always tough," he said. He wore a beard of suds that made him look like a thin, wet version of Uncle Remus.

Tommy helped Lash to his feet. "Are you okay?"

"He's fine," Simon said. "His personal trainer is here." Simon grabbed a coconut off the shelf and lopped the top off with a huge knife from the meat department. "Dr. Drew," he said, holding the coconut out to Drew, who took a pint of rum from his hip pocket and splashed some in the shell.

"Down this," Simon said, handing the coconut to Lash. "Kill the pig, partner."

The Animals chanted "Kill the pig" until Lash had downed the whole drink, coconut milk and rum washing streams though his beard of suds at the corners of his mouth. He stopped to breathe and threw up.

"Nine-two!" Barry shouted.

"Nine-four," Drew said.

"Six-one," Simon drawled. "Penalty points for chunks."

"Fuego," Gustavo said.

Simon jumped in Gustavo's face. "Fuego? What fucking number is Fuego? You can be disqualified as a judge, you know?"

"Fuego," Gustavo said, pointing over Simon's shoulder to the chip rack, where three dozen weenies had burst into flames and were spewing black smoke.

The smoke alarm went off with a Klaxon scream, drowning out the Rolling Stones.

"It rings into the fire department," Drew shouted in Tommy's ear. "They'll be at the door in a minute. It's your job to head them off, Fearless Leader."

"Me? Why me?"

"That's why you make the big bucks."

"Kill that stereo and put out the fire," Tommy yelled. He turned and was heading for the front door just as Clint came out of the stockroom.

"The kosher stuff is all blessed, and I prayed over some of the gentile food for good measure. You know, Tom, the guys said that you might be getting married, and I'm getting my minister card in the mail soon, so if you need —"

"Clint," Tommy interrupted, "clean-up in the produce aisle." He went to the front door, unlocked it, and went outside to wait for the fire department. The bay was socked in with fog and the beam from the lighthouse on Alcatraz cut a swath across Fort Mason and the Safeway parking lot. Tommy thought he could make out the figure of someone standing under one of the mercury lights. Someone thin, dressed in dark clothing.

A fire truck pulled into the parking lot, siren off, its flashing red lights cutting the fog. As the fire truck's headlights swept across the lot, the dark figure dodged and ran, staying just ahead of the lights. Tommy had never seen anyone run that fast. The thin guy seemed to cover a hundred yards in only a few seconds. A trick of the fog, Tommy thought.

Chapter 12 Fashionably Doomed

There were five police cars parked at the Van Ness Motel when Tommy got off the bus across the street. He thought: They've come to get me for turning in a false alarm to the fire department. Then he realized that only Jody knew that he was coming to the motel. Pity, he thought, I would have gotten a lot of writing done in prison.

He crossed the street and was met at the office door by a uniformed police woman.

"Crime scene, sir. Move along unless registered."

"Am registered. Need shower," Tommy said. He'd learned his lesson about saying too much when he had talked to the angry fireman at the store. They didn't want to hear why it happened, they just wanted to be sure that it didn't happen again.

"Name?" the cop said.

"C. Thomas Flood."

"ID?"

Tommy handed her his Indiana driver's license.

"Says 'Thomas Flood, Junior. No 'C. »

" 'C' is pen name. Thomas is writer," Tommy said.

The cop adjusted her baton. "Are you trying to give me a hard time?"

"No, I just thought you wanted to talk that way. What's going on?" Tommy looked over the cop's shoulder at the motel manager, a tall, balding guy in his forties who was wiping fingerprints off his bulletproof window with a towel, looking as if he was going to start crying any minute.

"Were you in the motel last night, Mr. Flood?"

"No, I just got off work at the Marina Safeway. I'm night-crew leader there."

"You live in the City then?" The cop raised an eyebrow.

"I've just been here a few days. I'm still looking for a place."

"Where can we reach you if the detectives need to talk to you?"

"At the store from midnight to eight. But I'm off tonight. I guess I'll be here. What's going on?"

The cop turned to the motel manager. "You have a C. Thomas Flood registered?"

The manager nodded and held up a key. "Room two-twelve," he said.

The cop gave Tommy back his license. "Get that changed if you're going to stay in the City. You can go to your room, but don't cross any of the yellow tape."

The cop walked out of the office. Tommy turned to the manager. "What's going on here?"

The manager motioned for Tommy to come closer to the window. The manager bent over and whispered through his talk hole: "The maids found a woman's body in the dumpster this morning — a woman from the neighborhood, not a guest."

"Murdered?" Tommy whispered.

"Her and her poodle. This looks horrible for the motel. The police are talking to all of the guests as they check out. They knocked on your friend's door, but she didn't answer." The manager passed Tommy's key through the slot, along with a business card.

"They want her to call the detective at that number when she gets in. Would you give it to her?"

"Sure," Tommy said. He took the key and stood there trying to think of something to say to relieve the manager's anxiety. "Uh, sorry about your dumpster," he said.

It didn't work. The manager burst into tears. "That poor little dog," he sobbed.

On the bed were a stack of official-looking papers, a map of San Francisco, and a thick envelope filled with cash. There was a note clipped to the papers. It said:

Dear Tommy,

Here's the stuff to get my Honda out of impound. Use some of this cash to pay the fines. I don't know where the impound lot is, but you can ask any policeman.

You will have to go to the Transamerica Building to get my last check. (I marked it on the map.) I've left a message on the personnel department's voice mail that you are coming.

Good luck finding an apartment. I forgot to mention that you want to avoid getting a place in the Tenderloin (also on map).

Sorry I'm being so mysterious. I'll explain everything tonight.

Love,

Jody

Why in the hell was she being so mysterious? He opened the envelope and took out a stack of hundred-dollar bills, counted them, then put them back in the envelope. Four thousand dollars. He had never seen that much money in one place. Where did she get that kind of money? Certainly not filling out claims at an insurance company. Maybe she was a drug dealer. A smuggler. Maybe she embezzled it. Maybe it was all a trap. Maybe when he got to the impound lot to pick up her car, the police would arrest him. She had a lot of nerve signing her note "Love." What would the next one say? "Sorry you have to do hard time in the big house for me. Love, Jody." But she did sign it that way: "Love." What did that mean? Did she mean it, or was it habit? She probably signed all of her letters with "Love."

Dear Insured, We are sorry but your policy will not pay for your barium enema as it was done for recreational purposes. Love, Jody. Claims Dept…"

Maybe not.

Maybe she did love him. She must trust him, she had given him four grand.

He shoved the money in his back pocket, picked up the papers, and left the room. He ran down the steps to the ground level and tripped over a large black plastic bag full of dead woman. A coroner's deputy caught him by the arm before he fell.

"Easy there, fella," the deputy said. He was a big, hairy guy in his thirties.

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay, kid. She's sealed for freshness. My partner went to get the gurney."

Tommy stared at the black bag. He'd only seen one dead person in his life, his grandfather. He hadn't liked it.

"How did it… I mean, was it murder?"

"I'm betting creative suicide. She broke her own neck, drained out her blood, then killed the dog and jumped into the dumpster. The ME's betting murder, though. You pick."

Tommy was horrified. "Her blood was drained?"

"Are you a reporter?"

"Nope."

"Yeah, she was about a gallon low, and no visible wounds. The ME had to go into the heart for a blood sample. He was not pleased. He likes things simple — decapitation by cable car, massive gunshot trauma — you know."

Tommy shuddered. "I'm from Indiana. Stuff like this doesn't happen there."

"Stuff like this doesn't happen here either, kid."

A tall, thin guy in coroner blues came around the corner pushing a gurney with a small, gray, dead dog on it. He picked up the dog by a rhinestone leash. "What do I do with this?" he asked the big hairy guy. The dog spun slowly at the end of the leash like a fuzzy Christmas ornament.

"Bag and tag it?" said Big Hairy.

"A dog? That's a new one on me."

"I don't give a shit. Do what you want."

"Well," Tommy interrupted, "you guys have a good day." He hurried away to the bus stop. As the bus pulled up he looked back and saw the two coroners tucking the little dog into the woman's body bag.

Tommy got off the bus at a coffeehouse near Chinatown where he had seen guys in berets scribbling in notebooks and smoking French cigarettes. If you were looking for a place to sit and stare into the abyss for a while, always look for guys in berets smoking French cigarettes. They were like road signs: "Existential Crisis, Next Right." And the incident with the body bag had put Tommy in the mood to contemplate the meaninglessness of life for a few minutes before he started hunting for an apartment. They had treated that poor woman like a piece of meat. People should have been crying and fainting and fighting over her will. It must be some sort of protection mechanism, more of that ability that city people had for ignoring suffering.

He ordered a double mocha at the counter. A girl with magenta hair and three nose rings frothed it up while Tommy searched though a stack of used newspapers on the counter, separating the classified sections. When he paid the girl she caught him staring at her nose rings and smiled. "Thought is death," she said, handing him the mocha.

"Have a nice day," Tommy said.

He sat down and began flipping though the classifieds. As he read through the apartments for rent, the money in his pocket seemed to shrink. Here was the reason why people seemed so distracted. They were all worrying about making rent.

An ad for a furnished loft caught his eye. He was a loft kind of guy. He imagined himself saying, "No, I can't hang around, I've got to get back to the loft and write." And, "Sorry, I left my wallet in the loft." And writing, "Dear Mom, I've moved into a spacious loft in fashionable SOMA."

Tommy put the paper down and turned to a beret guy at the next table who was reading a volume of Baudelaire and building up a drift of Disc Bleu butts in the ashtray. "Excuse me," Tommy said, "but I'm new in town. Where would I find fashionable SOMA?"

The beret guy looked irritated. "South of Market," he said. Then he picked up his book and cigarettes and walked out of the cafe.

"Sorry," Tommy called after him. Maybe if I had asked him in French…

Tommy unfolded the map Jody had left him and found Market Street, then a neighborhood marked "SOMA." It wasn't far from where Jody had marked the Transamerica Pyramid. He folded up the map and tore the loft ad out of the classifieds. This was going to be easy.

As he prepared to leave, he looked up to see an enormously fat man in a purple velvet robe enter the cafe carrying a leather sample case decorated with silver moons and stars. He sat at a table near Tommy, his bulk spilling over either side of the cane chair, and began removing things from the sample case. Tommy was captivated.

The fat man's head was shaved and there was a pentagram tattooed on his scalp. He covered his table with a piece of black satin, then placed a crystal ball on a pedestal of brass dragons in the center. Next he unwrapped a deck of tarot cards from a purple silk scarf and placed them by the crystal ball. Last he removed a sign from the sample case and set it up on the table. It read: "Madame Natasha. Palmistry, Tarot, Divination. Psychic Readings $5.00. All proceeds go to AIDS research."

Madame Natasha was sitting with his back to Tommy. As Tommy stared at the pentagram tattoo, Madame Natasha turned to him. Tommy looked away quickly.

"I think you need a reading, young man," Madame Natasha said, his voice high and feminine.

Tommy cleared his throat. "I don't believe in that stuff. Thanks, though."

Madame Natasha closed his eyes as if he were listening to a particularly moving passage of music. When he opened them again he said, "You're new to the City. A little confused and a little scared. You're an artist of some kind, but you don't make your living that way. And you've recently turned down a proposal of marriage. Am I right?"

Tommy dug into his pocket, "Five dollars?"

"Have a seat," Madame Natasha said, waving him to a seat at his table.

Tommy moved to the seat across from Madame and handed him a five-dollar bill. Madame Natasha picked up his tarot cards and began shuffling. His hands were tiny and delicate; his nails painted black. "What shall we ask the cards today?" Madame said.

"I've met this girl. I want to know more about her."

Madame Natasha nodded solemnly and began laying the cards out on the table. "I don't see a woman in your near future."

"Really?"

Madame pointed to a card on the right of the pattern he had laid out. "No. You see the position of this card? This card rules your relationships."

"It says 'Death. »

"That does not necessarily mean physical death. The Death card can be a card of renewal, signifying a change. I would say that you recently broke up with someone."

"Nope," Tommy said. He stared at the stylized picture of the skeleton with the scythe. It seemed to be laughing at him.

"Let's try again," Madame Natasha said. He gathered the cards, shuffled them, and began laying them out again.

Tommy watched the spot where his relationship card would fall. Madame paused, then turned the card. Death.

"Well, well, what a co-in-kee-dink," Madame Natasha said.

"Try again," Tommy said.

Again Madame shuffled, and again, when he laid down the relationship card, it was Death.

"What does it mean?" Tommy asked.

"It could mean a lot of things, depending on your other suits." Madame waved to the other cards in the pattern.

"Then what does it mean with the other cards?"

"Honestly?"

"Of course. I want to know."

"You're fucked."

"What?"

"As far as relationships?"

"Yes."

"You're fucked."

"What about my writing career?"

Madame Natasha consulted the cards again, then, without looking up, said, "Fucked."

"I am not. I'm not fucked."

"Yep. Fucked. It's in the cards. Sorry."

"I don't believe in this stuff," Tommy said.

"Nevertheless," Madame Natasha said.

Tommy stood up. "I have to go find an apartment."

"Do you want to consult the cards about your new home?"

"No. I don't believe the cards."

"I could read your palm."

"Will it cost extra?"

"No, it's included."

"Okay." Tommy held out his hand and Madame Natasha cradled it delicately. Tommy looked around to see if anyone was looking, tapped his foot as if he was in a hurry.

"Goodness, you masturbate a lot, don't you?"

A guy at a nearby table spit coffee all over his paperback Sartre and looked over.

Tommy pulled his hand away. "No!"

"Now, now, don't lie. Madame Natasha knows."

"What's that got to do with an apartment?"

"Just checking my accuracy. It's like zeroing out a polygraph."

"Not a lot," Tommy said.

"Then I'll have to adjust my reading. I would have rated you a wankmaster of the first degree. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Considering your relationship card, I'd say it's your only option."

"Well, you're wrong."

"As you wish. Let me see your palm again."

Tommy surrendered his palm reluctantly.

"Oh, good news at last," Madame Natasha said. "You will find an apartment."

"Good," Tommy said, pulling his hand back again. "I've got to go."

"Don't you want to know about the rats?"

"No." Tommy turned and headed toward the door. As he reached it he turned and said, "I'm not fucked."

The Sartre reader looked up from his book and said, "We all are. We all are."

Chapter 13 To-Do List of the Fashionably Doomed

When you know the future is grim, there is no need for speed. Tommy decided to walk to the financial district. He shuffled along with the hang-dog look of the cosmically fucked.

He walked through Chinatown, spotted three of the Wongs buying lottery tickets at a liquor store, and headed up to the room to get his typewriter and clothes before they returned. His spirits lifted a little when he climbed down the narrow stairway for the last time, but Madame Natasha's words came back to dump on him again: "I don't see a woman in your near future."

It had been one of the reasons he had come to San Francisco — to find a girlfriend. Someone who would see him as an artist. Not like the girls back home, who saw him as a bookish freak. It was all part of the plan: live in the City, write stories, look at the bridge, ride cable cars, eat Rice-A-Roni, and have a girlfriend — someone he could tell his thoughts to, preferably after hours of godlike sex. He wasn't looking for perfection, just someone who made him feel secure enough to be insecure around. But not now. Now he was doomed.

He looked up at the skyline and realized that he had navigated wrong, arriving in the financial district, several blocks from the Pyramid. He zigzagged from block to block, avoiding eye contact with the men and women in business suits, who avoided eye contact in turn by checking their watches every few steps. Sure, he thought, they can check their watches. They have a future.

He arrived at the foot of the Pyramid a little breathless, his arms aching from carrying his belongings. He sat on a concrete bench at the edge of a fountain and watched people for a while.

They were all so determined. They had places to go, people to see. Their hair was perfect. They smelled good. They wore nice shoes. He looked at his own worn leather sneakers. Fucked.

Someone sat down next to him on the bench and he avoided looking up, thinking that it would just be another person who would make him feel inferior. He was staring at a spot on the concrete by his feet when a Boston terrier appeared on the spot and blew a jet stream of dog snot on his pant leg.

"Bummer, that's rude," the Emperor said. "Can't you see that our friend is sulking?"

Tommy looked up into the face of the Emperor. "Your Highness. Hello." The man had the wildest eyebrows Tommy had ever seen, as if two gray porcupines were perched on his brow.

The Emperor tipped his crown, a fedora made of panels cut from beer cans and laced together with yellow yarn. "Did you get the job?"

"Yes, they hired me that day. Thanks for the tip."

"It's honest work," the Emperor said. "There's a certain grace in that. Not like this tragedy."

"What tragedy?"

"These poor souls. These poor pathetic souls." The Emperor gestured toward the passersby.

"I don't understand," Tommy said.

"Their time has passed and they don't know what to do. They were told what they wanted and they believed it. They can only keep their dream alive by being with others like themselves who will mirror their illusions."

"They have really nice shoes," Tommy said.

"They have to look right or their peers will turn on them like starving dogs. They are the fallen gods. The new gods are producers, creators, doers. The new gods are the chinless techno-children who would rather eat white sugar and watch science-fiction films than worry about what shoes they wear. And these poor souls desperately push papers around hoping that a mystical message will appear to save them from the new, awkward, brilliant gods and their silicon-chip reality. Some of them will survive, of course, but most will fall. Uncreative thinking is done better by machines. Poor souls, you can almost hear them sweating."

Tommy looked at the well-dressed stream of business people, then at the Emperor's tattered overcoat, then at his own sneakers, then at the Emperor again. For some reason, he felt better than he had a few minutes before. "You really worry about these people, don't you?"

"It is my lot."

An attractive woman in a gray suit and heels approached the Emperor and handed him a five-dollar bill. She wore a silk camisole under her jacket and Tommy could make out the top of her lace bra when she bent over. He was mesmerized.

"Your Highness," she said, "there's a Chinese chicken salad on special at the Cafe Suisse today. I think Bummer and Lazarus would love it."

Lazarus wagged his tail. Bummer yapped at the mention of his name.

"Very thoughtful of you, my child. The men will enjoy it."

"Have a good day," she said, and walked away. Tommy watched her calves as she went.

Two men who were passing by, embroiled in an argument about prices and earnings, stopped their conversation and nodded to the Emperor.

"Go with God," the Emperor said. He turned back to Tommy. "Are you still looking for a domicile, or just a woman now?"

"I don't understand."

"You wear your loneliness like a badge."

Tommy felt as if his ego had just taken a right to the jaw. "Actually, I met a girl and I'm going to rent us a place this afternoon."

"My mistake," the Emperor said. "I misread you."

"No, you didn't. I'm fucked."

"Pardon?"

"A fortune-teller told me that there was no woman in my future."

"Madame Natasha?"

"How did you know?"

"You mustn't give too much credence to Madame Natasha's predictions. He's dying and it darkens his vision. The plague."

"I'm sorry," Tommy said. In fact, he felt relieved, then guilty for the reason behind it. He had no right to feel sorry for himself. The Emperor had nothing except his dogs, yet his sympathy was all directed toward his fellowman. I'm scum, Tommy thought. He said, "Your Highness, I have a little money now, if you need…"

The Emperor held up the bill the woman had given him. "We have all that we need, my son." He stood and tugged on the ropes that held Bummer and Lazarus. "And I should be off before the men revolt from hunger."

"Me, too, I guess." Tommy stood and made as if to shake hands, then bowed instead. "Thanks for the company."

The Emperor winked, spun on one heel, and started to lead his troops away, then stopped and turned back. "And, son, don't touch anything with an edge while you're in the building? Scissors, letter openers, anything."

"Why?" Tommy asked.

"It's the shape of the building, a pyramid. They'd rather people not know about it, but they have a full-time employee who just goes around dulling the letter openers."

"You're kidding."

"Safety first," the Emperor said.

"Thanks."

Tommy took a deep breath and steeled himself for his assault on the Pyramid. As he walked out of the sun and under the massive concrete buttresses, he could feel a chill through his flannel shirt, as if the concrete had stored the damp cold of the night fog and was radiating it like a refrigerator coil. He was shivering by the time he reached the information desk. A guard eyed him suspiciously.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for the Transamerica personnel department."

The guard made a face as if Tommy had been dipped in sewage. "Do you have an appointment?"

"Yes." Tommy waved Jody's papers under the guard's nose.

The guard picked up a phone and was punching numbers when a second guard came up behind him and took the receiver. "He's fine," the second guard said. "Send him up."

"But —"

"He's a friend of the Emperor."

The first guard hung up the phone and said, "Twenty-first floor, sir." He pointed to the elevators.

Tommy took an elevator to the twenty-first floor, then followed the signs until he found the right department. An officious-looking older woman told him to have a seat in the reception room, she would be right with him. Then she took great pains to act as if he had been sucked off the planet.

Tommy sat on a black leather sofa that sighed with his weight, chose a magazine from the black stone coffee table, and waited. During the next hour he read a household-hints column ("Coffee grounds in that cat box will fill your house with the delightful aroma of brewing espresso every time kitty heeds the call"); an article on computer junkies ("Bruce has been off the mouse for six months now, but he says he takes life one byte at a time"); and a review of the new musical Jonestown! ("Andrew Lloyd Webber's version of the Kool-Aid jingle is at once chilling and evocative. Donny Osmond is brilliant as Jim Jones.") He borrowed some whiteout from the officious-looking woman and touched up the finish on his sneakers, then dried them under a halogen reading light that looked like a robot's arm holding the sun. When he started pulling cologne sample cards out of GQ and rubbing them on his socks, the woman told him he could go on in.

He picked up his shoes and walked into the office in his stocking feet. Another officious-looking woman, who looked remarkably like the first officious-looking woman, down to the little chain on her reading glasses, had him sit down across from her while she looked at Jody's papers and ignored him.

She consulted a computer screen, tapped on a few keys, then waited while the computer did something. Tommy put his shoes on and waited. She didn't look up.

He cleared his throat. She tapped on the keys. He reached down, opened his suitcase, and took out his portable typewriter. She didn't look up. She tapped and looked at the screen.

He opened the typewriter case, rolled a piece of paper in the machine, and tapped on a few keys.

She looked up. He tapped a few more keys. "What are you doing?" she asked. Tommy tapped. He didn't look up.

The woman raised her voice. "I said, what are you doing?"

Tommy kept typing and looked up. "Pardon me, I was ignoring you. What did you say?"

"What are you doing?" She repeated.

"It's a note. Let me read it for you. 'Couldn't anyone else see that they were all slaves of Satan? I had to cleanse the world of their evil. I am the hand of God. Why else would security have let me into the building with an assault rifle in my suitcase? I am a divine instrument. " Tommy paused and looked up. "That's all I have so far, but I'll guess I end it with an apology to my mom. What do you think?"

She smiled as if hiding gas pains and handed him an envelope. "This is Jody's final paycheck. Give her our best. And you have a nice day now, young man."

"You too," Tommy said. He gathered up his stuff and left the office whistling.

Fashionable SOMA looked to Tommy an awful lot like a light industrial area: two- and three-story buildings with steel roll-up doors and steel-framed windows. The bottom floors housed ethnic restaurants, underground dance clubs, auto-repair shops, and the occasional foundry. Tommy paused outside of one to watch two long-haired men pouring bronze into a mold.

Artists, Tommy thought. He had never seen a real artist, and although these guys looked more like bikers, he wanted to talk to them. He took a tentative step through the doorway.

"Hi," he said.

The men were wrestling with a huge ladle, the two of them gripping the long metal handle with asbestos gloves. One looked up. "Out!" he said.

Tommy said, "Okay, I can see you guys are busy. 'Bye." He stood on the sidewalk and checked his map. He was supposed to meet the rental agent somewhere around here. He looked up and down the street. Except for a guy passed out on the corner, the street was empty. Tommy was thinking about waking the guy up and asking him if this was, indeed, the fashionable part of SOMA, when a green Jeep pulled up beside him and skidded to a stop. The driver, a woman in her forties with wild gray hair, rolled down the window.

"Mr. Flood?" She said.

Tommy nodded.

"I'm Alicia DeVries. Let me park and I'll show you the loft."

She backed the Jeep into a spot that seemed too short for it by six inches, running the wheels up over the curb, then she jumped out, dragging after her a purse roughly the size of Tommy's suitcase. She wore sandals, a dashiki, and multicolored Guatemalan cotton pants. There were chopsticks stuck here and there in her hair, as if she were prepared at any minute to deal with an emergency stir-fry.

She looked at Tommy's suitcase. "You look like you're ready to move in today. This way."

She breezed by Tommy to a fire door beside the foundry. Tommy could smell the patchouli in her wake.

She said, "This area is just like Soho was twenty years ago. You're lucky to have a shot at one of these lofts now, before they go co-op and start selling for a million dollars."

She unlocked the door and started up the steps. "This place has incredible energy," she said, without looking back. "I'd love to live here myself, except the market's down right now and I'd have to sell my place in the Heights."

Tommy dragged his suitcase up the steps after her.

"Do you paint, Mr. Flood?"

"I'm a writer."

"Oh, a writer! I do a little writing myself. I'd like to write a book myself some weekend, if I can find the time. Something about female circumcision, I think. Maybe something about marriage. But what's the difference, right?" She stopped at a landing at the top of the stairs and unlocked another fire door.

"Here it is." She threw the door open and gestured for Tommy to enter. "A nice work area and a bedroom in the back. There are two sculptors that work downstairs and a painter next door. A writer would really round the building out. What's your take on female circumcision, Mr. Flood?"

Tommy was still about three topics behind her, so he stood on the landing while his brain caught up. People like Alicia were the reason God made decaf. "I think everyone should have a hobby," he said, taking a shot in the dark.

Alicia jammed like an overheated machine gun. She seemed to look at him for the first time, and did not seem to like what she saw. "You are aware that we'll need a significant security deposit, if your application is accepted?"

"Okay," Tommy said. He entered the loft, leaving her standing on the landing.

The loft was roughly the size of a handball court. It had an island kitchen in the middle, and windows ran along one wall from floor to ceiling. There was an old rug, a futon, and a low plastic coffee table in the open area near the kitchen. The back wall was lined with empty bookshelves, broken only by a single door to the bedroom.

The bookshelves did it. Tommy wanted to live here. He could see the shelves filled with Kerouac, and Kesey, and Hammett, and Ginsberg, and Twain, and London, and Bierce, and every other writer who had lived and written in the City. One shelf would be for the books he was going to write: hardbacks in thirty languages. There would be a bust of Beethoven on that shelf. He didn't really like Beethoven, but he thought he should have a bust of him.

He resisted the urge to shout, "I'll take it!" It was Jody's money. He had to check the bedroom for windows. He opened the door and went in. The room was as dark as a cave. He flipped the light switch and track lighting along one wall came on. There was an old mattress and box springs on the floor. The walls were bare brick. No windows.

Through another door was a bathroom with a freestanding sink and a huge claw-foot tub that was stained with rust and paint. No windows. He was so excited, he thought he would wet himself.

He ran out into the main living area where Alicia was standing with her hand on her hip, mentally shoving him into the pigeonhole of abusive barbarism she had made for him.

"I'll take it," Tommy said.

"You'll have to fill out an —"

"I'll give you four thousand dollars in cash, right now." He pulled the wad of bills out of his jeans.

"How many keys will you need?"

Chapter 14 Two Losts Do Not Make a Found

Consciousness went off like a flashbulb of pain: a dull ache in her head, sharp daggers in her knees and her chin. Jody was slumped in the shower. The water was still running — had been running on her all day. She crawled out of the shower stall on her hands and knees and pulled towels out of the rack.

She sat on the bathroom floor and dried herself, blotting away the water with rough terry cloth. Her skin felt tender, almost raw. The towels were damp from fourteen hours of steam. The ceiling dripped and the walls ran with condensation. She braced herself against the sink and climbed to her feet, then opened the door and stumbled through the room to the bed.

Be careful what you ask for, she thought. All the regret about waking up a little too alert, coming out of sleep like a gunshot, came back on her. She hadn't thought about falling asleep in the same way. She must have been in the shower at sunup, dropped to the shower floor, and stayed there throughout the day.

She sat up on the bed and gently touched her chin. Pain shot up her jaw. She must have hit it on the soap dish when she went out. Her knees were bruised as well.

Bruised? Something was wrong. She jumped to her feet and went to the dresser. She turned on the light and leaned into the mirror, then yelped. Her chin was bruised blue, with a corona of yellow. Her hair was hopelessly tangled and she now had a small bald spot where the water had worn away at her scalp.

She backed away and sat back on the bed, stunned. Something was wrong, seriously wrong, beyond her injuries. It was the light. Why had she turned on the light? The night before she would have been able to see herself in the mirror by the light filtering in under the bathroom door. But it was more than that. It was a tightness in her mouth, pressure, like when she had first gotten braces as a child.

She ran her tongue over her teeth and felt the points breaking through the roof of her mouth just behind her eyeteeth.

She thought, I'm breaking down from lack of… She couldn't even make herself think it. This will get worse. Much worse.

Now she could feel the hunger, not in her stomach, but in her entire body, as if her veins were going to collapse on themselves. And there was a tension in her muscles, as if piano strings were tightening inside her body, sharpening her movements, making her feel as if she would jump through a window any second.

I've got to calm down. Calm down. Calm down. Calm down.

She repeated the mantra to herself as she got up and walked to the phone. It seemed to take an incredible effort to push the zero button and wait for the desk clerk to come on.

"Hi, this is room two-ten. Is there a guy in the lobby waiting? Yes, that's him. Would you tell him I'll be down in a few minutes?"

She put down the phone and went to the bathroom, where she turned off the shower and wiped down the mirror. She looked at herself in the mirror and fought the urge to burst into tears.

This is a project, she thought. She turned her head and looked at her bald spot. It was small enough that she could cover it with a new part held by a couple of hairpins. Her bruised chin might require some explaining.

She started to run her fingers though her hair to facilitate the preliminary untangle, fighting the tension in her arms that seemed to be increasing every second. A large moth buzzed into the bathroom and went for the light above the mirror. Before she knew what had happened, she snatched it out of the air and ate it.

She stared at her reflection and was horrified by the red-haired stranger who had just eaten a moth. Even so, a warmth ran though her like good brandy. The bruise on her chin faded as she watched.

The first thing she saw when she turned the corner at the lobby was Tommy's grin.

"Good," he said. "You're dressed for moving. I like your hair pinned up like that."

Jody smiled, and stood awkwardly in front of him, thinking she should greet him with a hug, but afraid to get too close to him. She could smell him and he smelled like food. "You found a place?"

"An incredible loft, south of Market. It's even furnished." He seemed as if he would burst with excitement. "I used all the money; I hope that's okay."

"Fine," Jody said. She just wanted to get him alone.

"Get your stuff," he said. "I want to show it to you."

Jody nodded. "I'll be just a minute. Have the desk clerk call a cab."

She turned to leave. Tommy caught her by the arm. "Hey, are you okay?"

She motioned for him to move within whisper range. "I want you so badly I can hardly stand it."

She pulled away and ran up the steps to her room. Inside she gathered what few belongings she had and checked herself in the mirror one last time. She was wearing jeans and the chambray blouse from the night before. She unbuttoned her blouse and did a straitjacket escape from her bra, then buttoned the blouse halfway up. She stuffed the bra into her day pack and locked the room for the last time.

When she returned to the lobby, Tommy was waiting outside by a blue DeSoto cab. He opened the door for her, climbed in, and gave the driver the address.

"You're going to love it," he said. "I know you are."

She moved closer to him and held his arm tightly between her breasts. "I can't wait," she said. A tiny voice in her head asked, What are you doing? What are you going to do to him? It was so faint and foreign that it might have come from someone outside on the street.

Tommy pulled away from her and dug into his jeans pocket, coming out with an envelope. "Your check's in here. I didn't open it."

She took it and put it in her day pack, then moved on him again.

He scooted to the door and nodded toward the driver, who was watching them in the rearview mirror. "Forget him," Jody whispered. She licked Tommy neck and shuddered with the taste and warmth of his flesh.

"I couldn't get your car out of impound. It has to be the owner."

"Doesn't matter," she said, nuzzling into the space under his jaw.

The cab stopped and the driver turned to them. "Six-ten," he said.

Jody threw a twenty over the seat, reached over Tommy and opened the door, dived out and dragged him out of the cab after her. "Where is it?"

Tommy just had time to point to the door before she pushed him at it. She climbed on his back as he unlocked the door, then bolted past him and dragged him up the steps.

"You're really excited about this, aren't you?" he asked.

"It's great." She stopped at the fire door at the top of the stairs. "Open it," she commanded.

Tommy unlocked the door and threw it open. "This is it!"

She went through, catching the front of his shirt and pulling him in.

"Look at all these bookshelves," he said.

She ripped his shirt off and kissed him hard.

He pulled up for air and said, "The bedroom doesn't have any windows, just like you wanted."

"Where?" she demanded.

He pointed to the open door and she pushed him through it. He fell face down on the bare mattress. She flipped him over, hooked her hands into the waist of his jeans and ripped them off him.

"So you like it?" he asked.

She ripped her shirt open and held him to the bed, one hand on his chest while she took off her own jeans. She climbed on him and muffled his next question with a kiss.

He finally got the message and returned her kiss and tried to match her urgency, then didn't have to try at all. She pulled away from the kiss as her fangs unsheathed, then guided him into her as he moaned. Jody growled deep in her chest, pushed his head to the side and bit him on the neck.

"Ouch!" Tommy shouted. She held him down and snarled into his neck.

Dust from the old mattress filled the air and was stirred by the movement of their bodies.

"Oh jeez!" Tommy shouted, digging his fingers into her bottom. Jody answered him with a catlike scream as she came, then fell on his chest and licked the blood that dribbled from the punctures on his neck.

She twitched and shuddered while he repeated, "Oh jeez," over and over again between gasps. After a few minutes she rolled off him and lay on the bed feeling the warm nourishment running though her.

Tommy rubbed his neck. "That was great," he said. "That was incredible. You are —"

Jody rolled over. "Tommy, I have to tell you something."

"You're beautiful," he said.

Jody smiled at him. The urgency was gone now and she was feeling guilty. I could have killed him, she thought.

Tommy reached over and touched her lips. "What's that on your teeth? Did you hurt yourself?"

"It's blood, Tommy. It's your blood."

He felt his neck again, which was completely healed. "My blood?"

"Tommy, I've never done anything like that before. I've never been that way before."

"Me either. It was great!"

"I'm a vampire."

"That's okay," Tommy said. "I knew this girl in high school who gave me a hickey that covered the whole side of my neck."

"No, Tommy. I'm really a vampire." She looked him in the eye and did not smile or look away. She waited.

He said, "Don't goof on me, okay?"

"Tommy, have you ever seen anyone tear a pair of jeans like that before?"

"That was my animal attraction, right?"

Jody got out of bed, went to the bedroom door and closed it, shutting out the light from the living area. "Can you see anything?"

"No," he said.

"Hold up a number of fingers. Don't tell me how many."

He did.

"Three," Jody said. "Try again."

He did.

"Seven."

"Jeez," he said. "Are you psychic?"

She opened the door. Light spilled in.

"You have an incredible body," Tommy said.

"Thanks. I need to lose five pounds."

"Let's do it again, without our shoes on this time."

"Tommy, you have to listen to me. This is important. I'm not kidding you. I am a vampire."

"C'mon, Jody, come over here. I'll take your shoes off for you."

Jody looked up at the ceiling. There were open steel beams twenty feet above. "Watch." She jumped up and grabbed on to a beam and hung. "See?"

"Jeez," Tommy said.

"Do you have a book here?"

"In my suitcase."

"Go get it."

"Be careful. You could fall."

"Get the book, Tommy."

Tommy went into the living area, looking up at her as he walked under. He returned with a volume of Kerouac.

"Now what? Come down from there. You're making me nervous."

"Close the door and open the book."

He closed the door and the room went dark again. Jody read a half page aloud before he opened the door again.

"Jeez," he said.

She let go of the beam and dropped to the floor. Tommy backed away from her to the bed and sat down.

"If you want to leave, I'll understand," she said.

"When we were making love… you were cold inside."

"Look, I didn't mean to hurt you."

Tommy's eyes were wide. "You really are a vampire, aren't you?"

"I'm sorry. I needed help. I needed someone."

"You really are a vampire." It was a statement this time.

"Yes, Tommy. I am."

He paused for a second to think, then said, "That's the coolest thing I've ever heard. Let's do it with our shoes off."