Читать книгу Mob Rules - Cameron Haley - Страница 8

When he wasn’t tagging or tying someone up in his apartment, Jamal could usually be found on a playground in Crenshaw, shooting hoops with his homeboys. I parked on the street by the court and went in through a gap in the rusted chain-link fence.

There were seven guys playing full-court, all of them young black males. The oldest might have been twenty-five. A few girlfriends and hangers-on lounged courtside on the cracked concrete. They leaned against the fence and watched the game. They passed a blunt around and smoked. The court and both backboards were decorated with tags Jamal had put down.

The game stopped as soon as my car pulled up, and everyone was watching me as I stepped through the fence. The guy holding the ball walked toward me. He was a six-foot-ten, three-hundred-pound horse named Marcus. He’d come off the bench on a full-ride at UCLA for two years. He would have started his junior year at power forward, but he got collared for dealing crack and lost his scholarship.

“Yo, Domino,” he called. “We need a skin.”

It was going around. “You’ve got four skins and three shirts, Marcus.”

“Nah, D, Shawan gonna go shirts.” He nodded to one of the brothers. The kid jogged over to his gym bag and dropped a tank top over his head.

I was always a skin. Watching a five-foot-seven Mexican-Irish girl in her thirties trying to play ball with these guys wasn’t enough entertainment. Jamal’s boys always needed me to go shirtless. I’d learned a somewhat embarrassing lesson the first time this happened, so I was wearing a sports bra.

I stripped to the waist and handed my jacket and shirt to Marcus’s girlfriend, a young twentysomething with an elaborately styled weave and gold fingernails. She smiled and folded them neatly in her lap. I passed her the shoulder holster with the forty-five and she tucked it under my jacket.

“Don’t take Marcus money, Domino,” she whispered. “We got rent.”

“Yo, D, you been workin’ out?” Marcus asked, laughing and elbowing the kid named Shawan. “You lookin’ ripped, girl!”

“My people weren’t bred to pick cotton.” Casual sexism and racism were social etiquette in Crenshaw. I hear it makes some people uncomfortable.

“Nah, that’s right. Your peeps bred skinny to crawl under the fence.” Everyone laughed.

“I’m only half-Mexican,” I said, and gave up the straight line. “My dad was Irish.”

“Someone get this skinny bitch a potato,” said Shawan. The game was delayed another couple minutes so he could be congratulated for his wit with chest-bumps and fist-pounds.

“Okay, Shawan, I got you. Bitch.” I’d been cheating on the playground since kindergarten. This time, I only used enough juice to make sure Shawan didn’t score and to throw down a two-handed jam in his face on an alley-oop from our point guard. Skins still lost, and I coughed up my twenty so Marcus could make his rent. After the game, I joined them along the fence for Red Bull and weed.

“So what you doing, D?” asked Marcus. “You come down here just to give your money to us poor black folks?”

“Yeah, Marcus, I don’t pay taxes and I was worried your welfare check might bounce.”

“Fuck that, D. I got a job.”

Marcus, like most of the guys on the court, was a part-time criminal. No juice, no serious gang affiliation and no real connection with our thing. They were the handymen of Crenshaw’s ghetto economy. If a small-time rock-slinger turned up dead or incarcerated and his boss needed someone to fill in, he’d have a ready labor pool waiting at the playground.

“Actually, I was just wondering if you knew what Jamal has been up to.”

“You ain’t seen him, neither, huh?” said Marcus. “Word is he got a new ho.” Marcus’s girlfriend scowled and drove an elbow into his ribs.

“Sorry, baby,” he said.

“You know who she is?”

“Nah, girl, like I said, we ain’t even seen the brother. The woman, you know, that’s just what he said she said and whatnot.”

“Any new friends, besides the woman, I mean?”

Heads shook.

“Maybe you’ve seen some new faces hanging around. Maybe some guys in Papa Danwe’s outfit.”

“Nah, D, Papa Danwe got most of Inglewood and Watts, but he don’t got Crenshaw. Everyone know Crenshaw belong to the Turk.”

Rashan was known as the Turk on the street, at least by those who didn’t know him well. The outfit’s turf is shaped like a crescent, running from Santa Monica around the southern edge of downtown, up through East L.A. and reaching into Pasadena. Rashan controlled Crenshaw, but there was only a nebulous border separating his territory from Papa Danwe’s turf.

“All right, you give me a call if you hear anything else.” Nods all around.

“Jamal in some kinda trouble, D?” Marcus asked.

“I think y’all might need to recruit another player,” I said. “Jamal won’t be going skins anytime soon.”

I left Crenshaw and drove back to civilization. I took Santa Monica Boulevard into Beverly Hills. I’ve always liked Beverly Hills. The outfits exist by virtue of the fact that most people don’t pay any attention to what’s going on around them. It’s charming. No other place has reached Beverly Hills’s level of clueless perfection, with the possible exception of Vegas.

A vampire can walk down Rodeo Drive, window-shopping and pausing for the occasional snack, and no one will even notice as long as he’s wearing the right suit. A sorcerer would have to turn a demon loose in Gucci to attract attention.

The art opening was like any other of its kind. When I walked in, the gallery was bustling with the young, rich and fashionable in-crowd. This was L.A., though, so everyone had two out of three working—they were all faking the third.

I was there to meet an associate, a connected probation officer on the outfit’s payroll. His name was Tommy Barrow and he was twenty-nine years old. He used his secondary income, drug connections and gangster stories to circulate with the art-opening crowd and chase women who were out of his league.

I spotted him standing by an abstract painting in animated conversation with a salon blonde. Her swimsuit-model body and pouting lips advertised one of the many nearby clinics.

“Hi, Tommy,” I said. “Who’s your friend?” The blonde wore a diamond-and-ruby pendant that nestled in her prodigious cleavage. A red arrow painted on her chest wouldn’t have drawn more attention to her neckline.

“Sandy, this is Domino, a friend of ours,” Tommy said, his voice low and conspiratorial.

Sandy’s tastefully decorated face brightened and the pouty lips stretched into a sunny smile. “Oh, so you work for Tommy in, you know, the business?”

I looked at Tommy and raised an eyebrow. He shrugged apologetically. “Not exactly,” I said. “You could say we answer to the same boss.”

“Oh, I see,” Sandy said. “Can I ask what you do, or would you have to kill me?” She giggled, bringing a delicate and bejeweled hand to her mouth but making sure I could still see her perfectly straight and whitened teeth. In the outfit, I didn’t get any real sexism from the guys and I didn’t deal with cattiness from the girls. I had juice, and that’s all that mattered on the street. I only ran into that kind of shit from civilians.

I laughed, turning from her to Tommy, and then back to her. I put the smile away. “I wouldn’t have to.”

She stopped in midgiggle, and I could almost hear the little wheels in her head turning as she tried to figure out if I was joking or not.

Tommy laughed loudly and put his hand on my arm. “That’s a good one, Domino! Sandy, why don’t you run along so we can talk business?”

Sandy lit up again and the smile reappeared. “Oh, okay!” she bubbled. “It was nice to meet you, Domino.” She bounced away and I turned my attention to the painting on the wall, some kind of abstract brown swirl on a yellow background.

“Looks like shit.”

“It is,” Tommy said, following my gaze to the painting. “Dog, I think.”

I looked closer. It was. The artist had lacquered it to the canvas.

“Let’s go outside for a smoke.”

Tommy nodded, grinning. “Those things will kill you, Domino.”

I have a purification spell that rules that out, but I didn’t mention it. It’s the kind of thing that pisses people off. They don’t really mind if you smoke as long as it kills you. Out on the sidewalk, I drew a Camel and lit up.

Tommy immediately began scanning the area for attractive female pedestrians. “So what can I do for you, Domino?”

“Jamal is dead,” I said. Tommy’s gaze immediately snapped back to me. I wouldn’t be able to keep the murder a secret, and Tommy would need to know eventually.

“When? How?” Tommy asked. His store-bought tan had lost a little color.

“Last night. Probably a hit.”

“Jesus. Who did it?”

“Hard to say. Jamal isn’t talking.”

“How did he die? Where did you find him?” Tommy was fishing for all the details that would allow him to spin a good insider report to impress his friends.

“Skinned and crucified in his apartment, magical ritual. Squeezed.”

Tommy let out a low whistle. “Damn. Hell of a way to go.”

“Yeah, Tommy, not the best.”

“So what do you want from me? You want me to call it in?”

“No, just report him AWOL the next time he comes up on your schedule. I don’t need a police investigation, even if it is half-assed.”

Tommy nodded.

“What I really need is information. I already ran Jamal’s homeboys through the paces. They don’t know much.”

“Okay,” Tommy said, thinking hard. “Like what? I was his PO. It was my job to keep him out of Chino. I guess I knew Jamal about as well as anyone.” For once, I didn’t think Tommy was exaggerating, at least not much. A probation officer was the closest most outfit guys ever came to a confessional. Jamal probably told Tommy Barrow things he’d never tell his friends or family.

“I need to know if he was up to anything unusual. Maybe he had something going on the side, maybe he made a new enemy.”

Tommy shook his head. “Far as I know, Jamal was a stand-up guy. The outfit was his life, and he wouldn’t try to run something under the radar. He thought he had a future with the outfit…and more to the point, he didn’t think he had a future without it.”

That fit with what I knew about the kid. He was smarter than most, and ambitious. It wasn’t exactly helping me connect him to Papa Danwe, though.

“Any new habits? New friends?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, after a moment biting his lip. “He was hanging out at the Cannibal Club. He had this thing he was trying with bondage and that kind of stuff, to work on his craft. He said it was a good place to find girls who were into that.”

The Cannibal Club was a nightspot in Hollywood that was popular with the black leather and porcelain fangs crowd. It was hard to picture Jamal there, and once you did it was a funny picture. Hollywood wasn’t Papa Danwe’s turf—none of the outfits controlled it. Still, maybe Papa Danwe had something working at the club. Maybe Jamal had gotten in the way.

“What about family?” I asked. It bothered me that I hadn’t thought about it before. Jamal had been a person before he’d been a corpse and a problem for me to solve.

Tommy shook his head. “You know the story. Father split, mother OD’d when Jamal was fifteen.”

“Okay,” I said. “You got anything else?”

“I don’t think so, Domino. If I remember anything, I’ll let you know.”

“Do that. Have fun with Sandy. You make a great couple.” I guess I can be a little catty, too, sometimes. I flipped my cigarette into the street, drawing a contemptuous sniff from a middle-aged woman in a white dress, saucer-size sunglasses and a ridiculous hat. I smiled at her and tapped a little juice, vaporizing the butt where it lay on the asphalt. She didn’t even notice.

About eleven o’clock that night, I left my condo and drove into Hollywood. It was a Saturday night, and as usual, traffic was a bitch. Fortunately I have a spell that allows me to weave through even the worst snarls with a little lane-jockeying.

Technically, the incantation I think of as the traffic spell is chaos magic—the old school would call it a luck spell. It’s one of my favorites. It’s subtle, and practical and complex enough that most sorcerers can’t manage it. In simple terms, it isolates and adjusts probability lines such that you just happen to find an open route through even the heaviest traffic. I surfed the probability waves through the Hollywood night and found the club on Sunset Boulevard.

I pulled up out front and spun my parking spell, muttering the words of the incantation. “Any place worth its salt has a parking problem.” I eased my car into a spot right by the door of the club just as a yellow Honda tuner pulled out. What luck.

There was a line of pasty, black-clad kids winding around the block, but sorcerers don’t wait in lines any more than we settle for lousy parking or sit in traffic jams. I walked up to the bouncer and smiled.

“I’m on the list,” I said. I wasn’t. I didn’t even know if there was a list. The bouncer’s meaty, clean-shaven head didn’t even budge as he checked me out from behind his wraparound sunglasses.

I reached out and touched the juice, channeling it through my imagination and rearranging it according to the pattern I’d learned.

“I have with me two gods,” I said. “Persuasion and Compulsion.” I released the magic and let it wash over him. Behind the sunglasses, the bouncer blinked.

“Oh,” he said, stepping aside to let me pass, “you’re on the list.”

I met the chorus of protests from the waiting kids with a smile and a little shrug. “I’m on the list,” I said.

Metal detector, pat down, cover charge and then I was inside and heading to the nearest bar.

The Cannibal Club was black decor, chain-link fencing, head-splitting techno-industrial you can dance to, blacklight and the smell of sweat and patchouli. It was teenagers and twentysomethings in black leather, black rubber, black nylon, black vinyl and black velvet. It was body piercings and tattoos, black hair dye and white clown makeup. Flat-panel monitors offered a live feed of the writhing, thrashing, swaying bodies on the dance floor. An electronic ticker scrolling at the bottom of the screens announced that sunrise was at 5:41 a.m.

I went to the bar and ordered a beer. I used a little juice, or I’d have stood there for hours without attracting a bartender’s attention. I took a lengthy pull from the longneck and scanned the club. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for. I guess I was hoping to spot one of Papa Danwe’s guys hanging around, looking suspicious. I didn’t see anyone I recognized, but then it was dark as the Beyond and everyone was dressed like the Crow.

After a few minutes of fruitless squinting into the strobe-pierced gloom, I relaxed and tried my witch sight. A few of the kids in the club had a little juice. That was normal for a place like the Cannibal Club. None of them had the kind of juice to be my killer. I sensed stronger magic in the VIP area that ran along one side of the dance floor, but I didn’t have a clear view from where I was standing by the bar. I dropped the sight and headed that way.

The guy holding court in the semicircular booth was a prince among the pretenders. His glossy hair flowed to his shoulders and draped his white collar in black silk. He’d elected not to conceal the natural beauty of his caramel skin in the hideous clown makeup that seemed mandatory for most of the club-goers, male and female alike. His dark eyes were at once soulful and boyish, and the combination made my knees a little weak.

I’d been in the outfit most of my life, so I’d run into Adan Rashan on more than one occasion. I’d always thought he was attractive. Cute, even as an awkward teenager when his father had first introduced us. That night in the club, I thought he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

I don’t have a spell to counteract the intoxicating effect of a truly gorgeous man. If I did, I probably wouldn’t use it anyway. Even if it means I one day get sucker-punched by some seductive creature of the night, I say to hell with it. Some risks are worth taking.

So, yeah, Adan was hot. The Goth posse that flanked him in the booth was pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd, from where I was standing. One long-haired pale face sitting next to Adan stared at me menacingly. He leaned over and whispered something without breaking eye contact with me, and then he sneered. I hated him already.

I went back to the bar, juiced the bartender again and had her send over a couple bottles of Cristal. A waitress delivered the champagne, pointing in my direction. I raised my bottle and smiled, wishing I’d ordered something classier than a beer. Adan recognized me and returned the smile, then waved me over. The Gothtard next to him scowled, which I liked.

The VIP area was roped off, and I gave the bouncer the same Jedi mind trick that got me in the club. I handed him my empty before making my way over to Adan’s table.

He stood as I approached. He was wearing a tailored black suit, the ivory shirt unbuttoned at the collar just enough to be interesting. The rich fabric draped his slender frame like…well, like an expensive suit on a young male body that’s just about perfect.

“Domino,” he said, “thanks for the champagne.” He leaned across the corner of the table—and across Gothtard—to give me a hug and a chaste kiss on the cheek. He smelled like musk, and apples and cinnamon—and like sweat and patchouli, but that was just the fucking club.

“Hi, Adan,” I said. “You’re welcome. I’ll send the bill to your father.”

He laughed, and it echoed around the table, though the posse probably had no idea what I was talking about. Gothtard didn’t laugh. He just stared at me and brooded dangerously.

“I’ve never seen you here before,” Adan said. “Do you come here often?” Then, laughing, “Jesus, I can’t believe I just said that.”

I’d planned to play the tough girl and outbrood Gothtard, but I found myself laughing, too, because Adan’s dark eyes sparkled and because he had the tiniest little dimples in an otherwise classically sculpted face.

He introduced the posse—Edward, Louis, Armand, Elvira, Wednesday Addams, yada yada yada. I nodded, smiled and then politely ignored them.

Adan sat back down and turned to Gothtard. “Manfred, can you pour the champagne?” The intensity of his brooding deepened momentarily, but he slid out of the booth to do the honors.

“Thanks, Fred,” I said, and took his seat beside Adan.

“It is Manfred,” he growled. He had a cute little German accent, probably affected. I nodded absently and turned to Adan.

“Anyway, no, this is my first time here,” I said. Fred handed him the first glass of Cristal, and he passed it to me. Fred scowled and I smiled.

“And what do you think of the Cannibal Club?” he asked. He took the next glass from Fred and nodded politely.

“It’s growing on me.”

Adan grinned, flashing those dimples again, and we touched glasses. “So what brings you here?”

I waited until Fred finished pouring the champagne and wedged himself in at the other end of the booth, and then I stood up. “I want to dance.”

“That works,” Adan said and laughed. I could feel Fred brooding as we made our way to the dance floor.

I know gangsters who use their magic to dance. I even know the spell. It’s actually a variant of a nonlethal compulsion that neutralizes an opponent, with the secondary benefit of making him look goofy. You cast the spell on yourself, relax your body, and with the help of a little juice, you literally let the music move you.

That’s just weak. Using magic for parking spots and prompt bar service is one thing, and I’ll admit to using my purification magic in ways that will keep me away from cosmetic surgeons indefinitely. But I draw the line at using it for sexy dancing. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just cheating. Maybe it’s nothing more than a different brand of vanity, but whatever sexiness I’ve got is all-natural, baby. Mostly.

In fairness to the weak-ass sorcerers who use the spell, club dancing does present a bit of a dilemma. If you really have no idea what you’re doing, you’ll look like an idiot. But if you try too hard, you’ll look like you’re trying too hard, and you’ll still look like an idiot. The key is to look like you have no idea what you’re doing, but sexy just comes naturally to you.

Out on the floor, I did my best to still my body, mind and soul and settle into this Zenlike state of nondancing dancing sexiness. I probably looked like an idiot. Mostly, I just held on to Adan and hoped no one would notice me.

As I moved against my boss’s son, I reviewed what I’d learned so far. First, the Goths in Adan’s posse were all normal humans, unremarkable but for their poor fashion sense. All except Fred, who was the genuine article. Judging by how much black juice was oozing from his undead hide, he had to be at least five hundred years old.

Adan, of course, was the source of the magic I’d picked up from the bar. Not him, exactly, but his accessories. The small gold hoop in his left ear, the star pendant hanging from a slender chain around his neck, a ring, his Rolex—all of it radiated first-class juice, mostly protective magic, and I recognized it immediately as his father’s.

As for Adan himself, well, the parts of his incredible body I could feel were lean, toned and hard, and I could feel most of them. Other than that, there wasn’t much to talk about. He had a little juice, about what you’d expect from a young man. He wasn’t a sorcerer.

After about ten minutes of dancing, I dropped a sound-dampening spell around us. The music faded into the background. Adan’s eyes widened and he smiled. “Are you trying to impress me, Domino?”

“Of course,” I said. “Adan, you know Fred is a vampire, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I met him here at the club. He’s never tried to, you know, fang me or anything.”

“How long have you known him?”

“A few months. Really, he’s nothing to worry about. He’s a little weird, I guess, but you know, he’s just a guy at the club.”

What did that mean? He’s just a guy at the club as in I don’t swing that way and he’s not any competition for you? Or, he likes me and promised not to drain my blood until my heart stops?

“Okay,” I said finally. “You’re a big boy…I guess you can choose your own friends.”

Adan laughed. Dimples were brandished disarmingly.

“So you like this Goth, emo, industrial scene—whatever they’re calling it now?” I asked. “It doesn’t really seem like your style.”

He shrugged. “It’s okay. I go to other clubs, too. I feel like a loser if I hang around Dad’s strip clubs too much.” Touché.

“Adan, I heard one of our guys had started coming here, kid named Jamal. You ever see him?”

Adan nodded. “He started coming in about a month ago. I hang out with him sometimes. Manfred doesn’t like him, but Manfred doesn’t really like anyone. Anyway, Jamal seems pretty cool.”

“Who else did he hang out with? Did you ever see him with anyone that looked, I don’t know, out of place?”

Adan’s brow furrowed. “He leaves with women sometimes, I guess. A lot of gangsters hang out here, so Jamal didn’t stick out as much as you’d think.”

“Really? This is a gangster hangout?”

“Yeah, mostly Papa Danwe’s guys. You know him?”

This detective stuff was easy. “Yeah, I’ve heard of him.”

“A lot of them hang out here. They all seem to know Manfred—at least the big guy does.”

“The big guy? Do you know his name?”

Adan shook his head. “I don’t know him, but I think he’s like a captain or whatever. Like you, I guess. He comes in here the most, sometimes by himself and sometimes with others. Anyway, he’s black and just a really big dude.”

There was one gangster in Papa Danwe’s outfit who matched that description pretty well. Terrence Cole, one of Papa Danwe’s lieutenants. He was the kind of guy who made a lasting impression.

“Did you ever see Jamal talking to this guy—or any of Papa Danwe’s boys?”

“No, other than the girls and when he was hanging out with me, Jamal mostly kept to himself.”

I guess that would have been too easy. “Okay. Thanks, Adan, this is really helpful.”

“Why are you asking? Is Jamal in some kind of trouble?”

I decided not to tell him, at least not yet. If his father wanted him to know about outfit business, he could tell Adan himself. He’d eventually hear about it anyway. I changed the subject.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” I groaned inwardly. It had been the first thing that came to mind.

“No. I did in college, but it didn’t work out. It’s hard to find someone, you know?”

I nodded.

“What about you?” Adan asked. “Boyfriend? Is there a Mr. Domino?”

I smiled and shook my head. “The only guys I meet are gangsters. It’s hard to find someone to bring home to Momma.”

He laughed, tilting his head back so the strobes danced in his liquid-brown eyes. “Does your mom know what you do?”

“Yeah, she’s always known. She’s just glad I have a job.”

“She probably worries about you. You’re her baby girl. This line of work, it’s gotta freak her out.”

I shrugged. I didn’t tell him my mom was a fortune-teller, a good one. Mom probably knew more about my life and my future than I wanted to think. Then again, maybe not—the fortune-telling game is notoriously unreliable, even for Mom.

I’d probably learned as much as I was going to, and really, that was more than I expected. I’d found a connection between Jamal and Papa Danwe’s outfit. Maybe Jamal was doing business with Papa Danwe. Maybe the kid had unknowingly picked up one of Terrence Cole’s girlfriends and tied her to the bondage rack in his apartment. I could see Jamal getting himself squeezed for something like that.

And then there was the Vampire Fred. I couldn’t probe his mind as I could a normal human’s, probably because his brain was as dead as the rest of him. But I didn’t like him. I didn’t like him lurking around my boss’s son. I didn’t know exactly what Jamal had been up to in the club, but I didn’t like the apparent coincidence of an unaligned supernatural creature hanging out in the place—hanging out with Papa Danwe’s guys. I was itching to connect Fred to the murder in some way.

Mostly, though, I didn’t want the undead piece of shit with Adan. Maybe it wasn’t any of my business, but I thought his father would want me to step up. Okay, maybe I had ulterior motives. Maybe it was some maternal, protective part of me screaming to get involved. Or maybe it was the romantically challenged part. I was sure it was what the maverick in the cop shows would do, so it had that going for it.

“Do you think your friends would mind if we got out of here?” I asked. I’d planned to wait until the end of the song to make my move, but I think the same damn song had been playing since I walked into the club.

Adan’s arms tightened around me and he breathed in my ear. “I don’t think I care what they think, Domino.”

We left the club without returning to the table. Fred, of course, was leaning against my car when we got outside. My vintage 1965 Lincoln Continental convertible with the original Arctic White paint. The vampire gave me the Look—the usual vamp shtick that would make a mortal woman his willing slave or whatever. To me he just looked like a really pale and very gay fashion model.

“Scratch the paint and I’ll shove a stake far enough up your ass to pick the blood clots out of your teeth.” I smiled and tucked my arm inside Adan’s. “Fred,” I added.

I’d like to say Fred sensed my great power and backed down. I’d like to say he recognized the more dangerous predator and submitted to the law of the jungle. But he didn’t. Fred made a move.

There aren’t a lot of vampires in L.A. They don’t like gathering in large numbers—too much competition for food. But when it comes to vampires, popular culture is so full of shit I don’t even know where to begin. I’ll mention just two things in passing.

First, humans haven’t believed in monsters for a long time, but in the twenty-first century, we’ve taken it one step further. We’ve rehabilitated the bastards. These days, vampires aren’t really monsters; they’re just tragically hip antiheroes with unusual diets. They sip daintily from cherished and willing blood donors and pine away for their lost humanity.

Well, vampirism isn’t a disease. It’s not a virus, or a genetic disorder or any other ridiculous pseudoscientific rationalization. Vampirism is blood magic. It’s a necromantic shortcut to immortality and a limited range of superpowers. Vampires are just ex-human sociopaths who lacked the juice to become real sorcerers.

Second, in the supernatural food chain of the underworld, vampires are pussies.

The instant Fred leaned away from my car, I triggered the repulsion spell stored in the silver gangster ring on my right pinkie. The ring was a preloaded talisman, allowing me to cast the spell with only the barest concentration and no witty quotation.

So when the Vampire Fred launched himself at me with catlike speed and preternatural fury, the repulsion spell met him halfway and used his own kinetic energy—plus a little extra—to throw him over my Lincoln, across the street and into the storefront of an overpriced flower shop.

“This’ll just take a second,” I said to Adan, and then I went after Fred.

By the time I crossed the street, the vampire was standing up and brushing flower petals and broken glass from his suit. He saw me approach and dropped into a predatory crouch, fangs bared and ready for battle.

Still about twenty feet away, I casually extended my hand, palm up, toward the Vampire Fred. “Vi Victa Vis,” I said. That’s Cicero—sometimes I bust out the Latin. The force spell hit Fred in the sternum and knocked him through the back of the flower shop into the skin-care clinic on the other side of the drywall.

This time, Fred was a little slower getting up. It’s another myth of popular culture that vampires are fucking bulletproof. They’re tougher than humans and they heal quickly when they’re fed, but their bones still break when you hit them hard enough. Fred’s left shoulder was dislocated and his right leg was twisted at an unnatural angle.

“All movements go too far,” I said, picking him up with the telekinesis spell and flipping him back through the flower shop and out into the street. There was the screech of rubber against pavement and a double thump as the Vampire Fred was run over by a Mercedes before he could crawl out of the way. Oops.

I made my way back through the trashed flower shop, pausing to pick out a red rose for Adan. The Benz was stopped but the driver wasn’t getting out of the car. Fred was struggling to peel himself off the asphalt. I guess five hundred years of owning mortals had made him a little stubborn.

“A great flame follows a little spark,” I said, and a grapefruit-size sphere of fusion fire appeared, spinning like a miniature sun above my upturned hand. I let Fred get a good look at it.

“You might want to stay down, Fred, so I don’t have to cook your pasty ass.”

Fred’s jaw clenched, whether in pain or frustration I wasn’t sure. I could see the pride and survival instinct, both honed over centuries, warring in his eyes. He looked at me. He looked at the fire. Survival won.

Like I said, vampires are pussies.

“Here’s the way it is, Fred. Out of respect for your friendship with Mr. Rashan,” I said, turning and smiling at Adan, “I’m going to let you walk away. But Fred, if you fuck with me again, you’re going to burn. Clear?”

The Vampire Fred gritted his pointy teeth, and then he nodded.

“Groovy,” I said. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

Without a word, Fred pulled himself up and hobbled off down the street. Even with a busted wheel, the vampire limped faster than the human eye could follow.

I pulled in juice and dropped a confusion spell over the street, just enough hoodoo to render any witnesses or inconvenient security cameras useless to a police investigation. I looked in the direction the vampire had fled, then turned back to the crowd of stunned onlookers and shrugged.

“He wasn’t on the list.”