A Standup Dame

by Lilith Saintcrow

Lilith Saintcrow’s most recent books are Hunter’s Prayer, the latest in her Jill Kismet series, and Strange Angels (as by Lili St. Crow), the first in a new series for young adults. The third Jill Kismet book is due out around the same time as this anthology. Her other work includes the Dante Valentine series, as well as several other novels.

Saintcrow says each generation invents and reinvents different variations on the vampire theme. “Blood, sex, love, death, repression, liberation from the confines of civilization or meditation upon the link between Eros and Thanatos—vampires are tremendously versatile,” she said. “They endure because we can (and do) remake them with every generation. To Bram Stoker’s readers, vampires were about disturbing untrammeled female sexuality, discomfort with modernity, and the excesses of colonization. Since then they’ve gone through several incarnations, as filthy corpses, investment bankers, androgynous sexy avatars, you name it. The strength of the vampire is her ability to shapeshift for each new set of popular neuroses.”

This story is an homage to the noir gumshoe greats—Hammett and Chandler. “I was working on a very dark, ugly book and needed something shorter and a little more hopeful,” Saintcrow said. “Not too hopeful, though. Noir isn’t very hopeful.”

When a man wakes up in his own grave, he sometimes reconsiders his choice of jobs.

If he’s smart, that is. Me, I’m dumb as a box of rocks and my skull felt like a cannonade was going off inside. The agony in my head was rivaled only by the thirst. Aching thirst in every nerve and vein, my throat scorched and my eyes hot marbles. It was raining, but the water from the sky falling into my open mouth did nothing for the dry nails twisting in my larynx. I struggled up out of clods of rain-churned clay mud, slick and dirty as a newborn pig. My clothes were ruined and the monster in my head roared.

I fell backward, still trapped to my knees in wet earth, padded hammers of rain smashing along the length of my body, and screamed. The spasm passed, leaving only the parched desert plains inside every inch of me.

A few moments of effort got me kicking free, the last of the wet clay collapsing in a body-shaped hole now that the body was above ground. I opened my mouth, rain beating my dirty face, and got only a mouthful of muck.

Coughing, gagging, I made it to hands and knees. My head was a swollen pumpkin balanced on a thin aching stick, and the headache receded between waves of scorching, unbearable, agonizing thirst.

There were pines all around me, singing and sighing as the sodden wind slapped them around. It took me two tries to stand up, and another two tries before I remembered my name.

Jack. Jack Becker. That’s me. That’s who I am.

And I’ve got to find the dame in the green dress.

Outside the city limits and I’m a duck out of water. The mud wouldn’t dry, not in this downpour, it just kept smearing over the ruin of my shirt and suit pants. Even Chin Yun’s laundry wouldn’t be able to get it out of the worsted. Slogging and slipping, I made it down a hill the size of the Chrysler building and found the dirt road turned off the highway, and there was a mile marker right there.

Twelve miles to the city. Cramps screamed from my empty belly. Maybe getting shot in the head works up a man’s appetite. Every time I reached up to touch my noggin it was tender, a puckered hole above my right eye full of even more mud.

I wasn’t going to get far. The idea of stumbling off the side of the road and drowning in a ditch was appealing—except for the dame in the green dress.

Think about that, Jack. One thing at a time.

Thunder rumbled somewhere far away. Miss Dale would be at home, probably talking to her cat or making a nice hot cup of tea. The thought made my insides clench like they were going to turn into a meat grinder, and my breath made a funny whistling sound through my open mouth. My nose was plugged, and in any case, I was gasping for air. Sometimes it rains hard enough to drown you out here.

That was when I saw the light.

It was beautiful, it was golden, it was a diner. Not just any diner, but the Denton’s Dandy Diner, eleven miles from the city limits. I couldn’t go in there looking like this. It took me a while to fumble for my wallet and I nearly ended up in the ditch anyway, my feet tangling together.

The wallet—last year’s Christmas present from Miss Dale—was still in my pocket and held all the usuals, plus nineteen dollars and twenty cents. They hadn’t taken any money. Interesting.

Think about that later, Jack.

My shirt was wet enough to shed the mud, my suit jacket nowhere in evidence. Stinging pellets warned me the rain was turning to ice.

But the crazy thing was, I wasn’t cold. Just thirsty as hell. Maybe the idea of the dame in green was warming me up.

Neon blinked in the diner’s windows. It was closed, goddammit, and just when I could have used a phone. I could even see the phone box, smearing my muddy mitts on the window and blinking every time the Cold Drinks sign blinked as well. The phone was at the end of the hall, right near the crapper.

My legs nearly gave out.

This is turning out to be a bad night, Jackie boy.

I found a rock I could lift without busting myself and heaved it. The glass on the door went to pieces, and I carefully unlocked it. The long slugtrail of mud I left toward the phone might have been funny if I’d been in a grinning mood.

A man like me knows his secretary’s home number. Any dame dumb enough to work for a case like me probably wouldn’t be out dancing at a nightclub. Dale didn’t have any suitors—not that she talked, of course. She was a tall thin number with interesting eyes, but that was as far as it went.

Not like the dame in green, no sir.

I hung onto the phone box with fingers that looked swollen and bruised. Dirt still slimed my palms. Under it I was fishbelly white, almost glowing in the dim lighting. The Dentons were going to find their diner not quite so dandy in the cold light of dawn, and I was sorry about that.

“Hello?” She repeated herself, because I was trying to make my mouth work. “Hello?”

“Dale,” I managed through the obstruction in my mouth. Sounded like they’d broken my jaw, or like I was sucking on candy.

“Mr. Becker?” A note of alarm, now. “Jack?”

“You got to come pick me up, dollface.” I sounded drunk.

“Where have you—oh, never mind. Where are you?” I could almost see her perched on her settee, that cup of tea steaming gently on an endtable, and her ever-present steno pad appearing. “Jack? Where are you right now?”

“Denton,” I managed. “Dandy Diner, about eleven miles out of the city. You got the keys to my Studebaker?”

“Your car is impounded, Mr. Becker.” Now she sounded like the Miss Dale I knew. Cool, calm, efficient. Over the phone she sounded smoky and sinful, just like Bacall. I might’ve hired her just for that phone voice alone, but she turned out to be damned efficient and not likely to yammer her yap off all the time, which meant I paid her even when I couldn’t eat.

You don’t find secretaries like that every day, after all.

“Never mind, I’ll bring my car. Denton’s Dandy, hm? That’s west out of town, right?”

“Sure it is.” My legs buckled again, I hung onto the box for all I was worth. “I’ll be waiting out front.”

“I’m on my way.” And she hung up, just like that.

What a gal.

The pain in my gut crested as Miss Dale peered over the seat. I’d barely managed to get the door open, and as soon as I was in the car she took off; I wrestled the door shut and the windshield wipers made their idiot sound for about half a mile as I lay gasping in the back seat.

The car smelled like Chanel No. 5 and Chesterfields. And it smelled of Miss Dale, of hairspray and powder and a thousand other feminine things you usually have to get real close to a dame to get a whiff of. It also smelled like something else.

Something warm, and coppery, and salty, and so good. The windshield wipers went ka-thump ka-thump, and her Ford must’ve had something going on with the engine, because there was another regular thumping, high and hard and fast. My mouth wouldn’t close all the way. I kept making that wheezing sound, and she finally risked another look over the seat at me.

“I’m taking you to Samaritan General,” she said, and I stared at the sheen of her dark hair. “You sound terrible.”

“No.” Thank God, it was one word I could say without whatever was wrong with my mouth interfering. “No hospital.” The slurring was back, like my jaw was broken but I wasn’t feeling any pain. As a matter of fact, now that the headache was gone, the only thing bothering me was how thirsty I was.

Another mile squished under the tires. She turned the defroster up, and that regular thumping sounded like her car was about to explode, it was going so fast. “Mr. Becker, you are beginning to worry me.” She lit a Chesterfield, keeping her eyes on the road, and when she opened the window to blow the smoke out the smell of the rain came through and I realized what that thumping was.

It was Miss Dale’s pulse. I was hearing her heartbeat. And the tires touching the road. And each raindrop smacking the hardtop. The hiss of flame as she lit the cigarette showed the fine sheen of sweat on her forehead, and I realized Miss Dale was nervous.

“Don’t worry, dollface. Everything’s fine. Take me…”

Where can you go, Jack? The lady in green knows your office, and if she thinks you’re dead—

“Take me to your house.” Only it was more like hauwsch, like I was a goddamn German deli-owner, and when I ran my tongue along the inside of my teeth everything got interesting. My tongue rasped, and I lost whatever it was Miss Dale would have said because the taste of copper filled my mouth and I suddenly knew what I was thirsty for.

The knowledge might have made me scream if I hadn’t gone limp against the seat as if someone had sapped me, because it was warm and the twisting in my gut receded a little bit, and because goddammit, after a man claws his way up out of his own grave and breaks into a diner, he deserves a little rest.

The green dress hugged her curves like the Samaritan freeway hugs the coast, and under the little veil on her hat those eyes were green too. She even had green gloves, and she accepted a light from me with a small nod and raised eyebrows, settling her emerald velvet clutch purse in her lap.

“You come highly recommended, Mr. Becker.” A regular Bryn Mawr purr, over the sound of Miss Dale typing in the front. The lady kept her back straight as a ruler and the lamp on my desk made her out to be pale, not one of those sun-bunnies.

Miss Dale stopped typing.

“Glad to hear that.” I made it noncommittal, as casual as my shoes on the desk. It was five o’clock and already dark, the middle of winter, and I was behind on the rent.

“Mr. Becker?” Miss Dale stood tall and angular in the doorway. “Will you be needing anything else?” Her cat-tilted dark eyes met mine, and she had a sheaf of files in her capable, narrow hands. If she got a little more meat on her, she’d be a knockout. If, that is, you could chip through the ice.

Right now she was giving me the chance to say we were closing and the dame in green could come back another time. I waved a languid hand. “No thanks, Miss Dale. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Very good, sir.” Frosty as a Frigidaire. Miss Dale spent a few moments moving around the office, locking the files in the front cabinet, and the dame in green said nothing until my secretary left, locking the door behind her and her heels click-tapping down the hall, as efficiently as the rest of her.

The sign outside my office window blinked. We were up over an all-night lunch counter and newsstand, and the big neon arrow drenched the room with waves of yellow and red after dark once Miss Dale turned the lights off. The couch opposite my desk looked inviting, and it would have looked even more inviting if I hadn’t been looking eviction in the face, I suppose.

“So what do you want me to do, Mrs.…?” I made it into a question.

“Kendall. Mrs. Arthur Kendall. Mr. Becker, I want you to follow my husband.”

It smelled like Chanel and dirt. And even though I was under a pile of blankets, I was lying on something soft and I shot up straight, swallowing a scream. It was the sound a bullet makes when it hits a skull, the explosion that was death.

My fingers were around something soft, but with a harder core. My other hand flashed up, catching Miss Dale’s other wrist as she tried to slap me. Silk fluttered—she was dressed in a wrapper, a red kimono with a sun-yellow dragon breathing orange fire.

She yelped, and I realized I was half-naked, only in a pair of mud-crusted skivvies. Someone had undressed me and put me in a bed made of pink fluff, pillows spilling over the edges. The Chanel was her, and the dirt? That was me, stinking up a nice dame’s bed.

“Mr. Becker,” she said, and it was my imperturbable secretary again, the belt of her kimono loosened enough to show a strap of her—well, I’m only human, of course I looked. “Mr. Becker, let go of me at once.”

The nightmare receded. I let go of her wrists. She retreated two steps, bumping her hip against a bedside table loaded with a jar of cold cream and a stack of big leatherbound books that looked straight out of Dr. Caligari’s library, as well as a lamp with a frilly pink shade and an economy-sized box of Kleenex. We stared at each other, and the fine damp texture of her skin looked better than it ever had.

She rubbed at her right wrist, the one I’d grabbed first. “You were screaming,” she whispered.

For once, I had no smart-aleck thing to say. Of course I’d been screaming.

Miss Dale drew herself up, tightening her kimono with swift movements. She was barefoot, and her dark hair wasn’t pinned back. It tumbled down to her shoulders in a mass of curls, and it looked nice that way. She folded her arms and tried her best glare on me, and if I hadn’t been lounging half-naked in what I suspected was her bed, it might have worked.

“I’m sorry.” It was all I could say.

“You’d better be. You’re wanted for murder.”

I closed my mouth with a snap and started thinking furiously.

“You disappeared three days ago, Mr. Becker. The police tore apart your office. I am sad to report they also took your last three bottles of Scotch. They questioned me rather extensively, too.”

My throat was dry. The thirst was worse than ever, and that distracting sound was back, the high hard thumping. It was her pulse, and it sounded like water in the desert. It sounded like the chow bell in basic training.

Her heart going that fast meant she was terrified. But there she stood, high color on her cheeks, arms folded and shoulders back, ready to take me to task once again.

Three days? “Murder?” I husked.

“The murder of Arthur Kendall, Mr. Becker. His widow identified you as the killer.” Hung on the bedroom wall behind her was a Photoplay page of Humphrey Bogart in a fedora, leering at the camera like the bum he was. I was beginning to suspect my practical Miss Dale had a soft spot for leering bums.

“The Kendall job.” It was difficult to think through the haze in my head and the sound of her pulse, calming down a little now, thank God.

There was something very wrong with me.

“The Kendall job,” she echoed. “Naturally I have an extra copy of the file you prepared. And naturally I didn’t mention it to the police, especially to Lieutenant Grady. I think you are many things, Mr. Becker—a disgraceful drunk and an immoral and unethical investigator, just to mention a few. But a murderer? Not the man who does widow cases for free.” She rubbed at her right wrist.

So I’m a sucker for dames with hard stories. So what? “I didn’t kill anyone.” It was a relief to say it. “You’ve got the file?”

“Naturally.” She dropped her arms. “I would appreciate an explanation, but I’m only your secretary.”

“You’re a standup doll,” I managed. “The Kendall job went bad, Miss Dale. I didn’t kill him.”

Being that practical type, she got right down to brass tacks. “Then who did, Mr. Becker?”

Even though the thirst was getting worse by the second and the sound of her pulse wasn’t helping, I knew the answer to that one. “Get me that file, Dale. And while you’re at it, can I have some clothes or am I just going to swing around like Tarzan?”

If she’d muttered something unladylike under her breath as she swept from the room I wouldn’t have blamed her.

I cleaned the rest of the mud off in her pink-and-yellow bathroom. She had an apartment on the seedier side of Parth Street, but everything was neat and clean and prim as you’d expect from the woman I’d once caught alphabetizing my incoming mail. She even had a suit hanging on the back of the door for me, one of mine. The door didn’t shut quite tight, and I could hear her moving around the kitchen, and hear that maddening, delicious, irresistible thumping.

I looked like I’d been dug up that morning. Which, if you think about it, I had. There was an ugly flushed-red mark over my right eye, a divot I could rest my fingertip in. It was tender, and pressing on it made my whole head feel like a pumpkin again. The back of my skull was sore too, seamed and scarred under my short wet hair. There were bruised bags of flesh under my eyes, and my cheeks had sunken in, and I looked yellow as a jaundiced Chinaman.

I peeled away my shirt collar and looked. A fresh, bruised mark above the collarbone, two holes that looked like a tiny pair of spikes had gone into my throat. The bruise was fever-hot, and when I touched it, the rolling thunder of a heartbeat roared in my ears so loud I grabbed at Miss Dale’s scrubbed-white sink and had to fight to retain consciousness.

What the hell happened to me?

The last thing I remembered was Letitia Kendall wiping her mouth and the skinny, nervous redhead putting the barrel of the gun to my forehead. Right where that livid mark was, the one with speckles of dark grit in an orbit around its sunken redness. Then that sound, like an artillery shell inside my skull…

…and waking up in a cold, cold grave. Wanting a drink, but not my usual drink. Not the kind that went down the gullet like liquid fire and detonated in the belly, wrapping a warm haze between me and the rest of the world.

You’re insane, Jack. You got shot in the head.

The trouble with that was, I shouldn’t be insane. I should be dead.

But I had a pulse too. Just like Miss Dale. Who was starting to smell less like Chanel and more like…

Food.

A sizzling sound drifted down the hall. I tied the shoes she’d thoughtfully left right outside the bathroom door and saw her front door, and the warm light of the kitchen, a square of yellow sanity. She had her back turned and was fiddling with the stove, and a steak waited on a plate on the drainboard. She poked at the pan with a fork, and I was moving up quietly, just as if I was going to sap her.

Three steps. Two.

She never even turned around.

I reached out, saw my hand, yellow in the yellow light, shaking as it brushed past Miss Dale’s hip…and fastened on the plate with the steak.

She jumped, the fork went clattering, and I retreated to the table. If I hadn’t been so cold I would have been sweating buckets. I dropped down in one of Miss Dale’s two straight-backed, frill-cushioned chairs next to her cheap gold-speckled kitchen table, and I found out why my mouth hadn’t been working properly.

It was because the fangs had grown, and I licked the plate clean of bloody juice before burying my teeth in the raw meat and sucking as if it was mother’s milk.

Dale’s hand clapped over her mouth. She pinched so hard her cheeks blanched white from the pressure of her fingers, and her cat-tilted dark eyes turned big as the landlord’s on rent day. The pan sizzled, I sucked and sucked, and the two sounds almost managed to drown out the thunder of her pulse again.

Her free hand shot out and jerked the pan from the stove. The gas flame kept burning, a hissing circle of blue, and Miss Dale stared at me, holding the pan like she intended to storm the barricades with it.

I kept sucking. It wasn’t nearly enough, but the thirst retreated. This was what I wanted. When it was as tasteless as dry paper, I finished licking the plate clean, and I dropped the wad of drained meat down.

I looked at Miss Dale. She looked at me. I searched for something to say. Dames on her salary don’t buy steak every day. She must’ve thought I’d be hungry.

“I still need a secretary, dollface.”

Her throat worked as she swallowed. Then she put the pan down on an unlit burner. She peeled her fingers away from her mouth, the bruise still a dark bracelet on her right wrist. It took her two tries before she could get the words out.

“There’s another steak in the fridge, Jack. It’s…raw.”

Winter nights last forever, and the rain was still coming down. Dale’s wrist was swelling, but she wrapped it in an Ace and told me in no uncertain terms she was fine. She drove the Ford cautiously, the wipers ticking, just like her pulse. I spread the file out in my lap and checked for tails—we were clean.

Down on Cross Street, she parked where we had a good view of The Blue Room, and I paged through the file. Pictures of Arthur Kendall, millionaire, who had come back from Europe with a young wife who had begun to suspect him of fooling around.

If I hadn’t been so interested in the greenbacks she fanned out on my desktop, I wouldn’t have taken the job. Divorce jobs aren’t my favorites. They end up too sticky.

This one had just gotten stickier. Kendall wasn’t just a millionaire, he was as dirty as they come. I’d been careful, sure, but I’d gotten priceless little shots of him canoodling with the heavies in town—Lefty Schultz who ran the prostitution racket, Big Buck Beaudry who provided muscle, Papa Ginette whose family used to run gin and now ran dope. Big fan of tradition, Papa Ginette.

I’d thought I was just getting into a dicey situation until I snapped a few shots of Kendall and his wife at a pricey downtown joint where the jazz was hot and the action was hotter. The Blue Room had a waiting list ten years long, but money talks—and it was Willie Goldstein’s place. If Goldstein hadn’t owned more than half the cops in town, he’d have been in Big Sing years ago.

Another late-night appointment, and the dame in green waltzed in my door just as Miss Dale was waltzing out. I spread the shots out and told her Kendall wasn’t cheating. She’d married a dirty son of an unmentionable, but he wasn’t hanging out with the ladies.

Those green eyes narrowed, and she picked up the glossy of the crowd outside Goldstein’s. There they were, Kendall and the missus and the redheaded, ratfaced gent who followed Kendall like glue. He wasn’t heavy muscle—his name was Shifty Malloy, and he had a dope habit the size of Wrigley Field—but he was dapper in a suit and lit Kendall’s cigarettes.

Mrs. Kendall set the photo down again, and smiled at me. She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray and I glanced down at the pictures again. Something very strange occurred to me.

I remember thinking that for a dame who wore green so much, she had awfully red lips. I remember snapping the shot, and I remember the flash of white calf as she turned to follow her husband past the velvet ropes and into the restaurant.

But there in black and white was Kendall, and Malloy, and a crowd of other schmucks thinking it was hot stuff to pay five bucks for a steak and ogle the other rich schmucks, and there was a space where the dame in green should have been.

But Letitia Kendall wasn’t in the picture. She was sitting across the desk from me, the last ghost of her cigarette rising in the air, and her face suddenly shifted under its little green veil. She came over the desk at me like a feral tiger, and everything went black…

“There he is,” Dale whispered. “The redhead.”

And sure enough, there was Shifty Malloy, dapper as ever in tails, getting out of a shiny new Packard. The Blue Room had a long awning to keep the rich dry, but the ratfaced bum actually unfolded an umbrella and held his hand out to help a lady out of the backseat. Miles of white, white leg through a slit in her dress, and she rose up out of the back of the car like a dream. Only she wasn’t in green. The dame was in mourning like midnight, her red lips a slash on the white powder of her face, and I wondered how long it would take people to catch on that she liked to sleep in all day. I wondered if anyone would know her hands were cold as ice cubes under the satin gloves, and I wondered if anyone would guess how Arthur Kendall gurgled when she had her teeth in his throat.

Because if I hadn’t killed him, that only left one suspect, didn’t it.

It was cold. I lay on the floor and looked at the shapes in front of me—a wall full of splinters and long handles ending in metal shapes. It was the type of shack you have when you’ve got a pool and a garden and you need somewhere to store all the unattractive bits needed to keep it clipped and pretty—a lawnmower, shovels, all sorts of things.

“You’ll do as I say,” Letitia Kendall said.

“Aw Jesus.” Shifty Malloy whined. “Jesus Christ.”

Then a dainty foot in a green satin pump stepped into view. I blinked. Felt like I’d been hit by a train, throat was burning, couldn’t take a deep breath, and I couldn’t even squirm. My hands were tied back and my feet felt like lead blocks. She bent down, the dame in green, and she wasn’t wearing her pretty face anymore. The smear of crimson on her lips was fresh, and she wiped at it with one white, white hand as her other hand came down, snagged a handful of my suit coat and shirt, and hauled me up like I weighed nothing.

“You have to cut off the head,” she said. “It’s very important. If you don’t, you won’t get any more.”

Malloy was sweating. “Got it. Cut off the head.”

“Use a shovel. They do well.” Her head tilted a little to the side, like a cat’s considering its prey. “It is very important, Edward, to cut off the head.”

If I could have opened my mouth, I might have said that asking Shifty Malloy to decapitate someone was like asking a politician to be honest. I knew the bum. Malloy might shoot a man in the back, but he was squeamish about cockroaches, for Christ’s sake.

“All right, already.” Malloy stepped into view, and his ridiculous little pasted-on moustache was limp as a dead caterpillar with sweat. He raised the gun, a serviceable little derringer, and put it to my forehead. “You might wanna put him down. This is going to make a mess.”

“Just do it.” Letitia gave me an impatient little shake. My feet dangled like a puppet’s. “I have a party to attend tonight.”

When I came back from the war some bum asked me what the worst thing about it was. I told him it was the goddamn food in the service. But the worst thing in the war was the not knowing, in the smoke and the chaos, where the next bullet was coming from.

The only thing worse than that is knowing where it’s coming from, and when that gun is to your head and nothing comes out of your crushed and dry throat but a little sound like nuh-nuh-muh.

Then the world exploded.

“Wait until I get around the corner,” I said, handing her the file. “Then go home. You’re a standup dame, Dale.”

“For Christ’s sake.” She slid down in the seat, as if afraid someone would see us parked here. “Call me Sophie, Jack. How long have I worked for you?”

“Three years.” Kept me on time and kept that office from going under, too.

“I deserve a raise.” Her pulse was thumping again. Like a rabbit’s. The thirst was back. It scorched the back of my throat like bile from the worst hangover ever, and it smelled her. Chanel and softness and the steak she’d cooked, and my fingers twitched like they wanted to cross the air between us and catch at her dress. It was a pretty blue dress, high in the collar and tight in the waist, and she looked good.

Never noticed before how easy on the eyes Miss Dale was. Yeah, I’m an unobservant bum.

“Go home, Sophie.” It was getting hard to talk again, the teeth were coming out. Shophie, I mangled her name the first time I ever said it. “You’re a doll. A real doll.”

“What are you going to do?” She had never asked me that before. Plenty of questions, like, where did you put that file and do you want coffee and what should I tell Boyleston when he calls about the rent? But that particular one she’d never asked.

“I’m going to finish the Kendall job.” I slid out of the car and closed the door softly, headed down the street. She waited, just like I’d told her, for me to reach the corner. Then the Ford’s engine woke and she pulled away. I could hear the car, but the biggest relief came when I couldn’t hear her pulse anymore.

Instead, I heard everyone else’s. The drumbeats were a jungle, and here I was, the thirst burning a hole in me and the rain smacking at the top of my unprotected head. I flipped up the collar of my coat, wished like hell a bottle of Scotch could take the edge off the burning, and headed for Chinatown.

You can find anything in Chinatown. They eat anything down there, and I have a few friends. Still, it’s amazing how a man who won’t balk when you ask him to hide a dead body or a stack of bloodstained clothes might get funny ideas when you ask him to help you find…blood.

That’s what butchers are for. And after a while I found what I was looking for. I had my nineteen dollars and the thirty in pin money from Miss Dale’s—Sophie’s—kitchen jar. She said I was good for it, and she would take it on her next paycheck.

I would worry about getting her another paycheck as soon as I finished this out. It might take a little doing.

After two bouts of heaving as my body rebelled, the thirst took over and I drank nearly a bucket of steaming copper, and then I fell down and moaned like a doper on the floor of a filthy Chinatown slaughterhouse. It felt good, slamming into the thirst in my gut and spreading in waves of warmth until I almost cried.

I paid for another bucket. Then I got the hell out of there, because even yellow men will stop looking the other way for some things.

It’s amazing what you can do once a dame in a green dress kills you and pins you for murder.

The next thing I needed was a car. On the edge of Chinatown sits Benny’s Garage, and I rousted Benny by the simple expedient of jimmying his lock and dragging him out of bed. He didn’t know why I wanted the busted-down pickup and twelve jerrycans of kerosene. “I don’t want to know,” he whined at me. “Why’d’ja have to bust the door down? Jeez, Becker, you—”

“Shut up.” I peeled a ten-spot off my diminishing bankroll and held it in front of him, made it disappear when he snatched at it. “You never saw me, Benny.”

He grabbed the ten once I made it reappear. “I never goddamn see you, Jack. I never wanta see you again, neither.” He rubbed at his stubble, the rasp of every hair audible to me, and the sound of his pulse was a whack-whack instead of the sweet music of Sophie’s. How long would his heart work through all the blubber he had piled on?

I didn’t care. I drove away and hoped like hell Benny wouldn’t call the cops. With a yard full of stolen cars and up to his ass in hock to Papa Ginette, it would be a bad move for him.

But still, I worried. I worried all the way up into Garden Heights and the quiet manicured mansions of the rich, where I found the house I wanted and had to figure out how to get twelve jerrycans over a nine-foot stone wall.

The house was beautiful. I almost felt bad, splishing and splashing over parquet floors, priceless antiques, and a bed that smelled faintly of copper and talcum powder. There was a whole closetful of green dresses. I soaked every goddamn one of them. Rain pounded the roof, gurgled through the gutters, hissed against the walls.

I carried two jerrycans downstairs to the foyer—a massive expanse of checkered black and white soon swimming in the nose-cleaning sting of kerosene—and settled myself to wait by the door to a study that probably had been Arthur Kendall’s favorite place. I could smell him in there, cigars and fatheaded, expensive cologne. I ran my hands down the shaft of the shovel while I waited, swung it a few experimental times, and tapped it on the floor. It was a flathead shovel, handily available in any garden shed—and every immaculate lawn needs a garden shed, even if you get brown or yellow people out to clean it up for you.

I’m good at waiting, and I waited a long time. The fumes got into my nose and made me lightheaded, but when the Packard came purring up the drive I was pouring the last half of a jerrycan, lit a match and a thin trail of flame raced away up the stairs like it was trying to outrun time. Even if her nose was as acute as mine she might not smell the smoke through the rain, and I bolted through the study, which had a floor-length window I’d been thoughtful enough to unlock. Around the corner, moving so fast it was like being back in the war again, hardly noticing where either foot landed as long as I kept moving, and the shovel whistled as I crunched across the gravel drive and smacked Shifty Malloy right in the face with it, a good hit with all my muscle behind it. He had gotten out of the car, the stupid bum, and he went down like a ton of bricks while Letitia Kendall fumbled at the doorhandle inside, scratching like a mad hen.

The house began to whoosh and crackle. Twelve jerries is a lot of fuel, and there was a lot to burn in there. Even if it was raining like God had opened every damn tap in the sky.

She fell out of the Packard, the black dress immediately soaked and flashes of fishbelly flesh showing as she scrabbled on gravel. Her crimson mouth worked like a landed fish’s, and if I was a nice guy I suppose I might have given her a chance to explain. Maybe I might have even let her get away by being a stupid dick like you see in the movies, who lets the bad guy make his speech.

But I’m not a good guy. The shovel sang again, and the sound she made when the flat blade chopped three-quarters of the way through her neck was between a gurgle and a scream. The rain masked it, and she was off the gravel and on the lawn now, on mud as I followed, jabbing with the shovel while her head flopped like a defective Kewpie doll’s. I chopped the way we used to chop rattlers back on the farm, and when her body stopped flopping and the gouts and gouts of fresh steaming blood had soaked a wide swatch of rain-flattened grass I dropped the shovel and dragged her strangely heavy carcass back toward the house. I tossed it in the foyer, where the flames were rising merrily in defiance of the downpour, and I tossed the shovel in too. Then I had to stumble back, eyes blurring and skin peeling, and I figured out right then and there that fire was a bad thing for me, whatever I was now.

She was wet and white where the black dress was torn, and the flames wanted to cringe away. I didn’t stick around to see if she went up, because the house began to burn in earnest, the heat scratching at my skin with thousands of scraping gold pins, and there was a rosy glow in the east that had nothing to do with kerosene.

It was dawn, and I didn’t know exactly what had happened to me, but I knew I didn’t want to be outside much longer.

Of course she hadn’t gone to sleep. As soon as I got near her door, trying to tread softly on the worn carpet and smelling the burned food and dust smell of working folks in her apartment building, it opened a crack and Sophie peered through. She was chalk-white, trembling, and she retreated down the hall as I shambled in. It was still raining and I was tired. The thirst was back, and my entire body was shot through with lead. The pinpricks on my throat throbbed like they were infected, but the divot above my right eye wasn’t inflamed anymore. But my skin cracked and crackled with the burning, still, and the thirst was back, burrowing in my veins.

I shut her door and locked it. I stood dripping on her welcome mat and looked at her.

She hadn’t changed out of the blue dress. She had nice legs, by God, and those cat-tilted eyes weren’t really dark. They were hazel. And her wrist was still bruised where I’d grabbed her, she had peeled the Ace off and it was a nice dark purple. It probably hurt like hell.

Her hands hung limp at her sides.

I searched for something to say. The rain hissed and gurgled. Puddles in the street outside were reflecting old neon and newer light edging through gray mist. “It’s dawn.”

She just stood there.

“You’re a real doll, Sophie. If I didn’t have—”

“How did it happen?” She swallowed, the muscles in her throat working. Under that high collar her pulse was still like music. “Your…you…” She fluttered one hand helplessly. For the first time since she walked into my office three years ago and announced the place was a dump, my Miss Dale seemed nonplussed.

“I got bit, sugar.” I peeled my sodden shirt collar away. “I don’t want to make any trouble for you. I’ll figure something out tomorrow night.”

Thirty of the longest seconds of my life passed in her front hallway. I dripped, and I felt the sun coming the way I used to feel storms moving in on the farm, back when I was a jugeared kid and the big bad city was a place I only heard about in church.

“Jack, you ass,” Sophie said. “So it’s a bite?”

“And a little more.”

Miss Dale lifted her chin and eyed me. “I don’t have any more steak.” Her pulse was back. It was thundering. It was hot and heavy in my ears and I already knew I wasn’t a nice guy. Wasn’t that why I’d come here?

“I’ll go.” I reached behind me and fumbled for the knob.

“Oh, no you will not.” It was Miss Dale again, with all her crisp efficiency. She reached up with trembling fingers, and unbuttoned the very top button of her collar.

“Sophie—”

“How long have I been working for you, Jack?” She undid another button, slender fingers working, and I took a single step forward. Burned skin crackled, and my clothes were so heavy they could have stood up by themselves. “Three years. And it wasn’t for the pay, and certainly not because you’ve a personality that recommends itself.”

Coming from her, that was a compliment. “You’ve got a real sweet mouth there, Miss Dale.”

She undid her third button, and that pulse of hers was a beacon. Now I knew what the thirst wanted, now I knew what it felt like, now I knew what it could do—

“Mr. Becker, shut up. If you don’t, I’ll lose my nerve.”

Sophie is on her pink frilly bed. The shades are drawn, and the apartment’s quiet. It’s so quiet. Time to think about everything.

When a man wakes up in his own grave, he can reconsider his choice of jobs. He can do a whole lot of things.

It’s so goddamn quiet. I’m here with my back to the bedroom door and my knees drawn up. Sophie is so still, so pale. I’ve had time to look over every inch of her face and I wonder how a stupid bum like me could have overlooked such a doll right under his nose.

It took three days for me. Two days ago the dame in the black dress choked her last and her lovely mansion burned. It was in all the papers as a tragedy, and Shifty Malloy choked on his own blood out in the rain too. I think it’s time to find another city to gumshoe in. There’s Los Angeles, after all, and that place does three-quarters of its business after dark.

Soon the sun’s going to go down. Sophie’s got her hands crossed on her chest and she’s all tucked in nice and warm, the coverlet up to her chin and the lamp on so she won’t wake up like I did, in the dark and the mud.

The rain has stopped beating the roof. I can hear heartbeats moving around in the building.

Jesus, I hope she wakes up.

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