Well. He’d have to try normal, mundane bluffing, wouldn’t he?
He knocked on the door. A shadow passed over the peephole, and a voice called, “Who is it? What do you want?”
“My name is Rick. I’m an old friend of Charles Blake, and I heard he was here. Can I see him?”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“Yes—sorry about that. I just got off work. Bartender.”
“Just a minute. I’ll get him.”
“Mind if I wait inside?”
After a brief, wary moment of waiting, the deadbolt clicked back, and the door opened. A gruff man in his forties stood aside and held the door. “Come on in.”
Rick did.
The living room was worn and sad, with threadbare furniture and carpets, stained walls, a musty air. A bulletin board listed rules, notices, want ads, warnings. The atmosphere was institutional, but this might have been the first real home some of these men had known. Halfway house, indeed.
“Stay right here,” the man said, and walked to a back hallway.
Rick waited, hands in pockets.
The doorman returned after a long wait, what would have been many beats of his heart, if it still beat. Behind him came a very old man, pulling a small oxygen tank on a cart behind him. Tubes led from it to his nose, and his every breath wheezed. Other than that, he had faded. He was smaller than the last time Rick had seen him, withered and sunken, skin like putty hanging off a stooped frame. Wearing a T-shirt and ratty, faded jeans, he looked sad, beaten. The scowl remained—Rick recognized that part of him.
The old man saw him and stopped. They were two ghosts staring at each other across the room.
“Hello, Blake,” Rick said.
“Who are you? You his grandson?”
Rick turned to the middle-aged doorman and stared until he caught the man’s gaze. “Would you mind leaving us alone for a minute?” He put quiet force into the suggestion. The man walked back into the hallway.
“Bill—Bill! Come back!” Blake’s sandpaper voice broke into coughing.
“I’m not his grandson,” Rick said.
“What is this?”
“Tell me about Helen, Blake.”
He coughed a laugh, as if he thought this was a joke. Rick just stared at him. He didn’t have to put any power in it. His standing there was enough. Blake’s jaw trembled.
“What about her? Huh? What about her!”
Rick grabbed the tube hanging at Blake’s chest and yanked, pulling it off his face. Blake stumbled back, his mouth open to show badly fitted dentures coming loose. Wrapping both hands in Blake’s shirt, Rick marched him into the wall, slamming him, slamming again, listening for the crack of breaking bone.
“You thought no one would know,” Rick whispered at him, face to face. “You thought no one would remember.” Blake sputtered, flailing weakly, ineffectually.
The front door crashed open. “Stop!”
Rick recognized the footfalls, voices, and the sounds of their breathing. Detective Hardin pounded in, flanked by two uniformed officers. Rick glanced over his shoulder—she was pointing a gun at him. Not that it mattered. He shoved his fists against Blake’s throat.
Blake was dying under his grip. Rick wouldn’t have to flex a muscle to kill him. He didn’t even feel an urge to take the man’s blood—it would be cool, sluggish, unappetizing. Rick would spit it back out in the man’s face. He could do it all with Hardin watching, because what could the detective really do in the end?
“Rick! Back away from him!”
Hardin fumbled in her jacket pocket and drew out a cross, a simple version, two bars of unadorned silver soldered together. Proof against vampires. Rick smiled.
Blake had to have known he wouldn’t get away with murdering Helen. What had he been thinking? What had he wanted, really? Rick looked at him: the wide, yellowing eyes, the sagging face, pockmarked and splashed with broken capillaries. He expected to see a death wish there, a determined fatalism. But Blake was afraid. Rick terrified him. The man, his body failing around him, didn’t want to die.
This made Rick want to strangle him even more. To justify the man’s terror. But he let Blake go and backed away, leaving him to Hardin’s care.
The old man sank to his knees, knocking over the oxygen canister. He held his hands before him, clawed and trembling.
“He’s dead! Dead! He has to be dead! He has to be!” He was sobbing.
Maybe leaving him on his knees and crying before the police was revenge enough.
Rick, hands raised, backed out of the line of fire. “I could have saved you some paperwork, Detective.”
“You’d just have forced me into a whole other set of paperwork. What the hell did you think you were doing?”
The uniforms had to pick up Blake and practically drag him away. They didn’t bother with cuffs. Blake didn’t seem to know what was happening. His mouth worked, his breaths wheezed, his legs stumbled.
“I take it you got your evidence,” Rick said.
“We found the shooter, and he talked. Blake hired him.”
He certainly didn’t look like he’d pulled any triggers in a good long time.
“So that’s it?”
“What else do you want?”
“I wanted to get here five minutes earlier,” he said. Not that any of it really mattered. It all faded from the memories around him.
“I need to ask you to depart the premises,” she said. She wasn’t aiming the gun at him, but she hadn’t put it away. “Don’t think I won’t arrest you for something, because I will. I’ll come up with something.”
Rick nodded. “Have a good night, Detective.”
He returned to his car and left the scene, marking the end of yet another chapter.
Rick hadn’t been able to attend the trial, but he’d met with Helen every night to discuss the proceedings. She came to Murray’s, tearing up with relief and rubbing her eyes with her handkerchief, to report the guilty verdict. He quit his shift early and took her back to his place, a basement apartment on Capitol Hill. With Blake locked up, he felt safe bringing her there. He owned the building, rented out the upper portion through an agency, and could block off the windows in the basement without drawing attention. The décor was simple—a bed, an armchair, a chest of drawers, a radio, and a kitchen that went unused.
They lay together on the bed, his arm around her, holding her close, while she nestled against him. They talked about the future, which was always an odd topic for him. Helen had decided to look for an old-fashioned kind of job and aim for a normal life this time. “But I don’t know what to do about you,” she said, craning her neck to look up at him.
He’d been here before, lying with a woman he liked, who with a little thought and nudging he could perhaps be in love with, except that what they had would never be entirely mutual, or equitable. And he still didn’t know what to say. I could take from you for the rest of your life, and you’d end with . . . nothing.
He said, “If you’d like, I can vanish, and you’ll never see me again. It might be better that way.”
“I don’t want that. But I wish . . .” Her face puckered, brow furrowed in thought. “But you’re not ever going to take me on a trip, or stay up to watch the sunrise with me, or ask me to marry you, or anything, are you?”