CHAPTER 4
Hit Me with Your Best Shot
It was another mad dash through the streets of New Orleans with MCB in the loud car. We got up on I-10, the way I’d come into town, and made good time. The site was an old strip mall on Metairie Road. It looked not unlike the one where I’d enlisted in the Marines.
The original anchor store had apparently been out of business for some time. The area looked as if it was improving and apparently it was time to clean it up and do things like take the plywood off the…HOLY SHIT! VAMPIRES!
What appeared to be a survivor was babbling. It was a patois that was entirely impenetrable. And I’m a noted linguist in some circles.
“Epi li Coolie chire gòj li soti!”
“And then it just ripped the boss’s throat out,” the Metairie PD officer said, in a bored tone.
“San! San!” the man cried.
“Blood, blood.”
“Vampire,” Bob said, nodding his head in a knowing fashion and wagging one finger. “Bet you dollars to donuts.” He turned to me. “Sounds like you’re up.”
“Again,” I said, walking back to the trunk of my car and starting to rummage.
“I’m just messing with you, man. Carter’s stuck in traffic but will be here soon. My guys should be too. Just relax. They aren’t going anywhere before sundown.”
I reappeared with my .45 in a tac holster, a double-barrel sawed-off in a chest holster and bandolier with stakes and a dozen shotgun shells in loops. I had on a dog collar with spikes I’d picked up to get into punk clubs. Mo No Ken was slung at my side. I started walking toward the building.
“Seriously,” Bob said. “No joking around. You don’t want to rig up for this one?”
“Too damned hot,” I said. “Where’s the open door, Agent Higgins? And somebody do me the favor to pull down a couple more of these plywood sheets, please.”
The door was in the shade. I thought about it and decided I didn’t like the door option. The sun was shining from the other side of the building. There were windows on the sunny side. Take a couple of pieces of plywood off and I’d be golden. But if I entered by the door, everything would be in shadow and my vision would be horrible. Better in from this side through the windows.
Since none of the workers were willing to go near the building and MCB Bob wanted to wait for backup, I rummaged in the car again and came up with a Halligan tool, crowbar and ax.
“What all do you have in there?” Bob asked, amused.
“Well, to find out we’ll need something that requires C4, claymores, and a LAW,” I said, grinning.
Bob found a seat in the shade and was writing up an incident report. It probably read: foolish new MHI guy went in solo and got eaten by vampires, the end. “One vampire will fuck you up. There could be more in there, you know.”
A few minutes’ work with the Halligan tool and I had the first sheet off the windows. I took down two more and decided that was enough. It was too hot to do this shit. And I had to remember to fill my canteens.
I broke out one of the grimy windows, threw a blanket on the chest-high sill and stuck my face up to it.
“Hello! This is your friendly welcome wagon! I don’t suppose you’d like to just come over and get staked?”
“Go away, blood bag,” a female voice hissed from the darkness. “Or I will drink your very soul!”
“Come out here in the sunlight and say that, fang.”
“You come in here.”
“Okee-dokee, artichokee,” I said. “Take your best shot!”
I smashed the window all the way out and looked around.
“Hey, Bob, I need you to bring your car up here on the sidewalk,” I yelled.
“Why?” he said.
“So I can stand on the hood.”
“Stand on your own hood,” he said, indignant.
“I gotta pay for damages to my car,” I pointed out. “Besides, I did most of the bodywork myself. I don’t want to damage it. Yours is issue. Be a pal. Once a Marine, always a Marine!”
“Touché,” Bob said, getting up.
Only I had said all that for the vampire’s benefit. I backed up, put in a couple of earplugs, pulled a flash-bang out of my pocket, pulled the pin, flipped the spoon, waited two seconds, and threw it through the window as hard as I could. Then I ran up, put my gloved hands on the sill and vaulted through the window just as the flash-bang went off.
The secret to a flash-bang is to know it’s going to happen and have been around it before. They are loud, they are scary, they are very bright. But if you know it’s coming, they aren’t so bad. If you don’t have supersensitive eyesight and hearing like a vampire, that is.
The vamp was expecting me to climb up on the hood of a car and climb through the window. She was up against that wall, crouched down to avoid reflected sunlight. Her plan was to grab me as I came through and rip my throat out. She probably heard the pin coming out of the bang, but odds were good that she wouldn’t know what it was until it was too late.
I could see her clearly as I came through the window. She was crouched down, pressed against the wall, screaming, her hands over her ears and eyes tightly shut. The image was briefly superimposed on my eyelids as I landed.
I took one step forward and Mo No Ken flashed.
No more vampire.
* * *
A few minutes later I climbed back through the window carrying a skull in a mesh bag.
Vampires deliquesce quick.
“This do for proof of kill, Agent Higgins?” I asked, holding up the bag.
I was more or less covered in blood from cutting her head off. It’s the only way you can kill a vampire. Staking them only paralyzes them.
“Ought to,” Bob said. I swear some of his “you ain’t from around here” attitude was starting to wear off.
I was also standing on a fairly major road and traffic had picked up as schools let out. People were slowing down to figure out why the police cars were parked here. Some people were staring, dumbfounded, at the blood-covered guy. Some were surprised but mostly I was getting horns honking, people holding up thumbs, things like that. A pickup with a bunch of rednecks in the back, including a couple of teenage cuties holding beer cans, went by and I heard an excited “Hey, look y’all! Hoodoo Squad!” and a female voice yelled “Wooooo!”
“What was that you were saying about Parris Island Marines?” I yelled, holding one hand up to my ear. “I’m a little deaf from all the monster killing and big ’splosions. I know I heard something about Parris Island Marines.”
“I’ll get a trash bag,” Bob muttered. “Get out of sight before you make my job any harder than it needs to be.”
“I hate fucking heat,” I shouted. “I want to go back to Seattle!”
And that was the daylight part of my first day working the Big Easy.
* * *
Trevor Arnold was a big guy, from his head to his feet. Big bald head, big shoulders, big chest, big gut, arms like tree limbs and legs like trunks. He could barely fit into the office chair in the MHI team leader’s office. One of those tree-trunk legs was currently in a size ogre soft-cast that was propped on his desk. A cane with a silver-demon-head top was leaning on the desk as well.
The desk was covered in paper. I could tell it was in “this has got to be done, this should be done if I ever get a chance, this is never going to get done” piles. There were more piles around the office. You could tell MHI New Orleans was having a hard time keeping up with the minor shit.
“I hear you did pretty good today,” he said.
He had green eyes that reminded me of a Jamaican guy we had in my platoon before Beirut and what might be called café au lait skin. Other than that, his features were more or less Northern European with maybe a dash of Mediterranean. He had a big nose to go with the big everywhere else and high, Scandinavian cheekbones.
“Fairly well, sir,” I said. I pulled out the sheaf of receipts.
He ruffled through them, nodding, then shook his head.
“Even for around here that’s a rough first day,” he said.
The air conditioning was a window unit that could barely keep up. It was probably eighty degrees in the office. If Trevor noticed, it wasn’t apparent. The interiors of the offices were more pleasant than the exterior. There was a nice team room in the front by the balcony that was finely carpeted with wood paneling, comfortable furniture, projection TV and a full wet bar.
Trevor’s office was even well set up. More like a lawyer’s office than a Monster Hunter’s. There were custom bookshelves on the walls and the desk he had his foot propped on looked to be an antique. On the wall behind him was a shadow box with a Special Forces beret, jump wings, various other Army doodads I mostly didn’t recognize. One was a diver’s helmet I was pretty sure was SCUBA school, and an awards set surmounted by the Silver Star. There were a bunch of Vietnam decorations I recognized but didn’t know what they meant.
“If it wasn’t for the heat, I’d say I enjoyed myself, sir.” Which was true. Say one thing for New Orleans, I wasn’t going to be sitting on my hands. And that one day of Perpetual Unearthly Forces Fund bounties was what I’d usually make in Seattle in a month.
“Plus most of those will count as solo, so you’ll get one hell of a check. But about that…”
I got ready to be chewed out for going in alone on the vampire. “The situation was—”
“Shut up, Chad. I don’t care. Every good Hunter has a different style. You want to lone wolf it, and you get killed because of that, that’s on you. You’re a professional. Use your brain. It’s better to wait for help, but if you can’t, you can’t. This is a job, not a suicide pact, but the man on the scene has to make the call. That said, you get somebody else hurt because you aren’t where you should be, that is all on your head, son. And I will remove it from your shoulders.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Good. Joan Nelson called me to talk about you. By the way, she loves you and thinks you’re a brilliant Hunter, but she also said you’ve got a lot of self-destructive tendencies, delusions of invincibility, and possibly a death wish.”
“Well she is a psychiatrist.”
“I told her with a resume like that you’ll fit in fine in New Orleans. I asked Ray to shake the trees and find us some more help—you’re hopefully the first of many—but until then we’re short-handed, and everybody but you has something injured. I’m hopping on one leg, Ben shouldn’t be moving that arm at all yet, but Shelbye should be up for light hunting tonight. You two will be on call,” Trevor said, pulling out a beeper. “You got a cell phone?”
“I’ve got a radiophone, sir.”
“Probably won’t work around here. Soon as you can, get a cell. See if your radiophone works. Maybe keep both. You’ll need them. If it is something the two of you can’t handle, you call me. Gimped up or not, I can still shoot. Keep Shelbye from getting in close if you possibly can. That’s not her thing.”
“Close is sort of my specialty, sir,” I said. “Be nice to have someone at my back.”
“Here’s the deal,” Trevor said, as if he’d repeated the briefing too many times. “New Orleans has always been one of MHI’s busier postings, and it has a history of going nuts on the full moon. You’ve got to have your shit together here, or you will not last. I’ve been here for the better part of a decade, but lately everything has been getting worse.”
“The MCB agents said the same thing. Any idea why?”
“Nope. We’ve got bodies popping out of graveyards, loup-garou moving in, and fucking vampires think this city is Mecca, but we’ve always got that. Lately? It’s like the black magic spells suckers are always trying have actually been working, which gets more suckers trying them. The darker it gets, the more it riles up the monsters. The more folks talk, the more some asshole is going to be tempted to play with magic. MCB isn’t doing their regular scare-or-shoot-the-witnesses thing lately, so we’ll see where that gets us.”
“Agent Castro says he’s a lot more lenient than regular MCB. I was covered in blood and getting honked at today, and there was an agent just sitting there.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts. I’ve seen SACs come and go. He could get replaced tomorrow by an agent with a stick up his ass. Until then, this is probably the one place in the country where we can get away with being identified as Monster Hunters by the locals and it isn’t the end of the world. But we still try to keep our business away from the public as much as possible, because when we make the MCB’s job easy, they’ll make our lives easy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Carry a notebook. Log every incident with notes on what you killed and where. Always get the incident number from NOPD or the Sheriff’s office. There’s times when you’re going to have to roll before the paperwork is complete. Always stay on site while the bodies are cleared to cover coroners unless you’re sure it’s completely clear and coroners agree. They’ll lose people if you don’t and they get nasty when they lose people. Don’t expect any help from anyone. Sheriff’s will but it’s rare. NOPD will watch you get ripped to pieces before they’ll get out of their cars. We’re contracted to protect coroners. Everyone else is just regular folks. But protect coroners. Any questions like what the hell is going on around here?” he finished with a grin. He had big, white teeth.
“No, got that,” I said, still looking slightly puzzled. “I need to find someplace to live.”
“We’ve got a bunk room here,” Trevor said. “We generally hold here most nights and when we’re up to full roster we’ll keep an alert team on standby twenty-four until things get back to normal. So bunk here for now. I’ve already got a real estate agent ready to meet at your convenience. She’s, pardon, a wizard at finding the right place. Next.”
“When I cleared the zombies, the coroners gave me a receipt for every corpse, including the ones that hadn’t gotten up yet.”
“Ah,” Trevor said, nodding. “We usually try to ease people into that. This is New Orleans.”
“I saw the sign on the way in, sir.”
“Everybody is on the take,” Trevor said. “And I do mean everyone. Well, except MCB. I think. We have to pay the coroner’s office for prompt response or we’ll be sitting there for hours especially on the full moon. Then there’s the Sheriff’s office, local politicians to keep our contracts. It’s a long list. So the coroner’s will add a couple of PUFF here and there.”
“Ah,” I said. Given the rest, what was another major violation of federal law? “Thank you. Clarified, sir.”
“Just roll with it,” Trevor said, shrugging. “And welcome to the Big Easy.”
* * *
Shelbye turned out to be a brunette white lady in her thirties. Curly brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, scarred, rode hard but nice body from what I could see under the body armor. She had an American flag bandana tied on her head as a do-rag and was walking with a slight limp and favoring her right ribs. Flesh golem.
We’d rigged up and were in the team room hanging out. Our cars were out front in case we got a call-out. I’d borrowed Trevor’s Wahl clippers and now had a boot buzz for the first time in years. I’d put on a do-rag as well. Helmet in direct contact with buzz was uncomfortable and it would help keep the sweat out of my eyes.
The sun had set and business was booming for the drug dealers across the street. There were even a few Beemers passing by with decent suburban folk picking up their evening blow or weed before they headed home to their nice, safe, suburban homes and got the hell out of New Orleans.
Shelbye wasn’t talkative and I let her have the silence. We mostly watched the evening news. Several people had died in a gas leak at a high school. There was nothing about a demon in a cemetery or…
“And in news of the weird,” the anchor said, grinning with that look of someone playing a joke. “There were reports a vampire went shopping in Metairie!” There was what looked like a stock photo of a strip mall. It wasn’t even the same strip mall. “Police were called to reports of a vampire in a small store in Metairie! When they checked it out, it was an old clothes dummy dressed as a vampire.”
“Gotta love the Big Easy, Paul,” the anchorwoman said, shaking her head and laughing.
“And that’s the news this night,” the anchor said, smiling. “Good night.”
“And they’re clear,” Shelbye said. “And they’ll shake their heads and shudder. The producers probably know the actual story, but run the cover faxed to them by MCB.”
“People were waving when I came out,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s different. I know, welcome to the Big Easy.”
“Only thing easy here is dying,” Shelbye said fatalistically. The phone rang. “And it starts.”