Bloodsucking fiends: a love story

jerk, maybe…"
    "Whatever," Tommy said, moving on in the list. "Okay, sunlight is bad for you." He made a check mark. "You can enter a house without being invited. How about running water?"
    "What about it?"
    "Vampires aren't supposed to be able to cross running water. Have you tried crossing any running water?"
    "I've taken a couple of showers."
    "Then that would be fiction. Let me smell your breath." He bent close to her.
    She turned her head and shielded her mouth. "Tommy, I just woke up. Let me brush my teeth first."
    "Vampires are supposed to have the 'fetid breath of a predator,' or, in some cases, 'breath like the rotting smell of the charnel house.' C'mon, give us a whiff."
    Jody reluctantly breathed in his face. He sat up and considered the list.
    "Well? "she asked.
    "I'm thinking. I need to get the dictionary out of my suitcase."
    "What for?"
    "I'm not sure what a charnel house is."
    "Can I brush my teeth while you look?"
    "No, wait, I might need another whiff." He went to his suitcase and dug out the dictionary. While he looked up "charnel house," Jody cupped her hand and smelled her own breath. It was pretty foul.
    "Here it is," he said, putting his finger on the word. "'Noun. A mausoleum or morgue. A structure where corpses are buried or stored. See morning breath ! I guess that we check 'fact' on that one."
    "Can I brush my teeth now?"
    "Sure. Are you going to shower?"
    "I'd like to. Why?"
    "Can I help? I mean, you're much more attractive when you're not room temperature."
    She smiled. "You really know how to charm a girl." She got out of bed and went into the bathroom. Tommy waited on the bed.
    "Well, come on," she said as she turned on the water.
    "Sorry," he said, leaping to his feet and wrestling out of his shirt.
    She stopped him at the bathroom door with a firm hand on the chest. "One second, mister. I have a question for you."
    "Shoot."
    "Men are pigs: fact or fiction?"
    "Fact!" Tommy shouted.
    "Correct! You win!" She leaped into his arms and kissed him.

Chapter 17 – This Month's
    Makeover: The Faces of Fear
    Simon McQueen had once climbed onto the back of a ton of pissed-off beef named Muffin and been promptly stomped into mush in front of an amazed rodeo crowd, and still managed to pinch the bottom of a female paramedic as he was carried away on a stretcher, singing a garbled version of "I've Got Friends in Low Places." Simon McQueen had once picked a fight with a gang of skinheads and managed to render three of them unconscious before a knife in the stomach and a jackboot to the head rendered him helpless. Simon had jumped out of an airplane, fallen off the roof of a Lutheran church, run over a police car in his pickup truck, smuggled a thousand pounds of marijuana across the border from Mexico inside a stuffed cow, and swum halfway to Alcatraz Island on a dare before the Coast Guard fished him out of the bay and revived him. Simon had done all these things without the slightest tic of fear. But tonight, laid out across register 3 in his skintight Wranglers and his endangered-species Tony Lama boots with the silver spurs, his black Stetson pulled down over his face, Simon McQueen was frightened. Frightened that one of his two great secrets was about to become known.
    The other Animals were sharing tales of their weekend adventures, exaggerating aspects of binges and babes, while Glint professed to God that they knew not what they did.
    Simon sat up, pushed back his Stetson, and said, "Y'all wouldn't know a piece of ass if it sloshed upside your head."
    The Animals fell silent, each trying to formulate a new and exciting way to tell Simon to fuck off, when Tommy came through the door.
    "Fearless Leader!" Lash exclaimed.
    Tommy grinned and faked a tap-dance step. "Gentlemen," he said. "I have reached out and touched the face of God – film at eleven."
    Simon was wildly irritated by this added distraction from his worrying. "What happened, you go down to Castro Street and get converted?"
    Tommy waved the comment away. "No, Sime – I can call you Sime, can't I? You see, last night, about this time" – he checked his watch – "there was a naked redhead hanging from the ceiling of my new loft, reading Kerouac aloud to me. If I die now, it was not all in vain. I'm ready to throw stock. How's the truck?"
    "A big one," Troy Lee answered. "Three thousand cases. But the bitch is, the scanner is broken. We have to use the order books."
    Troy's comment jabbed Simon like bad gas pain. He