Bloodsucking fiends: a love story

now. Wake up the little woman, we need breakfast."
    Tommy opened the door a little wider and saw Drew dazzling a stoned and goofy grin behind Simon. "Fearless Leader!"
    All the Animals were there, holding grocery bags, waiting.
    Tommy thought, This is how Anne Frank felt when the Gestapo came to the door.
    Simon pushed through the door, causing Tommy to hop back a step to avoid having his toes skinned. "Hey."
    Simon looked at Tommy's erection-stretched jockey shorts. "That just a morning wood, or you in the middle of something?"
    "I told you, I was sleeping."
    "You're young, it could still grow some. Don't feel bad."
    Tommy looked down at his insulted member as Simon breezed past him up the stairs, followed by the rest of the Animals. Glint and Lash stopped and helped Tommy to his feet.
    "I was sleeping," Tommy said pathetically. "It's my day off."
    Lash patted Tommy's shoulder. "I'm cutting class today. We thought you needed moral support."
    "For what? I'm fine."
    "Cops came by the store last night looking for you. We wouldn't give them your address or anything."
    "Cops?" Tommy was waking up now. He could hear beers being popped open in the loft. "What did the cops want with me?"
    "They wanted to see your time cards. They wanted to see if you were working on a bunch of nights. They wouldn't say why. Simon tried to distract them by accusing me of leading a black terrorist group."
    "That was nice of him."
    "Yeah, he's a sweetheart. He told that new cashier, Mara, that you were in love with her but were too shy to tell her."
    "Forgive him," Clint said piously. "He knows not what he does."
    Simon popped out onto the landing. "Flood, did you drug this bitch? She won't wake up."
    "Stay out of the bedroom!" Tommy shook off Lash and Clint and ran up the stairs.
    Cavuto chewed an unlit cigar. "I say we go to the kid's house and lean on him."
    Rivera looked up from a stack of green-striped computer printout. "Why? He was working when all the murders happened."
    "Because he's all we've got. What about the prints on the book; any thing?"
    "There were half a dozen good prints on the cover. Nothing the computer could match. Interesting thing is, none of the prints were the victim's. He never touched it."
    "What about the kid; a match?"
    "No way to tell, he's never been printed. Let it go, Nick. That kid didn't kill these people."
    Cavuto ran his hand over his bald head as if looking for a bump that would hold an answer. "Let's arrest him and print him."
    "On what charges?"
    "We'll ask him. You know what the Chinese say, 'Beat a kid every day; if you don't know why, the kid will.' "
    "You ever think about adopting, Nick?" Rivera flipped the last page of the printout and threw it into the wastebasket by his desk. "Justice doesn't have shit. All the unsolved murders with massive blood loss involve mutilation. No vampires here."
    For two months they had avoided using the word. Now, here it was. Cavuto took out a wooden match, scraped it against the bottom of his shoe, and moved it around the tip of his cigar. "Rivera, we will not refer to this perp by the V-word again. You don't remember the Night Stalker. This fucking Whiplash Killer thing the press has picked up is bad enough."
    "You shouldn't smoke in here," said Rivera. "The sprout eaters will file a grievance."
    "Fuck 'em. I can't think without smoking. Let's run sex offenders. Look for priors of rapes and assaults with blood draining. This guy might have just graduated to killing. Then let's run it with cross-dressers."
    "Cross-dressers?"
    "Yeah, I want to put this thing with the redhead to bed. Having a lead is ruining our perfect record."
    She woke to a miasma of smells that hit her like a sockful of sand: burned eggs, bacon grease, beer, maple syrup, stale pot smoke, whiskey, vomit and male sweat. The smells carried memories from before the change – memories of high school keggers and drunken surfers face-down in puddles of puke. Hangover memories. Coming as they did, right after a visit from her mother, they carried shame and loathing and the urge to fall back into bed and hide under the covers.
    She thought, I guess there's a few things about being human that I don't miss.
    She pulled on a pair of sweatpants and one of Tommy's shirts and opened the bedroom door. It looked as if the good ship International Pancakes had run aground in the kitchen. Every horizontal surface was covered with breakfast jetsam. She stepped through the debris, careful not to kick any of the