Bloodsucking fiends: a love story

is still time."
    "Who?" Asked Lash. "Who's he talking about?"
    Tommy cleared his throat. "The Emperor thinks that there's a vampire stalking the City."
    "You're shittin' me," Barry said.
    "I've just seen him," the Emperor said, "at the marina. He changed from a cloud of vapor to human form as I watched. He's not far behind me, either."
    Tommy patted the old man's arm. "Don't be silly, Your Highness. Even if there were vampires, they can't turn into vapor."
    "But I saw it."
    "Look!" Tommy said. "You saw something else. I know for a fact that vampires can't change into vapor."
    "You know that for a fact?" Simon drawled.
    Tommy looked at Simon, expecting to see the usual grin, but Simon was waiting for an answer.
    Tommy shook his head. "I'm trying to get things under control here, Simon. You want to give me a break?"
    "How do you know?" Simon insisted.
    "It was in a book I was reading. You remember, Simon, you read that one too."
    Simon looked as if he had just been threatened, which he had. "Yeah, right," he said, pushing his Stetson back down over his eyes and leaning back on the register. "Well, you ought to just call the loony-bin boys for your friend there."
    "I'll take care of him," Tommy said. "You guys get started on the truck." He opened the office door and nudged the Emperor toward it.
    "What about the men?" asked the Emperor.
    "They're safe. Come on in and tell me about it."
    "But the monster?"
    "If he wanted to kill me, I'd be dead already." Tommy shut the office door behind them.
    Big hair, Jody thought. Big hair is the way to go with this outfit. After all these years of trying to tame my hair, all I had to do was dress like an upscale hooker and I would have been fine.
    She was walking up Geary Street, her fake Gucci bag of free cosmetics still in hand. There was a new club down here somewhere and she needed to dance, or at least show off a little.
    A panhandler wearing a cardboard sign that read, "I am Unemployed and Illiterate (a friend wrote this for me)," stopped her and tried to sell her a free weekly newspaper.
    Jody said, "I can pick that up anywhere. It's free."
    "It is?"
    "Yes. They give it away in every store and cafe in town."
    "I wondered why they were laying out there for the taking."
    Jody was angry with herself for being pulled into this exchange. "It says 'free' right there on the cover."
    The bum pointed to the sign hanging around his neck and tried to look tragic. "Maybe you could give me quarter for it anyway."
    Jody started to walk away. The bum followed along beside her. "There's a great article on recovery groups on page ten."
    She looked at him.
    "Someone told me," he said.
    Jody stopped. "I'll give you this if you'll leave me alone." She held out the cosmetics bag.
    The bum acted as if he had to think about it. He looked her up and down, pausing at her cleavage before looking her in the eye. "Maybe we could work something out. You must be cold in that dress. I could warm you up."
    "Normally," Jody said, "if I met a guy who was unemployed and illiterate who hadn't bathed in a couple of weeks, I'd be standing in a puddle with excitement, but I'm sort of in a bad mood tonight, so take this bag and give me the fucking paper before I pop your little head like a zit." She pushed the bag into his chest, knocking him back against the window of a closed camera store.
    The bum offered her the paper tentatively and she snatched it from his hand.
    He said, "You're a lesbian, aren't you?"
    Jody screamed at him: a high, explosive, unintelligible expulsion of pure inhuman frustration – a Hendrix high note sampled and sung by a billion suffering souls in Hell's own choir. The window of the camera shop shattered and fell in shards to the sidewalk. The store alarm wailed, paltry in comparison to Jody's scream. The bum covered his ears and ran away.
    "Cool," Jody said, more than a bit satisfied with herself. She opened the paper and read as she walked up the street to the club.
    Outside the club Jody got in line with a crowd of well-dressed wannabees and resumed reading her paper, enjoying the stares of the men on line in her peripheral vision.
    The club was called 753. It seemed to Jody that all of the new, trendy clubs had eschewed names for numbers. Kurt and his broker buddies had been big fans of the number-named clubs, which made for Monday-morning recount conversations that sounded more like equations: "We went to Fourteen Ninety-Two and Ten Sixty-Six, then Jimmy drank ten Seven-Sevens at