Bloodsucking fiends: a love story

resembling a smile crossed his face.
    One-Eye sat down on the bunk and resumed menacing. "What are you in for?"
    "Nothing," Tommy said. "I didn't do anything."
    "Don't fuck with me, ass-wipe. What were you arrested for?"
    Tommy fidgeted, trying to work his way into the cinder-block wall. "Well, I put my girlfriend in the freezer, but I don't think that's a crime."
    One-Eye, for the first time since he'd been put in the cell, smiled. "Me either. You didn't use an assault weapon, did you?"
    "Nope, a Sears frost-free."
    "Oh, good; they're really tough on crimes with assault weapons."
    "So," Tommy said, venturing an inch out of the corner, "what are you in for?" Thinking baby-stomping, thinking cannibalism, thinking fast-food massacre.
    One-Eye hung his head. "Copyright infringement."
    "You're kidding?"
    One-Eye frowned. Tommy slid back into his corner, adding, "Really? That's bad."
    One-Eye pulled off his ratty T-shirt. The Seven Dwarfs danced across his massive chest between knife and bullet scars. On his stomach, Snow White and Cinderella were locked in a frothy embrace of mutual muffin munching.
    "Yeah, I made the mistake of walking around without a shirt. A Disney executive who was up here on vacation saw me down by the wharf. He called their legal pit bulls."
    Tommy shook his head in sympathy. "I didn't know they put you in jail for copyright infringement."
    "Well, they don't, really. It was when I ripped the guy's shoulders out of their sockets that the police got involved."
    "That's not a crime either, is it?"
    One-Eye rubbed his temples as if it was excruciating to remember. "It was in front of his kids."
    "Oh," Tommy said.
    "Flood, on your feet," a guard said from the cell door. Inspector Nick Cavuto stood behind him.
    "C'mon, cutie," Cavuto said. "We're going for a last walk."
    The blood-high wasn't racing through her with flush and fever as it always had before. No, it was more like the satisfying fullness of a lasagna dinner chased with double espressos. Still, the strength sang in her limbs; she ripped the loft-door dead bolts through the metal doorjamb as easily as she had torn the plastic crime-scene tape the police had put across the door.
    Strange, she thought, there is a difference in drinking from a living body.
    Her remorse over killing Simon had passed in seconds and the predator mind had taken over. A new aspect of the predator had reared up this time, not just the instinct to hide and hunt, but to protect.
    If Tommy was in jail for putting her in the freezer, it meant that the police had also found Peary, and they would try to connect Tommy to the other murders. But if they found another victim while Tommy was behind bars, they would have to set him free. And she needed him to be free, first so that she could find out why he had frozen her, but more important, because it was time to turn the tables on the other vampire, and the only safe way to hunt him was to do it during daylight.
    She had bit Simon's neck and used the heel of her hand to pump his heart as she drank. There was no guilt or self-consciousness in the act; the predator mind had taken over. She found herself thinking about the burly fireman who had come to Transamerica to teach the employees earthquake preparedness, which had included a course in CPR. What would he think of one of his students' using his technique to pump lifeblood from the murdered? "I'm sorry, Fireman Frank, I sucked like an Electrolux, but it just wasn't enough. If it's any consolation, I didn't enjoy it."
    What little strength she had gained from Simon's blood seemed to evaporate as she walked into the loft. It was in worse shape than the day the Animals had come for breakfast. The futon was bundled against the wall; the books had been taken out of their shelves and spread out on the floor; the cabinets hung open, their contents tumbled across the counters; and a fine patina of fingerprint powder covered every surface. She wanted to cry.
    It reminded her of the time she had lived with a heavy-metal bass player for two months, who had torn their apartment apart looking for money for drugs. Money?
    She ran to the bedroom and to the dresser where she had stashed the remaining cash the old vampire had given her. It was gone. She threw open the drawer where she kept her lingerie. She'd kept a couple thousand rolled up in a bra, a holdover habit from the days of hiding cash from the bass player. It was there. She had enough for a month's rent, but then what? It