Club Dead

because I sounded so hoarse and weak.
    There was a long silence while she thought through the implications. “You have a habit of being in the wrong place,” she said, as if she were remotely sorry for me.
    “They are getting me to call you now,” I said carefully. “I am supposed to tell you that the vampire you have there, he’s the real thing.”
    She laughed a little. “Oh, but . . .” she began. Then she fell silent. “You’re shitting me, right?” Mamie Eisenhower would never have said that, I was willing to swear.
    “Absolutely not. There was a vamp working in the morgue that night,” I croaked. Betty Jo made a sound that came out between a gasp and a choke. “Don’t call him by his real name. Call him ‘Bubba.’ And for goodness’ sake, don’t hurt him.”
    “But we’ve already . . . hold on!”
    She ran. I could hear the urgent sound die away.
    I sighed, and waited. After a few seconds, I was completely nuts with the two guys standing around looking down at me. I was strong enough to sit up, I figured.
    Bill gently held me up, while Eric propped pillows behind my back. I was glad to see one of them had had the presence of mind to spread the yellow blanket over the bed so I wouldn’t stain the bedspread. All this while, I’d held the phone clamped to my ear, and when it squawked, I was actually startled.
    “We got him down in time,” Betty Joe said brightly.
    “The call came in time,” I told Eric. He closed his eyes and seemed to be offering up a prayer. I wondered to whom Eric prayed. I waited for further instructions.
    “Tell them,” he said, “to just let him go, and he will take himself home. Tell them that we apologize for letting him stray.”
    I relayed that message from my “abductors.”
    Betty Jo was quick to dismiss the directions. “Would you ask if he could stay and sing to us a little? He’s in pretty good shape,” she said.
    So I relayed that . Eric rolled his eyes. “She can ask him, but if he says no, she must take it to heart and not ask him anymore,” he said. “It just upsets him, if he’s not in the mood. And sometimes when he does sing, it brings back memories, and he gets, ah, obstreperous.”
    “All right,” she said, after I’d explained. “We’ll do our best. If he doesn’t want to sing, we’ll let him go right away.” From the sound of it, she turned to someone by her. “He can sing, if he’ll consent,” she said, and the someone said, “Yippee!” Two big nights in a row for the crowd at the king of Mississippi’s mansion, I guess.
    Betty Joe said into the telephone, “I hope you get out of your difficulties. I don’t know how whoever’s got you got lucky enough to have the care of the greatest star in the world. Would he consider negotiating?”
    She didn’t know yet about the troubles that entailed. “Bubba” had an unfortunate predilection for cat blood, and he was addlepated, and he could only follow the simplest directions; though every now and then, he exhibited a streak of shrewdness. He followed directions quite literally.
    “She wants permission to keep him,” I told Eric. I was tired of being the go-between. But Betty Joe couldn’t meet with Eric, or she’d know he was the supposed friend of Alcide’s who’d helped me get to the mansion the night before.
    This was all too complicated for me.
    “Yes?” Eric said into the telephone. Suddenly he had an English accent. Mr. Master of Disguise. Soon he was saying things like, “He’s a sacred trust,” and, “You don’t know what you’re biting off,” into the phone. (If I’d had any sense of humor that night, I would have thought the last statement was pretty funny.) After a little more conversation, he hung up, with a pleased air.
    I was thinking how strange it was that Betty Joe hadn’t indicated that anything else was amiss at the compound. She hadn’t accused Bubba of taking their prisoner, and she hadn’t commented on finding the body of Lorena. Not that she’d necessarily mention these things in a phone conversation with a human stranger; and, for that matter, not that there’d be much to find; vampires disintegrate pretty quickly. But the silver chains would still be in the pool, and maybe enough sludge to identify as the corpse of a vampire. Of course, why would anyone look under the pool cover? But surely someone had noticed their star prisoner was gone?
    Maybe they were assuming Bubba had freed Bill while he was roaming the compound. We’d