Dead Reckoning

thank God you’re awake.”
    “You’re unclothed.”
    Trust a man to mention that first. “Absolutely, and I’ll tell you why—”
    “Can’t get up yet,” he said. “Must be . . . overcast?”
    “Right, big storm, dark as hell out there, and there’s people—”
    “’Kay, later.” And he was out again.
    Crap! So I huddled by his corpse and listened. Had I left the front door unlocked? Of course I had. And the second I realized that, I heard a floorboard creak overhead. They were in the house.
    “. . . no drips,” said a voice, probably from the foyer. I started to crawl to the hatch door so I could hear . . . but I paused. There was at least a chance that if they found the hatch and flipped it open, they still wouldn’t see Bill and me. We were way back in a corner, and this was a very big space. Maybe it had been sort of a cellar, as close to a cellar as you could get in a place that had such a high water table.
    “Yeah, but the door was open. She must have come in here.” It was a nasal voice, and it was a little closer than it had been.
    “And she flew across the floor, leaving no footprints? Raining as hard as it is out there?” The sarcastic voice was a bit deeper.
    “We don’t know what she is.” Nasal guy.
    “Not a vampire, Kelvin. We know that.”
    Kelvin said, “Maybe she’s a werebird or something, Hod.”
    “Werebird?” The snort of incredulity echoed in the dark house. Hod could really do sarcastic.
    “Did you see the ears on that guy? That was pretty incredible. You can’t rule out nothing, these days,” Kelvin advised his buddy.
    Ears? They were talking about Dermot. What had they done to him? I was ashamed. This was the first time I’d thought about what might have befallen my great-uncle.
    “Yeah, and? He must be one of those science fiction geeks.” Hod didn’t sound like he was paying much attention to what he was saying. I heard cabinets open and close. No way I could have been in any of those places.
    “Nah, man, I’m sure they were real. No scars or anything. Maybe I shoulda taken one.”
    Taken one? I shivered.
    Kelvin, who was closer to the pantry than Hod, added, “I’m gonna go upstairs, check out the rooms up there.” I heard the sound of his boots diminish, heard the distant creak of the stairs, his muffled footfalls up the carpeted treads. Very faintly, I followed some of his movements on the second floor. I knew when he was directly above me, in the room I figured was the master bedroom, where I’d slept when I was dating Bill.
    While Kelvin was gone, Hod wandered to and fro, though he didn’t seem very purposeful to me.
    “Right . . . there’s nobody here,” Kelvin announced when he returned to the former kitchen. “Wonder why there’s a hot tub in the house?”
    “There’s a car outside,” Hod said thoughtfully. His voice was much closer, right outside the open pantry door. He was thinking about getting back to Shreveport and taking a hot shower, putting on dry clothes, maybe having sex with his wife. Ew. A few too many details along with that. Kelvin was more prosaic. He wanted to get paid, so he wanted to deliver me. To whom? Dammit, he wasn’t thinking about that. My heart sank, though I would have sworn it was already down to my toes. My bare toes. I was glad I’d painted my toenails recently. Irrelevant!
    A bright line of light suddenly appeared in the thin, thin outline of the hatch or trapdoor or whatever Bill called it. The light had been switched on in the pantry. I held as still as a mouse, tried to breathe shallowly and silently. I thought how bad Bill would feel if they killed me right next to him. Irrelevant!
    He would, though.
    I heard a creak and realized one of the men was standing right above me. If I could have switched my mind off, I would have. I was so conscious of the life in other people’s minds that I had a hard time believing that anyone could ignore a conscious brain, especially one as jittery as mine.
    “Just blood in here,” Hod said, so close that I jerked in surprise. “The bottled kind. Hey, Kelvin, this house must belong to a vampire!”
    “Don’t make no difference as long as he’s not awake. Or she. Hey, you ever had a female vampire?”
    “No, and don’t want to. I don’t like to hump dead people. Course, some nights, Marge ain’t much better.”
    Kelvin laughed. “You better not let her hear you say that, bro.”
    Hod laughed, too. “No danger of that.”
    And he stepped out of the