You Suck: A Love Story

from her grandson.
    “That shit is not the same!” Lash said.
    “Get some sleep. We have a big load to night.”
    Now half a million dollars was gone. His apartment was gone. The limo was costing them a thousand dollars a day. Lash looked out the blackout windows at the moving patchwork of shadows thrown by the streetlights, then turned to Blue “Blue,” he said. “We have to get rid of the limo.”
    Everyone looked up, shocked. No one had said anything to her since they’d finished stocking. They’d brought her coffee and juice, but no one had said anything.
    Blue looked at him. “Get me what I want.” Not a hint of malice, not even a demand, really, just a statement of fact.
    “Okay,” Lash said. Then to the driver he said, “Take a right up here. Head back to that building where we went last night.”
    Lash crawled over the divider into the front passenger seat. He couldn’t see shit out the blackened windows. They’d only gone about three blocks into the SOMA district when he saw someone running.
    Running way, way too fast for a jogger. Running-like he was on fire-running.
    “Pull up alongside of that guy.”
    The driver nodded.
    “Hey, guys, is that Flood?”
    “Yeah, it is,” Barry, the bald one, said.
    Lash rolled down the window. “Tommy, you need a ride, man?”
    Tommy, still running, nodded like a bobble-head on crack.
    Barry threw open the back door, and before the limo could even slow down, Tommy leapt in, landing across Drew and Gustavo’s laps.
    “Man, am I glad you guys came along,” Tommy said. “In about a minute, I’m going to-”
    He passed out in their laps as the sun washed over the hills of San Francisco.

15 – Broken Clowns
    Inspector Alphonse Rivera watched the broken clown girl-black-and-white-striped stockings and green sneakers-come out of Jody Stroud’s apartment and head up the street, then turn and look back at their brown, unmarked sedan.
    “We’re made,” said Nick Cavuto, Rivera’s partner, a broad-shouldered bear of a man, who longed for the days of Dashiell Hammett, when cops talked tough and there were very few problems that couldn’t be solved with your fists or a smack from a lead sap.
    “We’re not made. She’s just looking. Two middle-aged guys sitting in the car on the city street-it’s unusual.”
    If Cavuto was a bear, then Rivera was a raven-a sharp-featured, lean Hispanic, with just a touch of gray at the temples. Lately he’d taken to wearing expensive Italian suits, in raw silk or linen when he could find them. His partner was in rumpled Men’s Wear house. Rivera often wondered if Nick Cavuto might not be the only gay man on the planet who had no fashion sense whatsoever.
    The knock-kneed kid with the raccoon eye makeup was making her way across the street toward them.
    “Roll up your window,” Cavuto said. “Roll up your window. Pretend like you don’t see her.”
    “I’m not going to hide from her,” Rivera said. “She’s just a kid.”
    “Exactly. You can’t hit her.”
    “Jesus, Nick. She’s just a creepy kid. What’s wrong with you?”
    Cavuto had been on edge since they’d pulled up an hour ago. They both had, really, since the guy named Clint, one of the night crew from the Marina Safeway, had left a message on Rivera’s voice mail that Jody Stroud, the redheaded vampire, had not left town as she had promised, and that her boyfriend, Tommy Flood, was now also a vampire. It was a very bad turn of events for the two cops, both of whom had taken a share of the money from the old vampire’s art collection in return for letting them all go. It had seemed like the only option, really. Neither of the cops wanted to explain how the serial killer they’d been chasing had been an ancient vampire, and how he’d been tracked down by a bunch of stoners from the Safeway. And when the Animals blew up the vampire’s yacht-well, the case was solved, and if the vampires had left, it would have all been good. The cops had planned to retire early and open a rare-book store. Rivera thought he might learn to golf. Now he was feeling it all float away on an evil breeze. A cop for twenty years, without ever so much as fixing a traffic ticket, then the one time you take a hundred thousand dollars and let a vampire go, the whole world turns on you like you’re some kind of bad guy. Rivera was raised a Catholic, but he was starting to believe in karma.
    “Pull out. Pull out,” Cavuto said. “Go around the block until she goes