You Suck: A Love Story

phones, checked their houses,” Lash said. “The door was hanging open at Drew’s, and Jeff had left half a beer in the driveway, which he would never do. Besides, Jeff and Drew might
    flake, but Gustavo wouldn’t. We even went to his cousin’s house in Oakland looking for him.”
    “And he did not esta en la biblioteca either,” said Barry, who, for some reason, believed that all Spanish-speaking people spent a lot of time in the library and had therefore checked there for the intrepid night porter.
    “No more bodies that you might have forgotten to mention?”
    “Nuh-uh,” Lash said. “Our money was gone, though. But we’d given it all to Blue anyway.”
    “I didn’t,” Clint said. “Mutual funds, less ten percent for the church.”
    “You gave six hundred thousand dollars to a hooker?” Rivera almost slapped the kid. Almost.
    “Well”-Lash looked at Barry and Troy Lee, then, trying to suppress a grin-“yeah.”
    Rivera shook his head. “Keep the door locked and don’t report this to anyone else.”
    “That’s it?” Lash said. “You aren’t going to arrest us or anything?”
    “For what?” Rivera flipped his notebook closed and tucked it into the inside pocket of his suit coat.
    “Uh, I don’t know.”
    “Me either,” said Rivera. “Emperor, you stay inside tonight with these guys. Okay?”
    “As you wish, Inspector.” The Emperor scratched behind Lazarus’s ears.
    “That okay?” Rivera said to Lash.
    Lash nodded. “Are we going to be safe?” he asked.
    Rivera stopped, looked around at the Animals and the Emperor and his dogs. “Nope,” he said. “Let’s go, Nick.” He turned and walked out the door.
    T he foghorn was lowing across the Bay as the detectives walked back to their car. Fort Mason, just across the street, was barely visible in the rolling cloud of gray mist.
    “You think the old vampire is hunting the Animals?” Cavuto asked.
    “Someone is,” Rivera said. “But I’m not sure it’s him.”
    “You think it might be the redhead and the kid?”
    “Could be, but I don’t think so. You know, even with the vampire, we always had an identifiable MO-broken neck and massive blood loss, on a victim who turned out to be terminally ill, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So if he went after these kids, why no bodies?”
    “So it’s Flood and the redhead. And they hide their bodies.”
    “I think it could be worse than that.”
    “Like worse in a way that we’ll never be able to open the bookstore and may in fact end up doing time for taking the vampire’s art collection?”
    “Like worse in that the hooker and the missing Animals aren’t dead at all.”
    “How is that worse?” Then Cavuto realized how that was worse.
    They climbed into the car and stared at the windshield for a while without saying anything.
    Finally, after a full minute, Cavuto said, “We’re fucked.”
    “Yep,” Rivera said.
    “The whole city is fucked.”
    “Yep.”

26 – Being the Chronicles of
    AbbyNormal
    : Star-Crossed Lover and Tragic Femme
    Fatale
    OMG! We are doomed by our forbidden love! We are like from different feuding families, from the wrong side of the tracks, he is like year of the Rabbit and I am a Leo, so we are even star-crossed, and it’s a well-known fact that rabbits and lions have a strained relationship. OMFG! He’s so hot! He rocks my stripy socks. If we had moors, I would so be off brooding upon one, my delicate jaw muscles clenched as I stared off into the mist, feeling my profound missingness for him. (I can’t believe thatSan Francisco doesn’t have a moor. Everywhere you go we have automated, coin-operated robotic bathrooms, or Frisbee golf courses, or some new stainless-steel epileptic razor-blade public-art thingy, you’d think the least they could do would be to install a decent moor-because there are a lot more people who like brooding than like Frisbee golf. I’m pretty sure moors can be used for other purposes,
    too, like hauntings and hiding bodies and family picnics and whatnot.) Thus I am forced to do my brooding at Tulley’s Coffee onMarket Street.
    It took most of the day for us to move the Countess and the vampyre Flood to Jared’s room. First we had to wrap them up in duct tape and garbage bags to protect them from the sun, then get them down the hill from theBayBridge in the garden cart, which was totally physically hard, and not like taking X and dancing or playing DDR all night, more like work. Then, when we were loading