Bite Me Page 5

  So I’m all, “What?”

  And Rivera is all, “Allison, we have an agreement with Mr. Wong. He will stay here and work on a solution to the cat problem, and in return for our not filing charges, you both will say nothing to anyone about our previous—uh—adventures, with Mr. Flood, Ms. Stroud, and any other persons of the blood-drinking persuasion. Nor will we mention any funds that may have changed hands, and who may be in possession of said funds. Agreed?”

  I’m all, “Sweet!”

  “And you have to go home and live with your mother and sister,” the evil Hispano cop continued.

  And I’m all, “No way!”

  And all three of them are shaking their heads at me. And Foo, who is out of handcuffs now, is all, “Abby, you have to go with them. You’re still a minor and your mom will chuck a spaz if they don’t bring you home.”

  “And if that happens, we’ll have no choice but to drop a hammer on Mr. Wong,” said Cavuto.

  And Foo’s all, “And to defend ourselves we’ll have to tell everyone about everything. So we’ll all be hosed and meanwhile, Chet the huge shaved cat will own the City, plus our relationship and stuff would be strained.”

  And by “and stuff,” Foo meant that we would lose the love lair and no one would take care of Tommy and Jody, and Foo would have to become love ninja to some big guy in prison. We were owned.

  I was all, “I blame my mother.”

  I offered my wrists to Rivera for the cuffs.

  And they were all nodding, and “Sure,” and “That works for me.” And “Yeah, I’m good with that.”

  But Rivera didn’t put the cuffs on me.

  And I’m all, “Can we have a minute to say good-bye?”

  And Rivera nods, so I start to lead Foo into the bedroom.

  And Rivera is all, “Out here.”

  So I unzip Foo’s pants.

  And Cavuto grabs my arm and starts to drag me away, so I was forced to give Foo only a minor good-bye kiss that brushed his lips like a breeze from the tomb and left a little bit of a black lipstick streak on his cheek.

  And I’m all, “I will never forget you, Foo. They may tear us asunder, but our love will endure for eternity.”

  And he’s all, “Call me when you get home.”

  And I’m all, “I’ll text you on the way.”

  And he’s all, “Abby Normal, you rock my stripy socks.” Which was totally romantic, because he doesn’t wear stripy socks. I cried and my mascara melted in sorrow.

  Then Cavuto’s all, “Oh for fuck’s sake.” And he starts to lead me out the door, but turns to Foo and goes, “Is that your tricked-out yellow Honda downstairs?”

  And Foo is all, “Yeah.”

  And Cavuto’s all, “You know it’s full of rats, right?”

  And Foo’s all, “Yeah.”

  And so I am a prisoner of the dreaded Motherbot and Foo faces the menace of Chet alone. Gotta jet, my sister, Ronnie, is asleep and I’m going to Magic Marker a pentagram on her shaved head. L8erz.

  RIVERA

  As they were walking away from delivering Abby Normal and her mother to the apartment building in the Fillmore, Cavuto said, “You know, if I’d had Allison there around when I came out to my dad, I think he would have understood a lot more why I like guys.”

  “If the vampire cats’ victims turn to dust, most won’t even be reported unless someone sees the attack,” Rivera said, hoping Cavuto’s train of thought would head on to the next station.

  “She’s so obnoxious,” said Cavuto. “Like a whole Saturday night drunk tank full of obnoxious packed into one little body.”

  “Maybe if we get a cadaver dog,” said Rivera.

  “Okay, but don’t bitch about how the car smells later, because I want chili and onions.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Cadaver dogs. You were saying we should go to the ballpark and get cadaver dogs for lunch.”

  “I was saying no such thing. I was saying we should get a dog that’s trained to sniff out cadavers to help us find the clothing of the victims.”

  “Oh,” said Cavuto, who didn’t want to think about vampires. “Sure, that makes sense. So, Barney’s Burgers for lunch then?”

  “You buy,” Rivera said, as he popped the locks on the unmarked Ford and climbed in.

  They drove eight blocks down Fillmore Street toward the Marina, before Cavuto said, “She’s right, you know? I am a bear.”

  Rivera put on his sunglasses and took a few seconds adjusting them on his face to buy time before he answered with a sigh. “I’m glad you decided to come clean about that, Nick, because observing your six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-and-sixty-pound, growling gay personage for the last fourteen years would have never betrayed your true identity, given my dull, homicide detective powers of observation.”

  “Your sarcasm is the main reason Alice left you.”

  “Really?” Rivera had wondered. Alice had said because he was too much of a cop and not enough of a husband, but he had suspicions about her testimony.

  “No, but I’m sure it was on the list.”

  “Nick, in all our time as partners, have I ever indicated that I wanted to discuss your sexuality?”

  “Well, not beyond using it to threaten suspects.”

  “And have I ever offered to share the details of my sex life with Alice?”

  “I just assumed you didn’t have one.”

  “Well, that’s not really relevant. I’m just saying, I’m fine with you just the way you are.”

  “Mantastic, you mean?”

  “Sure, go with that. Although I was thinking more of large and furry, yet afraid of tiny girls.”

  “Well, you can’t hit her, she’s a kid,” Cavuto whined.

  They found parking in a garage near Barney’s. Rivera pulled into a no-parking spot (because he could) and shut off the engine. He sat back and looked at the wall in front of them.

  “So, vampire cats,” Cavuto said.

  “Yeah,” said Rivera.

  “We’re fucked,” said the big cop.

  “Yeah,” said Rivera.

  6

  The Vampire Parrots of Telegraph Hill

  A flock of wild parrots lives in the city of San Francisco. They are South American cherry-headed conures—bright green with a red head, a little smaller than a typical pigeon.

  No one is quite sure how they came to the City. It’s likely that they are the descendants of animals caught in the jungle, then released to the city skies when they proved too wild to be kept as pets. They fly over the northern waterfront of San Francisco, foraging for fruit, berries, and blossoms, from the Presidio at the entrance of the Golden Gate Bridge, over Pacific Heights, the Marina, Russian Hill, North Beach, and all the way to the Ferry Building near the Oakland Bay Bridge. They are social, squawky, silly birds that mate for life and advertise their presence with a cacophony of beeps and cheeps that inspire smiles from residents, bewilderment from tourists, and hunger in predators, mostly red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons.

  The parrots spend their nights high in the trees of Telegraph Hill, beneath the great concrete phallus of Coit Tower, sheltered from attack from hawks by the evergreen canopy overhead, and from all but the most ambitious cats, by the sheer altitude. But still, they are sometimes attacked, and although gentle creatures, they will fight back, biting with their thick, built-for-seed-crushing beaks.

  Which is what happened.

  The next morning after he witnessed the cat attack in the SOMA, the Emperor of San Francisco was awakened from a nest he’d made in one of the little stair gardens on Telegraph Hill, to hear parrots squawking in the trees. The sun was just breaking the horizon behind the Bay Bridge, turning the water red-gold under a blue morning mist.

  The Emperor crawled out from under a pile of carpet padding, stood, and stretched, his great joints creaking in the cold like ancient church doors. The men, Bummer and Lazarus, poked their noses out of the gray cloak, snuffled the dawn, then, with th
e call of the parrots, resolved themselves to morning and emerged like urgent butterflies to search for the perfect spot for the first wee of the day.

  The three watched as fifty or so squawking parrots circled Coit Tower and headed out toward the Embarcadero, where, suddenly, they all stopped flying, burst into flames, and fell like a smoldering storm of dying comets into Levi’s Plaza.

  “Well, you don’t see that every day,” said the Emperor, scratching Lazarus’s ears through the bandages. The retriever was a doggy version of The Mummy, wrapped ears to tail in bandages after his last encounter with the vampire cats. The vet in the Mission wanted to keep him overnight, but the retriever had never spent a night away from the Emperor since they had found each other, and the vet had no accommodations for a large and burly monarch, let alone a feisty Boston terrier, so the three had bunked together under the carpet pad.

  Bummer chuffed, which translated from dog to: “I don’t like it.”

  As the famous frog sang, it’s not easy being green.

  7

  The Fog Comes on Little Cat Feet and Whatnot

  FOO

  Stephen “Foo Dog” Wong’s fully bombed Honda drift machine was full of rats. Not completely full, the passenger seat was filled by Jared Whitewolf, Abby’s backup BFF. (BBFF, really.)

  “Did you have to get all white ones?” Jared asked. He was six foot two, very thin, and paler than Death shagging a snowman. The sides of his head were shaved and in the middle he sported an unlaquered Mohawk, which hung in his eyes unless he was lying on his back or looking up. In addition to a floor-length black PVC cenobite coat, he was currently wearing Abby’s thigh-high red platform Skankenstein® boots, which was completely within his rights, as her current BFF. What bothered Foo was not that Jared had on girl’s boots, but that he had on the boots of a girl with distinctly small feet.

  “Don’t those hurt?”

  Jared tossed his hair out of his eyes. “Well, it’s like Morrissey said, ‘Life is suffering.’”

  “I think the Buddha said that.”

  “I’m pretty sure Morrissey said it first—like, back in the eighties.”

  “No, it was the Buddha.”

  “Have you ever even seen a picture of the Buddha with shoes on?” Jared asked.

  Foo couldn’t believe he was having this argument. What’s more, he couldn’t believe he was losing this argument.

  “Well, I have some Nikes upstairs that might fit you if you need to change shoes. Let’s get the rats unloaded. I have to get to work.”

  Jared already had four plastic cages with two white rats in each stacked on his lap, so he unfolded himself out of the Honda and wobbled on the red platforms to the fire door of the loft. “Don’t try to paint them black,” Jared said, peering into the Plexiglas boxes as Foo opened the door for him. “I tried that with my first rat, Lucifer. It was tragic.”

  “Tragic?” said Foo. “I’d have never guessed. Put them on the floor in the living room. I’ll borrow the truck from work tomorrow and pick up some folding tables to put them on.”

  In addition to pursuing his degree in molecular biology, and variously rescuing Abby, formulating vampire serum, and tricking out his Honda, Foo still worked part-time at Stereo City, where he specialized in telling people that they needed a bigger TV.

  “You still have that job?” Jared said as he stumbled up the stairs. “Abby said you guys have total fuck-you money.”

  Why did she tell him? She wasn’t supposed to tell him. Did she tell him everything? Why did she have to have friends at all? She’d given Jared five thousand dollars of Jody and Tommy’s money for Hanukkah—despite the fact that neither one of them was Jewish. “Because I will not let mainstream society make me into the Christmas bitch of the zombie baby-Jebus, that’s why,” she’d said. “And because he helped me take care of the Countess and Lord Flood when they were in trouble.”

  “I need to keep my cover,” Foo said. “For tax purposes.”

  That was partially true. He did need to keep up his cover, because, like Abby, he hadn’t actually told his parents that he’d moved out. They were so used to him being at school, in the lab, or at work, that they hadn’t really noticed that he hadn’t been sleeping at home. It helped that he had four younger brothers and sisters, who were all carrying insane work and course loads. His parents were all about toil. As long as you were toiling, you were okay. They could smell toil from miles away, or the lack of it. He might be able to get away with living in his own loft with his spooky-sexy girlfriend, and doing bizarre genetic experiments on the undead, but if he quit his job they’d sense it in a second.

  It took Foo and Jared twenty minutes to get all the rats up the steps and lined up around the living room.

  “We’re not going to hurt them, are we?” said Jared, holding up one of the plastic cages so he was eye to eye with its occupants.

  “We’re going to turn them into vampires.”

  “Oh, cool. Now?”

  “No, not now. For now, you’re going to need to feed them and make sure there’s a water bottle in each of their cages,” Foo said.

  “Then what?” Jared asked, tossing his hair out of his eyes.

  “Then you can go home,” said Foo. “You don’t need to observe them full-time until the experiment starts.”

  “I can’t go home. I told my parents I was staying over at Abby’s.”

  Foo was suddenly horrified at the thought of having to spend the night in the loft with a hundred rats, two bronzed vampires, and Jared. Especially Jared. Maybe he’d go home and leave Jared to watch the rats—make an appearance at home for the parents, so as to throw them off the trail of his non-toiling, loft-living, Anglo-girlfriend lifestyle.

  “You can stay here, then,” Foo said. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

  “What about them?” Jared nodded toward the bronzed figures of Jody and Tommy.

  “What about them?”

  “Can I talk to them? I didn’t get to finish telling Jody my novel.” Jared had spent a very long night telling Jody the first part of the novel he was going to write, an erotic horror story that starred himself and his pet rat, Lucifer 2.

  “Okay,” said Foo. He didn’t really like thinking about the two people, well, vampires, but they seemed a lot like people, that he’d helped imprison in a bronze shell. It sort of gave him the willies, and that was highly unscientific. “But no touching,” he added.

  Jared pouted and sat down on the futon, about the only spot in the entire living-room-kitchen area not covered with plastic rat cages. “Okay, but will you help me get these boots off before you go?”

  Foo shuddered. It had been less than an hour since the cops led Abby away and already he missed her like a severed limb. It was embarrassing. How could hormones and hydrostatic pressure make you feel like this? Love was very unscientific.

  “Sorry,” Foo said. “Gotta jet.” A true hero, the kind Abby accused him of being, he knew, would have helped Jared.

  JARED

  Abby Normal had once offered to pay for a tattoo for Jared that read: Danger. Do not administer caffeine without adult supervision.

  Jared asked, “Can it be in red? Does it have to be on the forehead? Maybe on the side so I can grow my hair over it if I don’t like it. Am I being emo? Do you want to play Blood-feast on Xbox? They have green fur iPod cases at Urban Outfitters. I love white chocolate mochas. Marilyn Manson needs to be dragged to death behind a clown car. Oh fuck, I’m so allergic to this eyeliner I could cry.”

  Abby said, “Oh my God, you’re like Obnoxious and Annoying had an ass baby!”

  “What are you trying to say?” asked Jared.

  What she had been trying to say, although she didn’t know it at the time, was that under no circumstances should Jared be left alone in an apartment with an abundance of time and espresso, which is what Foo had just done. So after feeding, watering, and naming all the rats (most given French names from Abby’s copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal), Jared began brewi
ng espressos and was nine demitasse cups into the afternoon when he decided to act out the remainder of his unwritten vampire adventure novel, The Dark of Darkness, for a hundred rats caged in plastic and two vampires encased in bronze.

  “So the evil Blood Queen dons her chrome strap-on of death and goes after Lucifer 2. But Jared Whitewolf is on her like a fat kid on a cupcake, parrying her blows with his dagger of death, or Dee Dee, as it is known.” Jared pirouetted, a move he’d learned in ballet class at age six, and slashed the air, low and fast, with the double-edged dagger held backhand so as to sever his imaginary enemy’s femoral artery, a move he’d learned in Soul Assassin Five on the Xbox (although it was harder to do while wearing platform boots than it was in the video game). The dagger was real enough, twelve inches of double-edged high-carbon stainless steel with a dragon hilt. Jared carried it because he thought it made him look badass when doormen took it away from him at clubs.

  “And he strikes her weapon in half!” he said, leaping and bringing the blade around a little too fast. He turned his ankle, lost his balance, and as he fell, the dagger put a deep nick in the bronze statue.

  “Ow!” He sat on the floor holding his ankle and rocking back and forth in the yoga position known as the “freaked-out half-lotus.” Then he noticed the gash he’d put in the bronze, directly over Jody’s right clavicle.

  “I’m sorry, Countess,” Jared said, still a little breathless from his battle. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. It’s just that I had to save Lucifer 2. You’d do the same thing for Lord Flood if he was in the story.”

  Jared buffed at the bronze with his sleeve, but the gash was deep and wasn’t going to go away with polishing. “Abby’s going to kill me. I’ll patch you, Countess. Just hang on. Toothpaste. We used it on the wall that time we drank Abby’s mom’s vodka and played cross-country darts in her living room. Hang on a minute.”