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  I stand up and dig the last of my cash out of my pocket. After the drinks here and Niagara and the twenty for the doorman, there’s about forty left. I drop it in front of him.

  —Score.

  He scoops the money up.

  —Sure thing, don’t gotta tell me twice.

  —Score, and then get me my meet. I want it set up tonight.

  —I don’t know, man, could be tough on short notice. Like I said, not like he’s a pal of mine or anything.

  He’s looking sadly at the bills in his hand, rubbing them back and forth against one another.

  —Forget it, Phil, that’s all there is. Get me the meet. I’ll talk to you later tonight.

  He gives up, tucking the cash into his jeans.

  —Sure thing, Joe. You got it. Just tell me where to meet you and I’ll be there.

  —I’ll find you.

  —Uh, sure, sure OK. Um, where ya gonna find me?

  —You’ll be at Blackie’s, right?

  —Sure.

  —I’ll find you there.

  I make my way out of the place, leaving behind the low fog-bank of cigarette smoke, the fake wood paneling and the aroma of puke that drifts from the can every time someone opens the door. Leaving behind Philip, hip deep in his element.

  The Count.

  There’s one born every minute. Or every couple years anyway. Seems there’s always someone coming down the pike calling themselves The Count, or Vlad or Vampirella or some shit. Some asshole geeked on the whole vampire scene and wanting to play the role to the hilt. Whatever, I’ll meet this guy and talk to him. Won’t be the first time I’ve grilled a dude in a red satin-lined cape. Sad to say, it won’t be the last.

  It’s close to one. Blackie’s won’t open ’til the regular bars close at four. I wander past Doc’s. A sheet of plywood has replaced the window I sent The Spaz through last night. I think about going in to talk to the bartenders, see if they saw anything I didn’t, but it’s pretty packed. I’ll save it for later. I walk to the corner of 10th and A. Take a left and I can stop by my place and grab some more cash, dig into that emergency fund. I stand on the corner for a minute. But I’m just putting shit off. I know where I need to go now, and my money’s no good there anyway. I walk one more block down A, take a right on 9th, and cross over to Avenue C.

  When I come through the front door of Hodown, Evie glances up at me from behind the bar and gives me a look. She’s weeded back there. I slip past the pedal steel, fiddle and harmonica trio jamming on the tiny stage, collecting empties from the tables. I take the bottles behind the bar, dump them in a plastic garbage can with a couple hundred others just like them, and start washing glasses. Evie nods at me as she shakes a martini. Fifteen minutes later the glassware situation is looking better, so I go back around to the fun side of the bar and take a seat.

  Evie’s still serving the crowd. It’s not a bad bunch. This late at night in the middle of the week it’s mostly waiters and waitresses getting off their shifts at the ten thousand cafés and bistros that opened down here in the last decade. Or it’s regulars coming in to work on their liver disease and listen to the music. She pops open a Lone Star, slides it down the bar to me. A half hour later things settle down and she comes over.

  She wipes her hands on the bar rag tucked into her studded belt, picks up my smokes from the bar and sticks one in her mouth.

  —Got a light?

  She hardly ever smokes.

  —What happened today?

  She picks up my Zippo and lights the Lucky herself.

  —No big deal.

  —Good. What’d the doctor say?

  She looks at the band.

  —You hear these guys before? Corpus Christi?

  —Yeah. I heard them before. What’s the doc say?

  She takes a drag, coughs on the smoke.

  —Said. Cough! Said. Cough! S’cuse me.

  She takes a sip of my beer and stops coughing.

  —Doctor said my viral load was up. Said the HIV is showing again.

  I try to touch her hand, but she moves it. She stares at the band, holding the smoldering cigarette unsmoked.

  —OK. Then what’s next?

  A guy at the other end of the bar tries to catch her eye. She doesn’t see him.

  —Well, it’s the second test showing a load, so that means we have to test to see if I’ve developed a resistance to the Kaletra.

  —And if you have?

  —We try other drugs.

  —So when do you get the resistance test?

  The guy at the bar is waving his hand.

  —I get the resistance test after I take the recommendation from my doctor to my insurance company and they say I can have it, and if it comes back inconclusive I have to get them to approve a different test, and if that’s inconclusive we start shooting in the dark, trying different meds, but since Combivir and Kaletra are the Health and Human Services–recommended treatments, I’ll have to get every new drug we try approved first, and that will take Jesus knows how long, and they all have a different set of side effects so, instead of just puking all the time, I might start putting on something charmingly known as back fat or losing my hair or, you know, experiencing sudden heart failure.

  She hands me the cigarette.

  —Here, take this. I gotta go help this asshole.

  She crosses over to the guy who’s been waiting for his drink. I stare at the cigarette she was smoking. She comes back, plucks it from my fingers, puts it to her lips, then pulls it away and hands it back to me.

  —Sorry. Didn’t mean to blow up on you.

  I take a drag from the smoke.

  —What can I do?

  She tucks some loose hair behind her ear.

  —Honestly. There is something.

  —What?

  —Do you know your blood type?

  —Um.

  I take another drag.

  —No. I guess not.

  —Well, if you could find out that would be cool.

  —What’s up?

  —The doctor. He’s says I should start, this is so gruesome, he says I should start laying in a supply. For later. If I need transfusions. I can’t save my own obviously, so I need to find donors. I’ll get credits or something in the blood bank. So if you could find out. And then, if you’re a match.

  She laughs.

  —If you’re a match maybe you could give me some of your blood. Man, that’s about the most fucked up thing I’ve ever had to ask.

  She looks at me.

  —You OK, Joe?

  —Yeah. I’m fine.

  The infected population is pretty stable. And it’s that way for a couple reasons. One of the reasons is that it’s hard to infect anyone. It’s not just a matter of a couple bites on the neck. Somehow your infected bodily fluids need to mingle with someone else’s bodily fluids. The amount of mingling is up for debate. But seeing as how the Vyrus can’t survive outside the human body, it’s kind of tricky to get it from one person to another. It’s also not clear if it exists in any fluids other than blood. Not that I’ve done a lot of research into this stuff. My education stopped when I was about twelve. Biochemistry’s not my strong suit. I’m just getting by on the introductory lectures I got from Terry way back when. But I’m not special in my ignorance. Nobody has done any real research into this stuff. Way I understand it, researching a virus under the best of circumstances is a pretty tough proposition. But when the facilities at your disposal aren’t much more than a high school chemistry set, you’re doomed to operating in the dark.

  Not that people don’t try.

  The Coalition took a crack at it. They got their fingers into a very big pie called Horde Bio Tech, Inc. Took a shot at taking over the whole deal. Wanted to use their labs to start cracking the Vyrus. Didn’t work out for them. That was at least partly my fault. OK, mostly my fault. That’s why me and the Coalition don’t get along so well anymore. That’s why Predo has shifted me from his barely tolerated list to his torture-
maim-and-kill-on-sight list. Anyway, they got as close as anyone’s gotten to having a chance to really dig into this thing. The Coalition Secretariat has built up some big piles of money over the decades, centuries, whatever. Money like that creates cracks. And they have become very adept over the years at working their fingers into those cracks and widening them. Once again, that’s the way Terry tells it. And I got no better way of knowing. But that kind of brings up the second reason why Vampyres aren’t cropping up like mushrooms: The Coalition doesn’t want them to.

  The Coalition operates on a charter that is the exact opposite of the Society’s: They want to keep the Vyrus under wraps. They’ve been around for a long time, long enough to have a historical perspective of sorts, and they’ve already decided that no one is ever going to accept us as anything vaguely resembling normal. It’s pretty much the only thing I agree with them about. So while their grip on Manhattan may have slipped since the sixties, they still draw some lines, and one of the biggest is about keeping the numbers down. Not that they need to convince anyone. We all get it. This is a pretty delicate ecosystem here. It’s an island for fuck sake; the food supply, as it were, can only support so many predators. But in this case, the problem isn’t that the prey might be hunted to extinction. The problem is that when you get right down to it, we’re not predators, we’re parasites. And we are vastly outnumbered by the true masters of the territory. So it’s in all our interests to keep the numbers as they are.

  And that’s why I know Philip is an asswipe.

  I think about what an asswipe Philip is while I walk to my place. I think about Philip and all this other crap because the alternative is to think about Evie. The fact that she’s not getting better. The fact that she may be getting much worse. And, yeah, the fact that she’s hoping I’ll be able to donate some of my blood to help her if she gets really bad down the road.

  Philip. Think about Philip.

  At my place, I duck downstairs and grab the emergency cash. I didn’t need it at Hodown, but at Blackie’s everyone needs cash. I stand there for a second and look at the bed, still messed from last night. Evie didn’t want to come over tonight. Not after I told her I had to go take care of some business and didn’t know when I’d be home. Not the kind of thing a girl wants to hear from her guy the same day she finds out her terminal illness has taken a turn for the worse. Not the kind of thing I wanted to tell her. But I need to knock out this job for Terry, need to get the monkey off my back. I don’t take care of that, I’m not gonna be any help to her anyhow. And I want to, I want to help.

  I go in the closet. It’s not blood I need this time. It’s a gun. I unlock the gun safe and take out the .32 snub. I check that it’s loaded and tuck it into the back of my pants. I don’t have any reason to think I’ll need it, but it’s late, and I’m irritable, and I might want to pistol-whip Philip with it. Him or this Count clown.

  I lock up and go to Blackie’s.

  I push the button next to the anonymous door on 13th. I stand there, knowing someone inside is peeping at me to see if I look OK. The door opens. It’s Dominick.

  —Hey, Dom.

  —Hey, bud.

  He glances up and down the street, checking to see that no cops are nearby, then holds the door wide for me.

  —C’mon in.

  Blackie’s is a pit. It was probably once the super’s apartment for this building, now it’s as scummy an after-hours joint as you’re likely to find. It’s 4 a.m. and the place has just opened. Lucky me, I’m one of the first in. There’s only the one tiny room, but Blackie managed to crowd it with the bar, a few tables, a couple couches, a pool table and an old-school jukebox that plays real 45s. It takes me two seconds to look over the four or five losers in the place and see that none of them are Philip. I go to the bar and order a beer and a bourbon on the rocks. The beer is a can of Bud that comes out of an Igloo cooler at the end of the bar. The bourbon comes out of a bottle that says Maker’s Mark, but it ain’t. I give the bartender a twenty and she gives me back six and asks me if I need anything else. The anything else being a dime bag of coke that costs twenty-five bucks and wouldn’t get me high even if I didn’t have the Vyrus. I pass. With nothing else to do, I do the usual: sit out of the way, drink and smoke.

  An hour passes. The place fills up, but it never gets loud. There are only two rules in Blackie’s: no loud voices and no cursing. The loud voices I get, there are occupied apartments right above us. The cursing is Blackie’s thing. Guess it makes him feel better about running a shitty after-hours coke den. A couple people try to sit at my table and coke-rap my ear off. I stare them down and they leave. Blackie himself shows up at some point: a potbellied black guy in his late fifties sporting ostrich skin boots, a black cowboy hat, and ropes of gold chain draped around his neck. He takes his stool at the end of the bar.

  Blackie came to fame back in the day when he opened the first topless club in the East Village. He ran whores and did a brisk business in hijacked booze out the back. He also owned a piece of five or six other bars scattered around the neighborhood. That was then. He lost the club years ago and it was made into a rock venue. His whores left him. The other joints he sold off piecemeal. Now this place is all that’s left of his empire. And it probably makes more money than everything else put together ever did. He knows me from when I used to bounce at Roadhouse. He’d come in and pass me a heavy roll of C-notes and a tiny .25 automatic with pearl handles. I’d hang onto that shit for him ’til he left, the cash in case someone tried to rob him, the gun because he didn’t want to shoot no one if they tried to rob him. I’d pass it back to him at the end of the night and he’d peel off one of the hundreds and hand it to me.

  I eye him as he chats with the bartender, looking him over to see if he still carries that bankroll. There’s a baseball-sized lump inside his black Levi’s jacket. Take that off him and my money problems are all solved. He catches me looking, shows me a couple gold teeth, touches his index finger to the brim of his hat and tells the bartender to buy me a round. I nod my head and forget about robbing him.

  I drink the free drinks and inhale more Luckys. The place chokes with smoke, a James Brown tune whispers from the juke, everybody does key-bumps of shitty coke or just cuts lines right on the peeling Formica tops of the tables. A light by the door flashes from time to time and Dominick takes a look out the peephole and either lets in the person on the stoop, or doesn’t. I take a look at my watch. Fucking Philip. Boy is cruising for a bruising.

  I get up, collect my cigarettes, lighter and jacket. I give Blackie another nod and head for the door. Dominick comes over to let me out. Just as he’s about to check the peephole and make sure a cop car isn’t sitting outside, the light flashes. He peeks and shakes his head.

  —Hang on a sec, let me get rid of this guy.

  He opens the door and Philip tries to dart in.

  —Hey, Dominick, hey.

  Dominick puts a hand in the middle of his chest.

  —Uh-uh.

  —Uh-uh? What uh-uh?

  —Uh-uh you ain’t comin’ in.

  —Why? Why the fuck not?

  —Cuz ya can’t follow the rules. You talk too loud and you curse and you ain’t coming in.

  —What the fuck are you talking about I don’t follow the fucking rules!?!

  Dominick starts to close the door.

  I tap him on the shoulder.

  —It’s OK, he’s with me.

  Philip sees me for the first time.

  —Hey, oh, hey, Joe. You still here? Thought you might have left by now. Getting close to sunup, you know.

  He winks at me.

  —Sunup. You know.

  Dominick looks at me.

  —You sure you wanna vouch for him?

  —Yeah, let him in.

  He holds the door and Philip comes in.

  —Yeah, Joe’s my pal, he’ll fuckin’ vouch for me.

  —Watch your mouth, Phil.

  —Sure, yeah.

  Dominick still has t
he door open.

  —So you goin’ out?

  Philip shows me sad eyes.

  —You leavin’ now, Joe? Too bad. Wanted to buy you a drink or somethin’. Take care and all.

  I nod at Dominick.

  —No thanks, Dom, I’ll stick around a little.

  He sighs and closes the door. Guy opens and closes the door from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. and tells people to keep it down and not to curse. Think he’d like his job a little more.

  I catch Phil at the bar.

  —So, Phil.

  —Oh, Joe, hey. Decided to stay? Sure that’s a good idea? Like I say, getting light soon. Know how you hate to be going home when the sun’s up and all.

  —Yeah, thanks for the concern. I’ll stick around a little longer.

  The bartender comes over. I order another round for myself. Phil stands there and waits, but I don’t order one for him and he finally gives in and asks for a cup of water. Two bucks, the cheapest thing you can get here. The bartender takes a plastic cup over to the Igloo and pulls the little drain plug at the bottom of the ice chest, filling the cup with melted icewater. Philip looks at it.

  —That sanitary?

  The bartender plucks the dollar bill and four quarters from Phil’s palm and tosses them in the cashbox.

  —Like you care.

  Phil picks a flake of something black out of the water.

  —Jeez, what the fuck’s his problem?

  Blackie looks at him and clears his throat.

  I lead Phil to the table I was occupying.

  —Watch your mouth.

  —Yeah, yeah, I know. Language, language.

  We sit.

  He stares into his cup, making sure there are no other contaminants floating around.

  —Two bucks for some water, you’d think they’d at least give you a bottle or something.

  —Phil.

  He looks up.

  —Yeah?

  —Where’s my guy?

  He finds another particle in the water and chases it around with his finger.

  —Your guy?