CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

THIRTY EIGHT
Our little supper broke up a short while later
with the detectives promising to be in touch soon.
It was now obvious to me that these guys were not
going to catch Danny’s murderer. Maybe no one ever
would.
As the culprit in more unsolved murders than
I could ever count, the urgency that first gripped me
when Danny died was fading. At the risk of sounding
unfeeling, Danny was selling more tickets dead than
his name would have alive.
The two couples went
west toward Times Square and the subways and I
made my way home by catching a cab.
When I got here an email from a vampire in
London was awaiting me. He was proposing that
we switch territories, and he embellished the idea
with facts and figures and some internet links that,
all taken together, presented the case that England
could be a lot better environment for me to pursue my
passion for the stage.
While I mulled over all that I flew out to
Brighton Beach and found a young Russian wise guy
to feast on. All it took was sitting on a bench on the
boardwalk. The young thug was post-vodka for the
evening and started harassing me just to harass me.
Okay. Truth be told, he harassed me because I
was sitting there naked.
“What are you doing here like this? Are you some kind of crazy man?”
His speech was accented but quite understandable. He looked at my crotch.
“What are you? What kind of sickness is this?”
Perhaps now is the time to mention that we vampires have no genitalia. I wasn’t wearing sunglasses either and looked directly at him and he saw my eyes.
I grabbed him by the throat so he could not make a sound. Then I manipulated his consciousness with a deep stare. I dragged him over the rail onto the beach and down to the water. I love moonless nights for spending some time on the beach. At the water’s edge I sat down and held him in my arms while I drained him. Then I ripped his arms and legs from his torso, finding a .25 caliber automatic in an ankle holster during the process. That size pistol is a bit small for my needs. I thought of doing something obscene with it, but decided otherwise and replaced it and snapped the holster strap over the pistol grip before giving the limb a toss.
I threw all the young thug’s body parts a few yards out into the sea and then dove in myself to wash away the sand and any blood that might have splattered during feeding. I knew that it depended on who found the body parts whether my meal’s death would make the papers. If it was the cops, or some sanitation department or parks department beach patrol, there would be lurid tabloid coverage. If it was someone with ties to the Russian mafia who found him, the entire thing might be kept quiet as the mob tried to deal with the matter without the aid of the legal system. If a shark found him and fed, he would be a missing person, permanently.
Once my bath was complete, I leapt into the air and in less than three minutes landed back on the roof of my brownstone. All sorts of questions about London kept popping into my head, as they had off and on throughout the evening. But at least I was not hungry.