Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,90

it’s like they can pretend it don’t exist.

I’m still puttering and fussing around when the knock on the door comes and I’m crossing the room (the only room unless you count the bathroom, which I do when I’m in it) when it comes to me I ain’t done dick about myself. I’m still in my undershirt and shorts, for chrissakes.

“Hold on,” I call out, “I ain’t decent, quite,” and I drag a pair of pants outa the closet. But all my shirts are either in the oven or the tub and Company’ll get fanny-antsy standing in the hall—this is not the wat-chamacallit, the place where Lennon bought it, the Dakota, yeah. Anyway, I answer the door in my one-hundred-percent cotton undershirt, but at least I got my fly zipped.

Company’s a little different this time. The two guys as usual, but today they got a woman with them. Not a broad, not a bitch, not a bimbo. She’s standing between and a little behind them, looking at me the way women always look at me when I happen to cross their path—chin lifted up a little, one hand holding her coat together at the neck in a fist, eyes real cold, like, “Touch me and die horribly, I wish,” standing straight-fuckin-up, like they’re Superman, and the fear coming off them like heat waves from an open furnace.

They all come in and stand around and I wish I’d straightened the sheets out on the mattress so it wouldn’t look so messy, but then they’d see the sheets ain’t clean, so six-of-one, you know. And I got nothing for anyone to sit on, except that mattress, so they just keep standing around.

The one guy, Steener, says, “Are you feeling all right, Mr. Soames,” looking around like there’s puke and snot all over the floor. Steener don’t bother me. He’s a pretty man who probably was a pretty boy and a pretty baby before that, and thinks the world oughta be a pretty place. Or he wants to prove pretty guys are really tougher and better and more man than guys like me, because he’s afraid it’s vice versa, you know. Maybe even both, depending on how he got up this morning.

The other guy, Villanueva, I could almost respect him. He didn’t put on no face to look at me, and he didn’t have no power fantasies about who he was to me or vice versa. I think Villanueva probably knows me better than anyone in the world. But then, he was the one took my statement when they caught up with me. He was a cop then. If he’d still been a cop, I’d probably respect him.

So I look right at the woman and I say, “So, what’s this, you brought me a date?” I know this will get them because they know what I do to dates.

“You speak when spoken to, Mr. Soames,” Steener says, kinda barking like a dog that wishes it were bigger.

“You spoke to me,” I point out.

Villanueva takes a few steps in the direction of the bathroom—he knows what I got in there and how I don’t want Company to see it, so this is supposed to distract me, and it does a little. The woman steps back, clutching her light coat tighter around her throat, not sure who to hide behind. Villanueva’s the better bet, but she doesn’t want to get any further into my stinky little apartment, so she edges toward Steener.

And it comes to me in a two-second flash-movie just how to do it. Steener’d be easy to take out. He’s a rusher, doesn’t know dick about fighting. He’d just go for me and I’d just whip my hand up between his arms and crunch goes the windpipe. Villanueva’d be trouble, but I’d probably end up doing him, too. Villanueva’s smart enough to know that. First, though, I’d bop the woman, just bop her to keep her right there—punch in the stomach does it for most people, man or woman—and then I’d do Villanueva, break his neck.

Then the woman. I’d do it all, pound one end, pound the other, switching off before either one of us got too used to one thing or the other. Most people, man or woman, blank out about then. Can’t face it, you know, so after that, it’s free-for-fuckin-all. You can do just any old thing you want to a person in shock, they just don’t believe it’s happening by then. This one I would rip up sloppy, I would