stroll. Jody was posed with her hand on her hip, her head thrown back as if she'd just tossed her long hair over her shoulder, smiling.
Tommy turned his head to the side, getting perspective. She didn't look skanky. What made Abby say the statue was skanky? Sexy, well yes. Jody had been wearing some very low-cut jeans and a crop top when he'd posed her for the electroplating, and the bikers had insisted upon exposing more of her cleavage than was probably decorous, but what could you expect from a couple of guys who specialized in making high-end garden gnomes acting out the Kama Sutra?
Okay, she looked a little skanky, but he didn't see how that was a bad thing. He had actually been delighted when she came streaming out of the ear holes to materialize, stark naked, in front of him. If she hadn't killed him, it would have been the fulfillment of a sexual fantasy he'd nurtured for a long time. (There had been this old TV show he'd watched as a kid, about a beautiful genie who lived in a bottle - well, Tommy had done some serious bottle polishing over that one.)
So the Jody statue stayed. But the old vampire, Elijah, that was a different story. There was a real creature in there. A real scary creature. Whatever bizarre events had brought them to this spot had been set off by Elijah Ben Sapir. He was a reminder that neither he - Tommy - nor Jody had chosen to be vampires. Neither had chosen to live out the rest of their days in the night. Elijah had taken their choices away from them, and replaced them with a whole new set of scarier, bigger choices. The first of which was how the hell do you deal with the fact that you have imprisoned a sentient, feeling being in a shell of bronze, even if he is an evil dick-weed from the Dark Ages? But they couldn't let him out. He'd kill them for sure if they did. Really kill them, too, a complete death, the kind with no nooky.
Suddenly Tommy was angry. He'd had a future. He might have been a writer, a Nobel Prize winner, an adventurer, a spy. Now he was just a foul dead thing, and the furthest his ambition would reach was his next victim. Okay, that wasn't really true, but still, he was pissed off. So what if Elijah was trapped in bronze shell forever. He'd trapped them in these monstrous bodies. Maybe it was time to do something monstrous.
Tommy picked up Jody's statue and threw it over his shoulder and, despite his great vampire strength, followed it over backward as it clanged against the floor. Okay, it had taken the two bikers and a refrigerator dolly to get the statues up here, maybe a little planning was in order.
It turned out he could move the statue pretty efficiently if he slung it over his back and let one of her feet drag, and so he did, down the steps, half a block down the sidewalk, and back up the steps of the new loft. Bronze Jody looked happy in the new place, he thought. The turtle took half as long. She, too, looked pleased with the surroundings.
As for Elijah, Tommy figured what was the point of being in a city on a peninsula if you didn't take advantage of the water now and then. And Elijah evidently liked the ocean, since he'd come to the City on his yacht, which Tommy and the Animals had managed to blow to smithereens.
The vampire statue was even heavier that Jody's, but Tommy felt energized by the idea of getting rid of it. Just a short twelve blocks to the sea and that would be that.
"From the sea ye came, and to the sea ye shall return," Tommy said, thinking that he might be quoting Coleridge, or maybe a Godzilla movie.
As Tommy dragged the bronzed vampire down Mission Street, he considered his future. What would he do? He had a lot of time to fill, and after a while, figuring out new ways to jump Jody would only fill up a part of his nights. He was going to have to find a purpose. They had money - cash the vampire had given Jody when he turned her - and what was left of the money from the sale of Elijah's art, but eventually that would run out. Maybe he should get a job.