killed them.”
“Aww,” Billy said. “You kill every little vampire hunter who comes along, pretty soon no vampire hunters. And then what would we do for fun?”
She smiled in spite of herself. It had been a lot of lonely centuries before she found Billy. And Billy knew he wasn’t in charge.
He feathered the gas; the big engine growled. He guided the Impala towards an off ramp. “Does this remind you of home?”
“Because every fucking desert looks alike? There’s no yucca in Baghdad.” She tucked a thick strand of mahogany-black hair behind one rose-petal ear. “Like I even know what Baghdad looks like anymore.”
The door leaned into her arm as the car turned, pressing lines into the flesh. The dry desert wind stroked dry dead skin. As they rolled up to a traffic signal, she tilted her head back and scented it, curling her lip up delicately, like a dog checking for traces of another dog.
“They show it on TV,” Billy said.
“They show it blown up on TV,” she answered. “Who the fuck wants to look at that? Find me a fucking tattoo parlor.”
“Like that’ll change you.” He reached across the vast emptiness of the bench seat and brushed her arm with the backs of his fingers. “Like anything will change you. You’re dead, darlin’. The world doesn’t touch you.”
When you were one way for a long time, it got comfortable. But every so often, you had to try something new. “You never know until you try.”
“Like it’ll be open.” The Impala ghosted forward with pantherine power, so smooth it seemed that the wheels had never quite stopped turning. “It’s three in the morning. Even the bars are closed. You’ll be lucky to find an all-night truck stop.”
She looked out the window, turning away. The soft wind caught her voice and blew it back into the car with her hair. “You wanna try to make L.A. by sunup? It’s all the same to me, but I know you don’t like the trunk.”
“Hey,” Billy said. “There’s a Denny’s. Maybe one of the waitresses is knocked up. That’d be okay for both of us.”
“They don’t serve vampires.” Mahasti pulled her arm back inside, turned to face front. With rhythmic push-pull motions, she cranked the window up. “Shut up already and drive.”
Colorado River Florist. Spike’s Bar-B-Que. Jack in the Box. Dimond and Sons Needles Mortuary. Spike’s Saguaro Sunrise Breakfast. First Southern Baptist Church (Billy hissed at it on principle) and the Desert Mirage Inn. A Peanuts cartoon crudely copied on the sign over a tavern. Historic Route 66 (“The Mother Load Road,” Billy muttered) didn’t look much as it had when the Impala was young, but the motel signs were making an effort.
Of Needles itself, there wasn’t much there there, which was a good thing for the vampires: they crisscrossed the whole downtown in the hollow dark before Billy pulled over to a curb and pointed, but it took them less than a hour.
Mahasti leaned over to follow the line of his finger. A gray corner-lot house with white trim and a yard overrun by Bermuda grass and mallow huddled in the darkness. It was doing a pretty good impression of a private residence, except for the turned-off neon “open” sign in the window and the painted shingle hanging over the door.
“Spike’s Tattoo,” she said. “Pun unintended?”
As they exited the car, heavy swinging doors glossy in the street-lit darkness, Billy cupped his hands and lit a cigarette. It flared bright between streetlights. “Why is everything in this damned town named after some Spike guy?”
Mahasti tugged her brown babydoll tee smooth from the hem. An octopus clutching a blue teddy bear stretched across her insignificant breasts. Billy liked Frye boots and black dusters. Mahasti kicked at a clod with fuchsia Crocs, the frayed hems of her jeans swaying around skinny ankles. “Because he lives in the desert near here.”
Billy gave her a dour look over the ember of the cigarette. He took a drag. It frosted his face in orange.
“Peanuts?” she tried, but the blank look deepened. “Snoopy’s brother? It’s their claim to fame.”
Billy didn’t read the newspapers. It wasn’t even worth a shrug. He flipped the cigarette into the road.
He was dead anyway. He hadn’t been getting much good out of it.
“Come on.” Gravel crunched on the dirty road as he strode forward. “Let’s go ruin somebody’s morning.”
Mahasti steepled her fingers. “I’ll be right back. I’m just going to walk around the block.”
Spike’s Tattoo bulwarked the boundary between the commercial and the residential neighborhoods. Mahasti