Certain Dark Things(9)

He swallowed his dismay, as he always did, pushed it down and away. “What do you think you are doing?” Rodrigo asked.

“Nothing,” Nick said.

“You can’t hunt here.”

Not with sanitation crews sweeping the city. Bribes could buy almost anything back north, but this was not the North. This was good old Mexico City, which had fallen to the Spaniards but would not yield to vampires. Rodrigo had no time to bury a corpse for this spoiled kid. And if Nick didn’t mean to drink and kill, if he meant to drink and gain control of a human—that nasty trick the Necros loved to play—well, that wasn’t going to happen either. It was too f*cking risky.

“Who said anything about hunting?”

“Don’t bullshit me, pretty boy,” Rodrigo said.

The neon banana sign blinked from yellow to green and then back to yellow. Nick flashed him a smile that was all teeth.

“What if I was hunting? These people are nobody.”

“Nobody can still call the cops. If you’re hungry we’ll head back to the apartment and open one of those blood packs,” Rodrigo reminded the kid.

“Drinking that blood is like drinking piss.”

“Nothing I can do about it.”

“We should be hunting that bitch down,” Nick said as he fiddled with his sunglasses, thought it over, and put them on again.

“I might do that if you hadn’t left the apartment without an escort. It’s Mexico City.”

“I don’t need an escort. Give me a cigarette,” Nick said, snapping his fingers.

Damn twat, Rodrigo thought, but he took out his cigarettes. Gauloises. He never smoked anything else. Lighter, American-style cigarettes were for pansies. You either smoked dark or went home. Rodrigo smoked dark, and he smoked a lot.

He took out two cigarettes and struck a match, lighting both and handing one to Nick. Nick took a puff, gave the line of young people one last look, and shrugged.

“Fine, let’s head back to the apartment,” Nick said.

They had to walk several blocks, back in the direction of Parque Espa?a. They stopped at a liquor store because Nick wanted booze. Nick’s kind—Necros, though jokers called them “Necros nacos,” the trashy vampires—drank like it was going out of fashion. Something to do with endophenotypes, but Rodrigo was no biologist.

True to his heritage, Nick put half a dozen bottles of vodka into a green shopping basket. He also wanted absinthe. Not just any absinthe. Czech absinthe, using the original formula, with authentic wormwood. They did not have any and Nick looked like he was going to pitch a fit. Rodrigo convinced him to take two bottles of whiskey and said he’d find him absinthe later.

When they walked into the apartment they found La Bola eating fried chicken and playing video games. He sucked his fingers and waved at them.

“Where are Colima and Nacho?” Rodrigo asked as soon as he closed the door.

“They’ve gone to find those cousins they mentioned. To help with the job.”

Rodrigo had brought only three operatives with him. He needed a few extra hands to help out. It would not be difficult to recruit a few more guns. Nacho and Colima had relatives here, eager for a break, for a ticket back north. These thugs were cheap and easy to come by. He might have been able to play it with just the lot he had, but Rodrigo didn’t want to take chances. Although Atl was alone, she was still a vampire and she’d already given them a run for their money. Of course, Rodrigo had Nick, but Nick was young and hardly well trained for such a task. He’d lost the girl when they were in Jalisco; she’d slipped from his fingers despite his macho posturing. It hardly mattered how big your fangs were if your prey could outwit you, and land a mighty good punch in your face, breaking a few of those sharp teeth. He healed fast—vampires like Nick were like sharks and there was always a tooth behind the one that just fell out. When they were angry, their maws were a scary sight—but facts were facts. Nick had been outwitted by a girl.

“I wonder what they’ll bring,” Nick said. “Colima and Nacho are vermin. I liked Justiniano.”

“Justiniano’s dead and vermin serves its purpose.”

Nick grabbed one of the bottles and opened it. He sat down on the couch and began drinking it straight from the bottle, vodka dribbling down his chin.

“Come,” Rodrigo said, motioning to La Bola.

They headed from the living room to the studio. Rodrigo kept two places, one in Sinaloa and this other one. Of the two, the Mexico City apartment was the grander place even if he visited it sparingly. It had more style, more things, more of him. The apartment was large, with tall ceilings. There was a monochromatic look about the furniture, everything black and white, though he added dashes of color with several paintings of vast sizes hanging from the walls.

The studio was very much the same. A huge desk, a couple of comfortable chairs, and his rare books on display. Electronic books might be easy to purchase, but Rodrigo was a collector, not a consumer. This, he thought, was what differentiated him from the vampire lords—God, the affront of these drug pushers to call themselves lords—who splashed their cash with no taste. Rodrigo had taste. He had style.

He couldn’t say the same for everyone else.

“Sit,” Rodrigo ordered.

La Bola sat on one of his fine leather chairs. While Rodrigo was short and skinny, La Bola was a tall, beefy man. Despite their difference in bulk, La Bola looked at Rodrigo meekly.