By Blood We Live

…and waking up in a cold, cold grave. Wanting a drink, but not my usual drink. Not the kind that went down the gullet like liquid fire and detonated in the belly, wrapping a warm haze between me and the rest of the world.

You're insane, Jack. You got shot in the head.

The trouble with that was, I shouldn't be insane. I should be

dead.

But I had a pulse too. Just like Miss Dale. Who was starting to smell less like Chanel and more like…

Food.

A sizzling sound drifted down the hall. I tied the shoes she'd thoughtfully left right outside the bathroom door and saw her front door, and the warm light of the kitchen, a square of yellow sanity. She had her back turned and was fiddling with the stove, and a steak waited on a plate on the drainboard. She poked at the pan with a fork, and I was moving up quietly, just as if I was going to sap her.

Three steps. Two.

She never even turned around.

I reached out, saw my hand, yellow in the yellow light, shaking as it brushed past Miss Dale's hip…and fastened on the plate with the steak.

She jumped, the fork went clattering, and I retreated to the table. If I hadn't been so cold I would have been sweating buckets. I dropped down in one of Miss Dale's two straight-backed, frill-cushioned chairs next to her cheap gold-speckled kitchen table, and I found out why my mouth hadn't been working properly.

It was because the fangs had grown, and I licked the plate clean of bloody juice before burying my teeth in the raw meat and sucking as if it was mother's milk.

Dale's hand clapped over her mouth. She pinched so hard her cheeks blanched white from the pressure of her fingers, and her cat-tilted dark eyes turned big as the landlord's on rent day. The pan sizzled, I sucked and sucked, and the two sounds almost managed to drown out the thunder of her pulse again.

Her free hand shot out and jerked the pan from the stove. The gas flame kept burning, a hissing circle of blue, and Miss Dale stared at me, holding the pan like she intended to storm the barricades with it.

I kept sucking. It wasn't nearly enough, but the thirst retreated.

This was what I wanted. When it was as tasteless as dry paper, I finished licking the plate clean, and I dropped the wad of drained meat down.

I looked at Miss Dale. She looked at me. I searched for something to say. Dames on her salary don't buy steak every day. She must've thought I'd be hungry.

"I still need a secretary, dollface."

Her throat worked as she swallowed. Then she put the pan down on an unlit burner. She peeled her fingers away from her mouth, the bruise still a dark bracelet on her right wrist. It took her two tries before she could get the words out.

"There's another steak in the fridge, Jack. It's…raw."

Winter nights last forever, and the rain was still coming down. Dale's wrist was swelling, but she wrapped it in an Ace and told me in no uncertain terms she was fine. She drove the Ford cautiously, the wipers ticking, just like her pulse. I spread the file out in my lap and checked for tails-we were clean.

Down on Cross Street, she parked where we had a good view of The Blue Room, and I paged through the file. Pictures of Arthur Kendall, millionaire, who had come back from Europe with a young wife who had begun to suspect him of fooling around.

If I hadn't been so interested in the greenbacks she fanned out on my desktop, I wouldn't have taken the job. Divorce jobs aren't my favorites. They end up too sticky.

This one had just gotten stickier. Kendall wasn't just a millionaire, he was as dirty as they come. I'd been careful, sure, but I'd gotten priceless little shots of him canoodling with the heavies in town-Lefty Schultz who ran the prostitution racket, Big Buck Beaudry who provided muscle, Papa Ginette whose family used to run gin and now ran dope. Big fan of tradition, Papa Ginette.

I'd thought I was just getting into a dicey situation until I snapped a few shots of Kendall and his wife at a pricey downtown joint where the jazz was hot and the action was hotter. The Blue Room had a waiting list ten years long, but money talks-and it was Willie Goldstein's place. If Goldstein hadn't owned more than half the cops in town, he'd have been in Big Sing years ago.

Another late-night appointment, and the dame in green waltzed in my door just as Miss Dale was waltzing out. I spread the shots out and told her Kendall wasn't cheating. She'd married a dirty son of an unmentionable, but he wasn't hanging out with the ladies.

Those green eyes narrowed, and she picked up the glossy of the crowd outside Goldstein's. There they were, Kendall and the missus and the redheaded, ratfaced gent who followed Kendall like glue. He wasn't heavy muscle-his name was Shifty Malloy, and he had a dope habit the size of Wrigley Field-but he was dapper in a suit and lit Kendall's cigarettes.

Mrs. Kendall set the photo down again, and smiled at me. She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray and I glanced down at the pictures again. Something very strange occurred to me.