Haunted

CHAPTER 1

I’M STARING OUT THE BEDROOM SLIDING GLASS door feeling sorry for myself. Stupid, really, since being alone tonight is entirely my own fault. I could be in France with my family. Or at my business partner David’s for his annual Christmas Eve bash. Why aren’t I? Because both would require that I spend most of the time pretending to eat and drink, pretending to be human. A lot of work. So here I am, all by my lonesome the night before Christmas, feeling churlish, staring at a gray sheet of pounding rain.

Rain. It’s all we’ve had this winter. This is San Diego, for Christ’s sake. The land of predictable, even boring, weather. The land of a constant 72 degrees. The land of sun and blue sky.

Not this year.

I can count on one hand the number of nice days we’ve had. It’s beginning to get irritating. What’s the use of being a vampire who can go out in sunlight if there is no sunlight to go out in?

Even my reporter boyfriend, Stephen, is not around. He’s with the president visiting the troops overseas. He called me on Skype last night and we were able to exchange greetings. Greetings. What I want to exchange is bodily fluids. But that’s not going to happen for another ten days. Since there were about a hundred soldiers gathered around awaiting their turn on the computer, we couldn’t even talk dirty.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

I need to do something. I need to share the misery. Where would a sulking vampire go to find other discontents as sorry ass as she is?

Luckily, I know just the place.

BESO DE LA MUERTE LOOKS EVEN MORE DESOLATE and run-down than usual, which says a lot since it’s basically a ghost town you won’t find on any map of northern Mexico. There’s only one building in the middle of what could be called Main Street, if the streets had names, that shows any sign of life. A string of blinking red-and-green Christmas lights slumps over the door to Culebra’s bar in an attempt, I suppose, to invoke some holiday cheer. Half the bulbs are burned out. The other half sputter unconvincingly.

What was Culebra thinking? Is this his idea of a joke—a fuck-you to the season and its forced joviality? Suddenly, I find myself enjoying those pathetic little lights. They make me smile.

Culebra and I share a warped sense of humor.

There’s a single car in front of the bar. A car that looks familiar. It gives me a moment’s pause until I recognize whose car it is. Then it takes me another minute to decide if I want to drag an unsuspecting mortal into the black hole of my self-pity.

The car belongs to Max, an ex. Who better to drag into a black hole than an ex? I shrug off any misgivings and walk inside.

Max and Culebra are seated at a table in the middle of the bar. Alone. They have an open bottle of Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel whiskey between them. Half empty. They’re puffing away on cigars and blowing smoke rings at each other. If Max didn’t look like a well-dressed thug clad all in black, and Culebra like an extra in a spaghetti western, poncho and all, I’d say they belonged in a gentlemen’s club.

Max spies me first. “Well, well. Look what the bat flew in.”

“Hilarious, Max. I see in the newspapers that you DEA dudes have really done your part to win the drug war. We’re practically narco free.”

He shakes his head and clucks his tongue. “Ouch.”

Go easy on Max, Culebra says, straight from his brain into mine, something he can do because he’s a shape-shifter and we share a psychic bond. He’s feeling sorry for himself. Alone at Christmas. You understand.

The last is said in a kind of “there’s a lot of that going around, isn’t there?” tone.

I just grunt.

Culebra pushes his chair back and stands up to scoot another chair over from a nearby table. “Sit.” He grabs another shot glass from the bar and pours a shot. “Drink.”

Loquacious as ever. But I do take the glass and sip. Smooth. Tickles the back of the throat and warms a path all the way down.

Culebra refills his own glass, then Max’s. “What brings you here? I figured you’d be at David’s shindig.”

I take another sip before answering. “Too many people I don’t know. Too much work pretending I might want to know them. He travels in a different circle.”

Max tilts his glass toward me. “You mean a human circle, don’t you?”

He has the knives out. “Who shoved a stake up your ass? I helped you not long ago if I remember correctly. You didn’t seem to mind what I was then.”

Culebra places the bottle down between Max and me and raises his glass. “Come on now. Truce. It’s Christmas Eve. Time for peace on Earth. Good will to . . . creatures, great and small. For some reason, fate has drawn us here together this evening. Let’s make the most of it. To friends.”

He shoves his glass toward us. And looks around expectantly. I wait to see if Max will move first. He remains stubbornly still, arms crossed over his chest, waiting for me.

Shit. I want another drink. I raise my glass and clink it against Culebra’s. Max follows, reluctantly. He avoids my eyes, but does let his glass touch mine.

We drink.

And drink some more. Not much conversation. Culebra isn’t even intruding into my head. Each of us seems content to be alone together to wallow in whatever pits of dejection brought us here.

Alcohol, like blood, is absorbed directly into my system. After a half dozen shots, the booze loosens my tongue. There’s a question I’ve wanted to ask these two since I first saw Max and Culebra together a year and a half ago. I had just become vampire and was sent to Beso de la Muerte to hunt down the vamp who made me. Max was working undercover in the DEA and he was here, too, on an assignment. He never gave me a direct answer to what he was doing here then, and it seems the perfect opportunity to get that answer now.

I pour each of them another shot and dive in. “How’d you two come to know each other?”

At first I think Max is going to counter with some bullshit about classified DEA information or fall back on the old “if I tell you, I have to kill you” dodge. But he does neither. He looks over at Culebra and Culebra shrugs.

“She knows everything else.”

Max downs his shot. It’s the fifth since I’ve been here and I have no idea how many he had before I arrived. But the alcohol does seem to have smoothed the edge off his animosity. He shrugs back at Culebra. “Do you want to start or should I?”

Culebra looks hard at me, as if gauging how much truth I can take. In fact, that’s the very thought that sifts through the haze of alcohol in his head.

“Give it your best shot,” I quip cavalierly. What can he possibly say that will shock me? I’ve seen plenty in the last eighteen months.

He draws a breath. “You ever heard of Felix Gallardo?”

“Can’t say that I have. Is he a relative?”

That provokes a snort from Max and a shake of the head from Culebra.

“What? Who is he?”

“The godfather of the Mexican drug cartels,” Max says.

“Godfather?”

Culebra nods. “Gallardo was the first to organize the Mexican drug business. Started in the late eighties when he realized he was getting too well known and the narco business was getting too big for him to control by himself. He called together a select group of henchman in Acapulco and designated territories to be run by bosses not yet so well known to the Federales. Men who he could trust to report to him.”

“It was a smart move,” Max says with a tone of grudging admiration.

Must be the booze.

“What does that have to do with you?” I ask Culebra.

“I worked for one of his lieutenants. Boss of the Cartel de Sinaloa.”

That name I recognize, both for the ruthlessness of its methods and the success it’s achieved in getting huge quantities of drugs across the U.S. border. “The Sinaloa Cartel, huh? Were you an undercover agent for the Mexican government? Is that how you met Max? You were working together?”

“Not exactly.” Culebra’s eyes grow hard. “I was an asesino—an assassin.”

Culebra an assassin for a narco? I grin. “You’re kidding right?”

The steady, serious way he gazes back at me raises the hair on the back of my neck.

The glass I had just raised to my lips bangs down on the table with a thud. I was wrong. I can be shocked. Astonishment knocks the alcohol fog out of my brain. Suddenly I’m sober and shaken. How? Why? Questions tumble over themselves in my head.

Culebra reads them all. He smiles sadly. “The money,” he says. “Huge money. I was uneducated, an outcast in my own village because of what I was.” He averts his eyes, sarcasm tinges his words with the acid of bitter truth. “Shape-shifters are not considered valuable members of society where I come from. I was an anomaly—a freak. And treated as such.”

A pause, as if he’s waiting for me to comment. I have no comment. Even my thoughts are conflicted. He finally realizes it and continues.

“I moved to Baja when I was sixteen. Met the boss soon after. Became a runner. Eventually, I got married, had a family. Worked my way up the ladder.”

That evokes a comment. “Worked your way up to assassin?”

“I was caught up in the life.” He meets my eyes squarely. “I’m not proud of it. I hated it, but I had a family to support. There came a point when there was no turning back.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Or the dead calm tone of Culebra’s voice as he speaks. “You killed people.”

He looks hard at me. “And you don’t?”

Max makes a snickering noise.

I glare at him before snapping at Culebra, “I kill because I have to, because I’m protecting someone. It’s hardly the same thing.”

Culebra shrugs. “Semantics. I was protecting someone, too. Myself. My family. I followed orders.”

“Your family? Where are they now?”

Culebra waves a hand in a vague sweeping motion. “Dead.”

Still, no emotion. Nothing in his head I can penetrate but a dull pulse beat. It’s strange. As if his answers come from a separate part of his brain, turning on and off like a recorder at the push of the right button. Programmed answers.

I soften my own tone. “What happened?”

He looks hard at me. “You want the long version or the short one?”

I wave a hand. “I’ve got nowhere else to be. Do you?”

He pours another shot. Downs it. “Get comfortable. We’re going to be here awhile.”