Hellbent Read Free

wannabes and their strung-out beards.” By “beards,” of course, I mean their fake girlfriends. And also their Castro fanboy face-lawns.
    But given my druthers (and what precisely does that
mean
, anyway? I’ve always wondered) I would’ve liked something equally lowbrow and gauche, but less densely populated.
    Too late to change my mind.
    And just when I was thinking the little scumbag was going to be late, purely to torture me—as if I ever did anything to
him
—the door opened with a digital chime that almost no one else heard over the shouted orders for beer or fruity drinks and the busker somebody’d ill-advisedly brought indoors and given a microphone.
    I heard the chime. I craned my neck to look around the ass of the single serving girl, and there he was. All five-foot-six of him, impeccably dressed in a pin-striped Brooks Brothers suit and a pink tie, because yes, he is
that
secure in his masculinity.
    For a long time I thought he was gay. Then gradually, over the years, I realized that he’s not attracted to anything on earth except money. And maybe himself.
    He saw me and his freshly threaded eyebrows lifted in a chola arch of … something. It wasn’t surprise, obviously. And it probably wasn’t delight, though it might’ve been amusement, or maybe curiosity. I haven’t changed any since last he saw me. For that matter, I haven’t changed since 1921.
    The waitress slapped a glass of wine on a cocktail napkin directly under my chin, then vanished. I picked it up and lifted it in a half-assed toast in Horace’s direction. He gave a weird half bow and a wave back, then grimaced as he realized the crowd he was going to have to wade through in order to join me. He immediately assumed the position of a tightrope walker shimmying above a pitof alligators and began to squeeze his way across the room, doing everything short of removing a hankie from a pocket to cover his mouth and nose—mostly, I suspect, because he didn’t have a hankie.
    With a laser frown and a flip of his double-jointed wrist, he whipped out the unoccupied chair across from me and said, “Honestly?” as if I’d just told him I’d bought a pair of pasties and planned to take up table dancing.
    I smiled at him despite myself and said, “I swear to God, if I’d known about the busker, I would’ve picked someplace else.” Which was perfectly true. I’m petty, but I have my limits.
    “So you
say
,” he accused, snapping his fingers and—like magic—summoning the waitress, whom I probably couldn’t have flagged down again with a boomerang. He put in an order for a Manhattan, neat, and took a deep breath … then appeared to think better of it. He exhaled swiftly and, with a shake that might’ve been a shudder, he said, “Ray-baby!”
    “Don’t call me that,” I told him, but not with any weight behind it. I don’t really mind, usually. I especially don’t mind when I can barely hear it. The busker was leaning on the lyrics of “Yellow” like each word was a hook he was pulling out of his eye. “And it’s good to see you, you irascible bastard.”
    “Back at you, princess,” he said with a grin, which squinched at the busker’s manhandling of the chorus. “But really. Here?”
    I shrugged, like this was no big deal. “Well, you said you wanted to talk business, and it really doesn’t get much more private than a dump like this, now does it?”
    “I guess not,” he said, dubiousness written all over his forehead. I watched him work up to some feeble enthusiasm about slumming in utter security, and either he’s better at psyching himself up than I am, or his news was good enough to overrule any environmental discomfort. “Your taste in hangouts, Christ.Dracula’s castle may have been dank and filled with homicidal hookers, but at least it was quiet. I assume.”
    Horace knows I’m a vampire. He figured it out years ago, which isn’t such a strange thing considering his line of work. The most valuable and