The Vampire Files, Volume Four Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  LADY CRYMSYN

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  COLD STREETS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Ace Titles by P. N. Elrod

  Praise for P. N. Elrod’s

  The Vampire Files

  “Masterful . . . Elrod crafts an irresistible tale of gangsters, girls, double crosses, and old sins, told with the tantalizing bite of vampire fangs.”

  —Caitlin Kittredge, author of Devil’s Business

  “A refreshingly different vampire novel.”

  —Lori Handeland, author of Crave the Moon

  “You won’t want to miss this series.”

  —Cemetery Dance

  “Interesting twists, good period detail, fine characterization, and snappy dialogue.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “I love getting into bed with Jack Fleming. Vampires, Chicago, jazz, and mystery—nobody does it better than P. N. Elrod.”

  —Lilith Saintcrow, author of the Dante Valentine series

  “Elrod’s got it down. A blend of the hard-boiled detective novel and the vampire tale . . . good-natured fun.”

  —Locus

  “This long-running series just keeps getting better and better.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Filled with snappy action and sharp dialogue.”

  —Booklist

  “A good mystery wrapped in a fantastic premise.”

  —Chronicle

  Ace Titles by P. N. Elrod

  The Vampire Files

  BLOODLIST

  LIFEBLOOD

  BLOODCIRCLE

  ART IN THE BLOOD

  FIRE IN THE BLOOD

  BLOOD ON THE WATER

  A CHILL IN THE BLOOD

  THE DARK SLEEP

  LADY CRYMSYN

  COLD STREETS

  SONG IN THE DARK

  DARK ROAD RISING

  THE VAMPIRE FILES: VOLUME ONE

  THE VAMPIRE FILES: VOLUME TWO

  THE VAMPIRE FILES: VOLUME THREE

  THE VAMPIRE FILES: VOLUME FOUR

  RED DEATH

  DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

  DEATH MASQUE

  DANCE OF DEATH

  Ace Anthologies Edited by P. N. Elrod

  DRACULA IN LONDON

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2011 by P. N. Elrod.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace trade paperback edition / September 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Elrod, P. N. (Patricia Nead)

  The vampire files, volume four / P. N. Elrod.—Ace trade pbk. ed. p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54751-9

  1. Fleming, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Vampires—Fiction. 3. Private investigators—Fiction. 4. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3555.L68V365 2011

  813’.54—dc22

  2011015916

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  LADY CRYMSYN

  Thanks to:

  Teresa Patterson

  Keven Topham

  and

  Jean Marie Ward

  And a special thanks to:

  Joe James

  Sherry LaBelle

  Gardner Pourcio

  Ruth Woodring

  and Roddy McDowall

  1

  Chicago, June 1937

  I woke up in my basement sanctuary to the sound of a man’s shoe heel cracking hollow against linoleum three yards over my head. It was exactly sunset, so I’d be awake anyway without the alarm call; this was just my partner’s way of telling me something was up and to get moving.

  Having fallen into my daylight stupor still wearing a bathrobe and slippers, there was no need to don them as I rose from the army cot that was my humble bed. Being completely unconscious while the sun was high meant that comfort wasn’t the big concern so much as having a layer of my home earth sandwiched in between two sheets of oilcloth on the thin mattress. No coffins for me; the damned confining things give me the creeps.

  Escott thumped the floor again like a flamenco dancer with no rhythm and called down at me. “Jack? Are you there? Jack?”

  It was a perfectly reasonable question. Sometimes I slept the day over at my girlfriend’s place. Escott hadn’t bothered to lift the hidden trapdoor under the kitchen table to see if I was in.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I muttered. My bricked-up alcove with its cot, desk, chair, and lamp vanished into a gray nothingness, and I shot upward until encountering the resistance of the ceiling. Like invisible vapor through a grille, I sieved swiftly through the minute spaces and cracks in the barrier until fully clear. How the process worked, I couldn’t really explain, it just did, and though tiring, I often took advantage of the gift.

  I materialized, annoyed and puzzled, in the bright light of the kitchen. “What is it, a fire?” I asked, squinting.

  “A call,” Escott said, pointing to the phone on the wall by the pantry.

  “Something wrong with Bobbi?”
Past events made me more than a little anxious about the welfare of my girlfriend.

  “Miss Smythe is perfectly fine, so far as I’m aware. This has to do with that club of yours.”

  “Oh.” A whole different kind of worry for me. I hurried to snag up the earpiece. “Yeah? Fleming here, what is it?”

  “Mr. Fleming, we gotta problem.” The voice belonged to Leon Kell, the foreman I’d hired to take care of the renovations of the property I’d leased. He sounded tense. “I donno how you wanna handle it, so I told the boys to back off until you got here.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t wanna say over the phone.”

  I kept my cursing to myself. He’d apparently seen one too many gangster films. “C’mon, Leon, the G-men don’t wire phones of honest citizens,” I lied. “What’s wrong?”

  “The boys found something when they started knocking through that last cellar wall you wanted cleared. It happened just before quittin’, an’ I told them to hang around until you got here to tell us what to do.”

  Which meant a crew of half a dozen able-bodied men were all standing about with their picks and shovels in hand getting paid extra by me to smoke cigarettes. “Okay, then let them go for the night and—”

  “That might not be such a good idea, considerin’.”

  “Considering what?”

  “I don’t wanna say, Mr. Fleming, an’ if you come down here, you’ll know why I don’t wanna say it.”

  Shit and Shinola. This was a whole new side to Leon’s otherwise sensible character that I could have done without. “Okay, I’ll be right there.” I slammed the earpiece back on its hook with more force than was really required.

  “He strikes me as being a cautious soul,” Charles Escott commented from his seat at the kitchen table, where he’d heard my end of the conversation. Before him was his modest evening meal, purchased on the way back from his office. A sandwich and spuds tonight, making a change from his usual white cartons packed full of Chinese food. “He gave you no clue to the problem?”

  “Leon’s crew found something in the cellar. He wouldn’t say what.”

  Escott looked up, his gray eyes and lean face suddenly bright with interest and grim concern. “It must be a body, then.”

  “Now where the hell do you get that?”

  “If they’d ruptured a gas or water main, Mr. Kell would have been much more forthcoming with information. If it had been buried treasure, he’d not have called, period.”

  It was too early in the evening for me to deal with this kind of thing, I thought.

  “I’ll accompany you, if you don’t mind.”

  “You need to eat.” It wasn’t just his face that was lean. When he got busy on a case, Escott sometimes forgot about food unless someone bothered to remind him. He didn’t have a lot of friends, so that job usually fell to me. Besides, something was going wrong with the most important new thing in my life, and I didn’t want to sit around waiting for him to finish his feed bag.

  And damned if he didn’t seem to read my mind. “I’ll have ingested sufficient nourishment by the time you’ve finished changing, unless you plan to establish a truly informal atmosphere to the site by appearing in such attire.”

  I gave him a brief sour smile, then vanished between one eyeblink and the next to go upstairs for clothes. He must have expected the move, for I didn’t get his usual comment of “damn” in reaction. Show-off antics like that nearly always got some kind of rise from him. I only did it now to divert myself from the gut-sinking idea that he was probably right.

  This was post-Prohibition Chicago and still reeling from the aftermath of Big Al’s near-uncontested reign. The old building I’d picked to house what would become Lady Crymsyn had a violent history; it’d be strange if there wasn’t a nasty surprise in the cellar.

  THE creation of my own swank nightclub represented a lot more to me than just an interesting way to provide steady earnings for decades to come. It meant that for once I’d deliberately chosen a path for myself, not simply stumbled along on those created for me by the needs of others.

  You see, unaware of committing my worst crime against myself, I’d wasted my first life.

  I’d drifted, one year to the next, assuming I was in charge of my destiny until a murderous beating and a gangster’s bullet put an abrupt stop to such foolish thinking. There it should have ended, my disappearance an open mystery to my distant family, but of no concern to anyone else, least of all to the men who’d killed me.

  But much to their appalled surprise my weighted carcass didn’t stay where they’d dropped it in the cold depths of Lake Michigan. The one good thing that had happened to me during that wasted life wouldn’t leave me in such grim peace. I returned to the world of the living, confused and fired by rage, a dark rebirth attended by blood, madness, and, finally, no small amount of revenge. My killers were dead or the next thing to it; I was alive—or the next thing to it—and it was time for me to cease drifting and move forward.

  And for once it would be on my own terms.

  Not that God or Fate or whatever you believe in is stingy with second chances. Those are all around us, only we’re too distracted to notice them. Most of the time they’re a lot more mundane than the special one I’d been handed.

  Mine had to do with being a card-carrying, dusk-to-dawn, stake-in-the-heart, you’re-damn-right-I-drink-blood vampire.

  It was a hell of a resurrection, but not so bad once I got used to things.

  And since then I’d done rather well for myself.

  A few months back, while flattening out a few wrinkles with a local mob, I discovered a hoard of their cash that they didn’t know about. Though someone else walked off with the lion’s share, the sixty-eight grand I’d stuffed into my coat pockets like a greedy kid in a candy store seemed more than enough to get me set up for good if I went about it the right way. I’d wasted one life; I wasn’t going to repeat the mistake.

  First I had to clean the money. Flashing around undeclared fistfuls of dough is a fast way to get the attention of the tax man. Capone himself got tossed in the clink on that little detail, but I could avoid landing in the next cell over by playing smart. The government doesn’t seem to care how you make your money, so long as it gets its cut. Not much different from the mob, only there’s usually less gunplay and more paperwork.

  Presently, I was Charles Escott’s nominal employee in his private detective business. (He preferred the more genteel title of “private agent.”) Whenever we shared a case, we split the payment fifty-fifty, but the huge amount I’d collected could not be declared as income from the Escott Agency without putting him in a bad spot. Uncle Sam would want to know what sort of work Escott did to justify such a generous payout to his staff, and, oh, by the way, we’d like to check your earnings as well . . .

  Sure, I could sit on the dough and declare it a little at a time as cash earnings over the years. Escott was doing just that with his half of a ten-grand windfall we’d once gotten hold of by accident, but I was in too much of a hurry to wait. So with the help of a mobster who owed me a few favors I took advantage of a means to make my good fortune safely innocent. All I needed was a racing form and directions to the nearest line of bookies. Hell, all I needed to do was stand still, and they’d come to me. This town had them thicker than grass.

  For a month I hung out in such company, going to various joints as soon as the sun was down in Chicago to put bets on horses about to run in California, where the sun still shone. Not big bets, but lots of them, to show or place, never to win, since that was more of a risk and could drive down the odds.

  My mob advisor told me which horses I should play and which bookies to bet with. Not every race was rigged, but there were enough to slowly turn about half my fortune into legitimate-seeming wins. Only I wasn’t really winning money so much as breaking even. For every ten dollars I bet, I’d get back twenty—but the bookie would get a twenty from me, not a ten. It was all numbers in a book. Count
the actual cash and you’d tumble to the game, but no cop or Treasury agent ever interfered.

  The bookies were all in on the scam and took their cut for cleaning services when I purposely lost every fourth or fifth bet to make things look legit. In this way they took between five and ten percent. I could spare it, figuring it to be a fair commission and much better than me trying to explain the real source of the cash to a nosy government accountant.

  Duly entering every last dollar in a ledger, I kept careful records of my wins and losses. Declared cash all squeaky clean and financial records square enough for Euclid, I was free to get down to the real business of making my dream of a swank nightclub into a reality.

  Location is everything. I soon found a former speakeasy on the North Side once run by a mug named Welsh Lennet. It closed years ago when thugs tossed a couple of grenades through the front doors as part of an ongoing territorial dispute. Lennet and a few others in his group were killed, with no one to take over for him. When Repeal went into effect, there didn’t seem much point in trying to rebuild, so the gutted remains of his speak were left to gently rot.

  The present owner was mob, of course, and unwilling to sell, but he could be persuaded into making a two-year lease. I knew the catch on that one: I get the club up and running, then discover I can’t renew the contract or that the leasing price has suddenly tripled. Just in case I was unaware of the ploy, my mob mentor, Gordy Weems, mentioned it to me, which was damned decent of him. I decided to sign, though. If, at the end of two years the place was a bust, then I could slip out of it easily enough, and if it was a wild success, I had my own way of getting around the owner. Along with vanishing into thin air, I also possessed an innate talent for hypnosis. When the time came, he’d think it was his own idea to cut me a break. If Gordy had figured out what I was planning, he kept it to himself.