Pulling Up Stakes 2 by Peter David

Author:Peter David [David, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Amazon: B00AVBHMUY
Publisher: Crazy 8 Press
Published: 2012-12-30T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

My Unexpected Phone Call From the Morgue

You probably think that, when you’ve got guys like us—“us” meaning Body Men, not us meaning vampires—who operate primarily in the shadows and fringes of humanity, that we’re isolated and more or less on our own in our day-to-day, night-to-night operations.

Not the case. At all.

I mean, it’s not like the police commissioner has a Batphone in his office sitting inside of one of those clear plastic cake display stands (I never knew what was up with that) that he’d use to give the Garrison a call whenever vampire activity was suspected. Although I have to admit, that would be pretty cool.

But we have people on the inside in key places. We didn’t recruit them. Instead they sort of fell in with us, usually because we helped them out of some difficult situation. Maybe one of the Body Men wound up saving them from a vampire who tried to prey on them. There are some rogues around that don’t subscribe to any particular vampire belief system, but just go around doing whatever the hell they want to whomever they want. They’re kind of the Libertarians of vampires, except they won’t talk your ear off for hours on end. They’ll just bite it off. And when we encounter one of those rogues, we’ll put ‘em in the ground pretty quickly. Even I’ll do that, without hesitation. They’re bad for business. Everybody’s business.

Or maybe they were people who heard the rumors about us and sought us out because weird stuff came to their attention and they needed someone to step in and handle it. And from that point on, they’d be there to do anything they could to help us in return.

One of those guys was Teddy Olshefsky.

Teddy was a big, gangling guy who had a real sweet face and disposition, and always seemed cheerful and perky. When you asked him what he did for a living, you’d figure that maybe he was a clown or one of those DJs you hired for Bar Mitzvahs and such. So you’d be pretty much gobsmacked when he would then tell you that he was a police M.E. working at the city morgue, because you figured that guys who work in morgues would be like ghouls or something, no matter how many times you see them on television crime procedurals as good-looking young Hollywood actors. Or maybe they’d be hardened and dour because of having to work with stiffs every single day, many of which had died from some kind of violent encounter.

Not Teddy. He was what he was, and he had a perfectly fine attitude about it.

I crossed paths with Teddy purely by accident. I was supposed to be out hunting vampires and instead was hanging out in a bar, which I wound up doing more often than I should have. I tried not to make myself a regular at any of them. Endeavoring not to be noticed was simple force of habit. While I was there, though,

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