Stakeout at the Vampire Circus by Kevin J. Anderson

Author:Kevin J. Anderson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780758290106
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2012-10-30T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

I expected to find Fazio at his tent, stuffing valuables into a hobo sack so he could run far from the Quarter. That’s what I would do, if I were a killer clown cat-burglar responsible for the death of a vampire trapeze artist.

I did find Fazio in his tent, but he wasn’t packing up to leave. Instead he was wailing, outraged. “They stole my nose! The little bastards stole my nose!”

The clown whirled to face me, and I saw that the big red nose was indeed gone from the middle of his face. More shocking, though: The fake nose wasn’t the only thing missing. Fazio’s real nose was gone, leaving a cavernous empty sinus socket draped with a few shreds of rotted flesh. The makeup had been smudged around his eyes, and I could see the sunken hollow look, the grayish tone to his unpainted skin.

“You’re a zombie!” I cried, demonstrating my detective abilities.

“Not just a zombie,” Fazio insisted. “A clown, too. That’s my true calling in life—and afterlife.”

A zombie clown, I thought. Now that’s scary.

Fazio moaned, covering the nose hole in the middle of his face. “All I ever wanted was to make people laugh.” Then he looked up at me. “Why are you so surprised? You’re undead, and you came back to keep solving cases. Why can’t I still be a clown just because I’m a zombie? Maybe that’s why I rose up in the first place—to make people laugh.”

Actually, he wasn’t making anyone laugh that I could tell, but I decided not to argue with him.

He touched his cheeks. “Put on enough greasepaint and a wig, no one can tell the difference. I still do my job.” A wave of anger passed through him again. “And those little goblin bastards stole my nose! I thought we were done with them for good! Last time they were here, the twins stole everything that wasn’t superglued down.” He let out a huff. “In fact, we tried supergluing everything down . . . which did prevent the thefts, but kept us from using the items at all. Bad idea. And then they stole the tube of superglue.”

“Which way did they go?” I heard sirens wailing in the distance. McGoo responded quickly, especially when he knew he’d have a nice arrest on his record without having to do the footwork.

The clown sniffled again—which came out as a loud hooting sound without his nose—and pointed out the tent. “They grabbed the nose off my face and ran that way. Somebody must be hiding them.”

“What would they do with a clown nose?” I asked. “Can you sell it on an auction site somewhere?”

“They don’t do anything with what they steal—they just steal it. It’s an illness. That’s why you find so many things just lying around on the ground.”

I bolted out of Fazio’s tent, hoping to intercept the kleptomaniac goblins. The circus midway was full of attendees streaming toward the exits, chattering about Bela’s spectacular (and, most agreed, entertaining) death. Some unnaturals still insisted it was part of the show and were trying to figure out how the trick was done.

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