The Animals watched Blue walk away and, when she turned the corner, gathered by the registers. Clint unlocked the office door and came out. "So, we have to notify those cops, so they can help us hunt him down."
Lash looked at the Animals, who looked back. Lash raised an eyebrow. The others nodded. Lash put his arm around Clint"s shoulders. "Clint, the guys and I have discussed it, and we"d all like to do something for you."
Clint ran back in the office and slammed the door. "No! We have to destroy the agents of Satan."
"Right. Of course. We"ll get right on that. But first I"d like you to ask yourself something, Clint. And I"d like you to answer not as the born-again man that you are now, but from that little boy that"s inside of all of us."
"Okay," Clint said, peeking over the office door.
"Clint, haven"t you ever wanted to bone a Smurf?"
Jody heard Tommy come in the security door downstairs and met him on the stairs with a big hug and a backbreaking kiss.
"Wow," Tommy said.
"Are you okay?"
"I"m really good now. I was just checking on William. I think he p.o.o.ped himself."
"I"m so sorry, Tommy. I shouldn"t have left you on your own this soon."
"It"s okay. I"m okay. Hey, you have something on your dress."
Jody was still wearing the little black dress. Some of the dust that was James O"Mally was still clinging to it near the hemline. "Oh, I must have b.u.mped up against something."
"Let me get that for you," Tommy said, brushing at her thigh, then starting to raise the dress up past her waist.
Jody caught his hand. "Horndog!"
Chet the huge shaved cat looked up for a second, then put his head back down on William"s chest and went back to sleep.
"But you left me on my own," Tommy said, trying to sound sad, but smiling too much to make it work.
"You"re fine." She looked at her watch. "We only have about forty minutes till sunup. We can talk while we get ready for bed."
"I"m ready for bed now," Tommy said.
She led him up the stairs into the loft, through the great room, the bedroom, and into the bathroom. She grabbed her toothbrush off the sink and tossed Tommy his. She pasted, then chucked the tube to him.
"Do we still have to floss?" Tommy asked. "I mean, what"s the point of being immortal if we have to floss?"
"Yeah," Jody said, through a mouthful of pinkish foam, "you should just go lie in the sun and get it over with, rather than suffer the torture of flossing."
"Don"t be sarcastic. I didn"t think we could get sick at all, but your hangover proved that to be wrong."
Jody nodded and spit. "Don"t swallow any when you rinse. The water will come right back up."
"How come your foam is pink? My foam isn"t pink. And I went last."
"My gums might be bleeding," Jody said.
Jody wasn"t ready to tell him that she"d taken someone tonight. She would tell him, just not now. So, to change the subject, she summoned her superhuman strength and pantsed him.
"Hey!"
"When did you get skull-and-crossbones boxers?"
"I bought them tonight, when you were getting Christmas presents. I thought they would seem dangerous."
"You bet," Jody said, nodding furiously to keep from laughing. "And you"ll blend in-in case you"re ever caught with your pants down in the pirate locker room."
"Yeah, there"s that," Tommy said, a little toothpaste foam dribbling down his chest as he looked at his boxers. "I have the whitest legs in the universe. My legs are like great white carrion worms."
"Stop, you"re making me h.o.r.n.y."
"I"ve got to use that tanning lotion we bought. Where is it?"
Jody moved with catlike speed out to the kitchen, s.n.a.t.c.hed the lotion off the counter, and was back sitting on the edge of the bed in only a couple of seconds. If she could just keep Tommy from asking any questions until sunup, she was sure she"d figure out a way to tell him about the old man. "Come over here, worm legs, let me put some lotion on you." To emphasize her commitment to lotionization, she stood, pulled the straps of her dress off her shoulders, and let it fall to the floor at her feet. She stepped out of her dress and stood there, in just her pumps and a silver necklace with a tiny heart that he had given her.
Tommy hopped out of the bathroom-his pants still around his ankles-one long hop, and he stood in front of her. Jody smiled. Give a geek supernatural agility and speed, and what you get is a superagile, speedy geek.
"You went out commando, in that dress?"
"Never again," Jody said, grabbing the waistband of his boxers and pulling him toward her. "These are mine, now. I want to be dangerous."
"That"s so, so s.l.u.tty," he said, lisping a little, his fangs coming out now.
"Yep. Where do you want to start with the lotion?"
He pulled her close and kissed her neck. "We have to be careful not to break the furniture this time."
"f.u.c.k it, less to move," she said, her own fangs coming out now. She raked them down his chest. "If we figure out a way to get a place before someone kills us."
"Oh, yeah, I found us a minion," he said as she bit into his side and tore his boxers off in a single swift pull.
"What?"
But Tommy was finished talking for a while.
Blue watched as the b.u.t.terball rocketed by her and slammed into a triangle of two-liter soft-drink bottles-the front bottle burst, sending a cola-brown eruption of foam across the floor by the meat case.
"Strike!" Barry shouted. He danced in a tight circle among the Animals, pointing and chanting, "I own you, and you, and you," to each as he pa.s.sed.
Blue looked to Lash, and raised a cobalt eyebrow.
Lash shrugged. "It happens. That"s why we use diet soda. It"s not as sticky." He had decided that they all needed to sober up some more before they started stocking the shelves; thus the turkey bowling.
"Can someone bring a mop?" Clint said. Because he would not gamble, he was the designated pin setter. He was scrambling around trying to retrieve soda bottles even as Jeff Murray was warming up at the other end of the aisle, swinging a Foster"s Fresh Frozen Homestyle in each hand. He believed that he got better pin action off the Foster"s because of the savory gravy packet stuffed in its center. He claimed that Foster"s had mastered superior poultry technology, and was, in fact, working on an oversized t.i.tanium turkey. The other Animals were forced to point out to him that he was completely full of s.h.i.t as they sprayed root beer on him.
"So you guys hunted vampires?" Blue asked Lash. She had come back to the front with coffee for everyone just in time to hear Lash lay out the scenario for the Animals. She"d held off asking any questions until now. A Fresh Frozen meat missile zipped down the aisle between them. Lash didn"t even blink.
"Yep. We didn"t kill him. We just blew up his yacht and took his art. That"s where we got the money."
"Yeah, right," said Blue. "I got that part. It"s the vampire part I"m not clear on. Like a real vampire. A real, blood-drinking, can"t-go-out-in-the-day, live-forever vampire."
"We figured he had to be at least six hundred years old," Troy Lee added, joining in the conversation. "Blue, you wanna skid the buzzard?" He nodded to the end of the aisle, where Jeff was offering his spare Fresh Frozen turkey like a sacrifice.
"So you guys, who work in a grocery store, have seen a vampire?"
"Two of them," Lash said. "Our night-crew leader, Tommy, was living with one of them."
"She was hot," Troy Lee added.
"Vampire hunters?" Blue couldn"t believe it.
"Well, not anymore," Lash said.
"Yeah," Troy Lee said. "Clint says that Tommy"s a vampire now. We"re not going to mess with him."
"Sp.a.w.n of Satan!" Clint shouted from the end of the aisle.
Drew, who Blue had decided to think of as Doc, because he always carried the pot, ran down the aisle and shot-putted a twelve-pound self-basting at Clint"s head. "Shut the f.u.c.k up!" Clint ducked and covered. The turkey went over the meat counter and stuck in the drywall by the window at the back of the meat department. To Blue, Drew said, "Sorry, couldn"t be helped."
"Well, that"s gonna take all night to patch," said Clint.
Lash looked at Troy Lee. "Could you kill him?"
"On it," Troy Lee said, falling into a fighting stance, before taking off and chasing Clint around the corner. "Prepare to die, White Devil!"
"So," said Blue. "You were saying?"
"Well, Clint says Tommy is a vampire now, and we should go stake him out or something, but he"s one of us, so we"ve decided to pursue a policy of Buddhist tolerance."
Just then Troy Lee dragged Clint back around the corner in a headlock. Despite being six inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than Clint, he"d studied martial arts since he was six and that took size out of the equation.
"Should I hypnotize the chicken?" Troy asked.
"Make it so," said Lash.
Troy Lee adjusted his chokehold on Clint. The larger man"s eyes bugged out, his mouth moved like a gasping fish out of water, and he went limp in Troy"s arms, who then dropped him in the puddle of diet soda on the floor.
"He"ll come around in a second or two." Lash leaned into Blue to explain. "We used to call it choke choke the chicken, but that sounded kind of gayish." the chicken, but that sounded kind of gayish."
"Of course," said Blue. That trick would come in handy in her work. She"d have to ask Troy Lee to teach it to her.
"And you think that your friend and this girl are really vampires."
"I suppose. Clint said he heard it from the Emperor, and he was the one that turned us on to the old vampire guy in the first place. Either way, they"re not our problem."
"What if I said they were?" Blue said. Her mind was putting it together like a sewing machine on crack. It was insane, but for once she could see a future stretching out before her, welcoming her. "What if I said I wanted you to go after them?"
Lash blinked at her like she was speaking Klingon. "Huh?" He looked at the other Animals, who had stopped bowling and moved into range of the conversation. They stood there with frosty gobblers steaming in their hands like they were on wet-nurse duty for a group of headless infant snowmen.
"Flood is our friend," Lash said.
"I don"t want you to kill him," Blue said. "Just catch him."
Lash looked to the others, who looked away-at the floor, at the cabbage and lettuce counter, at the turnips, at their frozen charges.
"I"ll make it worth your while," Blue said.
Jody lay on the bed watching Tommy turn slowly, back and forth in the air like a pale white-boy mobile. The loft had twenty-foot ceilings with open, industrial-style beams, and sometime during their lovemaking, they had both ended up hanging from them. Jody dropped to the bed after she came, but Tommy still hung by one hand. The bright side was that with the exception of the set of shredded sheets upon which she lay, they had kept the destruction to a minimum. The downside-well, she really could have gone a couple of lifetimes without seeing him from this angle.
"We did good," Jody said. "Hardly anything broken."
"You think that monkeys really do it that way?" Tommy replied.
"I always thought you were just using that as an expression." She"d thought she could remain detached enough about their lovemaking to stay in control-to enjoy it, but to use it, as it were-but since Tommy had changed, it wasn"t like that anymore. She lost herself in it, she didn"t just make love with him, she f.u.c.ked him like a crazed monkey girl. It was good, but disconcerting. She had liked being in control.
"You look amazing from this angle," Tommy said.
"You look like a man-shaped fluorescent lightbulb," Jody said, grinning at him, then noticing a change. "Do not get wood, Thomas Flood. You will not get wood, do you hear me?"
"You sound like my mom," Tommy said.
"Ewwwww," Jody said, shuddering and covering her eyes.
"Ewwwww," Tommy said, realizing what he had just said and about what and whom.
He dropped to the bed and bounced. "Sorry. Quick, put the self-tanning lotion on me, we only have a few minutes before sunup."
"Okay, but just the lotion."
"Right, go."