Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Sam got on the Expressway and headed north. We don't have bridges in L.A. to match the majesty of the Whitestone Bridge or the half dozen other bridges that span the Hudson River. We have nothing like the Hudson. The Los Angeles River is a joke. If it ever flowed freely, its water was directed away from its original course to supply the city. The beauty of the landscape, the outlines of the bare trees, and the stars, seen through my enhanced vision, held me almost as spellbound as had Sam's music. It's one of the perks of being undead. City traffic had dwindled when we began to cross the long and lonely Tapanzee Bridge. There were few other cars.

The span seemed to come out of nowhere. We were surrounded by woods and then, quite suddenly, it seemed like we were soaring over water. Even the air changed. I smelled the salt air of the ocean on the wind. I became lost in the grace and beauty of the bridge and the black water east and west of us. Stars blazed above as bright as the lights on the bridge.

"You look half-asleep," Sam mentioned. "Didn't you rest well last night?"

"Too well," I admitted. "When I woke up I didn't remember where I was. It's a good thing you said something before you opened the freezer door. I was getting ready to kill to get out of there. I'm a little claustrophobic."

"How do you manage at home?"

"I have a Plexiglas lid on my freezer so I can see out. It keeps the cold in but it lets me see where I am when I wake up. How does Francis stand that thing?"

Sam chuckled. "In Rumania, that's the top of the line. He saw the same kind he was used to and bought it on the spot." We were more than halfway across when, to my surprise, he pulled into the far right lane. I hadn't noticed the uneven sound of a flat tire or anything at all amiss with the engine. He stopped the car and put one hand over his eyes. "Do me a favor. Look back at the bridge," he asked softly.

I did as he asked, moving my attention up to the towers, and around to the girders and lights. It reminded me of a spider's web, so strong yet stunningly beautiful, and graceful beyond description. I wished I could describe it to Sam. There were few distracting lights on the shore so the bridge was all there was. The flowing river seemed like a black mirror except for a few whitecaps whipped up by the wind. Ducks and seagulls slept on the rolling water, their heads tucked under their wings. I looked back to Sam, trying to guess what was wrong with him. His eyes were closed and his breathing had changed. He had one advantage over me; he could hear my thoughts when I could not hear his. "Are you all right?" I asked.

"I'll be fine in a minute."

A police car drove up behind us, flashers spinning like crazy, to make sure no one hit us from behind. A highway patrolman exited his car and walked up to Sam, pointing his flashlight at us. Sam rolled down his window. "Are you having any kind of problem, sir?" he asked.

"Just something in my eye. We'll be on our way in a minute," he said. The cop told us to drive safely and returned to his car, but he waited for Sam to pull back into the driving lane.

"What did you have in your eye?" I asked, but I thought I knew."

"Nothing actually. I caught a vision of how you see the bridge. I've driven over this thing a thousand times, but I never saw anything as beautiful as the way you're seeing it right now."

"You can see what I see? This can get dangerous," I said. "Maybe I'd better drive. I'm used to my vision. If it's going to distract you…"

"I'm fine now," he said. "Really. I've learned to turn off my gift when it gets in the way of something I'm doing, but that was too much. There's nothing else quite this spectacular between here and home. I'm ready to drive again." The cop car followed us until we were off the bridge and back on the regular expressway. Then, he peeled away from us to follow more promising subjects. "How can you stand for everything to look this amazing?" he asked. "How do you get anything done?"

"You learn to live with it, so to speak," I said and with a chuckle. "You know what I mean. It' must be like listening to your own music or hearing other people's thoughts the way you do. The bridge looks amazing to me, but you've seen it so often, it hardly affects you, ordinarily anyway. I suppose your drums and chants don't affect you either."

"Actually, they do," he said.

We drove until about 3:00 in the morning, when Sam found us a picnic table along the Expressway and pulled into a parking space. There were very few cars on the road and a few overnight truckers. He exited the car and stretched. I followed him, looking around, listening to make sure we were alone. There were trees and a rest station. While Sam made his way to the men's room, I carried both coolers to the picnic table for our meal.

When he came back, I was half through with a bag of A+. I sipped it slowly, letting the cool blood bathe my throat with relief from my building thirst. We hadn't brought any, but here was no need for a glass here. It was truly a fix I both craved and needed. I don't argue with the essentials of what I am and what I live on, just with how I deal with it. More than 22 years ago, I found a way to survive that didn't involve killing, a way I could live with. There's that word again. Sam looked awfully tempting, but the days when I followed my basest instincts were long gone.

He flipped the top of a can of apple juice and drank half without a breath. You'd think it was blood to a vampire. He drank the rest in a second gulp and opened another. "I was really thirsty," he said. "They ought to put yours in flip-top cans."

I looked at him. "I was on a case a month ago. I became delirious. I'm a P.I. Did I mention that?" He nodded. "I had an assignment in the desert, in the daytime, and it was not going well. I was in the sun too long even before I lost my car. I imagined I saw a can of blood in a snack machine next to the tomato juice." He laughed.

"I never met a human quite like you before," I said. "Doesn't anything offend or bother you?" I was thinking of my blood addiction. Even Beth, once she knew the truth about me, wasn't that easy about it.

"Cruelty offends me. People who use other people to gain their own ends offend me. People forcing their beliefs on other people – that offends me." I had to nod at that. Maybe it was what made me different from most of my own species, if you could call it that. "Taking innocent lives offends me," Sam said.

"Me too," I replied. Sam wasn't all jokes and music, or even all curiosity. He had a serious streak. He ate one of his sandwiches and we got back in the car.

About six O'clock in the morning, we pulled into a campground. It was still dark this far north, but there was a hint of dawn in the east. "We're not going to make it through to my folks tonight," Sam said. "I think we ought to go pretty far into the forest to find a place to rest for the day. My tent and sleeping bag are in the trunk. You can see better, but I know the trails. Will you follow my lead?"

"Sure," I said. I'd been doing it since we left the hotel.

We hiked pretty far in before Sam was satisfied that we wouldn't be interrupted. I heard the sounds of a running stream nearby. He had brought along a disassembled shovel in his backpack. "I have an idea," he said. "The ground is pretty cold. You could dig a trench to sleep in and I could set up my tent over it so no one would think to look."

That could work. The air was cold, in the 40s I guessed, and the earth would be colder. I took the shovel and set to work. In a few moments I had my trench dug. He set up his tent over it with the speed and ease of long practice. The canvas covered the trench and he set his bedroll right next to it.

Completely trusting, I undressed and climbed down into my earthen bed. Before I slipped away, I wondered again how I had come to trust this human man with my life and safety in so short a time. While I slept, I was vulnerable. Sam had the iron shovel. He had used a hammer and tent stakes to put up the tent. If he lured me up here to kill me, there wasn't much I could do to stop him, but I'd already trusted him with things about myself I never told anyone but Josef. I even described my freezer to Sam. Beth had never seen that room, my lair, as she'd probably call it, unless she peeked that night I was tracking a serial killer. She found other things then, but I didn't smell her presence in my hideaway. I felt the sunrise glowing red overhead like a ball of fire, and then I was out.

It was late afternoon when Sam woke me, a few hours before sunset. The late sun didn't hurt as much as the morning did. I went down to the stream and washed as well as I could, then dressed. Before Sam took down the tent, he handed me my cooler. We sat companionably in the shade, not speaking. He drank his juice and ate some cookies. I drank my blood. "We'll get there before midnight," Sam said. "There's one stop I need to make first. I think they'll still be open. It's Thursday, right?"

"Right." I didn't ask; I'd see where we were going when we got there.

"I'll explain what I can, but don't ask questions inside, okay?" It was like the reverse of yesterday when we pulled up to the Vampire club. The sign said "Deer Farm", but there were odd characters afterwards, foreign letters, but not in a language I knew.

We walked together to the office. The man behind the counter gave Sam a big smile. "Hey! Shmuel!"

"Dovid! Ma Nishma?" Sam responded.

"Kol BeSeder. We haven't seen you around here since last summer."

"I was working in Manhattan at that place I told you about. I'm heading home to the reservation for a visit and I need a deer butchered. Can you save me the blood? A couple of quarts should do."

The bearded man at the desk wore a small head covering. I suddenly realized what he was. The man looked at me, then said that they usually sold the blood to a fertilizer place. "We can't use it; you know that."

"I know. It's traif," Sam said. "But not for us. I'll pay you extra. Do you have a very clean container? We have to keep it fresh and I don't want it to coagulate before I get it home. I'll return your container when I pass by here on my way back in a few days. Keep the deer whole except for the stomach and the guts, would you please? And wrap it in something to keep it cold."

"Sure. Do you want to help? You know what you're doing."

"I'd like for my friend to watch this. He's an expert."

The man looked at me quizzically. "On kosher slaughtering?"

"No. On blood." The man led us back to the slaughterhouse.

We were back in the car with the deer and a white plastic-topped bucket. Sam put his car in gear and we took off into the gathering night. "What did you say to each other when you first came in?"

"The usual. 'How's it going? Everything's fine' - that kind of thing. We were speaking Hebrew. I help them during their busy season and they pay me in meat and blood for the tribe. I also learn a little. Kosher means acceptable, according to Jewish Law. Deer is kosher if it's slaughtered correctly. They do that at here, by slicing through the windpipe and letting the blood gush away. Sometimes, they save it to sell.

"Kosher butchers have customers who will pay premium prices for the rare treat of kosher venison, but they have a commandment against drinking blood. Their Bible says blood is 'life' and it belongs to God, so people who keep to their laws are not allowed to consume it. They even roast liver to make sure all the residual blood is burned away. I read that. Francis told me in the really old days, people in certain countries thought Vampires were gods. That was before they developed a bad reputation."

"Kind of like cats," I said, fascinated at the way Sam described things. "I heard back in ancient Egypt, cats were honored, if not as gods, as something special. In the Middle Ages, they were demonized and people blamed them for the plague. Of course, the more cats they killed, the more people died. Cats and people can live together. So can people and vampires, when there are rules." I had not expected Sam to be such a libertarian and a scholar of history, but there was a lot about Sam I never would have expected. He was no Freshie, in it for the thrill, but a student of history and a lot more. No wonder he was interested in us.

I'd learned a lot in my 85 years, but tonight I learned something new. "So you can't be kosher and be a vampire too. Good thing I was raised Catholic, I guess. How did you find out about this place?"

"Internet. I can't visit home without presents. You didn't really think I was going hunting in the dark, did you?"

I lifted my hands in surrender. "I had no idea," I admitted. "I'm just a tourist in your life today. You said some of your people think you're too modern. What will they say about purchasing kosher deer meat instead of hunting it?"

"Times change. My grandmother knows that, but some won't accept that we should live any differently than we did generations ago. It's a different world. By the way, would you like some deer blood now or would you prefer to wait until we get to my family's house? They'll want to toast you, our guest. They'll be curious to know if you have the stomach for it. I won't say anything if you don't." He winked. I wouldn't have caught it without my special vision.

"I think it can wait," I said. My friend Logan was known to drain cats. It would take more than ingesting deer blood to kill me, but I wasn't that anxious. We got to the reservation about 10 O'clock. The roads were kind of paved with gravel and the car complained. We pulled up at a small house. Children ran out into the road to see who was coming. People started calling Sam by name and all the lights came on in the house. The next thing I knew, a middle-aged woman was embracing him. A very old woman hobbled to the door. "Sammy!" she said.

He kissed her cheek. "Let me introduce my friend Mick to you and then we'll unload the car," he said. "Mick. My grandma. You can call her Mrs. Birchtree."

"Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Birchtree" I said politely. So this was Sam's famous grandmother. She smiled, but then looked at me uncertainly. She nodded her head towards her grandson who had gone to unload the car.

"Sam does find the strangest friends," she said softly, but she smiled me a welcome anyway.