The Best American Noir of the Century

“We’re waiting for you to get here. Then we’re going up to pay him a little visit.”

“I need twenty minutes.”

“Hurry.”

Not even the silver touch of moonlight lent the blocks of crumbling stucco apartment houses any majesty or beauty. The rats didn’t even bother to hide. They squatted red-eyed on the unmown lawns, amid beer cans, broken bottles, wrappers from Taco John’s, and used condoms that looked like deflated mushrooms.

Mike stood behind a tree.

“I followed him around back,” Mike said. “He went up the fire escape on the back. Then he jumped on this veranda. He’s in the back apartment on the right side. Neil’s in the backyard, watching for him.”

Mike looked down at my ball bat. “That’s a nice complement,” he said. Then he showed me his handgun. “To this.”

“Why the hell did you bring that?”

“Are you kidding? You’re the one who said he killed Bob.”

That I couldn’t argue with.

“All right,” I said, “but what happens when we catch him?”

“We tell him to lay off us,” Mike said.

“We need to go to the cops.”

“Oh, sure. Sure we do.” He shook his head. He looked as if he were dealing with a child. A very slow one. “Aaron, going to the cops now won’t bring Bob back. And it’s only going to get us in trouble.”

That’s when we heard the shout. Neil; it sounded like Neil.

Maybe five feet of rust-colored grass separated the yard from the alley that ran along the west side of the apartment house.

We ran down the alley, having to hop over an ancient drooping picket fence to reach the backyard, where Neil lay sprawled, face-down, next to a twenty-year-old Chevrolet that was tireless and up on blocks. Through the windshield, you could see the huge gouges in the seats where the rats had eaten their fill.

The backyard smelled of dog shit and car oil.

Neil was moaning. At least we knew he was alive.

“The son of a bitch,” he said when we got him to his feet. “I moved over to the other side, back of the car there, so he wouldn’t see me if he tried to come down that fire escape. I didn’t figure there was another fire escape on the side of the building. He must’ve come around there and snuck up on me. He tried to kill me, but I had this —”

In the moonlight, his wrist and the switchblade he held in his fingers were wet and dark with blood. “I got him a couple of times in the arm. Otherwise, I’d be dead.”

“We’re going up there,” Mike said.

“How about checking Neil first?” I said.

“I’m fine,” Neil said. “A little headache from where he caught me on the back of the neck.” He waved his bloody blade. “Good thing I had this.”

The landlord was on the first floor. He wore Bermuda shorts and no shirt. He looked eleven or twelve months pregnant, with little male titties and enough coarse black hair to knit a sweater with. He had a plastic-tipped cigarillo in the left corner of his mouth.

“Yeah?”

“Two-F,” I said.

“What about it?”

“Who lives there?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“If you were the law, you’d show me a badge.”

“I’ll show you a badge,” Mike said, making a fist.

“Hey,” I said, playing good cop to bad cop. “You just let me speak to this gentleman.”

The guy seemed to like my reference to him as a gentleman. It was probably the only name he’d never been called.

“Sir, we saw somebody go up there.”

“Oh,” he said. “The vampires.”

“Vampires?”

He sucked down some cigarillo smoke. “That’s what we call ‘em, the missus and me. They’re street people, winos and homeless and all like that. They know that sometimes some of these apartments ain’t rented for a while, so they sneak up there and spend the night.”

“You don’t stop them?”

“You think I’m gonna get my head split open for something like that?”

“I guess that makes sense.” Then: “So nobody’s renting it now?”

“Nope, it ain’t been rented for three months. This fat broad lived there then. Man, did she smell. You know how fat people can smell sometimes? She sure smelled.” He wasn’t svelte.

Back on the front lawn, trying to wend my way between the mounds of dog shit, I said, “‘Vampires’ Good name for them.”

“Yeah, it is,” Neil said. “I just keep thinking of the one who died. His weird eyes.”

“Here we go again,” Mike said. “You two guys love to scare the shit out of each other, don’t you? They’re a couple of nickel-dime crooks, and that’s all they are.”

“All right if Mike and I stop and get some beer and then swing by your place?”

“Sure,” I said. “Just as long as Mike buys Bud and none of that generic crap.”

“Oh, I forgot.” Neil laughed. “He does do that when it’s his turn to buy, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah,” I said, “he certainly does.”

I was never sure what time the call came. Darkness. The ringing phone seemed part of a dream from which I couldn’t escape. Somehow I managed to lift the receiver before the phone machine kicked in.

Silence. That special kind of silence.

Him. I had no doubt about it. The vampire, as the landlord had called him. The one who’d killed Bob. I didn’t say so much as hello. Just listened, angry, afraid, confused.

After a few minutes, he hung up.