The Vampire Murders: 6/?
by Nan Smith
Previously:
Lois looked quickly around, but there was no sign of life. She almost jumped when a seagull screeched a minute later.
"Guess we're disturbing the wildlife," Clark whispered. "We'd better make tracks."
"Before we do I want to get this place's address," Lois said. "Just in case we have to come back."
"Okay, but hurry."
**********
And now, Part 6:
Rounding the corner of the house some few minutes later, Lois looked around carefully for guards, or any sign of the advertised prowl car, but she saw nothing. The house number was located prominently on the right side of the door, and she copied it quickly.
"Hey!" A flashlight pinned her against the door, and she saw the pudgy form of the security guard lumbering toward them. "You two stop right there!"
Needless to say, the Hottest Team in Town did nothing of the kind. Clark grabbed her hand and the two of them ran. The street dividing the little beach resort from the rest of Old Town was only sparsely traveled at this time of night, and they fled across it as fast as they could move, dodging the two cars that happened to be traversing the thoroughfare. Only one driver slammed on his brakes and blew his horn indignantly, but they gained the opposite sidewalk intact and fled toward the main avenue that intersected it a short distance away.
Casting a look over her shoulder, Lois saw that the guard had given up the pursuit and was leaning against a streetlamp, apparently trying to catch his breath. They rounded the corner on flying feet and slowed down at once to a casual walk. No point in attracting the attention even of the two or three lone individuals in sight..
"Whew!" Clark said. "I think we lost him."
Lois laughed a little hysterically. "At least one thing went right."
"What do you want to do now?"
She looked at him in astonishment. "We need to go back to Cost Mart. I need to know what was in all those boxes. I'm guessing weapons, from the weight, but I could be wrong."
"You're probably right," Clark said, "but there's likely a lot of people still milling around inside. Maybe we should try coming back during the day. If we go in with a lot of shoppers, we might have a better chance of getting in without them noticing. I mean," he added, "they just smuggled whatever it is into the store. It's probably not going any farther tonight."
Lois had to think about that, before reluctantly admitting that he had a valid point. "But I still want to be sure they're not shipping whatever it is out once they got it into the store," she said. "Let's get the Jeep and just sort of park across from the lot, and watch them for a while."
"In the shadows," Clark specified. "Where they can't tell if anyone's in the car."
She cast him an exasperated look. "Nah, I was thinking of driving up to the front door and asking if we could help them move their smuggled goods! Don't try to teach Grandma how to knit, country boy."
Clark snorted. "You've been hanging around me too much, city girl."
The SUV, naturally, was parked two blocks on the other side of Cost Mart from their current location, but they made a point to pass near the big box store to see if any obvious activity was taking place. The parking lot was in darkness. There was no sign of life, although Lois was quite sure that inside the store there was a good deal of action going on.
A shadowy figure bearing a flashlight strolled casually around the building's corner and ambled at no great speed across the store front, flashing his light around in a careless way. Other than that, Lois could see no sign of life.
Clark was fiddling with his glasses. "Store security," he whispered. "I don't see anyone else, do you?"
Lois shook her head. "No. Let's see if we can get a look through the windows."
"I thought we were going to get the Jeep."
"We are. This will just take a minute."
But, as might have been predicted, the side windows of the building were locked and shuttered. Old Town's Cost Mart, to all appearances, was deserted and closed up tight.
They looked at each other.
"Okay," Lois conceded. "You go get the Jeep. I'll wait and watch the store until you get back."
"Are you crazy?" Clark whispered. "We know there are a bunch of smugglers inside this place! I'm not leaving you here alone!"
She glared back at him unapologetically. "I'll be fine! Besides, somebody's got to watch until the other one gets back with the car, and if anything goes wrong I can defend myself better than you can, unless you've been taking secret Tae Kwon Do lessons! Hurry up! The sooner you go, the sooner you'll get back!"
Clark stared back at her, frustration evident in his expression, and she knew she had won. "Go on! Hurry up! If anybody comes out we're going to need the Jeep to follow him!"
Clark hesitated and she thought he was gritting his teeth. "All right," he said finally, "but I'm not leaving until you're across the street, out of sight of anybody in that place that decides to check."
"I'll be fine," she repeated, her command none the less fierce for being uttered in a whisper. "Go!"
"Not until you're away from this building," Clark said stubbornly. "That's final!"
Once in a while, when Clark felt strongly about something, nothing she could say was going to move him, and Lois had begun to recognize when she had reached that point. This was one of those times.
"All right!" she whispered back. Without hesitation, she headed for the crosswalk and marched across the street, barely pausing to allow the traffic light to change. Clark hurried after her. She strode toward the corner and rounded it, pausing in the shelter of the canopy of a long-since closed restaurant. "There!" she said, looking challengingly at him. "I can see the place without them seeing me. Now will you go?"
Behind his worried expression, she could swear she could see a grin lurking. "All right, but please don't go any closer until I get back. Promise?"
"All right, I promise," she said in exasperation. "Now go on!"
Clark looked at her for another long moment and then nodded. "Okay. But I'll need the keys."
"Oh." She fished them out of the pocket of her jacket and dropped them into his hand. "There. Go."
Without another word, he turned and jogged away. Lois watched him until he crossed the street and vanished around the corner, half a block from her position. Silence, except for the much reduced and mostly distant sounds of traffic, and the occasional short blasts of wind, descended.
The street wasn't exactly deserted, since Metropolis never actually slept, but there were only one or two pedestrians within sight, and none of them were less than a block from her. Every now and then a car rolled down the street, but they were scarce as well. Standing in the shadow of the closed and shuttered restaurant, out of the pool of light from the nearest of Old Town's light poles, for the first time Lois became aware of the near quiet that reigned around her, and the shadows that lay between the pools of yellow light cast by the old-fashioned street lamps. The breeze that gusted erratically between the buildings was chilly, and she pulled her coat more snugly around her. Unexpectedly, she found herself hoping that Clark wouldn't take long. The area was somehow more intimidating without the solid bulk of her partner beside her.
Knock it off, Lois! she told herself. She had done this kind of thing before Clark had become her partner, and she was more experienced now. Certainly, no mugger was going to catch her by surprise where she stood, and even if someone tried, she could handle it. She was a week away from taking her test for Tae Kwon Do black belt at the dojang. Unless somebody showed up with a gun, she could handle stray assailants. Besides, Clark would be back in minutes with the Jeep. There was no reason to get nervous, just because she was standing here on a dim street of Old Town, by herself at -- she glanced at her watch -- two-fifteen in the morning.
From somewhere she heard the faintest hint of flapping of wings and twisted her head around to try to locate the sound. Probably a pigeon roosting somewhere in the eaves of the building behind her, she thought. Unbidden, the image of that rough, wooden coffin in that little stone room below the surface of the Cost Mart parking lot came to mind. Instantly, she banished the image. Vampires didn't exist, and even if they did, there were no legends of vampires among the Native American Indians.
But that crypt had shown signs of European influence, too, she reminded herself. So the European settlers had been here when that crypt was dug.
But that had no relation to anything, she reminded herself. Superstitions couldn't hurt anyone, and that was all this vampire thing was. Those bodies in the park had been put there by some human agency -- one that liked to play games. Probably the culprits were inside Cost Mart right at this minute, figuring that they had confused the police.
Another rustling of wings and more flapping, louder this time. Lois strained her ears, trying to discover where the sound was coming from. And then --
From somewhere above her, something large went by in a rush of air. Lois felt it rather than saw it. She ducked, which was silly, she reminded herself a second later. She was under a canopy, and nothing was going to descend on her from above without some kind of warning. She moved forward so that she could peer upward in the direction the thing had gone, but she could see nothing against the cloudy sky.
The flapping of wings had gone silent, she realized, all at once. There was no motion around her at all.
Her spine prickling, Lois backed under the canopy, as far back against the stone of the building as she could. It had probably been an owl, she thought, but if there was something out there, like that thing that Bobby Bigmouth had described, the thing that he thought had killed his friend, she wasn't going to help it surprise her. Whatever that had been, it certainly hadn't been Superman.
Motion out of the corner of her eye caught her attention, and she drew in a gasp of relief, when she saw the Jeep turn the corner and roll toward her. Clark pulled up next to her hiding spot and in an instant Lois yanked the passenger door open, jumped into the cab and slammed the door behind her, locking it all in one motion.
"What's the matter?" Clark asked at once.
"Nothing," Lois said. "It's cold out there when you aren't moving around."
The look he gave her told her he didn't believe the explanation for a minute, but she had no intention of letting him know that her imagination had been getting the best of her out there in the dark. Whatever that had been that had swooped past her had probably been an owl or something. She'd seen them at night occasionally when driving past Centennial Park. Didn't they eat mice or something? There were bound to be mice around the bay and in a part of the city so given over to little outside coffee shops and snack stands, so there were probably owls here, too. Determinedly, she shoved the incident to the deeper recesses of her mind and directed her attention to the business at hand. "Find a place to park where we can watch the doors and the parking lot for a little while and where they can't see us very well. Once we're sure they're not going anywhere tonight, we can go home."
"I'm all for that," Clark said. "I think we've found more than enough for one night. I just don't think they'll risk moving whatever it is right now. A bunch of trucks driving around Metropolis's streets at two-thirty in the morning is bound to get somebody's attention. I'd think they've got some other scheme to dispose of their contraband."
"Yeah, probably." Lois wasn't about to admit that she was pretty tired. It had been a very tiring evening, filled with unexpected developments, and she was ready to go home, crawl into bed, and catch some sleep. But first things first. "But we're going to be sure. I'm not losing this story because Bill Senior or his little boy decided to put one over on the Metro Police and move out their contraband before anyone could get a warrant to search the place."
"Okay, okay." Clark drove cautiously around the block, and when he returned to the street that ran across in front of Cost Mart, he turned left instead of right, let the car roll to a stop in the shadow of a tall, evergreen tree, fifteen feet from the corner and cut the motor.
Lois relaxed. Somehow, sitting safely in the cab of the Jeep, with Clark sitting next to her, all the nervousness she had felt earlier was gone. They sat still in the darkened vehicle, watching the Cost Mart store.
Silence descended. The street grew quieter, although the occasional lone passersby went past the Jeep, walking briskly along the sidewalk. There was no activity to be seen at the Cost Mart.
At last, when three-thirty had come and gone, Lois was forced to concede that there would probably be no more action tonight. She yawned behind her hand. "Let's go," she said through the yawn, "I'm thinking more about my warm bed than anything else right now."
"You got it." Clark turned on the engine, backed carefully out of their hidden parking space, turned on the lights and moved slowly and carefully forward on the street.
As he turned the corner, the headlights illuminated a single figure standing on the sidewalk. A man wearing a dark suit and a dark, form-fitting overcoat. He lifted his face as the lights flashed across him, and Lois saw a face that she would not forget for some time.
The face was narrow and pale, with dark, piercing eyes and a head of thick, black hair. As the headlights illuminated his features, he ducked his face, shading his eyes, half covering it with the lapel of his form-fitting, black coat. Then, he stepped swiftly backward out of the passing lights and was gone.
**********
tbc
