The Shake

officials in local and state law enforcement, as well as to California’s attorney general and the governor’s office. These were emotional pleas to find her husband’s murderer and clear his name. She was positive Dean had not been involved in any form of illegal activity. It was inconceivable, to her at least, that he was either selling or using drugs.
There were responses to some of these letters; all sympathetic and sincere expressions of bureaucratic buck-passing and indifference. In the absence of new evidence, everything that could be done was being done. The case was still open, but due to limited resources and case loads, blah blah blah. There was also a business card for Hamilton Investigations, LLC. The card was paper clipped together with two receipts for services rendered and a photograph cut out of the newspaper.
That was when things started to get more interesting. The face of the man in the photo was familiar, but it took a second to register. His name was Ron Richardson, a local real estate tycoon and building contractor. By all outward appearances, Ron was a respected member of the community, an active supporter of numerous cultural and charitable foundations, a family man with two happily married daughters, and a devout, though sadly divorced, Catholic. Outward appearances aside, he was also a major player in northern California’s illegal drug trade.
Ever since the drug business really started to take off, back in the 60s, traffickers had been a particular interest of mine. I kept an eye on the people who ran these organizations and was in fact indebted to them. I owed a large part of my financial independence to the fact that, operating as they do in an illegal and magnificently lucrative business, they often have very large sums of cash in their possession. Snatching a slice of their pie now and then was an easy way to fatten my bank account.
Richardson had been on my watch list for a couple of years. I’d been playing with the idea of coercing him into some kind of relationship that would allow me to forego the inconvenience of having to steal his money. There were basically two ways I could have gone about this. The less appealing would have been to provide him with some kind of service. I wasn’t too keen on this approach. It went against my general policy of avoiding complicated business arrangements with humans. The other approach was more to my liking: extort the money by scaring him senseless.
Ron seemed to be fairly typical of people in the higher echelons of the drug business. Barbarians, basically, these were people whose arrogance provided them with all the justification they needed to remain indifferent to the damage and suffering their greed inflicted on their fellow humans. In that sense, I suppose he wasn’t much different from your typical businessman. Typically, too, he put considerable effort into promoting his public image. Considering the scope of his illegal activities, quiet anonymity would have made more sense. But Richardson wasn’t the quiet type. His vanity required him to be in the limelight. I was curious how someone like him could manage to keep his public persona so pristine. I didn’t know of any negative publicity suggesting that the police were aware of his drug trafficking activities. This could have meant he was both smarter and more cautious than most. But more likely it meant that he was paying off all the right people.
Finding Richardson’s photo in Francine’s trunk was an unexpected coincidence, but little more than that. I probably would have dropped the matter had it not been for one other little detail. In the same block letters used on the envelope, Francine had printed the word “BLOODSUCKER” on the back of Richardson’s photo. I sat for a minute contemplating this word, “BLOODSUCKER.” It wasn’t a term I preferred to use in reference to those of my kind. In Richardson’s case the intent was no doubt figurative. The blood Richardson sucked from his victims was in the form of dollars. But it was one of those little blips on the radar that sometimes teased my sense of synchronicity.
Maybe Francine had discovered some reason to doubt Richardson’s public image. Maybe she even had reason to think Richardson was involved in her husband’s death. From a purely practical standpoint, if Richardson was mixed up in Dean’s murder, I might be able to use the threat of exposure to leverage money out of him. Of course, I didn’t need that kind of leverage. I was quite capable of applying my own. Either way, I thought it might be worth looking into. If I could uncover something that might make it easier to extort money from Richardson, fine. If not, it wouldn’t matter. I could fall back on my own distinctive methods of coercion.
I put everything back in the trunk, then returned to the bathroom for a final check on Francine. The water in the tub had already drained down several inches. Perfect. I left by the back door, locking it on the way out so the police would be less likely to suspect she’d had visitors.

Chapter 3
Any traumatic event can leave one feeling like his life has been split in two, divided into a before and after. War often does this to men who have survived combat. Natural disasters or a near-fatal illness can have the same effect. But no matter how traumatic an event might be, it will not break the underlying continuity of being human. Only death does that. Or becoming a vampire.
Being turned severed me from my human past. The split was not total—remnants have survived from my former existence—but the underlying continuity was cut. The first forty years of my life provided the raw material for what I was to become, but the change was so nearly total that the human part of my life seemed to be stripped of significance. Becoming a vampire was a corner around which, once turned, I could not