An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3), Fred Saberhagen [best large ereader .txt] 📗

the man said, in answer to a chocked-out, embarrassingly feeble protest. “I like the idea of you being one. I really do.”

    He then let go of Joe’s arms so suddenly that his victim was left off balance and did a prat-fall on the thick carpet. “All right, pull out the gun.” The huge man’s voice was perilously soft. “Go on.”

    In eight years he’d never drawn it, except on the firing range. He was ready to use it now, except the big guy was just too willing. Some fighter’s instinct warned Joe to choose another tactic. There was a small end-table within arm’s reach, and as Joe crouched to get up he seized it by one leg. Whipping it ahead of him as he rose, he jabbed it into the giant’s face as hard as he could. He got the surprise he wanted, and felt the table connect with what ought to have been a knockout impact.

    But his opponent came at him right through the blow. Again Joe scrambled backward; the table was knocked from his grasp. Now he tried in earnest to draw his gun, but the quickness of his enemy was as incredible as his strength, and again Joe’s arm was caught before his fingers could reach the holster.

    This time, it seemed, the arm might in fact be twisted off—

    “Stop!” The sharp command in the woman’s voice brought the torture to a halt. Joe was dropped to the floor, where he rolled helplessly for a moment, trying to verify that nothing in his arm was broken or seriously torn.

    Somewhere above him, Carol lectured. “The object is to learn something from him, remember?”

    “Whatta you want to learn? He’ll tell us.”

    “I want him to speak to us freely, Poach. Giving little details that will be clues, though he may not realize it. And I want to waste none of his sweet blood, if we can help it.” Her voice, that had begun normally, ended in a ghastly whisper, and long before she had finished speaking, Poach had moved away. Joe, getting shakily to his feet, could see the other man’s forehead marked with an almost straight horizontal line, oozing red. Poach dabbed at his hurt with a finger, looked back at Joe with the eyes of a wounded predator.

    But Carol was standing between them now, a hypodermic in her hand. “I have a little something here for you, Joe. It will only make you sleepy. Are you going to be a sensible young man and let me do it?  Or are you going to try again to—”

    He tried again. Ten seconds later he had a few more minor bruises, had discovered that a heavy metal ashtray made no more impression on either of his foes than knuckles did, and was being held down like an infant atop a great wooden table, a drafting or designing table of some kind, one place in the room where lights were bright. He could feel his shirt and jacket being peeled back partially from one shoulder. About all he could see from under the elbow that held his head immobilized, face down, was part of the nearest wall. What appeared to be a pair of harpoons were mounted there, crossed diagonally like fencing foils. Crude, early harpoons perhaps; even their heads were wood, or like wood, with pointy wooden barbs…

    The needle stung him in the shoulder and almost at once the world dissolved into a fog, a haze through which two pale faces hovered over Joe. One was haloed by read hair, the other blued with gun-metal stubble and bloodied with a forehead crease. Both of them were made gigantic by his own helpless terror.

    “Where is the old man, Joe? You know who I mean.”

    He knew who she meant, all right, but nothing more. If he had, he would have told her. He had been relieved of all choice in what he said.

    Carol was gentle and understanding. “If you don’t know where he is now, Joe, tell us where you saw him last.”

    “That house…out in the country…the night we…”

    “The night Gruner was killed. Yes. And where before that?”

    His mouth worked by itself. And he had to do was lie there on the table and observe the process. He mentioned the Southerland house, the parking lot of the Shores Motel, the Loop, the mausoleum in Lockwood Cemetery…

    “Enough,” said Carol when he started to repeat himself, and his mouth shut up at once. She turned to Poach. “That mausoleum ought to be worth a try. First, do you know where Lockwood Cemetery is? And, second, can you check it out before sunset? Do not try to meet him alone at night.”

    “You tell me that about twice a day.”

    “Because I don’t think you believe me, Poach. Look up the cemetery on the city map.”

    “Okay, okay. Then what about the house? We got to try to get in there sometime.”

    “Yes, the house too, today. If—”

    “Before sunset. I know. I’m on my way.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

   Sitting up in bed, Craig Walworth could feel on one side of his throat the paired coolnesses of two fresh drops of painless blood. No mirror at hand to see them in, but he knew from past experience they were so small that touching them would mark his finger with red specks barely visible

    “A couple of months ago,” he remarked, “you couldn’t have convinced me it was possible for people to really get their kicks doing this. I mean relatively normal people.”

    Carol had just rolled away from him and now her naked body lay curved in a far quadrant of the huge circular bed, her flame of hair almost covering an outsize pillow. Beyond her the unshaded window, twenty stories above observation, looked