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Originally written Thursday, January 5, 2006

“And you said they’re super-secret? So no one knows who’s in this group?” Already I was trying to figure out how to infiltrate the inner circle, if only because I needed to know for certain that I wasn’t a second-degree murderer.

“Not til they die, I guess. Since it’s been going on so long"—the club’s been around for nearly twenty years—"there are undercover police there constantly. They’ve been trying to find this group and weasel their way in forever, Joey says. They never have, though.” Now that the juiciest parts of the story were out, she went back to her food, picking up stray toppings between her fingers and waving them around while she spoke. “And you know what’s even weirder? Sometimes there are kids at the club with those puncture wounds in their necks like bite marks, right? And they think it’s cool to just go around like that like they hooked up with a creature of the night. So of course they get arrested sometimes, tested for drugs. The cops think these are the kids in that cult. But word in the pipeline is that they’ve never, ever come up dirty. Not for heroin, anyway. Maybe for LSD, X, other club drugs. But for anything they’d’ve had to shoot up, they’re neg every time. Swearing up and down they know nothing about the junkies.”

“How do they explain the marks?”

“How do you think? They say they were playing vampire.”

“Wow. Just… wow. I don’t think I have anything to say to all that.” Not to Jeanine, anyway. But much to Trudy. Maybe to Craig, her hookup that night. And possibly to Joey, too. I was glad to have agreed to couples night a few minutes earlier. I did have one small thing to ask, however. “So what do you think of it?”

“I think it’s just crazy. I mean, there are holes in the story, but it’s hard to come up with any better explanation.”

“Like what? What holes?”

“Like how hard it is to find these people. The CIA these days has more leaks than they do. Not counting… sorry. I was about to make a really tasteless joke.”

“About their wounds?”

“Yeah.”

“Not a problem. I find your tastelessness endearing.”

“I’m glad someone does. But the pizza? Not tasteless.” She held up a very large piece and let a couple of sundried tomatoes drop to her plate.

“Not at all. Quite tasteful, in fact. Or tasty. Go us.” I finished my last bite. Since she’d been doing most of the talking, I was doing most of the eating.

“Agreed.” And then she adopted change-of-subject tone. Or change-the-subject-back tone. “So it’s funny. But I guess maybe you wouldn’t know, or maybe you’d have said something.”

“About what?”

“About playing vampire. That’s what I thought your friend Trudy was doing with that guy when we found them.”

The events of this day to be continued...