But no, the evil bastard said to me, I cannot see you this weekend. Busy, you know, very busy, and the weekend after that, and the weekend after that. Probably forever.

Okay, so it was a mistake, I should never have mentioned the desire to know what goes on inside his head, probably he misunderstood me and thought I wanted to crack his head open and eat his brain, the way the Japanese do to monkeys. Oh, I wouldn't do that, he should know.

This was a lie and we knew it; Reverend Robertson had never trusted Reverend Andy, and with good reason since the man was a schizophrenic paranoid. But Reverend Andy wouldn't give up that easy; he shook his head in disgust and Loose Lucy chuckled menacingly. "Wickedness!" screamed Reverend Andy suddenly as we zoomed along with the top down, "vile evil nasty communist ACLU wickedness! Naked, writhing bodies covered in Crisco oil, doing vile evil nasty communist ACLU things to each other!" He shuddered with the overwhelming wickedness of it all and then said to Loose Lucy, "Give me my medicine, bitch, I'm in need." And he snorted it back and laughed maniacally, "Oh, oh, that's good medicine, the Lord bless that evil doctor who fucked me over on these!"

Anyhow, that was the final straw because that doctor, he was a good friend of ours, you know? So we stopped the car and heated up some coals, and clamped Reverend Andy down and cut off the top of his head, just like with the monkeys. Then we poured the coal inside his brain, and waited until it had cooked properly, and yes it was a great delicacy, with that fine charcoal flavor.

So anyhow Tony I'm coming to get you now, and we are going to have to do lunch together and settle this misunderstanding once and for all. You promised to get me drunk and I haven't forgotten, you bastard. You can run, but you can't hide. Justice lurks behind the bushes these days. I mean that's what Reverend Andy said before we ate his brain.

I came up out of the gloom off the San Diego freeway, whipped it onto Sunset Boulevard at sixty-five miles an hour. Playing an old Joe Walsh CD, we were just done with Theme From Boat Weirdos, and into Life's Been Good, lyrics stomping through my mind in demented counterpoint to the essential eeriness of my life, Walsh snarling at me that he locked his limo door, in case of attack--

Attacked by what, you senile old fool? The letter sat beside me on the passenger's seat of the old '69 Sports Satellite. Not a bad letter, no; but even the knowledge that it was going to scare Tony bad, or maybe piss him off, didn't cheer me up much. I zoomed east on Sunset, cut over onto Barrington, and dropped the letter off at the Brentwood Post office; he'd have it in UCLA's Friday morning mail.

Having a bad time of it, you know: Thursday evening in a cold January month, and the chills hitting me bad. I hadn't managed to keep anything down all day, nothing; I'd been bitten twice, and she was looking for me.

I had to see Tony tomorrow.

The warped son of a bitch thought I was a vampire. There was this false note of hysterical cheerfulness in his voice when I talked to him late Thursday afternoon, you know, "Let's do lunch," someplace sunny he was thinking.

Had the shakes again by the time I retraced Barrington up to Sunset Boulevard; from Brentwood you have to drive through Westwood and Beverly Hills to reach Hollywood, but I didn't mind. Driving down Sunset Boulevard is relaxing, even during rush hour; Sunset is a particularly civilized piece of road. My best friend Doctor Death says she thinks that Sunset Boulevard was an accident of design that can't, in this degenerate age, be duplicated. It's likely.

I love Sunset.

It's a good street; cool and serene in the summer, or splashed with neon on the warm rainy nights of winter, while the people wander around from club to shop to restaurant, to the theaters and comedy houses. My life is here; the Laff Connection and the Comedy Store and the Schtick; south of Hollywood Boulevard, and thank God, north of Wilshire, and the Evil Improv on Melrose.

I do love it. If it wasn't for this one street, I'd go live in Northern California somewhere, on one of those big, four-story tall black rocks that jut up out of the ocean thirty yards from shore. Or maybe I'd just buy the very top of a mountain somewhere, something like that.

East on Sunset, just going with the traffic.

And so I tried to relax and shake off some of the vicious weirdness of the day just past, hunched away inside my apartment with the windows in my bedroom painted black to keep out the light.

And drove.

I lost it somewhere around UCLA. I'd been fading in and out ever since I left home.

Hungry.

I sat at a stoplight, waiting for the light to change, and then a sudden horrible flashback gripped me: waves, really good waves, crashing against the beach, and riding them are the vampires, a dozen or so, surfing, and for one hideous moment I wasn't sure if this was just some evil dream, or something that really happened, maybe around Malibu, and I came out of it with the sound of the horn from the car behind me, astonishingly loud, reverberating in my skull, and burned rubber pulling away.

I pulled into the parking lot at The Duke's Daughter at 6:20. Somebody, one of Buck's Boys no doubt, had graffitied the west wall: Peter Buck is God. The parking lot was still mostly empty; the crowds don't show up at Duke's until after eight o'clock, weeknights. I recognized only two of the cars; the red Porsche belonged to Dreadful Sam, and the big white Caddy meant that the Duke's Daughter himself was there.

Once I closed down Duke's with about a dozen friends; I think it was a Wednesday night. About four a.m., Mick "The Duke's Daughter" Cohen was very earnestly explaining his choice of lifestyle to a group of his regulars, myself among them. It was all those old John Wayne movies, he explained in a rare burst of honesty; it was the closest I ever heard him come to admitting that he was not John Wayne's illegitimate daughter. "When I was a little girl, I used to watch him on the television, and I tell you, there wasn't ever anything else I ever wanted to do except be a cowboy. And then"--Mick blinked at all of us with an expression of utter woe--"I found out he was just an actor." Nobody laughed. Mick shrugged at length, and took a huge belt straight from the neck of a bottle of dark rum. "We all have problems."

Yeah.

I eased the old Sports Satellite into place next to Dreadful Sam's cherry red Porsche, set the alarm, grabbed my duster out of the passenger's seat, and went inside.

There's a sign that greets you upon entering The Duke's Daughter:

Duke's is a split-level bar, upstairs and down. There are booths on the bottom half, and large tables for large parties, and a long bar with stools for traditionalists. Upstairs are small tables with big, comfortable chairs you can sink into and hide from the world.

I didn't see Dreadful Sam, but Terminal Sue was tucked away in a corner, talking to a tall guy wearing black leather, a purple vest and a black fedora; she nodded to me as I came in. A big blonde guy in white, with a falcon on his shoulder, stood at the bar with a bottle in one hand and a shot glass in the other, pouring into the shot glass, tossing it back, and refilling with metronomic regularity. The bird was a white peregrine and it looked bored. They ignored me and I ignored them and went upstairs, took one of the seats near a window looking out over Sunset Boulevard, and waited for somebody to notice my existence.

The waiter who finally took my order was old and bitchy, your basic aging effeminate gay crossword puzzle fanatic. "What'll it be tonight, big boy?" His voice was pitched higher than his throat was really designed for, and his eyes were outlined with pastel blue eyeliner. Aside from that he might have been the waiter at any Jewish delicatessen, say Canter's. He flipped open his order pad and poised a pencil over it.

"Bud Dry. In the bottle. Unopened. Cold."

He held the pencil very still, and finally raised his eyes up from the pad. He looked me over carefully, the midnight black duster coat and the sunglasses. His hands dropped to his hips. "Well, my goodness," he said at last, "cheap black plastic sunglasses. I haven't seen a pair of those since Dirty Harry went out of style."

I stared back at him with my cheap black plastic sunglasses. "Bud Dry. One. In the bottle. In about fifteen minutes if you're not busy you can bring me another."

He shook his head in apparent disgust, and scribbled something on his pad. "Do you really need those trashy things indoors?" he asked rhetorically, since he knew deep in his heart that there was no way that I could possibly have a decent answer.

But you know, I had one for him. It goes, When you're cool, the sun shines on you twenty-four hours a day. When you're young, you use those lines whenever the occasion arises. Maturity teaches you not to waste the good lines on the help. I snarled, "Mind your own fucking business," which he seemed to understand.

The bottle of Dry came quickly. Mick doesn't tolerate lazy waiters. Rude, because the regulars seem to like that; but not lazy. I said "Thank you," and he seemed to have forgotten that he disliked me. He was new at Duke's and still getting into the swing of it.

I drank the beer and tried to relax. The balcony level is tucked onto Duke's northwest corner, giving a view up into the Hollywood Hills, and west, out over Sunset Boulevard. Rush hour traffic had just about finished its crawl down the Boulevard, and the street was nearly fit for decent people to drive on.

About seven, as things were starting to get busy, Mick showed. He dropped himself down in the booth across from me and said in a deep, gravely voice, "People are looking for you, Thomas."

"Oh?"

Mick wore a working cowboy outfit with mascara and false lashes; kind of restrained. If he'd wiped the makeup off you could have cast him in a Western, if they still made the kind Mick liked. "You blew off Connie, over at the Schtick. When you didn't show yesterday he had to go up on stage and do one of his old routines, and you know how those go over."

"Yeah, well." I studied my Bud. "Not my fault, man. I've been sick."

"Really?" Mick studied me. "You look like hell," he conceded. "You had the test?"

"Yeah. Twice, negative both times."

"How recently?"

"About four months ago. Terry and I broke up, and I wanted to start dating again . . . you know."

I saw the relief flicker across his features; the south wall at Duke's, lower level, has, in exquisite tiny print, the names of regulars, or the friends and family of regulars, who've died of the virus. When it started Mick had hung photos of the dead; today those photos would have covered five times as much wall space as Mick had available, with some left over. "So what is it, then?"

"Well, I ate the spaghetti at UnClean Joe's about a week ago."

Mick blinked, long eyelashes bobbing. "Yeah, that'd do it. I'm glad it's nothing bad, Thomas. But get your shit together, OK? I'm not a Goddam message center."

I'd taken the phone off the hook at home; the ringing was making me crazy. "Who else?"

Mick shrugged. "Terminal Sue was looking for people to go shooting with yesterday, she asked about you, but I don't think it was urgent."

It wouldn't have been. I used to work for Terminal Sue; we're still friends, sort of. She's the best private investigator in Los Angeles--she'll tell you so--and there was a time, a couple of years back, when she thought I had promise. She fired me after about six months. I kept getting beaten up, and she was tired of going to the hospital to visit me.

Naturally I went into stand-up.

I decided to wait out the evening rush hour before going home. Rush hour is the four hours between three in the afternoon and seven in the evening. I sat and nursed my Bud, listening to the music. Terminal Sue came up and said hello, and we talked for a bit, and then she had to go--business with Space Nazis, she said, which I hoped was a joke. Around a quarter of eight I was mildly drunk--three longnecks on a stomach that hasn't seen food in two days will do that to you--so the movement, down on the bottom level, didn't kick my adrenal gland into action the way it should have.

I felt very calm; without thinking about what I was doing I stood, took off my sunglasses, looked down onto the first level, and the entrance leapt into focus with dazzling clarity: the door swinging shut, nobody near it.

My hands twitched. I knocked the rest of my Bud back in one long pull, and then the music started, jukebox down on the first floor lighting up as it moved into the song, and I scanned around the balcony, down into the bright gloom of the pit near the bar itself.

Nothing.

Bruce Springsteen. It took me that long to hear what she had put on, and then the man's voice just cut through the babble, I mean right down into my soul--something about things dying and things coming back. It gave me the creeps, and baby that's a fact.

She came up the stairs then. I knew it was Lila, had known it since the door had opened, too silently, and the man's voice started wailing that unearthly song. She was just what I remembered: I stood there with the window at my back watching her come toward me, neither nightmare nor dream, the long blond hair and welding-black sunglasses, and the skin, that impossible golden skin. And she moved, I can't describe the way she moved except that it made me want her.

She took the sunglasses off--

All of a sudden I couldn't see her any more, I was floating and then the ground touched me. I hit rolling and came to my feet looking up, towards the windows that ran around the balcony at Duke's. Glass was still falling around me, falling like rain into the parking lot. Something flickered, appeared in the window and after that I do not remember anything at all until I was on the 405 northbound, my hands clutching the wheel, driving far too fast.