Madame Vera had a car waiting for me, courtesy of Uber Black and no doubt already added to my humungous bill. I rode most of the way back into town in pants-shitting terror, my eyes occasionally seeking out the invoice in my hands and instantly finding that huge number of twelve fucking thousand dollars and a few odd cents. I don't think I have ever seen that much money in one place, not even after cashing out my 401K after I had gotten laid off.

Somehow in my state of panic I managed to call Claude.

"Dude! Are you okay? Where the fuck have you been?"

"Dead. Dying. Mostly dead. I'm not anymore."

"I have so many bad words to say to you, but right now I'm just glad that you're alive."

"I guess that's one test we don't have to run anymore. It's official, I'm one hundred percent not dead anymore. I'm a vampire."

The driver jerked in his seat and I could see him looking at me in the mirror, clearly disturbed.

"Chill out dude.," I said to the driver. "It's just roleplay. I'm not going to bite you."

"What?" Claude said. "Since when were you biting people?"

"I'm not. I was talking to the driver. He's dropping eaves pretty hard right now," I said, and lowered my voice a little, deliberately looking out the window at the passing scenery. "I'm going to need a huge favour—"

"If this involves money to pay off the dealer who shot you in the head, then you've got to be fucking kidding me. I mean I'm glad you're not dead anymore and everything, but no."

Fuck. He knew about Julio and apparently Julio had been talking. A lot.

"No," I said and I heard Claude exhale in relief. "This is about money to pay off expenses with the vampire morgue. I apparently owe them twelve thousand dollars?"

Silence, then: "Did I mention all of the bad words I have to say to you?"

A wave of helplessness and desperation hit me hard then, and looking at the bill for confirmation didn't help at all. I found myself gritting my teeth and could feel my temples throbbing as I realized just how fucked I was. I looked down at the expensive suit that I was wearing and peeked at the bill to see how much the suit had cost me. I almost teared up when I saw a $7500 price on the suit, but the very next line was "Complimentary -$7500", so maybe Madame Vera had taken it easy on me after all.

"Dude, I really need your help here. Do you need me to beg? Is that it? Because I will—"

"Meet me at the Thompson Diner in twenty minutes."

I stared out the window, watching the trees turn into apartment buildings nestled among even more trees and steadily encroaching concrete, and I had a particular flash of clarity about the exact moment my life had gotten so fucked up. It wasn't when I had gotten turned into a vampire, or even when I first burned in the sun, but instead something much more insidious and perfectly ordinary, at least if you were me. It had been the moment I had chosen to take those drugs from Julio. Everything had just gone all fucked up from that moment and I knew it. I wondered what else Julio had been saying about me, if he had been ranting that I was some kind of vampire. I wondered if he had run from the scene of my murder and if some kind of high speed chase had followed that had ended in a blaze of gunfire worthy of a scene in a movie.

My phone buzzed, a text from Claude.

Claude: Don't panic dude. We'll figure this out.

Me: Panic over and done. Mild freaking out to begin in 5...

Claude: As long as it's mild. See you at the diner.

I suddenly realized that the driver was watching me again, probably wondering exactly what kind of psycho he was driving around.

***

For me, and millions of other people, coffee is sanity.

Dr. Mendelsshon was right about the coffee. I was still training myself to go through this ritual instead of pouring and drinking and enjoying the resulting embolism, but it was fairly easy to remember. In restaurants it earned me some really weird looks but I had decided that I really didn't give a fuck, since all I wanted was to drink my coffee. So the waitress would bring me four cups, one empty, two filled with hot water and one filled with coffee. First I poured one third of the coffee into the empty cup and then filled the rest with hot water. Add sugar, stir and blow before I scorched my lips off.

It was a new ritual and one I would come to know very well over the next year, so much so that it was almost automatic, but as it was still new at the time it was one I was still struggling with. The waiter, a skinny dude with a name tag that said "Jimmy" gave me an amused look as he took food to the booth behind mine.

Claude slid smoothly into the booth across from me, startling me with his sudden entrance.

"Dude, where the fuck did you come from?"

Claude got straight to the point.

"Do you know that your shooting didn't even make the news?"

That got my attention in a hurry. I paused from stirring the sugar into my heavily diluted coffee, the clink-clink-clink of the spoon on the mug coming to a sudden stop, then resuming ever so carefully after a moment as I let that particular fact sink in.

"How's that even possible?" I eventually asked.

"Is there something you're not telling me Bob?" Claude wanted to know. "Something happen while I was gone? I ask only because I'm completely in the dark here and I really want to help you, but I can't do that if you're keeping shit from me."

"Maybe..." I said, thinking of Harry and my encounter with the Gentlemen. I had meant to tell Claude everything, but had only loosely filled him in on the barest details about Harry. I hadn't told him a thing about the Gentlemen because even thinking about those guys made me extremely and irrationally terrified that they would show up just by the mere mention of them. Please note that I did mention how irrational that fear was, and yet there was something about it that I really didn't want to test out.

Oh and of course I hadn't told him about Julio and the drugs because frankly that was none of his damn business... except now that it was.

"If it wasn't in the news, how did you find out about it?" I asked.

"Oscar, the new apartment supervisor gave me a call. I've been paying him to keep an eye on you." Claude nodded to Jimmy and mimed drinking a glass of water. I could only stare at Claude in astonishment, my jaw practically hitting the floor.

"You're spying on me?"

"Only since you got turned into a vampire. Somebody's got to look out for you ya know."

Jimmy came over and Claude ordered the burger and a I'm-Sorry-All-We-Have-Is-Pepsi. Jimmy hustled away and I glared defensively at Claude.

"I can take care of myself."

"You just got shot in the face by your drug dealer Bob. How is that taking care of yourself thing working out for you?"

Fuck you dude. I didn't say that, but I thought it really hard.

"Well I'm still here, aren't I?"

"The only reason you're not dead is because you're a vampire, you idiot! If the whole coming back from the dead thing wasn't real, who do you think would be the one making the call to tell your mother how you died? Who do you think would be the one scrubbing your blood off the walls and wondering how his friend could be such a fucking moron? To die in such a pointless way?"

Holy shit.

I must have blinked maybe ten times out of sheer panic that I was getting this reaction from Claude.

How the hell do you respond to the unvarnished truth? How do you respond when you can still remember the pain of the bullets slamming one by one into your body, even though it's a memory you keep looking away from and denying that it even exists?

"Well this got heavy all of a sudden," I tried to smile, but Claude wasn't smiling with me. His usual happy-go-lucky attitude was gone, replaced by earnest caring. That earnestness made me nervous, but honestly it was more the greasy, queasy feeling of rock hard guilt that was making me squirm. "Come on man, at least crack a smile. Relax. I'm not dead anymore."

"Tell me about it then. Tell me why you suddenly owe someone twelve grand?"

"Only if we agree to put the Julio incident behind us. That was stupid and reckless and really, I mean really stupid—"

"You said stupid twice."

"Well, that's just how stupid it was. It bears repeating. Good news is that drugs no longer have any effect on me, so I don't have any use for a dealer anymore, not even if he's not going to shoot me in the face—"

"He ran you know. Julio. The cops had an idea he was involved, but he had taken off long before they figured it out. By the time I got there, your body was already gone but I was hoping that it wasn't you, you know? But I knew, and all I could feel was just this... this rage..." Claude looked me in the eye and it was scary how calm he was. "I... I know some bad people you know. Truly horrible men. I tend to meet them from time to time in my line of work and I always make a point to never work with them again. I don't need that kind of fucked up karma in my life, you know? Well, it turns out that these... horrible men... these guys know how to find people. The cops couldn't find Julio, but these guys did. I got the call while I was still trying to track down where they had taken your body, but it was like you had vanished. There was no record of your body anywhere, but you know what let me know your powerful vampires had gotten involved and that maybe you were still alive somewhere? The official police record of your death didn't exist. They had it down as a domestic disturbance, like it never even happened."

Claude saw my stunned expression and nodded.

"But my guys, my horrible men, they caught Julio and he told them that he had done us all a favour, that they should be giving him a medal because he had killed a fucking real life vampire. He had shot that fucker right in the face. He told them everything, because that's what happens when you get caught by these kinds of horrible men..." Claude trailed off in thought for a moment and then looked back at me, a fake smile cracking his face. "So I'm going to sit here and smile and I'm going to put the Julio incident behind us, because I don't want to think about what I had to do to find the man who killed my best friend."

"What did you do?"

"I did what I hope you would do if you were ever in my place. I got vengeance."

"Claude, I'm sorry—"

"By vengeance I mean we turned him over to the cops."

"Oh. Well that's a relief—"

"Eventually. We turned him over to the cops eventually. I mean you're a vampire, so you were coming back, right?"

If I were a complete sap, I would have almost cried at the raw emotion and honesty coming from Claude and the realization that he really did love me in the way that we men never like to talk about. With that kind of emotion, we beat our chests and make idiot noises and never tell each other the simple words that we tell rather easily to a series of women over the years. He loved me and I had disappointed him. Since I wasn't a complete sap though, I didn't tear up or even tell my friend of twenty years that I loved him right back and I'm sorry I was an idiot. No: I did the thing he and I always did when emotions came up and I made an idiotic joke about it.

"If you were a chick I'd kiss you right now."

See what I mean? Anyway, Claude just rolled his eyes at me, but he played along. This was familiar ground after all.

"If you kissed me I'd have to slap you. You're just not my type dude."

"That's only if you were a chick."

"Still slap."

I had to ask the question that was hanging over my head, even more than Claude's disappointment in me for being a complete idiot.

"So... can you help me out with the twelve thousand dollars?"

"Is someone going to break your kneecaps if you don't pay?"

That hadn't occurred to me to ask.

"If I don't then Madame Vera might be very disappointed in me and as sexy as she was, I don't think I want Madame Vera disappointed in me. Just a feeling in my gut, you know?"

"I need to pee. When I get back, there are going to be lots of words. First we're going to talk about the suit."

"It was for my funeral. You missed it."

"Funeral? How was it?"

"Expensive."

"I can tell by the suit. Fill me in on the details when I get back."

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