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.Drew, Jeff, and Gustavo didn’t show up tonight.”Rivera had Lash get the addresses of the missing Animals from the office and wrote them down in his notebook.“And you don’t think that they might just be out partying?”“We called all the phones, checked their houses,” Lash said.“The door was hanging open at Drew’s, and Jeff had left half a beer in the driveway, which he would never do.Besides, Jeff and Drew mightflake, but Gustavo wouldn’t.We even went to his cousin’s house in Oakland looking for him.”“And he did not esta en la biblioteca either,” said Barry, who, for some reason, believed that all Spanish-speaking people spent a lot of time in the library and had therefore checked there for the intrepid night porter.“No more bodies that you might have forgotten to mention?”“Nuh-uh,” Lash said.“Our money was gone, though.But we’d given it all to Blue anyway.”“I didn’t,” Clint said.“Mutual funds, less ten percent for the church.”“You gave six hundred thousand dollars to a hooker?” Rivera almost slapped the kid.Almost.“Well”-Lash looked at Barry and Troy Lee, then, trying to suppress a grin-“yeah.”Rivera shook his head.“Keep the door locked and don’t report this to anyone else.”“That’s it?” Lash said.“You aren’t going to arrest us or anything?”“For what?” Rivera flipped his notebook closed and tucked it into the inside pocket of his suit coat.“Uh, I don’t know.”“Me either,” said Rivera.“Emperor, you stay inside tonight with these guys.Okay?”“As you wish, Inspector.” The Emperor scratched behind Lazarus’s ears.“That okay?” Rivera said to Lash.Lash nodded.“Are we going to be safe?” he asked.Rivera stopped, looked around at the Animals and the Emperor and his dogs.“Nope,” he said.“Let’s go, Nick.” He turned and walked out the door.T he foghorn was lowing across the Bay as the detectives walked back to their car.Fort Mason, just across the street, was barely visible in the rolling cloud of gray mist.“You think the old vampire is hunting the Animals?” Cavuto asked.“Someone is,” Rivera said.“But I’m not sure it’s him.”“You think it might be the redhead and the kid?”“Could be, but I don’t think so.You know, even with the vampire, we always had an identifiable MO-broken neck and massive blood loss, on a victim who turned out to be terminally ill, right?”“Yeah.”“So if he went after these kids, why no bodies?”“So it’s Flood and the redhead.And they hide their bodies.”“I think it could be worse than that.”“Like worse in a way that we’ll never be able to open the bookstore and may in fact end up doing time for taking the vampire’s art collection?”“Like worse in that the hooker and the missing Animals aren’t dead at all.”“How is that worse?” Then Cavuto realized how that was worse.They climbed into the car and stared at the windshield for a while without saying anything.Finally, after a full minute, Cavuto said, “We’re fucked.”“Yep,” Rivera said.“The whole city is fucked.”“Yep.”26 – Being the Chronicles ofAbbyNormal: Star-Crossed Lover and Tragic FemmeFataleOMG! We are doomed by our forbidden love! We are like from different feuding families, from the wrong side of the tracks, he is like year of the Rabbit and I am a Leo, so we are even star-crossed, and it’s a well-known fact that rabbits and lions have a strained relationship.OMFG! He’s so hot! He rocks my stripy socks.If we had moors, I would so be off brooding upon one, my delicate jaw muscles clenched as I stared off into the mist, feeling my profound missingness for him.(I can’t believe thatSan Francisco doesn’t have a moor.Everywhere you go we have automated, coin-operated robotic bathrooms, or Frisbee golf courses, or some new stainless-steel epileptic razor-blade public-art thingy, you’d think the least they could do would be to install a decent moor-because there are a lot more people who like brooding than like Frisbee golf.I’m pretty sure moors can be used for other purposes,too, like hauntings and hiding bodies and family picnics and whatnot.) Thus I am forced to do my brooding at Tulley’s Coffee onMarket Street.It took most of the day for us to move the Countess and the vampyre Flood to Jared’s room.First we had to wrap them up in duct tape and garbage bags to protect them from the sun, then get them down the hill from theBayBridge in the garden cart, which was totally physically hard, and not like taking X and dancing or playing DDR all night, more like work.Then, when we were loading them into the minivan, these two cops come by.And they’re all, “So, what are you doing with your piercings and your magenta-on-black hair, and what can we do to further repress your creativity? Bluster-blah-blah.”And Jared was all, “Nothing.” All wussy and guilty-sounding.He had the front end of the Countess at the time and he totally just dropped her headfirst on the floorboard of the van.So I was like, “Fucktard! The Countess is going to rip your nads off when she awakens!” (And she might, too, although when we unwrapped her she seemed unbruised.) And the cop was all, “Hold it right there, kid.” With his hand on his gun like I was going to go all Columbine on his ass or something.So I knew it was time for some strategy.So I stepped over to the cop, and I started whispering like I didn’t want Jared to hear.And I’m all, “Officer, I’m really embarrassed to even be seen like this.I’m a Kappa Delta pledge and we’re doing this hazing thing.I wouldn’t be caught dead dressed like this, but it’s like the most popular and powerful sorority on campus.”And the cop is all, “What about the guy? He’s not in your sorority.”And I was all, “Shhhhhhh.God, you want to hurt her feelings? They made her shave her head like that and she’s having a hard enough time with that and being totally flat chested
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