A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (best reads .TXT) 📗

The hunters urged the breathing couple to stay where they were and hold the fort.

      John, when he heard of Maule’s and Joe’s planned expedition, volunteered at once to come with them.

      “You think you’re going to leave me here alone?” Angie snapped at him. Red spots showed in her anemic cheeks.

      Maule regretfully refused John’s request, with an appreciation of what it took to make it.

      “You have borne quite enough of the burden of combat, so far.” He smiled faintly. “I should feel deprived if I were not allowed to have a turn.”

* * *

      Then Maule and Joe Keogh proceeded to the eighty-ninth floor, the level of Kaiser’s apartment.

      “I take it you are still suitably armed, Joseph?”

      “You waited until now to ask? Damned right I am.”

      A few moments later, Joe was ringing Kaiser’s doorbell, standing squarely in what ought to be the viewer’s field of view.

      “Who is it?” The suspicious voice on the speaker sounded like that of the young woman in the surplus field jacket.

      “Me. Take a look.”

      “What the fuck d’you want?” Now she sounded outraged.

      “Let me in and find out.” He could only hope they didn’t realize the old man was up and running at full strength again.

      A moment later, bolts and locks were being undone.

      As soon as the door began to open Joe stepped in and called out in a loud voice words in Latin, words that he’d burned into his memory years ago.

      Confronting him in the sparsely furnished living room, gaping at the way he’d yelled, were the young field-jacket woman and an overweight, hairy man, a breather too, who held an automatic weapon ready in both hands.

      “What’d you say?” the man with the gun demanded sharply. “Was that a name?”

      “It was,” said the old man, coming out of thin air to stand some six or eight feet to Joe’s right. He ignored the Uzi now suddenly leveled at him and in polite tones posed a couple of questions for the youth who aimed it. “Where is Valentine Kaiser? What orders has he given you?”

      The potbellied one stood playing with his weapon, a finger on the trigger. “Up my ass. Ya wanna look?”

      As far as Joe could tell, he himself was the first one in the room to start moving. He jumped before anyone else, as soon as the contemptuous vulgarity had registered. Because no one was going to get away with talking like that to the old man, not in this kind of a situation. It just wouldn’t work. A photofinish camera would have caught Joe somewhere between a standing position and the floor, just at the moment when the old man, having taken time to think things over, started moving too. But still Joe’s reaction, like those of the other breathers in the room, came much too late and in fact he needn’t have bothered.

      The Uzi, finger on the trigger or not, never fired. Instead it was wrenched out of its owner’s hands with a force that might have harvested a finger or two with it and should have produced a yell of pain.

      But the potential yell never had time to get started. The automatic weapon came right back to the man who’d lost it, the curved steel bar that formed the stock driving right into his face, thrust at him by the old man’s one-handed grip on the barrel. Why bother to use two hands to swat a fly? The sound of the impact, metal gunstock crunching flesh and bone, was to stay with Joe for a long time. The man who had once owned the Uzi went down in his tracks. There would be no need to worry about his getting up.

      By now Joe, lying prone, had his own pistol out of the shoulder holster. But he saw no evidence that it was going to be needed.

      Mr. Maule cast the Uzi aside disdainfully—when you needed a flyswatter you could always find something that would serve—and dusted the fingers of his right hand lightly against one another, demonstrating grace and distaste at the same time.

      He smiled briefly in Joe’s direction. Then, with an expression of sorrowful contempt, he turned to regard the young woman in a field jacket, who for the last ten seconds had not moved a muscle, but had turned quite pale.

      “Valentine Kaiser?” Maule inquired gently. “His present whereabouts? His most recent orders?”

      “I don’t know,” said the young woman, in equally polite tones. Then she collapsed to the floor in a dead faint.

      By this time Joe was on his feet again. He put his gun away. Then he knelt beside the field-jacket lady and searched her for weapons.

      The old man had started going through the place. Joe followed. He looked into the bathroom where Liz Wiswell had died, but her body had been removed. The tub and surrounding tile had been scrubbed clean. Only the bolts and fasteners driven into the walls above the tub remained to show that something strange had happened here.

      He prowled on, cautiously, joining the old man in a bedroom, where Maule had just discovered some of Valentine Kaiser’s—or someone’s—home earth.

      The old man was murmuring thoughtfully to himself, ripping open plastic bags with fingernails suddenly grown talonlike, running the dried earth through his fingers onto the floor. Then he dropped the stuff, dusted his fingers again, and faced the bedroom windows. “This is on the north side of the building, like my own abode. Joseph, see if one of the windows opens.”

      Joe went to confirm the fact that here, as in Uncle Matthew’s own place, one of the windows had been modified so that it could be opened. No doubt untrammeled access to the night air was a handy thing for any vampire to have. He asked: “How about getting rid of some of this dirt while we’re here?”

      “An excellent idea.”

      When Joe turned from emptying the last plastic bag outside, he saw that Maule had left the room. He was back in a moment, carrying one-handed the body of the man who had once owned an Uzi.