"You will forget you saw either of us," Gavin gave the command to the bartender before gripping my upper arm and ushering me out the door.
"Go ahead, tell me not to call you doofus again," I muttered petulantly as he shoved me into the passenger seat and shut the door.
Gavin didn't say a word; he just slid in on the driver's side, started the car up and drove to the next bar. We met with pretty much the same results at all five bars that night. No, the other bartenders didn't take the cash and run, or buy marijuana (Not that came up in conversation, anyway). Three employees did remember the victims clearly, (two males and three females were missing) and they said that all but one left cash on the bar—mostly hundred dollar bills—to cover the drinks plus a hefty tip. All the cash had gone to the bank or otherwise gotten lost in the shuffle afterward.
"I'm sure the police have already checked with the area banks to see if anybody has done currency exchanges in large amounts," I said as we were driving through Tampa. Gavin looked at me sharply.
"He could be local but I'm thinking not," I said. I wasn't sure how to explain why I felt that way, I just did.
"You think he traveled here just to do this and then planned to go home?" Gavin asked, intrigued.
"Well, yeah."
"Fascinating."
With no idea whether Gavin thought I was an idiot or not, I turned my head and watched the city of Tampa off to the east as we drove across the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. Neither Gavin nor I would ever see that bridge in the sunshine it was named after. Not in person, anyway.
"Here," Gavin thumped a Tampa area Yellow Pages down in front of me after we made it back to our basement. I was sitting at the tiny kitchen table, my purse flopped onto the surface at my elbow. Looking up at his unreadable expression for a moment, I sighed and opened the book to look for bars. There were a lot of them. I was looking through the many listings when an idea hit me.
"Gavin, do we have any paper and a pencil?"
Gavin was watching news re-runs, checking for further disappearances. Without a word, he stood and went into his bedroom, coming back with a legal pad and a very nice pen. "Now," I said, "I know what bars we went to, but what order were they visited? What's the order of disappearances and the corresponding names of the bars?"
Gavin looked like he wanted to growl at me but went back again and brought out a thick file folder, setting it down next to me. The first page inside the folder had four names of victims listed, along with the name of the bar where they'd last been seen. The information had been printed before the fifth victim disappeared. Adding his name to the list, I wrote the information down on my legal pad in two columns, one for the person, the other for the bar in question. Three out of four fit my theory. It was the third one that didn't.
"The Bearded Manatee, that's where the waitress said she saw the girl but the girl paid with a credit card, right?" I looked over at Gavin, who'd gone back to watching the news.
"Yes." He didn't even turn in my direction when he answered.
"She wasn't abducted from that bar," I said. That got his attention. He was staring at me now.
"And just how do you know this?" A deep frown was aimed in my direction.
"It's likely the police haven't missed this either," I said. "The fifth guy disappeared from Eddie's Bar," I said. "Look at this." I took my list over to Gavin and showed him my columns. "First one disappeared from Antonio's. Second from the Beachcomber. The third one—that bar is listed as the Bearded Manatee, but I don't think that's the one the girl was grabbed from. That bar started with a C."
Gavin grabbed the legal pad away from me. The fourth bar had been Dio's Bar and Grille. "He's going through the phone book, Gavin," I said. "He's making this a
game, just like those two idiots who turned me."
Gavin stood faster than I could see him stand and had his cell phone in his hand in almost as much time. He hit a number on speed dial and I heard it ringing. Wlodek's voice came through, loud and clear.
"Honored One, do we know the whereabouts of Nyles Abernathy, Edward Desmarais' sire?" Gavin asked, ignoring the greeting.
"Charles!" Wlodek's shout for his assistant could have been heard by a human, I think, and Gavin was holding the phone away from his ear and grimacing in pain.
We both listened while Wlodek instructed Charles to get Nyles on the phone. We waited. Nyles had an assistant too, because Wlodek came back to us in a few minutes with the information that Master Abernathy was traveling.
"He's striking back at us for us killing Edward, isn't he?" Wlodek said after passing off the information.
"It looks that way," Gavin replied.
"Do you want Radomir to come?"
"Go ahead and send him but I'm still going to try and take Abernathy down in the meantime," Gavin raked fingers through his hair.
"He probably knows we know, now," I said quietly. "I'm sure his assistant was instructed to let him know if we tried to contact him."
"Did you hear that, Honored One?"
"Yes."
"Fuck," Gavin said.
"Heard that too," Wlodek observed dryly. "We have no record of his asking to use a safe house, so he could be almost anywhere," Wlodek went on. Gavin and I had heard Charles say the same thing, off in the distance.
"Dawn is nearly here, Gavin," Wlodek gave him the reminder.
"Thank you for the information, Honored One," Gavin said, ending the call.
"He's been killing with two or three nights in between," I said, but realized that Gavin already knew that. He didn't reprimand me. "I'll go read, now," I said quietly and went to my bedroom, closing the door behind me. Not being able to help myself, I stuck my head out again after a couple of minutes. "Since he knows now, he may step up his attacks." I shut the door a second time and went to find my book.
The page from the phone book containing names of bars beginning with the letter F was in my hand as Gavin drove through Tampa the following evening. I suppose the good thing about hunting a vampire is that he couldn't move in daylight, just as Gavin and I couldn't. He'd be asleep someplace while the sun was in the sky. We were headed toward Farscape, a nightclub near Tarpon Springs. I didn't think Nyles would pick the first name out of the book but Gavin wasn't satisfied with not checking all of them. I smelled plenty of perfume, aftershave, suntan oil and perspiration when we got there, but no vampire. We left.