The Ranch Visit — Tuesday, February 26, 1991, 5:48 PM

Cherry Hills Village / County Road 73, Sedalia Denver, Colorado

The carpet cleaner smell hit first. Then the cat. Then the television upstairs – body bags at Dhahran, the anchorwoman’s voice clipped and careful, reading the dead like a weather report.

Flash opened his eyes and the basement ceiling was the same ceiling it had been yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Emerson’s guest suite. The low wood-paneled room where five people who should have been dead slept through the days and stared at each other through the nights.

Four nights since the fire. Four nights since he killed a man and put the body in a river.

The hunger had changed. Sunday it pulled at him. Monday it pushed. Tonight it lived in the muscles of his jaw, a dull ache behind the teeth that sharpened when he swallowed. Not urgent. Patient. That was worse.

Marcus sat in the corner chair with the Denver Post angled under the overhead light. Terri was still down on the guest bed, motionless. Monica stood upright at the couch, eyes open, staring at the wood-paneled wall with the fixed attention of a woman building a closing argument from nothing. Emerson leaned against the wet bar with his hands around a glass of water he would never drink.

Everybody looked thinner.

Monica spoke first. “I checked in with the office before sunset. No warrant application on the box. Brandt’s still building. The ground war’s eating his resources – half of Arson/Homicide got pulled onto protest security at the Federal Building.”

She was about to say something else when the basement lights died.

Not the power. The television kept running upstairs. Just the basement circuit. The breaker clicked from the utility closet, fifteen feet from where any of them were sitting.

Marcus was on his feet with the Beretta before Flash heard him stand. Monica had her back to the wall. Emerson dropped the glass.

A voice from the dark. Near the utility closet. Male, Italian accent, conversational – as if he’d been part of the discussion for a while and was only now bothering to announce himself.

“You left the cat at your neighbor’s apartment for two days. Then you broke your neighbor’s wrist, put his body in a river, brought the cat here, and named it.” A breath, or what passed for one. “That’s not hiding. That’s interior decorating.”

Flash put his fists up. Squared his shoulders toward the dark. Weight forward, chin tucked, hands high – the linebacker stance he’d carried since South High, the one his body reached for before his brain caught up.

“I warn ya, yer gonna get clobbered if ya don’t wise up!”

The lights came back on. The breaker clicked from the utility closet. Nobody near it.

He was sitting on the dryer.

Late twenties, maybe. Dark hair, olive skin, leather jacket over a black t-shirt. One leg crossed over the other, hands in his lap. Watching Flash with the mild interest of someone observing a small mechanical toy.

“That’s adorable.” His eyes moved to Marcus, to the Beretta, back to Flash. “You can shoot me too, if it makes you feel better. I’ll wait.”

Nobody shot.

“My name is Tony. I don’t have another one. I’ve been watching you since Saturday night, which means I watched you drag a two-hundred-pound man down three flights of stairs, load him into a Cadillac, and drive him to the South Platte in a suit that cost more than my car.” His eyes moved to Emerson. “Your suit. His body. Teamwork.”

He uncrossed his legs and hopped off the dryer. The motion was too smooth – bypassing effort, simply arriving at its destination.

“I’m here because you’re going to die in about a week if somebody doesn’t explain some things to you, and I’m bored enough to be that somebody. Who wants to ask the first stupid question?”

Flash lowered his fists. Gave Monica the smallest nod.

She pushed off the wall and crossed her arms. “You’ve been watching us since Saturday. Three days you could have made contact and didn’t. Why tonight?”

“Because tonight is the fourth night, and four nights is how long it takes to know if someone is going to figure things out or get killed. You’re in the middle. Leaning the right direction. Mostly.”

“Figure what things out.”

“What you are. What that means. What’s going to happen to you if you keep leaving business cards at banks and having your husband’s brother answer the door.”

Monica’s jaw tightened. Daniel. He knew about Daniel.

“You’ve been inside Daniel’s house.”

“I’ve been inside every room you’ve been in since Saturday night. I don’t sleep much.”

Terri, from the bed, without moving: “Who are you?”

“I told you. Tony.”

“What are you.”

“Same thing you are. I’ve just had longer to get used to it. About seven hundred and sixty years longer.”

Flash looked at Tony’s hands, his skin. Nothing about him suggested seven centuries. Nothing suggested he was lying.

Tony gave them the rules. Fire. Sunlight. The stake – not death, but paralysis, and whoever put it there could do anything they wanted after that. Starvation, which was worse than all of it. He looked at Flash’s jaw, at the way Flash kept swallowing against the ache, and said the blood was the only thing. Everything else came back up.

Emerson set down the glass of water he’d been holding all evening.

“There is one thing worse than starving. If you drink another vampire’s blood three times, you belong to that vampire. Completely. It can be done to you without your knowledge. Don’t let anyone feed you.”

Monica: “The three men who killed Prestor. They work for someone.”

“A man named Edward. He owns a club called the Broadstreet. He runs Denver – not the city, the vampires in it. There’s a hierarchy. He’s at the top. I’m outside of it. You are nowhere in it, which means you’re a problem he hasn’t decided how to solve yet.”

“Does he know about us?”

“Not yet. Probably within the next two or three days. The police investigation will give him the trail – he has contacts at DPD. And he has people who can tell a vampire from a mortal at a distance.”

He gave them a meeting. Thursday night, one a.m., a club called the 24th Diocese. His territory.

Then he looked at Flash.

“One more thing. There’s a man – old, calls himself Klondike. He may have copies of your doctor’s research. If he does, and Edward finds him first, you’ll never see them.”

“Where can I find this guy?”

“I don’t know where he lives. South, maybe west. Ranch country. He’s not a vampire. He’s something else – something in between. Old. Paranoid about people like us, not paranoid about phone books.”

Marcus, from the corner: “What research?”

“You tell me. You’re the ones who walked out of that basement with a metal case and a journal. Whatever Prestor was working on – Klondike wanted it badly enough to write a letter and offer himself up as a test subject. That’s not curiosity. That’s desperation. Desperate men do things on a schedule.”

“Thursday. One a.m. The Diocese. Bring questions.”

The basement door opened upstairs. Windsor’s voice from the kitchen – “Sir, I didn’t hear the –” – then nothing. His footsteps retreating, steady and deliberate. He had decided he did not see what he just saw.

The front door didn’t open. There was no sound of it closing.

Tony was gone.

Terri pulled Prestor’s draft letter from the duffel. The handwriting matched annotations in the journal – Prestor had written Klondike’s name next to a supply-chain entry. Rural route delivery.

Marcus said, “Phone book.”

Emerson came back with a Denver Metro white pages and dropped it on the wet bar. Flash flipped to the K’s. County Road 73, south of Sedalia. Ranch country. Foothills of the Front Range, forty minutes from Cherry Hills.

He tore the page out.

They took two vehicles. The Cadillac and Windsor’s F-150. Santa Fe Drive to C-470 west, then south on 85 toward Sedalia. Past the stoplight, County Road 73 cut west – dirt with thin gravel, fenced both sides. Cattle country in the dark.

The mailbox was hand-painted, white on black. KLONDIKE. No number. The driveway ran two ruts in frozen dirt, a quarter mile back to a low ranch house with one light on. Kitchen window, west side.

Emerson cut the headlights two miles out. Parking lights only. The pickup behind did the same. They stopped fifty yards short. Engines off.

The wind came off the Front Range and carried nothing with it. No cattle. No dogs.

Flash and Marcus went over the cattle gate one at a time. Didn’t open it – the chain would rattle. Ground frozen hard enough to hold their weight without a sound. Marcus angled west toward the barn. Flash east along a fenceline of dead willow scrub. Forty yards out they both dropped. The house from two angles.

Through the kitchen window: a man at the table. Sixties or older. White hair, beard close-cropped. Both hands flat on the table on either side of a single sheet of paper and a black-and-chrome ampoule case that Flash recognized from the basement. The serum. A vial out of the case, standing upright in front of him.

He hadn’t injected. He was looking at it.

A lever-action rifle lay across the table next to his right hand. A revolver within reach of his left. Bare room. No television, no radio. No second person.

A tripwire ran across the yard – thin gray fishing line staked from a post to the porch. Low-tech early warning. They’d come in around its arc by luck or instinct.

Marcus mouthed: He’s alone.

Flash mouthed back: He’s about to.

Flash worked around to the porch from the side. Stayed off the boards that would sing. Knocked twice. Hands up, palms out.

“Mr. Klondike. I’m a friend. I need three minutes of your time. Hands are empty.”

Chair scraping inside. Footsteps – slow, deliberate. They stopped on the other side of the door. Breath audible through the wood.

“What’s your name.”

“Arnold Simpson. Flash to most people.”

“Don’t know any Flash.”

“You wouldn’t. We met through a third party. I’m here because of a letter you wrote. Draft of a letter. To a doctor in Five Points.”

“That letter wasn’t sent.”

“I know it wasn’t. I’m in possession of it.”

“Who else is out there.”

“One man on the chicken coop. Armed. He stays where he is unless I’m dead. Three more at the road. Same arrangement.”

“You’re a polite man for a kidnap victim.”

“I’m not the one who kidnapped me.”

A silence from the other side. Not hesitation. Calculation.

“Step back from the door. Six feet. Hands stay up. Tell your man at the coop he keeps his weapon at his side or this conversation doesn’t happen.”

Flash stepped back. Lifted his chin toward Marcus – down. Marcus lowered the Beretta to his thigh.

The door opened.

Klondike filled the frame. Broad through the shoulders, hands wide enough to wrap a fence post. Decades of ranch work written into his forearms and knuckles, and something else underneath the wear – a density to him, a solidity that didn’t match his age. The rifle was in his right hand, muzzle down. The revolver holstered. White beard shorter than it had looked from forty yards. Pale blue eyes with nothing asleep behind them.

“You’re new.”

“Four nights.”

“Then I’m guessing you didn’t drive forty miles south of Denver to bring me a letter.”

Flash told him. Kept it short.

“The doctor’s dead. Three nights ago. Somebody burned his house down on top of him with seven people in the basement, including me. Five of us walked out. We have what was in the basement – the journal, the vials, one finished dose of the Anti-Body.”

“You have it with you.”

“No. It’s in a safe place. We didn’t drive forty miles south to hand a stranger a dose of something the doctor died for.”

“Then what did you drive forty miles south for.”

“To find out if you’re worth talking to before somebody else gets here.”

Klondike’s eyes moved. First time. Past Flash, toward the road.

“Somebody else is coming.”

“Somebody else is going to. A man named Edward runs the vampires in Denver. Three of his people set the fire. He doesn’t know yet that any of us survived. When he finds out – two days, three, maybe a week – he’s going to want everything the doctor left behind. Including you, if he knows you exist. The letter you wrote tells anyone who reads it that you do.”

Flash made his pitch. Come to Denver. Stay where the cohort sleeps. Run the dose properly with someone who knows medicine in the room.

Klondike listened. Let him finish. Held the silence for a count of four.

“You’re young. Four nights young. Which means you didn’t make a choice to be what you are – you woke up and somebody had already made it for you. I respect that. I’d respect it more if you understood what you were selling.”

He shifted the rifle from one hand to the other. Not a threat. A man adjusting weight.

“That dose isn’t a thing you take with friends in a room with a doctor. The doctor is dead. That’s not a problem you solve by bringing more witnesses. The Anti-Body is between me and a hundred and twelve years of being somebody’s appliance. If it kills me I’m exactly as alive as I’m going to be either way, and the question of with whom is the kind of question a man asks who hasn’t done his own dying yet.”

Flash heard it. The hundred and twelve years. Not the number itself but what the number contained – a century in service to someone else’s blood, someone else’s will.

“I appreciate the drive. I appreciate the warning about your man Edward – that’s useful, and I owe you for it. I’ll consider it owed.”

“I’m not coming to Denver tonight. I’m not letting four strangers drive me anywhere. You want to keep talking, you keep talking from where you’re standing, or you come back another night with something I haven’t heard before.”

Flash sat on the cedar bench under the kitchen window. Klondike stayed in the doorway, the rifle against the inside frame.

“All right. You said you owe me for the Edward warning. I’ll take it in conversation.”

Klondike gave him what he had.

Edward Williams. Called himself Prince of Denver, no formal recognition from anyone who could grant it. Twenty-three years of self-appointment and nobody interested enough to stop him. A house band at the Broadstreet – all five vampires, with people at the door who could read a room in ways that went beyond good security. Three enforcers named Duke, Earl, and the Count, all disposed to solve problems with fire before conversation. Two cops in Edward’s pocket – a vice detective named Burrell, and a records secretary whose name Klondike had to reach for. A Frenchman named Roger Manot who ran bookings for four Edward venues and cracked mortal cover identities.

Flash filed it. Monica was the one to put on Edward when the time came. Edward would underestimate lawyers.

“We’re square.”

Flash didn’t stand yet. He pulled a pen from his jacket. Asked for a pad. Klondike handed him a small spiral feed-order notepad over the threshold, and the gesture – the reaching across the doorway without stepping through it – said everything about where they stood.

Flash wrote two lines. Phone number for Emerson’s bank answering service, twenty-four-hour pickup. And: Leave a message for Arnold. Use the word “saddle” so I know it’s you.

He handed it back and didn’t push. Just asked: if Klondike was going to inject what was on his kitchen table tonight, give them a day. One day.

Klondike folded the paper and slid it into his shirt pocket.

“Saddle.”

“Saddle.”

A nod.

“One night. I’ll give you one night. You won’t get two. If I don’t hear from you with something better than what’s already been said by sundown tomorrow, I take what’s on the table. That’s the trade.”

He started to close the door. Stopped halfway.

“And listen – I gave you Manot for the warning. The phone number’s a different transaction. If your day-after-tomorrow pitch is good, we’re at a new debt arrangement. Don’t waste it.”

“Tell your woman the assistant DA that the secretary in records is named Helen Yates. I remembered.”

The door closed. The deadbolt turned. The kitchen light stayed on.

Forty minutes of grassland and cold. The Cadillac’s headlights carved a tunnel through ranch country – fence posts, dead grass, the low bulk of Castle Rock against the sky.

Past Castle Rock, Monica broke the silence.

“Helen Yates.”

“Records secretary,” Flash said. “Edward’s pocket.”

“I can pull her personnel file from the county database tomorrow. Daniel has access – he’s done civil work that crossed records.”

“Don’t put your name on the search.”

“I won’t.”

It felt, for three miles of dark highway, like something that could be called control.

Cherry Hills at 22:15. Emerson pulled the Cadillac through the gate. Windsor had left the porch light on. The pickup swung in behind.

The five of them were halfway up the walk when Windsor opened the front door before any of them reached it.

His face was the wrong color.

“Mr. Wilkershire. There is a man at the gate. He says his name is Detective Brandt.”

The intercom on Windsor’s hip buzzed. Through the gatehouse kitchen window, yellow light spilled across the drive. A figure stood beside an unmarked sedan, breath fogging in the cold, one hand resting on the gate’s stone post. He was looking up the drive at the house. Patient. He had all night.

He raised his other hand. Waved.