THIS IS WHAT LEE BATCH looked like: cropped, manicured afro, distinguished, grey with enough metrosexual panache to let others know he had money to burn but chose not to do so smack in their faces. He didn’t blink much, which was disconcerting, disconcerting being the first tool in a lawyer’s arsenal of offense. He’d perfected looking intently at people. This gave him the deep crow’s-feet men in their fifties are considered ruggedly wise for, particularly black men used to seeing more than their share. Lee Batch could also bench press three hundred pounds, courtesy of the fact he was what’s colloquially known as a big mofo. His in-home fully equipped weight room wasn’t for show.
He saw his wife six times a year, his daughter three, and her daughter never except in pictures. The Batches were a traveling family, with Baby Batch considering the difference in skin tones between her and Nanny Frieda Gunter a parental anomaly.
But they were still a family, as the pictures throughout Lee Batch’s house attested.
That and that alone made him question his decision.
Vampires made the best poets and storytellers because they could seduce jizz from pumice if need be. The ones who studied and practiced anyway. Not these silly younger ones, but the old ones, old farts who’d generated more philosophy and macroeconomics than anybody should.
You could tell an old vampire from the general populace because the old ones never wore watches, even if they could afford to use Rolexes as rubber bands. This small confidence swayed Lee over to a wild, simple proposal: create not a new order but a necessary one. The Thoom were marginal, Buford egomaniacal, and vampires frankly couldn’t fight the tide of bootleg DVDs sweeping a forgotten Hollywood under a rug. Money, the lifeblood of all ambition, was hemorrhaging away such that, at around five hundred years from now, some of the higher level vampires might find a need to actually dip into their savings.
Batch draped a luxurious towel around his neck and grabbed a bottle of blood from the fridge. He popped the top on his anti-nausea pills and crunched two before getting a hard swig. Sweat continued to run down his face but he didn’t dry himself. He preferred to air dry. He’d earned that sweat. Batch exercised in solitude and the hired hands knew better than to enter unannounced or uninvited, not that they could since there were new security monitors installed no matter which wall he faced, plus the room could be voice locked if he chose. The weight room was the one place he felt completely divorced from the world.
Which was a good and necessary thing.
Ramses perched high in a ceiling corner of the room with his hands and feet braced against the walls. The major flaw in Lee Batch’s secure vision of the world was in feeling safety meant Lee saw what was to be seen. What Lee Batch saw didn’t mean squat. The advanced security system his benefactors provided wouldn’t normally be used to secure their own dogs, but Batch—used to a diet of labels and brands—was easily subsumed by the right trinkets and beads.
Ramses waited till Batch was nearly at the exit to drop lithely to the floor behind him.
“Lee Batch?” he said, clearly startling the big man.
Lee turned quickly. All that did was hasten the connection of his face with the slap of fye screaming his way.
~~~
His private blend of citrus smelling-salts revived him.
He took his time opening his eyes to assess the situation. He remembered the woman in the room; she had been the one who’d demanded to see him—because he’d interrupted his workout for her. One look at her and he’d sent the help on their way. Corporate lawyers often received corporate gifts.
Didn’t remember much after that. He’d gone back to the weight room and his face was a little tender, but other than that a man’s chest muscles didn’t get ripped by themselves.
There were others with that fabulous woman now.
In his weight room.
And one of them was in his fridge.
“Negroes had better have a good reason for this,” he said levelly as though whup ass and habeas corpus carried the same weight. “You’re in my fridge.”
“And you need to shut up,” said Milo without bothering to look at him. Milo straightened and unscrewed the top off a cold bottle, glancing at each of his party cursorily for forgiveness. “I, too, have leveled woods with my words. What’s going on, Lee?” He took a drink.
But Batch was strategically locked away in the courtroom of his mind.
“Ram,” said Milo, “stomp the stew.”
“Wasn’t sure which was which,” said Batch. Ramses paused. “Milo Jetstream in my damn house. Son of a bitch.”
Milo took another swig. “Got no problem with you being a vampire. Got a problem with you being in my mix. Understand, Lee, I’m not leaving here without a total of three answers. You approach the vampires or they approach you?” Nothing. “OK.”
“I can slap the fye out him again,” Neon volunteered.
“Lee, you are not high level. You will never be high level. You can sit there and try to be cool but you’ve noticed we aren’t restraining you and nobody’s particularly worried. That cool will crack long before you’re anywhere near a threat.” Milo sat on the edge of a calf-leather weight bench and regarded Batch squarely. “What’s new in your life, Lee?”
“You’re on camera.”
“We know.”
“They’re probably on their way here.”
“We know,” said Milo, catering to the bluff. “Smoove, we locked and loaded?”
“Enough to poke a bear’s nuts.”
“I imagine zoning would frown on heavy artillery leveling this neighborhood,” said Milo. “You won’t be the first operative giving up a confidence to us on camera. We do it all the time and we’re still here.”
“Speaks volumes,” said Batch.
“You may have heard we don’t kill people,” said Milo. “That, too, requires a bit of clarification.”
“Use logic in my home, Milo Jetstream. Don’t give me that ‘Tell me what I want or die’ shit. I don’t plan to talk after I’m dead.”
“Why are lawyers melodramatic divas? Lee…Thoom and vampires and Buford: Do you guys have him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Speculate.”
“Harvard law degree havin’ bastard,” added Neon.
“Morehouse. Yale.”
“What the hell ever.”
“You heard the words Bubba or Foom recently?” asked Ramses. Ramses’ stare was portentous, like a cobra’s, not merely hard like Milo’s. Hard returned like, but from portentous there was no defense.
“No,” said Batch.
“Brother to brother, would you lie to me?” asked Ramses.
“I would.”
The two men regarded one another from wholly different fields of play. “How long before your cavalry arrives?” said Ramses.
Batch said nothing.
“I hate a sellout,” said Smoove.
“I don’t think I got a price belongs to you!” said Batch, glowering at Smoove.
“Get in touch with whoever approached you,” said Milo rising, “and let them know you have personally fucked up the status quo.” Milo screwed the cap back on the sloshing red bottle. “There will be blood. Thanks for the answers.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Batch said to reassure himself.
“Can’t answer what you don’t know, and that was the entire question.”
They left via the front door.
Yvonne was the first to question Milo’s tactics.
“You drank blood in front of him,” she said. “You don’t think he’s going to blast that from here to kingdom come?”
Milo nodded that he actually did. “That’s the least of our problems. He doesn’t even know Foom exists, he has no idea where Buford is and…”
“We need to find out who else they’ve recruited,” Ramses finished.
“So the question is where’s the party at?” said Neon. “Sounds like a Walmart run again to me. I can pick up some necessities while we’re there.”
“Agents of Change do not purchase things from Walmart!” both brothers said in unison.
“Hey, Agents of Change; we got a name, Yvonne!”
“Not our own yet.”
“No, but still. So, Mr. Agent X, unless you’ve got a stash of panty liners on hand, we will be purchasing from Walmart.”
Aisle seven, personal products.
When the words “necessity” and “panty” appear in tandem, men know unequivocally to shut the hell up.