I made a sound of frustration and picked him up. What had this guy been eating? He must have weighed over a hundred pounds. Even with the increased strength vampirism gave me, I was sweating by the time I got him to the back door of the bar.
Maybe I could put him in the storage room and stack some boxes around him. It wasn’t much, but it was better than leaving him out in the open.
As I finished placing the last boxes around him, Rick’s eyes blinked once and then again. Holding one of the boxes, I stepped closer.
“Rick?”
His gaze focused on me. His mouth opened and a high pitched wail came out. I jumped back in shock. The boxes exploded outward, and a gray streak raced past me. He scurried across the room and huddled in the corner.
What the hell just happened?
One moment he was doing his impression of a statue, and then he was racing around the room like his hair was on fire.
I hesitated to approach, the sight of him muttering to himself and rocking back and forth like his world was about to end leaving me uncomfortable. Like I was the reason for his terror.
“Hey, Rick. Do you remember me?” No response came. “It’s Aileen. We met a few times at Dahlia’s bar.”
“Dahlia.” His voice was soft as he momentarily stopped rocking.
“Yeah. That’s where we are right now. Dahlia’s bar, the Blue Pepper.”
“Blue Pepper.”
Great, now I had a parrot on my hands.
“Yeah, the Blue Pepper. Do you remember how you got here?”
His hands came up to cover his head and his muttering got louder.
Ok, that was evidently a traumatic subject. I needed to find a way to calm him down so I could get some good information out of him. The problem was I didn’t know him well enough to know what might help him focus on something non-threatening. I needed Dahlia.
“Hey, it’s ok. You don’t have to think about that right now,” I tried. I was not the most comforting person. I’ve always been the one staring awkwardly when someone breaks down in tears while asking myself why they couldn’t have picked a better place to have a meltdown. One that wasn’t so public, or you know, in my vicinity.
Needed a distraction. What could I say?
“Oh, that prank you played on those annoying bankers was pretty funny. I wonder how long it took them to figure out you switched their wallets.”
This had happened the last time I was in the Blue Pepper. A pair of men from the local office for a national bank had made asses out of themselves and heckled some of the regulars. Rick had switched their wallets, which happened to be identical. The two still hadn’t figured out the switch by the time they stumbled out to their cab.
“Three days,” he said.
“Whoa, that’s a pretty long time. I bet they spent a little bit of each other’s money before they figured out what had happened.”
“The tall one spent over a thousand dollars before the short one got his card back.”
Heh. That’s a pretty big payday. Guess it paid not to piss off the regulars.
Now that his rocking had nearly stopped and he wasn’t clinging to the wall like he was trying to pass through it, I decided to chance a couple of questions about his statue impression.
“Rick, do you remember how you ended up in the woods outside the bar.”
I used the word ‘woods’ loosely as the area was more underbrush and young trees that had reclaimed the area.
“Don’t remember.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked, trying another tack.
His eyes avoided mine as he stared into the corner. “Last thing. Last thing. I had just rewired that jerk’s car horn to his lights.”
