Who Am I When the Sun Goes Down?

by
Scott Maddix

    "Yes, how may I help you?"
    I looked at the woman standing in my office and assessed her with the ease that comes only from years and years of playing hunches. She looked about twenty-five years old, 19 if you discounted dark see-too-much the eyes, which at the moment were pleading for help. Unless I missed my guess, this was a typically nervous woman who wanted to hire me to check on some bizarre paranoia stemming from a lurid but poorly written article in the weeklies. It would be an easy fee but a small one. I sighed internally and reminded myself the mortgage was due in two days, and even little piddly cases added up.
    The woman swallowed and adjusted her skirt. She was dressed like someone who had just gotten off shift at a truck stop, but had left her apron in the car. Her oversized half-tint glasses seemed to cover most of her face and made her look like a TV psychic, and her hair had that particularly pallid shade and texture that seemed to be caused by daily astringent shampooing after long days of grease, sweat and smoke.
    "My name is Mary Jo Pinkham," she said, "and I guess I need your help."
    I smiled my best "Go on" smile and she cleared her throat again, shifting uneasily on the ancient vinyl of the only chair in the room, aside from my own which was currently prodding me indelicately with an escaped spring.
    "You're going to think I'm crazy," she said, confirming my first speculations. "I need someone followed, because I need to know where they go at night."
    "Your husband?" I asked.
    "Me," she replied.
    I felt my poker face form automatically as I tried to guess what her game was. "Go on," I said tonelessly.
    "I know you're going to think I'm crazy," she said again, "but every night I come home from the diner, and every morning I go to work—but I have no memory of what happens in between."
    "You're having memory lapses and you come to a detective?" I asked, visualizing my easy fee flying out the window. The ethical thing would be to refer this woman to a shrink.
    "It's not just memory lapses, though that would be bad enough," she said. "I—how can I explain this—I think I go somewhere at night. None of my friends, and Lord knows I have few enough of them, have ever seen me after dark. They must all think I'm loony for some of the questions I've been asking. And the worst thing is realizing I don't have a single memory of doing anything at night. Not a childhood memory, nothing. And I only just realized this."
    "Sounds like you have a bit of a problem, Miss Pinkham," I said, "but this isn't a job for a detective, it's a job for a therapist."
    Her face crumpled even more, and I raised my estimate of her age to thirty. "I know it sounds crazy," she said, "but I don't want to go to a psychiatrist unless I'm sure it's all in my head."
    "No offense," I said, "but can you think of another explanation?"
    "Maybe I can think of another explanation," she said, "but it'd sound a lot crazier than a waitress losing her marbles."
    "Ma'am," I said, "if you hire me and don't tell me everything, you're putting me at a real disadvantage."
    "Then you'll help?" she asked, dropping ten years as hope reared up behind her eyes.
    "I haven't decided yet," I lied, "but you'll have to tell me     everything or I won't take the case."
    "Well, I have told you everything," she said. "Anything else is just wild guesses and paranoid imagination. I'd rather not tell you any of that. Really, it should be a simple enough thing. All you have to do is watch my house from sunset to dawn and find out where I go. If it turns out to be nothing, I'll go see a shrink and I'll pay you anyway. If it really is something else, I'd rather you see for your self, or you might decide I really am a loon and not really look."
    "Ma'am, I'm a professional," I said. "I'd do my job without prejudice regardless of what you said."
    "All the same, I'd rather not say until you have an answer."
    I sighed melodramatically. "I don't like it—but I'll take the case. Provided you have my fee. Up front." That mortgage payment was coming up awful quick.
    I named a price and she wrote out a check.
    "I have to get home," she said, glancing at her watch. "Just follow me and keep an eye on the place. Stake it out, right? Isn't that what you people call it?"
    "Yeah, that's what we call it," I said. "Would you mind waiting out in the hall while I get ready?"
    When the client had left the room I went to the cabinet and picked out my favorite pistol and some ammo. Of course, I didn't expect to need them, but you don't stay alive in this business by letting your guard down. Besides, I had a hunch this case was going to be a bit more than it seemed on the surface, or I would never have taken it.
    We arrived at her home just as the sun was approaching the horizon. Predictably, she lived in an aging trailer in a park just on the edge of town. It rested a bit drunkenly on its cinderblock skirting, and the postage stamp of a lawn was overgrown and seedy looking. The trailer looked like it could use a good carwash. The only unusual element about the trailer was that the windows had security bars on them. Miss Pinkham seemed a bit on the cautious side, but this made my stakeout easier. I could park across the lane from her trailer and watch it end-on. The only way anyone could enter or exit was through one of the two doors, since the windows were all barred, and both doors were visible from my vantage.
    "Okay," I said, "If you keep to pattern you'll be headed to work at the crack of dawn, right?"
    "That's right," she said, glancing at the sky a bit nervously and then pretending she hadn't.
    "Well, when you come out in the morning I'll tell you what I found," I said.
    "Great, I'll be off then," she said.
    "What's the hurry?" I asked.
    "No hurry, really," she said. "It's just, well, the sun's about to go down and this is when I stop remembering, and it always makes me nervous. I used to think I was just afraid of the dark, but now I know it's something more."
    "I wish you'd just tell me what it is you're afraid I'll see," I said.
    "I can't," she said, and practically bolted for her front door. In the quiet gloom of the trailer park I distinctly heard her slam her front door and lock it. Then one by one, each of the lights in her house came on, causing her blinds to glow like the square eyes of a particularly unimaginative Jack-o-lantern.
    As the dim evening deepened into dark night, street lights came on around me, giving everything I could see a sickly greenish tint. Inside one of the trailers I heard someone sneeze, and, fainter, a replied "bless you."
    I was reflecting on how close the residents of a trailer park lived to one another when suddenly all the lights in Miss Pinkham's trailer went out. I waited, expecting something further to happen, but I was disappointed. All continued to be silent, save for a barking dog in the distance.

    I met Miss Pinkham on her front walkway first thing the next morning.
    "Well?" she asked as soon as she registered my presence. She seemed a bit groggy, but not unusually so for the hour.
    "Not a thing," I said. "As far as I can tell, you went to bed early and slept all night. It was so quiet and your walls are so thin I would have heard it if you'd gotten up in the middle of the night to use the can."
    "I see," she said, seemingly uncertain how to respond.
    "So," I said, tipping my clichéd fedora, "thanks for the easy case. I'll be seeing you. Do you need a referral for a good shrink? My brother-in-law just got out of school."
    "Um, no thank you," she replied. "I don't understand."
    "What's to understand? You're memory's playing tricks on you. It happens all the time."
    "But I felt sure...."
    "Sure of what?" I asked. "Are you going to tell me what you thought I'd see?"
    "Alien abduction," she said quietly. "I thought you'd see lights, or hear strange sounds, or something."
    I tried not to snicker, but failed. I'm not as quick with a poker face when I've had no sleep.
    "They must have some way of reaching me through walls," she said.
    "That's what you thought? That's the big secret? Lady, no wonder you wouldn't tell me," I said. "Well, have fun in therapy."
    "I'm not crazy," she said. 
    I resisted the temptation to say "that's what they all say" and turned on my heel, headed back to my car.
    "Maybe you should come inside tomorrow night," she called at my retreating back.
    I stopped and turned back to her. "Lady, if this is some elaborate pick-up line..."
    "No, no it's not," she said blushing prettily in the wan light of dawn. "Won't you consider watching for one more night? I'll pay in advance again, of course."
    "Double, this time," I said, "and you have to promise to go to a shrink if I don't find anything this time."
    "I promise," she said, and fished her check book out of her purse.
    "Thank you," I said, receiving the proffered check and folding it into wallet-sized thirds. "See you at dusk."
    With that I left for home, ready to sleep on broken glass if I had too. All the while I wondered why I wanted to believe her.
    Just the lack of sleep, I guess.

    I slept eight hours and awoke in the middle of the afternoon with a light headache. I hated sleeping in the day.
    Once I had brushed the fur off my teeth and shaved the fur off my chin I headed to the office. I only had a couple of hours to get anything done before this evening's wasted stakeout. 
    I picked up my mail and checked for phone messages, but there was nothing of interest but the vain threats of an ever-increasing squadron of creditors.
    So there I sat in my office, munching a fried-egg sandwich and wondering just what it was that was nagging me about this case when I decided to give my brother-in-law a call.
    "Stan?" I asked when I heard his curt receptionist patch me through.
    "Danny Malloy, you old so-and-so," he replied, "how the hell have you been?"
    "Not bad, Stan," I said. "Listen, this isn't a social call. I have some questions."
    "Figures," he said. "Always working, eh, Danny? That's why Sheila left you, y'know."
    "Yeah, I know. Tell her I said hi, okay?"
    "Okay, Danny I will," he said. "So what can I do to help?"
Briefly I outlined the Pinkham case, without giving away enough details to breach confidentiality, and asked him for his professional opinion.
    "Well, I'd suspect a number of possibilities," he said, "but I'd have to run tests to be sure of any of them. Why is this woman not seeking help from a doctor?"
    "I don't really know, but I'll see to it she gets help when I'm through earning my fee," I said.
    "Always the humanitarian, eh, Danny?" I heard him chuckle.
    "Could you just highlight a few possibilities?" I asked.
    "Well, it could be anything from a brain tumor to multiple personality disorder," he said.
    "'Multiple personality disorder?'" I asked.
    "You know, like on TV, only it's a lot more rare than you'd realize from watching the soaps," he said.
    That was ringing some sort of a bell, all right. This was more in keeping with my hunch, and it didn't require any aliens.
    "Is it possible to have multiple personalities and not know it?" I asked.
    "Oh, yes," he replied. "It's part of the disorder that memory blocks are often placed so that each personality is completely unaware of the others. Blackouts and missing days are explained away with some plausible excuse, and most patients only discover their other personalities after they're in therapy."
    "Fascinating," I said. "Well, Stan, gotta go. I have a date to keep with a loon in a trailer park."
    "See that she gets help, Danny," said Stan. "She could be dangerous."
    Now that was an angle I hadn't thought of, I mused, hanging up the phone. I'd have to be especially on my guard tonight.

    I arrived at Miss Pinkham's trailer before she did, so I parked in the same spot where I'd staked the place out the previous night, and waited.
    I was halfway through my jumbo cup of convenience store coffee when I saw one of my client's neighbors coming out of his trailer. I stepped out of my car and flashed my credentials.
    "Danny Malloy, private investigator," I said. "Mind if I ask you a few questions about your neighbor, Mary Jo Pinkham?"
    "Is that her name?" he asked. "Sure, I'll answer your questions, but I can't say I know much."
    "Fair enough," I answered. "How long have you lived next to Miss Pinkham?"
    "Well, let's see," he said, scratching his sunburned scalp between the strands of his greasy combover. His sunburn covered the upper planes of his face and the lower two-thirds of his arms, and he looked like a boiled beet in an overextended white tank top. By sharp contrast, his shoulders and chest were beer-foam white and covered with dark hair. "The missus and I moved in two years ago, and I guess she lived there then," he said.
    "Have you noticed anything peculiar?" I asked. "Strange noises, odd visitors?"
    "No, sir," he answered. "I've never heard a thing out of her trailer. The missus, she's a terrible gossip, and she tells me Miss...Pinkham, did you say? Miss Pinkham comes home at the same time every day and goes right to bed. We haven't heard so much as a peep out of her. We call her the Quaker."
    "You've never heard a thing out of her in two years?" I asked. "Considering how thin these walls are, don't you think that's a bit odd in itself?"
    "Now that you mention it, that is a bit odd," he admitted. "I can hear it when the neighbor on the other side breaks wind, and the whole block can hear it when the Johnsons are fighting. But not once have I heard so much as a hiccup coming from her direction."
    "Thanks," I said, shaking the man's hand, and returned to the car to wait. The neighbor returned to his trailer, undoubtedly to tell the "missus" about his strange interview with a PI.
    Shortly, Miss Pinkham arrived, and I waved and followed her in.
    The inside of Mary Jo Pinkham's trailer was extremely clean and somehow empty. It reminded me of the showroom models where they sell trailers. It just felt unlived in, somehow. Of course, I thought, if she gets abducted by aliens every night I guess she doesn't do much living here after all.
    "This is the kitchen, Mr. Malloy," she said, gesturing to the linoleumed room to the left of the entrance. The kitchen was so small you could easily wash and put away the dishes without standing up from the table.
    "And here's the living room, the spare bedroom and the bathroom," she continued, leading me around the confines of the place and turning on lights. "And this," she said, leading me to the door at the end of a short hallway off the kitchen, "is my room."
    She opened the door and flicked on a light, and the first thing that struck me was how bare the room was. Of course, in a place that small one would try to avoid clutter, but her room had a bed that didn't look like it had been slept in, a closet, and a reading lamp perched on a shelf on the headboard.
    I entered the room and gave it a more thorough look around. Not a thing on the walls. No knick-knacks on little shelves. No slippers sticking their toes out from under the edge of the bedspread. Unlived in. 
    "This is your room?" I asked.
    "Yes."
    I checked the only window in the room. Behind its drawn shade it was closed and locked, and outside the security bars were intact. 
    "I'll set up in the living room," I said. "If I hear anything, I'll come running. If anything happens, call me."
    "Okay," she said, and I left to watch her bedroom door from the living room sofa.
    I settled down for a long night, wondering whether Miss Pinkham had indeed another personality, and whether it would choose to manifest itself while I was watching.

    It was after midnight, and the three coffees I had drunk so far were putting undue pressure on my bladder, so I decided to visit Miss Pinkham's bathroom again. The bathroom was done all in harvest gold and the tail of the toilet paper roll was still stuck down—an untouched roll. On each towel rack a hand towel and a matching washcloth were neatly folded, and when I checked, none of them were damp. The bathroom seemed as unused as the rest of the place.

    As I was at my business I looked out the miniscule window that pierced the cheap paneling of the bathroom.  The moon was just past half full, but the low clouds kept it dark out there, and all I saw was my muzzy reflection.
    When I was done I returned to the living room to continue my wait. Just to be on the safe side, I decided to check in on the client. 
    Somehow, I wasn't completely surprised to find her bed empty. Unslept in, in fact.
    I was surprised to find that both the front and back doors were still locked from the inside, and all the windows were still closed and locked.
    This was starting to look like one of those mystery novels where you have to figure out how the murderer got into the locked room. Of course, no one had been murdered in this case.
    As far as I knew.
    I looked at my watch. Two a.m. What else could I do but wait there in the bedroom for Miss Pinkham's return? 
    So there I sat, and stood, pacing around the room waiting for the sun to come up. Somewhere out there was one Miss Mary Jo Pinkham, whoever she was.
    Later, as I stood at the window watching the night sky turn gray with the approaching dawn, I heard a noise at the other end of the trailer. Moving as fast as I could in the cramped space, I raced down the hall, through the kitchen and living room, and into the bathroom, where I saw my client, fully dressed, unrumpled, and brushing her teeth.
    "Miss Pinkham!" I exclaimed. "Where have you been?"
Slowly she turned to looked at me and blinked, once, twice, and a third time before she seemed to recognized me. "Oh," she said. "Oh. Oh, Mr. Malloy. What happened?"
    "You don't remember a thing, do you?" I asked, exasperated.
    "No, last I remember is telling you goodnight. What happened?" she asked.
    "Dammit," I said. "I'm going to find out what's going on here if it's the last thing I do. But it's still going to cost you."
    "Of course," she replied demurely.
    I looked around the room. Hanging on the back of the door was a damp towel and a nightgown, one of those big frilly ones that gothic heroines always seem to be wearing when they're running through a storm calling out the name of their lost love.
    In fact, it looked a bit like it had been through such an ordeal. The hem was ragged and muddy, and there was a tear under one armpit. 
    I snatched it off the hook and showed it to Miss Pinkham. "Is this yours?" I asked.
    "I – I don't know," she answered. "I suppose it must be."
    "Anyone else live here?" I asked.
    "No, just me," she answered. "The spare room is empty."
    "Then I guess it's yours," I said. "Judging by this, you were fairly active last night. Look, there are stains. Does any of this jog your memory?"
    "It looks like blood," she said. "Doesn't it?"
    It did look like blood. Just a dribble by the neck, and, as I looked closer, I also saw some on the frilly cuffs. 
    "Lady," I said, "this looks pretty bad. Are you sure you don't remember anything?"
    Her eyes were frantic, now. "No, not a thing," she said.
    "Well, this looks a lot like blood, and unless you're wounded, it looks like you may have gotten into some bad stuff last night."
    "No, I'm not wounded," she said, quickly checking herself as she spoke.
    "Ma'am," I said, "perhaps you'd better call in sick at work and come with me."
    "Am I in some sort of trouble?" she asked.
    "I think, Miss Pinkham, you may be," I answered.

    An hour later we arrived at the police station, and I took Miss Pinkham straight to the back, to talk to Officer O'Toole, a friend of mine. 
    "Well, Mr. Malloy, what brings you around these parts?" he asked. "And who's this frightened-looking lady?"
    "I may need to ask a favor of you, chum," I said. "By the way, any unsolved murders last night?"
    "Nothing unusual," he answered, "just a little lowering of our homeless population."
    I tried hard not to look at Miss Pinkham. That blood on her gown had come from somewhere, and I was beginning to suspect it wasn't from a rare steak at Chez Michel.
    "Benny, I need you to look after her while I check a few things out," I said.
    "Sure, Danny, sure." He leaned closer and asked, under his breath, "Is she a suspect?"
    "Let's just call it protective custody," I answered. "Don't let her out of your sight. I'll be back before dark."
    As I left, Benny was asking her whether she'd had breakfast. "I don't eat breakfast," she responded.
    I dropped the gown off at the forensics lab and told my friend Manny to have it done by the afternoon. Manny knew me—he didn't even ask why the rush.
    I went back to my office and checked my messages, then took a nap in the store room, where I kept a cot. While I've been up two nights in a row before, it has never been by choice.
    I awoke by midafternoon and called Officer O'Toole to see if Miss Pinkham was still there.
    "Yeah, she's still here," he said. "Are you going to tell me what this is all about?"
    "Just playing a hunch, Benny, just playing a hunch."
Manny in forensics was out, so I left a message, and headed out.
    Of course, I hadn't reckoned on the L.A. traffic. I counted to ten under my breath, then in Spanish, then in Swahili. When all that failed I joined the other soreheads and leaned out of my car, yelling for the traffic to move. Of course I knew it wouldn't help, but it made me feel better. As the sun dipped closer and closer to the horizon I knew I just wasn't going to make it. What that meant was beyond me, but I knew it wouldn't be good.
    When I arrived, O'Toole was wearing a look that could wither an ancient sequoia, and it was aimed right at me. "Your friend is no longer in protective custody," he said. "She's a suspect in the murder of an officer."
    "Who?" I asked.
    "The police matron. We just found her ten minutes after dark with her throat ripped out. Messy." He looked grimly at his fingernails, as if they might hold the answer.
    "She'll be back by dawn," I said, "and send a car to her house. In the meantime, I'll see if I can find her."
    "You better get her," said O'Malley. "We don't like cop killers around here."
    The first thing I did was swing by forensics. Manny was there, grimly working on the late matron, and he saw me through the glass. He gestured for me to come in, and I gritted my teeth and entered his lab. Manny's work always gave me the creeps, and if I wasn't careful, I was going to add my sandwich to the other nauseating fluids he kept there.
    "Hiya, Danny," he said. That nightgown you gave me belong to that friend of yours?"
    "Yeah," I answered. "No chance this was a mistake?"
    "This kind of mistake you don't wake up from," he said, gesturing at the rather portly corpse of the matron. "I found some interesting things on the nightgown."
    "Do I want to know this?" I asked.
    "I'm gonna tell you anyway. I found blood, and fibers that link her to the death of an indigent last night. He wound up like this." Again, he pointed to the matron. "Throat torn out, bled to death."
    My God, I thought, what sort of monster have I allowed to roam the streets?
    Back in my Chevy I prowled around the seedier side of town, hoping against hope to catch sight of a mysterious woman in a diaphanous white gown.
    It's a big city, but I've done these sorts of searches before. I slowly trawl along the neighborhood, shining my big police-issue flashlight down the alleys. I had all but given up and decided to call the station to see if they'd found anything. I pulled up to an all-night convenience store and got out to use the pay phone. As I was waiting for someone to pick up I idly browsed through the tabloids. Vampires ate my dog, screamed one headline. As I was pondering the sort of trash people got away with writing, the phone picked up.
    "Twenty-fifth precinct," said a voice.
    "Yeah, this is Malloy. You guys have any luck finding the Pinkham girl?"
    "Just a minute," he said, and I heard him yelling over his shoulder to someone. Then someone picked up on another line.
    "That you, Malloy?" It was O'Toole.
    "Yeah, you got anything?"
    "I was about to ask you the same thing, Danny," he answered. "Where'd you get her, anyway?"
    "She hired me," I said. "She's got some sort of multiple personality disorder. Every night she becomes someone else."
    "I don't think I like who she's turning into," he said.
    "Me either," I sighed. "I'll let you know if I find anything."
I was just hanging up the phone when I caught a flash of white through the window. It was her!
    "Damn!" I ran after the streaking form in the dark city night. "Mary Jo!"
    The ghost-like form was almost a block ahead of me, and ducked into a corner, as if in response to my call.
    I knew she was dangerous, so I drew my gun as I approached the dark corner she'd ducked into. I don't think I had any idea just how dangerous, though, until I entered the shadow and found no one there. Cursing, I fumbled in my pocket for my lucky Zippo, and when the shaky light revealed a dead end, I nearly dropped it. Nowhere to go but up, I thought, and looked skyward. Was it my imagination, or could I just catch a glimpse of her gown whisking over the edge onto the roof?
    What am I following, I thought, and snapped my lighter shut.
    Mortal, you pursue your own death, came a sinister voice inside my head and I turned, like a horror-show sap about to discover the monster, and there she was, standing behind me.
    This creature bore the same resemblance to the demure Ms. Pinkham as the disreputable Mr. Hyde did to the good doctor.

     Her skin was pale as moonlit milk, her hair flowed dark and luxuriantly about her, as if with a life of its own. Her gown flowed white and dramatically in the dark of the alley, and backlit as it was from the streetlights behind her, I could see this one had a figure a bit more pleasing to the eye than Mary Jo's. But the face, for all its unearthly splendor, was hers.
    "Mary Jo?"
    Mortal, I am not the one you seek. It is against custom to speak my name to my meat, but I have been long without conversation. Perhaps I shall let you live a while, as long as you amuse me. 
    You may call me Rasha.
    And with that she leaned forward and grabbed me about the waist, lifting me off my feet with no more effort than if I had been a kitten. In my shock I had dropped my gun, not that it would have done me any good.  With a lunge she leapt straight for the brick wall of the alley, and I feared we'd dash against it hard enough to break skulls. Or my skull, anyway — I had no doubt she was a supernatural creature. My inner voice of denial shut up with an audible snap when she first spoke to me, directly into my head. Her lips never moved, except to smile a smile that would have been quite fetching if only it had been a little less pointy.
    So, my own apparently negligible weight in tow, she flung herself at the wall — and stuck. Then, with the ease of a garden lizard, she climbed straight up the wall to the roof, where she unceremoniously dumped me in a pile at her feet.
    Stay here, she commanded, and leapt off the opposite side. 
    I had no intent to obey her, but as I looked around, I found she had landed me on the only rooftop in the city with no access door. Not even a fire escape! If I survived this, I was going to look up the owner and book him on code violations.
    So there I was, waiting for my beautiful captrix to return, and wondering how many hours I had left until dawn, so I spent the time putting pieces together.
    It seemed obvious Ms. Pinkham had no knowledge of her alter ego; it was possible Rasha didn't know about Mary Jo, either. A classic case, if you will, of multiple personality disorder. An unusual twist, to be sure, but the psychiatric side of it I could handle.  I had seen stranger things than vampires in my time, and once I met her face to face I didn't waste any skull-sweat  on disbelief.  If I was going to get out of this, denial wasn't going to help.
    If only I could get to a phone and talk to my brother-in-law the shrink before she came back.
    In the meantime, all I could do was sulk until her return and hope my ace in the hole would protect me one more time.

    I was awakened from a fitful catnap on the tarpaper of the roof by a sound just beyond the threshold of hearing.  Meat, I have returned.

    I uncramped my joints and looked around and there she was -- just as beautiful and just as terrible as before.  It was about an hour before dawn, so all I had to do was stall her -- but a killer in a hurry can be pretty dangerous.  I sure as hell hoped she had just fed -- and then I immediately felt guilty.  Why was my neck more important than someone else's?

    Because it's mine, that's why.  I put my philosophical ruminations aside and decided to face Rasha head-on.

    "Do you know who Mary Jo Pinkham is?"

    She smiled her toothy smile at me and looked captivating.  If I didn't know what she was I'd fall for her.  If she wasn't trying to eat me I still might've.  Meat, she said in my mind, when you address the Queen of the Night, address me with respect.

    Apparently, Rasha had all the ego Mary Jo lacked.  I wondered what Mary Jo got our of the bargain.  "Your highness," I replied, dripping irony, "you're avoiding my question."

    That name rings a vague bell, Meat, she sang in my brain, but I make no point of remembering my victims -- and if I knew this person at all, it was as victim.

    Then she turned her gaze to the sky, noticing for the first time the approaching dawn.  I must go -- you shall be the last meal of the evening.

    I was hoping she'd make this easy, but I guess I was going to have to do this the hard way.  "Lady, you can't eat me.  I'm not any more human than you are."

    Meat lies.

    "If you drink my blood it'll have an unpleasant side-effect," I said, hoping this was true.  After all, my condition wasn't exactly given a write-up in medical journals.  Nonetheless I'd read somewhere that vampires couldn't stomach our blood.

    She smiled indulgently, like a parent playing along with a child's tall tale.  And what is it you claim you are, non-human?

    I didn't have much time before dawn, and I was afraid if she felt too rushed she'd simply pitch me off the roof.  I'd have to take a big gamble.  I held out my wrist.  "Taste for yourself."

    She looked wary, but as this was what she intended to do anyway, she didn't hesitate long.  "Just a taste, mind you!"

    Of course. I sure hope what had I read was right.  As it is there was going to be a mess on this roof before the sun came up -- one way or another.

    She took my hand in her cold clutches and brought the wrist to her mouth.  Those sharp teeth were barely slowed by my skin, and before I felt it there was blood pumping into the vampire's mouth.  

    As expected, she drank fully, intending to drain me dry before making her escape into the escaping night.  After what seemed an eternity, she had drunk enough so my body's defenses recognized the threat and triggered the Change.

    You see, in addition to being one of the city's best private detectives, I am also a werewolf -- and when a werewolf is under severe stress, he'll change even if the moon isn't full.  I've been doing this for a number of years now, so I could handle the intense pain involved in the Change without making a sound, so I was more than half-way transformed before Rasha noticed, deep as she was in the reverie of her drink.

    I could have attacked her as soon as the transformation was complete, but I was gambling on that bit of vampire trivia I'd read recently, so I held my ground -- as a wolf my wound was already healing up, and her supply was going to be cut off soon, anyway.  I wanted her to drink as much as she could first, though.

    The first indication that my desperate plan was working was a strange noise coming from deep in Rasha's throat -- the first actual noise I had heard from her.  Then she jerked violently, loosing her grip on my arm, and a small arc of my lycanthropic blood sprayed across my flank.

    With a gasp, she fell to the tarpaper of the roof and started convulsing, her fingers melting together and shortening, her face melting and elongating.

    You see, the blood of a changing werewolf triggers a similar transformation in a vampire -- just the once, mind you, it's not a conversion.  But what the movies don't tell you about werewolves is that the Change hurts.  A lot.  And your average vampire just isn't accustomed to that sort of pain.

    Also, since it's only a partial transformation, they stay in a painful half-form until their body finishes metabolizing the blood, which may take more than a day.  I felt confident that she'd be down for the count, writhing in pain and just not quite as pretty when the sun finally came up.  

    My own transformation was reversing now that the threat was past, and by the time the rosy-fingered dawn made its way over the rooftops of the city I was fully human again, though my clothes were torn to shreds from the transformation, and I was covered in quite a lot of my own blood.  Lying in front of me was a half-wolf, half-woman in a torn nightie, and she looked like she was having convulsions.  

    When she woke up hours later she was Mary Jo again, and she didn't seem too pleased at her surroundings.  I explained as best I could what had happened, but I could tell she didn't believe me, and feared I had taken some advantage of her.  It wasn't until she realized there was no way down from the rooftop she started to admit my story was at least possible.

    We spent the better part of an hour trying to get someone's attention, and it was especially frustrating to see all the faces in the windows of the building across the alley watching us, and knowing not a single one would call the police to come rescue us.  It was only when, in frustration, I started to flash them that a police helicopter finally came and picked us up.

    It wasn't too hard getting Mary Jo off on the murder charges -- when she told her story the court-appointed psychiatrist didn't even bat an eye and marked her non compos mentis without asking a single question.  

    I visit her in the institution from time to time, and she's making progress, I'm told.  She's gaining some of the self-confidence of Rasha, and is beginning to gain some of the night memories she had lost over the years.  The doctors won't believe her, but she thinks she's been leading a double life for hundreds of years.  Myself, I don't think she'll ever fully integrate her two personalities, for then she'd have to be either fully vampire or fully mortal, and really as she is she gets the best of both worlds.  Someday she'll convince the doctors she's okay, and she'll be out on the streets again.  When that day comes, she'll have a job at my agency -- turns out she's a killer secretary.  

    And besides, I promised my new partner I'd look out for her.  You see, Rasha still knows the trick of passing through bars, and we've become quite chummy during Mary Jo's incarceration.  I guess I'll have to get used to sleeping in the daytime after all.

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