“Thank you.” Mrs. Tompkins fluttered her eyelashes at him, gathered up her bags of groceries and marched out of the post on her first-class legs. Liam thought there ought to be a trumpet playing somewhere in the background, or at the very least, a round of applause.

“Come on, Harvey,” Liam said, “we’ll drop you off at the cop shop on our way.”

“Oh, man, you can’t put me back there! What are the rest of the guys going to say! Knocked on my ass by a little old lady with a bag of groceries! Campbell, come on, man, have some heart!” Then, when Liam uncuffed him from the chair and steered him toward the back door with a determined hand, he shouted, “I want to talk to my lawyer, goddamn it! I’m constitutionally entitled to a phone call!”

In the meantime, Dracula’s bride waited with the calm certainty of one who knew she had eternity at her disposal for someone to put an end to her reign of terror.

TWO

“Poor bastard.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Whaddya mean, you guess? He just lost his wife of fifty years a year ago. He’s allowed.”

“Accent on the year ago. He was getting better there for a while; I don’t know why he had to go off the deep end again.” Bill used the bar towel to mop up the vomit around Eric Mollberg’s head where it lay sleeping peacefully on the bar. “I oughta call Liam.”

“Cut him some slack, woman. He’s been picked up on D-and-D twice already this month.”

“Yeah, well. He sits on the city council, for crying out loud.”

“Guys on the city council can’t get blind drunk when their wives die on them? You wouldn’t get blind drunk if I died?”