Snowbirds of Prey Read online

  Snowbirds of Prey

  Freaky Florida Book 1

  Ward Parker

  Mad Mangrove Media

  Contents

  1. Of Pot Bellies and Pickleball

  2. Gone Fishin'

  3. Suspicious Minds

  4. An Angel, a Demon

  5. Not in My Backyard

  6. The Old, the Ill, the Undead

  7. Party Animals

  8. Florida Man Investigates Monsters

  9. Life on the Graveyard Shift

  10. Interview with the Vampire

  11. Of Bingo and Botánicas

  12. It's Magick

  13. A Priest Walks into a Botánica

  14. Reboot

  15. Fangs with a Sweet Tooth

  16. The Race

  17. A Real Barbarian

  18. Entities Most Foul, Part One

  19. Wolves at the Door

  20. Under Scrutiny

  21. Of Love Lost

  22. Closing Early Tonight

  23. Of Mind and Magick

  24. Support Your Local Businesses

  25. Eau de Wet Dog

  26. Bad Moon Rising

  27. Stay Vigilant

  28. Entities Most Foul, Part Two

  29. Great Balls of Fire

  30. Teamwork

  31. Obeah Man

  32. From Frying Pan to Fire

  33. Delaying Action

  34. Into the Lair

  35. Damn Your Hide

  36. Extrajudicial

  37. We're in This Together

  38. The Nighthawk

  Afterword

  About the Author

  1

  Of Pot Bellies and Pickleball

  Missy Mindle was a mortal human. There was nothing supernatural about her, unless you counted her budding powers of magick she was still trying to understand and develop. But she didn’t count them. She was a home-health nurse. Her main job responsibilities were medical screenings and basic care for seniors. It just so happened her patients were vampires, werewolves, and other creatures.

  Tonight, those responsibilities included examining the vampire curmudgeon Leonard Schwartz. Sitting on a dining room chair in his third-floor condo, he reluctantly allowed her to wrap a blood-pressure cuff around his pale, scrawny arm. The reading was a healthy (for a vampire) forty over fifteen and his resting heart rate was an admirable five beats a minute. He was, however, overweight.

  “What do you mean I’m fat?” Schwartz asked in his gruff Brooklyn accent.

  “I didn’t say you’re fat,” Missy replied, glancing at Schwartz’s protruding pot belly. “I said it would be good if you lost a little weight.”

  “I don’t understand how I could be fat. I’m on a liquid diet, for crying out loud. I had this,” he slapped his belly, “for years before I was turned. Couldn’t get rid of it no matter what. Then, when I was turned, I said to myself, ‘Schwartz, look at the bright side of being a vampire. You’re going to be better looking and much stronger.’ What a joke. I got the looks and the strength, but a hundred years later I still got this.” He slapped his stomach again.

  Schwartz had a shiny, bald dome fringed with tufts of white hair. Additional tufts served as eyebrows. His jowls were prominent and his nose was a force to be reckoned with. If he considered this good-looking, she couldn’t imagine what he looked like before.

  “Belly fat is especially difficult to lose for older men,” Missy said. “I guess that’s the case for vampires, too.”

  “But there’s no fat in the blood I drink. And I play pickleball four times a week. There’s no reason I should still have this gut. It lowers my confidence with the ladies.”

  He was showing some vulnerability here, but Missy couldn’t bring herself to say whatever words would bolster his sexual self-image. She simply couldn’t.

  Schwartz lived at Squid Tower, an oceanfront condominium community in Jellyfish Beach on Florida’s Atlantic coast, among other elderly vampires enjoying their golden years for eternity. Vampires can’t just show up at a doctor’s office to get their healthcare like the rest of us. Primary care physicians generally have daytime office hours and they ask awkward questions when they observe death-like symptoms. Missy had to take on that role with her home visits.

  Now, you’d probably assume an immortal creature would never have health issues. And you’d be wrong. A seventy-five-year-old like Schwartz was still a seventy-five-year-old, regardless of the supernatural power acquired when he was transformed into a vampire. His age when he was turned into a vampire would be his age forever.

  Being turned does give you some extra pep, more than any senior vitamin supplements could ever provide. However, you still have to deal with your human, pre-vampire health concerns. Vampirism gives you powerful wound-healing abilities, but it doesn’t automatically remove plaque from your arteries, or reverse your arthritis. True, your hearing becomes better than a human’s but it would still be diminished compared to a younger vampire’s.

  In short, dying and being reborn as a vampire does wonders for your health. And immortality is a handy thing for sure. But being a vampire can’t fully reverse the physiological damage aging does to your body. That truth is the business model of Acceptance Home Care, Missy’s employer.

  Unfortunately, diet, exercise, and a healthy weight were touchy subjects, even for the undead.

  “I’m concerned about your blood-test results,” Missy said. “Your glucose level is dangerously high. You could develop Type 2 diabetes.”

  Missy had drawn Schwartz’s blood the week before and her home-health company sent it to a special lab that handled “unusual patients,” as they put it. Getting the blood tested was easy. Drawing the blood sample was a different story. Despite her years as a nurse in hospitals, Missy found it difficult to find suitable veins in vampires. And the blood she extracted from them was dark and viscous, clogging many a needle.

  Still, Schwartz had whined and complained when she poked him with the needle. And seeing his hungry expression as he had watched the tubes filling with his blood made Missy fear for her life.

  “Vampires can be diabetic?” Schwartz asked.

  “Who would have thought? But that’s what I learned in my training with Acceptance Home Care. Now, do you have a sweet tooth? Have you been feeding on prey with high sugar levels? If they eat a lot of sugar, their glucose levels remain high for up to an hour before their insulin lowers it. Which means their glucose goes right into your own blood.”

  Schwartz muttered something under his breath. He clearly didn’t want a lecture on his feeding habits.

  “There’s always the Blood Bus for an easy, healthy meal,” Missy added.

  “I’m not drinking any damn donated blood. I need the thrill of the hunt. It’s part and parcel of the dining experience for me. It’s the essence of being a vampire, in my opinion. I’ll never be one of these folks who sit around waiting for the Blood Bus to show up every night. I am an alpha predator, a master of the night.”

  “It’s really simple, Mr. Schwartz. If you see a guy eating an ice cream cone, don’t hunt him. Or at the very least, wait an hour after he’s done eating before you attack. Okay?”

  He grunted. But at least it wasn’t an obscenity.

  “And I hope you don’t hunt close to home,” Missy said.

  “Nah, I don’t do that.” Schwartz wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “There are rumors about you.”

  “I told you I don’t. It’s against the rules, anyway.”

  “And you know why,” Missy said. “If the police are involved, it would endanger the entire community.”

  “I don’t kill my prey. Well, usually I don’t. And I always mesmerize them so they forget about the attack.”

  �
��Sometimes their memories come back. And what if there’s a witness who sees your attack?”

  “I don’t need a human to lecture me.”

  “If you insist on hunting, why not get away from the city, go out west into the countryside? That would be a perfect way to get more exercise.”

  “I’m late for my pickleball game,” Schwartz said, buttoning his shirt and getting up. He retrieved a duffel bag from the closet. “Don’t mean to be rude, but . . .”

  “Don’t pretend we’re finished, Mr. Schwartz. There’s one more thing I need from you.”

  “I’m not peeing in a cup.”

  “And don’t pretend this is the first time you’ve had to do this.”

  “Look, I only pee every other day. I’m not even technically alive—what value is there in my pee?”

  “Do you want me to list all the valuable data we get from your urine? Granted, many of them are different than when you were alive, but some are even more critical now. Low levels of creatinine can be fatal in vampires.”

  Schwartz gave a big, theatrical sigh and held out an open hand. Missy placed in it a plastic cup with a lid. He took it and retreated to the bathroom. Three hours later, he emerged and slapped the almost-empty cup on the dining room table.

  “I’ve got to leave,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I made you miss your pickleball game.”

  “No, I was lying before about being late. The game begins in a half hour. Goodnight,” he said, opening the front door and waiting for her to take her tote bag and leave.

  Missy didn’t have any more appointments that night, so she looked forward to getting home and relaxing. She started her ancient Toyota in the visitor lot and drove past the pickleball courts, where vampires in white tennis outfits, only slightly whiter than their skin, were assembling. She exited past the gatehouse, where the overnight guard smiled and waved at her.

  She was fairly certain he was a human, with plenty of Neanderthal ancestry. But the way he looked at her creeped her out more than monsters did.

  The vampire who wanted to kill him really sucked at pickleball. From his post in the gatehouse, Bernie watched Schwartz flail about on the court in a doubles match. Schwartz would let the easiest shots pass him by, then go after ones his teammate was hitting, resulting in tangled arms and the thwack of paddles hitting undead bodies. The balls Schwartz did hit, he hammered with preternatural strength as if he wanted to cause bodily injury to the player on the other side of the net. To clarify, it was a seventy-five-year-old’s preternatural strength.

  Every night at midnight, the four pickleball courts at Squid Tower Condominiums filled with vampires playing beneath the bright lights. They didn’t need the lights to see, but turned them on so humans passing by wouldn’t get suspicious. Bernie called the sport tennis for old people, or the lovechild of badminton and ping-pong. Seniors really liked pickleball. Vampire seniors, especially. As vampires, they could move a little faster than their human counterparts, leap an impressive distance (at times), and sometimes make shots that actually impressed Bernie.

  But, still, if one of players fell down it was a big production. Frantic clucking like vampire hens and if the vampires couldn’t help their friend to get up, Bernie would have to leave the gatehouse to help. He shuddered at the thought of the withered hands, cold as death, gripping his hand and arm as he pulled the fallen warrior to his or her feet.

  Sometimes, when there was shrieking about a possible broken hip, he would have to call the private medical service to come out since dialing 9-1-1 was a big no-no in a community of vampires trying to hide what they truly were. Fictional vampires were supposed to have magical healing powers, but try telling that to the geezer flailing around on the court like a turtle on its back, threatening to sue every last entity he could think of. It wasn’t pretty.

  Schwartz’s game on the court nearest the gatehouse didn’t last long. An unfortunate possum wandered by and two players chased after it for a late-night snack. Schwartz sat down on a bench beside the courts, wiping his face with a towel even though vampires don’t sweat (it must have been an ingrained habit). He put his racket away in his duffel bag. Then he trudged back toward the building.

  However, he made a point of passing by the gatehouse. He stopped just outside of Bernie’s window.

  “Hey, numb-nuts,” Schwartz said to him. “It’s good to see you’re not sleeping on the job for once. Never let your guard down anymore. Because I’m coming for you. You can count on it. I’m coming for you.”

  Schwartz laughed and walked away.

  This was the kind of crap Bernie had to deal with every night. Bernie Burdine was the new overnight gate guard at Squid Tower. And his prospects for survival were not good.

  2

  Gone Fishin'

  At the same time, a different tale of predation was taking place a few hundred yards away as two shark fishermen waited for a bite. It just so happened Jellyfish Beach had an ordinance against fishing for sharks from the beach. Partly, it was for public safety. Depositing chum made from pieces of dead fish just off the beach to attract the sharks wasn’t a good idea when there would be surfers and swimmers in those same waters as soon as the sun came up. Chumming was recently made illegal statewide for shore-based shark fishermen, though most did it anyway.

  And partly the city’s ordinance was to protect the sharks which were often killed by the stress of their long fight once hooked, pulled up onto the beach to be the subject of selfies with their captors. By the time the shark was pushed back into the water, it was often too late. Fragile, protected species like hammerhead sharks were particularly susceptible to dying this way.

  Billy Ray and Nubb were not concerned about the welfare of sharks, or about the ordinance. They loved the adrenaline rush of catching giant sharks at night, taking selfies with the dying sharks, and then forgetting to post their photos on social media. And, of course, they enjoyed getting good and wasted while they were at it.

  “It’s your turn to drop the bait,” Billy Ray said.

  “What the hell? That ain’t fair. I did it last time,” Nubb said.

  It was long after midnight and they hadn’t caught anything but a meager buzz. Nubb was enjoying himself, but he knew Billy Ray would start to get abusive if they got skunked with no catches. Billy Ray was large and, despite his giant belly, very strong, while Nubb was small and wiry. He’d been on the receiving end of Billy Ray’s fists before and didn’t want to repeat the experience. Such was the price of friendship.

  “You didn’t paddle out far enough,” Billy Ray said, finishing off a candy bar and draining the last of a can of beer down his throat. “So it don’t count. This time, go out another twenty yards at least. And dump some more chum.”

  Billy Ray obviously thought Nubb was stupid enough to fall for this logic, but the fact was Nubb was smart enough to avoid making Billy Ray angry.

  Billy Ray put a large bluefish on the giant hook and handed it to Nubb, who placed it in the rear tank-well of the kayak. He pushed the kayak into the surf, jumped on, and paddled furiously to get through the waves without dumping. Shark baits were too big, and the sinkers above them too heavy, to cast out with a fishing rod from the beach. They had to be delivered by boat.

  Nubb paddled further this time. He figured he was about a hundred and fifty yards out, farther than last time. But Billy Ray waved him to keep going. He was well past the second sand bars and the water was probably pretty deep here. He looked back at the beach and Billy Ray waved him on. Finally, after more padding, Billy Ray gave him a raised fist.

  Nubb opened a plastic container and poured the foul mix of fish heads and guts into the water. Then he dropped the baited hook and watched it sink. Time to head back. He hoped his kayak wouldn’t get rammed by a shark as he paddled back toward shore.

  On shore, which seemed to Nubb awfully far away, Billy Ray was reeling in some slack line, then pulled another beer out of the cooler. They weren’t supposed to be fishing for sharks or drinking bee
r on the beach, but neither the cops nor Fish & Wildlife ever patrolled at this hour. So they figured they’d be safe.

  A flare or Roman candle arced in the sky just inland of the beach. Whoever launched that wasn’t cool, Nubb thought. It could attract Johnny Law’s attention to their location.

  Nubb entered the surf zone and had to be very careful not to dump. He used the paddle behind him like a rudder, switching it from side to side, to keep the kayak straight and surfing the waves. He looked up and thought he saw someone talking to Billy Ray, but the kayak dipped into a trough and his view was blocked by a wave. When he went over the crest, he didn’t see anyone where Billy Ray had been standing, not his friend nor the dark figure speaking to him.

  Had Billy Ray been arrested? Nubb felt anxious and began paddling hard. As the kayak slipped through the wash and onto the sand, there was no sign of Billy Ray. He quickly pulled the kayak up onto the beach, away from the encroaching tide.

  “Billy Ray?” he called with a quaver in his voice.

  He didn’t receive an answer. It was quiet except for the growl of the surf. The beach was totally empty of people. Billy Ray’s rig, an expensive fiberglass rod and Penn reel, lay carelessly on the sand. There’s no way Billy Ray would have willingly placed it there because sand could get into the gears of the reel.

  “Billy Ray?”