Jules opened several of the drawers beneath her kitchen counter, looking for some aluminum foil to seal up the vase. A small pile of bills and letters was sitting on the countertop. The letter on top of the pile was addressed to him, care of Ms. Maureen Remoulade, cobeneficiary. The letter was from the Claims Department of the First Union Firemen’s Casualty and Insurance Company.

Inside was a check for twenty-one thousand dollars.

The phone rang. Jules yanked the receiver off the wall. “You fuckin‘ sonofabitch,” he said before the caller could utter a sound. “Got impatient, huh? Thought I wasn’t gonna call your fuckin’ chat line? Well, you jumped the gun, asshole-”

“Hello? Jules, is thatyou?”

The voice wasn’t the sneering, somewhat high-pitched voice Jules had been expecting to hear. “Uh… yeah, this is Jules,” he answered, a little embarrassed. “Who’s this?”

“It’s Dr. Marvin Oday. You know, your old morgue buddy? Well, I’ve gotta hand it to you, Jules. You and Dr. Landrieu are quite the kidders. If nothing else, you livened up a slow night by giving me a good laugh.”

Jules tried to decipher this comment, but drew a complete blank. “What are you talkin‘ about?” His mind felt like curdled pudding. “This about those pills I asked you to look at?”

“Those little whiteA pills you gave me? Oh, I’ve looked at ‘em, all right. You really got my curiosity going with all that talk about secret, non-FDA-approved research. I thought maybe my analysis would take a couple of nights, at least. Only took me about ten minutes, though.”

Events were shifting back and forth too fast for Jules to follow. He knew he should feel grateful, but he’d forgotten how. “You know what’s in them pills? That’s great, Marvin; that’s really, yeah, that’s really great. You’ve done me a big favor. So you’ll be able to make more of them for me?”

“The first rule of comedy is never try to squeeze more humor out of a used-up joke. You want more pills? Cough up two bucks and get your butt over to a drugstore. ‘Til next time, Jules-”

“Wait! Marvin, don’t hang up yet! You’ve gotta tell me what’s in those pills!”

The receiver was silent for a couple of seconds. “Hold on-you mean Dr. Landrieu didn’t let you in on the joke?”

“Whatjoke?” Jules cried, totally exasperated. “What the hell is in the damn pills?”

“Aspirin, man. Ordinary, generic table aspirin.”

Jules mumbled good-bye to his old coworker and hung up the phone. He went into the dining room and sat down, resting his elbows on the table and leaning his forehead against his hands.Aspirin. Ordinary table aspirin. That’s what had stripped the years off his weary, weight-burdened body?That’s what had canceled the shooting pains in his knees, restored wind to his lungs and strength to his biceps?

It didn’t seem possible. Ordinary, common aspirin. But it had worked. It had worked just like Doc Landrieu had told him it would. Jules had no doubt about that. Maybe there was more to aspirin than just headache and hangover relief. Studies had recently shown it could prevent heart attack victims from suffering a second attack. Maybe his ex-boss had discovered more about aspirin than was commonly known?

Another notion occurred to Jules. Maybe Doc Landrieu had discovered more aboutJules than Jules had known. Maybe the pills hadn’t done the work at all. Maybe what had really done the work had been his own trust, his ownbelief that the pills would help him.

A placebo. Doc Landrieu had slipped him a placebo. That rotten bastard. Here Jules had trusted him, believed in him, and his old boss had abused that trust, twisted him around his pinkie finger just so he could get Jules to reconsider moving with him down to Argentina Jules barely had time to work a good mad up before the delayed-action epiphany kicked him in the head like the business end of a French Quarter mule:

It wasn’t the pills at all. It wasme. It’salwaysbeen me.

Everything Doodlebug had tried to convince him of was true. Jules had been transforming into a wolf with a barrel-belly because that was the only kind of wolf he’d believed he could become. He hadn’t flown in years because he’d lost faith in his ability to leave the ground. He’d suffered from aches and pains and shortness of breath for decades, all because an unending stream of newspaper articles and TV shows had told him a person of his sizehad to suffer these things.

None of it had been necessary. Maybe it had been safe and comforting… he’d always had a ready excuse at hand whenever he screwed up. But those excuses were a part of his old, familiar self that should’ve burned up when his house did.

His form and his fate were in his own hands.

He was 450 pounds of Grade-A, USDA-choice vampire. It was time he started acting it.

He picked up the phone and dialed the number from the tape. An unfamiliar voice answered.

“Get me your boss,” Jules said. “Tell him it’s the fat man.”

Two minutes later, Malice X came on the line. “I guess you figured out which end of the tape to stick in the machine, huh?“

Jules briefly considered five or six snappy comebacks. But he was in no mood for banter, clever or otherwise. “You and me, Malice. Let’s do it. Let’s get this shit over with.”

“Whoa-ho-ho!You soundserious, man. But I guess losin‘ a friend and a lover in one night can do that to a guy. Just name your time and place, Julio.“

“Tomorrow night. Ten o’clock. Your place.”

“You mean where I live?”

“Whatever hole in the ground you crawl into at the end of the night.”

Malice X laughed. “You hit closer to the truth than you know, man. How come my house? Not that I mind, but you’ve got me curious.“

“I don’t want you worryin‘ about me settin’ an ambush for you. I want you to feel nice and comfortable.”

The black vampire laughed again. “Why, that’s downrightballsy of you, Jules! Stupid, but ballsy. I like that. Fine. My boys’ll watch, but they won’t interfere; I promise. ‘No ambushes’…heh. Youkill me, man!”

He gave Jules directions. The instructions were nothing Jules needed to write down. Malice X lived in the heart of the city, barely a mile from Maureen’s house. At the center of everything-but hidden, invisible-deep down. Jules was surprised when he learned the location of his enemy’s home, but after a few seconds of thought, it made perfect sense.

So in nineteen hours and twenty-three minutes, Jules would battle his nemesis deep beneath Canal Street. That suited Jules just fine. It meant he’d have less distance to travel when he dragged Malice X down to hell.

EIGHTEEN

Jules stared at the insurance check in his hand. Twenty-one thousand dollars. More money than he’d ever held in his hands in his whole, long, often impoverished existence.

A bus rumbled past, spewing a cloud of diesel smoke over the Hibernia Bank automated teller kiosk at the corner of Royal and Bienville Streets. Jules signed the back of the check, then sealed it in a deposit envelope. The envelope glue tasted like peppermint motor oil. He stuck his rarely used banking card into the machine’s slot, then realized with a sinking feeling that he couldn’t remember his numeric password. After a second of gastric upset, he smiled ruefully when he recalled that he hadn’t picked a numeric password at all. He punched inM-A-U-R-E-E-N. The machine flashed its electronic version of “A-OK.”

Twenty-one thousand dollars. He could do a lot of good with that kind of money. Maybe he couldn’t make amends for all the rotten things he’d done over the past eighty years. But he could make life better for the few friends he had left.

Half an hour after the Palm Court Jazz Cafй had closed, the stretch of Decatur Street in front of the club was deserted. Deserted except for a tired musician loading equipment into his creaky Coupe DeVille.