"Leave him," Riggs said to my sister. "They're vamps. They aren't really dead as long as their heads are attached."
"What?"
"They are going to wake up," he repeated to me, clearly impatient at having to keep explaining himself. "The cleaners will come back to finish the job on Steve, but these others..." Riggs trailed off.
Maisey was kneeling and trying to prop Steve, who was probably twice her size, over her shoulders.
"Put him the fuck down," Riggs said. "He's a vamp, and I'm not bringing a vamp in my truck."
"You said they'll come back for him," she said, straining under his weight. "I'm not leaving him to die. Are you insane?"
Riggs moved toward her, probably to rip Steve from her shoulders if his posture was any indication. I didn't know what came over me, but I reached out and grabbed his thick arm with two hands, stopping him.
He looked down at my hands, then at me.
"Please," I said. "She's not going to come without him. And I won't come without her."
I could see his jaw flexing in annoyance, but he finally let out a low sound in his throat. "Fine. But I'm not carrying that asshole."
Maisey didn't complain and waved off my offer to help as we went down the stairs. Thankfully, my sister was serious about her fitness, and she seemed to take carrying Steve as a sort of personal challenge. That, or she considered it a "fuck you" to Riggs, who probably hadn't thought she'd be able to manage to get him outside.
Riggs pulled out a cell phone as we were going down the stairs and called someone. “Yeah. Meet me at the bar. Five minutes.”
He hung up the phone, then took us outside to where a beat-up truck was waiting with the engine running and the door still hanging open.
Half a dozen people who had been casually going about their night stopped to gawk at us. Steve was leaking blood all over my sister and looked very much like a dead body. Without Riggs' imposing size, I imagined somebody would've probably tried to stop us or call the cops. Instead, he just glared at anybody who stared too long and ushered us all in the truck. He made Maisey put Steve in the bed of the truck, where he strapped him down with bungie cord like a load of cargo, despite Maisey's protests and even a few useless punches she'd landed on his back.
The whole process took less than a minute. Before I knew it, he was driving, and we were in a car with a dangerous man while being pursued by vampires.
Exactly how I'd expected my Wednesday to go.
There were about a thousand questions I wanted to ask, but I blurted out the most mundane of them a few seconds after he started driving. “You just left this running in the middle of the street? What if someone stole your truck?”
“Then I would hunt them down and kill them. And we would’ve walked to the bar instead of drove.”
I shook my head to myself, staring out the window.
Despite the obvious shit we were in, a thudding thrill was pumping through my body. I was doing something. Even if it was running for my life. Even if it made absolutely no sense. I looked around the interior of his old truck and felt the familiar fear rise up in me. If the “vampires” hunting us didn’t kill us first, I had a feeling whatever I caught in this filthy truck was going to do the job. I didn't even have my hand sanitizer with me.
I did my best to breathe shallow, although I was fairly sure that wasn't a true preventative technique.
“Who are you?” Maisey asked.
Riggs was driving now with either some of the worst driving skills I’d ever seen or the best. I couldn’t decide. He was weaving onto the sidewalk to avoid traffic and nearly killing pedestrians who got in his way. But he did it all with that same calm, deadly serious look on his face.
“I told you already. I'm Riggs, and I'm unwillingly coming out of retirement to help your dumb asses. You're welcome,” he said. “We can discuss payment now, if you like.”
“Payment?” Maisey sputtered. “For abducting us and-” she clutched the dashboard to stop from being flung across the cab as he swerved to avoid an old lady who was giving us the middle finger from the center of a crosswalk.
“For saving you. Yes. You can pay me in cold hard cash, or you can owe me. Either one works. But you’ll owe me pretty good for this. The cleaners are no joke.”
“We can owe you?” I asked. “What kind of respectable businessman lets people “owe” him?”
“Who said I was respectable?” Riggs asked. Somehow, while looking at me, he weaved the truck around a stopped car and passed into oncoming traffic, then narrowly dodged a bus coming toward us. “Nobody particularly wants an asshole. But I’m the asshole you got, and, unfortunately for you, the one you need.”