Blood Crimes: Book One by Dave Zeltserman Page B

wouldn’t be able to do it if they weren’t trying to hurt Carol. Not that he hadn’t killed before becoming a vampire.
          Yeah, he had killed more than his share before that…
          Shit, maybe even more than since his infection…
          His thoughts drifted back to his days during the First Gulf War when he had been a member of a special forces unit that was taking out command and communication bunkers in Western Iraq. This was during the first wave of bombings when the Iraqi Republican Guard were buried deep underground. His team blew their way into those bunkers, tossed down tear gas canisters, then
Jim
would lead the charge. He was good at what he did and killed most of them himself before the other members of his team could get in on the action. Afterwards they would collect whatever intel they could find and blow up what was left inside. He killed a lot of Iraqis during those first few days, enough to fuck him up good for a long time afterwards.
          After his stint in the army, he wandered aimlessly for the next eight years. For a while he took whatever odd jobs came his way; short order cook, bartender, bouncer, fisherman, lumberjack, even a short time as a bodyguard for one of Hollywood’s leading divas, but he couldn’t stay put in any one place for too long. He couldn’t sleep at night and was too antsy during the day to be able to concentrate on anything. After a few months in one place, the pressure inside would get to where he felt like he couldn’t breathe, like he had a knife pressed against his heart. He’d have to move then. After six years of this, he stopped giving a shit altogether. He stopped working and instead started doing smash and grabs, burglaries and purse snatches for his drinking money. Nothing too violent, but still enough too leave him filled with even more self-loathing. A short time later he started worshipping the needle and the release that gave him. The heroin numbed him out and kept him from slicing his wrists each night. For almost a year after that he was in freefall, and by all rights he should’ve ended up dead, contracting AIDS or in prison for a good five to ten year stretch, and if it wasn’t for a chance encounter in Austin, Texas, one of those fates probably would’ve happened.
          That day started off worse than most of the others. He had hooked up the night before with another addict, a deathly thin blonde woman about twenty years older than him. He didn’t remember much about her other than how damn hollow her eyes looked, how her lips were so unnaturally pale with this hint of blue tingeing them and hard it was for her to find a vein to tap. When he woke up the next morning she was gone along with his roll of over three grand and his stash. There was nothing in her apartment worth any money. She wasn’t coming back. His cash and junk were long gone. He was just lucky she didn’t take his clothes, and even luckier she didn’t take his army-issued boots. He sat on the floor for a long time holding his head, needing a fix as badly as he ever did. Eventually the stench of garbage got to him and he staggered out of the apartment.
          
M
ost of what happened that day was lost to him, but he remembered that night ending up in a diner. He tried to palm a couple of bucks from the counter and that was when a burly tattooed arm went around his shoulder, corralling him.
          “Hey, buddy, I think that was left behind for that pretty little waitress over there working her tail off. What do you say you put it back?”
          It was said in a soft friendly rumbling tone, and the man saying it was the size of a small grizzly. Long beard, long dirty blonde hair, sunburned face, and wire-rimmed sunglasses that looked like gray coins placed on the eyes of a dead man. The man peered at
Jim
, who was wearing one of his old military camouflage shirts.
          “You in Desert Storm?” he