He would’ve crapped in his pants if I had removed my contacts. These special contacts masked the reflection from the mirror-like tapetum lucidum at the back of my eyes, which gave me a threatening, lupine gaze. The tapetum lucidum allowed me-and all vampires-both night vision and the ability to see the psychic energy auras that surrounded living things. I wore contacts to keep from spooking the humans.

My vampire sense, a heightened awareness of my five other senses, which my brain processed into an intuitive sixth sense, detected his fear. Instinctively, I ran my tongue across my upper teeth, feeling my incisors start to grow. I smiled at him and replaced my sunglasses.

The guard quickly returned my license. After checking his clipboard, he gave me a pink plastic ID tag stamped VISITOR. A dosimeter was affixed to one corner of the tag.

He pointed to a black Humvee parked beyond the guard shack. “They’ll escort you to your destination.”

Two more guards in gray camouflage climbed into the Humvee. Besides submachine guns, these guards donned police helmets and carried protective masks strapped to their thighs. The edginess in their manner made me wonder if this had something to do with the reason I had been summoned here.

I followed them for a quarter-mile, taking in the desolate quality of Rocky Flats. From my reading of public documents about this place and its notorious past, I expected a giant industrial complex. Instead, rows of steel containers lay stacked together on asphalt pads, surrounded by sparse grass, dirt, and the ubiquitous rocks. Boxcars sat on rusted wheels, resting on segments of track leading to nowhere. Ahead of us stood the gray concrete buildings in the Protected Area, where DOE and its contractors used to manufacture plutonium. Rolls of razor wire glittered atop chain-link fencing that marked the perimeter.

I lowered my window and let in the aroma of sagebrush. A mood of apprehension and restrained panic permeated the air. My vampire sense failed to pinpoint the cause, and this should’ve alerted me, but in my arrogance-I was in the company of blunt-toothed humans, after all-I dismissed any concern.

My college roommate, Gilbert Odin, now the Rocky Flats Assistant Manager for Environmental Restoration, had asked for me. Hearing from him after losing touch for a long time surprised me, but not as much as the twenty-thousand-dollar check he had Fed-Exed as an enticement to consider his proposal. Which was? I didn’t know, but the money was enough to tempt any private detective.

The Humvee took the left fork of the road and continued until we ended in a gravel parking lot adjacent to a series of long office trailers.

The guards dismounted, keeping their submachine guns handy, and pointed to the wooden steps of the trailer to my right. Did everyone get so much special attention?

Removing my sunglasses, I climbed the short, creaking steps and entered a tiny, carpeted foyer lit by weak fluorescent lighting. The interior was of modular construction, with upholstered wall panels in alternating beige and gray. Along one wall hung photographs in cheap plastic frames, portraits of the President, the Secretary of the Department of Energy, and all the DOE management flunkies in the hierarchy between Washington, D.C., and Rocky Flats.

The hall emptied into a receptionist’s office. No one sat behind the desk. Stacks of papers and binders covered the surface, crowded against framed photos of a smiling middle-aged blonde posing with children and a man about her age. A pile of thick folders lay on the chair.

The door behind the desk opened and Gilbert Odin stepped out. My friend stood as tall as I remembered him, at six foot four. His tie ended three-quarters of the way down his shirt. We hadn’t seen each other in years, and while I recognized his thick mustache, the bald pate pushing through a crown of gray and brown hair was new. It was as if his worries had burnished the hair off his head. His gray eyes beamed pleasantly through the rimless glasses perched on a long, narrow nose. He carried a smell of cabbage, as if he’d just finished a plate of sauerkraut.

We made eye contact.

Gilbert’s eyes opened wide, and his head tipped back in surprise.

I gave him a practiced smile and offered my hand, ignoring his stare. “Hey, Gilbert, what’s it been? Years and years?”

He gave my hand a weak, hesitant shake while he continued to study my appearance. “Yeah, something like that.”

We went into his office and he shut the door. The office was what I expected for a mid-level government hack. More modular walls and fluorescent lighting. A desk and matching cabinets, finished in a fake teak veneer. Computer monitor and keyboard on the desk. An in-box overflowing with correspondence.

Gilbert put his hand up, indicating that I should halt. He pulled a black box the size of a cigarette pack from the pocket of his trousers. He pressed a button and red lights flashed along the box that I recognized as an electronic bug detector.

Waving the box from side to side in front of me, Gilbert flicked his gaze from the box to my person. When he pointed at my ID tag, the lights flashed steadily and the box began to chirp.

He retrieved a letter opener from his desk and pried the dosimeter from my ID tag to expose a silver capsule sprouting wires. A listening device.

“Got you, ya bastard.” Gilbert dropped the bug on the floor and crunched it under his heel.

He motioned for me to sit in the chair before his desk. My gaze lingered on the broken remains of the miniature transmitter on the carpet. My vampire sense had missed the bug, and I felt uncomfortably naïve and paranoid. I wanted to start with my questions, but Gilbert put his fingers to his lips, so I kept quiet. He picked up the receiver of his phone and hollered into it, a yell so loud I winced.

He returned the phone to its cradle. “Whenever I have a guest, those assholes in Security crank up the sensitivity of their snooper. I love to make their ears ring for the rest of the day.”

A black boom box rested on the credenza behind Gilbert’s desk. He flicked the on switch and filled the room with the strains of a Metallica concert loud enough to drown the shriek of a turbine engine. How the hell were we going to talk?

He opened the center panel of the credenza and placed both the boom box and his telephone inside. When he shut the panel, it turned the heavy metal guitar whine into a muffled drone.

“Let’s see those bastards try to eavesdrop now.” He sat in his high-backed chair and folded his hands on his desk, smiling wryly.

As a vampire and private detective, I should be used to the bizarre, but nothing in my experience had ever matched this loony display.

I looked back at the destroyed bug on the floor. “If we’re not safe to talk here, why not go off site?”

“If I did that,” Gilbert replied, “Security would get suspicious.”

“Seems to me they’re already suspicious.”

“This is nothing. They’re just covering their butts. It’s the illusion of vigilance that comforts them. In these days after 9/11, any act of paranoia is justified.”

Gilbert’s eyes shifted from my face to the bottom of my neck. He must have noticed the makeup smeared against the inside of my collar. According to popular lore, vampires aren’t supposed to be able to endure sunlight. Thankfully, popular lore doesn’t take into account the modern miracles of sunblock, vitamin supplements, and cosmetics.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what’s with your eyes and the makeup?”

“Gulf War Syndrome,” I replied. “The second Gulf War. Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

His expression became anxious. “I read that it’s not contagious. Is it?”

Not unless I bit him. “No,” I reassured him. “But I was exposed to every suspected agent. Got the notorious anthrax vaccine. The latest issue of the Gulf War Review says that I could have leishmaniasis or mycoplasma. During battle we drove through the smoke of burning enemy tanks that we had destroyed with depleted-uranium penetrators. God knows what we inhaled.”