“Find him,” the alien said. “Find the man who killed me.”

I sat on the alien’s bed. We were on the second floor of a cheap motel in Sarasota, Florida. To get up the stairs I had to get past three hookers, their pimp, and a blind man selling pot-for medicinal purposes only, of course.

Gilbert Odin, or, rather, the alien who masqueraded as my abducted and long-deceased friend from college, lay on his back. His jaundiced eyes looked ready to pop from their sockets. His slender body stretched the length of the mattress and his wing tips hung over the end. Iridescent blood pumped from the wound on his chest, stained his clothes, and pooled on the bedcovers. It looked like maple syrup mixed with motor oil. The stench of his charred flesh and his natural reek of boiled cabbage would’ve watered the eyes of a buzzard.

I cradled in my lap the space blaster I’d found on the floor-I’d almost tripped over the thing when I entered.

Odin wheezed and gasped. His mustache arched across the top of the flattened oval of his mouth. Every faltering breath pumped more of that thick, shimmering blood from the hole in his torso. The puncture looked like someone had impaled him with a white-hot length of rebar. A black ring of burned flesh surrounded the thumb-sized opening.

Odin was dying and there was nothing I could do to help him. No use dialing 911. What could I say? “Send help. I’m a vampire and need an ambulance for an extraterrestrial dying from a ray-gun blast.”

“Felix.” Odin’s hand touched my leg. “Find Goodman.”

“Goodman who?”

I’d barraged Odin with questions since I’d been here. An hour ago I was cruising south on I-75 when he called my cell phone. He asked for help, gave directions to this squalid motel along the North Trail Corridor, and hung up.

Question one. How did he get my number?

Question two. How did he know I was in Florida?

Question three. Why me?

He hadn’t answered these or any of my other questions. All Odin did was roll his eyes, squirm on the bed, and bleed.

The lights were out and the room was as dark as the night sky outside. I had removed my contacts to unmask the mirrorlike retinas-the tapetum lucidum-in my eyes and use vampire vision.

As a supernatural, I could see the auras of the psychic energy fields that surrounded all living creatures. The color of these auras corresponded to our chakras-our spiritual centers and the level of our psychic awareness. Humans had a red aura, the first and lowest chakra, which centered on manifestation in the material plane. Vampires, orange aura, the second chakra, connection from the material to the spiritual. Aliens, third and yellow, for transformation. To what? Judging from what I know about aliens, I wouldn’t regard them as more evolved or spiritually developed than vampires.

Auras can display our emotions more clearly than facial expressions. Since humans are blind to psychic energy, this gives us vampires the advantage when we pump them for information.

Odin coughed. His aura faded to a diluted piss-yellow color. The penumbra of his psychic shroud tightened around his body.

The last I’d seen of Odin was years ago, after he’d hired me to investigate an outbreak of nymphomania at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant in Colorado. He knew the nymphomania was caused by a special isotope of red mercury leaking from a UFO the government had squirreled away, but he hadn’t bothered to fill me in. I had to uncover that on my own.

Odin might exist on a higher psychic plane but he was still a liar. Something else Odin hadn’t told me was that he was an alien impostor and what he really wanted was a prototype psychotronic device other aliens had brought to Earth in violation of their intergalactic law. The psychotronic device was to test controlling humans by using psychic energy.

Screw that. We vampires didn’t need competition from extraterrestrials. So I had destroyed the device and had left Gilbert Odin the Alien with the mutual understanding that our identities would remain secret.

Now he was back, and dying.

Odin reached for the nightstand beside the bed. His aura brightened as he struggled against death.

I stood and faced him.

Odin hooked his fingers over the drawer pull and opened the drawer. He groped inside and withdrew a letter-sized envelope.

“Take me here,” he whispered. His thumb rubbed against numbers scrawled over the front of the envelope. Smears of his blood stained the corners.

I took the envelope. It was heavy and contained something thick. The numbers on the front read:

27.25 82.46

“What do these mean?” I asked.

“Just take me there,” he said. “Help me get home.” Odin turned his head toward me. The skin hung from around his eyes like he was starting to peel. “I have a family.”

I had considered a Mrs. Gilbert Odin and larvae Odins on another planet. Hope they stayed there. “You miss them?” I tried to sound sympathetic.

“Are you kidding?” Odin gasped. “That’s why I took this job.” He chuckled, snork, snork, snork.

I opened the envelope. It contained hundred-dollar bills in a wad thicker than my index finger. “What is this? About twenty thousand bucks, right? For what?”

Odin turned his head back toward the ceiling. The loose flesh sagged from his skull as if he was deflating. Odin had told me he had gone through cosmetic surgery to blend into human society. With his body shutting down, the alterations were disintegrating.

He aimed a crooked finger. His fingernail fell off and left a purple splotch on his skin. “For you.”

“Why?”

Odin smacked his lips and worked his tongue out of his mouth. It flopped on his chin and rolled down his cheek to land quivering on the bedspread.

Yuck. I hoped the tongue didn’t sprout eyes and legs and start walking on its own.

“Find Goodman.” I guess Odin didn’t need a tongue to talk. The voice sounded like a trio of drunks were in his throat. He had mentioned having a trifurcated speaking passage.

“Did Goodman do this to you? With this?” I held up the blaster. The gun had a housing the size of a large orange, with knobs sticking out the top and rear. Despite its size, the blaster felt light in my hand. The back of the housing had hieroglyphics around the circumference. A pointed barrel made of glass-like material stuck out the front. The grip and trigger seemed improvised for a humanoid hand.

“Goodman,” Odin repeated. His aura faded to a faint glow around his body.

Goodman who? This damn alien was loony enough the first time I’d seen him. Now, so close to death, his delirium made him incomprehensible.

I slapped the envelope against the nightstand. “You want my services, then help me. Who is Goodman? You said, ‘Find the man.’ He’s not an alien? He shot you with a blaster. This one? Where did he get it?”

Odin waved me close. I leaned over him and worried that he might spit a body part at me.

He whispered: “Find Goodman.”

What a mess. A dying extraterrestrial doing God knows what mischief on Earth. Mix that up with an assassin using an alien ray gun. But if I turned Odin away, what business did I have being a vampire private detective? Problem was, I kept getting cases that made me feel like Moses standing at the Red Sea.

“Okay, Gilbert. I’m in.”

“One more thing,” he whispered again.

What was he suckering me into? “What is it?”

“Save the Earth women.”

I should’ve expected this. An even bigger mess. “Save the Earth women from what?”

“No more questions.” Odin touched my face. “Tag, you’re it.”