She came back with a couple of plastic to-go cups. “It’s a fair-trade Cuban blend. Sierra Maestra with goat’s blood.”

The coffee smelled great. I put the manuscript down.

“Hope you learned something.” She gave me one of the cups. “I would call you stud but we wouldn’t know that, would we?”

“I appreciate the compliment. What are you going to do with this manuscript?”

“Get it published, what else? The general public will get off on the New Age woo-woo angle and we vampires will have yet something else that we passed under the noses of the blunt tooths. In the meantime, I’ve got more research to do.” She grinned. “The fun stuff.”

We walked to the pier, sat on the edge, and dangled our bare feet over the water. The resort’s Bayliner was docked next to us.

“You guys only have one boat?” I asked. “Seems you’d have more.”

“Antoine’s got one.”

“Where is it?”

Carmen pointed to the water fifty feet from the pier. A white oblong object rested on the bottom of the lagoon.

I asked, “More winnings from one of his poker games?”

“Of course.”

We sipped the blood-coffee blend and meditated on the beauty around us. Fish flashed like knife blades through the water. Crabs crept up the wharf pilings and, when they caught us looking at them, skittered back down to the rocky bottom.

The sun felt great against my skin. In the few minutes I’d been outdoors, my complexion had darkened but I needed to cook awhile more before I matched Carmen’s toasted patina.

The rhythmic grunt of an engine announced the approach of a motorboat. A white boat appeared around the northern spit of land at our right, about a twenty-footer, with a fabric canopy over the cockpit.

“Expecting company?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “It’s probably a fishing boat and the captain forgot how to read a chart. Happens now and then. Especially when we have naked chalices sunning themselves on the beach.”

The boat turned and chugged toward us. Sunlight glittered off the gold metallic letters on the hull, which read: SHERIFF. Under that, in dark green letters, it said, MONROE COUNTY.

A man in uniform-white short-sleeved shirt, yellow chevrons on his sleeve, dark green trousers, gun belt, sunglasses-occupied the helm. I guessed him to be well over six foot. Some of that height came from a pompadour so pointy and stiff it belonged on the nose of a rhinoceros.

Carmen and I got to our feet, our tapetum lucidum hidden by our sunglasses.

I don’t like cops. Any cops. Federal marshals, city police, and especially a deputy sheriff, like this guy. A visit by a cop was always a cure for a good mood.

The boat glided to within inches of the dock and stopped. The tall deputy with the pompadour hailed us.

“Know where I could find Antoine Speight?”

“He’s not here,” Carmen answered. “What’s this about?”

The deputy moved to the front of the boat and tossed the bowline. It landed between Carmen and me.

“A little help,” the deputy said.

Carmen didn’t move. “You didn’t answer me. What’s this about?”

The deputy grimaced in annoyance. He hopped onto the pier and bent over to hitch the rope to the closest piling. He stood and his pompadour towered above us. When he looked at Carmen, his expression became all big-bad-wolf-and-I’m-happy-to-see-you. “Deputy Sheriff Toller Johnson.”

He removed his sunglasses and forced them through the crust of gel holding his steeple of hair in place. His gray eyes went from Carmen to me and then back to Carmen. He addressed her breasts. “You work here?”

“I have a face, if you don’t mind, Deputy.”

Johnson’s gaze rose to her face, and that hungry smile of his widened. I wanted to sew it shut with wire.

He pulled a memo pad from his hip pocket. “And you are?”

“Carmen Arellano. I’m business partners with Antoine, so yes, I work here.”

Johnson pointed the memo pad at me. “And you?”

“I’m a guest.”

“Your name?”

Johnson needed that memo pad shoved up his rectum. I answered curtly. “Felix Gomez.”

Johnson’s stare didn’t move from Carmen. “Are you missing someone from your resort?”

Carmen didn’t say anything. I’m sure she and I shared the same thought. Why was the deputy asking?

True, one of the women guests was missing. That the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office was on to it meant bad news.

The deputy made a point of resting his elbow on the pistol holstered to his waist. The gesture signified that he had the authority to carry a gun and pry answers out of us. “Well, is anyone missing? Female?”

“A woman. Yes.”

“And her name?”

Carmen looked irritated at having to answer to this over-coiffed blunt tooth. “Marissa Albert.”

“How well do you know her?”

“As well as anyone else here.”

“Really?” Johnson gave a smug nod. “Then I need you to come with me.”

“Where to?”

Johnson flipped the memo pad closed and tucked it into his pocket. “To the morgue on Big Pine Key, Miz Arellano.” He worked the sunglasses back out of the pompadour and set them over the square bridge of his nose. “We have the body of a dead woman that needs identifying.”

Carmen’s brisk, angry steps churned the sand as we returned to her cabin.

“Fuck,” she kept repeating.

“You mean about the missing chalice or the deputy?” Deputy Johnson had told Carmen that she had to ride to Big Pine Key in his boat. We were on the way to her cabin to change clothes before we left.

“Both,” answered Carmen. “I was hoping to find her alive. She was a doll. Christ, now we got the goddamn authorities involved. What the hell happened to Marissa anyway?”

“Maybe it’s not her in the morgue.”

“Keep believing that, Felix. She’s been missing for three days and poof, this peckerwood comes around asking me to identify a body.”

We entered the cabin. Carmen plucked a sundress from a peg on the wall. “Naw.” She put the dress back on the peg and bent over to shift through a basket of laundry. She pulled out a tiny red tank top, whipped off her T-shirt, and stretched the tank over her head and torso. The tank looked as thin as a coat of paint. “How’s this?”

“I thought you didn’t want Johnson to stare.”

“The more he stares, the more that lech stays distracted.”

We put on our contacts. No telling how long we’d have to be among humans and we’d better take care to remain disguised. I got a T-shirt and boating mocs.

Carmen gathered her hair into a ponytail and pulled it through a scrunchie to hold it in place. She pushed her feet into a pair of flip-flops.

We rounded up her chalice Thorne. Poor guy had an ice pack on his crotch. Strapping or not, sex with Carmen had put his connecting unit through the wringer. The three of us returned to the dock. Johnson sat on a wharf piling. When he saw Carmen, he immediately stood at attention. His mouth gaped and his eyebrows arced over the top of his sunglasses. I expected his eyeballs would come flying through the lenses.

Carmen climbed aboard Johnson’s boat and Thorne and I got in the Bayliner. The two boats motored out of the bay and turned northeast from Snipe Keys. The sun hovered above us.

I went to the front of the Bayliner and stretched out on the deck. As a vampire, I never thought that I’d get a chance to work on my tan.

I watched Carmen and Johnson in his boat. They talked and he wrote on his memo pad, but I couldn’t hear what they said. I slipped off my contacts and read their auras. Carmen’s orange glow bristled with annoyance. Johnson’s red aura bubbled with lust, even though the conversation should have been about a dead body.

While I baked like a ham, I thought about what was happening around me. I came to Florida in search of the author of The Undead Kama Sutra. Then Odin’s mortally wounded alien impersonator hired me to find his killer and, in his dying breath, offered the name Goodman. And he added that little gem of needing to save the Earth women. Then the Araneum warned me about aliens and made a puzzling reference to a crashed charter airplane.