"Hey," he said.

"Ouch," Jody said, grabbing her forehead with both hands as if to hold her brains in.

"That's new, huh? Vampire hangover?" Tommy waved some feathers out of the air in front of him.

"I feel like death warmed over," Jody said.

"Cute. I'll bet you're missing coffee right now."

"And aspirin. I've fed off of you when you'd been drinking. Why did it affect me now?"

"I think maybe the huge cat guy had a little more in his blood than I did. Anyway, I have a theory about that. We can test it later, when you feel better, but right now we have a ton of stuff we have to do. We've got to figure out the move. Clint called me from the store last night. Wanting me to work. Then he called back all freaked out, saying I shouldn't come in."

Tommy played the message for her. Twice.

"He knows," Jody said.

"Yeah, but how does he know?"

"Doesn't matter. He knows."

"Fuck!"

"Little bit softer now," Jody said, holding her hair like it was hurting her.

"Too loud?"

Jody nodded. "You know, for your notebook, Tommy. Vampire senses when you're hungover? Not so good."

"Really? That bad?"

"Your breath is nauseating me from across the room."

"Yeah, we need toothpaste."

"There's someone at the door?" Jody covered her ears. She could hear sneakers scraping the sidewalk from all the way downstairs.

"There is?"

The door buzzer sounded.

"Yep," she said.

Tommy ran to the front windows and looked down to the street.

"There's a Humvee limo out there that's about a block long."

"You'd better answer it," Jody said.

"Maybe we should just hide. Pretend we re not home."

"No, you need to get it," Jody said. She could hear the shuffling at the door, the rock and roll playing in the limo, the bong bubbling, lines being chopped on a CD case, and a male voice repeating the phrase "sweet blue titties" over and over like a mantra. She grabbed the pillow from Tommy's side of the bed and pulled it over her head. "Answer it, Tommy. It's the fucking Animals."

"Dude," said Lash Jefferson, a wiry black man with a newly shaved scalp, wearing mirror shades. He pulled Tommy out of his doorway and hugged him furiously—crazed, back-slamming, good-to-see-you guy hugs. "We are so fucked, dude," Lash continued.

Tommy pushed away, trying to reconcile that he was glad to see his friend with the fact that Lash smelled like a beer-bar urinal filled with mackerel.

"I thought you guys went to Vegas," Tommy said.

"Yeah. Yeah. We did. Everyone's in the limo. It's just that I need to talk to you. Can we go inside?"

"No." Tommy almost said that Jody was sleeping, which had been his excuse for keeping the Animals out of his loft in the past, but Jody was supposed to have left town. "Step in the stairway, I've got something happening upstairs."

Lash nodded and looked over the top of his shades and bounced his eyebrows. His eyes were bloodshot and glazed over. Tommy could hear his heart racing. Coke or fear, he guessed. Both maybe.

"Look, dude," Lash said. "First thing, we need to borrow some money."

"What? You guys have over a hundred grand each from the art we sold."

"Yeah, we did. We had a big weekend."

Tommy figured in his head. "You guys blew over six hundred grand in what—four days?"

"No," Lash said. "No, not all of it. We're not completely broke."

"Then why do you need to borrow money?"

"Just twenty grand or so, to get us through to tomorrow," Lash said. "Luckily I almost have my MBA and have mad business skills. Otherwise we'd have been broke yesterday."

Tommy nodded. Twenty grand was about six months' salary for him at the Safeway. He'd been a little intimidated by Lash's almost-MBA up until now. Now he was just worried that Lash would be able to tell he had changed. He said, "So, like you were saying, you're fucked."

"We were doing fine, only down like ten grand each, until we met Blue." Lash looked at the ceiling wistfully, like it was a distant memory he was trying to conjure, instead of something that had happened a couple of nights ago.

"Blue?"

"You know that group they have in Vegas? The Blue Men?"

"Yeah, the guys who paint themselves blue and pound on pipes and stuff?" Tommy was lost.

"Yeah," Lash said. "Well, it turns out there are blue women, too. Or at least there's one. And dude, she's sucking us dry."

In the back seat of the limo, Blue held Barry's face between her boobs, snugly enough to keep him under control, but not so snug that he couldn't breathe. While the other Animals had drunk, smoked, and fucked themselves into a zombielike stupor—and now lay sprawled about the glittery interior of the limo—Barry had opted to do two hits of XTC, a line of coke, and a bong load of sticky skunk weed, which had put his brain into some sort of redundant tribal loop that had him kneeling naked before her, chanting "sweet blue titties" for the last twenty minutes. She just couldn't take it anymore, so she had grabbed his curl-fringed bald head and pulled his face into her cleavage just to shut him up. Mercifully, he had gone quiet, because she really didn't want to suffocate him as long as he still had money.

It takes a meandering road of wrong turns to take a girl from being the milky-skinned Cheddar princess of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, to a blue-dyed call girl turning tricks at downtown casinos in Vegas, but Blue would be damned if she'd add yet another wrong turn by smothering a golden goose between her proportionally improbable silicon joy orbs. The Animals were her way out, and if she had to stay in character as an Alien Pleasure Unit or a blueberry muffin to keep them on the hook, she would.

Blue was a method hooker. Early in her adventures, after she'd left cocktailing due to a propensity for spilling drinks, and before she'd begun stripping, where her lack of balance was mitigated by the presence of a sturdy pole, she had a short career acting in low-budget porn. She befriended a promising actress named Lotta Vulva, who gave her a book on the Stanislavski Method. "If you can find your sense memory," Lotta said, "it will keep you from barfing on the actors. Directors hate that." The «Method» had served Blue well since then, as it allowed her to calculate betting odds or figure her checkbook while her character was performing acts that she herself would have found unpleasant or outright disgusting. (How much better to reside in her sense memory of the budding Cheddar princess, coaxing the hearty, whole-milk goodness from the udders of a Holstein, than to face the harshly lit reality of her actions?)

After six months Blue was driven out of the film business by a «defect» one director called "not enough tits to fill a shot glass," which no amount of Method was able to remedy. She returned to cocktailing, albeit at a strip club, where she seldom had to carry more than one ten-dollar beer at a time, until she saved enough money for breast-augmentation surgery and made her way to the pole. She danced her way through her twenties, before she was driven off the stage by younger, more gravity-resistant girls, and because she had skipped personal typing class in high school and had therefore besmirched her permanent record, she landed in the employ of an outcall escort service.

"I feel like I'm doing Domino's delivery blow jobs," Blue told her roommate. "Satisfaction in twenty minutes or less or your money back. And the agency is taking most of the money. I'll never get out of this business at this rate."

"You need a gimmick" said her roommate, a cocktail waitress at the Venetian. "Like those Blue Men guys in the show. I swear they'd just be a bunch of frat boys beating on garbage cans if they weren't painted blue."

And so it began. The fallen Cheddar princess of Fond du Lac found some semipermanent skin dye, opened credit-card deposit accounts, had some pictures taken, placed ads in all the free sleaze rags around the city, and Blue was born. It wasn't as if she wouldn't have been able to make a living without the gimmick—most guys will shag a snake if you hold it steady for them. But it turned out they would pay a lot for the exotica of a blue woman.