Bite Me by Christopher Moore

then?”
    “You buy,” Rivera said, as he popped the locks on the unmarked Ford and climbed in.
    They drove eight blocks down Fillmore Street toward the Marina, before Cavuto said, “She’s right, you know? I am a bear.”
    Rivera put on his sunglasses and took a few seconds adjusting them on his face to buy time before he answered with a sigh. “I’m glad you decided to come clean about that, Nick, because observing your six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-and-sixty-pound, growling gay personage for the last fourteen years would have never betrayed your true identity, given my dull, homicide detective powers of observation.”
    “Your sarcasm is the main reason Alice left you.”
    “Really?” Rivera had wondered. Alice had said because he was too much of a cop and not enough of a husband, but he had suspicions about her testimony.
    “No, but I’m sure it was on the list.”
    “Nick, in all our time as partners, have I ever indicated that I wanted to discuss your sexuality?”
    “Well, not beyond using it to threaten suspects.”
    “And have I ever offered to share the details of my sex life with Alice?”
    “I just assumed you didn’t have one.”
    “Well, that’s not really relevant. I’m just saying, I’m fine with you just the way you are.”
    “Mantastic, you mean?”
    “Sure, go with that. Although I was thinking more of large and furry, yet afraid of tiny girls.”
    “Well, you can’t hit her, she’s a kid,” Cavuto whined.
    They found parking in a garage near Barney’s. Rivera pulled into a no-parking spot (because he could) and shut off the engine. He sat back and looked at the wall in front of them.
    “So, vampire cats,” Cavuto said.
    “Yeah,” said Rivera.
    “We’re fucked,” said the big cop.
    “Yeah,” said Rivera.

6

The Vampire Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    A flock of wild parrots lives in the city of San Francisco. They are South American cherry-headed conures—bright green with a red head, a little smaller than a typical pigeon.
    No one is quite sure how they came to the City. It’s likely that they are the descendants of animals caught in the jungle, then released to the city skies when they proved too wild to be kept as pets. They fly over the northern waterfront of San Francisco, foraging for fruit, berries, and blossoms, from the Presidio at the entrance of the Golden Gate Bridge, over Pacific Heights, the Marina, Russian Hill, North Beach, and all the way to the Ferry Building near the Oakland Bay Bridge. They are social, squawky, silly birds that mate for life and advertise their presence with a cacophony of beeps and cheeps that inspire smiles from residents, bewilderment from tourists,and hunger in predators, mostly red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons.
    The parrots spend their nights high in the trees of Telegraph Hill, beneath the great concrete phallus of Coit Tower, sheltered from attack from hawks by the evergreen canopy overhead, and from all but the most ambitious cats, by the sheer altitude. But still, they are sometimes attacked, and although gentle creatures, they will fight back, biting with their thick, built-for-seed-crushing beaks.
    Which is what happened.
    The next morning after he witnessed the cat attack in the SOMA, the Emperor of San Francisco was awakened from a nest he’d made in one of the little stair gardens on Telegraph Hill, to hear parrots squawking in the trees. The sun was just breaking the horizon behind the Bay Bridge, turning the water red-gold under a blue morning mist.
    The Emperor crawled out from under a pile of carpet padding, stood, and stretched, his great joints creaking in the cold like ancient church doors. The men, Bummer and Lazarus, poked their noses out of the gray cloak, snuffled the dawn, then, with the call of the parrots, resolved themselves to morning and emerged like urgent butterflies to search for the perfect spot for the first wee of the day.
    The three watched as fifty or so squawking parrots circled Coit Tower