The Undead Kama Sutra by Mario Acevedo

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.”

Chapter
9
    C armen’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.
    Next I found Carmen, leader of the Denver nidus, who turned out to be recreating this Kama Sutra. She’s also found the secret that keeps vampires from withering in the sun and she’s co-owner of a resort for vampires and their groupies. One of her chalices was missing. And now, Deputy Johnson asked us to identify a body.
    I’m after the one who murdered Odin and within days a second corpse turns up. Suspicious? Definitely.
    Because of my experience with psychic powers and the supernatural, I am aware of a grand cosmic design that binds our actions with what we call coincidences. In this case, what connected the many, many dots?
    We continued east, parallel to the Keys. Dozens of boats cruised around us and we rocked over their wakes. Small airplanes droned overhead.
    Our two boats approached a concrete pier, beyond which stood a jumble of