“You Son-of-a-bitch!” she screamed. “You’re gonna DIE, damn you!”
I dived forward. Rolled. Metal shrieked above me. “Can’t we talk?” I yelled trying to get flatter than the 10 inch steel I-beam I was hiding behind. I didn’t even try and reach for my gun. Lead would just make her madder.
“Talking time is OVER,” hissed Simone, stalking forward, her Berretta ready. “I’m gonna shoot your butt, squirmer. I can see it. Then I’ll shoot your balls off.  Then…”
My reaching hands grasped a solid piece of steel off-cut. Razor edged. Nasty. I twisted and flung it with desperate strength. Hit her.
Scrambling up, I sprinted headlong at her.  The bullet seared along my back as I jinked left.   I threw myself at her.
“No!” she yowled as I ripped at the gun arm. We fell together, wrestling on the oily floor. The thunder of gunfire echoed in my head, with the taste of blood and cordite in my mouth, as the gun clattered away. I wrapped my legs around her, locked ankles as she raked savagely at my eyes.  I pulled my face back. Grabbed her hand. Squeezed with my legs, crushing the breath out of her.
“I hate you!” she gasped. Bit, but I let her white sharp teeth bite on her own slim fingers.
“I hate me too,” tightening the scissors-grip on her lower chest as she tried to writhe free. “So, can you tell me why you want to kill me more than I want to kill me, if I let you breathe?” I was starting to feel the pain and shock now. My mouth was dry and full of bubbly spit and the taste of vomit. Her malignant, contorted face was as white as her wedding dress had been, well, except for the scarlet blood dripping down her forehead.
I tightened my grip. I still have horse-rider’s thighs from my youth. “Nod when you are ready to talk,” I said, wishing I knew why women always wanted to kill me or put drinks down on my head.
It was, I was sure, all going to be my fault. Some things you don’t need a private investigator to find out. I was one, with a pretty shiny official card and all, but I couldn’t afford to hire myself.  Not that I was pricy, but because I was broke. I kept right on squeezing. Killing one of the undead is usually quite difficult, but you can make busty vampires like Simone short of breath. I’m not sure if they actually need to breathe, but they do need breath to make their vocal chords work. And if Simone was deprived of the pleasure of killing me, she’d eventually want to talk. Or at least yell.
It took quite a while, but I conclude that yes, there must be some form of respiration happening in vampires, unlike in zombies, where it’s anerobic. You can’t even drown zombies. Simone’s lips were going a little blue by the time she nodded. It suited her, I thought. Went well with her hair. But then, I like blue. I have to.
I relaxed my grip slightly. She tried to squirm free, so I sqeezed harder again. “Try not to be dumber than rocks. I know it’s a challenge for you.” Tact has always been strong point. I’ve something like two and half thousand years to practice it, so I must be getting close to perfect, right? And I am not like one of the undead. I had to put up with living all of that time. And some of it was a challenge for me too, even when women weren’t trying to kill me. There were always other problems. Men trying to kill me, that kind of trivia. Taxes. Census takers.
She nodded again. So I let her breathe. She didn’t try anything this time around. If I’d been as dumb as she is, instead of merely as dumb as I am, I’d figured I was out of trouble. Eventually she’d get around to talking. Fortunately, I was here on my own time, and not billing myself per hour.
“This is all your fault, Bolg,” she muttered sulkily.
Yeah, so I was right. My fault. There is something satisfying about being right, even when it would be nice to be wrong. Now all I needed to know was just what I was being blamed for. I’d probably done it, but usually when I knew some woman was going to try and kill me, I was careful to be elsewhere. Also, in the private investigating business, mostly I investigate things to be blamed for finding out, AFTER the bride gets out of her wedding clothes. Sometimes not a whole lot after, but almost always after. “It was my fault,” I agreed. No use arguing on that one. “So… what was it this time?”
She sniffed. “Still having a heart that’s beating, you heartless bastard. I wish I’d blown it out of your chest. How could you do this to me?”
“I will put up with it being my fault. I am heartless, which naturally explains the beating part, but I will not put up with snot dribbling onto your chin. If I let you go and give you a kleenex will you tell me just what I did this time?”
“Are you trying to pretend you don’t know?” she sneered, sniffing again.
“Me? Pretend?” I said as I let go of her, handed her a pack of nose-wipes. “Yeah, I’m God’s own gift to drama. A natural actor. I was just off to audition for Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and you trying to kill me has held  me up.”
She blew her nose at me. Looked down it at me too. I’m used to that. It goes with being 4’7”and shall we say, of Pictish origin. “You really are a horrible blue little man.”
Even dumb-as-rocks vamp girls can get that one right. The tattoos on my face, and on most of the rest of me, even the bits I wouldn’t show her, are blue. It was fashionable, back then. I nodded. “At your service. Or rather not, but here anyway.”
“It was my big day and you ruined it.”
“I would hardly have thought shooting me classed as a big day, Simone,” I said, picking up her Berretta. I clicked the magazine out. “Silver bullets too. Were you expecting family?”
“They didn’t approve of the wedding. I thought I’d best be prepared,” she said.