being anointed in his anonymity with a flashy name by the worshipful press: "Back Street 
Strangler."
  
  I lust after such killers!
  
  What luck for me that such a celebrity had surfaced in my favorite city. What luck that 
he has struck six times in these very streets-slayer of the old and the infirm, who have 
come in such numbers to live out their remaining days in these warm climes. Ah, I would 
have crossed a continent to snap him up, but he is here waiting for me. To his dark 
history, detailed by no less than twenty criminologists, and easily purloined by me 
through the computer in my New Orleans lair, I have secretly added the crucial 
elements-his name and mortal habitation.
  
  A simple trick for a dark god who can read minds. Through his blood-soaked dreams I 
found him. And tonight the pleasure will be mine of finishing his illustrious career in a 
dark cruel embrace, without a scintilla of moral illumination.
  
  Ah, Miami. The perfect place for this little Passion Play.
  
  I always come back to Miami, the way I come back to New Orleans. And I'm the only 
immortal now who hunts this glorious corner of the Savage Garden, for as you have seen, 
the others long ago deserted the coven house here-unable to endure each other's company 
any more than I can endure them.
  
  But so much the better to have Miami all to myself.
  
  I stood at the front windows of the rooms I maintained in the swanky little Park 
Central Hotel on Ocean Drive, every now and then letting my preternatural hearing sweep 
the chambers around me in which the rich tourists enjoyed that premium brand of 
solitude-complete privacy only steps from the flashy street-my Champs Elysees of the 
moment, my Via Veneto.
  
  My strangler was almost ready to move from the realm of his spasmodic and fragmentary 
visions into the land of literal death. Ah, time to dress for the man of my dreams.
  
  Picking from the usual wilderness of freshly opened cardboard boxes, suitcases, and 
trunks, I chose a suit of gray velvet, an old favorite, especially when the fabric is 
thick, with only a subtle luster. Not very likely for these warm nights, I had to admit, 
but then I don't feel hot and cold the way humans do. And the coat was slim with narrow 
lapels, very spare and rather like a hacking jacket with its fitted waist, or, more to 
the point, like the graceful old frock coats of earlier times. We immortals forever fancy 
old-fashioned garments, garments that remind us of the century in which we were Born to 
Darkness. Sometimes you can gauge the true age of an immortal simply by the cut of his 
clothes.
  
  With me, it's also a matter of texture. The eighteenth century was so shiny! I can't 
bear to be without a little luster. And this handsome coat suited me perfectly with the 
plain tight velvet pants. As for the white silk shirt, it was a cloth so soft you could 
ball the garment in the palm of your hand. Why should I wear anything else so close to my 
indestructible and curiously sensitive skin? Then the boots. Ah, they look like all my 
fine shoes of late. Their soles are immaculate, for they so seldom touch the mother earth.
  
  My hair I shook loose into the usual thick mane of glowing yellow shoulder-length 
waves. What would I look like to mortals? I honestly don't know. I covered up my blue 
eyes, as always, with black glasses, lest their radiance mesmerize and entrance at 
random-a real nuisance-and over my delicate white hands, with their telltale glassy 
fingernails, I drew the usual pair of soft gray leather gloves.
  
  Ah, a bit of oily brown camouflage for the skin. I smoothed the lotion over my 
cheekbones, over the bit of neck and chest that was bare.
  
  I inspected the finished product in the mirror. Still irresistible. No wonder I'd been 
such a smash in my brief career as a rock singer. And I've always been a howling success 
as a vampire. Thank the gods I hadn't become invisible in my airy wanderings, a vagabond 
floating far above the clouds, light as a cinder on the wind. I felt like weeping when I 
thought of it.
  
  The Big-Game Hunt always brought me back to the actual. Track him, wait for him, catch 
him just at the moment that he would bring death to his next victim, and take him slowly, 
painfully, feasting upon his wickedness as you do it, glimpsing through the filthy lens 
of his soul all his earlier victims . . .
  
  Please understand, there is no nobility in this. I don't believe that rescuing one poor 
mortal from such a fiend can conceivably save my soul. I have taken life too often-unless 
one believes that the power of one good deed is infinite. I don't know whether or not I 
believe that. What I do believe is this: The evil of one murder is infinite, and my guilt 
is like my beauty-eternal. I cannot be forgiven, for there is no one to forgive me for 
all I've done.
  
  Nevertheless I like saving those innocents from their fate. And! like taking my killers 
to me because they are my brothers, and we belong together, and why shouldn't they die in 
my arms instead of some poor merciful mortal who has never done anyone any willful harm? 
These are the rules of my game. I play by these rules because I made them. And I promised 
myself, I wouldn't leave the bodies about this time; I'd strive to do what the others 
have always ordered me to do. But still... I liked to leave the carcass for the 
authorities. I liked to fire up the computer later, after I'd returned to New Orleans, 
and read the entire postmortem report.
  
  Suddenly I was distracted by the sound of a police car passing slowly below, the men 
inside it speaking of my killer, that he will strike soon again, his stars are in the 
correct positions, the moon is at the right height. It will be in the side streets of 
South Beach most certainly, as it has been before. But who is he? How can he be stopped?
  
  Seven o'clock. The tiny green numerals of the digital clock told me it was so, though I 
already knew, of course. I closed my eyes, letting my head drop just a little to one 
side, bracing myself perhaps for the full effects of this power which I so loathed. First 
came an amplification of the hearing again, as if I had thrown a modern technological 
switch. The soft purring sounds of the world became a chorus from hell-full of 
sharp-edged laughter and lamentation, full of lies and anguish and random pleas. I 
covered my ears as if that could stop it, then finally I shut it off.