Free The Other Teddy Roosevelts by Mike Resnick Page A

officer paused. “I think he’s dead, sir.”
    “The tall man?”
    “Jacobs, sir. We drew our guns and demanded that the tall man surrender to us, and he just laughed and began walking away, so we opened fire. So help me, sir, we must have hit him four or five times, and he didn’t even flinch.”
    “Let’s take a look at the body he brought to us,” said Roosevelt. He walked over to the corpse. “Do you recognize him?”
    “It’s Israel Zuckerman, the guy who runs the Jewish gang.” The officer frowned. “At least I think it is.”
    “You’re not sure?”
    “I remember Zuckerman being darker, like he’d spent most of his life in the sun. Mediterranean, I think they call the type. This guy’s so pale he looks like he’s spent the last twenty years in jail.”
    “It’s Zuckerman,” said Roosevelt. “Leave that scarf around his neck until you move him inside.”
    “Whatever you say, sir.”
    Another officer approached them. “Jacobs is dead, sir.”
    “Do you have any explanation for what happened?” asked Roosevelt.
    The officer shook his head. “It almost like something out of that crazy book everyone’s reading.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Roosevelt.
    “It’s some kind of thriller about, I don’t know, this creature that kills people and drinks their blood.”
    “I don’t read popular literature,” said Roosevelt with an expression of distaste.
    “Well, if you change your mind, sir,” said the other officer, “it’s called Dracula .”
    “I think I heard someone mention it once or twice,” said Roosevelt with no show of interest.
    “It’s about this guy who can’t be hurt, at least at night. He drinks people’s blood…”
    “Enough!” said a third officer, who was examining Zuckerman’s corpse. “I’d like to eat dinner again sometime before I die.”
    “Sorry,” said the officer.
    “All right,” said Roosevelt. “Let’s get these men inside before the sun comes up and we attract a crowd. Take them both down to the morgue, find out what killed Zuckerman (though I can hazard a pretty good guess right now), and have someone contact Officer Jacobs’ widow.”
    “Shouldn’t that be your job, sir?”
    “It should be, but we’ve got a killer on the loose, a killer that bullets don’t stop. I’ve got to find out what will stop him.” He paused. “I suppose we should put a guard around O’Brien, but it wouldn’t stop this man, and I’m not going to lose any more officers before I find out how to defeat him.”
    He went back into the building, climbed the stairs, and retrieved his hat and his walking stick from the corner of his office. Then he went back outside. A few minutes later he was walking up Park Avenue. After a mile he turned onto 34th Street, then turned left on Lexington. He wandered the city, considering the problem, discarding one approach after another, and suddenly realized that it was daylight.
    He stopped by a newsstand to pick up a paper, was pleased to see that neither murder had been reported yet, and saw a full-page ad for the hot new bestseller, Dracula —the same book his officers had been talking about. He waited until the library opened, walked inside, picked up a copy, and skimmed the first sixty or seventy pages.
    It was a flight of fancy. Well-written, though the man couldn’t hold a candle to Austen or the Brontes, or Americans such as Mark Twain or Walt Whitman. But the similarities between the fictional Dracula and the very real Demosthenes were striking, and finally he put the book back where he’d found it and began searching through the non-fiction section, trying to find the legends that Bram Stoker had used as his source material. It wasn’t easy. There were references to a Nosferatu, and to Wampyres, and to other creatures, but they were so far-fetched that he couldn’t see them being of any use. Still, they were something , and that was more than he could find anywhere else.
    He carried a