Night Shift

At Midnight’s local pawnshop, weapons are flying off the shelves only to be used in sudden and dramatic suicides right at the main crossroads in town. Who better to figure out why blood is being spilled than the vampire Lemuel, who, while translating mysterious texts, discovers what makes Midnight the town it is. There’s a reason why witches and werewolves, killers and psychics, have been drawn to this place...
"The first suicide arrives one October night. He is a middle-aged man with a scruffy beard. He parks his battered pickup in front of the Midnight Hotel. The six-to-midnight clerk, a junior college freshman named Marina Desoto, later tells Deputy Anna Gomez that when she saw the pickup pull to the curb, she assumed the driver would come in to rent a room. Marina does not add that she had been a little excited at the prospect, since in the months she has worked at the hotel only six people have asked for a room during her shift.
Marina’s hope is dashed pretty quickly. Peering out the glass door, she watches the man fall out of the pickup “like he was drunk,” she tells Deputy Gomez and Sheriff Arthur Smith.
Since Gomez knows Marina’s family, she also knows Marina is fully conversant with the behavior of drunk
people. “What did he do then?” the deputy asks. “He walked funny, kind of leaning, like a big magnet was pulling him into the middle of the crossroad. And then he . . .” Marina’s voice trails off, and tears roll down her face. She lifts her hand to her head, forefinger pointed and thumb cocked, and mimes pulling a trigger. “You saw this from the front desk?” Smith asks. He’s checked the line of sight, and he’s skeptical. “No, you can’t see the whole intersection from the desk,” Marina says immediately, but not as if she’s really thinking about the question. “I had gotten up and walked to the door to lock it, after I saw him get out of the truck. Because he was acting so weird.”