No Rest for the Wicked (2 page)

Meanwhile he secured the scene. He flashed his badge at a guy who tried to enter and then jammed the door closed with a trash bin. He brought out a slim black notebook from his inner pocket and licked at the pencil nub before starting to jot down notes.

“Exactly as you found him,” he said to me.

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

It was when I was lifting the stiff off the toilet that a derringer fell off his lap and clattered onto the tile floor.

“Don't touch it,” snapped Peter needlessly. He dug around in his pocket and brought out a pair of gloves. Peter's such a Boy Scout, he carries them with him everywhere. He gingerly lifted the gun by the corner of the handle and gave it a tentative sniff. He looked at me. “It's been fired.”

“Fat lot of good it did him.” I propped the body up as best I could. I had no idea where the gun had been originally, so I just stuffed it in a pocket. Peter had already begun looking for the bullet.

I was a homicide detective for a bit too, and even I could feel the wonkiness of the situation. Here was a guy totally drained, and no blood anywhere. Not even a dribble on his shirt.

Holding a piece, but with no sign of a gun having been fired in the small room.

“It didn't happen in here,” I told Peter, who stood in the center of the room, head down, hand rubbing at his still-damp hair in that thoughtful way of his. It made the short blond ends stick up in peaks at the back. Which made me think of my original agenda for the night, which made me sound a little snarly.

Peter knew me so well he could feel every nuance in my voice, and he shot a look at me.

His eyes were tired. “I'm sorry,” he said. And I immediately felt like the worm I am.

“No biggie.”

“I just need to wait until a unit arrives,” he told me. “Then we can leave.”

I didn't express my doubts about this statement but proceeded to check out the corpse. He had been youngish, midtwenties I'd have guessed. I searched the body and found his wallet, still full of cash and a couple of credit cards that identified him as a Justin Lake out of Thousand Oaks. Thirty-two.

“He looks more like a kid,” I said. He was dressed in a green hoodie with the recognizable skater company logo emblazoned across its front pocket. This had been pulled back by his attacker to reveal a band T-shirt. His feet were long and bedecked in checkered black-and-white skater shoes.

Peter had finished his perusal of the scene and was once more staring at the corpse. “Is he going to…” His brow acquired that pained wrinkle it always did when we talked about my “condition.”

“No, I don't think so.” It's not a science, this thing. Plenty of people get turned accidentally, yours truly being a perfect example. But our bloodless friend had a sticky, soft, meat-gone-bad feel to him that usually meant he was just dead. Not pre-undead.

“Look at this,” I said, drawing back his sleeve.

The watch on his wrist would have set Peter back two months' pay. Who wears a Rolex with a Target T-shirt? Bit of an enigma, this Mr. Lake. On the back of his hand, one of those marker stamps you get at a club. A pale blue cloud.

“Why leave the watch?” I asked. Most of the time the victim was robbed as well as drained. Undead creatures of the night need cash as much as anybody. Not everyone's lucky enough to have a deal like mine.

I turned Lake's head a little to check out the bite marks. They were perfect. Round and black-red in the center where the remaining blood had coagulated, with clean pink edges.

“Never seen such a neat job,” I told Peter.

The human being in Peter warred with the homicide detective. He wanted to know more, but he didn't want to know more. The homicide detective won. “What do you mean?”

“Well, see. A lot of guys kind of lose control, start chewing before they're done. There's no bite marks to indicate that kind of savagery.” I checked out the closely shaved skin of Lake's cheeks and neck. “Not even bruising. And he didn't spill, didn't drool out onto the floor, or spatter. You know what I mean.” Peter had seen me eat from the blood bags he delivered to me.

It was probably like watching a pig feeding at a trough.

He looked at me, his dark blue eyes troubled. Six months ago, he would have asked me if I'd done it. If I'd been the one to eat the guy in the stall. It was a measure of the progress we'd made that he knew better than to ask me that now.

“Your prints are all over him,” he said. “That could raise some eyebrows.”

“God knows how long it will take SI to process the evidence,” I answered. Currently, the LAPD was ten months behind on forensic processing. Unless the stiff was the king of a foreign country or a state senator, odds were those prints wouldn't be matched to mine for some time.

“Maybe you could save us the trouble,” said Peter hopefully.

“What
us
?
You
aren't on this case.
You
are on a break, remember?”

“Ye-e-es, but…”

“No. No
buts
. You have a week off and you are going to spend all seven days of it doing nothing, Peter.” Nothing but sex and replays of the championship, that is. I'd recorded the whole damned thing for him.

“When the ME sees the COD there's going to be a lot of hard questions. I'd just rather we had a few answers.” Exsanguination via holes in a major artery had been happening in Los Angeles County with increasing frequency. The coroner's office and select homicide departments had already begun to notice. It was just a matter of time before it hit the media radar, but until then those in the know at the LAPD and sheriff's homicide division were trying to keep it under wraps. “Adam, did you see anybody?”

“Two guys were in here when I came in.” I gave him a quick description. “Neither could have done this.” I'm getting so I can spot my fellows, you know?

“But they might have seen something.”

“They might have.”

We'd been hearing voices and thuds outside the door as various people tried to get into the restroom.

“Maybe they're still out there,” said Peter. “Can you go out there and look around? And, Adam? SI will search outside for the original scene. But it's been raining hard all night, and there's got to be a thousand tourists out there,” he said. “Could you…you know, to save time?”

“I'll look around outside and see what I can find,” I told him. Besides, the sound of sirens warned me that my former colleagues were about to arrive. Technically, I'm dead. I've been collecting death benefits at any rate, via Peter, who I'd named as my next of kin. And it would be pretty hard to explain my reanimated corpse to any LAPD officer who might recognize me. So I elbowed my way through the crowd that had gathered on the other side of the door and scanned the wet pavement outside.

Now, when I say “scanned” what I really mean is “smelled.” I try not to smell the warm blood around me most of the time. It's like a dieter surrounded by chocolate. It's best just to ignore it. But now that I was paying attention, the smell of the people around me had me salivating. I focused as best I could and isolated something older. Something deader. And that's when I saw the little puddle of pinkish water in Burt Lancaster's footprint.

“You find something?” Peter had come out of the men's room holding his shield aloft and loudly ordering the crowd to back off.

“Trail of his blood leads that way,” I said, pointing and averting my face. The smell of blood brings the change on. Especially when I haven't eaten in a while. I could feel my upper lip receding, which meant the pointed canines were showing. My eyes had that bulging sensation. I knew from seeing others like me that my pupils were probably slitting and my green eyes going pale and luminous. I hated Peter seeing me like that.

Peter followed the direction of my pointing finger. “Looks like there's a breezeway between the buildings there.”

A few more paces in that direction and the evidence of my nose was undeniable. “I smell fresh blood,” I told him. “There's your crime scene.”

And then LAPD was on the scene, so I dissolved into the crowd while Peter received the officers and showed them what we'd found.

I stood about watching as the coroner's van trundled across the alleyway and right up onto the pavement. Only when it had inserted itself between them and one of the exits did the crowd finally realize this wasn't business as usual. Then I intuited that something more than your average homicide was up just seconds before a pair of LAPD black vans pulled onto the sidewalks, disgorging a phalange of men in military black, shiny black helmets with black reflective visors, black rubber-coated batons and black boots. Like a black hand, they pushed back Martha and George from Idaho with a fierce efficiency.

Tourists are more tenacious than cockroaches. The terrifying show of military force only made them give a few feet of ground, and now their cameras were flashing. Like the cops were part of the entertainment.

I saw the great eyes of betacams coming from several directions, aggressive news reporters adding to the fray. And I
knew
. The stiff in the stall was
somebody.

This was not my night. I groaned out loud despite myself. Something out there was obviously determined to put the kibosh on any after-hours activities I had planned with Peter.

Because if the dead guy was
somebody
, LAPD was sure to assign his murder to Homicide Special, their elite homicide detective branch. Which happened to be the division in which Peter worked.

Sure enough, I saw Peter straighten, his gaze scanning the crowd until he spotted me and nodded, mouth grim. He flipped open his cell phone, and a minute later mine rang.

“Sergeant Davis lives out in Riverside. He'll be an hour with the rain and the traffic, so he asked me to supervise until he arrives,” he said.

Davis was Peter's superior in Robbery Homicide Division.

“Adam, I'm sorry, but it looks like it might take some time to process this scene. They went to the alleyway you indicated and found quite a mess back there. Looks like it might be the original scene, but there's still not as much blood as they'd expect. Did you get a chance to check it out?”

“The units showed up before I could.”

“Did you happen to spot the men from the restroom?”

“No sign of them.”

“Well, according to the prelim liver temp, he'd probably been in there for around forty-five minutes.”

“I told you that.”

“I know.” I saw a uniformed officer come up to him at that point. She held up a clipboard, and he signed something and then pointed the pen at a spot on the ground. When he came back on the line, he said, “I'm going to help them question the kiosk employees. It's Friday night, they're understaffed and…”

“It's okay, Peter. I understand. I'll meet you back at your place?”

The hesitation before he answered told me all I needed to know. “I don't know how long this might take.”

“You aren't up next on the rotation. Who's been assigned?”

A pause, and I saw him scanning the crowd until he spotted me. “I'll call you,” was all he said.

“Sure.” I hung up and let loose a few swear words. The Marilyn Monroe look-alike standing nearby fanned herself and grinned appreciatively. Her fake eyelashes drooped as she scanned me from head to toe.

And got stuck on a certain part of me that was making its presence a nuisance more and more of late.

“Darling,” she said in a husky contralto that barely concealed her actual gender.

I snarled something ungentlemanly and marched off.

Despite what he'd said, I still thought I'd go back to Peter's and wait for him there, but the plan continued to go arse up.

Firstly, there were
no
cabs on Sunset Boulevard, and when I called a taxi service they coolly reminded me that I had to give them at least thirty minutes lead time for a pickup. We'd come in Peter's car, which, obviously, he'd need later; so I was stranded in a mob of tourists with a hard-on, a recently stimulated appetite, and in an increasingly bad mood.

“Yo,” snapped Caballo when he answered his cell phone.

“I need a ride,” I said. “I'm outside the Chinese.”

There was a lot of noise behind him. Sounded like he was in some sort of sports arena.

“You piss off your boyfriend again, Adam?”

“Just come get me.”

“It's the last half,” said Caballo. “We're up by two.”

“Listen, there's at least a hundred human beings standing around me, and I could eat a horse. Get me the fuck out of here, man.”

“I'm not your twelve-step sponsor,” Caballo said crabbily.

“Somebody had a tourist for dinner here,” I told him.

“Fuck. Did you call Betsy?”

“No, I did
not
call Betsy. LAPD is on the scene.”

“I'll call her.” Before I could protest, he'd rung off. A few minutes later my cell rang again.

I could hear the stadium crowd screaming in the background as Caballo shouted. “Betsy called a meeting.”

I swore to myself. “I don't have time for a meeting.”

Caballo just laughed. “I'll be there in twenty.”

By the time Caballo had worked his Kawasaki through the traffic, LAPD crowd control had managed to drive back the unfortunate tourists around the Chinese. The entire area was cordoned off. Little yellow plastic triangles marked every bloody footstep in the pavement. News helicopters bobbed and swooped overhead. Their racket made it impossible to hear the betacam-wielding reporters straining at the hastily erected boundaries, shouting questions.

“Who died?” said Caballo when he'd pulled his red rocket up to the curb. In the months that I'd known him, Caballo had totally transformed himself from a Chicago Southside transplant to a Los Angeleno. He wore shredded black jeans that hugged his long, muscular thighs. His leathers were opened to reveal a T-shirt with LAKERS emblazoned across it in purple and gold.

Despite my continuous lectures about motorcycle safety, he wore designer sneakers instead of proper boots. His helmet was more stylish than practical. He'd had it custom painted to look like a screaming monkey, an opaque black visor where the monkey's throat should have been. His low-slung jeans slid down his ass, revealing bright yellow boxers when he rode.