Lloyd sat back shaking his head, making his limp hair move more than the Air-o-lux ever did. “You know what their job is. They’re there to destroy evidence, not to preserve it. Do you really want to bring them in on this? It’s their man who ran the tests. All he’s going to say is that Santino was a human and that you plugged him four times, twice execution style. Son, you’re just lucky this happened out of sight.”
Cole heard the threat and had to grind his teeth on an entire string of curses. “There was a girl. He took her down into that…”
“Yes, the recovery team saw the bare print. It’s why you’re not being charged. Santino was a murderer, we all know it. But God, Cole! If he’d been just a regular guy…” He shook his head again, letting Cole know he would have been strung up for killing him.
“If he was a murderer, wouldn’t there be some sort of bounty?”
Lloyd muttered, “Unconvicted murderer. Look, I’m not trying to dick you on this one. Santino’s in the morgue. You can see for yourself. What’s left of his brain is as pink as my balls.”
“I will look, thank you,” Cole said stiffly, doing his best to rein in his anger. Ten-thousand had just gone out the fucking window. Twenty-thousand, if he counted the girl. Furious he started to storm from the office and was halfway out the door when Lloyd called him back. “By the way, your paint’s running. You should fix that.”
Crap! One more expense he couldn’t afford. His tats weren’t real; they were squid-ink henna and usually lasted a few months if he was careful. The recovery team had been less than careful. Everything in the basement and the stairs leading down to it had been bleached and scrubbed, and that included Cole. Nine hours later and his clothes were still damp.
Without his tattoos, he looked exactly like a cop pretending he wasn’t one. “This day just keeps getting better and better,” he groused as he stomped down the stairs to the third subbasement. As always, the morgue was like a hothouse, and as always, the smell was enough to turn a hard man like Cole green beneath his smeared tattoos.
The morgue worked like a production line. The bodies were even placed on a conveyor belt. At the first station, they were stripped and any “valuables” placed in a single small bag. Those items not deemed valuable—a highly subjective term—were divvied up among the crew at the end of their shift. At the next stop, the body was printed. At the next, it was photographed from every possible angle. The actual autopsy came next. A difficult case might take all of five minutes. Santino probably took less than one. At the next stop, whatever notes that had been written were typed in triplicate.
After that, the body was sent to be mulched.
Cole caught up with Santino as he was rumbling down the line to the mulcher. He possessed no authority in the morgue except his voice, his steel fists and the fact that he would obviously use them if he had to. Three reasons that were good enough for the techs who got paid hourly and didn’t mind the break, short as it was. There wasn’t much reason to look any further than the holes in Santino’s head. The brain was clean, as were his eyes.
“Fucking human,” he whispered.
Mumbling more curses, Cole stormed from the morgue and then up out of the station, stopping on the crumbling steps outside. He thought about going back to his apartment, but it was a thirty-minute walk. He’d been planning to take a cab, but without the bounty he couldn’t even afford to spring for the train, and that was seventy cents.
What was at home, anyway? Nothing. His apartment was cold and virtually empty. Other than a few old suits, a mattress and some bags of boil and eat ramen, he possessed next to nothing. Except pawn tickets that is. Over the last year he had collected enough of them to cover his walls. His phone was dead because he hadn’t been able to pay the bill, and the electric would go any day.
His luck had been on a downward spiral and he hadn’t picked up a decent bounty in months. And now he’d lost two in one night.
“I need a drink,” he muttered, glancing around. There wasn’t much to see. The sun was coming up in all its glory and somewhere people were enjoying it, they just weren’t enjoying it in New York. The night mists were turning to a grey drizzle and the ghostly skyscrapers were beginning to solidify…more or less. Many of them weren’t exactly solid. They were dying, crumbling monuments to an old world.
Cole was still staring up when someone pushed him.
“Get your ass off the steps, slag.” It was a police officer, bringing in a stick-thin money-honey, in a see-through red dress that matched her contact lenses. She was twitchy, coming down from riding the Rican Mule. All in all, she looked as though she had been pulled from a gutter.
Normally, Cole would have knocked the beat cop’s teeth in and strolled away before he had the chance to come to, only just then, Cole was the one who felt beat down.
The cop and the honey swept by and he stared after them. If she hadn’t already, she was going to lose the cash she had made that night from renting out her body. Cole didn’t want to know what her daddy was going to do to her. New age pimps were rarely kind.
“But that’s not my problem,” Cole said, repeating the New York mantra. His problem was that damned slick. Cole couldn’t get him out of his head, and he knew that even if he went home, he wouldn’t be able to sleep. There were too many loose ends, too many questions without answers. If Santino wasn’t a Dead-eye, why on earth had he chopped up his wife and stuck her in a freezer?
“He could have buried her in the basement. It’s what I would have done if I was just an everyday murderer. But why would an average killer take out her heart?” It was the wife’s missing heart that had brought Cole in on the case. “I need to see the report on her,” he decided, turning on his heel and following the cop.
Since computers had gone the way of the dinosaur a hundred years before Cole was born, every report generated in the police station was eventually sent to the “Hall of Records.” If there had ever been an actual hall it had been buried under paper ages ago. Now the “hall” consisted of the top ten floors of the immense building.
It was a world unto its own.
The hall and the mole-like people who worked there had their own rules and worked on their own timeline. If a record took a week to be found, then it took a week, and no amount of bitching would ever move them along faster. If an officer was of a high enough rank, the moles could be threatened to produce reports quicker, and, like everyone else, they loved a bribe, and a good one could produce amazing results.
Cole had no money and less authority than anyone in the building, except maybe the honey.
He tried turning on the charm, however his smeared slag impersonation made his smile pathetic and the little person behind the counter—he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman behind the thick spectacles—only turned up a sneer at the attempt, before squinting through the quarter-inch lenses.
“Hmm,” he/she said. “A special? This early? It’s going to be a while.” The mole gestured to the waiting room, which was empty. It was always empty. A half day spent in the Records Hall waiting room was equivalent to six years on the outside. Still, there was a couch of sorts. It had been a cloth-neoprene mesh forty years before, now it was apparently made of tape. It could have been made of brick and Cole would have still slept on it.
Four hours passed in a blink and he was deep in a chaotic dream in which he was running through miles of barely lit tunnels when he heard: “Mr. Younger.” Cole cracked an eye and found himself staring at the oldest person he had ever seen. It was a woman half his height, stooped, wrinkled and so dusty that her white hair looked grey. She wore a faded pale peach blouse from the turn of the century that was tucked into an equally faded blue skirt. Apparently, she used the waist band of the dress as a bra.
It was not a sight to wake up to.
He sat up, quickly, thinking that she might rap his knuckles with a ruler and admonish him for having his feet up on the couch. “Yes…ma’am. That’s me. I’m Cole Younger.”
“That
wasn’t in question. I know who you are. You’re a bounty hunter.” She sighed and shook her head. “Follow me.”
Cole stood, noticing for the first time that the lights in the Records Hall had been dimmed and that the place looked deserted. As the building was windowless, there was no way to tell if it was night or day. He guessed it was night and was surprised that it wasn’t even noon. “Where is everyone?”
“On a break,” was all she said as she waddled along, watching her feet. He had to take achingly slow steps to stay abreast of her as they passed, with glacial slowness, through towering stacks of files each twice his height. They were so tall that he wondered how the diminutive clerks reached the higher ones. The moles hired their own people and it was obvious that men of Cole’s stature need not apply. Or people of his age either, for that matter. The moles had an eternal quality to them. There was never a “new” person. Each of them looked as if they had always worked there and always would, long after Cole was mulched.
“In here.” They had come to a door made of actual wood with a doorknob that was real brass. The knob was the only thing in the Records Hall that wasn’t filmed with grey dust. It actually gleamed. The old woman reached out a spotted hand for it, again so slowly that Cole felt himself catching up to her in age.
“Let me.” He opened the door, noting the stenciled name:
Joanna Niederer
Director
“Joanna or should I call you Director Niederer?” Unlike Lloyd’s office, Joanna’s was well lit and fastidiously clean. The walls were painted a stark white and empty of pictures. The floor was softly carpeted in white. The only real color was the desk and the two chairs that sat on either side of it. Again, they were of real wood and in perfect condition. Cole didn’t feel clean enough to sit in the one on his side of the desk. What was more surprising than the wood and the cleanliness, was that there wasn’t a single piece of paper in the room. He had expected her office to be a smaller, messier version of the Records Hall itself.
The director eased herself into her chair so slowly that she made all the sound of dust settling. “You can call me Jo.”
He liked Director Niederer better. It seemed fitting. “Sure, Jo. Was something wrong with the form?” Other than maybe changing a lightbulb for her, it was the only reason he could think of why he was there.
“Of course, there was!” she snapped. “This is a special, and not just any special. It’s a special, special.” He wasn’t following her and it showed on his face. “A special record usually involves a special person or a special case. You still don’t get it, do you? Sorry to burst your bubble, but we’re not all special. Yes, that talking butterfly my granddaughter watches on tv has got it all wrong.”
Although she had the smell of a grandmother, Cole could not picture Jo ever being young enough to have a child herself.
“Everyone has a record, even the mega-rich douchebags you kids call Vampires. They are the special ones. If you’re a famous person, or a mob boss, or a politician you’re considered a special. But this is a special special. Your kind of special.”
Cole only stared at her, refusing to acknowledge the obvious. She sighed tiredly and sat back. “Yes. I’m talking about a zombie. A Dead-eye.” Jo pulled out a folder from her desk drawer and slid it over. “See the reference number. It starts with a 6. That means it’s a special. The following 13 means it’s either a special special, or it’s tied to one. In this case, it’s the latter.”
“Tied to Mrs Grimmett?” Cole asked, sliding into the chair as he scanned the report. “She wasn’t a…one of them. I don’t see any sign of the infection. Her white count is within normal ranges. Was it changed?”
“No. She was only tied to the case. Take a look at her injuries.”
Cole was still reading and said, almost absently, “Injuries? The cause of death was blunt trauma to the back of the head.” When he glanced up, he found Jo had managed to summon the energy to cock a furry white eyebrow at him. Once more he felt as though she were about to rap his knuckles. His answer was incorrect. He looked again at the photos. “Her heart was taken out post-mortem. The lack of bleeding along the…wait.”
He looked again at the notes. “Her blood volume was three ounces? Oh God. She was bled, wasn’t she?” He saw it now. The jagged cut that took off her head had disguised the deep incisions on either side of her throat.
“Yes. It’s a special special and you don’t just come here demanding to see the notes on one of these. You of all people should know this. People talk, even my people, maybe even especially my people. I know it’s hard to imagine, but this isn’t the most exciting job and whenever any special comes up it becomes the stuff of gossip. And talk of actual specials is the last thing we need.”
“I agree. May I take this?” he asked, holding up the file.
She scoffed, rolling her eyes. “Are you kidding me? No one takes my files.”
It didn’t matter. He had leads. Perhaps Santino wasn’t a Dead-eye, but the blood he had taken from his wife was a lead. Had he sold it at the Mandarin joint? Or maybe at the flop house, or maybe…
He stood, his mind in a whirl and was about to leave when he stopped abruptly. “What did you mean by ‘you of all people?’ Did Lieutenant Lloyd say anything about me?”
“No. I’ve just read your file is all.” From her drawer, she pulled another file, this one an inch and a half thick.
Cole grimaced at in disgust. There were probably horror stories about him in the file. The force needed to justify taking his meager pension and cutting his insurance off while he’d been recuperating in the hospital. “Don’t believe everything you read,” he told her.
Chapter 4
Unless you had a torture rack, a soundproof room and a lot of time to kill, breaking a Mandarin was next to impossible. Even the wrinkled-up grannies would only glare ferociously, cursing you and all your unborn children in every language they knew.
They could be bought, however. For the right price, they would sell out that very same granny. Unfortunately, Cole didn’t have the money. He had just a few pawnable items left and only the Crown would get him anywhere near enough cash to move the Mandarin to give up info on a customer peddling blood. People bought and sold everything under the sun in New York, but blood was one of those items that raised flags, and for good reason.
Cole could see the reason from his apartment window when he raised his lead shutter. Jersey was a brown wasteland across the polluted waters of the Hudson. It was the edge of the Zone where a hundred million Dead-eyes had been incinerated a century and a half before. People had short memories for most things, but not with zombies. Everyone knew about their insatiable hunger for clean blood, and even a Mandarin would hesitate to sell it—unless the price was right.
With the smeared tats washed from his face and wearing his best long coat, Cole entered the Mandarin joint at just after one. He was immediately assaulted by the aroma of three-day old fish. Beneath that was the pervasive, cloying smell of fried food. Every Mandarin joint smelled like this.
There were fifteen or so customers; most at the standing tables in the center of the room. Two Mandarin families were sprawled out in a pair of booths in the back. They were all rather nondescript to Cole. It was another story with the wait-staff. They eyeballed a couple of almost-slags as if they were on the verge of becoming full-blown trogs in the middle of their Pho. The lone black man had it worse. The waiter wouldn’t come near him. He passed in a wide circle around the man and when he dropped off his plate, he left it at the far end of the table.
To Cole’s left was a counter where he could order seaweed noodles thirteen different ways, hot soup five ways, and “fish” either fried crispy or fried limp.
“We pay ah taxes, taxman,” the lady behind the counter said, right away. “We pay on time.” She spoke in the clipped tones of a recent immigrant. There was no such thing as a recent immigrant to New York. People paid good money to get smuggled out of the city, not into it.
&nbs
p; “I’m not here to shake you down. I’m not even a cop. I’m here for a bite and maybe a chat. What’s fresh?”
Because of the way Mandarins were, he judged her age to be somewhere between twenty and sixty. She wore her black hair short in front—razor sharp bangs sat high up on her forehead—and long in the back, reminding Cole of a silken mullet. Her eyes had been squinty to begin with, but at the mention of a “talk,” they practically disappeared.
“It all fwesh.” She cocked a thumb behind her at a filthy plexiglass aquarium where three fish of indeterminate species floated in some sort of fluid that was so grey and murky that Cole didn’t know if it still qualified as actual water. As the fish weren’t belly-up, he supposed that they weren’t dead yet. Then again, they weren’t alive like fish were meant to be; they only existed.
“You make insult, you go,” the woman added.
“No one’s insulting anyone. I’ll have the number two.” A quarter for soggy seaweed, a couple of old carrots and bits of “fish” bobbing about in the soup. He’d had worse. He ate slowly, ignoring the glaring counter girl. The black man had left, leaving Cole as public enemy number one.
It was an hour before a stunted little man slipped into the booth across from him. By his attire and the grease glazing his pockmarked face, he was a cook. By the way he studied Cole with dark, intelligent eyes, Cole knew he was much more than that. “You Uncle Wu?” The neon sign above the joint’s door read Uncle Wu’s Happy Fish.
“It’s just Wu. You buyin’ or sellin’?” He had no accent whatsoever.
“Buying. Syn-ope. I’m looking for maybe a kilogram.” Moving a kilogram meant jail time and yet the man’s expression didn’t change.
“Twenty-two hundred, up front,” he replied quickly, wasting no time. “Delivery: a quarter a day for four days.”
It was too much. “Fifteen-hundred. All tonight. And I might need more tomorrow.”
Wu’s reaction, a tiny shift of his chin, was significant. He was interested. “Eighteen hundred for tonight. Short notice and all. If you give me more notice, I can shave some of that off for tomorrow.”
Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling Page 43
