by Devin Hanson
The door behind me swung open and the abused hinges squeaked. I spun, sudden adrenaline rushing through me in preparation for violence.
A man in a suit stepped through the door, his hand on his gun and I froze. He was young, in his late twenties or early thirties, with clean-cut good looks. He had a nice tan and the body under his rumpled suit had the broad shoulders and narrow hips of a swimmer. Or maybe a surfer, given our location.
He held up his other hand, displaying a badge. “You’re Alex Ascher,” the cop said.
Shit. So much for knocking him on his ass and running. If he already knew who I was, all that would get me was jail time. I eyed his gun hand. “Who wants to know?”
The cop followed my gaze and took his hand off his gun. “We’ve been looking all over for you. Half the department expects to find your body floating in with the tide.”
I relaxed a little now that the cop wasn’t about to draw on me. “I’ve been busy,” I said. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.” The cop scratched at his head with a bemused smile. “You’re on the list.”
“What list?” I started walking slowly toward the door, giving the cop a wide berth.
“Your apartment was trashed too,” he said and gestured around at the room. “At our last count, fifteen apartments and houses have been destroyed like this. All the residents we’ve found so far have been dead.”
I drifted to a stop and stared at him incredulously. “They’re all dead?” Lei’s list of four apartments must have been an early sample, then, or she had only managed to track down part of the full list.
He nodded. His eyes were sharp, as he looked at me. “You know something.”
“Not nearly as much as you, apparently.”
“You knew enough to come here. That makes me curious. I don’t suppose you’d like to come into the precinct to talk?”
“You’re perceptive,” I said and forced a grin. “You sure you’re a cop?”
He chuckled ruefully. “Okay, fair enough. We can talk here.”
I shook my head. “Honestly, you’re not going to get a lot of useful information out of me.”
“You’re a registered PI,” he pointed out. “You have good enough connections to wind up here, which means you do know something, even if you don’t know its significance yet. Come on, let’s have a chat. No coercion or brow-beating. Have you had breakfast yet?”
My stomach growled before I could shake my head no. Staying up all night having sex had given me an appetite. “You buying?”
He grinned at me. “There’s a waffle joint a block away. Let’s get some grub and we can compare notes. I’m Detective Sam Friday.” He held out his hand and I shook it. “It’s nice to meet you.”
I followed the detective out of the apartment and squinted as the bright sunlight stabbed into my eyes. “Where’s your partner, Detective?”
“Please, call me Sam. She ran home for a shower and a change.”
“No offense, but you look like you spent the night in your car.”
He nodded. “Right in one. We’ve been staking out every site we can, hoping for something to give us a break. I saw you pull up and recognized you from your photo.” He turned a winning smile on me. “You’re much better looking in person.”
I rolled my eyes. “Thanks, I guess.”
Sam wasn’t how I expected a detective to be. He had a casual charisma about him and didn’t seem at all concerned that he had caught me trespassing in a crime scene. He seemed more interested in my scooter than the case he was trying to solve and he grilled me on the gas mileage, performance, handling, and other aspects of the vehicle on the way to the waffle house.
We got one of the last tables and sat amid a miasma of syrup fumes. I felt like I could get diabetes just breathing in the air. “You’re young for a detective,” I said after the waiter had dropped off a pair of menus for us. The laminated sheets felt slightly sticky from incompletely washed-off syrup.
“Yeah. Junior Detective, actually. I just got my shield. My partner is the old hand on the job, showing me the ropes.”
“You going to get in trouble for this?” I asked, waving the menu at him.
He shrugged nonchalantly. “For having breakfast? Last time I checked, there weren’t any regulations about that.”
I grinned. I liked this guy. Maybe he was putting on a surf-cop show for me, hoping to lure me into complacency with his easy-going attitude, but I had a hunch that what I was getting was genuine Sam Friday. “Okay, Sam, I’ll play your game. What do you want to know?”
He took a swig of his coffee and made a face before adding sugar and cream. “Normally I like black,” he explained, “but this stuff is vile.” He tried his coffee again and shrugged. “Well, nothing much I can do for swamp water. You in a rush to go somewhere, or something? I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry. I hate working on an empty stomach.”
“All right. Fine. What’s good here?”
He shrugged again. “Dunno. Never been here before.” He flipped through the menu haphazardly. “That fried chicken smells good, though.”
“For breakfast?”
“More like… third dinner, if I was to count.” He grinned at me, and I saw some of the weariness lurking beneath his cheerful demeanor. “At this point, calories are calories.”
“Fair enough.”
The waiter came back and I mirrored Sam’s order, asking for orange juice instead of coffee. Sam got a refill on his swamp water and we sat back to watch the other customers. This close to the beach, it seemed like there were equal numbers of surfers and vacationers as office workers grabbing breakfast before the day’s work.
“So, fifteen,” I said, unable to keep my thoughts from that number and the reason we were here.
“At least.” Sam raised his eyebrows at me. “For all we know, there are twice that many that haven’t filed incident reports yet.”
“And they’re all dead?”
“No, no. Sorry if I gave that impression. Only the ones we’ve found. A few seemed to have discovered a sudden interest in taking vacations out of the country. Others are probably like you, living their lives out of sight and hopefully very much alive.”
“I’m not completely off the grid,” I objected. “I have credit cards, a cell phone—”
“You’re not a suspect, Alexandra. We couldn’t get a judge to sign off on a warrant for you even if we wanted to.”
“Call me Alex,” I said.
He tipped his head at me. “All right, Alex. What I’m saying is, you’re not under suspicion. If anything, we would want to offer you protection.”
I couldn’t help myself. I laughed in his face. He looked at me, pained, and I shook my head. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m certain the police wouldn’t be able to help me.”
“You’re a tough girl, I can respect that, but your friend Ethan can’t be there with you at all times.” He sighed at the look on my face. “We did a known associate’s check when you went missing. We’re not stalking you or anything. We’re just concerned for your welfare.”
“We?”
“Me. My partner and I. The police.” He grimaced. “I’m making a hash of this. You seem like a nice girl. I’d hate for you to get hurt, is all.”
I leaned forward and saw his eyes flick to the V of my t-shirt. I was not two hours off a full, night-long sex marathon and I was already sizing Sam up, noting the roughness of his blonde stubble, the firm shoulders and strong hands. I imagined he was a polite lover, who got enthusiastic once he made sure you wouldn’t break.
I took a deep breath. “No, bad. Bad Alex,” I muttered.
“Sorry?”
“Nothing, forget it.”
Our food came, then, and we both sat back, feigning indifference while the waiter clattered our platters in front of us. I wasn’t exaggerating. I had a waffle the size of a hubcap with a full six-piece chicken strip meal stacked up next to it, along with a wire basket loaded dow
n with warm-to-the-touch pitchers of syrup in a half-dozen different flavors.
“Okay,” Sam said after he had finished prepping his own massive waffle and popped a bite of chicken into his mouth. “No protective detail. I don’t like it, but I respect your decision. I’m going to look like a complete asshole at the precinct if you turn up dead, though, so do us both a favor and avoid that.”
“Deal,” I said around a mouthful of waffle. The chicken was hot, and spicy enough to add a counterpoint to the sweetness of the syrup. I took a swig of orange juice and regretted it. The orange juice tasted like toothpaste after the syrup. No wonder everyone around me was drinking black coffee. The bitterness probably offset the saccharine overload. The waitress came by and wordlessly offered me a coffee mug and I nodded.
“So, how’d you find out about the apartment?”
How much could I tell the detective? I’m sure Lei wouldn’t appreciate me sending cops to the Sanctuary. “A friend.” He raised an eyebrow at me and I shrugged. “It’s sensitive. I got a list of four apartments, one of which was mine.”
“Can I see?” I shrugged and handed the list over to him. He glanced at it and handed it back. “You checked the Hollywood address?”
“Yeah, I haven’t had an opportunity to go to Pasadena yet.”
“Well, let me save you a trip. You won’t find anything different there. The woman was found dead on Saturday.”
“The… same way?”
He nodded. “Messy.” The humor faded from his eyes and took on an introspective cast. “I haven’t seen one this bad.”
“I’m a little surprised it’s not all over the news,” I admitted. “This has got to be the biggest chain of murders in LA in a long while.”
“Well, you have our Middle Eastern friends to thank for that. Department slapped a terrorism label on it and shut the press out cold. It hasn’t leaked yet, but it will cause a riot if we haven’t buttoned it up before it does.” He leveled a gaze at me and I held my hands up.
“They won’t hear about it from me. How… how did they die?”
He spread his hands helplessly. “That’s part of the mystery. They’ve been brutally murdered, but it would take a world-class strongman to do that kind of damage. We’ve picked up a few big guys in connection with the apartment destruction, but none of them know anything.”
“A few!?” There went the theory that it was a single marid doing the vandalism.
“Yeah, big weightlifter type guys. Totally roided out, but meek as lambs when we cornered them.”
It was fairly standard for marid to comply with the police. All it would take is a single lapel camera showing a cop car being used as a frisbee and it would be all over. “You still have them locked up?”
“Nah, vandalism on that scale is a felony, but a good lawyer could talk it down to community service and a fine. They’re all out on bail. Besides, none of them did the murdering, and that’s what we’re really concerned with.”
“You ever have something like this happen before?” I was genuinely curious.
He shook his head. “LA is weird and wild, but I’ve never seen an apartment so thoroughly trashed. They even flattened the spoons. Who does that?” He sighed and flipped his waffle over, poking at it with his fork. He seemed to have lost his appetite. “Place feels empty when it’s trashed like that. Not even a home anymore.”
I felt a wave of cold apprehension go through me at Sam’s words. Holy shit. That was an approach I hadn’t even considered. What did you do if you couldn’t cross a threshold? Hire a marid to systematically annihilate everything in the home and obliterate the threshold. Then you could walk in at will with no consequence. Now, what nasties did I know that couldn’t cross a threshold? The answer was obvious, even as I thought the question.
Vampires.
So much for the pact. The vampires were here, in LA, right now. How close had I come to falling for the trap? If I hadn’t called Ethan, if he had been any less insistent about coming to his house for the night, I would be one more casualty on Sam’s list.
Sam read my face and he went still, only speaking when I finally looked up at him. “You know something. You figured it out.”
I swallowed. “Detective Friday, you’re not going to like this.”
“No. Nuh-uh. I shared with you, damn it. You can’t just bail on me now!”
I reached over the table and grabbed his hands, squeezing them until he stopped protesting and looked at me in surprise. “Listen to me. Carefully. Leave town. Take a vacation to Hawaii or something. Break your ankle and go on medical leave. Shoot yourself in the leg if you have to. But you really, really do not want to get involved in this case.”
His gaze hardened and he pulled his hand away from me. “You want me to run? I can’t do that.” He pulled his badge out and slammed it down on the table. “You see that? Protect and serve. I take that seriously. People are getting torn apart and I mean to catch the sick fuck who’s doing it.”
“Shut up!” I hissed at him and pushed him back into his chair. People around the restaurant were turning to look at us. Only the badge on the table was keeping the waitress from calling the cops on us. She looked a question at me and I shook my head and gave her a quick smile.
I turned back to Sam. “Will you settle down? Jesus Christ. I thought you didn’t want the press involved.”
He finally winced at that last comment and put his badge away. “Fine, but you’re coming in. I’ll book you for obstruction if I have to. You’re telling me everything, one way or another.”
“What happened to no coercion?” I demanded. “You forget that part when it’s convenient? You try and drag me out of here and I’ll tell the waitress you were molesting me. Let’s see how long your captain will keep me in interrogation with my lawyers ramming that up his ass.”
He glowered at me, but finally sagged back into his chair with a muttered curse. “All right. I’ll give it to you, Alex, you’re a tough chick.” He showed me his palms. “I apologize. That was out of line.”
I huffed and folded my arms. “It was.”
“I would never molest you,” he muttered, scandalized. “You know what a report like that would do to my career? I’d be busted down to parking enforcement with or without proof.”
I felt a little bad, but not so much that I would tell him anything. “Next time keep your word,” I snapped. “But, okay. That was mean-spirited of me, I admit it. But I wasn’t kidding; you chase this thing and you’ll wish you were doing domestic dispute resolution for the rest of your life. If you even live through it.”
“I can handle myself,” he frowned at me. I could tell my warnings were starting to get to him, even if only a little bit. “I’ve taken down some bad dudes, Alex. Not bragging, just telling the truth.”
Somehow, I had to convince him that it was in his best interest to walk away. I looked him in the eye, picked up my little stainless-steel syrup cup, and crushed it in my fingers like it was made of cheap plastic. I crumpled it into a little marble-sized ball and tossed it onto his plate with a clack. Sam picked it up, his eyes wide, and tried to unfold it without luck.
I wiped my fingers on my napkin irritably, trying to get the syrup off. “There is a lot you don’t know, Sam. There’s bad, and then there’s bad.”
“That was sleight of hand? You’re good.” He was trying for bravado, but I could see my little demonstration had shaken him.
I got up from the table and tossed my napkin onto my half-eaten breakfast. “I’ve got to go, Sam. Do yourself a favor and forget you met me.”
I was halfway to the door when he called after me. I stopped reluctantly and he jogged over to me, apologizing as he bumped into a customer. “Alex. Look, I’m sorry, all right?” He went to run his hand through his hair before remembering it was sticky with syrup. “You’re right, of course. I don’t know what’s going on, but I also can’t walk away any more than you can.”
“Sure you can.”
“I meant what I said abo
ut that oath. It’s important to me, but I’m not going to argue with you about it.” He took out his wallet and extracted a business card, holding it by the corners to keep it from getting sticky. “Please, just take this. If you decide there’s something you can tell me, give me a call.”
I took the card reluctantly and tucked it into my back pocket. “Don’t hold your breath.”
He shrugged and grinned at me. “I can always hope. Thanks for coming to eat with me.”
“Tip the waitress.” I waved and turned away.
“That was a trick. With the bowl? It was a trick, right?”
I pushed through the door and stepped out into the sunshine, ignoring him. If the vampires were in LA, someone would need to know about it. My steps sped up as I hurried across the street toward my scooter. Fortunately, I had just made allies with a crew of European hunters. If anyone knew what to do, it would be Elaida and her friends.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Elaida’s clubhouse turned out to be in an old wrecking yard about ten minutes south of downtown Los Angeles. On the drive in, the neighborhood went from posh city-center to the worst part of the city I had ever seen in the space of about two minutes. If there was a vertical cement surface, it had graffiti on it. To be fair, a few of the pieces were brilliantly realized works of art, but the vast majority were either hastily-scrawled dicks or gang markers.
It was the kind of neighborhood that made young women like myself want to carry a .38 equalizer in my purse. Or an illegally modified assault rifle. Maybe Ethan had a point about carrying a gun. The closer I got to my destination, the more industrial the area grew. I crossed the LA river, really just a giant concrete trench dumping to the ocean, and pulled off the main road. I drove past a concrete mixing depot, dodged a cement truck hogging most of the narrow lane, and eased to a stop outside the wrecking yard.
Rusting, crushed cars were stacked ten high in windrows, with a lane wide enough for a dump truck to pass through deeper into the lot. There was nobody around to stop me, so I eased my scooter forward. There was a terrific amount of noise coming from the right, and I paused to watch a crane with giant steel jaws pick up a flattened minivan and drop it into an industrial shredder. The car went in one side, and glittering metal confetti came out the other.
