by Phil Malone
“What… how… how did he die?" Lucado wasn’t making sense. Maybe he was just crazy, just imagining things. But no, Fitz wouldn’t have released him at some random gas station to make a prank call.
“How?" Lucado hesitated. “Badly, I’m afraid.”
Kolka sagged against a wall. “Lucado, I need more information than that,” he said, though nothing could be further from the truth.
“I’ll give you anything you want if you can protect me. I’m out here on my own, Detective. I killed one of them, but as soon as they figure that out, they’ll send more. I need help.”
The world spun on the periphery of Kolka’s eyes. He squeezed them shut. Not enough sleep, he told himself. That was the only thing, at the moment, he felt sure was true.
“Detective?”
“I might need something from you too, old man. Do you really think you know who the serial killer might be?”
“Fairly sure. Not one hundred percent, though.”
“Right now, I’ll take what I can get. Go ask someone for the address of that gas station and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
A slim hope, but it was a lead. Something he could use to reassure the Congressman, to give Sanger hope when really, Kolka just needed to reassure himself.
It was a long drive out to Mosby’s Crossing, but at that hour of the morning, traffic was virtually non-existent. The gas station proved to be an oasis of lights amidst a void of dark trees and fields.
Along the way, Kolka passed the wreckage of a police cruiser, surrounded by more police cars, tow trucks, and an ambulance. A blaze of flashing lights lit up the otherwise dark and deserted back road. Kolka’s car crept past on the opposite shoulder, ushered through by police officers in the midst of erecting barriers around the scene.
Kolka had to remind himself about Sanger’s daughter, about the ticking clock. No matter how much he wanted to stop and find out what happened to Fitz and Wright, he knew there was no time. So he drove on.
Lucado waited for him inside the twenty-four hour convenience store, peering out into the night from behind signage that warned against consuming alcohol on the premises. When Kolka pulled up in front of the store and parked, the old man hurried out towards him, hobbling on his cane, peering up into the sky and flinching as if he expected a UFO to come sailing out of the night and zap him aboard with their teleportation ray.
“It was just a bird,” he said, as he climbed into the passenger seat of Kolka’s car.
The old man looked dreadful. Cuts and scratches covered him head to toe. Dirt caked in the folds of his clothes. His hands were almost black with grime, a few stray leaves nested in his hair, and dried blood dotted his skin. After what he’d seen at the intersection not too far away, Kolka wasn’t surprised.
“I passed Wright’s cruiser on my way here,” he said. “The police were blocking off the street all around it.”
“They still hadn’t found it when I went back for my cane. They must have arrived in the last half hour or so.”
“Should I have stopped? Found out what was going on?”
“It would only upset you. Anyway, they only know what they found. They don’t know what actually happened.”
“Which was…?”
Lucado craned his neck, scanning along the edge of the convenience store’s rooftop. “I don’t know if we’re being watched or not. If we were, I think they would have attacked by now. For the moment, at least, I hope we’re safe.”
“That didn’t answer my question.”
“You won’t believe me." He sighed. “It was a vampire. I killed it. Stabbed it through the heart with a broken tree limb. They decompose quickly, but the bones might still be in the woods over there somewhere." Lucado gestured vaguely towards the blackness beyond the lighted parking lot. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t want to venture back out there. Anything could be hiding in those trees.”
“Yeah." Kolka found an alternate route to the highway on his phone and started the car. “Well, you are handicapped, and you seem pretty jumpy.”
“I need to be protected. Even if that means the mental asylum, I don’t care. Before I killed it, the vampire said some things. They have some kind of society, a way of doing things…” Lucado hesitated. “I don’t know. But they know my name. They know I killed the vampires in that house. They wanted revenge. I’ll take whatever protection I can get.”
“You think you can get it in a nut house?”
“Maybe. They can’t simply walk in there and kill me, not if they want to remain hidden." He stared out the window as they drove. “It was an anonymous tip,” he muttered.
Kolka glanced over at him. “What was?”
“That’s how I learned about the vampire nest in Winchester. Someone set me up. They must have known my name before I ever came to Virginia.”
A few minutes slipped by while they drove in silence. Kolka navigated the back roads, traveling north to the highway. It was a less direct route back to Fairfax, but there wouldn’t be any stoplights and the traffic would still be light. In another three hours, the sun would come up and everyone’s day would start in earnest.
“I’ll take you over to Old Dominion myself,” Kolka finally said, “but we have to make a stop first. If you think you really know who the serial killer is, then you know where to find him, right?”
“The man I found, his name is Edgar Sallow. But it’s not… not really any of my business, Detective. Whatever’s going on in that man’s mind, if it’s what I think it is… that’s exactly what I’m running from. Take me to this Old Dominion place, and I’ll give you his address. Then you can go arrest him.”
Kolka shook his head. “He kidnapped a girl, Mario. A kid, fifteen years old. He’s had her for a few hours already." He glanced over at Lucado, who fidgeted with the handle of his cane. “Please, help me. She needs you. She needs both of us.”
“I… I don’t…”
“Mario, please. I could take you to the asylum, but then what? What if I go to save her, only I’m too late?”
Lucado’s hands tightened around his cane. He twisted the handle and unsheathed the blade hidden inside. “You win, Detective,” he said.
As soon as he saw the blade, Kolka’s eyes widened. “Holy shit. Has that been there the whole time?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Melody’s skin was crawling even before she woke up. She came to, groggy, making a heroic effort to pry her own eyes open. Shadows surrounded her, making her vision bleary, hard to focus.
She tried to remember if she’d been drugged, but it only felt like emerging from a deep sleep. More than anything, she wanted to close her eyes and slip back under, but gradually she became aware of lying on something hard and gritty.
There was light in the room. Melody couldn’t tell where it came from. She lay on her side, facing a ceiling of bare boards that slanted down to meet the floor in the far corner of the room. A few dusty cardboard boxes were stacked in that direction, their corners nibbled away. Old, yellowed papers showed through the holes, equally chewed on and despoiled.
A few feet away, Melody spotted a tiny mouse, no bigger than her thumb. Its nose twitched constantly, whiskers quivering, as it sniffed the air. The little creature would advance a few steps and pause, head slowly bobbing up and down as it smelled for imminent danger.
Tears welled up in Melody’s eyes as she watched it. Run from the danger, little mouse! she wanted to tell it, but run to where? The mouse was probably safer than she was. Safer, and closer to home.
Her shoulder started to hurt, so Melody shifted her weight. She wanted to dry her eyes with the back of her hand, but suddenly realized they were tied behind her back. Uselessly, her wrists tried to yank apart whatever tied them together. Her outburst of frenzied struggling accomplished nothing whatsoever, except to chase the mouse away.
“You there, are you awake?”
The man’s voice startled her. Melody squeaked in fright and rolled over, noticing him for the first time.<
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He wasn’t tied up, but he lay sprawled on the boards beneath him, his skin looking pale and sickly. A padded blindfold wrapped around his eyes, such that, even though he looked in her direction, he couldn’t see her.
“Who are you?”
Though the man was thick around the arms and midsection, he struggled to sit up. His hair had been hacked off inexpertly, a few inches long in some places, shorn close to the scalp in others.
“Me?" He gave a joyless laugh. “I’m just someone who’s happy to hear another human voice. You… you are human, aren’t you?”
If Melody hadn’t witnessed her mother’s death, it would be the most inexplicable question anyone had ever asked her. “Yes,” she said. “I’m human.”
“He’s a vampire, you know. I don’t care how crazy it makes me sound. He said his name was Bleda. He’s been feeding off me all week, drinking blood faster than my heart can pump more. I’m pretty sure I’ll be dead soon. And, I hate to break it to you, but that’s probably why he brought you here.”
“He killed my mom.”
The man’s head dropped back against a wooden beam along the wall. “Sorry to hear that. It’s what they do.”
“A week? Has he even been feeding you?”
Briefly, the man hesitated. Then he made a sour face. “Cold cuts and warm milk. I’ll take what I can get, but by this point I’m almost looking forward to death.”
“Is the milk spoiled?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“How come I’m tied up and you’re not?”
“I don’t have the strength to fight back, not anymore. You, though… I might be able to help you escape.”
Melody perked up. Escape sounded better than spoiled milk. “Just show me what to do,” she said.
“The thing about this vampire is, he likes to talk. He likes to torture his victims, play with his food, whatever you want to call it. But I’ve been listening the whole time. I’ve learned a few things about their kind.”
He leaned away from her, his hand feeling around in a pile of broken furniture just beside him. Melody inched onto her knees for a better look. She saw a few ripped sofa cushions with stuffing exploding through the holes, a few broken glass vases, a coffee table with one thick leg broken off. The last item might once have been a wooden rocking chair, shattered and reduced to little more than a pile of kindling.
The man gripped a particular piece of broken chair and extracted it from the pile. One end came to a jagged point. The man ran his fingertips over the broken end, as if to reassure himself that it was the piece he was looking for.
“This,” he said, displaying it for Melody. “It’s just like in all the stories. You can kill them by stabbing them through the heart with a piece of wood.”
“You expect me to do that?”
“Use it to defend yourself, or give it to someone else who will defend you. You just got here. There might even be people looking for you. The police. Your dad. Whoever.”
Melody imagined telling her dad to stab someone through the heart with a broken piece of rocking chair. It didn’t seem likely. “How am I supposed to get out of here? I’m tied up.”
“I might be able to help you with that, too." He returned to the trash pile next to him and felt around until he found a sharp piece of glass from a broken vase. “Turn around,” he told her.
She did as he requested. “You’re not going to cut me on accident, are you?” she asked. “How come you’re blindfolded?”
“Oh, that." His fingers brushed against her back, found her arm, followed that down to her wrists. He tugged at the strip of cloth that wound around them, then placed the sharp edge of the glass against it and carefully started sawing at it. “Bleda. The vampire. He cut my eyes out and sewed my eyelids shut. That was four days ago, I think." He shrugged. “I’ll try not to cut you.”
Again, as when she first woke up, Melody felt her skin crawl. Getting trapped here sounded worse than death. “How am I going to get you out of here?” she whispered.
He offered a hollow laugh. “You’re not. I’m dying. I would only slow you down." The cloth around her wrists tore apart, freeing her. The man held out the piece of broken wood. “Here, take it.”
Melody rubbed her wrists, then took the scrap of wood. “I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Eddie,” he said, after another moment’s hesitation.
“How do I even get out of here? Is the vampire here somewhere?”
“I don’t know." Eddie rolled away from her, crawling through the dust on his hands and knees. He reached a part of the room where the broad planks they sat on gave way to fuzzy pink insulation and narrow two by fours.
In between a couple of boards, he felt around for a depression where there was no insulation. He looked back over his shoulder, pointing his face in Melody’s general direction. “We’re in the attic. There’s a trap door here. Bleda hasn’t been back since he dropped you off, so I don’t know if he’s here or not. When you go, go quietly.”
Melody tried to stand without hitting her head. She wasn’t tall, but the ceiling didn’t leave much room for anything other than a few old boxes of bank records or Christmas decorations. Dust and grit clung to her clothes. She felt mortified when she realized she was still wearing her pajamas.
Careful not to tread with her bare feet on any of the broken glass, she crept up beside Eddie. The trap door was there, like he said, with an extendable ladder built into it.
“Okay,” she said. “Now what?”
He pushed the door open a few inches. Its old, rusted springs emitted an echoey squeal. There were no lights on in the hallway below.
Slowly, the door fell all the way open. Eddie kept one hand on the ladder, to keep it from unfolding and thumping noisily against the floor. “How far to the ground is it?”
Melody tried to gauge the distance. “Maybe eight feet.”
“Just hang off the edge and drop to the carpet. You won’t get hurt. Make as little noise as possible.”
She swung her feet out over the gap, letting them dangle. “If he’s not here, should I come back for you?”
Eddie offered her a smile. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t ever come back here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Just looking at the place set Lucado’s teeth on edge. It took time to find, nestled amidst trees in a dark neighborhood with few streetlights. At one point, Kolka almost drove into a ditch when he took a wrong turn. After that, he proceeded more carefully, eyes straining to pierce the blind black night that surrounded them.
He was anxious to rush into the house with his gun drawn, Lucado could tell. Neither one of them had any idea what awaited them inside, though.
Kolka killed his car’s headlights as they rolled past the house. He went down a little further, parking along the edge of the street, where the blacktop gave way to a steep drop into a wet, runny ditch. The car’s passenger side sloped downwards, forcing Lucado to use his cane to brace himself as he climbed out. Luckily, his knees held and he didn’t tumble face first into the muck.
After a little careful maneuvering, he joined Kolka in the street, staring back the way they’d come, at the house just a few doors down.
It was set back from the road, its yard overgrown with weeds and tall grass. An abundance of trees plunged the unlit property into an even deeper well of blackness. There were not even any lights burning beside the front door.
“This definitely looks like the place,” Kolka muttered. He unsnapped the clasp on his shoulder holster, but refrained from drawing his weapon.
Lucado had no such reservations. He unsheathed his blade right away. He could limp up to the door if he had to. “Don’t you need a search warrant to go in there?”
“To get a bulletproof prosecution, yes. Do you really think this is going to end in a courtroom?”
“It seems unlikely.”
“I’ll just say I heard a girl calling for help,” Kolka said with a wry grin. “Make sure
you back me up.”
“Why not? After the arson, I’m in enough trouble as it is.”
They crept into the yard, keeping to the deeper pools of shadow beneath the trees. Kolka was a little lighter on his feet, but Lucado managed to keep up.
All the windows in the house were dark. Nothing moved behind the curtains. Nothing even made a sound. If Lucado was wrong about the address, there might only be a sleeping family behind those windows.
Kolka scanned the front of the house, craning his neck to get a view of the windows in the upper floor. He turned to Lucado when the old man joined him beneath the spreading branches that shielded them from view.
Kolka gestured towards the darkened porch. “Does it look to you like the front door is open?”
Lucado’s eyes weren’t perfect. He squinted in the door’s direction, trying to parse one impenetrable shadow from the next. “Hard to say. We might as well get closer.”
The last stretch of yard between the tree and the porch was devoid of any more cover. Kolka took one last look around to make sure he couldn’t spot anyone watching, then made a break for the door. Lucado trailed behind, blade in hand, hobbling on a bad knee that felt like it wouldn’t bend properly.
He huffed for breath by the time he joined Kolka on the porch. It had been a long day. For the moment, a trickle of adrenaline kept him going, but he could feel the weariness stealing through his limbs.
Stifling a yawn, Lucado tottered to Kolka’s side. The detective was right. The door stood ajar, a few inches of black space hinting at the house’s interior.
Kolka put a finger to his lips. He drew a revolver from his shoulder holster and pushed the door open. No lights were on inside the house, and little enough spilled in from outside.
Keeping his gun aimed at the ground, Kolka felt around the wall just inside, searching for a light switch. When he found it, a subdued forty-watt bulb popped on in the foyer, its orange glow dispelling the darkness for no more than a few feet.
They waited and listened to see if the sudden light would draw any attention from anyone inside. After a few moments, when no one appeared, Kolka tugged the doorknob to one side of them and chanced a glimpse behind it. Over his shoulder, Lucado saw steps heading up to another closed door, barely discernible at the far end.
