Black Knight 02 - Back in Black

by Hartness, John G

  She took another deep breath, dashed a tear away with the back of one hand, and went on. "Stephen isn't just an old friend, he's my cousin."

  "Oh crap." I leaned back against the wall. "And you haven't told anybody in the department because..."

  "Because they'd throw me off this case so fast it would make your head spin, and I'm the only detective that cares enough to actually try to find out who's doing this."

  "Not to mention the only with the appropriate extra-curricular resources to actually get anything done."

  "And that."

  "What else?" I asked, leaning in to make sure we weren't overheard as a nurse wheeled a cart of expensive-looking equipment past us.

  "What do you mean?" Sabrina doesn't do innocent very well, and it works even less when she's been crying.

  "Really? You're still going to try to lie to someone who can read your blood pressure from ten feet away?" I put a hand on her shoulder and looked in her eyes, no mojo. "Tell me. I'll do anything I can to help. And I won't even be a smartassed jerk about it, I promise."

  "Stephen wasn't exactly the golden child in our family. His parents were – are – very Southern, and very Southern Baptist." She looked from Greg to me to see if we understood what she was saying. We looked at each other. We got it perfectly.

  "So you're saying the he wasn't exactly welcome for Thanksgiving once it became obvious that he wasn't ever going to bring home any grandchildren." I said.

  She put her head in her hands and talked to the floor. "Exactly. Stephen came out in high school, and it didn't go over well at school. He got beat up a lot, but it was even worse at home."

  "His parents beat him for being gay?" Greg asked furiously. My partner is the real champion of the downtrodden, having gone through life as an overweight comic book nerd. Now that he's a super-strong, super-fast overweight comic book nerd, he's gotten pretty self-righteous about it.

  "No," Sabrina said. "They never laid a hand on him. At all. I don't think my uncle even spoke to Stevie for the last two years he lived at home. They just ignored him, pretended like they didn't have a son, and when he turned eighteen, they kicked him out."

  "Just like that?" I asked.

  "Yeah. He came home from a summer dance clinic to find all his belonging in boxes on the porch and the locks changed."

  "That's pretty awful." I said. "But what does that have to do with you?"

  "Because he called me that night. When his folks kicked him out, he called his favorite cousin Sabrina to see if he could stay with me, just until he found a place."

  "So how long did he stay?" I asked.

  "I didn't pick up the phone. I was still in school and needed my dad's money to cover my apartment. I knew if I helped Stevie out, my parents would cut me off. So I didn't answer. I haven't seen him since." She still hadn't looked up, and I suspected she was afraid of what she'd see on my face. I reached down and took her hand.

  "How long has it been?" I asked.

  "Nine years. We were so close, it felt like I cut off my arm to abandon him like that, but I did it. And now he's lying in there hurt and I'm scared to go see him because..." Her words trailed off into her hands.

  "Because you're afraid he'll hate you for leaving him out in the cold." I made my voice a little hard, and it had the desired effect. Her face snapped up and she looked at me in a sort of shock. I went on, "He might, you know. But it's more likely he still loves you and has just been waiting for you to grow up enough to be a part of his life again. Now let's go in there and see what we can do to help him."

  "How'd you get so smart all of a sudden?" Sabrina asked as she wiped her eyes and got to her feet.

  "He's older than he looks, remember?" Greg chimed in. "You don't live this long without picking up a few things."

  "Well, technically, you didn't live all that long..." Sabrina shot back, laughing a little.

  "True, but you can still learn a few things walking around dead. Now let's go have a little family reunion." I said as I took her arm and led her down the hall to Stephen's room.

  Chapter 6

  Stephen was unconscious, and it was probably for the best. His face looked like something that had been dragged along I-77 behind a truck for a couple of miles, and then beaten with a meat tenderizer. He had tubes coming out of every visible orifice, and three or four different bags of different substances dripping into his arms. The beep beeping of his heart monitor was steady, and I was happy to see that he wasn't hooked up to a respirator. It looked like whoever beat him up knew exactly how much damage to do without causing any lethal injuries. Sabrina pulled a chair over to his bedside and sat down in it, taking her cousin's hand.

  "Stevie?" She asked in a small, trembling voice. Greg and I tried very hard to be invisible while she had a moment with her cousin. "Stevie, baby, it's Sabrina. I'm here now, little buddy, it's gonna be okay. I promise, Stevie, I'm gonna find whoever did this and I'm going to make them pay for this. Nobody's ever going to hurt my Stevie again, I swear to God." She put her head down on the back of his wrist and I saw her shoulders start to shake as she wept. I nodded to Greg that we should give her a minute, and we headed out into the hall.

  We had just stepped into the hall when we almost ran face-first into a very angry-looking Alex Glindare. "Alex," I said when we had all recovered from our near-collision. "What's wrong? I mean, I know what's wrong, but you look angry. Has something else happened?"

  "No, I'm fine." He said in a tone that made it pretty obvious he was anything but fine. "Just a run-in with a busybody nurse. It happens."

  "Oh," said Greg. "She didn't want to tell you anything because you're not family in her sense of the word?" Sometimes my partner is really perceptive, something that’s easy to overlook when he wraps himself in black spandex, which happens more often than it should.

  "Exactly." Alex took a deep breath and you could almost see him taking the insult and shoving it deep in a box somewhere. Then the questions poured out of him in a rush. "How is he? Is he awake? Did he tell you anything?"

  "Whoa, pal. Slow down a little. He's still unconscious. Detective Law is in there with him right now, but I doubt she's learned anything else."

  "Detective Law? Detective Sabrina Law?" Alex obviously recognized the name, and I thought that we might be about to witness some ugly family drama in the hospital hallway when the door opened and Sabrina came out, drying her eyes with the end of her scarf. She could actually do that and not look like a putz, which impressed me. Of course, she didn't cry blood, either, which helped. Yeah, that's another downside of being the bloodsucking fiend that we are. Makes watching Sleepless in Seattle with Greg a real clean-up nightmare.

  She drew up short and put on her professional mask when she saw who we were talking to, but Alex cut her off before she could say anything. "You look a lot different than in your ninth-grade yearbook, Detective."

  Sabrina actually blushed, a reaction I wasn't certain she was capable of, before saying "I told Stevie to burn those things. It's a pleasure to meet you, Alex."

  "You too, Cousin Sabrina. I just wish it were under better circumstances."

  They stood there staring at each other for a second before I lost all control of my mouth again. "Well are you two going to hug it out so we can get on with the investigation, or would you like to just stand here in the hallway and cast meaningful glances at each other all night?" Sabrina didn't even turn to look at me, just flicked out a punch that caught me square on a shoulder, while Alex actually laughed. He then looked around guiltily, as if someone might see him laughing and think ill of him for it.

  "It's okay, Alex." I said. "You're allowed to laugh when you're supposed to cry. You're Southern, it's the way things are done down here."

  He chuckled again and said, "It is indeed, isn't it? Now, what do you know about who beat the hell out of my husband?"

  "Right now, nothing." Sabrina said. "We found no usable forensic evidence at the scene. The alley just sees too much traffic for us to get anything
definite. So now we wait to see when Stevie wakes up and we find out what he can remember. What is it?"

  Alex was smiling a little, but his head snapped up at her question. "Oh, sorry. It's just that nobody calls him Stevie anymore. Nobody but me. He always said that there are only two people in the world allowed to call him Stevie. His favorite cousin and me. And here we both are."

  Sabrina's eyes clouded over again, and she reached out to take his hand. "Yeah, here we are. And here we'll be until he wakes up. Then we'll go get the son of a bitch that did this and teach him what pain looks like."

  "While you two are hanging out here drafting lesson plans on pain, Greg and I will start asking questions." I said.

  "Who are you going to ask?" Sabrina prodded.

  "We can't reveal our sources, Detective. Isn't that what you keep telling your Lieutenant?" Greg replied.

  "You guys usually are my sources, you dork."

  "Good point, but our issues remain unchanged." My partner put on his best enigmatic smirk, which did more to make him look like he had a sour stomach than a secret, and headed down the hall.

  "I have no idea what he's babbling about, but you go wait for your cousin to wake up and we'll see what we can come up with. I called Mike, and he’s on the way down here, so he can at least run interference with the hospital staff." I turned and started off toward the elevators, where a little kid was staring at Greg's utility belt.

  The doors chimed open, and we all got on. The kid's mother pushed the lobby button, while Greg hit the button for the basement, where the blood bank was kept. As they got off in the lobby, I turned to Greg and said "Where to now, Caped Crusader?" He flipped me off as the kid went wide-eyed out the elevator doors.

  Chapter 7

  The morgue isn't nearly the creepy, poorly lit place you'd expect based on decades of popular movies and zombie video games, but my impressions of the place could be colored by the fact that I'm dead. Regardless, Greg and I meandered through the hallways between exam rooms and cold storage until we got to Bobby's office. Robert Daniel Reed was not what anyone expected to encounter in a morgue as a medical examiner's assistant. The stereotype of a nebbishy little bookworm with visions of defiling corpses flew right out the window when you took a look at Bobby.

  A former Arena Football League quarterback, he'd migrated from North Georgia when his playing career ended (something about a shot to the knee one night in Birmingham) and tried his hand at entrepreneurial undertaking. Not an entrepreneurial endeavor, but a start-up as an undertaker. For exotic pets. When his grandiose idea fell on hard times, due in part to the economy and in part to the sheer lack of people needing to inter an anaconda, Bobby joined the coroner's office.

  We met Bobby a couple of years ago on a case involving an expensive and prematurely deceased parakeet, and when he migrated to civil service, he became an invaluable resource – a man with an embarrassing secret in his past and a key to blood bank. He looked up from what was no doubt a scintillating game of Farmville when we walked in, and his normally cheerful demeanor darkened when he recognized us.

  "What do you guys want?" He grumbled, settling all six foot four inches and 260 pounds back into his office chair, which let out a whine of protest.

  "I'm feeling a little peckish, Bobby. What's in the fridge?' Greg said as he walked over to a cooler on the wall.

  "Stay out of there, Knightwood, that's a customer!" Greg hastily took his hand off the door handle as Bobby walked over to the wall of slide-out drawers. For a dead guy, Greg has a crazy aversion to corpses. I mean, I'm not a huge fan, but as long as they're lying still, they don't bug me too much. It's when they get up and cause trouble that I have issues.

  Bobby reached up and opened a drawer high on the wall, pulling out a sliding steel tray with a pair of Igloo coolers on it. "I keep the stash up here so the boss doesn't get into it."

  "I don't know your boss, Bobby, why would that keep him out?" I said, sitting down at Bobby's computer and planting 4-day crops in all his virtual fields. That should teach him to leave a window open when there are other people in the room.

  "He's five-three with lifts in his shoes. He's banned us from ever putting the stiffs in the upper drawers, so I know he can't get into this stuff." Bobby pulled down a cooler and handed it to Greg. "The usual fee?"

  "Yeah, here. I put a little extra on here because we're gonna need to fill up before we leave." Greg reached into his utility belt and handed him a thumb drive. I raised an eyebrow and Greg just shook his head at me. Apparently there are some things I really don't want to know. Greg set the cooler on the floor and tossed me several bags.

  Bobby was standing there looking at us and I cocked an eyebrow at him. "You sure you want to watch this? Sometimes people freak out a little." I wasn't really sure how much Greg had told Bobby about us, so I didn't know if he understood we were the real deal as far as vampires go, or just thought we were humans with a blood fetish. I know, it's gross, but it happens. For that matter, drinking blood grosses me out sometimes, and it's how I stay alive.

  "Just pretend like I'm not here." Bobby said, showing no inclination to leave. I brought a bag up to my lips, grimaced at the cold plastic, and paused as another thought occurred to me.

  "That's fine, Bobby-boy, but if this shows up on YouTube, my next meal comes straight from the source." I saw his eyes widen and he reached over and hit a button on his laptop, apparently turning off the built-in webcam. I nodded at his discretion and began to drink.

  Greg and I emptied the cooler, putting away six pints apiece before we ran out of blood, and I felt stronger, faster and even smarter when we were done. Running low on blood always leaves me a little sluggish, but this infusion had me cooking on all eight cylinders again. Even ice-cold and tasting faintly of plastic, a little of the life force of the donor seeped through and I could smell more sharply, see more clearly, and hear more distinctly. I wiped my mouth with the back of one hand, and then licked the last stray drop from between my fingertips. "Good to the last drop," I murmured, and Greg belched, and then giggled as he blew a bloody burp-bubble.

  "That's disgusting, even for you." I chastised my partner.

  "Yeah, but still funny."

  "I didn't say it wasn't funny, just disgusting. How you doing over there, Bobby?" Our erstwhile observer had collapsed in his chair and was looking decidedly paler than before we began our meal.

  "I-I-I'm okay. I guess. I...I...just guess I wasn't really sure that you guys were..." his voice trailed off and he looked around, as if to make sure nobody could hear him.

  "Vampires?" Greg said from behind him, and giggled as Bobby jumped out of his chair. We're fast, and really quiet when we want to be, and sneaking up on people is one of Greg's favorite, and most annoying, tricks.

  "Yeah. That." Bobby looked back at me, obviously flashing back to my threat of drinking from the source if he told anyone about us.

  "We are, buddy. But don't worry, we hardly ever eat our friends." I grabbed Greg's elbow and turned him to head out the doors of the morgue and start looking for our gay-basher.

  "Hardly ever?" Greg whispered, trying not to giggle as we walked towards the elevator.

  "Well, I wanted to make sure we kept our options open." I pushed the door for the lobby level and smirked as the doors closed on Bobby's pale face.

  Chapter 8

  As we drove back to the crime scene, Greg and I started to go over the details of the case. "So what do we know?" I asked, as he turned right onto Hawthorne.

  "Well, we know that Detective Law has family issues, that some of those issues are currently lying in a hospital bed, and that your libido has elected you therapist."

  "Bite me." I replied, fiddling with the radio trying in vain to find something other than country music.

  "No thanks, you're stale. But anyway, we know that there have been several of these attacks over the past few months, and the gay community has been up in arms for the police to do more about them. Unfortunately, living as we do in t
he buckle of the Bible Belt, the police were reluctant to get involved until there had been too many attacks to ignore."

  "How do you know so much about this? There hasn't been anything on TV to speak of." I flipped the radio off and stared across the front seat at my partner. "Is there something you've been meaning to tell me?" I teased.

  "No, butthead. Popular culture to the contrary, being a vampire is not synonymous with sexual ambiguity. I have not ever been, nor will I ever be attracted to your skinny butt. Or any other part of your undeveloped frame."

  "I dunno, Greggy..." I needled. "Methinks he doth protest too much..."

  "Oh shut up. If I wanted to go after guys, I'd definitely go after better-looking ones than you. But anyway, there's been this invention lately called the Internet. You might have heard of it? I read about the attacks on a couple of city message boards that I monitor."