You’re not going anywhere, you fucker, he thought. He’d never say it out loud, because he’d been raised polite, but he meant every word.
He whipped the cruiser into a roaring turn and hit the sirens and lights, taking the next corner at a skid. Up ahead, Kenya was running hard and gaining on the intruder, who was just crossing the block up ahead. Kevin missed the man as he dodged and went sharply left up a narrow alley—too narrow for the cruiser. Kenya waved him on around, and he hit the gas again and took a left to run parallel with their fleeing cat-killer. It was a long block. His radio crackled as he took the turn to cut the man off, and he heard Kenya’s voice say, “Kevin, he’s got a truck, repeat, he’s in a—”
Too late.
Kevin saw the truck in a blur as it headed straight for the front quarter panel of the cruiser. The next second he was spinning, and the impact knocked him sideways. The cruiser jerked hard right and tipped, but didn’t quite topple over on its side, and then the truck pushed it out of the way and sped off, leaving a greasy smoke of burning tires behind it.
“Shit,” Kevin gasped, and let go of the wheel. “Shit!” He tried to steer away from the curb he’d landed against, but the cruiser made a grinding metal groan, and he heard the left front tire shred and pop. “Shit!”
It hurt to slam his hands down on the wheel, but he did it anyway.
Kenya yanked his door open from the outside—it took three tries—and looked him in the face. “You’re bleeding,” she said. Her voice sounded flat and professional, but there was a look in her eyes that said something different. She popped the trunk and got the first-aid kit. “Here, put some pressure on it.”
He didn’t realize how much he was bleeding until he glanced in the rearview mirror. There was a wide cut on his left temple, probably from broken glass, and a swath of red down his cheek. It had already dripped onto his shirt collar. “Guess this shirt’s done for sure,” he said, which seemed an odd thing to say when he thought about it, but he was a little disconnected. Too much, too fast. And twinges of pain were starting to make themselves felt, like sparks flying up from a fire.
While he fumbled a gauze pack out of the first-aid kit, Kenya was calling in on her shoulder radio, rattling off pursuit information and requesting an ambulance. She’d gotten the plate number of the truck, which was a damn good thing; Kevin had been too busy spinning to manage it. “We need a new car,” he said. “This one’s not going anywhere.”
“Only place you’re going is the hospital,” she told him. “Hush.”
“Did you just tell me to hush?”
“Hush,” she said again, and crouched down to eye level. She took the gauze from him and swabbed at the blood on his face. “Just hush.”
He did.
He was still sitting on a table in the emergency room getting stitches when Kenya came back in with a fresh undershirt and uniform shirt she must have taken out of his locker. Once the doc had tied off all his knots and headed to the next crisis, Kevin stripped off the stained clothes and put on the new ones. Kenya watched him without comment. He could tell she was thinking of something else.
“Thanks,” he told her. She nodded, but she looked tense and guarded and clearly was arguing with herself about something.
Finally, she said, “He ditched the pickup about fifteen minutes ago at a truck stop on the way to Shreveport.”
“And?”
“And he killed a nineteen-year-old to steal his car. Word from the scene is he was headed west,” she said. Her shoulders slumped a little. “Kid got torn apart, Kevin. We should have got him.”
“Yeah,” he said, and swallowed. “Not your fault.”
“Not yours, either. I should have taken Marie more seriously from the get-go. We need to get her in a room and find out who he is, right now.”
“Yep.” Kevin slid off the table and tucked the crisp new uniform shirt into his pants. It still had sharp creases in it from his momma’s ironing, and it smelled of some scent she’d started adding to the laundry. She’d started out with lavender, but he’d talked her out of that; who takes a lavender-scented cop seriously? Not that spring-fresh was much better.
Kenya sniffed him as he moved past her. “Better than swamp water,” she said, and he laughed. Just a little. It died as Kenya’s radio crackled and spat out their call number. She unhooked it and answered.
“It’s Dearborn,” the voice on the other end said. “Where you at?”
When Bud Dearborn got on the line personally, it was almost never good news. “Hospital, sir,” Kenya said. “Kevin’s getting stitched up.”
“He okay?”
“Yes, sir, he’s fine.”
“Good. Alcee Beck questioned your witness, and he’s got a name for your guy: Quentin Glick. He’s got a good long record of assaults, possessions, robberies, the usual stuff. I’ll send it to your e-mail along with his mug shots.”
“Yes, sir,” she repeated. There was a line grooving into her forehead between her slowly flattening eyebrows. “We’re on our way in.”
“No, you’re not,” he said. “I need you two to go up to that truck stop and talk with the detectives out there. Shreveport’s none too happy that we sent them our problem, and they want everything you know.”
Kenya opened her mouth, and Kevin knew she was about to protest, so he quickly grabbed the mike from her and said, “Yes, sir, on our way. Pryor out.”
Dearborn didn’t even bother to acknowledge. Yeah, he was pissed. Deserved to be, too.
Kevin pinned the mike back on Kenya’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”
The truck stop was still a busy crime scene, and the arrival of their cruiser and uniforms only added to the circus. The news crews focused on them briefly before deciding they weren’t as photogenic as the lumpy, bloody sheet under which the victim lay dead. Kevin and Kenya got looked over by the local detective and were ordered inside the truck stop Hardee’s to wait. It was three more long, boring hours, and dark had fallen, before someone walked in, ordered his own drink, and sat down across from the two of them.
He nodded and took out a notebook. The cup beside him steamed vapor into the air, but it had a funny smell that wasn’t coffee. That was when Kevin noticed that instead of the standard REG or DECAF boxes being checked on the side, someone had written in grease marker B+.
His gaze went back to the detective. Pale, thin, a coarse five-o’clock shadow. Long horsey face and big dark eyes under a mop of wavy black hair.
Not just pale after all. The detective was a vampire.
Kevin shot a look at his partner, but she’d already twigged to it, too; he saw it in the cautious, steady gaze she was leveling on the man.
“I’m Detective Wallace,” the man said. He had a faint accent, something East Coast, maybe. “You’re the ones who let him get away.”
Kevin kept his silence. So did Kenya. If Wallace felt at all disconcerted by that, or their stares, he didn’t show it, but then vampires weren’t long on empathy. Kevin had always gotten along with Bon Temps’s vampire celebrity, Bill Compton; he was a tolerant man by nature—live and let live. But there was something about Detective Wallace that raised the hackles on the back of his neck.
“What can you tell me about him?” Wallace asked. He tapped his pencil on the pad. It had chew marks. Kevin wondered if they were fang marks, technically.
“His name is Quentin Glick,” Kenya said. “He’s five eleven, about one fifty, greasy shoulder-length hair. He’s on something.”
“He’s on a lot of things,” Wallace said, “but in particular he’s on vampire blood. The drainers must have got their hands on something special, and we’re trying to track down everyone who bought it. This Glick’s the last, as far as we know.”
“We heard he tore somebody apart,” Kevin said. “That wasn’t literal, was it?”
Wallace shrugged, as if it weren’t any nevermin
d to him. “One arm, one leg. Kid died of blood loss and shock.”
The detective sounded disgusted by it, but Kevin had the feeling it wasn’t because of the loss of the boy’s life. More the waste of a good blood supply. “So this thing he’s on, it makes him stronger.” Kevin remembered the impact of what would have probably been a light shove from Glick that had sent him slamming into the refrigerator. He’d gotten off damn lucky.
“Faster, too,” Kenya said. “He ran like he was heading for the gold medal. Junkie usually has no stamina to speak of.”
That turned Kevin cold from the spine out, the idea that Kenya might have caught up with a man capable of ripping off limbs. He couldn’t help but imagine it, and a sick feeling welled up inside him that he didn’t want to properly identify.
“Do you know where he’s heading?” Kevin asked. The detective hadn’t taken any notes, and it looked to him as if the pencil and notebook were just props, there to make him look more normal. As the pencil’s untouched eraser tapped the paper, Kevin found himself focusing on the letters on the side: The Bat’s Wing. He’d never heard of it, but it sounded like the name of some vampire-themed bar, like Fangtasia in Shreveport.
“No idea,” Wallace said. He sounded bland and bored, and he took a deep gulp of his not-likely-to-be-coffee. “You ever met this Glick before?”
Kevin shook his head, but Kenya said, “Once. I booked him for aggravated assault years back. Just another drunk, back then. He had the two-beer answer.” Wallace gave her a questioning look. “Ask a drunk how much he’s had, he’ll always say two beers, even if he’s falling down. That was Glick. Mr. Two Beers.”
“He’s hit the big time now,” Wallace said. “What can you tell me about friends, associates, relatives?”
“Not too damn much. I looked into his files while we were waiting. He was pretty much a loner.”
“You discovered him in the house of a local in Bon Temps. What was he doing there?”
“Eating a cat,” Kevin said. “When he took the dead kid’s car, which way was he heading?”
“My information is he was headed south. Why?” Wallace asked. His eyes met Kevin’s, and there was something so darkly alien in them that it was hard not to break the stare. “Were you planning on going after him in hot pursuit?”
Yes, Kevin thought. “No, sir,” he said. “Just curious. Wanted to make sure he wasn’t going back to Bon Temps.”
“Doesn’t look like he is, so it’s none of your business from this point on,” Wallace said. “You can go. Thanks for the information.”
He snapped the notebook shut, chugged down the rest of his blood, and left them with the empty cup sitting on the table as he headed out.
A few seconds later came another detective, overweight, tired, and in a terrible mood. He didn’t bother to sit down, and he damn sure wasn’t a vampire. He barked rapid-fire questions at them about Glick, and after the first three, Kenya held up her hand. “We already answered all this,” she said. “Your Detective Wallace was in here first.”
That got her a weary, cold stare. “I don’t care who was in here or what you told him, you tell it again. Hell’s bells, you’re police, you understand how this works.”
They did. Kevin controlled his own frustration, but while he filled in his own answers, he was busy turning over things in his mind. I don’t care who was in here. That was a funny thing to say. The crime scene was busy, but not that busy.
When he started to ask a question, he got cut off by the Shreveport detective and told they could go. Again. Then the man was off, muttering under his breath.
Kenya let a few seconds go by before she said, “You get the feeling he and Wallace wanted us to turn around and go home?”
“I did.”
“You want to turn around and go home?”
“I don’t,” Kevin said. “I don’t even think Detective Wallace was police.”
Kenya looked blank for a second, but he knew her mind was racing. It was a pleasure to watch. “That’s why we just had to repeat everything,” she said. “So who was he?”
“I think he was sent here to find out what we knew—and if we knew something they thought we shouldn’t. Vampire business.”
She slowly nodded, turned her head, and looked out the window. No sign of Detective Wallace. He’d completely vanished from the scene. “Damn,” Kenya said softly. “I did not see that coming.”
“The Bat’s Wing,” Kevin said. “Have you ever heard of it? That was the name on the pencil he was using.”
“No.”
He pulled out his cell phone and Googled, and it was right there, top result. It was a vampire bar in Dallas. Close to Shreveport, by virtually no coincidence at all.
He put his phone back. “How do you feel about a road trip to Dallas?”
Kenya gave him a slow, deliberate smile. “Better get a couple of burgers for the road, and change clothes. I don’t expect we’re making this official.”
She’d switched their bags of civilian clothes, the ones they usually kept in the other (crashed) cruiser, into the new ride. That was what he liked best about Kenya, he thought.
Forward planning.
Kevin had been to Dallas before—he wasn’t some hillbilly—but it was a shock coming out of the relative peace of Bon Temps, or even Shreveport. You could see the glow on the horizon long before the city itself materialized, as if it were permanently on fire. Once the buildings began appearing, it was the neon-clad ones first. There was some new downtown hotel with a moving-screen exterior; it was showing random screensaver patterns of pulses and colors, and it was mesmerizing as he took the downtown exit.
“Turn right up here,” Kenya told him. If she was impressed by the lights and the traffic (which was considerable, though it was nearly midnight) she didn’t say so. “Well, this looks like Hipster Central.”
It did. The Bat’s Wing was in one of those derelict chic neighborhoods that ten years ago would have been crack houses and gang graffiti and today was devoted to herbal shops, stores that specialized in fancy hats, tea rooms, and—just up ahead—a tattoo parlor that no self-respecting biker would ever walk into. Kevin expected it got a brisk trade from sorority girls and soccer moms. Maybe stockbrokers.
The Bat’s Wing was two doors down from the tattoo place, which was probably ideal for them both. It had generous parking that was nevertheless completely full, so Kevin eased the cruiser into an illegal space, because cops never ticketed cruisers even if they were out of their own jurisdiction, and no business ever dared tow them.
The building itself was a windowless black-painted cube with a painting of a bat flight in red silhouettes that started small at one corner and exploded into huge wings at the upper diagonal. The neon sign just had a bat silhouette that flapped its wings. Kevin could hear the pump of music through the walls.
“Expensive crowd in there,” Kenya said, nodding toward the cars; she was right, the lot was full of shine and polish, and every single vehicle cost at least three times their annual salary, probably more. Still, he thought she’d fit right in. Kenya’s civilian clothes included a close-fitting pair of jeans that hugged her curves and a tight black shirt under a leather jacket. She looked hot and dangerous.
There were no clothes in the world that could make Kevin look buff and chiseled, but he’d done all right. As usual, all eyes would be on Kenya, and that was good. People tended to underestimate him, and it made it much easier to watch her back. He just blended into the woodwork in a place like this. He’d be lucky if people didn’t try to order drinks from him.
“Kevin.” Kenya’s tone was calm and level, but it had some weight to it, and he blinked and focused on her. “You sure you want to do this?”
“That asshole back at Hardee’s knew something,” he said. “I figure it’s something we ought to know if we plan to catch Glick before he does worse than he already did. I k
now it’s not our jurisdiction . . .”
“He rammed you with a truck,” she said calmly. “That makes it my jurisdiction. And you’re right. I don’t figure the Dallas police would put this at the top of their to-do list; they got plenty of bad stuff going on around here.”
“It’s weird. I can get past Glick killing a person. I just can’t get past him killing that cat.”
“You saw Marie’s house. That cat could have died of embarrassment.” She smiled, and looked ten years younger. He couldn’t help but grin back. “If the vampires are trying to cover something up, then we’re the only ones who know about it right now. Plus, we drove a long way for nothing if we don’t at least get a drink.”
He made a grand after-you gesture, and she straightened her jacket and headed on in.
It was probably wrong to admit, even to himself, that watching her back was purely a pleasure.
Kevin had been to the vampire bar Fangtasia before, but he hadn’t liked the place much, and it had made him feel worse about vampires, too. Fangtasia had seemed like a cross between a cheap B-movie set and a butcher shop. He’d had the uncomfortable feeling that everybody in it with a pulse was looked on as cuts of meat. He hadn’t stayed long, and he’d lied to his mother about where he’d been.
The Bat’s Wing made Fangtasia look both better and worse. It was bigger, louder, glossier, and packed with people, but it seemed . . . soulless, in ways even the smaller vampire bar hadn’t. If Fangtasia was a butcher shop, this place was a slaughterhouse, moving cows through with ruthless efficiency from farm to plate. Women dressed in skimpy, tight dresses tottered around on heels that ought to come with warning labels, and the men with them were either aging, balding, and wealthy, or gym-obsessed and cruising for a sugar momma.
And then there were the vampires.
They didn’t mingle as much as the Fangtasia regulars did; a few glided through the crowd untouched, icy and perfect, but most were sitting in what was obviously a special section, roped off from the general public and guarded by two linebacker-sized human guards with experience in looking tough. More vampires there than he’d expected, but then Dallas was a big city. It only made sense that their community was just as big.
Dead But Not Forgotten Page 2
