Death & the City Book Two

by Lisa Scullard

  “Wow,” I say, and I mean it.

  “It’s all very hush-hush,” she says, slurring just a little. “Sometimes I’m his paid go-between. If he needs information. I’m very good at getting men to talk. Especially in bed. And I can hold my drink too, which they can’t. And keep a secret. Of course, you don’t count. You’re a girl, and a stranger. I’ll probably never see you again, so it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s just beer talk between girls.”

  “I probably won’t even remember in a couple of hours,” I say, thinking it might be the case already.

  “Exactly. Because this is what we’re like, girls out drinking.” She zips up her cosmetics bag, and tucks it away in her patent quilted gilt-trim purse. “It’s important not to bottle things up when you’re out. You’re meant to let your hair down and hang loose and all that.”

  “Oh, I know the feeling,” I agree. I’ve never heard of a pimp referring to his slut girls as his Private Dick go-betweens before, but I guess it would work. Especially if the girls were gullible enough to believe it. So not only are they earning the pimp a living, they’re also bringing back information, by which he can blackmail the customers in future. Two birds with one stone - or throwing two stones with one bird, as is the case. The girls just think they’re seducing someone for information, like Cold War spies. Not realising they’re hookers, and their service has been paid for. They probably think any money they get from the pimp is their detective work expenses. Like, for travel, lube, and condoms.

  “There’s all sorts of people after us, because of what we know, and because of Justin,” she says. “I have to keep my eyes open all the time. Usually I suss them out pretty well. Some of them are on our side now, because I was smart, and confronted them.”

  “Too clever for them,” I nod. There’s a crash outside in the corridor. “Oops. What was that?”

  “Some drunk, I expect,” she says.

  I open the door to the toilets, and immediately get sprayed with blood.

  “Stop him bleeding,” Connor orders me. “We don’t want either of them dead.”

  Scarecrow is on the floor of the corridor, a hole through his upper arm. It looks like a brachial artery. Connor is kneeling on the floor over Van Helsing with his hand around his throat, also covered in blood, and as I look I see Connor shoving his darts wallet away quickly.

  “Oh my God, oh my God…”

  I realise Dorothy is just behind me, looking past me at the scene, from inside the toilets.

  “We want her too,” says Connor. “Shut her up for a bit.”

  My elbow takes care of that, and as she slides down the wall, I’m glad her lipgloss smear on my arm is lost in all the blood I’m now covered in.

  I crouch over Scarecrow, and lift his injured arm vertically up over my shoulder, pulling his belt out of his jeans with my other hand and looping it around the limb as a tourniquet, pressing into the wound with my fingers to stop the blood flow.

  “Are you always this messy?” I ask Connor, and spit out blood. “I’ve got blood in my eyes.”

  “Can’t hear you, I’ve got blood in my ears,” Connor says, sarkily. “I told you, I don’t do up close and personal. Not if I can help it.”

  “Oh, dear, what’s happened here?” Davy Crockett greets us, approaching from the beer garden. “A pub brawl?”

  “Looks like it,” says Connor. “Could you get the bar staff to ring an ambulance? And just keep the other customers away until they get here. It’s all right, we’re both First Aid trained.”

  While Davy Crockett ambles away, Connor gets his phone out with his free hand, wipes the blood off the screen and keypad as best he can on his jeans, before phoning head office.

  “All three secure, two bleeding, one unconscious,” he says. “Usual Emergency Services response needed. One biohazard victim, skin complaint. Will have to treat Lara as well if confirmed, he’s bleeding all over her at the moment. Might need checking over. No, I don’t think she has any broken skin or injuries.” He looks at me and I shake my head. “I’ll clean her up at my place, I’ve got stuff there I can give her. Yeah, it’s just kicking in now.” He picks up Van Helsing’s arm, and lets it drop. “Got muscular apathy in limbs. Some involuntary eyelid movement. Should be able to question him in an hour or so. Needs a few stitches in his neck first. Well, it was either that or aim for his face, you should see what he’s come dressed as. Firearm not yet secure, he dropped it, which is when it misfired and hit the other guy. I’ve kicked it under the pool table nearest the toilets. Special Unit will have to pick it up.”

  He disconnects the call, and puts his phone away.

  “Well, that was fun,” he remarks, mildly.

  I remember Adam Grayson giving me an anti-fungal tablet in the ambulance, after confirming that Wolf Boy’s mysterious lycanthropic skin condition is a nasty form of ringworm. Van Helsing and Dorothy were taken away by Special Unit in separate ambulances. Adam had the job of delivering the un-Wolfed Scarecrow - who turned out to be the Justin that Dorothy was talking about - to the University Hospital, for serious gunshot wound treatment, probably a lot of fungicidal cream, and possibly some light interrogation by police, who have collected my statement regarding the conversation about him in the toilets. I wonder how many more untreated skin complaints in Medieval times led to the invention of - and stories about - humans who changed into the undead, or other creatures, and whether the same conditions really are perpetuating the myth in modern times.

  A police uniform driver takes us back to Connor’s place, and all he has to say about it is that he wishes he had bigger plastic covers on the seats. Most of the blood is drying on now, and my clothes feel stiff and tacky, adhering to me unpleasantly in places. It reminds me of the incident where a customer was bottled in the neck, and I went home and sat on the sofa alone with a cup of tea for nearly two hours without moving afterwards, with the tea going cold, and my clothes plastered onto me with blood.

  Connor’s not going to let me do that this time, because he’s concerned that there’s still a chance of catching something from the blood of Scarecrow Wolf boy Justin. He takes me straight into the downstairs shower next to the study, fully clothed, and turns on the water.

  “Maybe I’ll sober up as well while I’m in here,” I say. He peels off his t-shirt and uses the back of it, which isn’t bloodstained, to start cleaning up my face and around my eyes. “I can do that, it’s okay.”

  “I can see better than you where the blood is. You just help by doing me.”

  The water pouring down isn’t shifting the dried blood on its own. I squeeze some shower gel onto my hands and rub it into his neck and around his ears, helping the smudges dissolve and sluicing them down his arms.

  “You need to wash your hair,” he says, matter-of-factly.

  “So do you.” I try to rub caked-on blood from his eyebrows and jaw line.

  “Take this off.” He tugs the front of my t-shirt. “Don’t be funny, come on. It’s covered. Arms up.”

  I raise my arms obediently and he strips it off, dropping it on the floor of the shower. He rubs blood off my arms and neck, then reaches for the shampoo.

  “Hold your hands out,” he says, and pours some into my hands for me to use before starting on his own. “Tell me if I miss any.”

  I watch as he rinses his hair, scrunching shampoo through my own, feeling it clogged in the lengths.

  “Nearly,” I tell him, as he rubs water out of his eyes. “Just the back of your ears, I think.”

  He turns around so that I can check, and I find a streak left behind one ear, which rinses away as I wipe it.

  “Need some help with yours?” he asks, turning back round. It’s more rhetorical that he’s asking, because he helps anyway, adding more shampoo to the ends of my hair, which came out worst.

  “Smells of limes,” I remark, looking at the shampoo bottle. “It’s not helping me sober up. I’m just thinking about tequila instead.”

  “Yeah, I did think you’d had en
ough,” he smiles, turning my shoulders gently so that my back is to him, and he can see the back of my head, which as he clicks his tongue sounds like it didn’t miss out on the gore. He coaxes the tangles out by threading my hair through his fingers slowly, easing out the blood clots along with the shampoo bubbles. “Hopefully we won’t have to do that again. I don’t like working in a confined space like that. Not in public either.”

  “It’s a bit Hollywood stereotype hit-man,” I agree.

  It goes quiet, as I get used to feeling his fingers comb through my hair, the only sound being the water drumming down onto us from the shower. I feel him squeeze the last of the shampoo out down the length of my hair, and his hands rub the backs of my arms briefly.

  “Thanks,” I say, turning back to face him. He’s very close, studying me. “Has it all gone?”

  “Think so,” he nods. His hands move up to my shoulders and he kisses me. I don’t think he intended it to be more than just one, but as we part and our eyes lock he moves in again. I feel a bit weakened and dizzy from alcohol, so as he goes further, an involuntary sound of protest escapes me, as I feel my back pushed up against the wall of the shower.

  “Okay.” Connor turns the water off, and pulls me away from the tiles into his arms, grabbing a towel and wrapping it around me. “Glad you didn’t just switch the water on to Cold, but I get the message.”

  “Didn’t know how to,” I say.

  “Wouldn’t be right anyway. We’ve both had a drink this time. Having sex drunk is really last Millennium.”

  I tend to agree, although without it, I wouldn’t have Junior. I feel my face burning red just hearing him say the S-word, and try to hide it behind the towel, drying my hot face and blushing ears. He switches off the light in the shower, and points me in the direction of the living-room.

  “Make yourself at home. I’ll go and find us both some medication we might need after tonight.”

  I wriggle out of my soaking denim skirt under the towel, leaving it next to our boots and jackets on the floor as he heads for the utility. The towel is big enough to wrap around myself like a blanket, and I manage to hit the TV remote buttons with my toe, while sitting on the giant circular sofa-bed. Weird old fantasy movie Legend is on, probably better enjoyed drunk, so I leave it on the same channel.

  Drunken curiosity getting the better of me, I kick Connor’s jacket to turn it over, reach down into the inside pocket and find his darts wallet, opening the flap to take a look just as he reappears in the living-room.

  “Please don’t tempt me to use those on you,” he warns, dropping the medical case onto the seat behind, and taking the wallet away. He sits down next to me, apparently unconcerned about his wet jeans on the furniture, and opens it. The dart in one slot is bloody. He slides out the clean one on the opposite side, and holds it out. “Don’t touch the point, whatever you do.”

  I take a good look. It seems fairly ordinary, until I notice that what I thought was a pattern on one side of the barrel is a liquid level indicator. I check the tip, and see it is in fact hollow, as I immediately suspected.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Beauty treatment. Nice old ladies use it to get rid of frown lines,” he says, cryptically. “Mixed with a few things that reduce social inhibitions.”

  “I’m a door supervisor, not a spa party drug dealer,” I remind him. “In plain English, please.”

  “Neurotoxin copied from botulism strain, not dissimilar to Botox. Induces temporary muscle paralysis. Combined with even more temporary truth drugs,” says Connor. “Means you get to interrogate someone, while they can’t do anything silly like run away or hurt themselves.”

  “How did it not paralyse the dartboard?”

  “You have to unlock the delivery spring by twisting the rings on the barrel,” he says, and takes it back off me, putting it away. “Means it can’t be used by accident. Or in the middle of the night, running away from me.”

  “I wasn’t just thinking that.”

  “You so were.” He puts the wallet in the medical case and flips through the other contents. “I’ve got a few more fungicidal treatments in here. Topical ones. Arms, face and neck you should probably treat.”

  He gives me a tube in medical packaging.

  “Should probably take some vitamins to counteract all the alcohol and pep up your immune system too,” he says, getting back up, picking up the darts wallet out of the medic’s case again. “I’ll get some orange juice.”

  He goes back to the kitchen. I open the tube after attempting to read the tiny writing on the side, and smell it. There isn’t a smell, which at least is inoffensive enough, so I squeeze some out experimentally, and rub it on the backs of my hands. Thinking, hmmmm, darts. That’s different. Proves he’s more used to dealing with animals, at any rate.

  I’m still thinking about animals, while Tim Curry’s underworld demon creeps out the 1980’s on the TV. Connor returns with two glasses of orange juice, and a packet of soluble high-strength vitamin tablets, looking anything but demon-like himself in comparison.

  “Are they going to test that guy for rabies?” I ask. “Because I don’t think this will help if he’s got that too.”

  “Yeah, he’ll get tested. And the others. I’ve got pretty much everything you’d need for that if it’s positive. Come into contact with a lot of it in Pest Control jobs. Not to mention all the other little nasties they carry.” He puts the glasses down and pops a vitamin into each one, which start fizzing. “That’s going to take you all night. Give it here.”

  I relinquish control of the medicated cream, and let him rub it into my arms.

  “You’ll probably need to use it as well,” I remark. “Seeing as you’ve touched me.”

  “Not as much as I’d like to,” he points out.

  I go quiet again, not knowing what the right answer is to that. He works his way up to my shoulders and around the nape of my neck. It feels nice, and takes my mind off the need to say anything, or to find anything to say.

  Something occurs to me, eventually, out of the relief of any pressure to think about it.

  “Anything you would have changed about our fake date if you could?” I ask him, not knowing if he considered it a good job or a bad one. In my experience of working alone, they’re all the same. If I get out alive, at least that’s a positive outcome.

  “Yeah,” he says. “The ending.”

  He moves around to outline the contours of my face with the medication, massaging it in with his thumb and fingertips.

  “I think you’ll need some eye drops,” he ponders. “I can see blood in your tear ducts. You should probably throw those contacts away too.”

  “I’ve got spare at home,” I confirm.

  “Take them out now, then. Sooner the better.” He puts the cream back in the kit, and takes an eye pack out, selecting a bottle and checking the label, as I pinch out my contact lenses. “Just stick them on the table next to you.”

  I know it’s there, through the blur, so I just aim and drop.

  “I think that was in my orange juice, but nice try,” he chuckles. “Head back.”

  I tilt my chin up and he puts the drops in, which sting.

  “Yeah, they’re strong ones,” he remarks, as I flinch. “Will stop any infection dead, though.”

  “Thanks,” I say, blinking. “Sorry about that.”

  “No, it’s all right - they’re on the floor,” he reports, leaning across me and picking up the two glasses, handing me one. “Got it?”

  “Yeah.” I feel the cold of the glass in my hands. “I meant about the ending.”

  “It’s not over yet,” he remarks. “I’ve still got to get my jeans off and into the wash, and your underwear has got blood on too, so it’s all coming off this time.”

  I drain about half of my orange juice.

  “I better go back in the bathroom, then,” I say, and he steadies me as I get up. “It’s okay, I can find it.”

  “Sure?”

  I nod,
and finish my drink before handing him the glass, then retrace my steps carefully back to the downstairs shower room, closing the door behind me.

  Even without my contacts in, I can see the blood went straight through my t-shirt to my skin. Even the towel I was wrapped in has re-absorbed some of it, from where my underwear got soaked in the shower. I don’t feel clean. After a few minutes wondering what to do, I decide I’ll have to shower again to wash the rest off, trying to keep the medicated parts of me still medicated.

  I find another towel in the storage cupboard, put the stained one on top of my underwear and our tshirts which are still on the floor, and turn the water back on. It takes less than a minute, but when I switch it back off I hear Connor outside the door.

  “Are you all right?” he asks, knocking.

  “Yeah, just found a bit more blood to wash off.”

  “Maybe you’d better let me take a look.”

  I look down and briefly consider it, but I’m too shy.

  “I think I got it all,” I say instead, wrapping the clean towel around me, picking up the bloody things and opening the door. He’s now wearing tracksuit bottoms, and is carrying my skirt and his jeans. He reaches out for the other stuff destined for laundry.