Underground Vampire

by David Lee

  “I’ve found your Human. He’s a policeman like the ones before” he replied, ignoring her request.

  “I don’t want a Human. Remember what happened to the last two,” she nodded at the pictures on the wall, “I want Ratman.”

  “I will do my best,” replied the bartender, “but understand he is …. unreliable.”

  “I know, just get the message to him, please.”

  She was refreshingly polite for a Vampire, he thought. Most of his interactions with the People of the Night had been decidedly less civil. He watched as she stood and walked toward the door leaving the beer untouched on the bar.

  “Want a game?” said the Indian as she passed by.

  “Stakes?”

  “Usually a beer,” said the Indian.

  “I’ll play you,” she whispered, “but I want more, much more.”

  Without a word he turned to the table arranging the disks, red on the left, blue on the right, “Lag for who goes first.”

  He slid a blue down with subtle english so that it curled at the three, holding a whisper over the line, “Your turn.”

  “Nice,” she said, as she delicately balanced a red disk in her hand. She stood in the middle of the table and ran the disk up and down, feeling the table, testing the friction, using her fingers to estimate the kinetic touch. The red slid the length, coming to rest next to his, slightly behind.

  “You have a soft touch for someone so large.”

  He went first, lagging a blue to the two, dead middle of the table. Arabella ineffectually left hers short. He parked one behind his first, tucking it in protected. Her second went further but still short on the left, and so it continued with the Indian building a triangle around his high score and her blocking the left side till her final turn came.

  “What are we playing for?” he asked, confident in his position.

  “Possession,” Arabella smiled, “what else is there?”

  She lined her last disc up in the middle and flicked her wrist so the disc shot down the table, the red popping the highest blue, starting a crazy chain reaction wreck till all his were in the gutters and her last stood alone.

  “One zip,” he said, “you win.”

  “I’ll be seeing you,” she said, walking to the door.

  “I’ll be here.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Standing across the street from West Precinct, Ortega hoped the Captain wasn’t around. Actually, he wished that the place was empty but that wasn’t going to be, so he needed a reason why he was digging around in old files. Nothing plausible came to mind so he fell back on the truth; he’d been familiarizing himself with the neighborhood, stopping in at the establishments and saw the pictures on the wall; he just wanted to know the history. Cops are nosy by nature, so hopefully he wouldn’t be questioned when his archive request went through.

  He headed in past the desk officer, nodding to the cops on duty and headed to his desk, hoping he still had a desk. Thankfully, the room was empty; most of the detectives worked days and were out in the field interviewing witnesses, following leads and otherwise performing excellent police work.

  His cubicle still had his name on it and when he booted the computer it accepted his login and password. Now came the tricky part: rummaging through archived files left a trail and management could review his access requests and question the search. He punched in the first name on his list, Patrolman James P. Malloy, bracketed the date range, and hit search. The other guy on the wall was also Malloy; the old Jew said they were brothers, maybe the search engine would pull them both up. He watched as the hands on the little clock spun around until a box that he’d never seen before popped up screaming RESTRICTED ACCESS. For further information he was directed to Special Matters.

  He’d never heard of Special Matters and was pretty sure he didn’t want them, whoever they were, asking him questions. Logging off search, he knew he’d stepped in it on his first day of lying low, flying under the radar and avoiding attention. Pulling up the internal SPD directory, he searched for Special Matters but drew a ‘nothing matches your query, try widening your search parameters.’ He went to the Index and scrolled through the departments looking for anything Special, but nothing looked remotely similar.

  He went back to archives and typed in the information again and hit enter; RESTRICTED ACCESS came up and he clicked on the referral to Special Matters. Nothing happened. As he stared at the screen pondering the total lack of information, the phone on his desk rang.

  Since he’d become the precinct pariah and they’d reassigned his active files, his phone had stopped ringing. He looked at it like it was an alien artifact and tried to ignore it, hoping that whoever it was would leave a message and go away. Finally, he picked up the receiver to stop the annoying ringing. “Detective Ortega?” questioned a voice he’d never heard, “This is Sergeant Malloy with Special Matters.” The voice was fatherly, the way you’d like a priest to sound.

  “Yes, this is Ortega,” he mumbled, while four alarm fire bells rang in his head and he fought the urge to slam the phone down and pretend like this wasn’t happening.

  “Let’s meet up,” the voice said, “I’d like to talk to you. You’re at your desk now so how about the Totem? We can get some chips and watch the boats,” Malloy said, like they were old buddies catching up on the families, “I like to watch the boats go through the locks.”

  “Sure,” replied Ortega, “that would be nice.”

  “Good, I’ll see you in an hour, I’ve got to stop and pick up a file,” Malloy replied, the most courteous man ever. “I’m looking forward to meeting you,” as he softly disconnected.

  If Ortega knew anything, it was that he didn’t want to meet Malloy. This Sergeant had the same name as the patrolmen on the bar wall so this wasn’t a coincidence; the computers must link the query to the Sergeant, which meant something. And he didn’t want to meet him at the Totem, an old fish and chips place next to the Ballard locks. And most important, he didn’t want anything to do with the Blue Anchor or the old Jew or the pictures on the wall. He just wanted to do his time in purgatory, get released and get on with his life.

  There was no way out of it, he thought, as he drove out Market Street then angled over on 54th to the locks. He’d just tell the Sergeant he was bored with nothing to do and had already forgotten their names.

  Malloy was standing there like a retiree come to feed the pigeons for something to do on a sunny Seattle day. He was a big old-country Irish, one of the beefy ones, white as a boiled potato with a ruddy wind burn to the edges of his face, topped by impossibly thick white hair parted on the left and combed the way the nun’s liked it straight across and off the forehead. In each hand he held a large bag of fries with cups of catsup and tartar sauce balanced on top, “I ordered for you, didn’t know what you liked so I got some of both,” poking his big red nose towards the condiments.

  Ortega took the closest bag, nodding and smiling, “Nice to meet you, there’s really no need for us meeting,” as Malloy led him to a bench where they could watch the boat traffic away from the other sightseers.

  “Oh but there is, there is,” said Malloy, ominous to Ortega’s ear but delivered with a warm, inviting smile.

  They sat and Malloy took a single chip, dunked it in the catsup and ate it like it was fine French food. “Not supposed to be eating fried food, if my wife knew I’d be in for it,” he said, as he set the bag down beside him and opened the file poking from under his arm. “Course, she’s been gone all these years so I guess I can get away with it, eh?”

  Malloy sat there, self-assured and solid; he managed to wear khaki pants and white shirt without looking like a rumpled old guy. A comfortable blue blazer with metal buttons was folded across his other arm and he wore a round-faced watch with a crisp leather band on his left wrist. The watch managed to look expensive without ostentation.

  “Jesus (Jesse) Ortega, let’s see now,” he said, burrowing into Ortega’s life, “a bit of trouble at the station, one
punch broke his nose.” He turned to Ortega sizing him up as a prizefighter, “Before your recent troubles you progressed quite nicely, passed all your exams, moving up the ladder, a credit to the department. Always wondered about naming a kid Jesus, seems blasphemous, but apparently the good Lord doesn’t give a damn so it’s alright by me.”

  Stunned that this stranger had his personnel file, not only had it but had been able to get it within an hour, not only had it and read it but obviously didn’t care that Ortega knew he had it, frightened him. “Hey, that’s my file,” Ortega blurted, “You’re not supposed to have that. How’d you get it?” officious as only the truly powerless can be.

  “I’m special,” Malloy said, “didn’t you see when you looked me up on line, right after you tried to access my brother’s file?”

  Completely cowed by Malloy’s offhand manner, Ortega could only stare at the sailboats transiting the locks, wishing he was on board one, sailing away, far away.

  “So tell me, Detective Ortega, why you were calling up a file that’s been forgotten by everyone, an ancient file?” Snack time finished, pleasantries concluded, time for the real meeting, time to get to business.

  “Oh, I don’t know, just got curious,” replied Jesse Ortega, and he was sure that his answer sounded as much like a deliberate evasion to Special Matters Sergeant Malloy as it did to him. While avoiding the issue, he tried to figure out how Malloy, sitting on the bench with him, could have a brother whose picture was hanging on the wall of the Blue Anchor from the turn of the last century. He couldn’t figure it out, so he stared across at the locks wondering if there were any salmon trying to climb the ladder so they could swim into Lake Union and die.

  Malloy let his answer float in the soft light reflecting off the blooming rhododendrons, all pink and soft, then casually popped Ortega’s balloon. “And what made you curious?” he asked, as gentle as a friend helping someone through a rough patch, “what exactly was it that made you decide to go to your desk and turn on your computer and search for this particular file, or were you just browsing through the history of the Department and coincidentally started with this file?”

  Malloy turned his attention to a huge sailboat motoring into the Sound, “Isn’t she a beauty?” like they were there to admire the scenery.

  “I saw the photos on the wall at the Blue Anchor and wondered about them,” said Ortega. He tried to do the math in his head again, but couldn’t calculate how this guy was the brother of the cop on the wall.

  “Ahh,” said Malloy blowing the word out like a barnacled ancient whale breaching after a deep cold dive, blowing it out like now it all made sense, like why didn’t you just say that in the beginning and save me all this inconvenience. “You’ve met Mr. Finkelstein, have you, and what did the two of you talk about?”

  Malloy was beginning to sound like the old country packed into the steerage of a leaky wooden sailing ship coming to America. Ortega could smell the peat and taste the whiskey. “What stories has Mr. Finkelstein been telling you, anything to share and something for me, eh? I like a good story and Finkelstein, he knows where the bodies are buried; his father before him and his father and his father, down the line, they buried them.” No longer your loving old uncle come to feed you chips on a pleasant afternoon; Special Matters Sergeant Malloy now seemed Grand Inquisitor Malloy come to pull your fingernails out in service of the truth.

  “Christ almighty,” thought Ortega “he knows Finkelstein, what the hell is going on?” “You mean the old Jew at the bar?” he replied, stalling for time, stalling while he tried to figure out if he was in more trouble, stalling while he tried to think of something innocuous to say.

  “Of course, who else? Him, his father or his father or the one before him have always been at the Blue Anchor. You didn’t know that?” One investigator to another, accusatory perhaps, but no he hadn’t known that when he went into the Blue Anchor. He’d been looking for a drink, not a history lesson.

  “The Malloy family goes way back with the Finkelstein family, baptisms, brisses, you know what that is right, it’s where the mohel cuts your foreskin off, hell I was at Finkelstein’s kid’s, bar mitzvahs, graduations all of it, we been to all theirs and they’ve been to ours, corned beef and cabbage, pastrami and rye.” Malloy went silent.

  Ortega fell into Malloy’s ice blue stare and started at the beginning, recounting the fight at the station house, the subsequent disciplinary hearing, his demotion and the rainy walk through nighttime Pioneer Square and his decision to drop into the Blue Anchor to have a drink while on duty. Now that the venial sins were out, the truth came easier and he picked up steam in his rush to confess. He told Malloy all about Finkelstein and his cryptic summons and his warning not to say anything out loud and how silly it all sounded now, sitting on this bench in the warm Seattle sun watching expensive sailboats transit the Locks while munching on chips sauced with tarter.

  “It’s starting again, he said that?” asked Malloy, leaning in close, “those exact words?” boring into whatever secrets Ortega had left, time to get to the root of the evil, time to root it out of the dark hidden part of the soul.

  “Something like that, he talks in circles and doesn’t really say what he’s thinking. Says I’m supposed to read the file and go back to the bar. Said he’d give me another drink and we’d talk about the next step.”

  “You, for the next step?” clearly, Malloy had doubts about Finkelstein’s choices.

  “You know this is not really a case and I’m dropping it,” said Ortega, sensing a way out, babbling on, “don’t know anything, don’t want to know anything, haven’t seen the file and I promise I won’t look for it. We can just drop this thing; no harm no foul, right? I mean all I want is to get back to my job and maybe a little excitement, what they have me doing looks pretty boring.”

  Malloy settled down into the bench and, letting out a deep breath, deflated like a punctured beach ball. “You need to watch the drinking, you hear? I made some calls and you’ve been known to take more than your share,” he said, “Can’t have that now.” Ortega had the demeaning thought that Malloy might assign him penance, maybe the Stations of the Cross after a good Act of Contrition. With that out of the way, Malloy raised his huge head from his chest, face relaxed to another place or time. Finally, he came back from wherever he went, “I envy you for what’s to come, you’re going to get excitement. Got a computer?”

  “Of course,” said Ortega, “usually I log on at the station.”

  “Don’t log in from the station,” ordered Malloy, “and don’t use your personal computer, don’t want anyone tracking your address.” Taking pen and pad from inside his jacket, he scribbled for a minute, tore off a page and thrust it into his hand, saying, “use this access name and password, not your name and SPD password, understand, and get a cheap second hand computer that you only use for this, nothing else, no email, no porn, no dating sites, no nothing.”

  He said “Yes, Sir.” Malloy had that effect on him. Ortega understood the words but he didn’t understand what was going on, and Malloy wasn’t doing any more explaining because Malloy stood up and said, “Listen to the rabbi, he’s not a real one but he’s yours now; listen to him and do what he says. He says you’re the one, then it’s you. I’ve got work to do now; don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on you, and help if I can. One more thing, about referring to my good friend Mr. Finkelstein as the Jew, it’s disrespectful, like calling me the Mick or you the Spic, understand? I’d consider it a personal favor to me if you could show him respect and I mean a lot of respect.”

  Ortega thought about it for a minute then, determined not to be stupid, said, “You’re right and I of all people should know better; I’ll apologize the next time I see him.”

  Malloy heaved himself up off the bench growling, “Don’t even think about bull crapping me, Ortega, and don’t think you can BS Mr. Finkelstein either. Just be polite and if you want to get out of this in one piece, do what Mr. Finkelstein tells you to do.” With
that he spun about with a nimbleness Ortega never would have guessed and ambled down the sidewalk smiling at the kids, leaving him alone with two bags of cold and greasy chips.

  Ortega sat on the bench and worried. He wondered what it was that everyone knew, he thought about Malloy and Finkelstein and wondered how they knew each other and what the connection was, but most of all he worried about the sense of doom that hung over him on the bench in Ballard, the only grey cloud in a beautiful blue sky.

  Eating both bags of chips filled the hole in his stomach while he called ads from the Stranger locating a cheap old anonymous computer. After picking it up from a student in the Wallingford district, he drove home to access secure archive files using a false name and password on an untraceable-to-him computer, which he was pretty sure violated most of the Seattle Police Department Rules and Regulations. On the way, he worried that Malloy was somehow setting him up for what he couldn’t even guess and the next call he’d get would be from Internal Affairs.

  CHAPTER 8

  At five o’clock escalators and elevators all over downtown freighted office workers down the towers and out the doors delivering the men and women to cars, buses, monorails, and limos for their ride home after a fulfilling day of legal briefs, sales reports, insurance binders and metrics measuring. Some went to the streets where they met with dates or friends, making plans to drink and eat in the bars and restaurants and clubs that pack the downtown area. Others focused on the ride home, hoping it would be smooth and quick.

  Thick crowds surged across sidewalks splotched with gum. Clustering at corners, the dense crowds pushed against those in the front until walk blinked permission to step off the curb and dash across the street to catch the bus or grasp a lover’s hand. Shapely secretaries in pencil skirts and curvy sweaters scurried to beat the light, stepping carefully in stiletto spikes over manholes and concrete cracks to get to bar stools and movie seats.