The Blood Detail (Vigil)

by Arvin Loudermilk

  I dug right in. So did Mac. The name conversation was dropped, and I attempted to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. This wasn’t the strangest way a man had ever tried to tell me he was attracted to me. The truth was, most men were too afraid of me to even broach the subject. Mac may not have been thinking things through, but he did have some balls on him, which I counted as one of his better qualities. I also liked that his light blue eyes glistened every time he looked at me, and that his smile seemed so genuine. The guy was just incredibly fucking handsome, but I was not about to say that out loud.

  We finished our meals, doing next to no talking in the process. I think both our minds were elsewhere. He paid the bill and asked me what I wanted to do next. I suggested we go back to my place and make it look like someone was getting lucky. He didn’t argue. While we were in his car, I looked around for a radio so I could call in for an update. He said there wasn’t one. Updates would have to wait until we were safely inside the house.

  We pulled in front of my condo. He got out, opened my door, and held my hand as we strolled up the walkway.

  “You do realize,” I said. “There is absolutely no chance that I’m going to fuck you. I’m only taking this act so far.”

  “And I wouldn’t want you to. Not yet. Not with all those cameras in your place.” He leaned in super close to me, pressing his waist against mine. “But I don’t want this to be the only time we go out.” After a long and mutual gaze, he kissed me, his fingers grazing the small of my back and sliding downward until he had completely cupped my ass. You can say what you will about my professionalism, but the guy had my head spinning. It had been months, and apparently, I was more hard up than I realized.

  “I need you to unlock the door,” he whispered. “We only have to give him so much of a show. That is, unless you like putting on a show?”

  I dug out my house key from my purse and slipped it into the upper lock. I went through the doorway first, his hand still grasping at my hip. It must have been the whole ‘on the job’ thing. Because right there and then, I’d never wanted a man more in my life.

  On Patrol

  We had dinner again the next night, and went to see a movie the night after that. Each of the operations went smoothly, with no trouble, no sex, and absolutely no sign of Jessup.

  Getting me back into a squad car, phase three of our ever-evolving plan, was moved up with little fanfare to night eight. Beth Ganna would continue to play my partner, outfitting herself into an actual uniform for the first time in years. Personally, I was feeling loads better. My bad wrist was actually usable again. A twinge of pain remained, but it was nothing I couldn’t manage.

  When I arrived at the building early that afternoon, my old squad car appeared to be waiting for me in a front parking spot. I wandered over to check the clunker out. Upon closer inspection, I figured out that it wasn’t the same vehicle. The license plate matched, but there were no dents on the driver’s side door or chips in the front windshield. It couldn’t be the one Angie and I normally used, not with how slow Maintenance was about fixing things. A squad car was still a squad car, however—and it would certainly fool the general public.

  We endured a full rundown of the evening’s planned events in the conference room, and then Beth and I left the building in our stand-in black and white and headed north toward my old beat. We were to remain on major thoroughfares until told differently. Three follow cars would have us in their sights at all times. These assigned teams were good at remaining invisible, too. I never saw a single trace of their presence the entire night.

  Before we left, I brought up the possibility of running into unrelated trouble. We were going to be in a police vehicle after all—and people in need tended to approach patrolmen when they encountered them on the streets. No one believed that such a chance existed, since we were only taking staged calls. Yet a half hour into our patrolling, an elderly woman flagged us down outside of her squat little home. I rolled my window down and greeted her. The woman approached the vehicle and told me she smelled gas and wanted one of us to go inside the home to see if we could smell it too. I couldn’t do it myself because I was still officially suspended, according to Castellano’s latest proclamation—although I did have special dispensation to be assisting the Detail. Assisting the public was another matter altogether. I suggested Beth go in and do it as rapidly as possible, but she did not feel good about leaving me alone, so she radioed for assistance. As we waited for said assistance to arrive, the old woman grew more and more impatient. Her pets were inside and she needed our help—wasn’t that what police people were supposed to do? Unable to leave the vehicle, I felt helpless, primarily because the woman was not wrong in her assessment. Three minutes after the call went in, Mac and Racine pulled up behind our squad car, and waved us onward. We wished the lady luck and pulled back into traffic. The woman gave no acknowledgment. She was too wrapped up in the explanation of her plight to her handsome new savior.

  “You see. I told them we would run into some kind of trouble,” I said. “But did they listen to me?”

  Beth slid into the left turn lane at the intersection. The light was going from yellow to red as she said, “The bigwigs assume the world operates only in the manner they wish it to. They do not care about such things as reality. Life is only about what they want or need. And let’s not forget, it’s been a long time since any of them have been out on patrol. The chances of a decent sense of recall from that group of lightweights is way, way out of the realm of possibility.”

  I grinned. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

  The light shifted to green and Beth turned southbound.

  “Mac sure was looking good today,” she said.

  “Was he? I didn’t really notice. I could only see him out of the corner of my eye.”

  “I hate to pry, but what’s going on with the two of you? You’ve thrown the whole office into a tizzy. Our usually tough-minded co-workers have transformed into these gossiping little teenagers.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know it had become such a big thing. “He’s a good looking guy, I guess. And he’s made it clear he’s got feelings for me. I’m just not sure if it’s mutual. I’m not one of those sickening kind of girls whose life revolves around finding a husband. The idea of that bores me. I just want to do the job.”

  I could tell that Beth was as caught up in the soap opera of it all as much as anyone else. When she talked about Mac and me, her eyes went all dreamy.

  “I always thought Mac looked like that movie star. I can’t think of the guy’s name he reminds me of.” She patted the wheel and twisted in her seat as she tried to force herself to recall.

  “Greg Tonell,” I said. “We saw one of his movies last night. It was incredibly stupid. But Mac likes the guy, probably because he resembles him so much.”

  Beth’s head bounced up and down. “That’s it…yeah. That’s who I was thinking of. He looks almost exactly like Greg Tonell.”

  He did, particularly if you squinted. But I could have cared less.

  “You’re gorgeous like that, too,” she said, unprompted. “Not that you look like someone. But you do have that movie star quality about you. People just don’t look like you in real life. You glow. Guys must be chasing after you all the time.”

  I stared out my window. “Yeah, all the time.”

  Mercifully, the conversation drifted away from my incandescent attractiveness and we returned to the patrol patterns we had sketched out back at the bullpen—around and around ten square blocks, making ourselves as visible as was humanly possible. Our first staged emergency call was at a strip mall where we had to go to the back room of a grocery store to arrest a ‘shoplifter’. While we were there we shared some coffee with two of the guys from the Detail. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, we put one of the guys, the one who was playing the shoplifter, into cuffs and frog-marched him out to the car which was parked out in front of the busy storefront. A couple of streets
down, we handed him off to two more of our team in front of the station—my old station. I had to be careful not to be seen, so the exchange was done in a side parking lot. It was completely against procedure—but unless Jessup was a cop in a former life—he’d never be able to tell the difference.

  Our next handful of calls were staged domestics, loaded up with people from the Detail I had yet to meet. All four ‘incidents’ went down as expected, and then Beth and I went back to patrolling. This time out, we were given free rein to swing through as many dark and unsavory neighborhoods as we could before the sun came up. The hope was to draw some kind of visual on Jessup. Once we got back to the bullpen, we found out that we had done just that. The suspect had been spotted three times, observing from assorted rooftops, and up high on an overhanging tree branch.

  Our patience had paid off, which set up the next night perfectly.

  The Old Stomping Grounds

  It may not have ended that way, but as of sunset, April the fifteenth felt like the previous night all over again. Such was the monotonous truth of modern, street-level police work.

  Beth and I left the bullpen following another extended briefing, and restarted our patrol. We put some workman-like effort into varying our path through our tiny quadrant of Los Angeles, yet in general terms, we went how we went before. We did not get stopped by any citizens, and we did not take any faked calls. There was only one task for the evening, and if all went well, this would we be the last night of carnal carousing for one Danny Ray Jessup.

  The Detail’s choice for an ensnarement site had my full support. In fact, I was the one who had first suggested it. The Las Rosas townhouse complex made for an ideal location, for no other reason than Jessup might feel safe there. He’d gotten away with killing someone in that particular venue before—and putting ourselves into his mind—he could probably get away with it again. It was all guesswork, but it made a lot of sense. I also liked the idea of getting another shot at him in the complex where I missed snapping the cuffs on the last time out.

  At six minutes after eleven, we received a call on the radio. I didn’t recognize the voice, but we were told to mount up and head to Las Rosas. The operation was already in progress.

  The Detail had emptied the complex out over the course of the day and taken over the site in its entirety. I don’t know how they convinced the occupants to leave without a fuss, but they’d been pulling off similar feats over the course of the week I’d been working for them. Clearing a whole townhouse complex was just the restaurant and the grocery store on a greater scale.

  The plan as written called for seventy-five Detail members in the housing units themselves—all with a second story, bird’s-eye view of the door Beth and I were about to knock on. Mac would be positioned somewhere among the masses, so would Racine—and even Castellano was deigning to show his face. Snipers would be on the surrounding buildings, ten of them at last count. A helicopter was also at the ready, as well as a fleet of twenty-four vehicles to block every way in or out. We were as safe as you can be in an urban environment, and I genuinely thought we were ready.

  We pulled into the front entrance and I pointed out the spot Angie and I had parked in a week before. Beth thought we should take that one for no other reason than we could. We climbed out of the vehicle and snapped on our caps.

  “It was raining before,” I said as we walked the pathway between buildings.

  “Well, that’s one thing even Castellano couldn’t recreate.”

  Beth had her hand on her weapon. We were both armed with tranquilizer handguns, and mine was shifting strangely on my hip—a bad fit in the holster. The tranqs were all we were supposed to be carrying, but Beth advocated that we both wear .22s on our ankles to be safe. The mini-gun down there gave me more comfort than I cared to admit. Firearms were a calming adornment for me, and they always would be.

  As we entered the courtyard, lights were on in several of the upstairs windows. We cut through the damp grass, on a swift approach to unit 1032. For a brief second, I wondered which house Mac was in, but then cleared my head of such brain dead stupidity. Beth and I strolled up shoulder to shoulder and knocked on the double door twice, just as we were instructed. The porch light to my right made the entryway as bright as day, and blinded my peripheral vision. Loud music was playing inside the house, some sort of bouncy pop song which sounded like I must have heard it before, but probably never had. We stood there a full minute without an answer. This was also planned. But when the lag dragged on a minute beyond that, Beth and I looked at one another. I heard a female scream soar above the music and my back went up. I went to pull out my gun, but Beth stopped me, placing her hand on my bent forearm.

  “Wait,” she said.

  I gritted my teeth. “Jeez, what the fuck are they trying to prove in there? We’re on a goddamned timetable, aren’t we?”

  “We are.”

  Beth seemed as confused as I was, but that wasn’t going to make the door open. And the music was only getting louder. She snagged hold of the portable radio on her belt and began to ask questions in a perturbed and angry voice.

  I turned to get a better look at what was going on behind us, taking a step away from the glare of the porch light. The pool in the courtyard of the complex was to my direct south, and it was glowing blue. All of a sudden, one of the upstairs lights on the frontmost building went out. In succession, all the others blinked out as well, one by one. Lodged in a now deeper darkness, the pool glowed bluer. Then, Beth stopped talking in mid-sentence and the porch light went dead. So did the music.

  I spun around, but Beth was no longer there.

  I raced back to the door and wetness fell down on top of me. At first I thought it was raining again, but what was coming down was too thick to be precipitation. I craned upward and saw a darkened figure on the roof holding a smaller figure by the neck. It was Jessup—and he was cackling.

  I pulled out my tranq gun and shot him in the leg. It startled him and he dropped what he’d been holding. Beth plummeted downward into the rose bushes, compressing their size in half. Her arms dangled amidst the branches, but she wasn’t moving. I continued backing up, hoping my first shot had had some kind of effect on Jessup. He held tight on the roof, his coat flapping in the breeze.

  I called for help, my eyes searching for any kind of cover.

  Jessup leapt, plowing down on top of me feet first. I crumpled into the grass and lost hold of my weapon. I remained flat out, gasping for breath and unable to think. He began to parade around me, watching my every move tantalizingly. After a while, I attempted to crawl away, in hopes of reaching my .22. But whenever I could create any distance between the two of us, Jessup would grab whatever appendage of mine was closest and drag me back to the spot where he had knocked me down. This went on for several minutes. I screamed and screamed, yet no one came out to help me. My predicament became crystal clear. If I was to survive, it was going to be on my own.

  “Do you want me?” I said, my attempt at speech was strained and garbled. “You can have me if you want. Just come closer. I want you, too.”

  “Not stupid,” he said in his creepy drawl. “You’ll get me if I get too close.”

  He was right about that, but I planned to get him either way. The .22 was my secret, my lifeline. He just needed to be within a foot or so, and I could put one right into his head.

  “Tying ya up would do no good,” he said. “Going to need to break you.”

  I had no idea what that even meant, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I reached down for my ankle, but he was reaching for it at the same time—and he was a lot quicker than I was. In a single twist of his wrist, he flipped me over and brought his fist down on the base of my spine. The blow was hard and solid, and I felt nothing below the waist afterward. Maybe I yelled out in pain, maybe I didn’t. But how could I have not? Breathing heavily, he lifted me up by the scruff of my neck and struck me in the back again, this time dead center between the shoulder blades. I could no longer fee
l my arms or my neck. When he set my paralyzed body back down in the grass, he did so gently. I don’t know how I stayed conscious, but I did.

  He left me where I was and returned to the rose bushes where Beth’s body had fallen. He began gathering up flowers, and did not stop until his arms were full. I watched him, and all I could think about was the prospect of him eating me. I knew that was what he was going to do. I’d have done anything for that gun around my ankle. If I could still move, I’d have put it right into my mouth and just pulled the trigger.

  He returned with his arm full of flowers and let them fall around me. He appeared to be unhappy with the inadvertent arrangement, so he spread them out more carefully, making sure most of the bunch were surrounding my head in a halo pattern.

  “Mine,” he said. “You’re mine.”

  I did belong to him—he was right. Vampires were real, and I was seconds away from being devoured. I’d never been a crier by nature, not in the slightest, but I was sure I’d been doing exactly that since I had been knocked down. My cheeks felt wet and my eyes were burning.

  Jessup squatted down above me and nudged my arms away from my body with his knees. Straddling my torso, he started to dig around in the pockets of his overcoat until he had found what he had been searching for—a hunting knife, about six inches in length. I thought the exposed blade was for me, but he slipped off his duster and used it on himself, cutting a foot-long gash from his wrist to the crook of his forearm. Blood began to gush outward. He tilted my head back and forced open my mouth. I tried to bite down on him, but his grip was unbelievably powerful. Whispering sweet nothings into my ear, he maneuvered his opened arm over my face and allowed the blood to drain into me. I choked as the hot liquid drizzled down my gullet. Once my mouth had been filled, he jammed my jaw closed and leaned in and kissed my reddened lips. I was just about to black out when I swallowed. I didn’t want to, but I did. He grunted his pleasure at my ingestion and snaked both hands around my neck and squeezed, crushing my airway as if I were nothing.