by M. Z. Kelly
BROOKLYN BLOOD
MZ KELLY
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
FORTY-EIGHT
FORTY-NINE
FIFTY
FIFTY-ONE
FIFTY-TWO
FIFTY-THREE
FIFTY-FOUR
FIFTY-FIVE
FIFTY-SIX
FIFTY-SEVEN
FIFTY-EIGHT
FIFTY-NINE
SIXTY
SIXTY-ONE
SIXTY-TWO
SIXTY-THREE
SIXTY-FOUR
SIXTY-FIVE
SIXTY-SIX
SIXTY-SEVEN
SIXTY-EIGHT
COMING SOON
CONTESTS
STREET TEAM
THANKS FOR READING...
More by This Author
ONE
“Madison, wake up,” Max said, poking her head in my bedroom. “I just heard something that sounded like a scream coming from the cemetery.”
I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes and trying to focus. “What...? What time is it?”
“A little before three.”
I groaned and fell back against my pillow, knowing that we had to be at work in a few hours. “Did you tell Amy?”
Max shook her head. “I didn’t wanna bother her. You know how she is when she doesn’t get her beauty sleep.”
Amy was our roommate and my best friend; a Jersey Girl, with a tendency to revert to her roots if she didn’t get her sleep. Those roots involved a lot of attitude, not to mention some fits of screaming and occasional acts of physical violence. I loved her like a sister, but she sometimes put the capital D in Drama.
“Give me a second to pee and get dressed,” I said, swinging my legs out of bed.
Let me give you some background, and explain why I live in a cemetery with Max and Amy. My name is Madison Knox. I’ve been an NYPD cop for seven years, two of those as a detective third grade. I’m twenty-eight, have bottle blonde hair and hazel eyes. My natural hair color is brown, but there’s nothing natural about my life, including where I live. Amy once said she thought my father (who I never met) might be related to Beelzebub, since there seems to be a satanic theme running through my life. More about that later.
Max is Maxine Carter, my partner on the police force. She’s pushing thirty, heavyset, African-American, and someone who isn’t afraid to state her opinion, whether you want it or not. We’d only become friends a few weeks earlier, when we were both assigned to a specialized police unit called Precinct Blue. More about that later, too.
My friends and I live at Funk’s Forever Fields on the outskirts of Brooklyn. It’s a sprawling ancient graveyard, with a memorial chapel and a series of underground rooms that service the place. Our cozy quarters are the former caretaker’s residence beneath the archaic crumbling graveyard. We live here because we’re always one paycheck short of a homeless shelter and the rent’s cheap. My friends and I do part-time security work for the place. Our duties usually involve trying to keep family members from shooting one another during funeral services, and keeping an eye on a guy named Thorndike, who’s the mortician for the place.
After throwing on some clothes, I met Max in our underground living room. It was surprisingly spacious, given the fact that we live like a bunch of moles with a freezer full of dead bodies on one wall. The bodies are unclaimed, awaiting burial when spring comes and the fields above our cozy quarters eventually thaw out. Some people might find it a little disconcerting living with the dead, but we’d grown used to it, along with the added benefit of our roommates never talking back.
As soon as I made it to the living room, there was another muffled scream from somewhere above us. Amy stumbled out of her bedroom, her red hair looking like she could be the maid of honor at the bride of Frankenstein’s wedding.
“What the fuwk was that?” she demanded.
My friend had a way of saying the f-word like it had a w in the middle and several syllables, something she’d acquired on the streets of Jersey.
“Don’t exactly know,” Max said. “Me and Madison were just about to investigate.”
Amy pushed the hair out of her eyes and dropped another f-bomb. “Let me get my coat, and I’ll go with ya.”
Amy Ross and I had gone to elementary school together before she and her parents had moved to New Jersey. Despite the move, we had remained friends and even did a stint in community college together before dropping out so that we could prove to the world that we had degrees in lunacy.
My degree involved marrying a guy name Vinny Wozniak, who had a PhD in stalking. Dr. Vinny began his studies when we were both in the third grade. Our marriage lasted about a year, until he proved he was an equal opportunity stalker and moved on to other victims.
Amy’s marriage had lasted a few years longer, before her ex proved that he and Vinny took the same classes. My friend was now officially on the rebound, hoping to hook up with a plumber she’d been seeing named Jake.
As it turned out, Jake was a hopeless romantic, telling Amy that he had developed feelings for her, but they needed to give it some time before becoming involved. He wanted to meet her in six months at the top of the Empire State Building, similar to what happened in that old Cary Grant movie, An Affair to Remember. If they both showed up, Jake had told Amy it would be a sign that they were meant to be together.
Amy, being less romantic and far less patient, had responded to what she called Jake’s idiotic idea by saying, “Aw, fuwk,” more times than I could count.
Amy came out of her bedroom a couple minutes later, wearing enough layers of clothing to lead an expedition to the north pole.
“What?” she said, when she saw Max and me eyeballing the mounds of clothes.
“Somebody might mistake you for the Michelin Man,” Max said.
“I don’t wanna freeze my freaking balls off,” Amy said, “even though I don’t officially got any, last time I checked down there.”
My friend was a kick-butt private investigator, owning a business called Gir
l Gotcha. If a girl could have balls, Amy was packing a giant pair. It was her way of making up for the fact that she didn’t pack a weapon.
“Let’s go,” I said, after Max and I both got our guns out of the closet. “And let’s be careful. There’s no telling what’s going on up there.”
“Up there” was a no-man’s land between a couple bad neighborhoods. Funk’s Fields bordered the neighborhood of Greenwood Heights, a densely-populated area of multifamily units and brick row houses that was being infiltrated in recent years by upscale condo projects.
The Heights was a prime example of the American melting pot, with a whole lot of lumps in the stew, consisting of just about every ethnic group imaginable. The cemetery was a sometimes shooting gallery involving drug rip-offs and territorial disputes.
The three of us wound our way through the labyrinth of corridors that made up the Habitrail leading from our living quarters. There were dozens of underground rooms beneath the cemetery, including a refrigerated morgue, an embalming room, a funeral prep station, several supply rooms, and dozens of rooms that we hadn’t explored, since we’d only moved in a couple weeks earlier.
We finally made our way up to the large wooden door that led into Balfour Chapel. According to Thorndike (no first name), the memorial cathedral where funeral services were held was built in the late 1800s and modelled after a Gothic building in Europe. The place could accommodate a couple hundred mourners, with a soaring ceiling, ornate carvings, and images of what looked like gargoyles at each corner of the structure. Amy probably put it best when she described the place as looking like a “fuwking house of horrors”.
We finally made our way through a side entrance and onto the cemetery grounds, where the air temperature smacked us like an ice-bucket challenge. I knew from last night’s news reports that the temperature was in the low teens.
“Shit,” Max said, wrapping her coat tighter. “I’m probably gonna end up with frostbite and lose my nose.”
“That’ll teach you to make fun of the Michelin Woman,” Amy countered, wrapping her arms around herself for warmth. “Some of us got coats and brains.”
“Any idea where the screaming was coming from?” I asked, scanning the frozen grounds, a landscape of hundreds of headstones that seemed to go on forever.
“There’s no way of knowing,” Amy said. “We got us more dead bodies here than a Saturday night in Trenton.”
We forged ahead for a couple minutes before stopping about a hundred yards from the cathedral, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. I turned to Max and said, “Maybe we should separate, go in different directions. We can call if we see something.”
“Damn, I forgot my phone,” Amy said. “Aw, fuwk it. If I get in trouble, I’ll just scream bloody murder.”
She began moving off on her own, but turned back to us and yelled, “Awwwuck! In case you’re wondering, that was my bloody murder scream.”
I looked at Max as Amy headed off again and said, “Call me right away if you see anything.”
Max and I moved in opposite directions, while Amy had already disappeared behind a mound of snow piled up against a large headstone. The night was clear and moonless, the stars shining overhead like icy diamonds.
In the distance, I saw the Gothic arch that marked the entrance to Funk’s Fields. It consisted of a series of spires with guard stations on either side that, I was told, hadn’t been occupied in years. The soaring structure gave the place a foreboding, ethereal look, like something out of a Wes Craven movie.
After spending about ten minutes wandering down a hill, and slipping on an icy patch of ground, I got Max on the phone. “I just fell on my ass. I say we give it up.”
“Agreed,” Max said. “It’s so cold out here, I’m afraid my blood might freeze and turn me into a zombie.”
“See you back...” My words were cut off by a scream. It was so loud and desperate that it reminded me of a woman I’d once seen, from a distance, being butchered by a mad man who was too far away to stop.
The scream was coming from Amy.
TWO
I ran in the direction of the scream. At least I thought it was where the screaming was coming from. The blood-curdling cry seemed to echo around the empty graveyard, bouncing off the massive old headstones. I had no doubt it was Amy screaming, but it was nothing like her previous pretend shriek. This was the desperate, terrified sound of someone in extreme distress.
After a couple minutes, I got disoriented and felt like I was running in circles. I finally found Max near one of the larger headstones.
“Did you see anybody?” I asked.
Max shook her head, her dark eyes still scanning the grounds. “No, but I’m pretty sure it was Amy.”
“What are we going to do?” My voice was frantic, a dozen horrifying images coming to mind about what might have happened to our roommate.
“I’m calling the local precinct. We need help.”
Max had her phone out when we saw an image in the distance. It was a woman, coming around one of the headstones toward us. When she drew closer, I realized she was covered in blood.
Then I realized something else: it was Amy!
THREE
“What the hell happened?” I asked, after Amy got over to Max and me. The front of her white jacket was covered with blood.
“There’s a...an angel...” She took a ragged breath, looking over her shoulder in the direction she’d come from. “...she’s flying.”
Max’s heavy features drew together. “What you talking about? You need to get a grip.”
“She’s in the air,” Amy said, still trying to catch her breath, and waving for us to follow. “We need to help her.”
We followed her past a large monument and down an icy path.
“She’s over here,” Amy said, suddenly slipping and falling. Max and I went over to help. When we got her on her feet, we both looked in the direction she’d indicated. We released a collective gasp when we saw the horrifying image. It actually did look like an angel, floating in the air a few yards ahead of us.
“What the hell?” Max said.
“She’s bleeding,” Amy called out. “We need to help her.”
We managed to find our way forward and stood in front of the young black woman. I told Amy what was now apparent. “She’s dead, probably from bleeding out.”
The woman had somehow been trussed up on a makeshift platform over a grave marker. Her flowing white gown was covered with blood that was dripping onto the frozen ground.
“She’s got wings,” Max said, making her way to the side of the dead woman and seeing that someone had affixed large gossamer wings to her gown.
She not only had wings, but there was a crown of thorns affixed to her head, which had caused blood to cover her face. I realized that her hands had been tied behind her back, as I pulled out my phone to call the local precinct.
After I made the call, Amy came over to my side. “Who do you think did this?”
I’d already scanned the area, but hadn’t seen anyone. “I don’t know, but whoever it was wanted to send a message.”
Max had finished her preliminary examination of the scene and overheard us. She walked over. “You got that right.” She motioned to a nearby grave marker. “You guys need to take a closer look at the headstone.”
Amy and I took a couple steps closer to the grave marker beneath the floating victim. We saw that the decedent’s name and date of death on the headstone had been crossed out. There was handwritten black lettering on the marker that sent a chill down my spine as I read it aloud.
“I am the angel of death, the destroyer of worlds.”
FOUR
By the time dawn broke, Funk’s Forever Fields had taken on a circus-like atmosphere. Uniformed cops cordoned off the area and tried to keep the neighborhood looky-loos and the press away. A small army of crime scene investigators were descending on the cemetery to begin processing the area. As the sun came up, the steam rising from the frozen ground where the
victim remained suspended, made the scene as bizarre as anything I’d ever encountered.
“We better call our precinct,” Max said. “I got a feeling we’re gonna spend our morning right here, explaining what we saw and heard to the local cops.”
I yawned. “I’m too exhausted to work anyway. I’ll make the call.”
Max and I had been assigned to Precinct Blue, NYPD’s version of reform school for cops, about a month earlier. Officers assigned to Blue were culled from the local precincts for retraining because of conduct the department deemed to be in violation of policy.
Max’s violation involved a sadistic domestic violence suspect falling and cracking his head open during his arrest. She got the blame when he died on the pavement before the ambulance arrived, something that I personally thought deserved a commendation.
My reassignment involved a fellow cop, who looked suspiciously like an alien life form, falling into an open dumpster of chicken grease and drowning during the chase of a suspect. I was blamed for not properly handcuffing the suspect, despite him stomping on my toe and breaking it, while my partner held him at gunpoint.
After making the call to our precinct, I waited around while Max and Amy were separately interviewed by the assigned homicide investigators, Detectives Andy Jenkins and Earl Hammond.
After they finished up with my roommates, I drew the Hammond card for my interview. The big, bald detective took me inside Balfour Chapel to take my statement.
After I filled him in on what had transpired and tried to rub some warmth back into my hands, I said, “Do you have any idea about the identity of the victim?”
Hammond was probably pushing sixty, but looked older. He was haggard, and a nasty brew of aftershave and bourbon wafted my way as he spoke. “A working girl, from what we know. She spent a lot of time over on Lexington.”
I knew the area was a local hangout for prostitutes and drug dealers. “Why do you suppose the message was left on the headstone?”
I got another shrug. Maybe it was a nervous habit.
“Just a guess at this point,” Hammond said. “Somebody probably wanted some notoriety. We seem to get a lot of that lately.”
