Vampire Unseen (Vampire Untitled Trilogy Book 2)

by Lee McGeorge

  Trapped. Pinned between a gunman on the second floor and armed police out the front.

  He spun, looked for an exit.

  Light on the roof. He ran through the rain to the chink of light he could see. It was a skylight that dropped into a back office, probably the back of the reception area. There were desks directly below. Back to back desks with computer monitors.

  He didn’t have a choice. He smashed it with his heel and jumped in. As he fell he noticed the gunman from the second floor was hanging from the window, preparing to drop, giving chase.

  He hit the computer monitors hard, the desk buckled and collapsed. For a moment he was wrapped in computer cables and paperwork.

  “Are you alright?” A slim man in a front of house uniform was offering a hand to lift him. Paul grabbed him, got up, pulled a knife and swung the man to the wall.

  “Listen... or I’ll kill you... There is a parking garage below here. Are they guest cars?” The boy hummed a response that sounded like affirmative. “Take me there, now. If I get stopped I will slit your throat.” Paul pulled the man ahead of him, holding him by the collar and keeping the knife blade pressed to his cheek. “Which way?” he screamed.

  “Here... here...” the man pointed to a door at the back of the office. Paul pushed him firmly, quickly. He dared look behind at the hole in the skylight. The gunman wasn’t there yet.

  As they exited the back office Paul could see through to the reception. The police were running through the lobby. One of the baseball capped armed police was barking instructions to the concierge about getting the lobby clear.

  Paul kept pushing the hotel clerk who led him through a second door, they passed a petite girl with tightly curled blonde hair who stared at them open mouthed. They made it into a thin set of concrete stairs. At the bottom, the final door opened to the garage.

  A bright red Ferrari, black BMW, an orange Porsche.

  “Where are the keys to the cars?” Paul asked.

  “They’re in the cars.”

  “Really?” It seemed stupid. They could be stolen. Then Paul looked up the exit ramp and noticed the garage was now covered by a roller shutter that had to be raised. “How do we open the doors?”

  “In the office,” he pointed to an unmanned glass booth and Paul pushed him to it. The door was locked. Paul slammed the knife into the glass with all his force shattering the pane. He swiped at the window, shards and crystals of glass falling away.

  “Open it. Open the shutter or I will kill you.”

  The clerk leaned in and pressed a button. The barrier began rolling up with a mechanical whirring sound. Paul turned him by his collar and pushed him back towards the cars. The BMW was the least conspicuous. He looked in, the keys were in the ignition.

  “Thank you,” Paul said and jammed the knife deep into the back of the clerk’s knee, bringing him down with a shriek. Immobilized, unable to raise the alarm quickly.

  Paul got in the car and started the engine. It purred.

  Slowly, slowly, he thought. Don’t bring attention to yourself. Ease out and drive away.

  That was when the passenger side window exploded.

  The gunman was back. In pursuit. Tooled up and shooting.

  Paul pressed hard on the accelerator making the car lurch forward rapidly. He exited the garage with too much speed and couldn’t turn fast enough sending the car onto the pavement and making a couple of pedestrians under an umbrella scream as they dodged aside.

  He drove fast, too fast. At the end of the street he turned left just to get out of the way. Some people were waving at him and pointing at the front of the car. Lights. He hadn’t turned the lights on. He pushed all of the buttons and accidentally found the windscreen wipers on the way to the lights.

  Rear view mirror.

  The Ferrari emerged from the garage. He could hear the high pitched engine of the supercar through his busted window. Paul floored it and scraped the car into a side street with less foot traffic. It was narrow, dark, possibly leading to a loading dock and a dead end.

  Oh, shit... he may have trapped himself.

  ----- X -----

  Bogdan caught sight of the BMW as it screeched into a side street. He followed too fast, struggling with traction. The gears of the car were controlled by paddles on the steering wheel and he didn’t fully comprehend how to even drive this car.

  The BMW was ahead. Stopped. The driver side door was open. The red tail lights were on.

  Bogdan got close in the Ferrari then stopped the vehicle. He checked his surroundings to make sure McGovern wasn’t in sight then checked the revolver, throwing away the spent shells and reloading. Six shots. Six bullets and one shot of M99. Fuck the injector, it was too risky, he stuffed it into his belt to free both hands for the revolver.

  He exited the car. He never took his eyes off the BMW ahead.

  It was abandoned. McGovern was on foot. He walked towards the car holding the pistol ready, seeing raindrops illuminate as they fell past the red tail lights.

  Pain.

  Serious sharp pain in his right kidney and his left flank.

  He should never have looked at the rain in the tail lights.

  McGovern had skewered him from behind. Two knives, stabbed into his lower back and left side. McGovern held onto the handles like they were the handlebars of a bicycle, a way to steer Bogdan if he wanted to. The pain in his kidney was excruciating and held him in absolute paralysis.

  The knives twisted, rotating. The pain in his flank was momentary but the shock in his kidney was debilitating. It was the most ferocious pain he had ever felt in his life and it froze over his entire body.

  “Drop the gun,” came the voice. It was deep, a dark and gravelled voice.

  Bogdan felt sleep rushing towards him. He capitulated in an instant and allowed the gun to fall from his hands, anything to end the pain. Wooziness enveloped him. He felt the knives withdraw and immediately his legs gave way and dropped him to his knees. He felt the concrete through his clothes, felt the water of the puddles. He was going to die in this dark back street, in the rain.

  The M99.

  He gripped the handle of the gun still trapped in his waistband. He would fall forward and roll over, fire on McGovern. That was the plan. If he could survive another five seconds, that was his plan.

  He gripped the gun, fell forward slowly, rolled over, lifted and fired straight at him.

  McGovern didn’t have time to get out of the way. Instead he did something extraordinary. He swiped the pencil sized dart with a lightening fast move of the knife. Bogdan had known that vampires can dodge bullets. McGovern could cut them out of the air.

  McGovern kicked the pistol away. He pulled the injector from Bogdan’s hands and tossed it aside.

  Bogdan survived long enough to see McGovern return to the BMW and slowly drive away. He lay in the alley unable to move as the rain fell on his face. He stared up into the rainfall and saw a single lightning flash illuminate the sky. He began counting the seconds to the thunder. He died on the count of four.

  Epilogue

  Corneliu Latis’ face was badly disfigured. His nose in particular looked like a patchwork of slightly different shades of skin built on top of one another. The injury to his lips and nasal cavity had left his voice a hissing and buzzing distorted mess, but at least he was alive. He’d arrived back in Romania to a pseudo hero’s welcome. They made him out to be a wonderful detective, then dropped him from the police force officially at a fitness review to put him on a disability pension.

  That was over a year ago

  He was in his forties. He was kicked out with honours in the spotlight, but once the press died down they dumped him on the rubbish heap; but he had time, he had money coming in and he had a hobby.

  He swilled his drink looking through the window.

  The door to the bar opened. Ciprian. The young upstart cop who wanted to do things. The kid was barely more than a beat cop but had become obsessed by the murders in Noua. Corneliu liked
him. Cornel drank bourbon. Ciprian took a coffee. He was still in uniform.

  “I managed to trace it back to a law firm in Zurich. But it’s weird though, I mean it’s really weird. It’s like she won the lottery or something.”

  Ciprian sat beside Corneliu and they both watched as Ildico Popescu fussed over her baby daughter in the garden outside of the apartment block. She wore a flowing white dress and a sun hat. There was a breeze and she spent most of her time with one hand on her head to keep the hat in place. “It’s McGovern. He’s the one supporting her.”

  “You know what I found out?” Ciprian said. “Check this out. That apartment was bought cash and it cost over a hundred thousand Euros. Bought through a local realtor with a wire transfer through the same office in Zurich that’s sending the money every month.”

  Corneliu nodded. “McGovern has got money from somewhere.”

  Are you sure it’s him, I mean... how can you know for sure?”

  “I know it’s McGovern because of something he wrote on a wall.”

  “What was it?”

  “Sublimation...” Ciprian didn’t react to the word. Cornel smiled a little. “That girl is a nobody from Noua, yet suddenly she has a mysterious benefactor hiding behind Swiss lawyers. That girl there is McGovern’s squeeze. He sees her as his reason to live… And that little baby girl,” he stared down his finger as he pointed, “is his baby daughter.”

  “So what do we do?” Ciprian asked.

  “We follow the money. Because when we find out where McGovern is getting enough cash to buy her a house and send her money every month, we find him.”

  ----- X -----

  It was December. Corneliu was preparing for Christmas alone. He was sitting at home looking through the old files he had from building the networks of very bad men. Reminiscing, recalling the glory days that had ruined his life. He wondered what those men were doing now. He wondered if anyone bothered to chase them the way he had. For old times sake he searched a few names on the internet. He no longer had access to police databases and reports but a few of the names he entered came up as arrested and on trial, a few were in prison which made him smile.

  Then one item almost punched him in the face.

  The Gjokeja brothers.

  The Gjokeja clan were the Albanian bad boys that had people smuggling sewn up entirely in their region. They had the police, the politicians, the whole judiciary tied up or bribed. They were major players in smuggling girls from the Ukraine and Romania to brothels all over Europe.

  They were dead.

  Someone had killed two of the brothers and paralysed the third. Someone had robbed them whilst they were transferring hard currency from their agents in Montenegro to their base in Shkodra. The story took some believing. Three men armed with guns, were attacked and robbed by a single man armed with a samurai sword and a knife.

  Corneliu felt electrified.

  All of the details of the Gjokeja network were contained in his laptop, the same laptop that McGovern had stolen. Corneliu had meticulously built up a picture of how they moved money around including the times they transported hard currency.

  Now two of them had been stabbed to death despite having guns.

  There was a survivor.

  Corneliu got on a plane to Albania.

  ----- X -----

  The police station was sleepy. Outside it was blustery and the air was humid and sticky. The Mediterranean in winter was a thousand times warmer than Brasov and Corneliu found the winter clothes he’d brought with him were too warm.

  “Do you speak English?” Corneliu asked the desk officer.

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to meet Aldo Gjokeja.”

  “What makes you think I can arrange that?”

  Corneliu smiled. “I think I know who killed his brothers.”

  He didn’t have to wait long. A taxi was summoned that drove him high above the picturesque Lake Scutari that straddled the border between Albania and Montenegro. Low in the city were pleasant comfortable homes. Once you went to higher ground those homes became wealthier and fewer until towards the top were mansions for millionaires. This is where Corneliu was taken.

  A man in a suit greeted him at the front gate and patted him down, searching for weapons. He was led to a lounge of plush sofas with incredible views of the lake and mountains which he soaked in whilst he waited for Aldo Gjokeja to appear.

  Aldo was in a wheelchair, bald headed and broken. A stab wound to the chest inflicted from a short curved blade had paralysed him from the chest down and immobilised his left arm. The left side of his face hung slack and bore a horrifying scar. The reports said the weapon was a karambit, a hooked knife used like a tiger’s claw. A handful of blows had destroyed his body leaving him incapacitated and looking much older than he should. His brothers hadn’t survived.

  Aldo was pushed into the room by a girl in a tiny nurses uniform. She had silicon filled lips and tits and looked like a sex doll. Aldo was broken, but still had enough appetite to dress his nurse as a whore. He spoke in Albanian. The nurse translated to English.

  “Hello,” she said. “Mr. Gjokeja asks why you are here.”

  “I used to be a policeman,” he began casually. “I was attacked by a man. He did this to me.” He drew a circle around his face with his finger as the nurse translated his English back to Albanian. He reached into his inside pocket and took out images of McGovern. Real photographs and composites of him with beards and moustaches. “This is the man who attacked me.”

  Aldo’s eyes widened. His right hand made a fist. He squirmed in his chair. He spoke rapidly and angrily.

  “Mr. Gjokeja is asking who this man is.”

  “Is it the same man who attacked him and his brothers?”

  The nurse translated.

  “Po!” Aldo screamed. “Po!”

  Corneliu didn’t need the translation to know he was saying yes.

  “I don’t know where he is. But I think I know how to flush him out. Would you like to help me catch him?”

  The nurse translated. Aldo barked back his response in broken English. “I want kill him. No catch. I want kill.”

  Corneliu nodded then spoke his words slowly. “Then you and I want the same thing. And I think I know how to do it... Will you help me?”

  Aldo stared back with a ferocity belied by his broken stature. He stared with all the anger and menace of the man he really was; a war criminal, an ethnic cleanser, a people trafficker, the man who leaves girls gutted in the boot of a car just to send a message. “Po,” he said spitting his words. “I will help you kill this man.”

  ...to be concluded.

  Vampire “Unleashed”

  The Final Chapter of the Vampire “Untitled” trilogy

  Paul McGovern believes he has become a vampire. The law enforcement agencies pursuing him across Europe are beginning to believe it too.

  He has killed, evaded and vanished with an almost supernatural skill.

  But in the process Paul has incurred the wrath of a ruthless criminal gang. He has stolen from them, he has injured them and now their net is closing around him.

  Law enforcement, government agencies, soldiers and criminals are tracking him down and preparing to take him dead or alive.

  Paul McGovern will face them alone.

  It will be a fair fight.

  Vampire "Unseen" - Available Spring 2015

  www.lee-mcgeorge.co.uk