Blood Games

by Lee Killough

  Kreutzer gave him a bland smile. “I guess they just want to make sure there’s no delayed reaction and you won’t pass out into your pepper foam literature. You’ve had a pretty traumatic experience, after all. And I’m sorry, but we need to know more about the attack on you.”

  Becker stiffened. “I’ve told you everything. The pervert dressed like a woman so I don’t have any idea what he really looks like and he didn’t happen to hand me his card with his name and address on it.”

  Garreth always tried to regard victims sympathetically. He understood displacing anger on the people closest at hand. But Becker raised his hackles.

  Kreutzer’s jaw had tightened, too, he noticed, though the detective kept his voice pleasant. “I realize that. Now, you said he pulled the gun on you and forced you to take him to your room. Where were you when he pulled the gun on you? Did he hide it so no one else noticed? How did you discover he was a man and do you have any idea why he approached you as a woman in the first place?”

  Becker stiffened. “How the hell should I know? Maybe he’s got a thing for this Lebekov bitch and--”

  “Mr. Becker.” Even as he interrupted, Garreth imitated Bradshaw’s near whisper to avoid a whip-cracking snarl. A part of him wanted to backhand Becker for the slur. Talk about displacing anger. What he really wanted of course was to tear the albino apart. For not only killing Maggie, but stealing her identity and profaning it by using it in commission of a crime! “Sir, I have a question.”

  Becker barely glanced at him...seeing what, a skinny kid in cowboy boots, dusty jeans, and a rumpled sport coat, holding a Stetson tucked under his arm? The glance dismissed him as insignificant and returned to Kreutzer.

  Garreth’s gritted his teeth. The arrogant son of a bitch!

  Becker scowled at Kreutzer. “Just go do the job you’re paid to do and--”

  “Mr. Becker,” Garreth interrupted again, in the same Bradshaw voice.

  Becker glanced around again, staring down his nose. “Who are you?”

  “The partner of Maggie Lebekov.” He punched every word at Becker. “The real Maggie Lebekov...a fine, dedicated police officer murdered by the same man who attacked you.” He pulled off his glasses and stuck them in his breast pocket.

  Becker reared back, clearly startled.

  Garreth stared him in the eyes, drilled his gaze into them. “Knowing that, you’re going to stop worrying about your own ego...aren’t you? Because you realize that lets this son of a bitch get away with killing her and attacking you. Answer...our... questions.” He discovered he wanted Becker to resist, wanted to have to beat the man down and break his will. “Tell us everything that happened. Right...now.”

  But Becker caved instantly, as if hollow inside. The story poured out in a rush. “Last night some of us from the exhibition were sitting around in the hotel bar and up came this babe who looked like a showgirl...the longest legs I’d ever seen and showing most of them in that skirt. She started talking, asking what we’re in town for, and when we told her about the exhibition she said she’s in security herself, and showed us her police badge. At first she sat around joking with all of us, but after a while it was just her and me, with her rubbing her leg against mine and her boob against my arm. She suggested we go up to my room. But when we got there and she starting working on my belt and zipper--” He squirmed. “--I pulled up her skirt and...” He stumbled into silence, going scarlet.

  “Found more than you bargained for?” Kreutzer said pleasantly.

  Becker recoiled. “The next thing I know I’m staring into the muzzle of this gun and he’s laughing. He has a real ugly laugh. ‘Surprise,’ he says, then, ‘I showed you mine; now you show me yours.’ He made me strip, laughing the whole time. He called someone else in the hotel and said to bring the duct tape.”

  “Who came?” Kreutzer asked.

  Becker shook his head. “I don’t know. He said close my eyes, that he’d shoot my dick off if I opened them. But there were several of them and one was a little girl. They didn’t talk, just wrapped the tape around my eyes and mouth. He said it was better I didn’t see what was going to happen.”

  Thereby terrorizing Becker by letting his imagination run amok.

  “And what did happen?”

  Becker swallowed. “He threw me on the bed and taped my ankles and wrists. He told me he had a knife and started running the tip of it all over me, singing a song about a red robin bob, bob, bobbing along. Then he started getting weird.”

  Kreutzer caught Garreth’s eye with an expression that said: Then he started?

  Garreth drew in a breath. Had the albino done something that would reveal, finally, definitively, whether he was human or vampire? “Weird how?”

  Becker stared through Garreth, vision turned inward. “He started talking about blood. At first I thought it was to me, but think it was to the others...about how blood is life and power and the taking of it brings the ultimate power over that person, and how blood makes a fountain when a throat is cut or torn open and how it feels to have that fountain pumping in your mouth. ‘Splashing at first,’ he said, ‘hot and hard and salty sweet, then softer and softer and ever slower as the bottle empties.’” Becker’s voice slowed and lowered in concert with the words.

  Beyond him, Kreutzer listened with a disgusted expression but sudden ravenous hunger scalded Garreth’s throat. His vision locked on a vein throbbing at Becker’s temple. With an effort, he wrenched his eyes away.

  “‘But the last is best,’ he said,” Becker went on, “‘...the final oozing drops telling you that you have all this person’s life.’ Then he was talking to me...right down by my ear, whispering in it. ‘Total power,’ he says.” Becker’s voice dropped to a whisper, too. “‘Nothing tastes as sweet as death.’”

  Psycho, Kreutzer mouthed.

  Vampire. He had to be. The bastard sounded just like Lane.

  “I thought he was going to cut my throat.” Becker covered his face with his hands. The whisper leaked between his fingers, hoarse with the memory of terror. “He kept dragging the point of that knife back and forth across it. When he stabbed my arm I thought he had cut my throat.” He shuddered.

  “And then you think he licked the blood off your arm?” Kreutzer said.

  “They took turns. Then...they just walked away” Becker lowered his hands and sat slumped on the bed, spiritless. All arrogance gone.

  Garreth still felt no pity for the man. Controlling Becker was too easy to use up his anger.

  “Left, you mean?” Kreutzer asked. “After bandaging your arm?”

  “No, they stayed in the room but they walked away. I could feel blood running down my arm but they ignored me, just letting me bleed while they searched the room. The guy warned the others to put on gloves, then I heard drawers opening and closing, and the guy said, ‘Well, well, look at this. I’ll just take it since he won’t be needing it.’ He found my travel cash and spare credit cards in the false bottom of my shaving kit. When the stretcher went out I saw everything from the kit scattered on the bathroom counter.”

  “How much cash?”

  Becker shrugged. “Five hundred. He got my billfold, too. I spotted my pants across a chair with the pockets inside out. There was a couple of hundred and a credit card in there, too. Then I guess they’d had enough fun.” His mouth twisted. “They left. Is there anything else? I think you’re right about after-effects. I don’t feel well.”

  “Did they ever call each other by name?” Kreutzer asked.

  Becker shook his head.

  “What about the bandage on your arm?” Garreth said.

  “Oh.” Becker sighed. “When the guy went in the bathroom this girl’s voice said, ‘The sight of him makes me sick. Can I cover him up?’ The guy said yeah if she wanted. There was a gasp and a shushing sound, then the girl whispered in my ear, ‘You’re a pig but I guess you don’t deserve to die for it.’ and she started wrapping my arm with tape. The guy found my cash and she jumped. I thought she was going to j
ust quit, but then I heard the guy whizzing. She whipped that tape around my arm and yanked the sheet up over me.”

  Garreth eyed him bitterly. So one of the bb’s had a heart, but she had not tried to save Maggie and him. The thought kept anger simmering in him as he and Kreutzer left Becker and made their way back through the ER.

  Kreutzer raised a brow. “What about that doesn’t make you happy? I don’t know why he rolled over for you like that, but it was slick. You ought to come work for us.”

  “What doesn’t make me happy?” Garreth grimaced. “The man is a pig. He could have told you everything when he was found, but no, Mr. Pecker couldn’t admit that he invited his assailant up to his room thinking he was about to get laid and found himself groping a man. You wasted hours waiting for him to come clean when we could be out hunting a shop that worked on the Aerostar, learning what it looks like now so we can update--”

  They froze. A male in his twenties...clothing over-sized enough to bag even on his big frame, rings in his nose and ears, straggling beard...stalked through the ER doors holding a gun. Seeing them, he thrust the weapon out arm’s length, aiming at first Garreth, then Kreutzer, then the security officer stepping automatically forward. “Everyone back!” His eyes glinted, white-rimmed. “I’m coming in! I want a nurse with the key to the drugs and I don’t want any fucking nonsense or someone’s going to die. Understand!” He shrilled the last word.

  The sudden silence behind him told Garreth everyone in the ER had frozen. He imagined the fear on all the faces, staff and patients alike. But fury boiled up through him. Another of the world’s stupidest criminals! The moron appeared not to know his Colt Pony needed to be cocked before firing, and he had also left the safety on. The magazine protruded abnormally below the gun butt. “You worthless piece of crap!”

  The gunman swung to aim at Garreth. Not fast enough. Two lightning steps brought Garreth in arm’s reach. His left hand grabbed the Pony’s barrel and twisted the weapon up and into the male’s thumb, ripping it free with a force that audibly dislocated the thumb. At the same time his other hand grabbed the male by the throat, cutting off the scream of pain. The throat gave in his grip, outer flesh doughy over the inner stiffness of cartilage. With only a little more pressure he thought he could make his fingers completely encircle the adams apple. The male gurgled, his eyes bulging.

  Then an inner voice sounding like Maggie cried, No, Garreth! accompanied by Lane’s, warning, Witnesses!

  Shit.

  He released the throat and grabbed the beard instead. Jerking the gunman forward, the man’s gurgle turning to a squeal, he pivoted, dragging his captive along on the spin and slinging him into the ER. “You want in...then come on in!”

  Still squealing, the male hit the tile sliding backward and on his side...caromed off an empty wheel chair and into the waiting area, into loose chairs...sending them sliding, too, through scattering patients, successive rows piling up ahead of him until they all hit the wall in a tumbling, rattling crash of plastic and metal.

  A part of Garreth noticed Kreutzer had secured the entrance and was calling on his phone for backup but Garreth’s focus remained on the gunman...following him with measured strides. “Let me suggest, you bungling cretin, that if you presume to enter a life of crime, you take the trouble to learn the tools of your trade!” As he talked he grabbed the protruding bottom of the magazine and wrenched it free. The imbecile had put it in backward! He longed to reinsert it correctly, but--witnesses!--settled for pretending to do so while letting the magazine drop into his coat sleeve, flipped off the safety, pulled the slide back as if chambering a round–while reassuring himself he had an empty weapon...cocked it. “There... now it’ll work.” He aimed at the screaming male and pulled the trigger.

  Kreutzer yelled, “No!” Nurses and patients gasped. The male doubled, screeching.

  The hammer fell...click.

  “See?” Garreth said. To his satisfaction, a pungent smell and spreading stain on the male’s trousers indicated that the would-be thief had fouled himself twice over. Garreth released the grip so the Pony flipped over and dangled from his index finger by the trigger guard. Turning, he extended the weapon toward a gaping Kreutzer. “Sir, I’m not sure about this, of course, because I’ve never met you before and I’m sure you don’t know me from Adam, but I thought I heard someone say you’re a police officer. Maybe you’d better take possession of this. And this.” He shook the magazine out of his coat sleeve. “And that dog shit under the chairs. Now please excuse me.”

  He scooped up the Stetson from where he dropped it, settled it down to his mirrored glasses, and headed out through automatic doors. As they hissed closed behind him, the voice of the hospital guard slipped through, wry: “Say, who was that masked man?”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Eight blocks from the hospital Garreth heard a vehicle approaching behind him. As it pulled even and slowed, the passenger window hummed down. “Feel better?”

  Garreth could not blame Kreutzer for the dry tone. Did he feel better? In one respect, yes. But since leaving the hospital he kept asking himself how he could let himself lose control like that. It could have been worse--he sweated blood thinking of the worse--but he should have stopped at just disarming the bastard. “Any guesses how bad the fallout is going to be?” Lincoln’s Internal Affairs did not apply to him but depending on how Kreutzer reacted, this could make trouble for Danzig and Reichert.

  “What fallout?” Kreutzer’s brows rose. “I’m cool since I don’t have much sympathy for scumbags who stick a gun in my face...and you didn’t make me witness to a homicide.” An undertone suggested he might not be feeling quite as cool as he claimed. “It’s just personally embarrassing. I mean, this unarmed civilian disarms a drug-crazed thief then walks away while yours truly of Lincoln’s Finest stands there with his thumb up his butt.”

  Garreth eyed the empty rear seat. “Speaking of our perp...what did you do with him?”

  “Turned him over to a member of the Southwest Team, of course. I didn’t want him stinking up my vehicle.” Kreutzer paused. “You want to get in or are you planning to walk downtown?”

  Garreth climbed in.

  Pulling back into traffic, Kreutzer said, “Never, ever do that to me again.”

  Garreth slunk down in his seat. “I’m sorry.” Kreutzer did not respond and Garreth waited several blocks before speaking again. “Where are we going?”

  “The Cornhusker.” He switched on the car radio and they listened to classical music the rest of the way downtown.

  In the hotel lobby Kreutzer left Garreth to stare at the soaring ceiling, woodwork, and grand sweep of stairs while he used the house phone. Garreth heard him mutter, “How’s it going?” to whomever answered, and for the first time since leaving the hospital, he smiled. Hanging up, he crooked a finger at Garreth and headed for the elevators. “Lady Fortune has favored us.”

  Upstairs Garreth did not need the uniformed officer in the corridor to indicate where they were going. As soon as they neared the door...he knew. That room had been the albino’s. The sense of menace raised the hair on his neck.

  “Mikaelian!”

  He realized Kreutzer and the uniformed officer were staring at him. “What?”

  “That’s what I want to know.” Kreutzer stuffed his glasses in his breast pocket. “You just--well, to use another dog metaphor...you went on point. What gives? I think you owe me.”

  Yes. Maybe half the truth? “Don’t laugh.”

  “Try me.”

  The uniformed officer, who appeared about to smile and whose eyes seemed to have a permanent crinkle of amusement, eyed him with obvious curiosity.

  Garreth took a breath. “Sometimes I...sense things. Courtesy of my Irish blood, probably. My Grandma Doyle had Second Sight. I just knew this is the suspects’ room. Am I right?”

  No doubt about the officer’s smile now. He peered up at Kreutzer. “Hey, Cruiser, you ought to introduce him to your grandmother.”

/>   Face deadpan, Kreutzer strode into the room. “Okay, Sparacino...so we’re just in time for something exciting. Thrill and impress us. Oh, this is Officer Mikaelian from Bellamy County in Kansas, where these suspects killed an officer.”

  A dark-eyed woman looked up from checking an evidence list against a room sketch and numbered cards holding fingerprints. “It’s up to you to be thrilled and impressed. We’ve already done our part. There are plenty of prints in the victim’s room, but so many had overlying smudging from gloves I expect they’ll all be eliminated except for the ones on the back side of the duct tape from the victim’s arm. In here the Piece turned up just some smudged partials--your suspects polished almost everything to a fare-thee-well--and thought he’d have to be satisfied with those. That is until--but it’s his find so I’ll let him do the Show and Tell. Reece, baby, you’re on! And Kreutzer has a visitor with him.”

  Reece? Garreth glanced back toward the officer in the open doorway. That was the name on his name tag. Then he noted everyone watching him expectantly.

  When the evidence tech in the bathroom opened the door Garreth understood why. They wanted to see his reaction to double vision...the same amused face as at the door, the same compact build. Only this version wore a t-shirt and jeans.

  “That’s cute. Not many departments have identical twins.”

  “Meet the Reeces Pieces,” Sparacino said.

  Garreth could imagine civilians running into them separately at a crime scene thinking: Man, that officer gets around...but how did he change clothes so fast?

  Sparacino stacked the fingerprint cards. “There’s a younger sister, too, who’s in the document examination section. Fortunately she doesn’t look anything like these two.”