by Matt Lincoln
“Cookies, doughnuts, we even have coffee! All fresh and hot!” she called his way, flashing him a warm smile. She had the tiniest gap between her front teeth and round rosy cheeks that gave her a youthful appearance. He found himself blushing as he realized he’d been staring for just a second too long. He moved toward her cart, in part to make it seem as though the crepes were what he had been interested in from the beginning, and in part because he wouldn’t mind the opportunity to admire her for just a little longer.
“How can I help you?” she offered cheerily as he approached, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet. “I’ve got chocolate glazed, apple fritter, cinnamon, custard, jelly, chocolate chip, sugar cookie. You name it, I got it, and if not, I can make it for you.” She winked as she leaned forward against the open window and looked at David expectantly.
David blinked and blurted out, “Um, chocolate glazed.” Truthfully, he couldn’t remember what other flavors she’d named after that. He’d been too busy thinking about how pretty her eyes were, a sort of honey-brown with what looked like bursting green flowers blooming out from the centers. He blushed again and mentally chastised himself for acting like such a tool.
“You work around here?” she asked him casually, as she carefully drizzled a generous amount of melted chocolate glaze over both sides of the fresh doughnut.
“Oh, uh, yeah,” David answered dumbly, slightly mesmerized by watching her work and taking a moment to realize she had spoken to him. “I’m a police officer with the Las Vegas police.” He was unable to conceal the pride and satisfaction he felt over that fact.
“Yeah, I could tell. You know, the uniform, Officer Baxter,” she chuckled, gesturing with the hand that was holding the chocolate-filled ladle towards the left side of his chest where his name was embroidered onto his uniform. He deflated a little, feeling slightly foolish now.
“Oh, uh, yeah, of course.” He could feel himself blushing again, wondering if by now his face was just completely red and splotchy from the number of times he’d flushed in the last few minutes. He was sure that it must have looked really attractive. “And you can just call me David,” he added quickly, hoping to salvage what he now felt was a sinking ship of a conversation
“I’m just teasing you, David,” The girl smiled at him sweetly, setting down the ladle and using her forearm to brush a few stray strands of dirty blonde hair out of her face. She deftly wrapped the doughnut up, folding the paper neatly into perfect lines and sections, before pulling a pen out of the front pocket of her apron. “I’d love to chat more, but you seem like you’re in a rush. Maybe you can call me sometime, though.” She spoke simply, a small and somewhat sly smile gracing her features as she handed David the crepe, its wrapper now bearing her name and phone number in looped, pretty handwriting.
For the fourth time in less than ten minutes, David blushed, stuttering out an awkward and hurried “sure” as he paid for the doughnut and began to walk away again toward the police department. It wasn’t until he’d walked over twenty steps away from the truck that he suddenly felt stupid for not having given a more conclusive or enthusiastic answer. Nevertheless, it had still been a nice experience and even further proof that this would be a great day. He took great care not to wrinkle or tear the paper as he walked with the doughnut held in his hands.
David’s partner was a man twice his age named Otto, with a round stomach, gray-flecked hair, and droopy, somewhat sad-looking eyes that gave him a haggard and tired appearance, as if he was always on the verge of falling asleep. He wasn’t mean exactly, but he wasn’t friendly either, and David had learned it was best to keep to himself. Still, it was in David’s own nature to be friendly and kind, and so he strolled into the precinct that morning cheerily calling out good mornings to Officer Camilla at the front desk, as well as Officers Roy and Jackson in the bullpen, all of whom either returned his greeting with the barest of nods or seemed to ignore him altogether.
It had been a little disheartening, at first, for David’s enthusiasm to be met with cynicism or outright scorn. Nevertheless, he felt determined to stay true to his path and maintain his moral character as an upright and inspiring police officer. So it was with vague annoyance that he took his seat that morning across from Otto, catching the tail end of a conversation he was having with someone over the phone.
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll go check on the old broad,” he said, hanging up without bothering to say goodbye. It irritated David when Otto made those kinds of disparaging remarks about the citizens they had sworn to protect and serve, not to mention how rude it was to just hang up the phone like that, but he kept those thoughts to himself, opting instead to go the diplomatic route.
“What was that about an, um, ‘old broad’?” he asked tentatively, not liking the way the remark sounded and stumbling over it. Otto just rolled his eyes.
“That was the Sarge,” he responded, sighing with the air of a man who has given up all of his former goals and aspirations. “He says dispatch wants us to go check on some senile old lady who keeps calling about her upstairs neighbors and their pets or something. It’s low priority, so none of the patrols have gotten around to it, but she keeps calling gettin’ all hysterical over it. Some crap about zoo animals or something.” He made no move to get up, despite the Sergeant's orders.
“If she’s hysterical and isn’t making sense, she could have dementia,” David started, genuinely concerned. “Wait.” He paused his own train of thought. “The Sergeant just called you? Isn’t he just in his office?” He turned his head toward the small office where, through the open blinds on the other side of the plexiglass window, he could, in fact, see the Sergeant sitting at his desk.
Otto only raised an eyebrow and huffed out a small scoff. “Kid, you haven’t realized yet what a lazy ass that guy is? Hell, what a lazy ass everyone in this place is?”
Including you, David thought to himself and immediately felt bad for it.
“Including me,” grunted Otto, as if he’d heard him, and for a moment, David panicked, thinking he somehow had. “Which is why you’ll be going to check on the crazy broad for me. I ain’t got time for that damn.” He turned then, back to his computer, where David was pretty sure he was playing some kind of card game and not actually doing any work.
“What, by myself? You’re not coming with me?” David asked.
Otto looked over at David and raised an eyebrow condescendingly. “It’s just some old bitty who’s probably lonely and keeps calling 911 just to have someone to talk to. Just go, make sure she’s not hurt or living in squalor or anything, and come right back. Shouldn’t take more than an hour tops, and we can get dispatch off our asses about it. You really need me to babysit you just for that?”
David was a little irked at being left to do this all alone, and by Otto’s insinuation that he needed a babysitter, but he wasn’t actually bothered by having to do it. David took his job seriously, and he really was concerned about that poor old woman. One way or another, she needed help, and so he dutifully packed up his belongings, making sure to double-check that all of his equipment, radio, and gun were in place before heading out.
The building where the old woman, Maude, lived was in an impoverished part of the city. The building itself was in an early state of disrepair, with heavily faded paint and rust along the exterior stairway. There were no broken windows, though, and David tried to see that as a positive. He didn’t like to judge others, and he was told more than once that this trait would lead him to become a lousy cop. He couldn’t help it, though. It wasn’t in him to assume the worst of people just because of where they lived or where they’d come from. So while most people had discounted Maude as just some crazy lady from the bad side of town, David was more than willing to provide her with whatever help he could.
It was with this thought that he got out of his car and headed toward her apartment on the ground floor, making sure to straighten his tie and shirt collar before he went to knock on the door. The woman who answered the d
oor was thin and looked frail, with wiry salt and pepper hair. Her eyes, however, were alert, and there was nothing in her demeanor or speech that made David think she was senile.
“Oh, thank goodness you’re here,” she started, her gaze hard and focused. “I’ve been calling them for four hours, and no one came!” She glanced above her, for the first time looking nervous.
“Okay, wait, ma’am,” David started a little unevenly. He had been expecting to deal with a helpless, senile old woman, and he had to take a moment to readjust himself to the situation. “Can you start at the beginning?”
“It started this morning. Around five o’clock, in the apartment just above mine. I like to get up early to make myself some coffee and watch those early morning game show reruns. You know, with the prizes that-” she cut herself off, shaking her head. “Nevermind that. Anyway, I heard something like a big thump, and then something like the sound of ripping. Like that scratchy sound when you rip paper up? Only louder and scratchier. Like… Like, oh, I don’t know. Anyway, then there was this absolutely nasty sound like a scream or a hiss, ooh, like a big screaming snake.” She prattled on, definitely worked up now.
What she was saying sounded a bit nonsensical, but at the same time, David couldn’t help but believe her. She didn’t seem like she was lying, and she didn’t seem crazy, either.
“And then,” she continued, and David snapped back to attention, a little ashamed that he had zoned out in the middle of her explanation. “Probably an hour after I first called, I heard screaming, a man screaming.” That caught David’s attention.
“I couldn’t tell you what exactly I’d heard up till then,” said Maude, “but I know that what I heard right then was a man screaming.”
David felt something heavy and cold, like a lead weight drop into his stomach.
“Ma’am,” he started, surprised at how steady and sure his own voice sounded even to his ears, “please stay right here.” He turned and hurried up the stairway to the apartment directly above Maude’s.
He took a deep breath, drew his gun, and held it in position just like he’d learned and practiced so many times at the academy. He lifted his hand and went to knock on the door, tensing immediately as he felt it give and swing open under the force of his knuckles rapping against the wood.
This was enough for probable cause, he told himself, pushing the door open further and stepping into the apartment. He wasn’t more than two steps in before the smell hit him. Thick and acrid, like iron, prickling in the back of his nose and down his throat to the point where he could almost taste it. He was recoiling from the smell even before he looked down and saw the body, absolutely decimated.
What was once a man was spread across the living room floor of the apartment in several pieces. Directly in front of him was the bulk of the body, a torso with a head and a single leg still attached. Both arms had been ripped from the body, judging by the crude and haphazard stumps left behind, and although David could see one lying a few feet away, the other was nowhere to be seen. The other leg was torn into shreds below the knee, several chunks hanging off by bits of sinew and muscle.
David wasn’t sure what the man looked like when he was alive. His face was almost entirely gone, bloody and torn beyond all recognition. It took David what felt like an endless amount of time, but was really only a few seconds, before he realized he’d stopped breathing. For a moment, he wasn’t sure what he should do. None of his training at the academy prepared him for this, but in an instant, his radio was in his hand.
“Officer Baxter. Dispatch, this is Officer Baxter. Um, dead body. Be advised I have found a dead body. I… um… I need backup. And paramedics. ASAP. Um, please.” That probably wasn’t what he should have said. Was he supposed to call for paramedics? That was standard protocol, he thought, but he couldn’t quite remember. What was the point if this guy was dead? His stomach was churning, and he felt the edges of his vision blurring, but he couldn’t look away from the scene in front of him.
He was staring hard into the tiny exposed threads of muscle and tissue swirling together in what used to be the man’s leg when he heard it. There was something moving in the bathroom.
Damn, he needed to clear the rest of the apartment, and he’d just been standing there like a moron. He moved toward the bathroom, stumbling as his boot met something soft and wet. He looked down.
It was a piece of the body.
Contamination. Destruction of Evidence. Damaging the scene. It was all rolling around in his head, but he pushed it to the side. That couldn’t be helped now. He needed to focus on the suspect in the bathroom.
The bathroom door was slightly ajar, and he readied his pistol as he positioned himself to push it open. He took a breath, braced himself, and knocked back the door.
Inside, curled against the edge of the bathtub, with the man’s other arm held snugly beneath its large, clawed paw, was a huge golden animal that David immediately recognized as a lion.
For about the hundredth time today, David’s brain seemed to short-circuit, and he found himself frozen and unsure of what to do. Then, some small, primal, instinctual voice in the back of David’s brain screamed at him to move just as his eyes roved up to meet the animal’s. In the same moment that David moved, the big cat leaped forward, gouging its claws into the other side of the bathroom door just as David managed to get it closed.
He snatched his radio off his place where it sat over his collarbone. “I NEED BACKUP NOW!”
2
Charlie
The first thing I was aware of when I woke up that morning was a sharp pain on the left side of my neck. It was the kind of deeply rooted ache that usually came from spending a night sleeping in a very uncomfortable position, and I knew it would stay with me for the next day or two. I groaned as I rolled over onto my side and then up into a seated position. There was a dull ache in my neck that I just knew was going to send shocks of pain over my shoulders and down my spine every time I turned my head too quickly for the rest of the day.
Great.
My first thought was that I’d gotten trashed on cheap liquor and stumbled home too out of it to make it to bed. I’d certainly done that plenty of times in my youth, and the throbbing headache and sore muscles I was experiencing now were all too familiar, bringing me back to those days.
That didn’t really make sense, though, and almost as soon as I’d had that thought, I dismissed it. I’d left that life of irresponsible foolishness behind and traded cheap beers and bar fights for a badge and a gun. Although, I guess bar fights were still a pretty regular part of my life. Except, now I was usually the one called to break them up instead of being the sorry idiot instigating them.
Thoughts of badges and guns and breaking up bar fights sparked something in my memory, and like a tidal wave, my memories of the night before came flooding back.
The reason I was sleeping on the floor was that I didn’t have a bed. I didn’t have anything since I had just moved here the night before. I stood up and stretched, wincing as every muscle in my body seemed to cry out in protest. Really, sleeping on the floor shouldn’t have taken this much of a toll on my body, considering I’d slept in worse, considerably less comfortable, and considerably more dangerous places. That being said, I wasn’t a kid anymore, and even though I made it a point to work out regularly and stay in shape, it was far too easy to get used to little comforts such as having a soft place to rest. I padded my way across the dingy, cream-colored carpet, which, at some point in the distant past, may have been a fluffy kind of shag but had now been weathered and beaten down by so many years of footfalls that it had taken on a lumpy, fuzzy sort of texture. It was still kind of soft, though, and I couldn’t help but notice how it felt beneath my feet as I walked toward the window that overlooked the front side of my apartment complex.
The sun was just beginning to set, and in the distance, I could make out the dazzling lights of the Las Vegas strip. That was one of my favorite features of the apartment when I had firs
t toured. I definitely couldn’t afford an apartment on the strip where the rent for a tiny studio even smaller than this apartment would be three or even four times what I was paying here. Although I was getting a fairly impressive salary increase as a result of switching jobs from a small-town detective to a federal agent with MBLIS’s Las Vegas branch, I still wasn’t wealthy or crazy enough to blow that much money on an apartment.
The view from here was enough for me, and the distance even had the added benefit of allowing me to live and sleep in relative quiet, something that would be impossible for those living in the heart of all the hustle and bustle.
That said, even this small apartment on the outskirts of downtown was still a massive change from my former home in Elko, Nevada, where, at a population of just under eighteen thousand, there was seldom a more pressing crime for me to investigate than a group of teenagers that had broken into a gaming store after hours to steal less than two hundred dollars worth of merchandise. I chuckled to myself as I remembered how they had come in on their own to confess a few days later, terrified I was going to throw them in prison. It was nice in a way to live in a small, friendly town where nothing bad ever happened, but if I was totally honest, it made my job incredibly boring.
Even though I loved my community and was definitely comfortable with what was basically a desk job, I knew there was more I could be doing. Years of living on the street as a young man had exposed me to crimes and horrors most people went their whole lives without experiencing. I wanted to do what I could to prevent any more young people from going through what I did, which was why I made the decision to join the Military Liaison Border Investigative Services, or MBLIS.
My mentor, Harry Monroe, told me that an international federal investigative service was establishing a branch in Las Vegas and encouraged me to apply. I had my doubts, of course. Not of Harry, since I knew that I could trust him with my life, but over whether they’d even want me. Sure, I was a good cop and confident in my abilities, but what chance did a small-town cop from the middle of nowhere have against what were most likely more experienced applicants? I knew that I had the mettle to do the job, but how exactly was I supposed to convey that to them? I couldn’t exactly put that my up-close and personal experiences with the seedy underbelly of the crime world as a teenager made me the perfect candidate for rooting out career criminals on my resume. It certainly didn’t help, either, that I didn’t have any educational experience beyond a high school diploma and absolutely no extracurriculars or impressive accomplishments to speak of.
