by Mark Henwick
I wobbled a bit, thrown by the question. “Everything I do when I’m in uniform.”
“So all the rest is play.”
I didn’t talk to anyone, other than the colonel, about what I did for the army. I was living two lives and there was a sense of inevitability that they would cross. I’d dealt with stress and secrecy in Ops 4-10, but I’d had support from people in the same position. Here, I was alone. I had no one I could truly share with, let alone receive support from. Sure, I had help from the PD. Help appropriate for a rookie doing her job.
There wasn’t any play. It had all but disappeared into the colonel’s work, exercise, eating and sleeping. I didn’t want to lie to Liu.
My balance went to hell, and I had to bring my foot down and move into the next sequence of moves early. Damn. I came here to stop thinking about these things.
He sighed.
“Sit,” he said, folding down into a half lotus. I copied him.
There was a small class doing exercises at the other end of the Kwan, leaving us alone.
“I enjoy you attending this Kwan,” he said and paused. “But I am worried for you.”
“Shi Fu?”
“Your training in the army has given you such control. The Western world calls this ‘iron control.’ You use this to completely hide things deep inside.” He held up a hand to stop me from interrupting. “But iron can rust. Iron can become brittle. There are angers and forces buried in you that will find their way out. If they do this by themselves they can destroy you.”
Liu could sound obscure at times, but we’d never had a conversation like this before. With anyone else, it would have just been embarrassing. But Liu seemed to be talking to something inside me that was taking note.
“Whatever it is, you cannot continue to do what you are doing,” he said. “You must change. You will change; you have no option except how much you are in control of the change.”
Well, what would he advise, if I told him everything that was happening?
Even thinking about it at a mundane level: should I become a PI? Cut myself off from what little support the police were able to provide me? At least then, I wouldn’t be keeping things from them.
“Everywhere you hide your true self, you do damage, to yourself and to those you are hiding from.”
Would he say I should stop seeing my family?
Liu watched me mull through what he’d said.
“If you wish, we will talk again, after sessions.”
I nodded silently.
“For now, trust to your instincts more. Trust them against the rote learning that tells you that things must be so. You are more powerful than you think, if you let yourself be.”
He rose suddenly. “Now, more sparring,” he said.
“Boxing again?” I put my gloves back on, but he shook his head.
“Jujitsu, I think. Not with me. With Tullah.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
I turned to look and sighed. I was going to have to go back to being careful again. Tullah was shorter and slighter than me, and she looked as if she was still in college. She was some exotic blend of Chinese, but martial arts aren’t braided into the genome, they have to be learned. Liu sometimes had me sparring against students who thought they had come a long way. A sort of salutary lesson against getting big-headed.
If she read my thoughts, she made no sign of it. Her face, partly covered by the head protector, was shiny and open. She moved well at least.
We squared off on the mats and I made a standard lunge. A feint, to see how quickly she got out of the way.
She didn’t jerk back, she didn’t move away. She moved in. Inside the span of my arms, she canceled any advantage of reach I had. My weight was too far forward, my center of gravity higher than hers, and she grabbed the collar of my gi, crouched and twisted herself, so that my momentum made me fall over her. Then she heaved and I was tossed in the air.
Luckily, all the necessary reactions had been burned into me. I tucked up and rolled right back onto my feet, coming back up ready for a secondary attack. Purely as a matter of form.
It was a good thing that kind of action had been drilled into me. Tullah was right in there, pressing home her attack.
Instincts took over and I caught her coming in off balance against my stable stance. I thumped her in the belly and then threw her over my hip.
She rolled neatly and bounced back onto her feet, just like I had, ready in case I was already coming in. I wasn’t. I was standing there berating myself for being an overconfident asshole.
“That was awesome!” she squealed. And came straight back at me.
Ten minutes later we were both dripping in sweat, and I’d been infected with her laughter.
But I had a date with Officer Knight, so I reluctantly put up my gloves in surrender.
She tossed her head protector aside and gave me a hug.
“Thank you so much, Amber. I can call you Amber, can’t I? I’ve seen you practicing but Pa didn’t want me to spar with you. I’ve had to go on at him for, like, ages.”
“Whoa! Master Liu is your dad?”
“Yeah. He’s pretty cool.”
“Okay.” I guessed I would call him pretty cool if I was nineteen years old and overfilled with exuberance.
“When are you coming back? Can we spar again?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course. Tuesday probably. I won’t go so easy on you next time,” I said.
Ha!
“Awesome.”
I had a sudden thought. “And what if I sent someone to train with you? She might have a problem persuading her parents or her uncle to pay for coaching, but if she could just join in and see what it’s like? Ask a few questions?” I said, innocently.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Her name’s Jo. I’ll send you her cell.”
“Okay. Thanks so much for today.” She skipped away.
I grinned. Oh, that was evil. But they’d wear each other out instead of me.
I waved goodbye to Liu and went to shower.
It didn’t escape me that he’d matched me up with Tullah deliberately and given me a message in one neat maneuver.
His earlier comments were replaying in my mind. Could he really see things inside me?
What if his message was about things going on deeper inside me? What if he was saying I’d be better off not fighting it, just becoming a vampire? Disappear into their world. All this crap would just go away then. Life would be simpler.
What would it feel like, being a vampire?
I shut that thought down. Anyway, there was no way he could see stuff like that inside me.
Even at a surface level, he had certainly given me lots to think about, but Saturday night on patrol wasn’t going to be the place for it.
Chapter 13
Saturday’s patrol with Knight was like any other Saturday—the constant feel that things could become a riot with the wrong spark. The feeling of disbelief when they didn’t.
I wasn’t sure whether he’d worked through his anger, or he was just giving me another chance, but Knight acted as if the last shift hadn’t happened.
He was on good form with his patter as we went from incident to incident. I heard things I hadn’t heard before. Some of them were useful.
We were making our way back after a trip to the station to hand over an incompetent burglar, stoned out of his mind, when I turned onto 12th and an idea formed about checking out Werner Schumacher’s sighting on Friday night.
“Y’know, it used to be that burglars were worth chasing,” Knight was saying. “They were professionals. It gave you a sense of achievement to bring them in. Now the guy doesn’t even notice us walking up behind him.”
“I don’t think he even knew we were at the station,” I said. “It’ll be fun for him when he wakes up in the morning.” We drew level with the alley where the body had been found and I let the car slow. The traffic was light.
“It’s quieter,” I said.
I nodded in time with the emphasis he beat out on the dash. I’d learned that lesson in harder schools than he had, where the gap between careless and dead was frighteningly small. Still, it was sound advice, the sort of thing a rookie would need to hear.
We passed the Schumachers’ shop. Werner had looked out and seen three men walking along here. From his description, the security camera I’d seen from the club, and the death of the man whose body we’d found in the dumpster, it was a reasonable assumption that they were the same group.
I didn’t have proof and I couldn’t talk it through with Knight, but we were in the right place and I could use the time to think about it.
They’d walked along here. They’d been wearing coats. Of course, they could have parked a car and walked the last bit. If they did that, how had they picked their parking spot? Why not park right outside where they were going? If they didn’t want the car to be seen where they were going, how far would they walk? Where would they park that would make them feel it was safe?
“What’s up?” asked Knight, finally.
“I’m practicing being a detective,” I said. He knew which case I was talking about. “I heard that they’ve identified the vic and he shared an apartment backing onto the alley. I’m guessing he was dumped so his roommates didn’t find him. The body might never have been found, or only found when it went to the dump.”
“You know what Buchanan will think about you getting involved?”
“Humor me. Buchanan’s not in the car with us. We’re just kicking it around.”
“Yeah? Okay, so he still wasn’t killed in the apartment or the alley. He had to have bled out someplace else. Where? How did they get him back there?”
I knew an answer to that—he’d been bled out right in that apartment, but I wasn’t about to share how that was.
“Not relevant at the moment,” I said instead. “My point is, the three guys we have reported walking here at the right time are either suspects or need to be questioned.”
Knight played along with it, but I could tell what he thought about the rookie trying to be detective.
“So,” I said. “Three guys in coats. Where did they walk from?”
He waved his hands. “There are buses, there are roads going everywhere. There’s the path along the creek. They could have come from anywhere.”
“Yeah, but why park up at the stadium, say, and walk down here to commit a murder? You wouldn’t walk miles. You wouldn’t take a bus or a taxi and leave a trail. Not three guys together. Gut feel says they came by car, but they didn’t want to park right by the apartment.”
“Okay, fair enough, but where does that get you?”
“Well, they live here, or work here, or have someplace to park that doesn’t raise suspicions. Someplace private, where they’re not going to be noticed or need to buy a ticket.”
“Like a private garage?”
“Or a business they work at.”
Knight shook his head. “They wouldn’t feel safe. Some other employee might come in and see the car.” He frowned. “Unless it was a small, three-man business.”
He made a fair point. I nodded.
We’d gone as far as Speer Boulevard. Speer cuts diagonally northwest to southeast. It’s a major road, split into north and southbound lanes by Cherry Creek and the trail. It felt like a border. Past it were school sports fields, businesses and a park. It didn’t feel right, them coming that far, so I turned and drove slowly back, looking at the side roads.
One of these?
“It’s all kinds of problem, this case,” Knight said.
“Why especially?”
“Press. Most murders, however they get reported, people read the details and they know, or think they know, why the person was killed. They move on, they say they’re not like that, it’s not going to happen to them.” Knight shrugged. “But this one is strange, especially when you add in the thing about the blood. If the press gets hold of that before we’ve caught the perps and explained it all away, they blow it up. ‘Police don’t even know where the murder was committed’—you know the kind of story. Things like that make people feel unsafe. It gets air time. It makes everyone look bad. The mayor gets unhappy, the chief gets it in the ear and we get it in the neck.”
I snorted. I was looking down the side streets hoping for inspiration to strike.
Is this the sort of place vampires hang out?
“What makes the brass happy are murders that can be pigeonholed in one of the known categories,” Knight said, counting things on his fingers. “Gangs killing each other, mugging gone bad in the wrong part of town, crime of passion, revenge, that sort of thing. What they don’t want to hear is anything that makes Joe Average feel unsafe. Psychopaths, serial killers, murders the police don’t understand, and so on.”
Vampires, I thought.
Knight ran his hand over his face. “Look, you did okay Friday night.” He sighed. “It’s kinda difficult remembering you’re not a rookie like the others.”
I nodded.
“Word is,” he went on, “your scores are good enough for the SWAT team.”
“Thanks.” That wouldn’t be so bad. Not one partner, but a team. Much more like the army. But I’d need to do my time on patrol first, and for that I needed a partner like Knight.
“But if you want my advice, which is free, and you get it anyway…”
I managed a sickly grin. “Hit me.”
“Instructor.”
“Oh, come on!”
“I have only one more thing to say about it. Something very important.” He waited till he saw he had my attention. “Regular hours.” He tapped the clock on the dash, and we laughed.
Then he turned serious again. “Farrell, listen to me, just this once, hey? This one is the kind of case you want to keep as far away from as you can,” he said. “Don’t do anything you aren’t specifically told to do. Don’t start spouting any theories.”
Yeah. Unfortunately, not an option.
The buildings on the right, down Cheyenne Street, looked like an interesting mix, but it was one-way. Further up, near the Schumachers’, I was thinking about doing the circuit and driving back up Cheyenne when I saw a group of girls on the street. They looked far too young to be out this late.
“Whoa,” I said. “How old are those kids? No way their parents let them out at this time of night.” I stopped the car. “And if they did, they shouldn’t have.” Especially if there were vampires roaming the neighborhood. I shivered at the thought of those guys on the video getting hold of a kid.
“Sneaked out, probably. Not really our problem,” Knight said, but he got out with me. They were even younger up close. Young enough so that the approach of ‘authority’—namely me in my scary police uniform—evaporated all the bravado of being out on the streets at night. The group was too young to know what to do or where to go. They wouldn’t get into any bars. The whole purpose seemed to have been to put on makeup and hang out with their friends without their parents knowing.
Fine, but not in this neighborhood, and not this late. Not on my watch.
“Evening, girls.” Knight beat me to it, sounding a little awkward. “I don’t think this is an appropriate place for you to be at this time.” He pointed at one in the front. “Where’s your home?”
The girls had regained a little courage and were just about to start some bluffing and back-talk, when I recognized a face at the back, even with the Goth makeup.
“Emily Schumacher, isn’t it?” I reached through the group and got her shoulder. Her friends eased away as if I’d just told them she had the plague.
“Err…yeah,” she admitted.
Her look was mirrored on every face. Aw crap, busted.
Immediately followed by thoughts of what their parents were going to do. It was almost funny.
Knight and I shepherded them a coupl
e of blocks, to where the Schumachers lived. Werner came running out as we arrived. He’d just discovered Emily missing.
The Schumachers handled it well. I could see they were upset, but there was no shouting. Klara recognized the girls and had them sit in the kitchen while she started calling their parents. She was merciful enough to bring out some wipes so they could clean up before being seen. Poor Emily wouldn’t have that advantage.
Werner wiped the sweat off his brow, thanked us several times and checked that there wasn’t anything more going to come of it.
We assured Werner it wasn’t a problem and walked back to the car.
Now, where was I? A circuit to come back up Cheyenne. But Knight had gotten bored.
“Take a left here and head up to the center,” he said. “We haven’t been up that end yet tonight.”
We hadn’t, and there just happened to be an all-night café with good donuts that way. I sighed. He was my partner and I was the rookie. I turned left.
We handed things over to the graveyard shift, making it feel like an early night for us. A few minutes later, and we’d have caught the radio calls about the next murder, the one that moved it all a huge step closer to me.
Chapter 14
SUNDAY
I spent the morning down at the station, looking at traffic footage for the cameras in the vicinity of the first murder and cross checking with the area around Club Agonia. It’s not the quick and easy job they show on TV, not by a long way.
Lunch was at Mom’s. It wasn’t a success. Naturally, she always wanted to know what was going on in my life and there was almost nothing I could tell her. It frustrated me and it hurt her. I escaped as soon as I could and went back to trying to figure out where the vampires had come from and what cars they drove.
In the late afternoon, I took a break and stopped in at the Schumachers.
We sat in their living room. Klara brought out some little Bavarian cakes and cookies that were a regional specialty. The treats tempted Emily downstairs.
Not surprisingly, she wasn’t made up today. I gathered the makeup had been restricted to pre-agreed get-togethers, and only one per week was going to be allowed, which had to be supervised. The rest of the time, she was completely grounded. She was only allowed out for school or with her parents.