BloodWalk

by BloodWalk (lit)

  Serruto came into the room, face grim, and whispered to one of the shooting team. Fear flooded Garreth. Was it about Harry?

  Serruto backed against the wall by the door. The detective turned to look down at Garreth. "Describe what happened to you in the restaurant where you and Sergeant Takananda went for lunch."

  Garreth stared at him. How could anyone have learned about that? The obvious answer took long seconds to occur to him, but when it did, Garreth came out of his chair grinning. "Did Harry tell you about that? Can he talk?"

  "He told us," Serruto said soothingly. "He's going to be all right."

  Garreth wanted to cry in sheer happiness and relief.

  "Tell us about the restaurant," the detective repeated.

  So overjoyed about Harry that nothing else mattered, he told them, scrupulously detailing all his symptoms, omitting only his knowledge of the cause. That gave them a whole new set of questions to ask, of course, but eventually they ran out of even those, perhaps in sheer exhaustion, and let him go.

  Serruto walked down the corridor with him. "Mikaelian, until further notice, keep in touch. No more APBs, okay?"

  Garreth nodded, too tired to talk. He could feel daylight outside the building. It made his head ache. He pulled the dark glasses out of the coat over his arm and put them on.

  "I have your badge in my office. If you change your mind, you can have it back."

  Garreth bit his lip. "Thanks, but I can't take it."

  Serruto eyed him. Garreth sensed an emotional jumble in the lieutenant, but when Serruto spoke, it was only to say dryly, "Resigning doesn't get you out of the paperwork for everything up to now."

  They stopped at the elevator. Garreth punched for down. "I know. Let me get a few hours in the rack and I'll type the reports."

  "Why don't you see Harry before you do either? When they let us in to see him a couple of hours ago, the first thing he did was ask about you. He blames himself for everything."

  Garreth shook his head. "No. It's my fault. I-"

  Serruto interrupted. "You don't have to fight for the blame. I'm willing to spread it between both of you. You're not a child, Mikaelian; no one should have had to tell you that that attack indicated you weren't fit for duty. You should have seen a doctor immediately. Harry should have made sure you went and that I was notified of what happened." He grimaced. "My guess is, before the shooting board is finished, all of us will be wearing some egg."

  4

  The Records section clerk regarded Garreth with some surprise. "Well, good evening, Inspector. I heard you gave up your badge."

  The grapevine worked as efficiently as ever, he noticed. "I did, but I have a few reports to finish before it's official. Would you have time to find this for me?" He handed her the case and serial numbers on Madelaine Bieber's assault charge.

  "I think so. How is Sergeant Takananda?"

  "He's doing fine."

  Except for insisting on blaming himself for the O'Hare screwup. "I'm senior partner," he had repeated several times during Garreth's visit, his voice thin and weak but emphatic. "I let us go hot-dogging in there."

  "Don't worry about it now," Lien had said, just as quietly and emphatically. "Neither of you died."

  Garreth's and Harry's eyes met, mutually agreeing not to discuss the differences between her scale of priorities and that the shooting board would apply.

  "What's this Lien tells me about you turning in your badge?" Harry asked. "You didn't have to do that. You just need more time to recuperate before you come back to work."

  Lien's eyes begged Garreth not to discuss the issue. He gave her the barest nod in reply. Anything that might stress Harry should be avoided at all cost, and Garreth read serious anxiety in Harry over the resignation. "I see that now."

  "Go ask for it back."

  "I will," Garreth lied.

  Harry relaxed. A moment later, a nurse appeared and chased them out of the room.

  In the corridor, Lien had looked up at him and read the truth somewhere in his face. "Thank you for giving him peace. What will you do now?"

  "I have some things to finish first. Then"-he shrugged-"maybe I'll go back to school and finish my degree."

  The lies went on and on, he thought, leaning on the counter in Records. Did he think the web of them would help him bridge the gulf around him? Or were they building a protective fence to keep others from discovering that gulf and falling into it?

  "I'm sorry, Inspector," the clerk said, returning. "That file is out."

  Garreth sighed. Who else would want it after all these years? Unless . . . "Did Sergeant Takananda check it out?"

  "No. Lieutenant Serruto."

  Thanking her, he went back to Homicide. He found the squad room nearly empty. The few detectives there crowded around him as he came in, asking about Harry. He repeated what he had told the clerk in Records.

  Beyond the windows of his office, Serruto slumped tiredly at his desk, looking as though he had not slept in days. He glanced up and, seeing Garreth, beckoned to him.

  "How do you feel?" he asked when Garreth reached the open door.

  "Fine. I'll get started on the reports." He lingered in the doorway. "I wanted to check out this Madelaine Bieber whose prints were all over Barber's apartment. R and I says you have the file on her assault arrest."

  "Yes." Serruto eyed him. "Why do you want to know about her?"

  Garreth put on a faint smile. "Curiosity, I guess."

  Serruto reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a badge case Garreth recognized. He laid it on top of the desk. "Mikaelian, if you want to play detective, you pick this up again; otherwise, forget about Madelaine Bieber and Lane Barber until you're called to testify at Barber's trial. They're police business." He yawned hugely and added almost as an afterthought, "I nail vigilante hides to the wall."

  Garreth retreated to his typewriter.

  Now what? he wondered, feeding a report form into the typewriter. He could wait out Serruto. He could sit here working all night until Serruto and the others left, then search for the file. His sharpened hearing could detect someone coming in time to avoid being caught burglarizing his lieutenant's office.

  Is this how you uphold the law, an inner voice asked contemptuously, breaking it for your own private ends?

  He bit his lip, suddenly ashamed. What was he thinking about? It might take a vampire to catch a vampire, but if he let himself become like her in the process, what right did he have to hunt her? All right, no shortcuts, he promised his conscience. Somehow, even without a badge, I'll stay legal. He rubbed aching temples.

  "Why don't you forget that and go back home to bed?" Serruto asked from the doorway of his office. "On second thought, let's make that an order. Go home. You're on limited duty: desk duty only, daytime only."

  "Yes, sir," Garreth replied, and obediently left.

  Riding down in the elevator, however, he considered the problem of legally seeing the contents of the file. Could he ask Cohen or Kolb to look at it and pass on the information? They might expect him to say why he wanted to know. Worse, they might tell Serruto who asked them to look at it. Was there anywhere outside the file that he could find the same information?

  He found the answer to that about the time he stepped out of the elevator onto the ground floor. Then he had to run for his car to reach the library before it closed.

  "I need the October 1941 editions of the Chronicle," he told the librarian on duty in the microfilm section. He wished he remembered the exact date of that assault. It meant searching the entire month's newspapers.

  He spun the film through the viewer as fast as he could and still read it. He felt closing time coming and sped up the viewer a bit more.

  By concentrating so hard on small items, though, he almost missed what he wanted. Lane had earned herself two columns and a picture on the front page. There was no mistaking her, towering tall between the four police officers hauling her back from a woman who crouched with blood leaking through the fingers
of the hand held over her left ear. "The Barbary Coast Still Lives," the headline proclaimed.

  Garreth thanked Lady Luck for the lurid reporting of that day and pressed the button for a printed copy of the page. Maybe he had something here. This Madelaine with her face contorted in fury was a far cry indeed from the Lane Barber who stood him up against a wall years later and coolly proceeded to drink his lifeblood, then go back to work.

  He read the story in the dome light of his car, writing down all names and addresses in his notebook. He smiled as he read, amused at both the gossipy style of the story, laden with adjectives, and what he saw between the lines, knowing Lane to be what she was.

  A woman named Claudia Darling, described as "a pert, petite, blue-eyed brunette," was accosted in the Red Onion on the evening of Friday, October 17, by "a Junoesque" red-haired singer named Mala Babra-Lane could fill a phone book with her aliases-employed by the club. An argument ensued over a naval officer both had met in the same club the evening before, Miss Babra claiming that Miss Darling had caused the serviceman to break a date made previously with Miss Babra.

  Garreth smiled. He could just imagine Lane's frustration . . . supper all picked out and some other lady walking off with it.

  When Miss Darling denied the allegation, the story went on, Miss Babra attacked. They had to be separated by police hastily summoned to the scene. Four officers were needed to subdue and hold Miss Babra. Miss Darling suffered severe bite wounds to one ear and scratches on the face, but "the popular habitue of the nightclub scene is reported to be in satisfactory condition at County General Hospital. "

  Garreth eyed the last sentence, ticking his tongue against his teeth. He sensed a sly innuendo, something readers of the time had been meant to infer, but which he, a generation later, failed to understand. He studied the photograph: the four officers straining to hold Lane, obviously surprised by her strength; Lane ablaze with fury; and the Darling woman, showing what the photographer must have considered a highly satisfactory amount of leg as she crouched dazed and bleeding on the floor. The bare leg caught Garreth's attention, but the rest of the woman held it. Even with the differences in hairstyle and fashions, he recognized what she wore as just a bit flashier, shorter, and tighter than the dresses on the women in the background. Now he understood the innuendo and chuckled. Even a generation removed, she clearly signaled her profession to him: hooker.

  That was a break. If she was in the life, she had probably been busted a time or two, and that meant a record of her: names, addresses, companions. Tomorrow he would run her through R and I.

  Humming, he switched off the dome light and started the car, heading out of the parking lot towrd home to pick up his thermos before hunting supper.

  5

  Danger! Even in the oblivion of vampire sleep Garreth sensed it. The heat of human warmth touched him, spiced by the scent of blood. Someone stood in the room with him . . . stood over him! Wake up, Garreth. As though floating somewhere apart, he saw the young Englishman pick up a spade and bring it down toward the man lying in the coffin.

  Fear dragged Garreth up from darkness, spurring him to open his eyes and roll away from the slashing spade, but sleep and daylight weighted him. His arms rose with painful slowness to ward off the blow.

  "No, don't," he said.

  A hand caught his arm and shook it. "Garreth, wake up. You're having a nightmare. It's all right."

  The words reached his ears, but his brain made no immediate sense of them. His eyes, focusing, saw Lien's face above him and recognized that it did not belong to the spade-swinging man, but his mind spun in confusion, disoriented. Lien? Where was he? The pallet under him on the bed indicated that he must be home. So how-

  Panic flooded through him. He sat bolt upright. Lien! She had caught him in his unorthodox sleeping arrangement! And naked, too, beneath the single sheet over him, he remembered, clutching the sheet and pulling it up to his chin.

  "Lien, what are you doing here? How did you get in? What time is it?"

  She sat on the edge of the bed. "It's past two in the afternoon. I came because your mother called me after church. She's been trying to reach you since Friday. When I saw your car out front, I knew you had to be home, but I pounded on the door for five minutes without any response, so I used your spare key to let myself in."

  As of today, the practice of hiding a key outside stopped. What if an enemy had stood over him, like Jonathan Harker in his nightmare? He would have been helpless to protect himself.

  "Why did you unplug your phone?" Lien asked.

  Unplug his phone? Oh, yes . . . he remembered now. He had done it Friday. He sighed. "I forgot I did it."

  "I've reconnected it. Now you'd better call your mother before she has a heart attack." Lien started to get up, but paused in the act. "Why do you have that air mattress on top of the bed? And how can you sleep with only a sheet? It's freezing in here."

  He avoided the question. "I'll call . . . if you'll let me get up and dress."

  She headed toward the bedroom door. "Don't take too long."

  He pulled on the first shirt and pair of pants he found, which turned out to be jeans and a ski sweater. The jeans, always snug before, hung on him. He added a belt, taken up four holes tighter than usual, and slipped his off-duty gun into an ankle holster.

  He was hurriedly shaving when he heard Lien call, "Garreth, how old is this food in your refrigerator?"

  He dropped the razor and ran for the kitchen.

  Lien stood before the open refrigerator, unscrewing the top from his thermos. "I thought I'd fix you something to eat, but everything seems to be either moldy or mummified."

  "Don't open that!" He snatched the thermos away from her, then, as she stared open-mouthed at him, stammered, "It's . . . the liquid protein that's part of my diet. It . . . needs constant refrigeration." Carefully tightening the lid again, he returned the thermos to the refrigerator.

  Lien frowned at him. "You don't mean to tell me that's all you're eating?"

  "Of course not," he lied. "It's just all I eat here at home."

  He shut the refrigerator and herded her out of the kitchen, sweating. Had she seen too much? Would it make her suspicious? He wished he could think, but his mind only churned, screaming at him to run.

  "You should eat more," Lien said. "'Losing weight too fast isn't healthy, and you look positively gaunt."

  As much as he adored her, he longed to throw her bodily out of the apartment. Her concern and solicitude terrified him. "Thanks for coming by."

  "I want to hear you call your mother before I leave."

  He did not sigh; that might tell her how anxious he was to have her leave. Instead, he made himself smile and pick up the phone.

  After all the fuss, his mother wanted nothing more than to see how he was. "Mother keeps insisting that you're dead," she said, "and you know how unnerving her Feelings can be for everyone else. Why don't you come home for a visit? Actually seeing you should reassure her."

  "Maybe this weekend," he said, "if I have time."

  "Judith needs to talk to you when you're here, too."

  "Judith?" A new fear touched him. "Is something wrong with Brian?"

  "He's fine. It's something else; she'll tell you."

  "Do you know?"

  She hedged and wandered off on a tangent, which told him she knew, all right.

  "Tell me. Don't let her hit me cold with it."

  "Well." He heard her take a breath. "She wants your permission to let Dennis adopt Brian."

  That single sentence buried all his impatience to be rid of Lien and on his way to the office to check the Darling woman through R and I. "She what! You can tell her-no, I'll tell her myself!"

  He stabbed down the phone button. Releasing it again, he punched Judith's phone number. No one answered. Punching for Information, he asked for Judith's parents' number. She often spent Sunday afternoons there.

  "Hello, Garreth," Judith said cautiously when her mother put her on the line. "
How are you?"

  "What do you mean, you want permission for your husband to adopt Brian? What the hell makes you think I'll ever agree to that?"

  Her breath caught. "So much for polite amenities. No, it's all right," she said to someone on the other end. "Just a minute, Garreth." He heard her moving and a door shutting, with a diminution of background sound. "Now. I thought maybe you'd agree because you love Brian and want what's best for him. Brian and Dennis are already good friends, and-"

  "They can be friends, but I'm his father. I stay his father."

  "He needs one full-time, Garreth, someone he can feel he belongs to. What are you? He's lucky if he sees you four or five times a year."

  "You were the one who insisted on moving back to Davis. My job doesn't give me enough time off to-"

  "Your job is exactly what you choose to let it be." Her bitterness came clearly over the wire to him. "It wouldn't have to be twenty-four hours a day every day, but you wanted it that way. You chose that job over Brian and me."

  Oh Lord here we go . . . two minutes of conversation and down into the same old rut. "Judith, I don't want to start that again."

  "With Brian adopted, you wouldn't have to pay child support anymore."

  She thought she could buy Brian for her precious Dennis? "Forget it!" he said furiously. "Brian is my son and I'm not giving him to anyone else!"

  He slammed down the receiver, shaking, and turned to find Lien regarding him with sympathy. All the anxiety related to her presence here returned in an icy flood. Don't let her think too much.

  "I have to be going. I have stacks of paperwork," he said. "Thanks again for coming by. I appreciate your concern."

  "You'll visit Harry sometime today, won't you?"

  He picked up a ski jacket and hurried her out the door. "Of course. May I have my spare key back? Thank you." He clattered down the steps ahead of her and out onto the street, calling over his shoulder. "I'll come by this evening."

  Pulling away from the curb, he saw Lien in the rearview mirror, staring after the car. He shivered. She had caught him asleep! She had almost found the blood in the thermos. If he remained friends with Harry and her, sooner or later he would slip, would give away something fatal. He had to find Lane just as soon as possible, take care of her, and leave the city before he woke some morning to find someone standing over him with a pointed wooden stake.