“Y’know you guys really shouldn’t fuck with me,” I said. “I’m starting to feel like a broken record saying that, and everyone I feed that line to ends up dead by the time the dust settles.”
The talkative one turned and smiled, his fangs glinting in what little light made its way down the alley. It was the smile of a predator who knew he was on top of the world. Not the nervous smile of a vampire who was worried about cornering one of the few humans out there who could kick his ass.
“Really, Mr. Byron?” the talkative one asked. “And why shouldn’t we fuck with you tonight?”
“Because the past couple of nights your guys caught me by surprise and I still kicked their asses. Tonight I’m prepared, and you really won’t like dealing with me when I’ve had time to prepare.”
A boot crunched into the grime of the alley behind me. A small sound, but more than enough to give me warning. I had to give the silent big guy credit. He was mostly silent right up until the end.
It was the “mostly” part that was going to make this the end for him though.
I pivoted and my foot shot out catching the silent one in the chest. That put an end to his silence. He let out a surprised grunt and doubled over which allowed just enough time for me to pull my bat off my back and slam it down with the pointy end first.
It slid into the suddenly not-so-silent vampire with the sound of tearing paper and I grimaced. They couldn’t even sound right when they were getting stabbed. It was supposed to be all wet and messy sounding. I knew because I’d done it plenty of times to the living.
This time he really started making some noise. The vamp threw his head up and screamed at me, but it was too late. Already the vamp was starting to decompose so I ripped my bat free and swung around just in time to make contact with the talkative vampire’s head.
It connected with a satisfying crunch that did sound absolutely correct. The vampire went down for the count and I moved to stand over him. It struck me that it might not be the greatest idea inviting this asshole to give me a surprise shot to the nuts, but I figured the way his head was caved in left me with a bit of a safety margin.
It would be a couple of minutes before that healed up well enough for the vampire to do much of anything other than flailing around on the ground. I grimaced. The grime on the alley floor, refuse from decades of neglect and a few years of drunk college kids coming out here to relieve themselves when the bathrooms in the club were full, couldn’t be good for the guy’s suit.
Not that the asshole would have to worry about that for much longer.
“I tried to warn you,” I said.
I held up my bat and was about to finish the job when I heard a piercing scream behind me. A scream that didn’t sound at all like a vampire dying. I turned around in time to see a college girl standing with phone in hand screaming at the top of her lungs.
A crowd had gathered down there. Damn. The line for the front entrance must have snaked around to the alley entrance while I was preoccupied with these two assholes. Even as I stared I saw familiar blue and red lights reflecting on the alley entrance.
Game over man. Game over. Damn it.
I turned back to the talkative vampire. He had some blood streaming down the side of his head where I’d hit him. The guy probably just ate or something. I smiled a wicked smile as his eyes darted to the alley entrance. I guess he’d healed faster than the others.
“Looks like tonight isn’t your night,” the vampire said.
I pointed my bat at the vamp and shook my head. “It’s not going to be your night when I come back here. Remember that.”
The vampire’s smile only grew wider. He flashed his fangs, but I wasn’t impressed. I’d never be impressed by something supernatural trying to intimidate me again. Not when I’d seen firsthand just how easy it was to kill them if you went at the job with the right tools.
In the end wasn’t that always what the job was about?
Boots echoed against the alley wall and I reluctantly dropped my bat. I’d really liked that bat. Maybe it would still be waiting for me when I came back. I had every intention of coming back.
A couple of cops, city cops rather than the campus variety, appeared.
“What the hell is going on here?” a tall overweight cop with an epic grey mustache asked. I glanced at his name tag. Higgins.
“This man assaulted me!” the vampire said, suddenly looking far more worried than just a minute ago.
All his confidence was back. He knew I wasn’t going to do anything in front of the cops just as much as I knew the vampire wasn’t going to pull the fangs routine in front of the cops. We were at an impasse.
I opened my mouth then closed it. What was the point in telling these guys the asshole I’d been beating was a vampire? No point at all. All I could do was let them take me in and hope Anderson and Hooks got there before the bad guys in lockup realized I was a cop.
I figured the criminals probably wouldn’t care to find out any kind of cop was sharing a cell with them. Even if I was just a campus cop.
Just a campus cop. Maybe that was worth something.
“I’m a cop,” I said. What the hell? It worked in the movies sometimes. I flashed a smile at the vamp who suddenly looked a little unsure of himself. “Wallet’s in the back pocket. You’ll see my badge there.”
The other cop, a skinny guy named Mosley if his name tag was anything to go by, frowned as he dug into my back pocket.
“Whoa there buddy,” I said with a smile I didn’t feel. “Usually I like someone to buy me a drink before they get that up close and personal.”
“Can it,” Mosley said as he pulled out my wallet and handed it to the fat cop. Higgins. His name might be Higgins but I couldn’t stop thinking of him as the fat one.
Apparently the city cops were held to the same exacting standards as the veterans on the campus department.
The fat one took one look at my badge and made a noise that sounded like something between disgust and the noise I imagined the guy made when he got off duty and went over to the local five dollar Chinese buffet for breakfast.
“He’s a campus cop,” Higgins said. He reached down, picked up my baseball bat, and examined the point. “Doesn’t make any difference. I don’t know how you rich campus cops handle things in Fancyland over there, but we don’t take kindly to you assaulting legitimate businessmen on our side of the lines.”
I didn’t say anything. I could already see where this was going. Obviously these guys were in the vampires’ pocket. I recalled what the first one said about cover ups, and I had a feeling these guys were about to try and do some covering up.
“He won’t bother you again,” Higgins said. “Sorry about the trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” the vampire said as the cops led me away. The smile never left his face, and he flashed his fangs where both cops could see.
Their reactions said it all. The fat one looked away but didn’t seem surprised to see vampire fangs. The young skinny one missed a step and wouldn’t stop looking at the vampire.
Yeah, the fat one was in on it and the skinny one was about to be in on it. This was going to take some doing to get out of.
At least being taken in by the local PD would be a new experience and a change of scenery, though I was pretty sure they weren’t taking me back to the station.
29
Local PD
These cars are nice,” I said as I looked around the back of the squad car. “Doesn’t smell like puke at all. You have no idea how hard it is to get puke smell out of your carseat when it’s not plastic and you can’t hose it out.”
I took a deep sniff as though I was enjoying the most delightful fragrance known to man. Of course it smelled just a little like the two cops in front of me which meant it didn’t smell all that good at all, but I was trying to make conversation here.
“Like you’d think it’s nice having cloth seats in your squad car. You’d think the plastic was the cheap stuff, but no one ever th
inks about hosing out the back of the car after a couple of drunk college kids tried to make out while you’re driving them home and lost their dinner instead,” I said.
“Shut up,” Higgins said.
“Come on officer Higgins,” I said. “Is that any way to treat a fellow officer?”
They’d cuffed me before loading me into the car. That was the first smart move someone had pulled all night. I would’ve had a hell of a time fighting off those vampires at my house if they’d cuffed me, for example.
I still would’ve pulled it off, but it would’ve been harder.
I looked out at the city passing us by. I usually only got out to the city proper when I was going to the grocery store. The ones by campus were all hippie type grocery stores that charged people a premium for organic this and natural that.
That might be nice for the profs, but on my salary I had to go to the big box grocery store where everything was slathered in pesticides and pumped with growth hormones like God intended.
“Shut up Byron,” Higgins said, glancing down at his computer. “Besides, according to the info we have in our system here it looks like you’re officially no longer considered a member of the campus PD, so we don’t have to worry about professional anything.”
I sat back and shook my head. I’d figured that was coming, but I was surprised it came so quickly. Riding in the back of a squad car was certainly the most interesting place I’d ever been informed I was fired. Hearing it via a notification in the local police department’s system was the most interesting way a firing had been delivered to me, for that matter.
“Guess I’ll have to apply for unemployment then,” I said, still trying to sound cheerful.
I’d worry about my job after I got my daughter back, and not a moment sooner.
“I doubt you’re going to have to worry about that after tonight,” Higgins said with something that almost approached an ominous tone.
I decided to play dumb. I still wasn’t sure if the younger tall skinny one, Mosley, was in on this. I might be able to use that to my advantage.
“Oh? Do you think that nice vampire back there is going to press charges? Can the undead press charges? Must be awful difficult for them to do that if they can’t show up to court during the day,” I said. “Last I heard they didn’t do night court down at the city building.”
Both cops tensed. They were on edge. On edge was good. If they were on edge they might make a stupid mistake. Or not. Either way I figured I’d get out of this, but one way involved breaking a lot more of their bones than the other way and I was trying to limit damage to non-undead people.
Though the jury was still out on whether or not that desire to limit damage extended to people who were in on the undead conspiracy in this town.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about Byron,” Higgins said.
Mosley glanced at him with a look that clearly said “are you fucking crazy?” We’d all seen the vampire fangs on that guy, but I didn’t say anything else. My point was made. There was a seed working its way through the younger guy’s head. Maybe he didn’t want to be a pawn for the vampires.
Or maybe it was wishful thinking on my part. Either way I was wasting time stuck in the back of this squad car and it looked like I’d been absolutely right about them not taking me back to the department.
“I can’t help but notice you’re not taking me in the direction of your HQ,” I said.
“He’s right,” Mosley said. “What the hell are you doing Higgins?”
“Never you mind,” Higgins said. “You’ll see when we get there.”
“See what?”
“How we handle things in this department.”
“I was wondering about that,” I said, still trying to sound conversational. “You just caught me assaulting someone with a baseball bat. Now I don’t pretend to know how you big city cops do things since I’m but a lowly campus cop, but it seems to me you should at least be booking me for the night or something. Why the ride out into the countryside?”
The city was small enough that there was a certain point where the houses and businesses ended and cornfields started rather abruptly. It was one of those things about living in the Midwest.
“I told you to shut up and you’re going to do it if you know what’s good for you,” Higgins said.
“Would you take me back to the station if I told you I just murdered a guy too?” I asked. “That’s gotta be good for a booking, right?”
The skinny one, Mosley, jumped at that shocking confession. Shocking to him, at least. “You what?”
“I mean he was a vampire, sure,” I said. “Probably deserved it. Not sure what the law says about killing undead creatures, or if there’s even a law about it. Wouldn’t surprise me if there was something somewhere off the books.”
“I told you to shut up Byron,” Higgins snapped.
“Why? Is talking to me making it more difficult for you to think about taking me out to some cornfield in the middle of nowhere and offing me?” I asked.
Tonight didn’t seem to be young Mosley’s night. He jumped again. I got the feeling this was the first time the poor guy had been let in on this city’s vampire infestation. Sure I’d taken the news a lot better when I discovered it, but I’d been more than a little occupied at the time.
“Didn’t your partner tell you that’s what was going on here?” I asked, still trying to sound casual. “The first vampire I killed a couple nights back mentioned they do a lot of covering up. Only makes sense that the local PD would be behind those cover ups, because I know the campus cops aren’t in on it.”
At least I assumed the campus cops weren’t in on it. I hadn’t seen anything to make me think the campus cops were in on it. That didn’t mean it wasn’t true, just that I hadn’t found the evidence yet.
Still, I had trouble imagining anyone on that department being behind any sort of vast vampire conspiracy. They were all so incompetent that they could barely take care of drunk college kids, let alone manage a coverup involving bloodsucking undead horrors.
“Damn it Byron,” Higgins said, slamming on the brakes and turning onto a small gravel path that led out into the middle of a cornfield. “You just don’t know when to shut the fuck up, do you?”
I wondered if this was where Higgins meant to go. We were driving down a tunnel of corn. It looked like he’d turned down an access road or something meant for farmers.
“Where the hell are you taking me?” I asked.
“Someplace appropriate for an asshole like you who goes on about crazy stuff like vampires,” Higgins said.
“Are you really going to try and deny that? We all know what we saw back there in that alley.”
The headlights bounced a couple of times and the police cruiser went through a puddle no doubt left behind from a recent rainfall. Water splashed up on the windshield and then we came out into a clearing.
I was confused for a moment. It looked like we’d gone from the middle of a cornfield to a house of horrors. Nothing looked right, then it hit me.
“A corn maze? You took me out to a fucking corn maze?”
Another one of those things you could only find in the Midwest. Corn got tall enough in October that farmers could cut out paths in the stuff and make it into a haunted house with people in costumes stalking other people through the corn.
Farmers got to make money scaring the pants off of college kids looking for something fun to do for the entire month of October and then they got to harvest the rest of the corn when they were done. It was a genius bit of double dipping.
And it looked like the cops had taken me to a storage spot in the middle of this cornfield where the farmer who owned the land kept his house of horrors hidden from the rest of the world between the haunting seasons.
“Amazing,” I said. “I never thought someone would try to kill me in a corn maze.”
“We’re going to do more than try Byron,” Higgins said. “Word came down that you’re making too much tr
ouble for the wrong sort of people. I’m afraid when that happens there’s only one solution.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Covering it up by covering me up? What, are you going to make me part of the haunted corn maze or something?”
“We could string you up in a scarecrow and no one would notice for months,” Higgins said. “But we’re not going to do anything like that. They want us to make an example out of you.”
He tapped away at his computer as he said it. They had one of those irritating screen protectors that made it impossible to get a look at what was on the screen, but the fact that Higgins was saying all this as he read from his screen told me everything I needed to know about where this info was coming from.
Word came down from on high that I was to be taken care of. That meant there was someone on high in the local city police department that wanted to make sure the vampires in this town were kept happy.
“Are you sure you guys want to do this?” I asked.
That seemed to bring Higgins up short. He turned around and eyed me suspiciously. “Why wouldn’t I want to do this? I got a choice between taking care of you and making my bosses and a bunch of fanged bloodsuckers happy or not taking care of you and pissing off my bosses and a bunch of fanged bloodsuckers who don’t take too kindly to people not doing what they want.”
“Yeah, but there’s one more wrinkle you forgot to add to that little problem,” I said.
“What’s that,” Higgins asked, smiling and looking over to Mosley who was looking more and more nervous with every passing moment.
“The problem is these bloodsuckers might be scary, but I’m the guy who’s been running around town the past three nights killing them. Making them deader than undead,” I said. “So you have to stop and ask yourself whether or not you really want to piss off the guy who’s killing the assholes you’re afraid of.”
“Maybe this guy has a point,” Mosley said. “That vampire looked like he was really happy we were taking care of this guy for him. I think this dude was on the verge of kicking some vampire ass.”
Blake Byron: Paranormal Investigator Page 17