“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Higgins said. “Trust me, now that you’re in on this they’re not going to take too kindly to you getting in the way of what they want any more than they’ll like me getting in the way. This is how things are in this town, and you had to figure it out someday.”
I shook my head and let out a disgusted noise. I’d heard about corrupt cops before, but I always figured it was an isolated problem. A few bad apples here and there that made everyone look bad.
Well here was at least one bad apple right in front of me, and he was already souring another apple. Higgins got out and went around to open my door. I thought about trying something, but I still needed more information from these assholes.
They just didn’t know they were going to give it to me. Not yet.
I stepped out and tried to look like I was afraid. Which was just a little difficult as some asshole local cop who looked like he ate Barney Fife wasn’t exactly intimidating after taking on honest-to-God vampires complete with fangs and super strength.
Higgins took one look at me and rolled his eyes.
“You look ridiculous when you try to act scared like that,” he said.
I shrugged. “Sorry. Wanted to make you feel like you were doing something right tonight. I know that probably doesn’t happen very often.”
Higgins rolled his eyes again and shoved me towards a big wood structure that looked like it was supposed to be a castle. Probably of the haunted variety. The thing looked like shit. Obviously the farmer who ran this place hadn’t taken the time to touch up the paint for this year yet.
I stumbled forward just a little then stopped. I figured if these guys were going to push me around then I was going to make them work for it.
“You’re going to move where I tell you or else,” Higgins said.
I turned and regarded him, and there was no easygoing smile on my face now. I glared until Higgins looked away. The fat cop might be the one with the gun, but I wanted him to know he wasn’t the one calling the shots.
“This is your last chance to set me free,” I said.
Higgins laughed, but Mosley, looked like he was about to lose whatever cheap sugar packed calorie dense snack he’d picked up at the start of his shift. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here.
Whether that was because he genuinely didn’t want to take part in cold blooded murder or just that he didn’t like his chances against me was anyone’s guess. Probably a mix of both if I had to put a bet down.
“Why should I be afraid of you?” Higgins asked.
“Because I’ve killed everyone else who’s tried to do this,” I said.
It wasn’t a boast. It was a simple statement of fact. I delivered it in a monotone, and from the way Higgins started pulling at his collar it seemed that he was just now starting to realize that maybe taking me out here wasn’t the best idea.
I was sure the idea had been to take me out where they wouldn’t have to worry about anyone seeing them doing their dirty work, but it went both ways. No one out here to see them doing their dirty work meant there was also no one out here to help if things went wrong.
Then Higgins’ face hardened and he shoved me. I allowed the guy to have his power trip. I’d put up with it until I had all the info I thought I could get from these assholes, and then I’d let them know just what a bad idea it had been to take me hostage and waste my time when I was trying to find my little girl.
I was pretty sure these uniformed assholes were human, but I didn’t give a damn what they were if they were in my way.
30
Execution
You know this reminds me of a similar situation I came across when I was still in the service,” I said. “Of course back then I was with the gun and I was the one coming to the rescue instead of the one being pushed around by local toughs.”
“Why should I give a fuck?” Higgins asked.
I glanced at him. “Just making conversation here. Then again I’m guessing you were never in the service, right? A little too old for Vietnam, and a little too young to be in the first Iraq? Too much of a coward to go the second time around? Or had your donut habit already made enlisting impossible by then?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Higgins said.
“Of course this field is a lot different from the one I was in that day. We were surrounded by poppies there, you know, not corn. It was like the Wicked Witch of the fucking West herself came down to put a curse on us that day.”
“I told you to shut up!” Higgins said.
I turned to him again. Tried my best to look wounded, but it was difficult. I was having a difficult time conveying anything but annoyance to this asshole, and that seemed to really piss Higgins off.
So of course I was going to keep slamming my hand down on that big red button considering how effective it was.
“You should really be a lot nicer to the people you’re trying to kill,” I said. “It’s not nice to be mean to people in their last moments.”
“Oh yeah? And what the hell would you know about that?” Higgins asked.
“I always try to be polite to someone before I kill them,” I said. “Just look how I’m treating you.”
It took a moment for that to register with Higgins’ pea brain. I figured it probably took a long time for a lot of things to get through to him. When he realized my meaning, though, he looked furious. He pulled out his gun and I braced myself to do something if the fat cop did something stupid.
I figured my reflexes were probably faster than Higgins’ trigger finger.
But instead the older cop did an old fashioned pistol whip. At least he tried to do an old fashioned pistol whip. The butt of the gun went through the air where my head had been a moment ago. He came around for another strike and I ducked so he missed again.
The way I saw it he only had himself to blame since he’d only cuffed my hands.
Mosley was chuckling and trying his best not to look like it. The guy seemed decent enough for all that he was going along with Higgins trying to kill me. If I met the guy in a professional capacity I figured we might even get along.
“I can do this all night,” I said. “Something tells me you’re going to get tired out a hell of a lot sooner than I do.”
Higgins paused and moved his hands down to his knees as he panted. The fat fuck really was out of shape if all it took to exhaust him was waving his gun around in the air for a little while.
“Fuck you,” Higgins said.
I shrugged as best as I could considering my hands were cuffed. “The last guys who tried to string me up in a field like this were carrying AKs they got from when Ivan tried taking over their country. Next to that you’re not that intimidating.”
I’d backed against the fake castle wall. I could do this without my hands, but I figured it would be a hell of a lot easier if I could use them. I’d noticed a bunch of wire holding the thing together, if there was a code out there for creating fake haunted castles then this thing wasn’t up to it, and I hoped I’d be able to make use of some of that wire.
I almost smiled as my hand came to rest against what I’d been looking for. I said a prayer of thanks to any higher power that might be listening, I wasn’t going to discriminate now that I knew vampires were real which I figured meant there was at least a fifty/fifty chance almost anything from legend could be real, and pulled at the wire while keeping what I was doing blocked from Higgins and Mosley.
Higgins raised his gun and pointed it at me. “Oh yeah? Well something tells me my pistol is going to do a better job of taking out you and your smart mouth than those guys in Afghanistan.”
I lowered my head and shook it. Let out a little chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” Higgins asked.
“I was thinking of another story from my time working overseas. You’d really like it, but it might take a few to tell and I know you’re in a hurry to kill me,” I said.
Higgins glared at me, his gun shaking, and I tensed m
yself to drop if it looked like the asshole had been pushed too far. Higgins didn’t look like the kind of man who was about to shoot someone though. Not yet. I’d seen it often enough to know. There was something in the eyes.
For all his bluster Higgins wasn’t a killer. Or at the very least he didn’t like the idea of being a killer.
Finally the gun lowered. Yeah, he didn’t like the idea of being a killer. That or he was genuinely curious.
“Fine,” Higgins said. “Are you going to tell me what was so damn funny?”
“Sure,” I said, still working with the wire behind me. Almost there. Timing was everything with a joke like this, after all. “I was thinking of the time I was held up by those jackasses with the AKs. They talked a big game like you, but they didn’t know one important thing.”
“What’s that?” Higgins asked.
“Well they were using old style cuffs, and what they didn’t realize was it’s pretty easy to pick those. So the whole time they were taunting me about how they were going to kill me, dead Yankee and all that stuff which is about the most English you can expect to hear over there outside the city, I was busy picking my cuffs that’d probably been raided from some local cop shop in the ‘70s. Sort of like the cuffs you’re still using around here.”
Higgins frowned. “So what’s the joke?”
I felt a click and smiled. Yeah, delivery was everything with a joke like this. I pulled my hands around to show Higgins the cuffs dangling from one of my wrists.
“You just made the same mistake they did.”
Higgins tried to bring his gun up, but it was obvious he was out of practice. That was the problem with using a ranged weapon. You had to make sure you kept it trained on your target unless you wanted to waste precious moments bringing it to bear.
Precious moments where I was able to ram into Higgins’ considerable gut. That threw him off balance and I grabbed the cop’s gun hand and pointed it at Mosley who was raising his gun to shoot.
I fired. The bullet slammed home accompanied by the peculiar sound of a bullet hitting a vest, and Mosley went down.
I ripped Higgins’ gun out of his fat hand. Mosley scrambled to his feet and made a move to run for their car. There was a radio in there and that would mean nothing but headaches for me. So I fired a shot that landed at Mosley’s feet.
He seemed like a nice enough guy even if he was partnered with an asshole, and I didn’t want to hurt him too much if I could avoid it.
The skinny cop got the point. He raised his hands in the air and turned around nice and slow without me even having to ask him. I grinned.
“Good,” I said. “At least one of you is smart enough to do what you’re told.”
“Do you really think you’re going to get away with this?” Higgins asked. “Do you really think I’m going to rest until I see you dead?”
“You’re awfully ballsy for a guy who just got his ass handed to him,” I said.
“I don’t have a choice,” Higgins said, a hint of worry coming to his face. “It’s the vampires. They said they’d do terrible things to me. They said my wife and kids…”
“Higgins you divorced your wife ten years ago because she couldn’t stand you and you never had kids,” Mosley shouted from his spot twenty feet away.
I looked up and nodded at the guy. That was just the sort of information I needed. I turned my attention back to Higgins. There was no need to go bothering the rookie on the department when it was the fat old asshole calling the shots and threatening my life.
“You’re a lousy liar Higgins,” I said. “I’m pretty good about picking out liars, but even if I wasn’t I’d be able to smell your bullshit from a mile away.”
“I’m going to…”
“You’re not going to do anything,” I said, leveling the gun at his head, and then lower to his heart. “I figure this can go one of two ways. Either you’re a human who’s helping out the vampires which means you’ve probably been complicit in a lot of shit that’s gone down in this town.”
“Or?” Higgins asked.
“Or you’re a vampire and I get to do to you what I’ve done to every other vampire I’ve met lately.”
Higgins started to shake. He licked his lips as he looked at the gun. He seemed to finally be having that unfortunate realization that comes to most bullies at some point in their careers. Eventually they fuck with the wrong person, and tonight was his night.
“What if I told you I was a human?” he asked, his voice hoarse, barely able to get out the words.
I looked at the surroundings. It was nice and remote. It’s not like anyone was going to come along to interrupt us.
Basically in bringing me out here to the middle of nowhere they’d assured that I’d have a nice quiet place to work. It wasn’t my problem that they thought they were the ones who were going to use this nice quiet place to torture me.
I smiled. I didn’t mean for it to be a reassuring smile, and from the way Higgins’ eyes widened it didn’t look like he took it as a reassuring smile.
“In that case, officer Higgins, I think we might be able to talk,” I said.
I’d leave out the bit about my plan to kill the bastard whether or not it turned out he was a vampire until the very end. It got really difficult to interrogate someone unless they thought there was a chance they might get out of the interrogation alive.
31
Escape
So why don’t you tell me what you know about the vampires in this town?” I asked.
I tried to use my nicest tone, but I knew it probably wasn’t all that nice from Higgins’ point of view. The problem was I was in a hurry and this cop was keeping me from getting out there and finding my little girl.
This whole thing had been a distraction and I was tempted to steal their squad car and call it a night, but if there was a chance I could learn something from this guy that might make up for that waste of time I figured I had to take it.
I lowered the gun to try and make Higgins feel a little better about his precarious situation. After all, I wasn’t going to use the thing until the very end. And I wasn’t going to use it on Mosley.
Higgins’ eyes narrowed as he looked at the gun and then up to me. He might be an asshole, but he seemed to be crafty. He also seemed to be realizing there might not be any getting out of this situation.
“What guarantee do I have you’re going to let me go when we’re done with this?” he asked.
“You don’t have any guarantee,” I said. “The best you can do is tell me everything I want to know and hope that’s enough that I let you go. You won’t find out until we’re done.”
Okay then. So that was maybe a little more than I intended to tell him. Maybe that was a little more bleak than Higgins hoped for. Still, I’d left open a small chance he might make it out of this alive.
I figured that was something. It had been more than enough to get people talking when I was doing this sort of thing overseas.
The problem was Higgins seemed intent on clamming up. His mustache bristled but he wasn’t talking. I sighed. It looked like it was going to be one of those interrogations.
I held the barrel of the gun against his forehead. There was something about cold metal on flesh that sometimes put people in a talking mood. Not always, but it worked often enough that it was worth a try.
“I’m not saying anything,” Higgins said. “You can go ahead and shoot me.”
“Is that a bluff you really want to call?” I asked.
“I think a bullet to the brain is a hell of a lot better than anything the vampires do to me if they figure out I was the one who talked.”
I sighed. I pulled back the slide and sure enough there was a bullet waiting to be put into some asshole who had it coming. I held the gun at an awkward angle because there was never a way to do this gracefully or safely, so don’t try this at home kids, and the bullet came out into my hand. I chambered a new round because it never hurt to be too careful or too prepared when you were deal
ing with people who’d been trying to kill you.
“You said you weren’t ever in the military, right?” I asked.
Higgins didn’t say anything. Well that was just fine with me. I wasn’t particularly in a mood for a conversation. I just wanted to make it clear how much trouble the guy was in if he didn’t talk.
“Of course you weren’t,” I said. “Trust me. I know your type. Saw plenty of you when I was in the service. You think you’re pretty big and bad. Maybe you tried to get into the service or something stopped you, or maybe you were afraid of getting shipped off to war and you went for the next best thing which was serving and protecting.”
I laughed. I wanted Higgins to know exactly what I thought of small town cops.
“So you become a small town cop instead. Nothing too impressive in the long run, but you get to feel big and bad and enjoy your power trip and on top of all that you get a steady job and a nice pension.”
I paused to see if this was doing anything for Higgins, but he stared up defiantly. He looked more and more pissed off with every word.
“Well I was in the military,” I continued. “I don’t like to brag or talk about it that much, but I was in special forces.”
I shook my head.
“I suppose that doesn’t mean anything to you. You’re a city cop. I’m sure every other guy on your department talks about how he was in special forces. Thing is I don’t really like to talk about it. I tell people I was a rear-echelon motherfucker pushing papers if they ask me about my time. That’s how you tell the braggart’s from the real deal.”
Higgins stare said he clearly thought I was going insane. And maybe I was going just a little insane. After all, there was a lot of shit that had gone down the past three days. Enough to crack even the toughest nut.
I held the bullet I’d palmed up in front of Higgins. Let him get a good look at it. I’d found it was sometimes nice to give people a reminder of their mortality at times like this. A little reminder that while it might be in my palm right now, this bullet or one of its brothers could just as easily be lodged in his thick skull.
Blake Byron: Paranormal Investigator Page 18