Known Devil

by Matthew Hughes

I was acting like a real hardass because I wanted psychological domination over this guy. Something very fucked up was going on here, and I wanted to know everything about it. Everything.

  “Yeah, OK, Detective. Whatever you want.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that, Thor. Because what I want to know is what’s up with you, and I want it without a lot of bullshit.”

  I sat back in my chair to give him a little space.

  “You claim you need some kind of medication,” I said. “What exactly is it you think you need – and why?”

  “Hell, I don’t know the scientific name, or nothing, man – uh, Detective. We call it Slide.”

  “We? Who’s we?”

  “Me and Car. And some other dudes we know.”

  “Car’s the guy who was with you in the diner tonight? The one standing on the table?”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “What his real name?”

  “Caranthir Helyanwe. But most of us just call him Car.”

  “So, you and ‘Car’ and your buddies take this stuff called ‘Slide’,” I said, “and now you’re hooked on it?”

  Drug-addicted elves. Shit.

  “Nah, I ain’t hooked on nothing. I can quit whenever I want.”

  The elf even talked like a fucking junkie.

  “OK, you can quit whenever you want,” Sefchik said. “So why don’t you just quit it now?”

  Thor licked his lips. “It ain’t that I need it, OK? But I ain’t had any in a while. I just like the stuff – that’s all.”

  “A while – how long ago is that, exactly?” I asked. “When did you last have some of this Slide?”

  The tongue ran over his cracked lips again. “I dunno. Couple days ago, I guess.”

  “And you like this stuff so much,” Sefchik said, “that you and your buddy were willing to stick up a fucking diner just to get money for some?”

  Another shrug. “Slide ain’t cheap.”

  “What’s it do for you, anyway?” I asked him.

  He looked at me as if I’d just spoken in Polish. “Say what?”

  “He means,” Sefchik said, “How do you feel when you’re using it?”

  “It hits you in, like two stages, man… uh, Detective. At first, it’s like fireworks are goin’ off inside your head, you know? There’s flashes of light, all different colors – some that ain’t even been invented yet.”

  “How long does that usually last?” Sefchik asked.

  “Oh, m… Detective, I don’t fuckin’ know. I never looked at my watch – hell, I probably couldn’t have seen it, anyway, with all the colors goin’ off inside my head.”

  “So, there’s two stages,” I said. “What happens after the flashing lights?”

  “After that, you just feel gooood, you know? All relaxed and happy and shit. It’s like you just got laid, but about ten times better.”

  “And how long does that go on for?” I asked him.

  “Like I already told you–”

  “I know,” I said. “You don’t check your watch. But give me a ballpark estimate – an hour, three hours, half a day, all day?”

  He wiped a shaky hand over his face. “I dunno, maybe three hours, could be a little more. But that’s about right, I guess.”

  Sefchik frowned. “How much per pop?”

  “Twenty-five bucks.”

  “How do you take it?” I asked him.

  Thor turned his sweaty face toward me. “Huh?”

  I will not hit the suspect in the head. I will not hit the suspect in the head.

  “Do you snort the shit, inject it, smoke it, stuff it up your ass – what?” I said.

  “Me and Car mostly smoke it,” he said. “But I know a couple guys who say snortin’ gives you a bigger blast. I dunno; I never tried it that way. Look – can you guys, uh, Detectives help me out here? I need to see a doc pretty bad. I feel like I’m gonna jump out of my fuckin’ skin or something.”

  I got to my feet. “Detective Sefchik and I are gonna step outside for a couple of minutes.”

  Sefchik stood up too and followed me to the door.

  “You guys gonna call the doctor?” Thor asked. The need in his voice was unmistakable.

  “We’ll think about it,” I said.

  “Cause if you ain’t, then I want a fuckin’ lawyer in here! He’ll get me to a doc. This is fucking inhumane treatment! I got my–”

  Then we were in the hall, and I closed the door behind us, cutting off Thor in mid-rant. Sefchik looked at me, his face a study in disbelief.

  “Elf junkies?” he said. “Is this asshole fucking kidding?”

  “Does he look like he’s kidding?”

  Sefchik shook his head a couple of times. “I knew fucking gobs could get hooked on meth, and that’s bad enough – but elves? What’s next – werewolves shooting heroin? Vamps on speed? Makes my head hurt, just tryin’ to think about it.”

  “Yeah, I know just what you mean.”

  “So, why’d you take a break?” he asked me. “Just want to vent a little? Not that I blame you.”

  “Nothing wrong with venting,” I said. “But the main reason is I have to make a phone call, and I don’t want my man Thor listening in on it.”

  I pushed a button on my speed dial, and a few seconds later Karl’s voice said in my ear, “Hey, Stan.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “We’re still in the waiting room at the ER. You know how it is – they give you a quick once-over, and if you’re not actually dying, you can go sit and wait for a few hours. I figure an elf’s busted wrist isn’t real high on their priority list tonight.”

  “There’s a couple of things I’d like you to do while you’re down there.”

  “Like what?”

  “When they finally get your little buddy into a treatment room, make sure the docs get a blood sample and send it to the lab.”

  “Lookin’ for what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Anything that shouldn’t be in an elf’s blood, I guess.”

  “I’ll take care of it. What else you need?”

  “Since you’re gonna be waiting a while, why don’t you ask your pal about something called Slide.”

  “What the fuck’s that?”

  “I’m not positive, but I think it might be a drug that elves can get hooked on.”

  “Well, fuck me,” Karl said. “You sure about this stuff?”

  “No, I’m not. That’s why I want you to talk to Car about it. You know that’s his name, right?”

  “Yeah, he told me. Guess he got tired of me saying, ‘Hey, you’.”

  “Later on, I want to compare whatever you get from him with what I already heard from his partner, Thor.”

  “Thor, you said? Like that old pixie joke, ‘I’m tho thor, I can hardly pith’?”

  “That’s the one. And listen, if you have to use a little vampire mojo to get him talking about Slide, that’s OK.”

  “Seriously? I don’t even know if it’ll work, Stan – but if it does, anything I get from him’s gonna be inadmissible in court. You know that.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I don’t want this for the DA’s office – I want it for me, so I can maybe figure out what the fuck is going on here.”

  “OK, I’ll see what I can do. We’re gonna be here a while, anyway.”

  “Good. Besides, if Influence doesn’t get you anywhere, you can always flash your fangs at him.”

  “I’ll keep that in reserve, just in case.”

  I checked my watch: 4.22. Sunrise would be about ten after seven.

  “Listen, if you’re still there an hour from now, give me a call,” I said. “I’ll bring one of the other detectives over, or even a uniform, if I have to. He can take over custody of Car, and I’ll give you a ride back here, so you can head home in time.”

  “Thanks, Stan, I appreciate it.”

  “No problem. OK, I gotta go back and see Thor. He was yelling about a lawyer when I left him, and I sure woul
dn’t want to violate his constitutional rights by denying him timely access to counsel.”

  “Heaven forbid. Alright, I’ll talk to you later, dude.”

  “Don’t call me dude.”

  Thor was as good as his word. Once he was sure I wasn’t going to bring in a doctor to give him a hit of Slide, he clammed up and demanded a lawyer.

  I took him back down to Booking, where they’d put him in a holding cell and give him a phone, just like the law requires. I was pretty sure that once his lawyer got here, Thor wasn’t going to be nearly as chatty as he had been upstairs.

  If Thor was a human going through withdrawal from heroin, a doctor might actually have do him some good – and we’d provide one. That’s the law, too. Some junkie bouncing off the walls because his dopamine receptor cells were going crazy wasn’t exactly a new phenomenon around here.

  A doc wouldn’t give a prisoner any heroin, but a dose of methadone wasn’t out of the question, or maybe a strong sedative. Even if we had a fucking goblin going nuts because he can’t get any of the meth he’s hooked on – the medical community knows how to handle that, too.

  But an addicted elf? Hooked on a drug that nobody’s ever heard of? No doctor could be sure that any drug he gave Thor might not interact with the stuff already in his system and kill the little bastard. So Thor was going to have to sweat it out, literally, until a specialist in elf medicine could get a look at him.

  I went back to the squad room and got started on the paperwork stemming from the arrest of the two elves at the diner. I was almost done when Karl called around 5.30, saying he was still stuck at Mercy’s ER. Car hadn’t even made it into a treatment room yet.

  “OK, I’ll find somebody to take over for you,” I said. “We oughta be there in ten, fifteen minutes.”

  “Roger that.” Karl loves that kind of talk.

  Sefchik had started his shift by now, and he and Aquilina were out on the street somewhere. But McLane and Pearce were in the squad room, drinking coffee and waiting to handle the next call that came in. Lieutenant McGuire was in his glass-enclosed office at the back, and I told him that Karl was stuck over at the ER with sunrise fast approaching. McGuire said I could run over there and take one of the other detectives with me to relieve Karl.

  Ten minutes later, Pearce was at the ER, handcuffed to Car, and Karl was riding shotgun in my Toyota Lycan as I headed back to the station house. I had a lot to tell him. Turned out, he had a few items for me, too.

  When I finished telling Karl about my interview with Thor, I said, “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’d have said it was bullshit. But there he was, right in front of me – an elf who was obviously strung out on something.”

  “I think you’re being too hard on yourself, Stan. You were going on what you’d been taught at the academy, and they taught me the same thing: supes don’t get hooked on drugs, apart from goblins, I mean. Now it looks like some motherfucker has come up with a new kind of drug, and that throws all the old knowledge into the wastebasket.”

  “A game changer,” I said.

  “Uh-huh – like the old game wasn’t tough enough already.” Karl shook his head. “Well, I got a couple of things from talking to my buddy Car that I can add, and one of them’s gonna blow your mind. I know it did mine.”

  “I can hardly wait,” I said.

  “I’ll start with the other one. Car told me that there’s another street name for Slide, and he thinks this one came first. He says some of his homies call it HG.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off the road to stare at him, but I wanted to. “HG,” I said. “Seriously.”

  “That’s what Car said.”

  “It sounds like some old-time movie director – Ready when you are, HG!’’

  “Turns out, I can give you a better idea of its etymology,” Karl said.

  “Etymology.”

  “Yeah – it means the study of word origins.”

  I looked sideways at him. “You been looking at those copies of Reader’s Digest I keep in my desk?”

  I saw his shrug from the corner of my eye. “I sneak one every once in a while.”

  “OK,” I said. “So, enlighten me as to the, uh…”

  “Etymology.”

  “Yeah. The etymology of ‘HG’.’”

  “Car says he’s pretty sure it stands for ‘Hemoglobin-Plus’, on account of hemoglobin being the basic ingredient.”

  “Hemoglobin plus what?” I asked him.

  “Car didn’t know. He says nobody does.”

  “With a guy like Car,” I said, “nobody probably consists of him and three other losers like him.”

  “Probably. We’re gonna have to start working our street contacts, see if somebody out there knows more about this stuff.”

  “OK, so the name is one piece of news,” I said. “What’s the other item – the one that’s gonna blow my mind?”

  “Thing is, it could be just bullshit – considering Car was the source and all.”

  “Fine – I’ll keep that in mind. It might keep my skull from imploding. So what is it?”

  “Car says he knows a vampire who’s hooked on the shit, too.”

  With dawn coming soon, Karl had to split as soon as we pulled into the parking lot behind the station house. My shift was over, too, but I still went inside to see McGuire.

  I told him what Karl and I had learned from the two junkie elves. He was as disbelieving as I’d been, at first. But he agreed with me that it was something the unit needed to know more about. He said each shift of detectives would be told to ask their snitches about Slide and exactly who might be addicted to it.

  When I got home, Christine’s car was parked in the driveway. Since the sun was already well above the horizon, I knew she’d be in her basement bedroom by now, wrapped in a sleeping bag and literally dead to the world until dusk. I’d talk to her then.

  I went upstairs and traded my detective outfit for a sweatshirt and jeans. Time was, I’d head off to sleep right after getting home from work, but lately I’ve got into the habit of unwinding for an hour before I go to bed. I have fewer nightmares that way.

  I went into the spare bedroom and checked on my hamster, Quincey. His water bottle was mostly full, but the bowl was empty. I filled it with food pellets and put it back in his cage. That woke him up – hamsters are nocturnal, just like vampires and some cops I know. When he came over to the bowl, I rubbed his head with my index finger for a little while. He likes that.

  Then I went to sleep – and had bad dreams anyway.

  When Christine came upstairs, I was in the kitchen, eating some scrambled eggs. “Morning, honey,” I said.

  “Good morning, Daddy.”

  It wasn’t morning, but we’d agreed that starting the day with “Good evening” sounded stupid – especially when I said it using my Bela Lugosi imitation.

  Christine wore the outfit she usually slept in – sweatpants and a T-shirt. Today the shirt said in front, “Thousands of vampires go to bed hungry.” As she went to the fridge, I saw that the back read, “Give generously when the vampire comes to your door window.”

  She got at least a dozen different “vampire-centric” shirts, and I’d asked her once where she bought them. She’d given me a wink and said, “The Sharper Image catalog, of course.”

  Christine got a bottle of Type A from the refrigerator, pried off the cap, and put it in the microwave to warm up. Then she sat down and poured the contents into the mug I’d put on the table for her, along with a placemat and napkin. Setting the table for a vampire is pretty uncomplicated, but I knew she appreciated the gesture.

  “So how was work?” she asked, taking her first sip.

  “Depends on what part you mean,” I said. “Do you wanna hear about how Karl and I almost got held up by elves, or about when it got really weird?”

  Her eyes widened a little. “Goodness,” she said. “You mean I have to choose?”

  “Naw, I’m having a sale tonight – two for the price of one.
”

  “Hmmm,” she said. “And what is the price?”

  “Your opinion, when I’m done.”

  “You’ve got yourself a deal, Sergeant. Go for it.”

  So I told her about my shift, starting with when the two elves hit Jerry’s Diner. Eventually, I got around to the new street drug, Slide.

  The look she gave me when I finished was as skeptical as McGuire’s had been – not that I blamed her.

  “A drug that addicts supes…” She’d picked up that term from me and used it freely, even though some supernaturals consider it a slur. Christine knows I don’t mean anything by it.

  “That’s what it looks like,” I said.

  “I knew about the goblins and meth, of course,” she said with a frown. “I’m not likely to forget, after a bunch of them came over here to kill you a while back.”

  “That’s over and done,” I said. “And anyway, things didn’t work out too well for the gobs that night.”

  “Just as well,” she said. “Little green bastards.”

  “I never thought it possible that other species of supes could become drug addicts,” I said. “But I trust the evidence of my own eyes.”

  “I trust your eyes, too,” she said, “but, for gosh sake… So this stuff affects both elves and vampires?”

  “The vampire angle’s just hearsay, for the moment. It came from that asshole Car, and I’m not sure I’d trust him if he said bats fly at night. But elves… yeah, I’d say that’s a certainty.”

  She drained the mug and put it down. “Goblins and elves are both part of the faerie family. Think there’s a connection there? Some kind of genetic thing?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “And for the moment, guesses are all I’ve got.”

  “I don’t imagine that state of affairs will continue for very long – now that Detective Sergeant Markowski is on the case.”

  Some of that was kidding, but only some. Despite knowing me better than anyone alive – or undead – my vampire daughter seems to think I’m pretty cool. How many dads can say that?

  “So,” I said, “I take it that this is the first time you’ve heard about this HG stuff?”

  “Absolutely. There hasn’t been even a whisper. What’s HG stand for, again? Hemoglobin-something?”