Known Devil

by Matthew Hughes

  “Only one of each, so far,” I said. “But you’re right, it could be the start of a trend that’s gonna catch on big-time unless we do something about it.”

  We got into the car, and as I started up, Karl said, “And what exactly did you have in mind to do, oh wise man?”

  “The crimes are caused by addiction to Slide, right? Slide is being pushed by members of the Delatasso family. Stop them, we stop the drug from circulating. Eliminate the drug, and we get rid of the crime.”

  “So we’re gonna do Calabrese’s dirty work for him?” Karl didn’t sound too happy about it.

  “No, we’re doing the City of Scranton’s work. It just happens that Calabrese’s goals and the city’s goals converge this time.”

  We’d gone a couple of blocks when Karl said, “Remember that rule you told me about once, ‘Locken’s First Law’?”

  “‘You can do everything right and still lose,’” I quoted. “Yeah, so?”

  “So, let’s say we succeed beyond our wildest dreams. We drive the Delatassos out of Scranton for good, and the supply of Slide dries up to nothing. Then what’ve we got?”

  “Peace and quiet?” I said.

  “No, just a different kind of noise. What do you think’s gonna happen when all these addicted supes can’t get a fix, no matter how much money they steal to pay for it?”

  “They all go into rehab?” I knew that wasn’t what he meant.

  “No, they all go fucking apeshit – sticking up drugstores to find something that’s similar to Slide, and tearing into bloody pieces anybody who so much as looks at them sideways. It would be like every dog in town suddenly went rabid.”

  “Say you’re right,” I told him. “What’re we supposed to do, then? Let the Delatassos sell their shit wherever they want? I know some people who wouldn’t care for that much – one of ’em’s named Tapley, and another one’s named Donna, not to mention everybody else who was in Johnny’s Diner the other night.”

  “I’m just raising the question.” Karl said. “I never claimed I had the answer.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s only one answer to your question that I can think of,” I said.

  “I am all attention.”

  “Shut the fucking Delatassos down as soon as we possibly can – that won’t eliminate your ‘mad dog’ problem, but it’ll keep the impact to a minimum.”

  “As soon as possible,” Karl said, with a slow nod. “That means we’re gonna have to cut some corners.”

  “Shit,” I said, remembering all the lies I’d told the brass yesterday, “we’ve already started.”

  But before you can cut corners, you have to know just where the corners are. So back at the squad room, Karl and I sat down with McGuire to talk about the legal status of Slide.

  “Somebody’s selling that shit, but we can’t even bust them for it, can we?” I said.

  “Not right now, you can’t, no,” McGuire said.

  I gave a sigh. “I was kinda afraid of that.”

  “Why the fuck not?” Karl said. “Selling addictive drugs is illegal, right? Everybody knows that.”

  “I wish it was that simple,” McGuire told him. “‘Addictive’ is a medical term, not a legal one.”

  Karl frowned at that. “Say what?”

  “Lots of stuff’s addictive,” McGuire said. “Tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine, for instance. But none of them is illegal, you might have noticed.”

  “Because they’re not ‘controlled substances’,” I added.

  “Exactly right,” McGuire said. “Something’s a controlled substance because there a law that says it has to be controlled. Shit, a hundred years ago cocaine was legal, before they knew how bad it could fuck people up. Heroin, too – all that shit. It just took time for the law to catch up with the menace.”

  “And cause Slide’s so new, there’s no laws on the books banning it.” Karl shook his head. “Fuck.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Fuck.”

  “Wait a minute,” Karl said. “We’ve busted goblins for meth before.”

  “Yeah, that’s because meth was already illegal before the goblins ever got hold of it. It was the only drug that addicted supes – well, one species of supe – as well as humans.”

  “Or so we thought,” McGuire said.

  Karl looked at McGuire, then at me. “And we don’t even know if Slide has any effect on humans, do we?”

  “Nope,” I said. “And if it turns out that there’s no human addiction…”

  “It could be years before Congress, or even the state legislatures, get around to banning it,” McGuire said. “You know how it is.”

  “Yeah, I know how it fuckin’ is,” Karl said. “Stuff that only involves supes doesn’t exactly get a high priority with the government.”

  McGuire had the good grace to look a little embarrassed. Karl was speaking nothing but the truth. Supes were still considered second-class citizens by a lot of people – some of them government officials.

  “Course, since this stuff seems to be causing supes to rob humans,” Karl said, “maybe it’ll get some politicos’ attention a little quicker.”

  “Could be,” McGuire said. “But for now, Slide’s as legal as soda pop.”

  “Well, fuck me,” Karl said.

  I shook my head slowly. “Sorry,” I said. “I kinda like you, but not that way.”

  “What we need to do,” I said, “is get our hands on some Slide.”

  Karl and I were sitting behind our desks in the squad room, facing each other. He understood what I meant, but he pretended not to. “What’s up with that, Stan – you lookin’ for a new kind of high?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, “but you’re pretty close.”

  He gave me raised eyebrows.

  “For one thing,” I said, “I want to have the shit tested, to see if it does have any effect on humans. If it’s as addictive for them as it is supes, we might see some quicker action on making it illegal.”

  Karl made a disgusted sound. I don’t think he disagreed with me – he just hated the fact that I was right.

  “I’d like to get some Slide for Rachel. She wants to see if magic might work in curing somebody who’s hooked on the shit.”

  “Well, good luck to her, then.” Karl glanced at his watch. “Looks like it’s almost quitting–”

  That was when McGuire came out of his office and yelled, “OK, listen up!”

  The room got quiet fast, and then he said, “We just got a call, and I want everybody on it.”

  “What’s up, boss?” Sefchik asked him.

  “A report of multiple shots fired in the 400 block of Moosic St. Get in your cars – now!”

  “Shit!” I said.

  Karl looked at me. “That’s Ricardo’s.”

  “Looks like the war’s not over yet.”

  The other detectives were already out the door. We stood up, and Karl turned to McGuire, who was still standing outside his office. He pointed his chin toward the window, then pointed to his watch. “Lieutenant…”

  It was still dark outside, but the sun would be up in less than an hour. That was what Karl meant, and McGuire knew it. He nodded at Karl and said, “Yeah, I know. OK, head on home.” Then he looked at me. “You’re riding alone on this one, Markowski.”

  As we walked toward the stairs that led to the parking lot, Karl said, “Try not to do anything stupid and get yourself killed, OK?”

  “Do my best.”

  “I mean, you’ve still got my DVD of Thunderblood, and Christine might not be in a hurry to give it back. She might even decide to keep it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She just might.”

  In the parking lot, I caught up with Sefchik and Aquilina and asked if I could ride with them out to the crime scene – if that’s what it was. No sense in taking another car out just for me – especially since the police department had been hit by another budget cut this year by the City Council.

  Once I was in the back seat of their car, I called Christine. I knew
she was still at work, and so wasn’t surprised to get her voice mail. I waited for the beep, then said, “Hi, honey, it’s your old man. We’ve had some shit hit the fan at work. Nothing to worry about, but it looks like I won’t be getting home until you’re sacked out. So, sleep well, and I’ll see you at breakfast.”

  On the way to Moosic Street, I told Sefchik and Aquilina what I’d learned about Slide and the Philly fangsters who were peddling it in town.

  “Christ, that’s just what we need,” Aquilina said from behind the wheel. She never took her eyes off the road. “A new drug on the streets, addicted supes going crazy, and a gang war, to boot. God, I love this job!”

  We arrived at Moosic Street a couple of minutes later. The end of the block containing Ricardo’s Ristorante had a couple of black-and-white units straddling the street with their lights flashing, to keep out civilian traffic. That was as close to the action as the uniformed officers were likely to get. Department policy said that when vampire perps were suspected, regular patrol units were supposed to secure the area, keep their distance, and wait for the specialists from Occult Crimes to arrive.

  Two more cars from the squad, headlights still on, had got there ahead of us. They were parked more or less in front of Ricardo’s Ristorante, diagonally from the sidewalk. Cops at crime scenes don’t have to park at crazy angles that nobody else would imitate – we do it because we can.

  I was noticing trivial stuff like that because there was nothing else to look at. No suspects in custody, no bodies, no wounded vamps – nothing. That street was cleaner than a nun’s asshole.

  The restaurant itself was shut tight, with no lights showing anywhere. I thought that was unusual – places like Ricardo’s usually stay open until dawn, at least. But maybe Calabrese didn’t want the restaurant to be known as a supe hangout – or maybe they’d just closed early tonight.

  The only things moving in that block of Moosic Street were seven detectives, who were milling around and looking at each other with “What the fuck” expressions on our faces.

  I glanced around at the others. I was the only sergeant in the bunch, and that meant I was Ranking Officer on Scene – at least until some Lieutenant or higher came along and relieved me. I hoped it wouldn’t take long for that to happen. In the meantime, I figured I’d better act like I knew what I was doing.

  “Alright, everybody!” I said. “Looks like I’m ROS for the time being, so we might as well get to work.” The other detectives all looked at me, but nobody gave me an argument.

  “Aquilina, Sefchik, see if you can get somebody to answer the door at Ricardo’s, and don’t forget to check around back. The rest of you start the canvass. A lot of the neighbors aren’t gonna want to come to the door at this hour, but keep your thumb on the buzzer until they do. You all know what kind of questions to ask, so let’s get started.”

  Nobody ever answered the door at Ricardo’s that morning, and our canvass of the neighborhood turned up exactly zip. None of those living in the apartments overlooking the street saw anything, knew anything, or thought anything – or so they said. Even the two people who’d called 911 about shots being fired told us that they’d heard the gunfire, yes, but hadn’t looked out to see where it was coming from. They had said so very earnestly, and the detectives interviewing them had just nodded, as if they believed every word.

  It’s a pain in the ass when witnesses won’t talk, but I couldn’t really blame the civilians for clamming up. Who wants to get on the wrong side of a bunch of criminals – hard guys with guns who aren’t afraid to use them?

  So we had no witnesses, and no forensic evidence, either. Whoever had cleaned up the scene had been fast but thorough – they hadn’t left so much as a shell casing behind. There were bullet holes in some of the buildings, but the bullets would be so badly fragmented that ballistics tests would be impossible. Several fresh-looking stains in the street were probably blood, but that stuff was useless without somebody’s DNA to compare it with. And I had a feeling that the guys whose blood had seeped into that asphalt were never going to be seen again.

  It took about two and a half hours to reach the conclusion that this so-called crime scene was going to be about as fruitful as a dead apple tree. Lieutenant Russo from Homicide had taken over by then, and he finally turned us loose. Since my shift was already long over, I didn’t have to go back to work. I’d been feeling hungry the last hour or so, so I decided to stop for something to eat on my way home.

  I didn’t go to Jerry’s Diner this time – I had a hankering for something that wasn’t served with a light coating of grease. Fortunately, Wohlstein’s Deli and Eatery downtown serves everything on their menu all day long.

  Whoever wrote “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” must have been thinking of Manny Wohlstein’s turkey club sandwich – and if not, he should have been. I was halfway through mine when I saw the ghoul come in and take a seat at one of the corner tables.

  You can’t ID a ghoul just by looking – although if you get close enough to smell their breath, it’s what you might call a dead giveaway. But this one I recognized. He goes by “Algernon”, and he’s the brother of a guy everyone calls Barney Ghougle, a local undertaker and one of my most reliable informants.

  I knew who Algernon was because he’s got a little problem that sometimes gets him into trouble – a habit of taking his cock out in front of people and waving it around. I hoped he’d be able to resist the impulse as long as he was in Wohlstein’s – I was off duty. Besides, I’d seen ghoul cock before and hoped never to have to look at any again.

  Taking another bite out of my sandwich, I began to wonder what the hell Algernon was doing there. Wohlstein’s offers a large menu, but they don’t serve the kind of stuff that ghouls eat. Just as well, really – a menu item like Human thigh, sliced thinly and served au jus would probably turn off a lot of human customers, me included.

  All of the waitresses are Manny’s daughters, and the tall one, whose name is Clara, stopped at Algernon’s table, order pad in hand. The ghoul said something that I couldn’t hear, but Clara went away and returned a minute later with what looked like a glass of iced tea. She said something to Algernon, who shook his head, and she went off to her other tables.

  I continued eating but kept an unobtrusive eye on Algernon. I was waiting for him to drink some of his iced tea. But although he tapped the straw out of its paper wrapper and put it in the plastic tumbler, it never touched his lips. He just sat there, staring off into space.

  After a while, one of the busboys came over to Algernon’s table. I didn’t recognize him, but that meant nothing. Manny has four daughters but no sons, so busboys come and go. But I did think it was strange for a busboy to wipe down a table while the customer was still sitting there.

  The busboy, was a slim, red-haired human in his early twenties. He gave the table a quick once-over with a damp rag and said something to Algernon without looking at him. Then he turned, stashed the rag in his apron, and walked across the dining area to the men’s restroom. Half a minute or so later, Algernon stood up and went in there, too.

  The two of them were in the bathroom together for a couple of minutes, then the busboy came out and went directly into the kitchen. I started counting silently to myself, one thousand one, one thousand two… When I got to ten, Algernon came out and headed for the door without returning to his table.

  I knew what I’d just witnessed, as any cop worth his badge would. Restaurants are prime locations for drug dealing – always have been. You’ve got people coming and going all the time, and nobody pays much attention.

  Sometimes the restaurant owner is in on the action, other times not. I’d known Manny Wohlstein for years, and I’d have bet my pension that he had no idea how one of the employees was supplementing his salary. If Manny ever found out, I hoped the busboy had some very good health insurance – the kind with catastrophic coverage.

  Ordinarily, this kind of thing was none of my business. I’d just drop a word to a guy
I know in Vice, Gus McDorman, and let him deal with it. But one of the parties in the transaction I’d witnessed was a supe, which meant that the drug for sale had almost certainly been Slide. And that made it my business. The only question was what I was going to do about it.

  It didn’t take me long to make up my mind.

  Manny Wohlstein can usually be found in his office at the back of the restaurant, but I decided against paying him a visit. The busboy might see me and ask somebody who was in there talking to his boss. All of Manny’s daughters knew me by sight, and I didn’t want one of them putting the busboy on his guard by telling him that Manny was talking to a cop.

  I finished my sandwich, paid the check, and went out to my car. The Yellow Pages app on my phone gave me the deli’s number, and I called it.

  “Wohlstein’s Deli,” a cheerful female voice said. “How can I help you?”

  “I’d like to speak to Mister Wohlstein, please.”

  “Can I say who’s calling?”

  I was pretty sure the voice belonged to Naomi Wohlstein, and I didn’t want her saying my name where the busboy might overhear it.

  “This is Lou Pastorelli,” I told her. “From Mid-Atlantic Produce Distribution.”

  “Just a minute, Mister Pastorelli.”

  Then Manny’s voice was saying in my ear, “This is Manny Wohlstein. What can I do for you?”

  “Manny, it’s Stan Markowski. I’m sorry for giving Naomi a false name, but I didn’t want her saying my right name out loud. I’d rather you didn’t say it, either.”

  “Why do you want me to do that?” His voice sounded wary.

  “I’m calling to ask about one of your employees, who’s still in the building. I didn’t want him to hear you say my name, in case he’s heard it before. I don’t want him to start wondering why you’re talking to a cop.”

  “You said ‘him’, so this isn’t one of my girls you’re asking about.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Alright, then.” Manny’s voice relaxed a little, and I could hear that old desk chair of his creak as he leaned back. “So how can I help you, Mister… Pastorelli?”