"Yeah. Shit, I would, in his place."
"And since we know that, if we were ready for him..."
"Uh-uh. No way, no how. I'm not using the guy as bait. We fuck it up, and Prescott's toast. There's got to be another way to get this fucking Sligo."
"Hope we think of it soon," Karl said, and began to tap in numbers.
At certain times of the day, getting around Scranton is quicker if you use side streets and stay away from the main thoroughfares, such as they are. That's what I was doing, and I managed to get the speed up to about forty while Karl tried to track down a witch who had apparently changed her phone number a couple of times.
A hundred feet or so ahead, a black cat was just starting to lead three of her kittens across the wide street. I'm fond of animals, so I figured I'd better speed up a little – that way, I'd be past them and gone before they reached my side of the road. I could've just slowed down and let then go first, but that would mean a black cat – hell, four of them – would be crossing my path. I'm not superstitious or anything, but I still thought that was a bad idea.
Turned out I was right.
Because if I hadn't speeded up right about then, the dead body that fell on top of us would have gone right through the windshield, instead of just putting a humongous dent in the roof.
Close to two hundred pounds of dead weight moving that fast – it might well have killed one or both of us if it had gone through the glass, or at least hurt us pretty bad.
But we were fine. Being scared shitless doesn't count. Or so they tell me.
I've been around plenty of crime scenes, but this was the first time I found myself the focus of one. Since there was igh place nearby – either manmade or natural – that the guy could have jumped, fell, or been pushed from, the first uniforms on the scene started kicking around the idea that maybe I'd hit a pedestrian who'd been crossing the street – him hard enough with the front bumper to toss his body onto the car's roof. The pricks.
The doc from the M.E.'s office put the kibosh on that pretty soon, though. Even without an autopsy, body temperature showed the dude had been dead for at least two hours.
The M.E.'s guy wasn't a guy this time, but a gal. Instead of Homer, they'd sent a thin, I mean really thin young woman named Cecelia Reynolds. Fine with me – she's as good at pathology as Homer, maybe better. I'm always telling her, in a kidding way, to go eat a cookie, and she usually responds, in an equally joking way, by telling me to go fuck myself.
I was explaining, to the third pair of my brother officers – these two from Homicide – what had happened to Karl and me, when Cecelia called me over. She was squatting over the dead guy, who had come to rest on the asphalt after sliding off the car's roof.
"We're just about to bag him," she said to me, "but I thought you'd be interested in this."
Cecelia tugged on a fresh pair of latex gloves. "It was just a hunch I had," she said, "and turns out, I was right." She leaned forward and used her fingers to peel back the corpse's upper lip.
Fangs. Two nice long, sharp vampire canines.
"Thanks, Cecelia," I said after a moment. "And, listen: I realize you can't undress him here, but when you get him on the table, I'm betting you'll find some weird symbols, probably three of then, carved into the body someplace. If you do, I'd be real grateful if you'd give me a call, okay?"
She looked at me for a couple of seconds before nodding slowly. "Okay, Stan, I'll be sure to do that."
I straightened up and headed back to the Homicide cops to answer more questions. There wasn't any doubt in my mind that Cecelia would find three more of the arcane symbols carved into the dead guy. Because now that I knew he was a vamp, I was also pretty sure I knew something else about him, too.
He was the fourth sacrifice.
• • • •
Whenever a cop is involved in anything where somebody gets killed, whether it's an officer-involved shooting or something more unusual, like having a dead guy drop out of the sky on you, Internal Affairs takes over – and the only reason we don't call them Infernal Affairs is that we don't want to be insulting to Hell.
I had to relate the details of my current case, over and over, to a couple of IA cops named Famalette and Sullivan. Karl was going through a similar routine down the hall with another pair from the Rat Squad. Maybe my two interrogators figured I'd get sick of the repetition sooner or later, and confess to something, just to make it stop.
But they didn't get any confessions out of me, because I hadn't done anything. And I kept bringing the conversation back to the central fact that the undead guy had been truly dead for at least two hours before he ended up on top of my car, however the hell he got there.
"How do you know the vamp had been iced two hours earlier?" Famalette asked, as if he'd just caught me in a slip-up. He had a rubber band wrapped around the spread fingers of one hand and he kept twanging it with the other. I think Internal Affairs training must include lessons on how to be annoying.
"Because the M.E. doc said so. What's her name – Reynolds."
"The M.E.'s report hasn't even been filed yet," Famalette said, in an a-ha tone.
"She told me at the scene. She knew from the body temp."
"What's she doing revealing confidential information like that to you?"
"She thought I'd be interested," I said, "since I'm the one who had the dead guy dropped on top of him, and all. Well, me and my partner. And who says it's confidential?"
"All M.E. reports are confidential, Markowski, you oughta know that," Famalette said.
"Yeah, but the M.E. report hasn't been filed yet – you said so, yourself."
His face started going red, and he turned away.
"You real chummy with this chick from the M.E.'s office?" Sullivan asked me. He had a Brillo pad of curly hair that reminded me of that singer from the Seventies, Art Garfunkel. I hoped that he wasn't going to break into "Bridge Over Troubled Water" – although even that would have been better than the crap I'd been listening to for the last two hours.
"Chummy?" I said. "I dunno – the last thing she said to me was 'Go fuck yourself.' Draw your own conclusions."
"You sure the one you're fucking isn't her?" Sullivan said with a leer.