Reaper III: Rookies Read online

I swallowed nervously, but tried not to lose my composure.

  This man is going to be the ruin of me, I was certain.

  “I’d like that,” I replied honestly, feeling as though I’d been put on the spot.

  “And this time, pack a bag for it.” Neal suggested, winking at me, even though my partner was there listening, watching, being entertained by our exchange.

  “I will.” I promised, feeling my cheeks warm with embarrassment. I just knew Phil loved watching me squirm like this. “Call my cell?”

  “You know I will,” my lover said and then turned away, heading for the briefing room.

  My partner’s smile was far too smug for my tastes.

  “What?” I asked him, flustered.

  “He’s totally smitten by you, you know?” Phil winked at me and then glanced at his watch. “Crazy about you. I can tell just from the way he looks at you.”

  “Really?” I asked, unable to see things the way he seemed to.

  I watched Neal’s blond head disappear around the corner.

  Was that how Neal felt about me?

  “Really,” Phil said and I felt the warmth in my cheeks return. “And he seems like a nice kid.”

  “He is nice.”

  “Well, you have my blessing.” He checked his watch again. “We might as well head to the briefing room—it’s almost that time again.”

  By the time we got there, we entered a room filled to capacity. There were no chairs left, so Phil and I stood at the back of the room, facing our peers. Facing Neal, who was sitting so close to us, I could have reached out and touched him. I found myself wanting that very much, perhaps wanting to touch him even more because I couldn’t.

  It would be unprofessional and everyone would see me do it...

  Which made me want to do it all the more.

  “So did you hear about the weird one last night? At the North Pier Road warehouse district?” Officer Pratt asked his partner.

  “No, why?” Officer Dale asked, curious.

  Curious as well, I found myself eavesdropping, listening closely to their words.

  What had Pratt heard?

  “It’s a bizarre case, all right. The three victims of the ordeal claimed that a woman dressed in black leather wearing a monster mask saved them. She took a good twenty rounds of bullets to the chest before taking out the four hostiles.” As Pratt spoke, I remembered too well the feeling of the bullets striking but not hurting me, as the Dark Thing stopped them in their trajectories.

  “No way!” Officer Dale turned in his seat to hear more. “Anyone notable?”

  Pratt continued, “One of the deceased has been identified as Benny the Blade.”

  “The mobster?”

  Neal was paying attention to the conversation, as many of us were.

  “Seriously?” He asked.

  “Seriously.” Pratt assured them. “The 55th Division of course had to turn their findings over to the special task force the FBI set up to handle the Wild Animal Killer.”

  “Fuckin’ feds.” Dale’s face was marked with anger. “Them and their jurisdictional bullshit. How do they even know it was her?”

  I noticed that Dale said her almost reverently.

  “Apparently,” Pratt continued, “The flattened appearance of the twenty-plus rounds found on the floor of the warehouse stumped the 55th forensics team. The slugs were flattened like they had hit armor plating, or something” The officer paused and then continued, a sigh escaping his lips. “So it doesn’t look like the Wild Animal Killer is a wild animal anymore, like some witnesses were originally speculating. That much they know for sure.”

  “How do they know that?” Neal asked.

  Pratt shrugged. “The three vics are all singing the same tune. And this morning’s papers…they’re calling her the Pier Heroine.” The officer gave a small yawn. “So anyway, that other description of the Wild Animal Killer is really holding water this time. A woman about six feet tall, with gloves or gauntlets of some kind that have claws for fingers, dreadlocks and a monster mask of some type.” He paused to frown at the officers to whom he was speaking. “Don’t you guys watch the morning news? Read the paper? This was front-page.”

  “Naw,” Officer Dale yawned. “I slept in and pretty much rushed here. I didn’t have time to glance at the paper, never mind watch it on the morning report.”

  “So,” the more knowledgeable officer continued. “Heart of the story is, there’s some whacked-out woman out there playing superhero in a bullet-proof monster suit, who’s moved from slicing and dicing to decapitating her would-be villains.”

  Slicing and dicing? I remembered how Benny’s eyes had stared at me, as he himself experienced the blades of the Dark Thing.

  Officer Dale offered his two cents. “I remember when the Wild Animal theory first started, they thought that the killings were being done by some wild animal, there was that one homeless guy thought he’d seen a demon. The monster suit would support that claim. All those reports of a woman in head to toe leather.”

  “A bullet proof leather suit of body armor.” Neal concluded. “Any other idea is just too fucking weird to be true.”

  It was a nice theory, but the truth was too fucking weird for anyone, excluding myself.

  Furthermore, it was a truth that only I was completely aware of. The witnesses, as other witness before them, knew some of the facts, knew what their eyes had told them, those far-fetched claims that the police tried to rationalize and explain away.

  The details that the police didn’t want to believe.

  Couldn’t afford to believe.

  They had to chalk some things up to mob hysteria, which is how they would probably have classified the projectiles from last night, my leeches.

  Nothing in science could explain some of the things that the three witnesses would have claimed to have seen, besides mob hysteria. The police would have to conclude that they had all hallucinated, under the extreme duress of their traumatic situation.

  Any other explanation, they would conclude as Neal had, was simply too strange to be true.

  “Hey,” Officer Dale said suddenly, becoming more animated over the topic. “I got an idea. What if this woman isn’t a vigilante at all? What if she’s in with one of the crime syndicates, killing off the rivals of whatever organization she’s serving? Like maybe one of Benny’s rivals had a woman in costume do the bloody deed.”

  “Nah,” Pratt yawned. “Think about the different types of victims there have been over the years. That pedophile, the domestic cases, the rapists, the murderers, the gang bangers, et cetera, et cetera. Think about—“

  “Okay, everyone…let’s get this show on the road,” Captain Briggs declared loudly, interrupting the officers’ discussion of my most recent night’s adventure.

  I admired the way that the tall blond woman commanded the attention of a room full of cops.

  I found myself only half-listening as the Captain briefed us on the activities of the previous shift.

  I was mostly engrossed in staring at the back of Neal’s head, wanting to taste the skin of his neck with the tip of my tongue, wanting to taste that which I could smell so sharply with my heightened senses.

  “Earth to Sam,” Phil whispered, reminding me to pay attention to the briefing.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I whispered back, the warmth of embarrassment spreading across my cheeks.

  I wondered how long I had been staring.

  I had rather zoned out, so Phil was right to have put me in my place. It was difficult to focus on the Captain’s report, with Neal so near me. I could feel the heat radiating from his body.

  His was a body I had come to know very well over the past two months… A body that I wanted to get to know even better.

  “Okay, people, that’s it. It’s like a freaking skating rink out there, so drive safe.” The Captain wrapped up her briefing. “See you at sixteen hundred hours.”

  Phil and I left for the squad car assigned us, did our equipment checks, checked
in with dispatch and were soon on our way to Zone Three. Lately, we had settled comfortably into our typical routine. He drove for the first half of the shift while I did the paperwork and I drove for the second half, while he did the paperwork.

  It was called teamwork. We were bona fide partners now, working as two halves of a whole. I wasn’t a fumbling Rookie anymore—at least, not very often…

  “Hey Sam, how about Vietnamese for lunch today?” Phil addressed me from behind the wheel of the car.

  Since we were headed for the downtown zone that included a large portion of the Chinatown region of the city, we would likely end up at our favorite place to grab a quick bite, the Phuong Nam Restaurant.

  “Sure, Phil.”

  “Can I get a little more enthusiasm out of you? We’re talking Vietnamese!”

  I feigned sheer excitement, my voice girly and saccharine sweet. “Sounds good to me, boss. I can’t wait.”

  “You got a bee in your bonnet?”

  “I never did understand that expression.”

  “Something on your mind, Sam?” Phil used his paternal voice.

  “Nothing worth discussing.”

  We rode a few moments in silence. “Vietnamese,” he repeated. “Spring rolls. Pickled plums.”

  “If there’s no line up.”

  “Line up? That doesn’t matter! Girl, they can get a lunch combo into a take-out container faster than you can say hungry cops.”

  “If we get a lunch break, that is.”

  “You seem…a little pissy today.”

  “Pissy?”

  “Cranky.”

  “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

  I thought of the warehouse district, of Benny the Blade and the three eye witnesses who had seen everything. I wondered what the feds were making of the case.

  “I’ll bet.” Phil chuckled. “You Rookies and your youthful energy. When you get to be my age, you’ll know the value of a good night’s sleep.”

  “I spent most of the night tossing and turning.”

  “Is that what you kids are calling it now?” He laughed again.

  I groaned in response.

  “You want me to tell Schroeder to back off a little, that you need your beauty sleep?” Phil teased.

  “You saying I’m anything less than beautiful?” I joked back.

  “Naw.” My partner glanced at me with fatherly adoration in his eyes. “Besides that luggage under your eyes, you’re as breathtaking as ever.”

  “Aw, gee, thanks, boss.” I said playfully.

  Another comfortable silence passed between us.

  “Vietnamese.” He said once more.

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, thinking fondly of Phuong Nam’s spring rolls.

  I logged unto the computer and scrolled through the bulletins. “Looks like a quiet day for us, so far,” I told him. “Just like the Captain said.”

  “I didn’t think you’d heard anything she said.” He chuckled. “You were so busy staring at Schroeder with that far off look in your eye and that dreamy smile on your face.”

  “Will you quit busting my balls about Neal?” I asked, flustered.

  “If you had balls, I’d consider it.” He began to apply the brakes of the car well before an intersection and frowned as it continued to slide forward, despite his intervention. “I’ll credit the Captain one thing. She was right about the road. It’s slippery as all Hell.”

  No thanks to the icy road conditions, we ended up answering four motor vehicle accident calls before our lunch break, which finally came around one-thirty. I was starving, to say the least, when Phil finally pulled the car to a stop outside Phuong Nam’s street entrance. We had called in our order ahead of time on Phil’s cell phone. He went inside while I waited in the car, taking the driver’s seat. He returned a short time later brandishing a large paper bag that smelled like Heaven to my growling stomach.

  “Settler’s Park?” I asked him, putting the car into drive.

  “Sounds good to me,” he said, of the location that would put us in the middle of Zone Three.

  Settler’s Park wasn’t really a park at all, so much as it was the WebDotWeb parking lot with a large abstract sculpture of what we all thought was a bird in the center of the property, looming over the cars parked around it. We found a spot in the shadow of the massive WebDotWeb building and began opening take-out food containers when the electronic hiss of the radio interrupted our meal.

  “So much for that,” I groaned under my breath and began putting the foil containers back into the paper bag.

  “Base Ten,” crackled the radio that we sometimes loved to hate, “To nine-zero-five Tango. There’s a ten eighty-seven-“—shots fired —“-at the All Saints Church, in Zone Three at two-twenty Palmer Street. Please acknowledge.”

  “Ten four, Base Ten.” Phil answered the radio. “We’re on our way.” He turned to me, as I started the engine and began to pull out of Settler’s Park. “Step on it kid, fast as you dare and-“

  “-and try not to hit anyone.” I interrupted his usual spiel with mild annoyance. “I know, I know.”

  We arrived to find a scene of bloodshed.

  At the base of the steps of the church was the body of a youth, no more than twelve years of age. He was lying in a pool of dark blood, made vibrant red at its edges by the white snow beneath him.

  The Dark Thing was made excited by the sight of the blood, so I knew that the young man was guilty of something noteworthy.

  Still…what a shame, I thought. One so young hurt so badly.

  As we approached the church, we saw that there was no movement coming from him. Phil looked at me and shook his head. The boy was dead, his body drained of its lifeblood, his eyes staring listlessly at the grey clouds overhead.

  We didn’t have to take his vital signs to know it, but Phil took the boy’s pulse at the base of his throat anyway. At his solemn nod, I called dispatch for the coroner.

  “Sam, I knew this kid.”

  The look on my partner’s face spoke volumes of his despair.

  “Was he…troubled?”

  “You could say that. His name is BJ Brown. I coach his basketball team at the Boys and Girls club. He was a great player. One of my best.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  His distaste for the turn that the youth’s life had taken was evident in the caustic tones of his next words. “He’s a member of the Blue Crew gang.”

  “How do you know?”

  He lifted up the boy’s blue shirt with a gloved hand and indicated the gangland symbols tattooed into his abdomen. “See? He’s the kid brother of one of their higher ups. JD is going to be really upset when he finds out his baby brother bit the big one.”

  Phil pulled the youth’s shirt back down and continued speaking in my silence. “What happened here today is just the beginning. There will be a backlash and you don’t have to be my kinda psychic to know that I lot of people could get hurt in the process. There’s going to be more blood in the streets of Zone Three tonight, mark my words.”

  We secured the scene immediately and were providing some crowd control when our back up arrived. The homicide investigators were en route as well, the dispatcher informed us.

  The Dark Thing seemed to be craving the predicted bloodshed, as much as it craved the blood beneath the boy’s body. And I wasn’t just confusing its needs with the hunger pangs of my empty stomach, either – I knew the Dark Thing’s call too well, that tingling feeling, just beneath my skin, a growing itch that demanded attention, demanded appeasement.

  Another squad car pulled up to help secure the scene, as well as one ghost car driven by the homicide investigators. Having been first on scene, it was our job to brief the detectives and we did so in earnest. The victim of the shooting was the youngest person that I had ever seen dead, I realized, as Phil spoke to the detectives at length.

  It was a damned shame, a kid like that tangled up in gang business.

  What did you do to get
yourself killed? I asked the young corpse silently.

  I knew if I had access to his blood— if I could sample it with the Dark Thing—I would likely have the answer to that question, at least in the form of a vision of his crimes in my mind.

  Nevertheless, there was no way that I could risk using the Dark Thing like that—not now, with so many officers around and not with winter gloves on my hands.

  Besides, what would I tell the homicide detectives anyway? Hey guys – just thought I’d let you know - I solved your mystery by using the blood of the victim as an interpretive tool? Oh and by the way, I’m the Wild Animal Killer that you have been looking for, killing baddies from the tender young age of fifteen?

  The Dark Thing made me aware of people watching us.

  It felt eyes and ears focused on the scene, hesitant to approach because of the police presence. I looked in the direction that my instincts were insisting that I seek and saw two dark-haired heads looking in our direction from around the corner of a Laundromat down the street.

  I tried to listen to what they were saying, but over the noise of the officers nearby scurrying around, speaking with dispatch and talking amongst themselves, not to mention the din of the crowd of onlookers that had gathered about us, I couldn’t make out more than a few words with my sensitive hearing.

  Nothing that I could use to string together a single sentence besides two hastily spoken words, “Let’s go.”

  The two, dressed head to toe in blue, disappeared around the corner of the Laundromat, heading away from the crime scene as quickly as they could.

  I didn’t think that either of them were the shooters, since they were wearing the same colors as the fallen boy. More than likely, they were from his Crew, gone off to tell the others what had happened—if the others didn’t already know.

  The Dark Thing wanted me to follow them, all the way back to their leaders. However, I couldn’t simply walk away from the scene of the crime. There were things expected of me. I had a role to play, as a police officer who had been first on scene and they would notice if I were to disappear.

  In broad daylight, yet.

  The Dark Thing would have to wait.

  Up next?

  Reaper IV: Daddy