Dark Moonlighting (16 page)

“Jurisdiction… jurisdiction,” Table
struggled. “I know we have jurisdiction for some reason. Wait, I
know! We’re investigating the Urinator serial killings.”

I froze in fear as I learned that the experts
were there to investigate my murders. Luckily I had plenty of time
to compose myself as Jasmine was still questioning the, as she
called it, “flimsy excuse” for why the F.B.I. would be taking the
lead in the investigation. I reminded myself that the authorities
still believed that Lindsay was only missing. There was nothing to
tie her to the Urinator, and no reason for anyone to suspect that I
was that poorly named serial killer.

“Victim is a white male approximately
twenty-three years of age,” Dr. Kenner began.

“All right,” Jasmine said irritably. “How
could you possibly know that?”

“She’s the best in her field,” Agent Table
answered affectionately.

“No, I mean how could she tell that when she
hasn’t even looked at the body yet?” Jasmine questioned.

Distracted by the absurdity of the strange
outsiders, Jasmine either forgot or ignored her aversion to the
corpse. She held up the police tape for me, Table and Kenner to
walk under before proceeding into the area herself.

“I can tell the victim is male because of the
size and shape of the femur bone,” Kenner explained as if speaking
to a child.

“The femur is a leg bone or thigh bone or
something,” Jasmine stated confidently. “The victim’s legs are
still buried inside that drain.”

“I’m a keen observer of scientific facts,”
Kenner answered as if the statement clarified everything. “For
instance, I can tell your partner was smoking a very weak type of
marijuana called Bhang no more than a half hour ago.”

“Okay,” Jasmine said defensively. “You just
go ahead and point those keen senses of yours towards the
corpse.”

Dr. Kenner spent the next five minutes
examining the body. She mentioned a lot of scientific words that
the rest of us did not understand, but she did not bother to
explain them. Agent Table spent the time making bad jokes that
Jasmine and I pretended to laugh at. He never once took off his
sunglasses.

“This is definitely a homicide,” Dr. Kenner
concluded.

“How do you know?” Jasmine questioned. She
was more diplomatic than she had been earlier.

“Did I mention our Toyota
Highlander
comes with a rear camera?” Kenner asked.

“That’s… not at all pertinent to this
investigation,” Jasmine answered.

“It really helps when you’re backing out of a
tight spot,” Kenner added emphatically. “I just think it’s neat.
Anyway, I’ve determined the cause of death to be this nick.”

“What?” I asked in a panic. “I didn’t kill
him!”

“This nick on the vertebrae of his neck,”
Kenner answered, puzzled by my reaction.

“Guess that weed was a little stronger than
you thought,” Jasmine whispered to me. “You’re acting
really
paranoid,” she finished before turning to Kenner and raising her
voice. “So, you thinking he was stabbed in the neck with a knife or
something?”

“No, not a knife. This man was…”

Jasmine, Agent Table and I all stared at the
forensic anthropologist as she paused and stared off into space.
After about fifteen seconds my partner and I grew concerned by
Kenner’s lack of movement. After another thirty seconds passed,
Jasmine finally nudged Agent Table in the stomach with her elbow
and raised a questioning eyebrow.

“She does this,” Table reassured us. “She has
trouble with dramatic—”

“Bitten!” Dr. Kenner concluded. “The nicks on
his neck were caused by sharpened human teeth that pieced the
victim’s skin and ruptured the carotid artery.”

“Oh my God,” Jasmine said in horror.

“Oh my God,” I said in a completely different
type of horror.

“Oh my God,” Agent Table said as he looked at
his watch. “We’re going to be late for
Avatar 3
!”

Dr. Kenner tore off the latex gloves she had
been wearing and dropped them next to the corpse. She ducked under
the police tape, wobbling in her high heels, and trotted with Agent
Table towards their car.

“Don’t worry, Table,” Kenner reassured her
partner. “The Toyota
Highlander
gets excellent gas mileage.
We won’t have to fill up the tank on our way to the theater.”

“And I don’t have to worry about speeding
since it was given a five star crash test rating by the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration,” Table added.

Dr. Kenner grabbed her partner’s arm,
stopping him in his tracks. She put a hand on his cheek and stared
longingly into his eyes before saying, “I love you, Table.”

“Really?” Table asked hopefully.

Kenner removed her hand quickly and shifted
her eyes towards the ground. “I don’t know.”

“The F.B.I. dude and the skeleton lady were
weird,” Jasmine said to me.

I grunted in response, too distracted to
engage her in any sort of meaningful conversation. I had not
disposed of any bodies in the area of Hamilton Boulevard. That
meant that the bizarre woman’s inexplicable abilities had confirmed
my worst fear. The teeth marks found on the victim had come from
another vampire.

Jasmine, still visibly shaken by the poor
condition of the human remains she had seen, seemed unconcerned by
my emotional distance. She pulled the cruiser into the parking lot
of the police station and parked next to my civilian car. She
forced a smile at me and nodded as I exited our squad car.

“I’ll see ya next week,” she said. She
started to back out of the parking lot but slammed on the brakes.
“Actually, I guess I’ll probably see you tomorrow for Crockett’s
funeral.”

“I’ll try to make it,” I lied. I waved
goodbye as I collapsed into the driver’s seat of my car.

Officer Crockett’s untimely demise, while
tragic, was not something I was going to be able to commemorate.
Even if I had not had another job to go to during the funeral, I
doubt I would have been able to hide under a shady tree for the
entire memorial service without drawing attention to myself. With
the way things were going, I considered the strong possibility that
I might be running for my life by the next afternoon. I let out a
deep sigh at the thought as I pulled out of the police station’s
parking lot.

As I was contemplating running from my
problems, I literally ran into another one. Two figures suddenly
emerged on the nearly deserted street on which I was driving. They
were darting across the street, and I felt the impact against the
hood of my car even as I was desperately slamming on the brakes.
Adrenaline surged through my body as my subconscious screamed at me
for speeding on a residential street. I leapt out of my car,
terrified that I had killed both of the figures.

Bathed in the car’s headlights, the two
bodies were easily visible even without my predatory eyesight. The
first was a young Hispanic boy who was lying on his stomach.
Despite his positioning, his face was pointing up and his eyes were
fixed in a glassy stare. His neck was clearly broken. The boy’s
body made me sicker than I had been when I saw the disintegrating
corpse, but I forced myself to check on the other victim. The
second body was that of a woman in her early twenties. I was
relieved to see that her head and body were facing the right way,
but startled a moment later when her eyes shot open. She pressed
her hands out, arched her back and suddenly leapt to her feet in a
single motion. A disturbing cracking noise filled the air as she
turned her head to the left and the right. She rolled her shoulders
and pushed some loose strands of brown hair out of her face. She
glanced down at the nearby corpse and shook her head in
disappointment before locking eyes with me.

“You owe me dinner,” she said. “I was really
in the mood for Mexican too. I guess… mixed European will have to
do. What are you anyway? German, English? Nothing in Western Europe
really works well for that kind of joke. Why couldn’t you be
Chinese?”

I pulled my pistol from its holster and
leveled it at the woman. “So you’re the other vampire who has been
hunting in my city,” I said.

“Other vampire?” she questioned. She leaned
forward and squinted at me. “Nick?”

“You know who I am?” I questioned.

“Know you?” she asked. “You’re the whole
reason I’m here,” she said with a smile. She took a few steps
towards me with her hand extended, but stopped when I pointed my
gun at her head. “The name’s Kim.”

“And you’re the vampire responsible for these
strange reports and mysterious corpses turning up in my city,” I
said confidently. “Why—”

“I’m
one
of them,” she interrupted.
“Gasp! Dun dun dun!” she mocked. “I’m glad I ran into you, or you
ran into me, so I could see you first hand. He’s always saying you
look like such a tool in your uniform. I think it kind of makes you
look sexy though. It’s pathetic that you’re pretending to be one of
them, of course, but… you still look kind of sexy. I have to say
you’re really playing the part of a human well. Pointing that gun
in my face like it’s at all a threat to me. You’re supposed to be
this super old, super experienced vampire right? You have to know
that won’t kill me.”

“You’re obviously new at this then,” I said
to her. “If you’d been shot before you’d know that it stings like a
real sonvabitch.”

“Well that’s not going to matter because… Oh,
my God! Look out, behind you!” she yelled.

I had made a lot of stupid mistakes in my
life, but even I was not dumb enough to fall for that one. Hell, I
was alive when that one had been invented. The other vampire was
young and overconfident. She lunged at me even though I had not
taken my eyes off of her. She was lightening fast and agile, but
this meant nothing without the element of surprise. I squeezed the
trigger of my gun and sent a single round into her chest. She
crumpled to the ground at my feet, moaning in agony.

“See,” I said triumphantly. I pointed the gun
towards her position on the ground. “I told you.”

“Oh, right in the boob,” Kim groaned as she
clutched her left breast. “I always told him that you might be able
to teach us something. I was hoping for a less hands on type of
lesson though. Something more philosophical and deep about the
meaning of life.”

“The bullet is going to be a real bitch to
get out if it’s lodged in your tissue,” I lectured. “I recommend a
scalpel, needle-nose pliers and a lot of alcohol. Now, who are you
working for? Or, more importantly, where is he?”

“Thanks for the tip,” Kim said with a sly
smile. “The master would be very upset with me if I told you where
he was. He’s got big, some would say needlessly intricate, plans
for you. The one thing I can tell you now is that…”

The sharp pain in my groin was the first
indication that, this time, I had let her get the jump on me. I
looked down briefly as I instinctively cupped the wounded area, but
forced myself to ignore the pain and prepare for her next blow. I
raised my gun but found that instead of launching another attack
she had taken the opportunity to run halfway down the block. She
had paused in her escape, but she had her legs tensed in case she
had to bolt again. She shook her head at me as I started to stumble
forward.

“No time for that, old man,” Kim laughed. She
pointed a finger towards the horizon in the east. “You could
probably catch me, but you’d have to be pretty quick to beat that
glow.”

I looked to my left and saw the earliest
signs of the sunrise. I had five, maybe ten minutes at the most
before it was high enough to start killing me. Kim ran from the
area, but I made no effort to pursue her. I took one last look at
the poor boy who I had run down before climbing into the safety of
my car.

“Typical woman,” I said to myself. “Kicks me
in the balls and is gone before the sun comes up.”

I was in no mood to laugh. I started the
car’s engine and made a quick departure from the area. The gunshot
had likely kept any of the residents in the area from looking out
of their windows, but that respite would only last so long. I
squinted through the specially designed glass of my car when the
sun peaked above the horizon a few minutes later. It was still low
in the sky when I arrived back at my apartment. My next door
neighbor, Anthony, was outside when I pulled up. He was wearing a
bathrobe with fuzzy slippers and had a coffee cup in his hand.

“Hey, doc,” Anthony yelled even though my
windows were rolled up.

I waved back at the young man and smiled. The
cheerful expression that Anthony wore dissolved into a look of
confusion. It was not until I had pulled into my garage and got out
of the car that I realized what had been so perplexing to him. I
had planned on getting home before sunrise and slipping into my
apartment unnoticed. My encounter with the other vampire had
delayed me, and I had not had time to change into civilian clothes
after my shift ended. Anthony had just witnessed a man he knew to
be a doctor wearing a police uniform.

Chapter Eight: My Favorite Mistake

Who was the mysterious “master” who Kim the
vampire had mentioned? Why had he come to Starside? What did he
want with me? Even at that time I was fairly confident I had the
answer to all those questions. I am not going to answer them at
this point in the story because it would not fit very well. Sorry,
but I just think the book will work better if I hold off for a
while. Everyone who watched my trial knows about the “one-armed
vampire” defense. I always thought it was a stupid allusion since
my nemesis had both of his arms. Sometimes the media can just be so
lazy. I mean, it was one of the most interesting trials in American
history and that was the best they could come up with? Some lame,
half-assed reference to
The Fugitive
? Anyway, I am straying
off topic. The point is that everyone familiar with the trial knows
the man who I claimed to be the real murderer. What they do not
know is the background story that leads up to that. If Caleb Hass
had done some research it probably would have made for a better
defense. But I digress.