Once Bitten (3 page)

especially psychologists with twenty years clinical experience.

I asked for the results in graph form and the screen cleared and then horizontal and vertical lines sprouted from the bottom left hand corner followed by diagonal wavy lines that represented the parameters within which previous cases suggested normal personalities would lie. A small flashing star marked Terry's profile. Dead centre. This girl was more stable than I was.

“Am I, like, OK?” she asked.

I smiled. “You're fine, Terry.”

She grinned. “Can you do me a favour now?”

“Depends what you want,” I told her.

She nodded her head sideways, indicating her arms handcuffed behind the chair. “Can you get them to take these off me. They hurt, for sure, and my nose, like, itches.”

“I'll try,” I said, getting to my feet and picking up the briefcase. “I'll ask De'Ath.”

“Don't go yet,” she said. “Scratch my nose for me, first. Please.”

“Are you serious?”

“You don't know how shit fire serious, Jamie. It itches like you wouldn't believe.”

She smiled and nodded, looking earnestly at me like a dog asking for a bone. I sighed and reached over and scratched her slowly on the tip of the nose. She groaned quietly, her eyes closed.

The door banged open and I flinched. “You finished?” De'Ath asked.

I felt my cheeks go red because I was sure he'd seen me touching her and there was a supercilious smirk on his face.

“Yeah, I'm done,” I said. I nodded at Terry and went to the door, which De'Ath held open for me.

“Jamie?” she said, and I looked back at her. “Thanks,” she said, and winked at me.

De'Ath followed me out into the corridor. “Well?” he asked.

“She seems fine to me,” I said. “Though it might have been a help if you'd told me beforehand that she was a girl.”

He laughed. “I must've forgotten,” he said. “Sorry 'bout that.”

“What did she do, Samuel?”

“Stabbed a guy, in the heart. Then slashed his throat. When we found her she was crouched over him, lapping at the blood. We haven't found the murder weapon yet, but it won't be long. And what we don't want is for her to spring some vampire story on us, you know. Now, is she sane or not?”

“As sane as you or I,” I said. “Or at least as sane as I am. You I'm not sure about.”

“That's all I need to know, Doc.”

“And Samuel?”

“Yeah?”

“Don't tell people that my name is Van Helsing. It's not funny.”

“You know what your problem is, Beaverbrook? You've no sense of humour, that's what.”

“From you, dumb shit, I take that as a compliment. Now who's this other guy you want me to see?”

De'Ath took the file from under his arm and opened it. "Name's Kipp, Henry Kipp. Six priors,

five of them armed robbery. He's ...."

“Come on De'Ath,” I interrupted, “you know you're not supposed to give me information like that. I'm only supposed to make my judgments on the basis...”

“OK, OK, stay calm, man. Forget what I said.”

“You're always pulling dumb stunts like that, so don't tell me to forget it,” I said. “These people deserve a fair hearing, and for that I have to be completely impartial.”

Our argument was cut short by the swing doors being banged open and a gruff voice echoing down the corridor. “Well if it isn't Batman and Robin.”

I turned to see a barrel-chested white-haired man in a dark blue suit, his cheeks flaring red.

Captain Eric Canonico. Not one of my greatest fans. He pointed at me and yelled at me with his head slightly back, his booming voice echoing off the walls of the corridor. “And who the fuck gave you permission to park in my spot, Beaverbrook? Who the fuck told you to leave the Batmobile in my parking space?”

“I didn't think you'd be in this late, Captain,” I said.

"Yeah, well you thought wrong, Batman. But it's not the first time you've been wrong is it?

Now get that pile of shit out of my space and park it somewhere else."

He lowered his accusing finger and transferred his fiery gaze to De'Ath. “Has Mr Wonderful here seen the girl?”

“Yes Cap'n.”

“And?”

“She's OK.”

“So have you started the interrogation yet?”

“Just about to, Cap'n.”

“And the victim?”

“No ID. No wallet. Stripped clean. We're running his prints through the computer and checking missing persons.”

“Keep me informed, I'll be in my office.”

The doors banged shut but Canonico's presence lingered in the corridor for a few seconds like a bad smell.

“He's never forgiven you, has he?” asked De'Ath.

“Never has, never will. What room's Kipp in?”

“B. What do you think of the girl then?”

“Young. Pretty. Innocent.”

“You man, would never make a cop.”

“De'Ath, I wouldn't want to. Not in a million years. By the way, she wants the cuffs off.”

“Procedure, Doc. She's in on suspicion of homicide, and a nasty one at that. The cuffs stay on till we're sure she's safe. All you can tell me is if she's sane or not, not if she's likely to scratch my eyes out with her fingers. Leave her to the professionals. And save your pity for the victims.”

“Why the blood?”

“Blood?”

“On her mouth. And her hands. I thought you said Forensic had been over her?”

“They have, swabs and scrapings and samples. They're down at the lab now.”

“So why hasn't she been cleaned up?”

“Man, this is a police station, not a dry cleaners. She can wash up later, right now I've a homicide to investigate. You concentrate on Mr Kipp. After you've moved the Batmobile.”

“Don't call it that, De'Ath. I hate it when you do that.”

De'Ath's laughter boomed around the corridor as he knocked on the door to the room where Terry sat. When it opened I saw her over De'Ath's shoulder. She looked up and smiled weakly at me, and then the door closed, blotting her out.

I went outside and moved my car and then went to see Henry Kipp. He was as sane as I am,

possibly saner. He'd gone into a drugs store on Olympic Boulevard run by an old Polish couple.

He'd clubbed the old man over the head with the butt of his sawn-off shotgun, then taken a couple of hundred dollars from the cash register. The woman had begun crying and Kipp had forced the twin barrels of the gun into her mouth and told her to stop. Then he blew her head off.

“The voices told me to do it,” Kipp laughed, showing a mouthful of bad teeth.

“What sort of voices?”

“Devils,” he said. “”Devils in my head. They tell me what to do."

“Male voices or female voices?”

“Male.”

“Like your father?”

“I never heard my old man's voice. Long gone before I wuz born.”

He had closely-cropped hair and a nose that had been broken so many times that it was almost flat against his face. His hands were square with nails bitten to the quick, strong hands that he kept making into fists as he tapped away at the mouse. He banged it so hard that it rattled and he ground his teeth as he answered the five hundred questions. He breathed through his nose, the heavy,

snorting of a wild animal. But he was sane, the program said. Aggressive, amoral, cruel, and as nasty a piece of humankind as you're ever likely to meet, but sane. Sane according to the Beaverbrook Model, which at that stage was all that mattered. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, lying about the voices. Some amateur lawyer he met up with doing a previous spell in the slammer had probably told him that insanity was a good defence but the manic laugh and the staring eyes didn't fool the program. When I ran it the blinking star that represented Kipp's psyche was well within the boundaries of what the court accepted as sane. A bit lower and to the left of Terry's, but sane nonetheless.

The door to room F was closed when I went back down the corridor and I stopped and put my ear to the wood and listened. I could hear De'Ath but not clearly enough to tell what he was saying.

I left him to it.

The storm was all but over when I left the station and climbed into my car. As I started the engine I saw that someone had hung a small rubber bat from my aerial. It was probably De'Ath.

Canonico didn't have that sort of a sense of humour. He would have broken the aerial off and slashed my tyres, that was more his style. I let the bat wave in the wind all the way home.

The Nightmare The alley was dark, so dark you wouldn't believe it. It was narrow, so narrow that if I were to put my arms out to the sides like a crucified man my fingers would touch both walls. I looked up and the walls seem to go on forever, so high that they seem to meet in the air miles above. I couldn't see the sky, not even a strip of star-studded blackness, and I couldn't see the moon but I knew it was up there somewhere, lurking like a hunting leopard. There was a scuffling sound somewhere up ahead but I couldn't see anything. In the distance I heard the whoop-whoop of a siren and I turned around to look back along the way I'd walked but I'd come so far that I couldn't see the street lights any more. The scuffling was repeated, as if a rat was rooting through a trash can. The floor was uneven and littered with rusting tins and rotting fast food containers, and here and there were puddles of dirty water. I moved slowly down the alley, holding my hands out in front of me because I was worried that I might walk into something: something cold and clammy. There was a ripping noise, the sound of material being torn by impatient hands, and then something whacked into my legs and clung to them like a pleading child. I jumped back but it stuck to me and I kicked out but still it wouldn't let go. I reached down to grab it and my hands met wet paper. It was a newspaper, blown down the alley by the midnight wind. I shivered and pulled away the scraps of wet paper, crumpling them up into waterlogged balls and throwing them to the side.

I could hear a slurping noise, the sound of an animal drinking. No, not drinking. Lapping. Like a cat feeding from a saucer of milk. Lap, lap, lap. My trousers had become damp below my knees where the wet paper had stuck to the material and rivulets of water trickled down to my ankles. I moved towards the noise, peering into the blackness, but all I could see were the trash cans and the untidily-stacked cardboard boxes waiting to be collected. High up above me I heard a window grate open and then slam shut but when I looked up there was nothing there, just two sheer, blank walls.

Ahead of me I could finally make out a shape, a grey lump on the floor like a man in a sitting position, legs sticking out, bent at the waist, head slumped against his chest, the slurping noise coming from its throat as if he was having trouble breathing. I wanted to speak, to ask if he was OK, if he needed help, but the words wouldn't come and I walked forward. As I drew closer I realised I wasn't looking at one form but two, one lying down on the ground, the other crouched over him, with its back to me. I moved to the side and I saw that the figure on the floor - I assumed it was a man but there was no way of telling for sure because it was just a shape - with its legs pointing in my direction, one arm flung out to the side, the other obscured by whatever it was that was kneeling over him. The slurping was louder. It sounded less like a cat feeding and more like two lovers kissing, soft, wet, squelchy sounds and swallowing noises, the sound of flesh against flesh.

Something within me wanted to cry out, to try to stop whatever was happening on the floor of the alley, but I wanted to see exactly what was going on. I wanted to get closer. The two shapes became clearer as I moved towards them. The figure on the floor was lying on its back. It was a man, wearing a suit of some dark material and shiny black shoes. His socks were dark but sprinkled with white triangles. The material around the knees of the trousers was torn as if he'd been dragged along the ground. The shape looming over his neck was wearing a glossy leather jacket with the collar turned up and jeans that could have been blue or black, and boots with silver tips on the toes. The heels of the boots were clearly visible because the figure was on its knees,

bending over the head of the man in the suit.

The snuffling noises stopped suddenly and the shoulders of the kneeling figure stiffened as if aware that I was watching. Its head began to turn slowly and I tried to move away but my feet seemed to be fixed, as if they'd sprouted roots that had wormed their way into the ground and were holding me fast. I saw a cheek first, alabaster white, a smooth curve from the eye to the chin, then a curtain of hair swung across and that was all I could see as the head continued to turn and then, as the figure began to rise and turn at the same time, only then did I see her face. Terry. She was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket zipped up to her neck, steel zips running at angle across her chest and others marking where the pockets must have been. She smiled up at me and raised her right hand to her mouth. There was a streak of something along her right cheek, something wet that glistened as she moved, and her fingers touched it, rubbed it, and then carried it to her lips.

Slowly and sensuously she licked the fingers with the tip of her tongue, one by one. I couldn't take my eyes off her and she smiled as if she knew how firmly I was trapped. I was in her power.

Totally.

“I knew you'd come,” she said, and she took another step forward. For the first time I could see the head of the man lying on the floor. His mouth was wide open as if he had been trying to scream but I doubted that any sound would have managed to pass the drawn-back lips because the throat had been ripped messily open as if the flesh had been hacked and gouged with a dull knife. Or teeth. He looked dead and the eyes were blank and lifeless but there was blood pooling in the hollow of his throat and it bubbled and frothed as if he was trying to breath through what was left of his windpipe.

“Look at me, Jamie,” she whispered, and I found myself doing as she asked. “Forget him. He's nothing.” She licked her fingers again and then reached forward and pressed them to my lips.

They tasted salty and vaguely metallic. She stood up against me so that her jacket brushed against my chest. I hadn't realised until that moment how short she was, the top of her head barely reached my chin and she had to tilt her head back to see my face, the action stretching the skin taught across her cheekbones making her look impossibly young, a child with a smeared face. “You have to want to give yourself to me, Jamie. You have to want it deep within your soul. That's the way it works. You have to offer yourself. Nothing less. Do you understand?”