Dark Heir

Someone else shouted, “I din’ hear no shots. What kill dem peoples?”

Another one of the crowd shouted, “Tell us what goin’ on!”

“Is she in there? You gots to tell me. Is my baby in there?”

“Damn cops!”

Under all the smells, beneath the worried muttering and angry catcalls, I scented a hint of aggression, not ugly, not yet, but on the edge. For now the words were mostly curiosity, not yet tuned to revenge. But it would all change. Soon. As soon as word went out that a vamp had done this.

I opened my eyes and found my partner, his back to the vehicle, searching the night. Eli had elected to wear black dress pants and a starched black shirt, no tie, shiny shoes, like a civilian. And no weapons. Without even talking about it, we were on the same page, my partner and I, in sync, which was one reason that we worked so well together, that mental consciousness of each other, like soldiers in battle, with situational awareness and comrade-in-arms mindfulness. Not that he was weaponless. Eli could kill with his bare hands. For that matter, so could I.

Eli’s eyes flicked my way and back to darkness. “You gonna make it through this, Janie?”

“Yes,” I said. But I heard the feeble note in my tone.

“This isn’t your fault. You had no way of knowing.”

I shook my head and gestured him into the street.

The sounds of our footsteps were lost beneath the crowd noise and the squeal of a siren pulling away, allowing us to move silently through the dark. As we neared the commotion, Eli’s head went up, his shoulders back, and he led the way down the middle of the street, like a dance that left us striding side by side on the potholed blacktop. He looked like what he was. Dangerous. And so did I. People seemed to sense that we were trouble, or maybe that we were part of the entertainment, because the hangers-on, the curious, the partygoers rubbernecking at disaster, parted as we neared, leaving a wide gap straight down the block to the sawhorses and crime scene tape that blocked the road.

We were closer to the old woman shouting, “Is she in there? You gots to tell me. Is my baby in there? Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!”

My lips parted and my breath came fast and shallow.

“Is my baby in there? Tell me!”

A cop watched us as we neared, and sadly it was my old pal Officer Herbert—pronounced A-bear, in the French manner, he had told me the first time I met him. He was a career cop, mid-forties, smelling of Cajun spices and lots of aftershave, his familiar scent picked up over the crowd. He was also was a chauvinist pig, an ass, mean just for fun, and downright malicious. He hated anything that wasn’t human, male, straight, and white, including me. Herbert’s face twisted as we walked up, looking us over for weapons, backpacks, anything he could use to cause us trouble, the intent unmistakable on his face. I had gotten on his bad side at our first meeting, and I had never been in the mood to make nice-nice with him. I still wasn’t in the mood to try. Not tonight.

“Tell me! My baby, my baby my baby mybabybabybabybaby . . .” The woman sat on the curb nearby, arms around her knees, rocking, rocking, in time with the lament. The stink of grief and fear and cheap wine was a fog around her. “My baby, baby, baby, baaaby . . .”

“Morning, Dickhead,” I said softly, using the same name I’d called Herbert the first day I met him. In front of Jodi. This time in front of Eli, who goggled in shock. Well, his right eye twitched. A little.

“You wanna take a ride down to NOPD?” Herbert barked, his hand going to his gun.

I grinned, letting my own meanness show, a shadow of the heated turmoil boiling in me. “Not my idea of a fun first date. If I dated dickheads with badges.” I wanted him to attack. I wanted him to hit me so I could hit him back. Suddenly, I wanted to hit something and I didn’t care what.

Herbert’s face went purple, and had he been seventy pounds lighter and twenty years younger, he would have dived over the barricade and tackled me to the ground. As it was, Jodi appeared behind him, like a magician materializing out of the gloom, and placed a hand on his arm. “Jim, why don’t you take a break. You’ve been on sixteen hours already. Grab something at the taqueria. On me.” Jodi placed a ten in his pudgy hand and nudged him over. Herbert shot me a look promising all sorts of horrible things, and went.

“You like yanking his chain,” she said mildly. Too mild. She was holding herself on a tight leash.

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s an ass. One you used to bait me when we first met. It was necessary at the time; I understand that. And it never stopped me from being your friend. But it never made me like him.”

Jodi appeared to mull that over as she checked us out, giving particular attention to Eli. She knew his military history and his penchant for going heavily weaponed. But whether from exhaustion or because she recognized a familiar face in a foxhole, she didn’t linger. “I won’t apologize for doing my job,” she said, still mild.

“Jane Yellowrock,” a female voice shouted in the distance.

Crap. The press. My stomach did a somersault. “And I won’t apologize for doing mine,” I said, which, at the moment included ticking off Herbert, holding my wounded arm steady, and trying not to throw up. “The media has now recognized us and is starting to point parabolic and shotgun mics at us. You want to let us in?”

Jodi let her eyes travel behind us to the media. Bright lights began moving our way as people started running toward us. “Those things won’t pick up much past eight feet, so you’re safe. But yeah. I need you inside.” She lifted the crime scene tape just as a woman came running up, mic in hand, shouting my name, her cameraman jogging behind her. We three walked away, leaving her and her cronies speculating into their mics about why the vampire hunter turned vampire lover was there. Vampire lover. They had been wondering online and on air for months whether Leo and I were sleeping together. Idiots.

We said nothing as we followed Jodi to the corner building, the blue lights turning our skin to zombie gray. Men and women, uniformed and plainclothes, moved grimly. They had set up a temporary morgue under tents, the cloth sides hiding the gurneys waiting for the legal types and the crime scene techs to release the bodies to be taken for forensic postmortems. But with multiple victims, processing started at the scene, often proceeded close by, and finished on a stainless-steel table at the morgue.

Until now, I had hoped that the number of casualties had been wrong. Five, maybe. Eight. Not fifty-two. But the portable crime scene said otherwise. It was bad. Really bad.