I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (13 page)

“Fuckin’ bloodbath,” announced the detective.
“Why don’t you and Conan there have a look around. See what you can
find.”

“Gritz,” the uniformed cop spoke up. “We just
gonna let these guys waltz in here like—”

“Quiet, Smith.” Gritz dismissed the officer
but Boone was already talking shit.

“Hey, flat foot. Don’t you got some Haitian
immigrants to fuck up the ass or something?”

If Smith was intimidated by Boone’s size and
attitude he didn’t show it.

“Foley.” Gossitch stopped next to the
coroner, who was bagging evidence.

“Frank, Frank, Frank. How ya been?”

“Can’t complain. Life’s been good to me so
far.”

“You and Joe Walsh, Frank. But not these
people.”

Boone looked down at the lower half of a
human jaw that rested on the floor. He prodded it with his
foot.

“Hey,” warned Foley. “Don’t play footsey with
that shit. That’s evidence.”

“How many you’d say we got here?” Gossitch
asked the coroner.

“At least twelve. But I’m still counting.
Dental and DNA will have to sort it out.”

“They were making a movie.” Boone noted the
wrecked audio-visual equipment and the lighting.

“Must have been a fag film then,” uttered
Foley, “cause we got what looks like a fucking sausage festival
here. All these body parts? Male. ‘Cept that one.”

Boone walked over to look at the remains
Foley had indicated.

“How can you tell?” Gossitch has seen a lot
of ugly things in his life. This scene was surreal. If he didn’t
know that these had been human beings a couple of hours ago, he
wouldn’t have believed it.

“Well, one thing, if these were broads, they
had some hairy arms and legs. And we got their wallets over on the
table near the door. Only one purse.”

Gossitch looked at the nearest severed arms
and sure enough they were covered with blood matted hair.

Boone stared down at what was left of a naked
woman. Aside from where she had been severed in half, her legs and
stomach looked untouched. A section of spinal column jutted out of
her.

“Other thing?” continued the coroner. “Take a
look at that there. That’s a glans.”

“What’s a glans?” questioned Boone.

“It’s the head of your dick.” Boone
involuntarily grabbed his own crotch. “And I’ve counted six of them
so far.” Foley talked as he did his work. “But we’ve got eight
wallets with I.D., so I’m expecting we’ll find a couple more.”

“Wait a second…” Boone put his hands on his
knees and focused on the lower torso before him.

“I know this woman.” He couldn’t believe
it.

Foley raised an eyebrow. “You knew her?”

“No. I mean, I know
of
her. I know who
she was. See those tattoos on her thighs?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s Stephanie Swallows.”

“He’s right,” acknowledged the man squatting
across the room with the Fu-Manchu.

“I’m just the clean up crew, okay Gossitch?”
Foley asked rhetorically. “But for my money, here’s what happened.
We had some kind of adult movie being filmed here, right?” Foley
counted off on his gloved fingers. “We got the lower end of our
fluffer there. Director. Cameraman, at least one. Those are the
parts with clothes still on them, okay? We got seven or eight
strokers…who we missing here?”

“Steph Swallows was no fluffer.” Boone was
adamant. “She was a featured performer.”

“She fucked for a living, kid,” replied
Foley, ignorant of the look the other man gave him.

“They called us in we had to break down the
door.” Gritz had wandered over. “It was locked from the
inside.”

“Who called?” Gossitch wanted to know.

“Neighbors downstairs. Said they heard
screams. Sounded like a big fight. Some firearms discharged.” The
detective indicated the marked positions of cartridge cases that
littered the floor. “Haven’t found the gun yet.”

“It’ll be here somewhere,” Foley promised,
looking over the wreckage.

“It got out that way.” Boone pointed to the
shattered skylight over their heads.

“Yeah, we noticed that.” Gritz was staring
out into the afternoon sky. “But it doesn’t make sense. How did
this go down? I’m thinking, someone dropped in from above, blew the
fuck outta everybody and locked the door.” The detective revised it
as he said it. “Probably locked the door first and then blew the
fuck outta everybody.”

“Stephanie Swallows woulda been blowin’
everyone,” said Boone. “This was a Rick Savage film. You know what
he’s known for?”

“You tell us,” prompted Gritz.

“Blow bangs.”

“What’s a blow bang?” asked officer Jason
Smith.

“Woman sucks off a bunch of guys,” explained
Foley. “No fuckin’. Not that I’m a connoisseur of that shit, mind
you.”

“A blow bang, huh?” Gritz looked around.
“Like Lewinsky?”

Boone ignored them. “I’d heard she was
working with Savage.”

“Where’d you hear about that?” Gritz asked,
wondering where someone heard about something like that.

“
Screw
magazine.”

“
Screw
magazine.” The detective shook
his head.

“I knew there was a reason I brought you
along, kid.” Gossitch smiled, drawing a Marlboro from the box.
“Okay if I smoke here, Foley?”

“Yeah, just don’t leave the butt on the
floor,” required the coroner. “Don’t want to get it mixed up with
the other ones already here.”

Boone noted that there were some cigarette
butts marked off with little evidence flags.

“Those things are gonna kill you one day,
Frank,” Gritz said of the Marlboros. “You sound like shit
already.”

“If I live long enough.” Gritz thought it
through out loud. “Okay, so someone pulls a burn, kills Savage and
our Miss Swallows over there, then leaves.”

“But, Gritz, how do we know for sure it was
that director?” Officer Smith asked.

Gritz cast him an irritated look. “The crime
scene investigators were in here right before he arrived,” he said
to Gossitch, nodding at the man in the rain coat with the facial
hair. “They pulled what they could with their portable print
scanners. We’ll get I.D.s soon. But like Foley was saying, we got
all their personal effects bagged over there by the door.”

“Through the roof though?” asked Smith.
“Don’t make sense.”

“Whole thing doesn’t make sense,” agreed
Foley. “Hey, Smith, see this?” The coroner held something up in an
evidence bag. “Know what this is?”

The cop shrugged.

“Saline breast implant.” Foley made like he
was going to throw it. “Here catch.”

The cop recoiled and the coroner
chuckled.

“Frank.” The man in the microfiber rain coat
stood up, pulled a plastic glove off his hand, and shook the one
Gossitch extended.

“Johnny. How’s Dickie?”

Johnny’s long dark hair was slicked back and
tied off in a pony tail. Sunglasses covered his eyes like the
Fu-Manchu covered his upper lip.

“He’s been better.”

“Fuckin’ Feds, right?”

“Fuckin’ Feds, right.”

“Johnny Spasso,” said Boone.

“Boone.” Johnny replied in a neutral
tone.

“Kill anybody today, Spasso?”

“No.” As Johnny Spasso rubbed his index and
middle finger with his thumb, he studied his fingers like he was
thinking on something. “But you know, the day ain’t done yet,
Boone.”

As Gossitch spoke with Johnny Spasso, Officer
Smith stepped up to Gritz.

“Hey, Gritz…”

“What’s on your mind, Jason, aside from the
obvious?”

“These guys? I mean, why are they even here?
The Captain know about this?”

“Listen kid.” Gritz sounded two steps from
perturbed. “There’s the way the world is, and then there’s the way
the world ought to be, right? You want leads, or you want another
cold case?”

He didn’t wait for the officer to answer.

“Then we keep our ears to the street. And the
way we do that, is we talk to these shady characters and listen to
what they say. And more importantly? We listen to what they don’t
say. Capiche? Good. Then shut the fuck up.”

But Smith wasn’t going to be shut up. “Come
on, Gritz, look at these two monkeys? And that other guys a known
Nicolie Family associate. He’s a hit man for Christsakes.”

“You want to get busted down to reading
meters? No? Then keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. Don’t
make me tell you again.”

“These guys,” surmised Gossitch. “Thought
they were gonna be handed a few hundred bucks to blow their loads
all over some chick’s face. Then this…”

“You know how it goes, Frank,” said
Johnny.

“The family was bankrolling this then?”

“Yeah.”

“And that was pretty common knowledge, I take
it?”

“To those in the know.”

“So whoever did this?”

Johnny nodded.

Gossitch considered. “Who’d have…?”

“That’s what I’m wondering,” replied the
gunman.

“You ever realize how tightly packed the
inside of a human body must be?” Boone was wondering aloud,
standing above a blood pool.

“There’s twenty-eight feet of intestines in
the human body,” offered Foley.

Boone reached out to touch the string of
intestine hung across the room, thought better of it, put his hand
back down.

“You know who’s missing here?” he asked
Gossitch and Johnny Spasso.

The latter raised an eyebrow.

“At least one other girl,” explained Boone.
“Set up like this? They’re going to have more than the girl on
screen. And Stephanie Swallows? She was no fluffer. Girl’s only
been in the industry, what, two years?”

“Who else?” asked Spasso.

“Swallows had a boyfriend,” said Boone.
“Duffy or something. He’d of been here.”

“He’d of been here?” asked Gossitch. “To
watch his girl suck off a bunch of mugs?”

“Some guys get off on it,” said the kid.
“Some guys say its just business. Make a living ‘managing’ their
girls. Suitcase pimps.”

“What I don’t get,” said Spasso, “is what’s
up with the feathers?”

“The feathers?” asked Gossitch. Spasso
pointed to the wreckage in the center of the room and Gossitch and
Boone looked. Sure enough, there were several loose feathers among
the blood.

“Maybe they were fuckin’ an ostrich?” Boone
half joked.

“I seen ostrich feathers.” Gossitch crouched
down to study the feathers. They were black and large and the barbs
coming off the rachis were crimson-black. “And these don’t look
like ostrich feathers.”

“I seen this fat chick fuck a horse once, on
video.” Boone told them. “Fuckin’ thing came for like a full
minute. Shoulda seen it hose her down.”

“Those don’t look like any feathers I’ve ever
seen,” concluded Gossitch. “Hey, Gritz. See if you got a guy named
Duffy or whatever with a record on him. He might be here…”

“If he was, he didn’t leave his wallet,”
offered the detective.

“He wouldn’t have,” added Boone. He had taken
a knee and was looking at a feather outlined in chalk, thinking of
a story he had heard about the Italian porn star Cicciolina, that
her first film she had fucked a horse. He didn’t know if it was
true. She’d gone on to serve in government somewhere, maybe
Italy.

There was a cigarette butt circled off next
to the feather. Thin and brown. Looked like a Moore, Boone
thought.

“Somethin’ bad about this.” Johnny Spasso
thought out loud. “Very similar to a couple of others happened in
the last week. You heard about them?”

“Yeah, I did,” affirmed Gossitch. “Were those
guys with the family?”

“They were. That guy they fished parts of out
of the river? He was involved in this. Executive producer or some
bullshit title.”

“Well, we’ll see what turns up in the next
couple of days.”

“Dickie sends his thanks, Frank.” Johnny
said. “For you coming out here and all.”

“You give Dickie my best. It’s been too long.
Listen, Johnny, we’re going to be at Xerxes tonight. Anything comes
up, you can find us there, okay?”

“Sounds good.”

“Come on kid, let’s go.” Gossitch turned and
left the loft, Boone following him. As he walked past Lynch, the
officer glared at him.

“See you later, Bad Lieutenant.”

The night had come, and with it, the hunger.
Always the hunger, mused the dark Lord Rainford, always the
night.

He walked the dark streets of his adopted
city, the air humid and the pavement damp. When groups of people
passed he kept to the shadows, merging with the gloom. If they saw
him they would see a person not unlike themselves, older than most
perhaps, but age indeterminate. He would be nondescript in his dark
clothes and black, soft-soled shoes. Yet, they would not detect him
unless he so wished it.

Not that he feared any human or group of
humans. Far from it. Even at his advanced age and with the
certitude of his decline hanging over him like the sword of
Damocles, he was more than a match for every human being he might
encounter.

A group of rambunctious white teenagers came
down the street he was on. Ranford blended into the gloom at the
side of a building. The boys were young and stupid and somewhere
they shouldn’t have been, but in their youth and ignorance they
mistook tom-foolery for bravery and risk as reward in itself. By
the way they carried on and the clothes they wore, he judged them
children of privilege. Rainford momentarily considered snatching
one from the bunch and draining the child before his friends but
decided against it.

He hid in the dark until the teens had
passed, and then he resumed his hunt.

The earth had turned and hid one side from
its star, much as the people who lived on its surface hid. Rainford
knew they concealed their true motivations and intentions from
everyone else, including their families and friends. They hid their
own morality from themselves. They had evolved a consciousness
capable of allowing them to grasp the full import of their
existence, but they chose to employ that consciousness to mask the
gravity of their situations. To evade responsibility.