The Blood Detail (Vigil) (6 page)

The Old Stomping Grounds

It may not have ended that way, but as of sunset, April the fifteenth felt like the previous night all over again. Such was the monotonous truth of modern, street-level police work.

Beth and I left the bullpen following another extended briefing, and restarted our patrol. We put some workman-like effort into varying our path through our tiny quadrant of Los Angeles, yet in general terms, we went how we went before. We did not get stopped by any citizens, and we did not take any faked calls. There was only one task for the evening, and if all went well, this would we be the last night of carnal carousing for one Danny Ray Jessup.

The Detail’s choice for an ensnarement site had my full support. In fact, I was the one who had first suggested it. The Las Rosas townhouse complex made for an ideal location, for no other reason than Jessup might feel safe there. He’d gotten away with killing someone in that particular venue before—and putting ourselves into his mind—he could probably get away with it again. It was all guesswork, but it made a lot of sense. I also liked the idea of getting another shot at him in the complex where I missed snapping the cuffs on the last time out.

At six minutes after eleven, we received a call on the radio. I didn’t recognize the voice, but we were told to mount up and head to Las Rosas. The operation was already in progress.

The Detail had emptied the complex out over the course of the day and taken over the site in its entirety. I don’t know how they convinced the occupants to leave without a fuss, but they’d been pulling off similar feats over the course of the week I’d been working for them. Clearing a whole townhouse complex was just the restaurant and the grocery store on a greater scale.

The plan as written called for seventy-five Detail members in the housing units themselves—all with a second story, bird’s-eye view of the door Beth and I were about to knock on. Mac would be positioned somewhere among the masses, so would Racine—and even Castellano was deigning to show his face. Snipers would be on the surrounding buildings, ten of them at last count. A helicopter was also at the ready, as well as a fleet of twenty-four vehicles to block every way in or out. We were as safe as you can be in an urban environment, and I genuinely thought we were ready.

We pulled into the front entrance and I pointed out the spot Angie and I had parked in a week before. Beth thought we should take that one for no other reason than we could. We climbed out of the vehicle and snapped on our caps.

“It was raining before,” I said as we walked the pathway between buildings.

“Well, that’s one thing even Castellano couldn’t recreate.”

Beth had her hand on her weapon. We were both armed with tranquilizer handguns, and mine was shifting strangely on my hip—a bad fit in the holster. The tranqs were all we were supposed to be carrying, but Beth advocated that we both wear .22s on our ankles to be safe. The mini-gun down there gave me more comfort than I cared to admit. Firearms were a calming adornment for me, and they always would be.

As we entered the courtyard, lights were on in several of the upstairs windows. We cut through the damp grass, on a swift approach to unit 1032. For a brief second, I wondered which house Mac was in, but then cleared my head of such brain dead stupidity. Beth and I strolled up shoulder to shoulder and knocked on the double door twice, just as we were instructed. The porch light to my right made the entryway as bright as day, and blinded my peripheral vision. Loud music was playing inside the house, some sort of bouncy pop song which sounded like I must have heard it before, but probably never had. We stood there a full minute without an answer. This was also planned. But when the lag dragged on a minute beyond that, Beth and I looked at one another. I heard a female scream soar above the music and my back went up. I went to pull out my gun, but Beth stopped me, placing her hand on my bent forearm.

“Wait,” she said.

I gritted my teeth. “Jeez, what the fuck are they trying to prove in there? We’re on a goddamned timetable, aren’t we?”

“We are.”

Beth seemed as confused as I was, but that wasn’t going to make the door open. And the music was only getting louder. She snagged hold of the portable radio on her belt and began to ask questions in a perturbed and angry voice.

I turned to get a better look at what was going on behind us, taking a step away from the glare of the porch light. The pool in the courtyard of the complex was to my direct south, and it was glowing blue. All of a sudden, one of the upstairs lights on the frontmost building went out. In succession, all the others blinked out as well, one by one. Lodged in a now deeper darkness, the pool glowed bluer. Then, Beth stopped talking in mid-sentence and the porch light went dead. So did the music.

I spun around, but Beth was no longer there.

I raced back to the door and wetness fell down on top of me. At first I thought it was raining again, but what was coming down was too thick to be precipitation. I craned upward and saw a darkened figure on the roof holding a smaller figure by the neck. It was Jessup—and he was cackling.

I pulled out my tranq gun and shot him in the leg. It startled him and he dropped what he’d been holding. Beth plummeted downward into the rose bushes, compressing their size in half. Her arms dangled amidst the branches, but she wasn’t moving. I continued backing up, hoping my first shot had had some kind of effect on Jessup. He held tight on the roof, his coat flapping in the breeze.

I called for help, my eyes searching for any kind of cover.

Jessup leapt, plowing down on top of me feet first. I crumpled into the grass and lost hold of my weapon. I remained flat out, gasping for breath and unable to think. He began to parade around me, watching my every move tantalizingly. After a while, I attempted to crawl away, in hopes of reaching my .22. But whenever I could create any distance between the two of us, Jessup would grab whatever appendage of mine was closest and drag me back to the spot where he had knocked me down. This went on for several minutes. I screamed and screamed, yet no one came out to help me. My predicament became crystal clear. If I was to survive, it was going to be on my own.

“Do you want me?” I said, my attempt at speech was strained and garbled. “You can have me if you want. Just come closer. I want you, too.”

“Not stupid,” he said in his creepy drawl. “You’ll get me if I get too close.”

He was right about that, but I planned to get him either way. The .22 was my secret, my lifeline. He just needed to be within a foot or so, and I could put one right into his head.

“Tying ya up would do no good,” he said. “Going to need to break you.”

I had no idea what that even meant, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I reached down for my ankle, but he was reaching for it at the same time—and he was a lot quicker than I was. In a single twist of his wrist, he flipped me over and brought his fist down on the base of my spine. The blow was hard and solid, and I felt nothing below the waist afterward. Maybe I yelled out in pain, maybe I didn’t. But how could I have not? Breathing heavily, he lifted me up by the scruff of my neck and struck me in the back again, this time dead center between the shoulder blades. I could no longer feel my arms or my neck. When he set my paralyzed body back down in the grass, he did so gently. I don’t know how I stayed conscious, but I did.

He left me where I was and returned to the rose bushes where Beth’s body had fallen. He began gathering up flowers, and did not stop until his arms were full. I watched him, and all I could think about was the prospect of him eating me. I knew that was what he was going to do. I’d have done anything for that gun around my ankle. If I could still move, I’d have put it right into my mouth and just pulled the trigger.

He returned with his arm full of flowers and let them fall around me. He appeared to be unhappy with the inadvertent arrangement, so he spread them out more carefully, making sure most of the bunch were surrounding my head in a halo pattern.

“Mine,” he said. “You’re mine.”

I did belong to him—he was right. Vampires were real, and I was seconds away from being devoured. I’d never been a crier by nature, not in the slightest, but I was sure I’d been doing exactly that since I had been knocked down. My cheeks felt wet and my eyes were burning.

Jessup squatted down above me and nudged my arms away from my body with his knees. Straddling my torso, he started to dig around in the pockets of his overcoat until he had found what he had been searching for—a hunting knife, about six inches in length. I thought the exposed blade was for me, but he slipped off his duster and used it on himself, cutting a foot-long gash from his wrist to the crook of his forearm. Blood began to gush outward. He tilted my head back and forced open my mouth. I tried to bite down on him, but his grip was unbelievably powerful. Whispering sweet nothings into my ear, he maneuvered his opened arm over my face and allowed the blood to drain into me. I choked as the hot liquid drizzled down my gullet. Once my mouth had been filled, he jammed my jaw closed and leaned in and kissed my reddened lips. I was just about to black out when I swallowed. I didn’t want to, but I did. He grunted his pleasure at my ingestion and snaked both hands around my neck and squeezed, crushing my airway as if I were nothing.

I died there on my back. I died there utterly alone.

When tragedy occurs, people tend to feel the need to ask why. Not me. It’s a waste of time. Bad things happen, that’s just the way of the world. Sometimes you die, sometimes you live forever. Wanna guess which way it worked out for me?

TO BE CONTINUED IN

ONE OF THEM

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, Arvin Loudermilk hand wrote his first novel—a high school superhero fantasy based embarrassingly, and almost entirely, on himself—at the age of seventeen. A ‘sequel’ followed, but his focus soon turned to the intricacies of comic book writing.

In May of 1989, Arvin met Mike Iverson, a skilled illustrator and designer, and together they created the comic book series
Vigil
, a crime fiction epic featuring a gun-wielding vampire vigilante. Hot on the heels of a thousand pages of
Vigil
, they produced a sci-fi comic called
Collective
.

In the years that followed, Arvin became more and more convinced that
Collective
and
Vigil
would be natural fits in the world of prose. The development process to shift to this new creative platform was long and frustrating, but the end result, an assortment of novels and novellas, began its long-term publishing schedule with the 2012 release of
In a Flash
.