The Dirty City (10 page)

“Feel better? Can we get down to business now?” She said, slowly descending into her chair, elegantly making herself comfortable.

“Hold up, sweetheart. I want to know how you got in here. My PA locked this place up, and the door was locked when I arrived, yet here you are. My PA and I are the only people who have a key for that door. So what does that mean?”

“Well, you obviously are in possession of your own key, so I must either have accosted your PA and relieved her of the other key? Or possibly I might have climbed in through your open window, there?”

My office window was always left a tiny bit ajar, I liked to keep the place cool and let the fresh air in. Someone with extremely dainty arms could conceivably slip one through the gap and lift the latch to open the window fully and permit ingress, and Shelley Valance was nothing if not dainty. But getting the window open, that was the easy bit. We were only on the first floor, but the window ledge was still a good twenty feet above the sidewalk – which is why I never worried about leaving that window open all the time. It would require a ladder or a grappling hook and rope, neither of which were in evidence. Not forgetting that she was wearing a formal business suit jacket, a smart, snug fitting knee length skirt and high heels - not exactly practical attire for scaling the outside of an office block. Suddenly I felt uneasy. I levelled the gun at her again.

“If you have done anything to hurt Lydia I will-.”

“Your little friend is fine, Mr Jerome. I know what you’re thinking, but, believe or not, I did get in here via the latter means rather than the former.”

“Bullshit.”

“Well, whatever. You can call her when I’m done here and check for yourself, anyway – I do not have all night, Mr Jerome, I’m going to talk now and you are going to listen, okay?”

“Wait a sec-.”

“Shut up,
please
.” It takes something pretty special to put me in my place like that. I’ve faced off people wielding knives, machetes and guns, but none of them had ever brought me down quite as comprehensively as that. I think it was the sheer confidence and authority in her voice – she didn’t shout, she didn’t sound stern, but there was something almost ethereal in her tone that commanded compliance.

“Right, I’ll keep this brief. I don’t know exactly how much of what’s going on you’re actually aware of – but my associate, Mr Gianni Vitalli, thinks you know far too much.”

“So the goons he keeps sending after me are telling me.”

“Yeah, about that - you put two of them in the hospital today, that was
really
stupid, you know that? Gianni is pretty pissed at you over that, he would have been happy with letting you off with just a warning – if you could just keep your nose out of our business, but you didn’t heed that. Then, you could have gotten off with a mild beating, no permanent damage, but you sure made certain that wasn’t going to happen. So now, well, you’re a dead man walking, aren’t you, Mr Jerome?”

“If you say so,” I grinned. In truth I didn’t need her to tell me how much deep shit I was in, but I sure as hell wasn’t let it show.

“Oh come on. The next guy Gianni sends after you won’t be some goon in a suit. He will be a professional hitman, someone who has probably killed dozens of people. You will not see it coming and you will be able to do nothing to prevent it.”

“So, something tells me you aren’t this silent assassin that I should be so worried about. Just why the hell are you here, Miss Valance, what’s your angle?”

“Simple, Mr Jerome. I don’t like you, no offense intended, and to be fair, I like you even less having met you. But you are resourceful, reasonably intelligent, you know the city well and you know how to find things out. A guy like you would be pretty useful to me, considering the kinds of idiots that Gianni has on the payroll. You could be a valuable asset to the little enterprise I’ve got going on here.”

“Excuse me, are you trying to offer me a God damn job?”

“I’m making you an offer, yes.”

“And what exactly is your little enterprise all about?”

“Wow, you’ve been digging and digging, you’ve pissed off a mob boss to such an extent that he wants you dead, and you still don’t truly know what’s going on, do you?”

“I know about the heroin.”

“Oh that, a necessary evil component in a much larger scheme.”

“I know that lots of people have been going missing, strange trucks are ferrying bottles of blood out of the city – of which the driver of one of these trucks inexplicably exploded in front of a load of cops when exposed to sunlight just the other day, and I know that although Vitalli is the big man, word is that you’re really the one pulling all the strings here. Care to fill in the blanks?”

“Very well, Mr Jerome, seeing as it could cost you your life, I guess you might as well know the full picture – I’d hate for you to die without knowing what you actually died for,” she allowed herself a little girly smile.

“My, how sweet of you,” I replied, in as ironic a tone as I could muster.

“Indeed. The heroin - my people smuggle it into the country. And we are very adept at making sure it gets here – more so than any mobsters have ever been, and in much greater quantities. We ensure a steady supply is getting out onto the streets. It’s good shit, it commands a good price and the profits we make get reinvested into the important arm of the business. Blood.”

“Okay, I was with you up to that moment, what’s the deal with the blood? My source said something about it being all mixed up – all different blood types. I’m no doctor, but I know from a medical perspective it’s useless, so who the hell needs blood like that?”

“My kind need blood like that.”

“
What?
”

“We go out at night and we find the absolute dregs of society, people with no ties – people who won’t be missed. We kidnap them, we drug them so they’re docile, we keep them alive through intravenous feeding and we harvest their blood in large quantities. That blood then enters our supply network, being dispatched to our outlying communities. I guess you’d call us bloodrunners, Mr Jerome.”

I just stared at her. She was talking so matter of fact about this whole business. After a long pause I finally broke the silence, “Lady, you are shitting me, right? You’re telling me you and your
kind
are actually-.”

“Vampires, Mr Jerome. I don’t care much for the term, but essentially that is exactly what we are. We need to feed on human blood to survive. And we aren’t fussy – who it comes from, their health, blood type, none of that matters – stick it all in a vat, mix it up, it’s all good stuff to us. And we are highly photosensitive, hence the reason we only come out at night – otherwise we are prone to the unfortunate fate that the driver you spoke of suffered. Otherwise we are pretty much immortal and considerably stronger, faster and most definitely smarter than humans.”

“I’m sorry, I’m pretty open minded but that story is the biggest heap of-.”

“I’m still talking, Mr Jerome, don’t interrupt me again, okay? So, this is the deal – two simple choices. One, you come and work for me. Two, you end up very dead, very soon. You have twenty four hours to consider it, after which you will have to make your choice and one of those two things will occur.”

She stood up, making like she was going to leave. I sat there for a few seconds, attempting to process what she had just said. Eventually I got up and strode around to my drinks cabinet at the far wall. I fixed myself a generous glass of whiskey.

“Miss Valance. Do you have any idea how utterly preposterous what you’ve just told me sounds. Seriously, what do you take me for?”

“You’re human, Mr Jerome, you’re frail and slow compared to us, but above all, your biggest weakness is that you can’t comprehend a race like ours could exist amongst you, feeding off your kind. It has been this way for centuries, we’ve existed almost like parasites at times. But things are changing, we are close to taking our rightful place in this world, right at the very top of the food chain. One day soon we will have the numbers and the infrastructure in place. We are going to take control, and we will farm your puny species just as you farm cattle. Soon, Mr Jerome, and when that time comes, the safest place for you to be is in my employment.”

I looked at her. Such beauty, poise and grace. How could she be so completely unbalanced as to believe the crap she was spouting. My mind couldn’t entertain such things, it was the stuff of bad drive-in b-movies. I let a smirk cross my features.

“No offense intended,” I said – mimicking her from earlier, “but I do believe that you are completely out of your pretty little, deluded mind, Miss Valance.”

And that was the moment, right there, when everything – my life, my outlook on the world, the whole lot, was changed forever.

In an instant Shelley Valance became a blur to my eyes. She had been stood across the room from me, a good ten or so strides away. Within a fraction of a second, impossibly quickly, she had crossed the room and was standing in front of me. Before I could react she grasped my throat with one of those dainty hands of hers and with unfeasible force she lifted me clean off my feet and slammed me violently into the wall.

Her grip tightened, I began to choke and gag. Then she moved her face just inches in front of mine – her features, that only moments ago had been beautiful and feminine, had become contorted and hideous, like some kind of demonic abomination, but worst of all, her eyes – they were wild with fury and glowing luminous green. And when she spoke, it was with a tone and timbre that shook me to my very soul.

“Twenty four hours, Mr Jerome!”

And with that, she opened her mouth to bare a pair of terrifying oversized fangs and made a guttural hissing sound - then she released me, turned around and vanished out through the open office window with a swiftness that defied believe.

I slumped to the floor, shaking from the pure shock of it all and gasping for breath.

CHAPTER 8

I was at a loss as to what to do. Rarely in my life had I found myself backed into such a corner.

The streets of the dirty city, while not being that safe at the best of times, suddenly seemed to me like a terrifying and deadly place to be. By day, they held threat in the way of danger from ordinary mortals, but now the nights filled me with a new dread generated by the knowledge that there were creatures out there that didn’t conform to the normal notions of reality.

I decided to see the night out in my office, planning to leave at the crack of dawn. I couldn’t risk staying any longer just in case Vitalli wasn’t keen on honouring Valance’s 24 hour window and sent some goons here to find me.

I tried to grab some sleep – in the absence of anything to lie down on besides the cold floor, I reclined in my office chair. Somehow I managed to drop off eventually – but rest was not forthcoming – because that’s when the nightmares first began.

It was always the eyes first of all. I’d be dreaming, though not aware that I was dreaming, then I’d notice the colour. The shade of green, it would start almost imperceptibly, clouds of faint smoke, the clouds taking on a tinge of emerald. Then it would become more intense, like someone was putting a green filter over everything. Generally at that point the whole background of my dreaming environment would suddenly turn pitch black, and out of the gloom, closing in from a distance, would be a terrifying pair of luminous green eyes. And as they got closer there came with them the low guttural sound, almost a hiss. And when the eyes were almost upon me, a glint of light and there were those terrible fangs. At that point I’d always awake with a start, out of breath – my heart pumping and sweat pouring down my face.

That night I tried to sleep twice. At around 3am, after suffering the nightmare for the second consecutive time I decided to dose myself with copious amounts of coffee to avoid the need for sleep altogether.

*

The Holy Church of Santa Justina was steeped in history. The city itself was founded on the patch of land that the modern day church stood – there had been a place of worship there for almost two centuries, beginning with a simple shelter that the early settlers could congregate within – ultimately leading to the imposing stone structure that now towered before me.

I was not, nor ever truly had been previously, a man of great faith, but I had gotten to know the local priest, Father Laurie McBride, pretty well from my time as a cop. I had attended a couple of his services at the behest of others, and as a part of my duties I had attended one or two funerals.

I don’t really know what brought me there that day – I guess when you see things that can’t be explained by rational means you actively seek out alternatives?

The church doors were wide open, almost welcoming. I checked my watch - it was just before 10.30am as I strode somewhat uncertainly inside.

Father McBride was stood casually in front of the alter, greeting the odd parishioner who presumably had dropped in for a quick prayer or two. He was a tall, heavily built man, now in his mid-fifties, a full head of silver-grey hair and very deep set features.

“Good morning, Father.”

“Why, Johnny Jerome, isn’t it? I haven’t seen your good self in a few years. What brings you here, my son?”