The Dirty City (7 page)

I could see him from a distance, his dark navy blue uniform standing out against the surrounding natural green hues around him. He was casually seated on one of the many wooden benches dotted around, tucking into some kind of oversized sandwich.

“Heart attack food, Ed.” I joked.

“Hey, I gotta’ maintain my figure, huh?”

“Good to see you, thanks for meeting up at short notice.”

“No worries, Johnny, always glad to be of service. Fancy a donut?”

“Not for me, Ed, can’t stomach the sugar these days.”

During our patter, I’d produced a blank envelope and placed it casually next Edgar, as I took a seat next to him. Without either of us actually looking at it, he picked it up and stashed it out of site in a concealed pocket in his jacket. Edgar did a lot deals like this – it never ceased to amaze me how his jacket seemed to have an extraordinary quantity of concealed pockets.

“Need some info, Ed, bit stumped on a case.”

“Shoot.”

“Anything -
weird
going on in the city at the moment?”

“Define weird.”

“What’s going on with the local mobs? Vitalli is the main man now, right?”

“Everyone knows that.”

“How did that come about?”

“Bosses rise to the top, usually by taking down their rivals, this is no different.”

“But it’s sudden, isn’t it?”

“True.”

“You ain’t seen this kind of domination occur so quick anywhere else before, right?”

“I guess.”

“So what is different here, what’s given him that advantage?”

“Well, there are rumours...”

“Uh huh?”

“It’s mostly crazy talk, drunken wino talk, most of it ain’t worth the time of day.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“You aware of Vitalli’s operations at the old docklands?”

“Heard about them. D’you know what’s going down out there?”

“Nah, no-one does. Been raided twice and we ain’t found shit – but the word is that the raids were
prearranged
, we weren’t meant to find anything, but there is stuff going on there.”

“What about missing persons?”

“That is an odd one. On average, three or four a week in the vicinity of the Old Portland Bridge and the surrounding area. No trace found yet for any of them.”

“Word is you’re not exactly carrying out an exhaustive investigation.”

“We ain’t. The people vanishing are scum, Johnny. Beggars, petty crooks, old winos, hobos and lowlifes. The taxpayer wants us to catch crooks and keep them safe, not commit resources searching for crazy old bag ladies with a gin habit.”

“You heard of a chick called Shelly Valance?”

“We’ve heard talk, but we’ve no idea if she’s a real person or just a smokescreen, but word is she is some out of town business woman who has a specialist team of enforcers at her command. She’s thrown her lot in with Vitalli, and it’s her boys who’ve been taking down Vitalli’s rivals. We also assume it’s through her that all the heroin we’re seeing on the streets is getting in.”

“Any other weird shit happened?”

“Funnily enough, two very strange things. We stopped a suspicious transport truck a week back, middle of the night. Driver jumps out and is gone in literally seconds, I mean he moved so damn fast it was like he vanished. We searched the truck, it’s stacked out wall to wall with crates. Each crate contains 25,000 vials of human blood.”

“Really?”

“But it’s odd – it’s not any one person or group of persons blood, its hundreds of peoples blood, and all different blood groups, just mixed together, and we have no idea where it all came from. None of the hospitals are missing stocks of blood, it’s a complete mystery. And apparently there are trucks like this sited pretty much every night heading out of town.”

“You managed to catch any of the drivers?”

“No, they’re sneaky, take all the back routes, they keep out of site. And it’s very likely that most are being deliberately
ignored
, if you know what I mean? We did manage to corner one suspect, though – we gave pursuit until he wrong-turned down a dead alley, just before dawn.”

“Did you apprehend him.”

“What I’m about to tell you is a little hard to believe, but it’s true. Big group of cops head into the alley, this guy goes stir crazy, he tries to fight his way out with his bare hands – I’m told he was doing pretty good 'til the cops opened fire on him. They totally unloaded on the guy, but he doesn’t go down, he takes all these bullets but it’s like they’re passing through him without doing any damage. But then the sun came up.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, the witnesses say he just exploded, right there and then.”

“What?”

“Literally, he came apart, he blew up. Into pieces.”

“Bullshit!”

“Hey, I wasn’t there, but I witnessed the remains being brought to the coroner. In plastic bags.”

“There must be some reasonable explanation?”

“Initial thoughts were that it was spontaneous human combustion, SHC. Extremely rare phenomenon – still just a theory, really, a bit of supportive evidence from previous possible cases. But...”

“But?”

“It wasn’t consistent with the few documented previous examples. In SHC it’s thought the combustion begins within, typically in the stomach. The body burns from the inside out, often leaving the clothes only mildly scorched. But this guy, his flesh burnt off first, his bones crumbled almost to dust and then his vital organs exploded.”

I honestly had no response to that.

“And one more weird thing. When he went pop, blood was sprayed all over the place, but it was all the wrong consistency. It only travelled a few yards from exploding out of the body to hitting walls and shit, but in that short distance it almost completely coagulated, it had dried to powder before forensics got there. Blood doesn’t normally behave like that, the process usually takes hours to get to that stage.”

“So what was the official verdict?”

“It was all so bizarre and difficult to explain that it was agreed, seeing as the guy was a John Doe, that SHC would be the best explanation, providing no-one asked too many questions. But in truth, they didn’t have a God damn clue. Because the incident coincided with sunrise their best guess was maybe some kind of photosensitive reaction to ultra violet light, but it would have been off the chart and incomparably larger than anything anyone has ever seen before. Photosensitives get bad sunburn in direct sunlight, but they don’t explode.”

I left Edgar to the rest of his lunch and headed back to the car. The city was dirty, but these reports were just plain crazy. I wondered just what the hell was going on here?

My rational mind was still trying to keep things in balance, and for all the bizarre stuff going on it kept repeating to me that there had to be a completely logical explanation. But... The rest of me could not help itself, I was a detective, I have a deductive mind, and it was leaping to some awkward conclusions. People vanishing, strange shadow-like figures, mysterious consignments of human blood and people exploding in sunlight. My rational mind was screaming, ‘Bullshit!’ But my deductive mind was reluctantly saying, ‘Vampires...’

*

I knew something wasn’t quite right the moment I got back to the office.

“Hi, sweetheart, how’s it been here?”

Lydia said nothing. She put one finger to her lips to indicate I be quiet and gestured me over to her desk. Once I was close enough she whispered into my ear.

“Johnny, there’s a guy in your office, he just turned up, he’s built like a brick shithouse and is demanding to speak to you. I think he could be mob.”

“Sure, thanks for the heads up.” I whispered back, “listen, I’ll go in, if things get crazy, you just get out, get a few blocks away then call the cops, alright?”

“Be careful, Johnny,
please
.”

I wasn’t sure how to play this. I was known to the mob, most PI’s were, and sometimes we had to ask questions that revealed things that perhaps they’d rather we didn’t know about. And sometimes that required a little, polite word in the PI’s ear, just a subtle warning across the bow to say, ‘hey, stand down.’

I hadn’t dug too deep into the mob’s operations in this case – or at least I didn’t think I had. I was reasonably confident that the guy in my office was here just to talk – but at the back of my mind was the possibility that I could walk in there and the son of bitch might just put a slug through my temples. And so it was, with trepidation, that I opened the door. I decided I would take what I called the ‘unshakable’ approach, and with a deep breath and a shot of courage, I strode diminutively into the room.

“Good afternoon, apologies if you’ve been waiting a while for me, I’ve been having one of those days.”

I marched past the man and got a good look at his features. He was a big guy. Seriously big, I reckon he must have been a tleast 6’5” – and very heavily built. But he was young, no more than 25, probably not vastly experienced in dealing with people, and judging by the looks of him, he was employed because of his physical presence rather than his brain power.

I had breezed past him and gotten my desk between us, which for me was always one of those weird psychological things – like the barrier it created put me in a position of strength. I hoped it served to remind him that this was my domain. Territory secured, I knew that next I had to keep hold of the dialogue. I sat down, and beckoned him to do the same.

“Now, Mr...? Sorry, I don’t believe my PA caught your name, what shall I call you?”

He looked a little unsure – not of his name, you understand, but that by now he should be the one doing the talking, not me.

“Hugo. I’ve been sent to-.”

I interrupted promptly, “Hugo, great, now – tell me, Hugo, do you work for Mr Vitalli?”

This was definitely not what he was expecting, so far so good.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Excellent, has he sent you to give me a message?”

“It’s more of a warning, really.”

“Does it involve not asking any more questions about Anton Jameson or poking around near the Old Docklands?

“Uh-.”

“Only, I’d have to query Mr Vitalli’s choice in respect to yourself for this kind of job.”

Hugo looked confused, as I had anticipated, words were not his strongpoint. I could see from his expression that he knew he was not in control of this conversation and was mightily uncomfortable about it.

“Now, I respect Mr Vitalli is a busy man, but so am I, we’re both just trying to make a living, right? But in my game, and I’m sure in his - you got to know you’re speaking to the organ grinder and not, and I don’t mean to be insulting when I say this, the monkey. D’you get my drift?”

It’s fair to say Hugo almost certainly didn’t get my drift. I could tell his patience was wearing thin, I sensed he was planning a much simpler method of action – one that probably involved lifting me up by the scruff of my neck and merging me face first with the office wall. I elected to change tack.

“So, essentially, you can tell Mr Vitalli that I accept his conditions, I shall drop the Jameson case, you won’t be bothered by me anymore. And here is a little something for you, for your trouble.”

I handed Hugo a sealed envelope, I always had a few of these knocking around. What can I say? Money talks.

“There is $100 in there, but please, if Mr Vitalli can give me any indication as to the ultimate fate of Anton Jameson, he does have a family that could do with some closure. You got my number, get in contact.”

I got up and extended my hand toward Hugo, not totally sure if he would still be up for giving me a beating or not. After a moments indecision he accepted my hand and shook it firmly. With that, I was able to usher him out before he really had time to process anything else. I waited until I saw him disappear down the stairwell, then closed the main office door and locked it. I exchanged a very relieved glance with Lydia.

“There you go, sweetheart, that’s how you deal with the mob. How about some coffee?”

*

I knew I was taking a risk, but I figured having thrown off the mob, for a little while at least, that perhaps I could move around incognito for a day or two without anyone realising I was still on the trail.

That evening I donned an old coat and hat, then left my apartment via the secluded fire escape exit off the main street. I was reasonably happy that no-one had observed me leave.

I took a cab to within about half a mile of the Old Portland Bridge. It was time to interview the underclass.

The Old Portland Bridge was one of the oldest major river crossings in the city. The old suspension bridge still carried it’s fair share of commuters to other side of the river, but newer, better located bridges had since been built and were much more used.

The embankment of the river below the bridge had been adopted by the city’s dropouts and hobos – as I approached on foot I could make out the little improvised campfires of the ‘residents.’