BiteMarks (8 page)

Carefully I lift up her head and slide out from under her, tenderly placing her back down on the bed and covering her with the sheets. I slip my trousers back on, pausing when loose change chimes a soft alarm before settling again in my pockets, but she remains motionless. I fix myself a drink in the kitchen and open up the French doors to get some air, the full moon is high in the night sky casting an ethereal glow on my bare-chested form. The moon will always be a haggard old face to me, with familiar hollows for eyes and a ghost of rough stubble on his sallow sunken cheeks, echoing the appearance of a father forever dying but never quite dead.

I swallow the warming liquid in the glass, feeling the burn and enjoying the sensation, but never needing it like he did, and glance back in the direction of the sleeping lady somewhere back in the darkness. Perhaps life doesn't have to be a series of empty fucks in darkened rooms.

Chapter 6

The monster sits motionless, pale and naked on a dirty mattress, in a room that is ripe with the meat and rust smells of old blood. A battered leather chair with legs of varying lengths is pushed underneath the overhang of a thick shelf that serves as a desk, and a badly abused metal waste bin cowers in the corner. He has a large scar on his chest; the edges are bright pink a vivid contrast with his skin. The scar is self-inflicted, a stylized scarification design depicting a phoenix rising from flames, the lines neat and precise but angry with the memory of the lemon juice that had been used to raise them up from the background.

He tries to ignore the accompanying memory of the woman who he had coerced into carving the intricate design for him all those years ago. She had spoken about love and spirituality at length, a modern day flower child confusing his intense silence for interest and concentration, warbling on and on about the search for truth and reason. The desire to harm her had been extremely strong, but would have proven impossible, since there were several others present watching the ornamentation taking shape. A certain part of him wonders whether she would still be living in the same place now.

A small russet colored spider busies herself constructing a new web in the top corner of the window frame, buffeted from time to time by the movement of air through into the room. Twice a day her home is destroyed when the man opens the window and closes it again, but her patience is limitless and the spot yields an abundance of flies drawn by the tempting odors inside, so she persists with her rebuilds. 

The monster has none of her qualities. The pain she causes out of the necessity to feed herself, his borne out of sadistic enjoyment and the strange creeping madness that tells him that he needs the fresh blood to rejuvenate his own.

He can feel it building inside him now, the maddening sensation that alerts him when it is time to hunt again. First an itching and tingling in the extremities, signaling the spoiling of the fluid in his veins, this will gradually become a burn until he can ignore it no longer. For now he sits in calm silence though, fixating on the people passing in the street below, embracing the changes inside and imagining how it would feel to take them all one by one and drain them completely.

I think I'm afraid which pisses me off, since it's not a sensation that I'm accustomed to. A terrible night's sleep punctuated by blood-stained dreams that I can't quite recall doesn't help matters, but the presence of Marcus beside me in the car right now is helping a little – misery loves company. I can feel his eyes on me trying to read my expression, and when I glance across at him he looks nauseous and skittish. I wonder if I look the same.

The purple BMW parked opposite us outside the address doesn't help either, since it serves to confirm that Levi 'Evil' and 'Arachnid' Jones are probably inside, quite possibly watching us shitting ourselves across the street and laughing their asses off.

“
Do you think they'll flay us alive first, or let us say our piece and then start the torture?”

“
Thanks, Marcus, I feel so much better about this now.”

“
You're welcome. Anyway, it was your bright idea, I'm just here to back you up, mate.”

“
Fantastic job you're doing too.”

We are on Corporation Oaks in Mapperley Park, at an address listed on Crimint – the police criminal intelligence database - as the permanent head of operations for Bennett and Jones's gutter empire. I want to talk to them about our sharp-toothed friend, and hopefully be in a position from there to be able to narrow down the pool of potential suspects. Unfortunately, men in their particular line of business are not always happy to meet those from ours.

Searches on Crimint, also helpfully advised us that the two men are strong suspects in the murder of a Police Officer back in Kingston. The victim was the head of an anti-drug gang task force, employing heavy handed tactics in an attempt to clean up the city slums. It had been going very well, until person or persons unknown threw a tire full of petrol over his head and ignited it, delivering the charred body to the street outside the Police Station. Call me weird, but bad manners like that upset my equilibrium a little.

“
Fuck this; I'm not sitting here running through mental images of my own demise all day. Come on.”

I stride across the silent street and up to the front door, which stands halfway open. A pair of pale female legs are visible in the hallway, nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that they're motionless, horizontal rather than vertical and heavily mottled with livid bruises. I push the door a little wider open with my toe-cap, relieved to see the rhythmic rise and fall of a flat chest. It's hard to tell whether she's unconscious or sleeping, but there's fresh blood oozing from a pinprick in the crook of her arm, so I know what my money's on. The grunt to my right signals that Marcus has come to a similar conclusion. 

“
Hello? Levi, Antony?”

We step over the prone girl, feet too loud on the quarry tiles, doing a better job of announcing our presence than my tight voice box.

There is a burst of music from somewhere up ahead at the back of the property, hip-hops not my genre of choice but I bust a couple of involuntary moves at the sudden unexpected noise, before I regain control of my galloping heart and settle back down again. I hope Marcus missed that.

At the end of the hallway is a heavy wooden door which opens, with a little resistance, into a large rear sitting-room. There is intricate plaster cornice running around the top of the room and solid hardwood picture rails further down, but I have to abandon my appraisal of the interior design features to avoid being thought of as rude by the half a dozen Jamaican men reclining in chairs around the room. They don't look overly concerned at our presence, a quick glance confirms that Marcus hasn't fled for the car, and one of them is smiling. The effect of the smile is ruined by the white cats-eye contact lenses that he's wearing, Antony 'Arachnid' Jones, I presume.

“
Is she going to be okay out there?”

I nod back towards the hallway. The man with a cane-row hairstyle sitting next to Jones, who I recognize as Levi Bennett, replies dead-pan.

“
Don't know, why don't you go and ask her?”

“
We're not here about her anyway, and this isn't a raid.”

“
That's a relief.” The sarcasm raises a chuckle from the hangers-on around the room.

“
I've come for your help.”  

“
We don't go helping the five-O in case you haven't heard. Run along now little piggy's.”

He gives a wave and gestures towards the door, cue more laughter, the guy's evidently a comic genius.

“
Some of your girls have been attacked by a man with sharp teeth and a taste for blood. They won't talk to us because of you, which makes it difficult to catch him.”

“
So?”

“
So, he'll do it again soon, which then puts another girl out of action which is bad for business, right?”

Bennett shrugs, uninterested.  “We got it covered Mr Po-lees, we don't need your help.”

Marcus finds his voice and tries a different tact.  “You don't need the hassle of trying to find this guy either. Just give us something to start us off and then sit back and we'll take him out of the equation.”

“
Now, what kind of message would that send? That we're the kind of men that can't take care of our own business? Show them out.”

Jones leans in to say something in Bennett's ear as the other unnamed men begin to escort us out, stepping over the girl in the passageway once again. Frustrating as it is to take the chance but come away with nothing, the cool air that greets us feels good on my skin; like breaking the surface of murky water after spending slightly too long down in the depths. Jones' voice is suddenly in my ear.

“
Don't come back here unless you get tired of living. Good luck finding your albino friend.”

The guy is still smiling even when hissing death threats at me, I'm beginning to like him already and I smile back with the reply. “Make sure the girl in your hallway keeps breathing unless you get tired of freedom.”

We lock eyes for a few seconds, long enough for me to show him a brief flash of what I contain, before I turn away and walk back to the car. As we pull away I can't help thinking, was that recognition on his face? Did he place me as local, or did he see me for what I really am?

“
That went well. I think you've got a friend for life there, mate.”

“
Scary fuckers aren't they?”

“
You think? Now remind me again why that was a good idea, and what it actually achieved?”

“
They just helped us to narrow down our search.”

“
How so?”

“
When Jones was threatening to kill me if we show up again, he said good luck finding your albino friend.”

“
So we're looking for a guy with pink eyes and chalk white skin then?”

“
Maybe, but if not, we're definitely looking for someone who is conspicuously pale even if they're not technically an albino.”

Is that why you're drinking their blood then? Perhaps, but you don't have to tear people to bits to get blood do you? Why is that necessary, and why is it prostitutes?

Marcus is looking at me expectantly.

“
What?”

“
I said what's the big deal with protecting working girls, mate?”

“
They don't deserve the treatment that they get.”

“
It's their choice.”

“
No it's not. They're drug addicts, abused, isolated and alone. All they've got are the sick leeches that live off their earnings and feed them drugs, alternating between telling them that they love them and beating the shit out of them. They're people, not combination pin-cushions and punch-bags with added holes to fuck.”

“
No one makes them run away from home, and no one makes them continue to take drugs and then refuse help from the Compass workers when they're in custody, do they?”

“
That's just it. They are made to do these things, running from abusive or smothering homes, making mistakes with who they choose to trust when they do leave. The mistakes that we make shouldn't have to mean torture for the rest of our pitiful lives.”

“
My old man beat me up all the time, Shane. Trying to make a man out of his faggot son, but I still made something of myself. Most of these people aren't prepared to help themselves, so you can't save them. You get out of life what you're prepared to put in.”

“
Well congratulations to you, accept a standing ovation and the step back down from your big fucking pedestal. Not everybody can deal with the things that they've done or had done to them the same way that you have. People are like dogs, some get kicked and then retreat into themselves shaking and cowering; others lash out at everything and everyone except the tormentor that they fear, and the last type wait for the next kick and then do their damnedest to rip the whole leg off.”

We sit staring at each other, faces hard with anger.

“
We don't need to fight about this, mate. Let's agree to disagree.”

“
Did you hear what was said after the briefing the other day?”

“
No.”

“
Strang told the guys and girls a joke. He said what's the difference between a whore and an onion?”

“
Go on.”

“
You can't cut an onion without crying.”

“
Shit.”

“
Yeah, if you find that as funny as the others did, you may want to reconsider helping me out on this thing.”

“
I don't hate them, mate. I just think that they should accept some responsibility for their own situations.”  He holds out a hand, which I accept and give a quick crush.  

“
What were you folks like, Shane?”