Known Devil (3 page)

I took him back down to Booking, where they’d put him in a holding cell and give him a phone, just like the law requires. I was pretty sure that once his lawyer got here, Thor wasn’t going to be nearly as chatty as he had been upstairs.

If Thor was a human going through withdrawal from heroin, a doctor might actually have do him some good – and we’d provide one. That’s the law, too. Some junkie bouncing off the walls because his dopamine receptor cells were going crazy wasn’t exactly a new phenomenon around here.

A doc wouldn’t give a prisoner any heroin, but a dose of methadone wasn’t out of the question, or maybe a strong sedative. Even if we had a fucking goblin going nuts because he can’t get any of the meth he’s hooked on – the medical community knows how to handle that, too.

But an addicted elf? Hooked on a drug that nobody’s ever
heard
of? No doctor could be sure that any drug he gave Thor might not interact with the stuff already in his system and kill the little bastard. So Thor was going to have to sweat it out, literally, until a specialist in elf medicine could get a look at him.

I went back to the squad room and got started on the paperwork stemming from the arrest of the two elves at the diner. I was almost done when Karl called around 5.30, saying he was still stuck at Mercy’s ER. Car hadn’t even made it into a treatment room yet.

“OK, I’ll find somebody to take over for you,” I said. “We oughta be there in ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Roger that.” Karl loves that kind of talk.

Sefchik had started his shift by now, and he and Aquilina were out on the street somewhere. But McLane and Pearce were in the squad room, drinking coffee and waiting to handle the next call that came in. Lieutenant McGuire was in his glass-enclosed office at the back, and I told him that Karl was stuck over at the ER with sunrise fast approaching. McGuire said I could run over there and take one of the other detectives with me to relieve Karl.

Ten minutes later, Pearce was at the ER, handcuffed to Car, and Karl was riding shotgun in my Toyota Lycan as I headed back to the station house. I had a lot to tell him. Turned out, he had a few items for me, too.

 

When I finished telling Karl about my interview with Thor, I said, “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’d have said it was bullshit. But there he was, right in front of me – an elf who was obviously strung out on
something
.”

“I think you’re being too hard on yourself, Stan. You were going on what you’d been taught at the academy, and they taught me the same thing: supes don’t get hooked on drugs, apart from goblins, I mean. Now it looks like some motherfucker has come up with a new kind of drug, and that throws all the old knowledge into the wastebasket.”

“A game changer,” I said.

“Uh-huh – like the old game wasn’t tough enough already.” Karl shook his head. “Well, I got a couple of things from talking to my buddy Car that I can add, and one of them’s gonna blow your mind. I know it did mine.”

“I can hardly wait,” I said.

“I’ll start with the other one. Car told me that there’s another street name for Slide, and he thinks this one came first. He says some of his homies call it HG.”

I didn’t take my eyes off the road to stare at him, but I wanted to. “HG,” I said. “Seriously.”

“That’s what Car said.”

“It sounds like some old-time movie director –
Ready when you are, HG!
’’

“Turns out, I can give you a better idea of its etymology,” Karl said.

“Etymology.”

“Yeah – it means the study of word origins.”

I looked sideways at him. “You been looking at those copies of
Reader’s Digest
I keep in my desk?”

I saw his shrug from the corner of my eye. “I sneak one every once in a while.”

“OK,” I said. “So, enlighten me as to the, uh…”

“Etymology.”

“Yeah. The etymology of ‘HG’.’”

“Car says he’s pretty sure it stands for ‘Hemoglobin-Plus’, on account of hemoglobin being the basic ingredient.”

“Hemoglobin plus
what
?” I asked him.

“Car didn’t know. He says nobody does.”

“With a guy like Car,” I said, “
nobody
probably consists of him and three other losers like him.”

“Probably. We’re gonna have to start working our street contacts, see if somebody out there knows more about this stuff.”

“OK, so the name is one piece of news,” I said. “What’s the other item – the one that’s gonna blow my mind?”

“Thing is, it could be just bullshit – considering Car was the source and all.”

“Fine – I’ll keep that in mind. It might keep my skull from imploding. So what
is
it?”

“Car says he knows a vampire who’s hooked on the shit, too.”

 

With dawn coming soon, Karl had to split as soon as we pulled into the parking lot behind the station house. My shift was over, too, but I still went inside to see McGuire.

I told him what Karl and I had learned from the two junkie elves. He was as disbelieving as I’d been, at first. But he agreed with me that it was something the unit needed to know more about. He said each shift of detectives would be told to ask their snitches about Slide and exactly who might be addicted to it.

When I got home, Christine’s car was parked in the driveway. Since the sun was already well above the horizon, I knew she’d be in her basement bedroom by now, wrapped in a sleeping bag and literally dead to the world until dusk. I’d talk to her then.

I went upstairs and traded my detective outfit for a sweatshirt and jeans. Time was, I’d head off to sleep right after getting home from work, but lately I’ve got into the habit of unwinding for an hour before I go to bed. I have fewer nightmares that way.

I went into the spare bedroom and checked on my hamster, Quincey. His water bottle was mostly full, but the bowl was empty. I filled it with food pellets and put it back in his cage. That woke him up – hamsters are nocturnal, just like vampires and some cops I know. When he came over to the bowl, I rubbed his head with my index finger for a little while. He likes that.

Then I went to sleep – and had bad dreams anyway.

 

When Christine came upstairs, I was in the kitchen, eating some scrambled eggs. “Morning, honey,” I said.

“Good morning, Daddy.”

It wasn’t morning, but we’d agreed that starting the day with “Good evening” sounded stupid – especially when I said it using my Bela Lugosi imitation.

Christine wore the outfit she usually slept in – sweatpants and a T-shirt. Today the shirt said in front, “Thousands of vampires go to bed hungry.” As she went to the fridge, I saw that the back read, “Give generously when the vampire comes to your door window.”

She got at least a dozen different “vampire-centric” shirts, and I’d asked her once where she bought them. She’d given me a wink and said, “The Sharper Image catalog, of course.”

Christine got a bottle of Type A from the refrigerator, pried off the cap, and put it in the microwave to warm up. Then she sat down and poured the contents into the mug I’d put on the table for her, along with a placemat and napkin. Setting the table for a vampire is pretty uncomplicated, but I knew she appreciated the gesture.

“So how was work?” she asked, taking her first sip.

“Depends on what part you mean,” I said. “Do you wanna hear about how Karl and I almost got held up by elves, or about when it got
really
weird?”

Her eyes widened a little. “Goodness,” she said. “You mean I have to choose?”

“Naw, I’m having a sale tonight – two for the price of one.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “And what
is
the price?”

“Your opinion, when I’m done.”

“You’ve got yourself a deal, Sergeant. Go for it.”

So I told her about my shift, starting with when the two elves hit Jerry’s Diner. Eventually, I got around to the new street drug, Slide.

The look she gave me when I finished was as skeptical as McGuire’s had been – not that I blamed her.

“A drug that addicts supes…” She’d picked up that term from me and used it freely, even though some supernaturals consider it a slur. Christine knows I don’t mean anything by it.

“That’s what it looks like,” I said.

“I knew about the goblins and meth, of course,” she said with a frown. “I’m not likely to forget, after a bunch of them came over here to kill you a while back.”

“That’s over and done,” I said. “And anyway, things didn’t work out too well for the gobs that night.”

“Just as well,” she said. “Little green bastards.”

“I never thought it possible that other species of supes could become drug addicts,” I said. “But I trust the evidence of my own eyes.”

“I trust your eyes, too,” she said, “but, for gosh sake… So this stuff affects both elves
and
vampires?”

“The vampire angle’s just hearsay, for the moment. It came from that asshole Car, and I’m not sure I’d trust him if he said bats fly at night. But elves… yeah, I’d say that’s a certainty.”

She drained the mug and put it down. “Goblins and elves are both part of the faerie family. Think there’s a connection there? Some kind of genetic thing?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “And for the moment, guesses are all I’ve got.”

“I don’t imagine that state of affairs will continue for very long – now that Detective Sergeant Markowski is on the case.”

Some of that was kidding, but only some. Despite knowing me better than anyone alive – or undead – my vampire daughter seems to think I’m pretty cool. How many dads can say
that
?

“So,” I said, “I take it that this is the first time you’ve heard about this HG stuff?”

“Absolutely. There hasn’t been even a whisper. What’s HG stand for, again? Hemoglobin-something?”

“Hemoglobin-Plus, according to the elf.”

“Plus what?”

“That’s the mystery, or one of them. It must be something pretty potent, since hemoglobin all by itself isn’t addictive to anybody.”

“Well, it is to
me
,” she said.

“Fuck that. You’re talking about nourishment, honey. Calling blood addictive to vampires is like saying humans are addicted to food. I mean, in a literal sense I guess that’s true – without it, we’d die.”

“The ultimate withdrawal pang.”

“It’s still not the same,” I said.

She laughed softly.

I looked at her. “What?”

“Stan Markowski, once the scourge of the undead from Scranton to Shickshinny, defending vampirism. There was a time when you didn’t talk like that.”

I turned my head and looked out at the night that was pressing against the window. “There was a time when I didn’t know better.”

After finishing my eggs, I said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d ask around the… community about this HG shit when you have a chance.”

“I’ll be happy to,” she said. “But if somebody’s actually using this stuff, it’s pretty unlikely they’re gonna just admit it – at least to me.”

“Maybe not, but it could be somebody heard about another vampire getting hooked on this stuff. You know people like to gossip.”

“And vampires, like corporations, are people, too,” she said, giving me a toothy smile.

“Yeah,” I said, “but a lot more talkative.”

 

On the way to work, I passed a couple of new billboards that had gone up just since yesterday. One said “SLATTERY FOR MAYOR” and, underneath that, “The man for REAL change.” Three blocks farther on, another billboard reminded me that six of the eight people sitting on the City Council were up for reelection this year, too. But the ad wasn’t paid for by them, even though they were shown in it. The faces of all six were lined up in a row, each with a red X across it. Below that, in big red letters, it said, “THROW THE BUMS OUT!”

I thought that was strange, since I was pretty sure that four of the councilors running for re-election were Democrats and the other two were Republicans. Who would call members of their own party bums?

Then I got a little closer and saw the smaller print saying that the billboard was brought to us courtesy of the fine folks at the Patriot Party. Now it made sense.

The Patriot Party didn’t like anybody – except for fellow Patriots, that is. They were new on the local scene, and while I don’t usually pay much attention to politics, I knew that the Patriot Party combined fiscal conservatism with a social agenda that some people found kind of disturbing. They were backing Philip Slattery for the mayor’s seat, and supporting a whole slate of candidates for City Council.

Everybody wants lower taxes, including me. That’s just what the Patriots promised – I think they wanted to cut the property tax rate in half. That would make a lot of people happy, but the big drop in revenue which would require serious cuts in city services.

The Patriots were fine with that, especially if the services that got cut involved poor people, unwed mothers, or people with substance abuse problems. Supporters of the Patriot Party apparently believed that poor people deserved to be poor, unwed mothers were sluts, and drunks and druggies had brought their problems on themselves and shouldn’t expect taxpayers to help them cope.

The Patriots also weren’t real fond of gays, and they were especially down on supes. Their members contained quite a few Bible-thumpers, who had declared supes to be “abominations before the Lord”. They usually accompanied this claim with a bunch of quotes from the Old Testament – like the one from Exodus that says, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

But some other members of the Patriot Party made a more legalistic argument. They said that a “citizen” was defined someplace as “a man or woman living under a particular legal jurisdiction”. Since supes weren’t human, their argument went, they couldn’t be considered citizens and therefore had no basis to claim civil rights.