Stephen Leather - Once bitten

"Cruelty?"

"Mental cruelty. Pain and suffering. To the tune of two hundred thousand dollars."

"Deborah says that I was cruel to her? I don't believe it."

"Don't forget that she has employed one of LA's toughest counsel to act for her. Carol Laidlaw is one mean son-of-a-bitch. And a dyke to boot. By the time she's finished she'll have your wife hating your guts, no matter how friendly you started out."

"That's great news, Chuck," I said, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. "What are their chances?"

"That depends on how solid their grounds are. Whether or not they'll be able to prove their case in court."

"Cruelty. No way, Chuck. I never laid a finger on Deborah. Never. And as for mental cruelty, God, I can barely remember the last time we had an argument." That wasn't true. I could remember. And I could remember her final words, too.

"You've got to remember that Laidlaw is a real professional at dragging up all the bad things that happened during a marriage. She's not interested in the happy memories, the good things you shared. She wants the skeletons, and she knows exactly how to get them rattling out of your closet."

I didn't like Chuck's imagery, I didn't like it one bit. It had been more than a year but I hadn't come close to getting over April's death and I doubted that I ever would. She lived for just four days, all of them on a life support machine, tenaciously clinging to life but with so little chance of success that we almost didn't even give her a name. We spent hours next to the incubator, watching her little deformed body twitch and breath, her perfect tiny hands clenching and unclenching.

"What does she want, Chuck?"

"Another hundred thousand."

That would just about clear me out. "Tell her it's OK. She can have it." I'd have to sell the car.

And a few other things. Like the house.

"We could fight this, Jamie. There's no need to give up. I had no idea it was going to get this nasty. I should've expected it when she hired Laidlaw. She's a bloodsucker of the first order, a real vampire, she sucks and sucks until there's nothing left. But we can fight."

I held up my hands. "Just leave it, Chuck. Just pay what we have to pay so that I can get on with my life."

He looked pained. "I'll tell you what I'll do, Jamie, I'll offer fifty thousand and see what happens. Maybe I can get her down, get her to accept less." He didn't sound convinced. Maybe I was the one who should have hired Laidlaw.

I stood up and held out my hand to say goodbye. "Whatever you want, Chuck. Just do what you think is best." He shook my hand and I went back to the car. I was going to miss it. I sat for a while, gripping the steering so tightly that my knuckles whitened, my head full of thoughts of the daughter I nearly had. I missed her so much.

Eventually I started the car and drove home, my mood swing wildly between sorrow and bitter, bitter anger. I was so busy seething that I nearly tailgated a Mercedes convertible and I had to practically stand on the brake before I screeched to a halt. A horn honked as the red pick-up behind me stopped suddenly and I waved an apology and tried to clear the bad thoughts from my head.

My heart was pounding in my ears again and there was a dull pain in my chest like I'd pulled a muscle there.

When I arrived home I pressed the remote control device in my car that automatically opened the garage door but I didn't drive in, suddenly I couldn't face the house or the memories it contained so I reversed back into the road and drove to the precinct instead. It was early evening and I figured I might as well wait out the full moon where the action was.

I checked out Homicide before I went to my office but both Filbin and De'Ath were out. A couple of the detectives nodded hello and when I walked past one of them howled like a wolf and the other laughed and I heard the words "vampire hunter." As usual De'Ath's desk was hidden under a sprawl of papers and phone books and torn-open envelopes. I dropped into his chair and picked up the phone, pressing numbers at random while I scanned his desk. What was I looking for? I wasn't sure. There were half a dozen active files on his desk and some mugshots of men who looked as if they'd be prepared to kill for a handful of change and under a large envelope I found a half-eaten ham on wholewheat with mustard. Whatever number I had dialled turned out to be engaged so I cut the line and dialled my home. I flicked the envelope open and slid out some black and white photographs of Terry Ferriman. They weren't the front and side views with numbers underneath like they take when they're processing a perp, they were more casual, she was wearing the leather motorcycle jacket and her hair was neatly combed. I reckoned De'Ath had arranged for them to be taken so that he could use them to show witnesses and the like without making it obvious that the girl was in police custody. I took one of the photographs and put it in my briefcase as my voice droned in my ear that I should leave my name and number so that I could get back to me. I replaced the receiver and went upstairs to my office. It was half past six and starting to get dark outside.

The first call came at just before nine o'clock. Two officers had picked up a guy roaming through downtown LA stark naked, bent double and occasionally stopping to howl at the moon. To be honest that sort of behaviour isn't all that unusual in La-La Land, but according to the arresting officers he'd attacked two girls. Tried to bite their tits off, they said. They'd asked him for his name and he hadn't replied, just grunted and growled. He wouldn't, or couldn't, answer my questions either, which sort of made my job impossible. He refused to sit in the plastic chair and instead crouched on all fours in a corner of the room. The first time I got too close he snapped and spat at me and two officers wearing anti-AIDS gear bundled him into a strait jacket and held him in the chair.

"What do you think, Doc?" asked one of the men, his voice muffled by the respirator and white hood.

"I think he's on something," I said. "Angel Dust, or one of the designer drugs coming out of Cal-Tech. Best bet would be to leave him for a few hours, see if he comes down. And get the medics to run a blood test on him. Once he's seen a lawyer, that is."

The two masks nodded in unison, and I wondered if they were taking the piss because it wasn't my job to examine every screwball junkie they pulled in off the streets. I was supposed to concentrate on the serious cases. I left them to it and went back to the officers. Rivron was there, his feet on his desk, reading a magazine.

"Evening, Jamie," he said, without looking up. "You're late."

"I had an appointment with a Wolfman," I replied. "A complete waste of my time. I sometimes think the cops take a perverse pleasure in messing us around."

"Don't let them get to you," he said. I was Rivron's boss but he was five years older than I was and it often seemed that our roles were reversed. He'd offer me advice and more often than not I'd take it because he was a good, solid psychologist and spent a lot more time going over the literature than I ever did. Rivron was one of those guys who faded from the memory seconds after he left the room. He had the perfect face for an extra in the movies, if you get my drift, it wouldn't matter how many times he popped up in the background, you'd never remember him. Pretty much everything about him was average. He'd have made a great criminal, you could just imagine the cops doing the rounds and collecting descriptions at the crime scene – average height, average build, brown eyes, brown hair, no distinguishing features. "Do you think you'd recognise the man again, mam?"

A pause. A cough. An embarrassed look. "Well, not really officer, no."

His choice in clothing also bordered on the nondescript – sports jacket, neatly-pressed flannels, light checked shirt, loafers, quiet socks. He had his own practice as a psychoanalyst, working out of an expensive office in Beverly Hills. His day job, he called it. Working for the LAPD was his pro bono, you know? Something to talk about at dinner parties with the stars. If I sound bitter, ignore me, I'm just jealous because I don't get to tell Farrah Fawcett-Majors about my tangles with LA low life. Since Deborah walked out, I don't get to talk to anybody about my work.