Stephen Leather - Once bitten

I drove to the police station via my house so that I could change into a suit and pick up the computer. I'd promised Rivron the night off for covering me during the day so I had my hands full.

There was an old guy, seventy-four he said he was, who'd been brought in for smashing a row of shop windows in Rodeo Drive. He hadn't stolen anything, just walked from boutique to boutique smashing the glass frontages with a tyre iron until a cruiser had turned up and then he'd hit two officers over the head before they'd subdued him with their night-sticks. The man sat in front of me with a bandage across his head and a plaster holding his nose together while he moved and pressed the mouse. According to the program he was suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome, probably induced by chronic alcoholism, so I recommended that they took him straight to a mental institution and didn't even bother charging him. He was just old and sick and would be better off in a geriatric ward than in a holding cell.

I went back to my office and started writing up my report on the old man when the phone rang and I was called down to the interview rooms again, this time to run two black teenagers through the program. They were both cocky and aggressive, swearing at me and demanding their lawyers.

They were wearing black and silver jackets with the logo of the LA Raiders and according to De'Ath they were both members of the Bloods, one of LA's more homicidal adolescent street gangs, and were well known as crack dealers. They'd raped and beaten up a teenage girl on her way back home after cheerleading practice, taking it in turns to hold a knife to her throat. The girl was in intensive care, De'Ath told me, and it would be some time before she was cheering for the High School football team again. Before they left her they'd stuck the knife up inside her, just for the hell of it. The surgeon reckoned she'd live, but she wouldn't ever have children. Sick world, isn't it?

One of the black kids asked me if I had any games he could play on the computer and I wanted to smash it into his leering face and take a knife and stick it inside him the way he'd abused the girl. I put it out of my mind, ran him and his unsavoury pal through the program and told De'Ath that there was nothing clinically wrong with either of them. Nothing a lethal injection wouldn't cure.

Later I sat at my desk with my head in my hands and tears in my eyes, grieving for a girl who I didn't even know. The phone rang and it was Terry, asking me how I was and why I was in the office so late. I lied and said I was fine and that I was just writing a few reports. She asked me if I wanted to go out for a late night snack and I looked at my watch and was surprised to see it was already one o'clock in the morning. The blinds were down and I'd lost all sense of time. I said OK and she asked me if I had my car and she said she'd meet me outside in half an hour.

I finished the report on the old man and then went and told De'Ath I was calling it a night. Extra help had arrived in the form of one of the junior psychologists from a local hospital. He was in doing a shift and he'd been well trained in the use of the Beaverbrook program and I told De'Ath that I was wearing my pager if the shit really hit the fan.

"You going out for a bite?" he said, gnashing his teeth together and imitating a vampire's bite.

"Don't you ever give up, Samuel?" I asked dejectedly.

Two patrolmen walked by and one of them crossed himself and laughed. His friend slapped him on his back.

"And another thing, Samuel. Can you ask your men to stop putting rubber bats and garlic on my car. It's not funny. It's just not funny."

"Hey man, no problem, I'll just put a note on the bulletin board. Vampire Hunter Demands Truce. How does that sound?"

"Just fine, Samuel. Thanks a bunch."

He laughed uproariously as I walked down the corridor.

Terry was waiting for me in the precinct car park, leaning against the bonnet of my Alpine. She stepped forward to hug me and kissed me on the cheek. "Who's the comedian?" she asked, nodding towards the windscreen. Someone had put a plastic crucifix under the windscreen wiper on the passenger side. I grabbed it. It was a gory example of religious art, painted blood on its cheek, side and hands, a grimace of agony on the tortured face. It wasn't pretty. I threw it into the gutter.

"You shouldn't do that, not, like, with a cross," she said.

"I didn't know you were religious," I said, opening the driver's door.

"I'm not," she said, getting in beside me. "Do you like Japanese food?"

"Raw fish? I love it. But at this time of the morning?"

"Night," she said. "It's still night. Trust me." She took me to a restaurant which was indeed open, and doing well by the look of it. It was close to Hollywood Boulevard and seemed to serve the same sort of clientele that went to the club Terry had taken me to. It was a combination of high-tech noise and neon and Japanese simplicity, with wall-mounted television sets showing Japanese game shows with the sound turned down, while a Japanese DJ behind a white metal console played deafening pop songs and jumped up and down a lot. The waitresses all seemed to be Japanese but wore white t-shirts and jeans instead of kimonos. A girl with waist-length hair and scarlet lipstick showed us to a corner table and handed us two menus. Terry asked me what I wanted and proceeded to order in Japanese.

The waitress expressed no surprise at being spoken to in her native language so I guessed that Terry had been there before.

"How many languages do you speak?" I asked Terry as the waitress went over to the sushi bar.

"I dunno, I just kinda pick them up, you know," she said. "I've never found them difficult. I guess I've got an ear for them. So, how was your day?"

"Same as usual. Full moon brings them out, as always."

"You believe that?"

"Sure." We chatted about the moon, and whether or not it affected people, while we waited for our food to arrive. I felt sort of guilty about not asking her about Greig Turner but I wanted to get my thoughts straight before broaching the subject. Also, I had a feeling that it might drive some sort of a wedge between us and I didn't want to risk spoiling it. Whatever "it" was I wasn't sure, but I knew that I wanted it to develop further and showing her that I'd been rifling through her apartment would show a distinct lack of trust. And without trust, so they say, there is nothing.

The sushi arrived along with a Japanese beer for me. She mixed the green mustard stuff into a small saucer of brown soy sauce and watched as I ate. She only picked at her food, a small piece of cooked shrimp, some fatty tuna, a strip of yellowtail, and she did most of the talking. So what did we talk about? It was strange, really strange, but afterwards I had a hard job remembering what it was she said. I can remember the way she said it, the way she looked, the way she made me laugh, the way I felt, but I can't recall the topics. I can be more specific about what happened afterwards, when I'd driven her back to my house and undressed her and she'd kissed me all over, but I'd kind of like to keep that between the two of us, you know? Suffice to say that I went to sleep with a big sloppy smile on my face and her curled up in the crook of my arm.

She was gone when I woke up. I showered and dressed and made coffee and I was just thinking about plowing through some back issues of Psychological Medicine when the phone rang. It was a jubilant Archie Hemmings.

"Found him, Jamie!" he said.

"What, you found his agent?"

"Better than that, Jamie. Much better than that. I found the man himself!" I could picture him standing in his cactus-muraled lounge, stabbing at the air with his big cigar.

"You found Greig Turner? But he must be a hundred years old!"