Stephen Leather - Once bitten

I turned to see a barrel-chested white-haired man in a dark blue suit, his cheeks flaring red.

Captain Eric Canonico. Not one of my greatest fans. He pointed at me and yelled at me with his head slightly back, his booming voice echoing off the walls of the corridor. "And who the fuck gave you permission to park in my spot, Beaverbrook? Who the fuck told you to leave the Batmobile in my parking space?"

"I didn't think you'd be in this late, Captain," I said.

"Yeah, well you thought wrong, Batman. But it's not the first time you've been wrong is it?

Now get that pile of shit out of my space and park it somewhere else."

He lowered his accusing finger and transferred his fiery gaze to De'Ath. "Has Mr Wonderful here seen the girl?"

"Yes Cap'n."

"And?"

"She's OK."

"So have you started the interrogation yet?"

"Just about to, Cap'n."

"And the victim?"

"No ID. No wallet. Stripped clean. We're running his prints through the computer and checking missing persons."

"Keep me informed, I'll be in my office."

The doors banged shut but Canonico's presence lingered in the corridor for a few seconds like a bad smell.

"He's never forgiven you, has he?" asked De'Ath.

"Never has, never will. What room's Kipp in?"

"B. What do you think of the girl then?"

"Young. Pretty. Innocent."

"You man, would never make a cop."

"De'Ath, I wouldn't want to. Not in a million years. By the way, she wants the cuffs off."

"Procedure, Doc. She's in on suspicion of homicide, and a nasty one at that. The cuffs stay on till we're sure she's safe. All you can tell me is if she's sane or not, not if she's likely to scratch my eyes out with her fingers. Leave her to the professionals. And save your pity for the victims."

"Why the blood?"

"Blood?"

"On her mouth. And her hands. I thought you said Forensic had been over her?"

"They have, swabs and scrapings and samples. They're down at the lab now."

"So why hasn't she been cleaned up?"

"Man, this is a police station, not a dry cleaners. She can wash up later, right now I've a homicide to investigate. You concentrate on Mr Kipp. After you've moved the Batmobile."

"Don't call it that, De'Ath. I hate it when you do that."

De'Ath's laughter boomed around the corridor as he knocked on the door to the room where Terry sat. When it opened I saw her over De'Ath's shoulder. She looked up and smiled weakly at me, and then the door closed, blotting her out.

I went outside and moved my car and then went to see Henry Kipp. He was as sane as I am, possibly saner. He'd gone into a drugs store on Olympic Boulevard run by an old Polish couple.

He'd clubbed the old man over the head with the butt of his sawn-off shotgun, then taken a couple of hundred dollars from the cash register. The woman had begun crying and Kipp had forced the twin barrels of the gun into her mouth and told her to stop. Then he blew her head off.

"The voices told me to do it," Kipp laughed, showing a mouthful of bad teeth.

"What sort of voices?"

"Devils," he said. "Devils in my head. They tell me what to do."

"Male voices or female voices?"

"Male."

"Like your father?"

"I never heard my old man's voice. Long gone before I wuz born."

He had closely-cropped hair and a nose that had been broken so many times that it was almost flat against his face. His hands were square with nails bitten to the quick, strong hands that he kept making into fists as he tapped away at the mouse. He banged it so hard that it rattled and he ground his teeth as he answered the five hundred questions. He breathed through his nose, the heavy, snorting of a wild animal. But he was sane, the program said. Aggressive, amoral, cruel, and as nasty a piece of humankind as you're ever likely to meet, but sane. Sane according to the Beaverbrook Model, which at that stage was all that mattered. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, lying about the voices. Some amateur lawyer he met up with doing a previous spell in the slammer had probably told him that insanity was a good defence but the manic laugh and the staring eyes didn't fool the program. When I ran it the blinking star that represented Kipp's psyche was well within the boundaries of what the court accepted as sane. A bit lower and to the left of Terry's, but sane nonetheless.

The door to room F was closed when I went back down the corridor and I stopped and put my ear to the wood and listened. I could hear De'Ath but not clearly enough to tell what he was saying.

I left him to it.

The storm was all but over when I left the station and climbed into my car. As I started the engine I saw that someone had hung a small rubber bat from my aerial. It was probably De'Ath.

Canonico didn't have that sort of a sense of humour. He would have broken the aerial off and slashed my tyres, that was more his style. I let the bat wave in the wind all the way home.

The Nightmare The alley was dark, so dark you wouldn't believe it. It was narrow, so narrow that if I were to put my arms out to the sides like a crucified man my fingers would touch both walls. I looked up and the walls seem to go on forever, so high that they seem to meet in the air miles above. I couldn't see the sky, not even a strip of star-studded blackness, and I couldn't see the moon but I knew it was up there somewhere, lurking like a hunting leopard. There was a scuffling sound somewhere up ahead but I couldn't see anything. In the distance I heard the whoop-whoop of a siren and I turned around to look back along the way I'd walked but I'd come so far that I couldn't see the street lights any more. The scuffling was repeated, as if a rat was rooting through a trash can. The floor was uneven and littered with rusting tins and rotting fast food containers, and here and there were puddles of dirty water. I moved slowly down the alley, holding my hands out in front of me because I was worried that I might walk into something: something cold and clammy. There was a ripping noise, the sound of material being torn by impatient hands, and then something whacked into my legs and clung to them like a pleading child. I jumped back but it stuck to me and I kicked out but still it wouldn't let go. I reached down to grab it and my hands met wet paper. It was a newspaper, blown down the alley by the midnight wind. I shivered and pulled away the scraps of wet paper, crumpling them up into waterlogged balls and throwing them to the side.

I could hear a slurping noise, the sound of an animal drinking. No, not drinking. Lapping. Like a cat feeding from a saucer of milk. Lap, lap, lap. My trousers had become damp below my knees where the wet paper had stuck to the material and rivulets of water trickled down to my ankles. I moved towards the noise, peering into the blackness, but all I could see were the trash cans and the untidily-stacked cardboard boxes waiting to be collected. High up above me I heard a window grate open and then slam shut but when I looked up there was nothing there, just two sheer, blank walls.

Ahead of me I could finally make out a shape, a grey lump on the floor like a man in a sitting position, legs sticking out, bent at the waist, head slumped against his chest, the slurping noise coming from its throat as if he was having trouble breathing. I wanted to speak, to ask if he was OK, if he needed help, but the words wouldn't come and I walked forward. As I drew closer I realised I wasn't looking at one form but two, one lying down on the ground, the other crouched over him, with its back to me. I moved to the side and I saw that the figure on the floor – I assumed it was a man but there was no way of telling for sure because it was just a shape – with its legs pointing in my direction, one arm flung out to the side, the other obscured by whatever it was that was kneeling over him. The slurping was louder. It sounded less like a cat feeding and more like two lovers kissing, soft, wet, squelchy sounds and swallowing noises, the sound of flesh against flesh.