Jim Cogan - The Dirty City

I could see him from a distance, his dark navy blue uniform standing out against the surrounding natural green hues around him. He was casually seated on one of the many wooden benches dotted around, tucking into some kind of oversized sandwich.

“Heart attack food, Ed.” I joked.

“Hey, I gotta’ maintain my figure, huh?”

“Good to see you, thanks for meeting up at short notice.”

“No worries, Johnny, always glad to be of service. Fancy a donut?”

“Not for me, Ed, can’t stomach the sugar these days.”

During our patter, I’d produced a blank envelope and placed it casually next Edgar, as I took a seat next to him. Without either of us actually looking at it, he picked it up and stashed it out of site in a concealed pocket in his jacket. Edgar did a lot deals like this – it never ceased to amaze me how his jacket seemed to have an extraordinary quantity of concealed pockets.

“Need some info, Ed, bit stumped on a case.”

“Shoot.”

“Anything - weird going on in the city at the moment?”

“Define weird.”

“What’s going on with the local mobs? Vitalli is the main man now, right?”

“Everyone knows that.”

“How did that come about?”

“Bosses rise to the top, usually by taking down their rivals, this is no different.”

“But it’s sudden, isn’t it?”

“True.”

“You ain’t seen this kind of domination occur so quick anywhere else before, right?”

“I guess.”

“So what is different here, what’s given him that advantage?”

“Well, there are rumours…”

“Uh huh?”

“It’s mostly crazy talk, drunken wino talk, most of it ain’t worth the time of day.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“You aware of Vitalli’s operations at the old docklands?”

“Heard about them. D’you know what’s going down out there?”

“Nah, no-one does. Been raided twice and we ain’t found shit – but the word is that the raids were prearranged , we weren’t meant to find anything, but there is stuff going on there.”

“What about missing persons?”

“That is an odd one. On average, three or four a week in the vicinity of the Old Portland Bridge and the surrounding area. No trace found yet for any of them.”

“Word is you’re not exactly carrying out an exhaustive investigation.”

“We ain’t. The people vanishing are scum, Johnny. Beggars, petty crooks, old winos, hobos and lowlifes. The taxpayer wants us to catch crooks and keep them safe, not commit resources searching for crazy old bag ladies with a gin habit.”

“You heard of a chick called Shelly Valance?”

“We’ve heard talk, but we’ve no idea if she’s a real person or just a smokescreen, but word is she is some out of town business woman who has a specialist team of enforcers at her command. She’s thrown her lot in with Vitalli, and it’s her boys who’ve been taking down Vitalli’s rivals. We also assume it’s through her that all the heroin we’re seeing on the streets is getting in.”

“Any other weird shit happened?”

“Funnily enough, two very strange things. We stopped a suspicious transport truck a week back, middle of the night. Driver jumps out and is gone in literally seconds, I mean he moved so damn fast it was like he vanished. We searched the truck, it’s stacked out wall to wall with crates. Each crate contains 25,000 vials of human blood.”

“Really?”

“But it’s odd – it’s not any one person or group of persons blood, its hundreds of peoples blood, and all different blood groups, just mixed together, and we have no idea where it all came from. None of the hospitals are missing stocks of blood, it’s a complete mystery. And apparently there are trucks like this sited pretty much every night heading out of town.”

“You managed to catch any of the drivers?”

“No, they’re sneaky, take all the back routes, they keep out of site. And it’s very likely that most are being deliberately ignored , if you know what I mean? We did manage to corner one suspect, though – we gave pursuit until he wrong-turned down a dead alley, just before dawn.”

“Did you apprehend him.”

“What I’m about to tell you is a little hard to believe, but it’s true. Big group of cops head into the alley, this guy goes stir crazy, he tries to fight his way out with his bare hands – I’m told he was doing pretty good 'til the cops opened fire on him. They totally unloaded on the guy, but he doesn’t go down, he takes all these bullets but it’s like they’re passing through him without doing any damage. But then the sun came up.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, the witnesses say he just exploded, right there and then.”

“What?”

“Literally, he came apart, he blew up. Into pieces.”

“Bullshit!”

“Hey, I wasn’t there, but I witnessed the remains being brought to the coroner. In plastic bags.”

“There must be some reasonable explanation?”

“Initial thoughts were that it was spontaneous human combustion, SHC. Extremely rare phenomenon – still just a theory, really, a bit of supportive evidence from previous possible cases. But…”

“But?”

“It wasn’t consistent with the few documented previous examples. In SHC it’s thought the combustion begins within, typically in the stomach. The body burns from the inside out, often leaving the clothes only mildly scorched. But this guy, his flesh burnt off first, his bones crumbled almost to dust and then his vital organs exploded.”

I honestly had no response to that.

“And one more weird thing. When he went pop, blood was sprayed all over the place, but it was all the wrong consistency. It only travelled a few yards from exploding out of the body to hitting walls and shit, but in that short distance it almost completely coagulated, it had dried to powder before forensics got there. Blood doesn’t normally behave like that, the process usually takes hours to get to that stage.”

“So what was the official verdict?”

“It was all so bizarre and difficult to explain that it was agreed, seeing as the guy was a John Doe, that SHC would be the best explanation, providing no-one asked too many questions. But in truth, they didn’t have a God damn clue. Because the incident coincided with sunrise their best guess was maybe some kind of photosensitive reaction to ultra violet light, but it would have been off the chart and incomparably larger than anything anyone has ever seen before. Photosensitives get bad sunburn in direct sunlight, but they don’t explode.”

I left Edgar to the rest of his lunch and headed back to the car. The city was dirty, but these reports were just plain crazy. I wondered just what the hell was going on here?

My rational mind was still trying to keep things in balance, and for all the bizarre stuff going on it kept repeating to me that there had to be a completely logical explanation. But… The rest of me could not help itself, I was a detective, I have a deductive mind, and it was leaping to some awkward conclusions. People vanishing, strange shadow-like figures, mysterious consignments of human blood and people exploding in sunlight. My rational mind was screaming, ‘Bullshit!’ But my deductive mind was reluctantly saying, ‘Vampires…’

I knew something wasn’t quite right the moment I got back to the office.

“Hi, sweetheart, how’s it been here?”

Lydia said nothing. She put one finger to her lips to indicate I be quiet and gestured me over to her desk. Once I was close enough she whispered into my ear.

“Johnny, there’s a guy in your office, he just turned up, he’s built like a brick shithouse and is demanding to speak to you. I think he could be mob.”