Jim Cogan - The Dirty City

“No offense intended, but you’ll just have to forgive me for being slightly paranoid,” I said as I made a cautious sweep of my office.

“You can search me if you like?” I had to hand it to her, a doll that can find time to be flirtatious while someone has a gun trained on her is a cool customer indeed.

She began to rise – it spooked me a little and I levelled the gun to her remarkably pretty face. Her skin was extraordinarily pale, where the light from my desk lamp shone upon her cheeks it resembled to texture of fine porcelain. And yet, it didn’t look like she was wearing any kind of makeup, she looked so natural, but fragile at the same time. Then I noticed her eyes – like two giant emeralds, the deepest, greenest eyes I’d ever seen – I felt compelled to simply stare at them.

“Easy, Tiger,” she said, grinning slightly, as she raised her hands, palms open, “just letting you have your seat back, okay?”

I blinked a couple of times, it allowed me to look away from her and bring me back to my senses. Satisfied that we were alone, I lowered my gun and beckoned her to sit on the chair in front of my desk, where my clients usually sit. We rotated our positions around the desk, eventually ending up in what I considered to be the natural order. I slunk gratefully down into my own, familiar chair, and a small semblance of my composure began to return. I placed my hand, containing the gun, in a somewhat more neutral position resting on the table in front of me – pointing away to the corner of the room, but clearly visible. I didn’t want her to forget about it.

“Feel better? Can we get down to business now?” She said, slowly descending into her chair, elegantly making herself comfortable.

“Hold up, sweetheart. I want to know how you got in here. My PA locked this place up, and the door was locked when I arrived, yet here you are. My PA and I are the only people who have a key for that door. So what does that mean?”

“Well, you obviously are in possession of your own key, so I must either have accosted your PA and relieved her of the other key? Or possibly I might have climbed in through your open window, there?”

My office window was always left a tiny bit ajar, I liked to keep the place cool and let the fresh air in. Someone with extremely dainty arms could conceivably slip one through the gap and lift the latch to open the window fully and permit ingress, and Shelley Valance was nothing if not dainty. But getting the window open, that was the easy bit. We were only on the first floor, but the window ledge was still a good twenty feet above the sidewalk – which is why I never worried about leaving that window open all the time. It would require a ladder or a grappling hook and rope, neither of which were in evidence. Not forgetting that she was wearing a formal business suit jacket, a smart, snug fitting knee length skirt and high heels - not exactly practical attire for scaling the outside of an office block. Suddenly I felt uneasy. I levelled the gun at her again.

“If you have done anything to hurt Lydia I will-.”

“Your little friend is fine, Mr Jerome. I know what you’re thinking, but, believe or not, I did get in here via the latter means rather than the former.”

“Bullshit.”

“Well, whatever. You can call her when I’m done here and check for yourself, anyway – I do not have all night, Mr Jerome, I’m going to talk now and you are going to listen, okay?”

“Wait a sec-.”

“Shut up, please .” It takes something pretty special to put me in my place like that. I’ve faced off people wielding knives, machetes and guns, but none of them had ever brought me down quite as comprehensively as that. I think it was the sheer confidence and authority in her voice – she didn’t shout, she didn’t sound stern, but there was something almost ethereal in her tone that commanded compliance.

“Right, I’ll keep this brief. I don’t know exactly how much of what’s going on you’re actually aware of – but my associate, Mr Gianni Vitalli, thinks you know far too much.”

“So the goons he keeps sending after me are telling me.”

“Yeah, about that - you put two of them in the hospital today, that was really stupid, you know that? Gianni is pretty pissed at you over that, he would have been happy with letting you off with just a warning – if you could just keep your nose out of our business, but you didn’t heed that. Then, you could have gotten off with a mild beating, no permanent damage, but you sure made certain that wasn’t going to happen. So now, well, you’re a dead man walking, aren’t you, Mr Jerome?”

“If you say so,” I grinned. In truth I didn’t need her to tell me how much deep shit I was in, but I sure as hell wasn’t let it show.

“Oh come on. The next guy Gianni sends after you won’t be some goon in a suit. He will be a professional hitman, someone who has probably killed dozens of people. You will not see it coming and you will be able to do nothing to prevent it.”

“So, something tells me you aren’t this silent assassin that I should be so worried about. Just why the hell are you here, Miss Valance, what’s your angle?”

“Simple, Mr Jerome. I don’t like you, no offense intended, and to be fair, I like you even less having met you. But you are resourceful, reasonably intelligent, you know the city well and you know how to find things out. A guy like you would be pretty useful to me, considering the kinds of idiots that Gianni has on the payroll. You could be a valuable asset to the little enterprise I’ve got going on here.”

“Excuse me, are you trying to offer me a God damn job?”

“I’m making you an offer, yes.”

“And what exactly is your little enterprise all about?”

“Wow, you’ve been digging and digging, you’ve pissed off a mob boss to such an extent that he wants you dead, and you still don’t truly know what’s going on, do you?”

“I know about the heroin.”

“Oh that, a necessary evil component in a much larger scheme.”

“I know that lots of people have been going missing, strange trucks are ferrying bottles of blood out of the city – of which the driver of one of these trucks inexplicably exploded in front of a load of cops when exposed to sunlight just the other day, and I know that although Vitalli is the big man, word is that you’re really the one pulling all the strings here. Care to fill in the blanks?”

“Very well, Mr Jerome, seeing as it could cost you your life, I guess you might as well know the full picture – I’d hate for you to die without knowing what you actually died for,” she allowed herself a little girly smile.

“My, how sweet of you,” I replied, in as ironic a tone as I could muster.

“Indeed. The heroin - my people smuggle it into the country. And we are very adept at making sure it gets here – more so than any mobsters have ever been, and in much greater quantities. We ensure a steady supply is getting out onto the streets. It’s good shit, it commands a good price and the profits we make get reinvested into the important arm of the business. Blood.”

“Okay, I was with you up to that moment, what’s the deal with the blood? My source said something about it being all mixed up – all different blood types. I’m no doctor, but I know from a medical perspective it’s useless, so who the hell needs blood like that?”

“My kind need blood like that.”

“ What? ”

“We go out at night and we find the absolute dregs of society, people with no ties – people who won’t be missed. We kidnap them, we drug them so they’re docile, we keep them alive through intravenous feeding and we harvest their blood in large quantities. That blood then enters our supply network, being dispatched to our outlying communities. I guess you’d call us bloodrunners, Mr Jerome.”