Certain Dark Things(20)

“There’s a chick who says she saw the dead girl with a guy inside the nightclub,” the young policeman said as he returned, pointing at a teenager with spiky hair and tremendously tall high heels who was standing nearby.

“All right,” Ana said. “Call forensics and see if they’ll get their ass here before someone from the morgue hauls the body away, will ya?”

The boy looked terribly annoyed, but he had the good sense to comply. Ana went toward the young girl in the heels, quickly pulling out her notepad and her pen. They were supposed to have standard-issue mini-tablets, but hers had broken and nobody had bothered to give her a replacement. Ana preferred the feel of a pen between her fingers, anyway. Old school but reliable. Just like a knife. Electric zappers were also good for vampires. But knives had their appeal. She still carried the good old silver knife with her.

Cut off their heads and burn the bodies. No other way.

“They’re telling me you saw the girl inside,” Ana said, and the teenager gave her a vehement nod of the head.

“Uh-huh. Sure did. She was with this majorly hot guy.”

“What did he look like?”

“Platinum blond hair, pale. He was wearing nice clothes,” the girl said.

“Age?” she asked, her short hand neat against the yellow pages of the notepad. She’d taken typing classes in high school. Technical high school. She had been trained to be a secretary and picked an application for the local police department instead.

“About my age. I dunno. Nineteen? Twenty, maybe. Hard to say.”

“Anything special about him? Any marks, tattoos, piercings?”

The girl seemed to think it over. She rubbed her arms and finally spoke. “He didn’t have piercings. But, yes, I remember a tattoo.”

“What did it look like?” Ana asked.

“He took off his shirt to dance,” the girl said, mimicking the motion of a man lifting his arms. “He was wearing a wife beater and I could see, kinda, part of the back of his neck. It was a shark.”

“Anything else you saw?”

“No. I was inside ’til someone came running in and said the cops were here and someone had killed a girl. I just wanted to see.”

I hope it was amusing, Ana thought.

*

Ana got home around 6 a.m., nearly time for Marisol to wake up for school. She peeked into her daughter’s room. The girl was peacefully asleep. Ana recalled the spectacle of the dead girl in the alley and shook her head.

God, a vampire kill. She hadn’t looked into one of those since Zacatecas. You took statements, nodded, maybe caught one, and then a couple more bodies popped up in another part of the city, like mushrooms after the rain. It never ended. It was a fact of life. That was what brought her to Mexico City. It was safer, and they were starting the new investigating units. Reforming the police system. She was going to have a chance to be a “real” detective.

Not that I’m anything “realer” now, she thought as she walked into her bedroom and peeled off her uniform. It was a dark blue, form-fitting suit woven with a nano-fiber worn under a standard-issue raincoat in the same color. It itched, and she often found herself scratching her neck.

Ana carefully folded her clothes and lay down on her bed. She lay on top of the covers and wondered if the examiner was going to get to the girl’s corpse that evening. Probably not. The girl was nobody of importance and Ana didn’t have much pull around the office. If the coroner looked at the girl and if he deigned to produce a report, it might be weeks later.

She didn’t think Castillo really expected this crime to be solved and the vampire, in all likelihood, was already out of the city.

She felt bad for the mother of the girl, who was probably hearing about her daughter’s murder right about now—she’d told the young, surly officer to see about that.

Ana wondered what she would do if Marisol did not show up one morning.

Don’t think that, she scolded herself.

Ana turned and looked at the corner where she kept a table with a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe on top of it, along with a plastic image of San Judas Tadeo and her mother’s rosary.

Mexico was going to hell. It was hell. If she’d had any money she’d have left the country. Somewhere nice and quiet, without vampires and drug dealers. But she didn’t.

Ana pressed a hand against her forehead and wondered what gang the vampire belonged to. The shark didn’t sound familiar. But the bite marks did. She could bet this was the work of a Necros. She’d seen bites like that in Zacatecas and had learned to recognize the telltale signs of several vampire species.

The Necros, with its strong mandibles and big, sharp teeth, was easy to identify. The Tlāhuihpochtli left fewer, smaller marks—smudges blooming on the neck and wrists. Only once had she come upon a Revenant and it had scared the hell out of her. The thing … it had … it was … And the victim. Like a mummy, the flesh shrunken and the body twisted. The devil’s work.

She rolled away from the shrine to the Virgin and closed her eyes, hoping for a restful sleep, but the image of the dead girl flickered behind her eyelids, superimposed like a negative.

*

Ana woke up far too tired. Vampires drained you one way or another. She rose from bed and found Marisol in the kitchen, frying an egg.

“Hey, are you back from school early?” she asked.