The trouble with hairy, p.11
The Trouble With Hairy, page 11
part #2 of West Hollywood Vampires Series
The thing was huge. It towered over him, so impressive and terrifying that Bobby wasn’t able to take it all in at one glance. All he saw were the sharp fangs dripping with saliva and the blazing, golden eyes as it stared at him. He stood stunned, speechless when it raised arms corded with muscle and extended its claws with menace. It growled again.
Bobby Falberg was trained to react quickly in life threatening situations. Almost without thinking, he drew his gun and fired in one rapid motion. The bullet struck the creature square in the middle of the chest and it roared in pain. But it remained standing. Bobby fired twice more and was certain his aim was good. But the monstrosity, instead of collapsing to the ground in a pool of blood, merely threw back its head and howled chillingly at the night.
Bobby Falberg was no fool. With a wordless cry, he turned around and bolted for the safety of the patrol car. He never made it.
The creature hit him low across the back, propelling him head over heels across the lawn and into the bushes. Landing face up, the wind knocked out of him, Bobby didn’t bother to roll over and instead used his feet and elbows to crab-walk backwards into the shelter of the oleander.
The thing came on. It slashed madly at the bushes, trying to get at its victim, sending cascades of oleander leaves flying through the air. As one of the wickedly sharp claws shredded the foliage inches from his face, Bobby tried to pull his legs farther in toward his torso to get them out of his assailant’s reach. But it was too late.
He screamed and felt searing pain shoot through his right calf as the monster stepped down onto his leg, the claws clutching at him in an inescapable grip. The pain cleared his mind for a second and he realized he had kept hold of his gun. Firing wildly above him until the chambers were empty, he couldn’t be certain whether or not he’d scored a hit. Dimly he heard Gina’s shouts in the background and the slam of the car door as she ran to his aid.
The oleander parted, and the creature’s muzzle was revealed in all its horrifying majesty. Bobby threw up his hands to protect his face from the cruel fangs and waited for the burst of pain in his forearms. But the expected attack didn’t come.
Risking a glance, Bobby peeked through his arms, full into the face of a demon from hell.
My God! he thought. It’s smiling!
Indeed it was. Slowly, the horrible teeth withdrew and then, with lightening speed, the creature surged forward, burying its fangs in Bobby crotch. Bobby shrieked in agony as his penis, testicles, upper thighs and part of his lower abdomen were ripped away. He drew breath for another wail, but as his life’s blood surged over his legs and chest from a severed femoral artery, he found he was unable to make a sound.
Distantly, he heard shots from Gina’s gun, and he saw the creature begin to chew. One of its arms darted forward toward his chest.
Is that my heart? he had time to wonder, dimly. And then, Bobby Falberg’s wondering — and his heart — stopped.
Gina Martelli heard the first shots through the open car window, followed by her partner’s first shout of alarm. Instinctively, she grabbed the radio handset and, pressing the button, yelled, “Car 621. Requesting backup. Gardner and Santa Monica. Shots fired. Officer in trouble.”
Without replacing the handset, she threw the car door open and started to get out. Her seat belt delayed her for a few seconds, and by the time she got it unfastened, she heard Bobby’s first screams. Drawing her gun, she bolted for the break in the hedge where she’d seen her partner enter the yard.
It took another few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the dark, still more for them to readjust when the inhabitants of the house turned on the exterior lights to see what all the screaming and shooting was about.
“Kill those lights!” she shouted and hunched down in order to present a smaller target to whatever was making Bobby shriek so much. Suddenly, there was silence.
At first all she saw was the blood. She crouched for a moment trying to get her bearings and, out of the corner of her eye, saw the hindquarters of the dog as it disappeared around the side of the house. She crept forward a few feet and stumbled over something.
Looking down, she saw her late partner’s left leg. Unfortunately, the rest of him was still about a yard in front of her. Thoughts of CPR and other emergency training vanished as Gina moved forward until she was practically on top of the tattered corpse. Overcome, she leaned sideways and her Astro Burger and Coke mingled with Bobby’s blood as she retched into the bushes.
Arriving at the office the following morning, Becky was greeted with an unpleasant surprise. She’d started the day with guilt — guilt at her weakness in buying and devouring three raspberry jelly donuts in blatant disregard of her diet. Guilt moved on to grumpiness when Ty cheerily announced that another patient was already prepped and awaiting her in the morgue. Even worse, Ty managed to interject after Becky had ample opportunity to vent her spleen against the recent rash of corpses, this one was a deputy sheriff.
All thoughts of calling Clive to nastily thank him for the gift immediately vanished. He was probably upset enough as it was. He’d awakened her when he came on duty at six thirty that morning, demanding that she get down to the morgue right away, but forgetting in his anger, to mention that the deceased was one of his own.
Shaking her head in sorrow at the profligacy of three corpses in as many days, Becky drew on her lab coat, pulled an extra memory card out of the box in her office closet and, irritably, marched down the hall to the morgue with Ty trailing closely behind.
She popped the card into the recorder, set the sound levels and drew on her gloves before turning to examine this latest example of the increasing pall of death pervading the city. Ty dramatically drew back the plastic sheet covering the naked body, and Becky, totally unprepared for anything other than bullet or knife wounds, gasped in shock. Regaining her composure quickly, she pressed the button to start recording.
“Preliminary examination number B-151. June 2. Rebecca O’Brien, MD, Chief Medical Examiner. Ty Takahara assisting.”
Her gaze met Ty’s, and his flippant air vanished at the seriousness of the work they were about to perform.
“The victim is male, Caucasian, approximately thirty to thirty-five years of age, six feet, give or take. Weight, maybe 175.”
“More like 190,” Ty corrected. He added with an apologetic shrug, “You know you always underestimate by fifteen or twenty pounds. I just thought…” His voice trailed off when he realized the foolishness of pursuing the matter.
Becky glared at him, cleared her throat and continued.
“At first blush, I’d say death was caused by massive trauma to the throat, left side of the chest, lower abdomen and groin. The left leg has been entirely severed at the hip and the entire groin area is…ah…not there.” She repressed a shudder at the extent of the damage and, taking a deep breath, went on.
“Let’s start with the throat. Flesh and cartilage from approximately the bottom of the chin to the top of the sternum has been torn away. Larynx is gone along with everything around it. Trauma is severe enough that the vertebrae of the spinal column are partially visible…”
The autopsy proceeded apace and Becky’s expression grew first puzzled, then concerned. After the examination had been underway for about twenty minutes, Becky started to choose her words carefully so as not to alert Ty to the thoughts starting to percolate in her mind. Fifteen minutes later, Becky had reached a certain nerve-shattering conclusion.
She drew some blood from the corpse and, popping the tube from the hypodermic, handed it across the body to her assistant. “Ty,” she said, keeping her voice deliberately casual, “would you mind going into the lab and running this right away?”
Ty looked at her oddly. “We’re in the middle of a protocol, Becky.”
“I noticed that,” she said dryly. “This is an animal attack, in case you hadn’t noticed. All we need right now is a rabies scare. Burman’ll foam at the mouth without being infected. I want this done stat.”
“We’ll be through the prelim in half an hour,” he protested. “You want to section and weigh all this stuff by yourself?”
Becky glared at him.
“All right, all right!” he conceded. “Jeez! When are you gonna get off that damned diet?” He marched to the double doors leading to the hallway. “This morgue used to be such a cheerful place to work!” He pushed through the doors, not bothering to stop them from swinging violently shut and stomped down the hall.
As soon as she was sure Ty wasn’t going to immediately barge back into the room for a final quip, Becky paused the recording, snapped off her gloves and, donning a clean pair, moved to the large body freezer against the far wall. She opened the bottom right hand drawer and unzipped the plastic bag that contained the earthly remains of Jeremy Lucas.
It was not without great trepidation that she grabbed a magnifying glass from the nearby counter and began to examine Lucas’s mutilated body carefully. She bent forward, wrinkling her nose against the imagined smell, until her face was only inches from Lucas’s throat. Moving the magnifying glass slowly from side to side, occasionally shifting a piece of flesh with a small tweezers, she grunted several times in satisfaction.
She rapidly finished with Lucas, and exchanging her soiled gloves for yet another clean pair, she slid open the center drawer to reveal Peter Kaiser’s charred remains. Again she repeated the process of careful examination with the magnifying glass, this time paying close attention to the remaining bones of the corpse’s arms and legs. At one point, she barely managed to refrain from slapping herself in the head at her obtuseness when conducting the examination two days before.
But she had to make certain. She moved back and forth, from corpse to corpse, checking and re-checking her findings, thrusting her face down into the drawers like some macabre hound seeking to flush a rabbit from its hole. Finished, she paused for a minute, deep in thought, absently tapping the soiled magnifying glass against the side of her chin.
She heard Ty coming as he tramped heavily down the hallway toward the morgue, making certain with each footstep that Becky knew he was still angry. She quickly re-zipped the bags and closed both drawers. By the time he came in a minute or so later, she had re-donned the soiled first pair of gloves, started the recording once again and was ready to proceed.
Now, however, she knew exactly what she was looking for.
CHAPTER 6
Oblivious to the shocked stares of her fellow shoppers and the supermarket checkers, Pamela Burman was so happy that, without realizing it, she was actually whistling. In fact, to the consternation of all, she was almost skipping down the baked goods aisle using her cart as a battering ram to cause housewives and out-of-work hairdressers, actors, waiters and models to dive frantically behind the nearest stack of displayed foodstuffs to avoid being mowed down by this magenta and puce-clad, white-haired madwoman and the deadly accurate aim of her grocery-laden cart.
I’ve got to remember to shop at Pavilions more often, she thought as she seized a package of lemon Bundt cake mix and thrust it down amidst the jars of marinated artichokes and wheat germ.
The reason for Pamela’s good humor was all too clear to those few remaining lunchtime shoppers who had been waiting in line at the deli counter half an hour before. Pamela, intending to purchase a half pound of Swiss cheese, a quarter pound of beef tongue and a loaf of onion bread, had been delighted to discover a young man actually smoking in the supermarket!
With undisguised glee, she had swooped down on the unsuspecting nicotine addict, grabbed the cigarette from his mouth and, crushing it under the heel of her emerald green tennis shoes with satisfaction, had proceeded to loudly recite verbatim the section of the West Hollywood Municipal Code preventing the smoking of tobacco indoors in public places. Then without further ado, she’d called over the store’s security guard and, using the political pull inherent in her position as city manager, demanded the guard arrange for the youth to be ticketed and cited. Satisfied that, in the face of her wrath, the guard would not dare fail to comply, she had gone on to happily complete her purchase of cold cuts. She was particularly pleased with her apprehension of the evil smoker as, she reflected proudly, she had hand-drafted West Hollywood’s anti-smoking ordinance herself. The fine would be substantial and the city’s coffers would be justifiably increased.
Her good humor was only slightly dimmed when she was unable to catch the man behind the deli counter in any nefarious activity, such as overcharging her for the meats. She watched carefully, hoping to see an errant thumb pressing down upon the scale, but he obviously recognized her and decided to save whatever criminal acts he might have in mind for the next unsuspecting shopper.
She swung the cart around, just missed clipping the thigh of one of two young men who were more absorbed in examining each other’s meat than the meat displayed in the deli case, and headed off to the Health and Beauty aisle. Reaching for a box of mint-flavored Ex-Lax, she reflected that there were some things inherent in getting older that no amount of careful diet or exercise could change. Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye — oh joy of joys! — she witnessed a long-haired young woman with some kind of rock symbol tattooed on one arm take a packaged generic eyeliner off the rack and slip it surreptitiously into her pocket.
Pamela almost came down with an attack of apoplexy as she descended on the girl, loudly yelling for security once again. The young woman looked up, first in dismay and shock at being caught in her dastardly scheme to cheat Pavilions out of a dollar fifty-nine, and then in amazement at the vision of the old lady bearing down upon her, green sneakers slapping the floor, her magenta sweat suit jacket spread out behind her like huge wings, huffing, puffing and yelling all at the same time as she dragged the grocery cart behind her.
To Burman’s dismay, the manager of Pavilions refused to press charges, in large part because of the aggravation Burman had already caused the security guard during the apprehension of the smoker. However, Pamela insisted — under pain of death, dismemberment and the potential revocation of his license to sell liquor — that he call the Sheriff’s Station and ask the duty sergeant to run the culprit’s identification through the computer. He complied and Burman hardened her heart against pity as the weeping young woman was led off to await the arrival of the sheriff’s deputies and to increase the city’s revenue with three hundred dollars in unpaid West Hollywood parking tickets.
All in all, it had started out to be a good afternoon.
While she was standing in the checkout line, impatiently waiting for the elderly Russian woman in front of her to count out sixty-two cents in nickels and pennies, a low buzzing sound came from the vicinity of her waist.
“Shit,” she said aloud. “Can’t they wait twenty minutes ’til I get back to the office?”
She grabbed her beeper and looked at it in disgust. She was convinced, not without reason, it was the latest ploy in Mayor Daniel Eversleigh’s vendetta against her. Two city council meetings ago, Daniel, on his own idiotic initiative, had managed to pass a resolution that certain high-ranking city officials above the position of department manager should be required to wear beepers. Publicly, Pamela decried the idea as a waste of hard earned city funds as beepers were antiquated and expensive compared to cell phones. Privately, however, Pamela shared Eversleigh’s conviction that cell phones caused brain cancer, though she’d rather have her manicurist shove hot irons under her fingernails than admit she agreed with the mayor about anything. Besides, Clive could always be reached on the department’s radios and Becky already had a cell phone, though for some reason it always seemed to be out of order. Two of the other four members of city council were fast approaching their eightieth birthdays, if they hadn’t already celebrated them, and couldn’t seem to figure out how to use the damned things. Though in public she raged against the beepers, she had to hide her relief at keeping her brain intact when Eversleigh, with a smirk, handed her the small, black, unspeakably irritating piece of equipment.
Pushing past the Russian woman, she thrust her Pavilions card into the hands of the startled checker.
“Excuse me,” she said, cutting off the explosion of protest in Russian. “City business.” She turned to the checker. “Take care of this. Double bag it in paper only and screw the fucking trees. I’ll be back.” She started to turn away and then fixed the checker with a stern, steely-eyed glare. “And only God can save you if you overcharge!”
With her last comment still hanging in the air, she pushed past the other people in line and strode off toward what was possibly the sole surviving telephone booth in West Hollywood. She snarled with disgust when she spied the little metal tag affixed to the phone identifying it as part of the city’s Cultural History Preservation Campaign. Her annoyance grew when she realized that, anachronistic as the device might be, it was not so outdated that it hadn’t been modified to accept only credit cards instead of coins. Burman ceased digging through the detritus in her purse for quarters and instead viciously jammed her MasterCard into the slot. She dialed the number of the morgue from memory.
“What the hell does she want that’s so goddamned important?” she demanded of Ty as he answered, not bothering to identify herself.
She listened carefully. “I’m at Pavilions. Tell her I’ll meet her at the station as soon as I get my groceries home.”
Ty started to protest, but Burman cut him off.
“Look Ty, I don’t give a good goddamn how big of an emergency she says it is. Short of bubonic plague raging through the city, nothing is more important than getting these frigging shrimp into my freezer before they defrost.”
Ty was not to be dissuaded so easily; he’d dealt with Burman before.
“All right,” she snapped finally. “I’ll drop by your office first. But you better make sure the frozen stuff goes right into one of the body drawers. Anything defrosts and you’ll join the rancid shrimp in the drawer — permanently. Got that?”
