Bite Me_ A Love Story Part 6

Then she was gone. And Jared was like in the middle of catching some escaped rats and he's all, "You guys are going to totally lose your security deposit."

Jody is just gone. Gone. On her own in the night. It's like Lord Byron said in that poem "Darkness."

Darkness had no needOf aid from them-She was the Universe.I'd like to go bone my sister now.

I'm paraphrasing.

9.

Tenderloin If you're looking for a great taco in San Francisco, you go to the Mission district. If you want a plate of pasta, you go to North Beach. Need some dim sum, powdered shark v.a.g.i.n.a, or ginseng root? Chinatown is your man. Hankering for stupidly expensive shoes? Union Square. Want to enjoy a mojito with an attractive, young professional crowd, well you'll want to head for the Marina or the SOMA. But if you're looking for some crack, a one-legged wh.o.r.e, or a guy sleeping in a puddle of his own urine, you can't beat the Tenderloin, which was where Rivera and Cavuto were investigating the report of a missing person. Well-persons.

"The theater district seems somewhat deserted today," said Cavuto as he pulled the unmarked Ford into a red zone in front of the Sacred Heart Mission. The Tenderloin was, in fact, also the theater district, which was convenient if you wanted to see a first-rate show in addition to drinking a bottle of Thunderbird and being stabbed repeatedly.

"They're all at their country homes in Sonoma, you think?" Rivera said, with a sense of doom rising inside him like nausea. Normally at this time of the morning, the Tenderloin sidewalks ran with grimy rivers of homeless guys looking for their first drink of the day or a place to sleep. Down here you did most of your sleeping during the day. Night was too dangerous. There should have been a line around the block at Sacred Heart, people waiting for the free breakfast, but the line barely reached out the door.

As they walked into the Mission, Cavuto said, "You know, this might be the perfect time for you to get one of those one-legged wh.o.r.es. You know, with demand down, you could probably get a freebie, being a cop and all."

Rivera stopped, turned, and looked at his partner. A dozen raggedy men in the line looked, too, as Cavuto was blocking the light in the doorway like a great, rumpled eclipse.

"I will bring the little Goth girl to your house and film it when she makes you cry."

Cavuto slumped. "Sorry. It's all kind of getting to me. Teasing is the only way I know to take my mind off of it."

Rivera understood. For twenty-five years he'd been an honest cop. Had never taken a dime in bribes, never used unnecessary force, had never given special favors to powerful people, which is why he was still an inspector, but then the redhead happened, and her v v-word condition, and the old one and his yacht full of money, and it wasn't like they could tell anyone anyway. The two hundred thousand that he and Cavuto had taken wasn't really a bribe, it was, well, it was compensation for mental duress. It was stressful carrying a secret that you could not only not tell, but that no one would believe if you did.

"Hey, you know why there's so many one-legged wh.o.r.es in the Tenderloin?" asked one guy who was wearing a down sleeping bag like a cape.

Rivera and Cavuto turned toward the hope of comic relief like flowers to the sun.

"Fuggin' cannibals," said the sleeping bag guy.

Not funny at all. The cops trod on. "If you only knew," said Rivera over his shoulder.

"Hey, where is everybody?" asked a woman in a dirty orange parka. "You f.u.c.kers doing one of your round-ups?"

"Not us," said Cavuto.

They moved past the cafeteria line and a sharp young Hispanic man in a priest's collar caught their eyes over the heads of the diners and motioned for them to come around the steam tables to the back. Father Jaime. They'd met before. There were a lot of murders in the Tenderloin, and only a few sane people who knew the flow of the neighborhood.

"This way," said Father Jaime. He led them through a prep kitchen and dish room into a cold concrete hallway that led to their shower room. The father extended a set of keys that were tethered to his belt on a cable and opened a vented green door. "They started bringing it in a week ago, but this morning there must have been fifty people turning stuff in. They're freaked."

Father Jaime flipped on a light and stood aside. Rivera and Cavuto entered a room painted sunny yellow and lined with battles.h.i.+p gray metal shelves. There was clothing piled on every horizontal surface, all covered, in varying degrees, with a greasy gray dust. Rivera picked up a quilted nylon jacket that was partially shredded and spattered with blood.

"I know that jacket, Inspector. Guy who owns it is named Warren. Fought in Nam."

Rivera turned it in the air, trying not to cringe when he saw the pattern of the rips in the cloth.

Father Jaime said, "I see these guys every day, and they're always wearing the same thing. It's not like they have a closet full of clothes to choose from. If that jacket is here, then Warren is running around in the cold, or something happened to him."

"And you haven't seen him?" asked Cavuto.

"No one has. And I could tell you stories for most of the rest of these clothes, too. And the fact that clothing is even being turned in means that there's lot of it out there. Street people don't have a lot, but they won't take what they can't carry. That means that this is just what people couldn't carry. Everyone in that dining room is looking for a friend he's lost."

Rivera put down the jacket and picked up a pair of work pants, not shredded, but covered in the dust and spattered with blood. "You said that you can link these clothes to people you know?"

"Yes, that's what I told the uniformed cop first thing this morning. I know these people, Alphonse, and they're gone."

Rivera smiled to himself at the priest using his first name. Father Jaime was twenty years Rivera's junior, but he still spoke to him like he was a kid sometimes. Being called "Father" all the time goes to their head.

"Other than being homeless, did these people have anything in common? What I mean is, were they sick?"

"Sick? Everyone on the street has something."

"I mean terminal. That you know of, were they very sick? Cancer? The virus?" When the old vampire had been taking victims, it turned out that nearly every one of them had been terminally ill and would have died soon anyway.

"No. There's no connection other than they were all on the street and they're all gone."

Cavuto grimaced and turned away. He started riffling through the clothing, tossing it around as if looking for a lost sock.

"Look, Father, can you make us a list of the people these clothes belong to. And add anything you can remember about them. Then I can start looking for them in the hospitals and jail."

"I only know street names."

"That's okay. Do your best. Anything you can remember." Rivera handed him a card. "Call me directly if anything else comes up, would you? Unless there's something in progress, calling the uniforms will just put unnecessary steps in the investigation."

"Sure, sure," said Father Jaime, pocketing the card. "What do you think is going on?"

Rivera looked at his partner, who didn't look up from a dusty pair of shoes he was examining.

"I'm sure there's some explanation. I don't know of any citywide relocation of the homeless, but it's happened before. They don't always tell us."

Father Jaime looked at Rivera with those priest's eyes, those guilt-shooting eyes that Rivera always imagined were on the other side of the confessional. "Inspector, we serve four to five hundred breakfasts a day here."

"I know, Father. You do great work."

"We served a hundred and ten today. That's it. Those in line now will be it for today."

"We'll do our best, Father."

They moved back through the dining room without looking anyone in the eye. Back in the car, Cavuto said, "Those clothes were shredded by claws."

"I know."

"They're not just hunting the sick."

"No," Rivera said. "They're taking anyone on the street. I'm guessing anyone who gets caught out alone."

"Some of those people in the cafeteria saw something. I could tell. We should come back and talk to some of them when the priest and his volunteers aren't around."

"No need, really, is there?" Rivera was scratching out numbers on his notepad.

"They'll talk to the paper," Cavuto said, pulling in behind a cable car on Powell Street, then sighing and resolving himself to move at nineteenth-century speed for a few blocks as they made their way up n.o.b Hill.

"Well, first it will be covered as amusing stuff that crazy street people say, then someone is going to notice the b.l.o.o.d.y clothes and it's all going to come out." Rivera added another figure, then scribbled something with a flourish.

"It doesn't have to come back to us," Cavuto said hopefully. "I mean, it's not really our fault."

"Doesn't matter if we get blamed," said Rivera. "It's our responsibility."

"So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that we're going to be defending the City against a horde of vampire cats."

"Now that you said it, it's real." Cavuto was whining a little.

I'm going to call that Wong kid and see if he has my UV jacket done."

"Just like that?"

"Yeah," Rivera said. "If you go by Father Jaime's example, they've eaten about three-quarters of the Tenderloin's homeless in, let's call it a week. If you figure maybe three thousand street people in the City, you're talking about twenty-two hundred dead already. Someone's going to notice."

"That's what you were calculating?"

"No, I was trying to figure out if we had enough money to open the bookstore."

That had been the plan. Early retirement, then sell rare books out of a quaint little shop on Russian Hill. Learn to golf.

"We don't," Rivera said. He started to dial Foo Dog when his phone chirped, a sound it hadn't made before.

"The f.u.c.k was that?" asked Cavuto.

"Text message," said Rivera.

"You know how to text?"

"No. We're going to Chinatown."

"A little early for eggrolls, isn't it?"

"The message is from Troy Lee."

"The Chinese kid from the Safeway crew? I don't want to deal with those guys."

"It's one word."

"Don't tell me."

"CATS."

"Did I not ask you not to tell me?"

"The basketball court off Was.h.i.+ngton," Rivera said.

"Have that Wong kid make me one of those sunlight jackets. Fifty long."

"You get that many lights on you they'll have you flying over stadiums playing Goodyear ads on your sides."

10.

Unlikely Knights THE EMPEROR.

They called it Wine Country. What it was, in fact, was an area south of Market Street, adjacent to the Tenderloin, where liquor stores sold a high volume, yet small variety, of fortified wines like Thunderbird, Richard's Wild Irish Rose, and MD 20-20 (known in the wine world as Mad Dog, for the propensity of its drinkers to urinate publicly and turn around three times before pa.s.sing out on the sidewalk). While Wine Country was technically the SOMA, or the "fas.h.i.+onable" South of Market Street South of Market Street neighborhood, it had yet to draw the young professional crowd that sprayed everything with a s.h.i.+ny coat of latte and money, as had its waterfront neighbor. No, Wine Country consisted mainly of run-down apartments, sleazy residence hotels, deeply skeezy p.o.r.n theaters, and old industrial buildings, which now housed mini-storage units. Oh, and a huge Federal Building that looked like it was being molested by a giant steel pterodactyl, but evidently that was just the government trying to get away from their standard bomb shelter architecture to something more aesthetically appealing, especially if you liked G.o.dzilla p.o.r.n. neighborhood, it had yet to draw the young professional crowd that sprayed everything with a s.h.i.+ny coat of latte and money, as had its waterfront neighbor. No, Wine Country consisted mainly of run-down apartments, sleazy residence hotels, deeply skeezy p.o.r.n theaters, and old industrial buildings, which now housed mini-storage units. Oh, and a huge Federal Building that looked like it was being molested by a giant steel pterodactyl, but evidently that was just the government trying to get away from their standard bomb shelter architecture to something more aesthetically appealing, especially if you liked G.o.dzilla p.o.r.n.

It was in the shadow of that architectural abomination that the Emperor had taken his search for the alpha vampire cat. He and the men didn't spend much time in Wine Country, as he had lost a decade in a bottle somewhere and had since forsworn the grape. But it was his city, and he knew it like the cat-scratch scars on b.u.mmer's muzzle.

"Steadfast, gents, steadfast," said the Emperor, throwing his shoulder against a Dumpster behind a hundred-year-old brick building. b.u.mmer and Lazarus had commenced low, rumbling growls since they'd come into the alley, as if there were tiny semi-trucks idling in their chests. They were close.

The Dumpster rolled aside on rusty wheels, revealing a bas.e.m.e.nt window with a sheet of plywood loosely fitted into it. The building had once housed a brewery, but had long since been refitted for storage, except for the bas.e.m.e.nt, half of which had been bricked off from the inside. But this window had been forgotten, and it led to an underground chamber completely unknown to the police, where William, and other people who succ.u.mbed to the Wine Country's charms, would seek shelter from the rain or the cold. Of course, you had to be drunk to think it was a good place to stay. Except for the spot by the window, the bas.e.m.e.nt was completely dark, as well as damp, rat infested, and reeking of urine.

As he pulled away the plywood, the Emperor heard a high sizzling sound, and the smell of burning hair came streaming out the window. b.u.mmer barked. The Emperor turned away and coughed, fanned the smoke away from his face, and then peered into the bas.e.m.e.nt. All over the visible parts of the floor, cat cadavers were smoldering, burning, and reducing to ash as the sun hit them. There were scores of them, and those were just the ones the Emperor could see from the window light.

"This appears to be the place, gents," he said, patting Lazarus's side.

b.u.mmer snorted, tossed his head, and ruffed three times fast, which translated to, "I thought I would enjoy the smell of burning cats more, but strangely, no."

The Emperor got on his hands and knees, then backed through the window. His overcoat caught on the window sill and actually helped him in lowering his great bulk to the floor.

Lazarus stuck his head in the window and whimpered, which translated to, "I'm a little uneasy about you being in there by yourself." He measured the distance from the window to the bas.e.m.e.nt floor and pranced, preparing himself to leap into the abyss.

"No, you stay, good Lazarus," said the Emperor. "I fear I wouldn't be able to lift you out once you are down here."

With the ashes of burned cats crunching under his shoes the Emperor made his way across the room until he reached the end of the direct light that lay across the floor like a dingy gray carpet. To move farther he'd have to step on the bodies of the sleeping-well, dead-cats, as even in the shadows, he could see that the floor was covered with feline corpses. The Emperor shuddered and fought the urge to bolt to the window.