I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (23 page)

“What if Spasso and his guy find her first?
I’m collecting shit then.”

“We ain’t gonna let that happen,” Bowie spoke
up. “Those guys find her, find Jay with her, they’ll probably both
disappear. Forever.”

“We’re not gonna let that happen to one of
our own,” continued Gossitch. “Jay’s our guy. The girl? I could
care less. You turn her over to the others, get what you got coming
to you.”

“Okay, Gossitch.” Damian gave them an address
uptown.

“Appreciate it, Damian.” Gossitch gestured to
Bowie, who peeled five fifties off his cash roll and laid them on
the bar.

“Hey. Now that’s nice.”

“You seen that guy shoot his load like that?”
Hamilton walked back over to Gossitch and Bowie. “She wasn’t even
touching him.”

“Ham, me and Bowie are going to take a ride
with Johnny. You want us to drop you and Boone off somewhere?”

“Nah, I’ll chill here for awhile,” said
Hamilton. “Peace.”

Hamilton took Bowie’s place against the bar
and listened to Damian complain. “These preppy assholes are going
to get us shut down by the state.” He shouted across the room
again. “Hey, asshole! How many times I have to tell you—not in your
mouth!” He pointed the guy out to Young Big Mike, who was sidling
through the room.

“Damian,” asked Hamilton. “What’s my friend
Jay got himself into?”

“He’s in over his head.” Damian said it
matter-of-fact.

“Tatianna?”

The bartender nodded.

“I gotta find him.”

“Find her,” offered Damian, “you’ll find
him.”

“What does she want from him?”

“Who knows. Companionship?”

“Is she using him?”

“Her type ain’t like that.” The way Damian
said it sounded like he spoke from authority. “It’s not like when
one of the vampires looks at you and can get you to do whatever it
wants. If he’s in her service, he entered voluntarily.”

Hamilton thought about that.

“What can I do?”

“Find him, find her.” Damian shrugged. “You
get your friend, get him away from her. You get her, let me know
where. Like I was telling your man, Gossitch, before, there’s other
interested parties in this lady.”

“Is she dangerous?” Hamilton wanted to
know.

“Only if you wrong her. Oh, and, listen, Ham.
I didn’t get a chance to tell Gossitch before the goon squad
arrived, but there was a vamp in here asking about your crew last
night too.”

“A vamp?” There was concern in Hamilton’s
voice. “You sure?”

“Ham, look at me,” something sparkled in
Damian’s eyes. “I’m sure.”

“What’d it want to know?”

“Wanted to know if Gossitch’s crew was still
active around here.”

“What’d you tell it?”

“I told it I never heard of anyone named
Gossitch.”

“You think it believed you?”

“Nah.”

“Okay. Well, thanks Damian. Hey, you got a
pay phone in here?”

“Other room, by the pillory.”

Hamilton thanked him again and left the
bar.

Damian thought about the thing that had come
around asking questions last night. It had called itself Enfermo,
said it like he would know what it was, like he should have heard
of it before. Enfermo.
Sick
,
diseased
. Thing looked
it too. Maybe it hadn’t fed in awhile.

Something he hadn’t told Hamilton, the thing
had come with a lot of cash in hand, a lot of cash that was now in
Damian’s bank account. A lot more than Gossitch and Bowie and their
five fifties. Damian had lied to Hamilton. Sure, he’d told the
vampire, he’d heard of Gossitch and his crew. He’d told Enfermo a
few things he knew, it had handed him the money and left.

Damian wasn’t sure why the creature had been
asking. He didn’t know for a fact what its intentions were. Far as
he saw it, no harm, no foul. Anyway, Damian felt that by mentioning
it to Hamilton, he was giving Gossitch and his guys a heads up. It
was out of his hands now.

“I hate that fucker Sully,” Boone growled in
the car with Bowie and Gossitch.

“I don’t think he likes you either,” said
Bowie. “Hey Boone, let me ask you this, who
do
you
like?”

“Gossitch is okay. And you still ain’t on my
shit list.”

“We need you, I’ll page you,” Gossitch said
to Boone as Bowie pulled the Audi over to the curb. Boone struggled
to get out of the backseat. He thumped his palm on the top of the
sedan and walked off to the subway entrance.

Bowie checked his rear view and pulled away
from the curb. He looked in his rear view. Johnny Spasso and Sully
were behind them in Spasso’s ruby red Mitsubishi Eclipse.

“Hey, Gossitch, let me ask you a
question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Is it true Spasso’s gay?”

“That I don’t know. Why don’t you ask
him.”

“Because he might shoot me.” There was little
traffic and Bowie gunned the Audi. Spasso’s Mitsubishi followed him
easily.

“How about Damian—remind me what’s up with
that cat?”

“What do you mean?” asked Gossitch.

“Is he some type of demon or what? He’s got
that look in his eye.”

“Damian’s heavily medicated. That’s crazy
eye.”

“Oh yeah.”

Gossitch unclipped his pager and looked at
it. “It’s Hamilton.”

“Want me to pull over at a pay phone?”

“Nah. Later. Let’s see what’s on the
radio.”

Gossitch hit the power knob on the Audi’s
sound system. Monster Magnet was singing “Space Lord mother
mother...” Gossitch hit the scan button and the numbers on the
digital readout flickered to the next station. “Get at me dawg.”
DMX was barking. The radio scanned to the next station. “This is
Armand DeMile and the Positive Mind here on WBAI, 99.5 on your FM
dial, and my special guest today is—.” Haddaway plaintively asked
“What is love?” on Z-100.

“Nothing on the radio.” Gossitch hit the
power button again.

When they turned the corner to the block with
the address Damian had given them, there were flashing lights, half
a dozen police cruisers, and an ambulance.

“Look at this, Frank.”

“I’m seeing it.”

Bowie pulled the Audi over at the curb and
hit the alarm on his keychain as he and Gossitch got out of the
car. Behind them, Johnny Spasso and Sully disgorged from the
Mitsubishi.

As they walked up to the scene Gossitch noted
a woman crying hysterically in the back of the ambulance. She had a
little poodle on her lap. The dog looked nervous and was licking
her face. There were two sheets on the sidewalk, one larger than
the other, the kind of sheets they put over bodies. Shards of glass
littered the concrete.

“Frank.”

“Gritz. What happened to her?” he nodded
towards the woman in the ambulance.

“Guy took a dive out of his twentieth-floor
apartment window.” The cup of coffee in the detective’s hand was
steaming even in the muggy night air. “This lady’s out walking her
dogs. Guy lands on one of the dogs. Splat.”

“That’s terrible,” said Sully.

“Another couple of feet,” Gritz looked up at
the building above them, “we would have been consoling the
dogs.”

“I’m thinking I don’t need to guess who the
jumper was.”

“You’re right, Frank. It was that Duffy guy.
I’m going up to look around. You and Johnny want to come
along?”

“Yeah.”

The elevator dinged as the doors opened on
the twentieth floor. Gossitch and Spasso followed the detective
down the hallway to the door that was marked off with yellow crime
scene tape. Neighbors in their robes and slippers were talking to
police officers around the tape.

“These are some high class digs,” noted
Johnny Spasso. The dwelling was a luxury apartment, big with a lot
of space. Sleek, black furniture with plenty of curves and
stainless steel. Much of it was upended and scattered around the
apartment. Stuffing from what looked like an outrageously priced
Italian couch was strewn all over the place.

There were a dozen official looking people
working the apartment, marking things off and gathering
evidence.

Gossitch studied the depressions in the
walls. Looked like someone had been battered into them
repeatedly.

“Pimp lived well off his girl,” Johnny
surmised.

“Sucking and fucking paid for this,” said
Gritz. “You gotta love America. Maybe I’m in the wrong line of
business.”

One entire wall behind the upturned couch was
taken up with a floor to ceiling window. A huge, jagged hole in the
center of the window gaped out into the night air.

“You see the feathers, right?” Spasso asked
Gossitch, and
yes
he had, but Gossitch was more interested
in the cigarette butts that littered the floor. He crouched down
next to one that was marked off and considered it. A Moore.

“I always thought of Moore’s as a woman’s
cigarette,” Spasso said.

“Only smoke Marlboros myself.” But Gossitch
knew who smoked Moores. “Maybe Duffy’s?”

“Yeah, could be.” The way Spasso said it,
Gossitch knew he didn’t mean it.

Gritz came over after speaking to another
detective.

“Neighbors said they heard a racket, sounded
like World War Three in here. No one was brave enough to go down
the hall and take a look. One old lady had her eye pressed to the
peep hole in the door. Saw something she described as ‘a malevolent
shadow’ pass her apartment.”

“A malevolent shadow, huh?” Spasso
smirked.

The detective shrugged. “You got some
educated people living here.”

A few minutes later, Gossitch and Johnny
walked out of the apartment to the elevator together. It took a
minute for the elevator car to arrive and when it did they had to
let some more emergency response personnel off before they could
get on.

Neither spoke until the elevator doors
closed.

“You think Bowie and Sully killed each other
by now?” Spasso inquired.

“Nah, Bowie knows how to get along. Now if it
was Boone…”

“The kid has a lot of anger in him, don’t
he?”

“You could say that. You find
whoever—
whatever
did this, you’re gonna kill it?”

“Someone’s got to answer, Frank.”

Gossitch’s pager vibrated. When he and Johnny
walked out onto the street he was squinting at it.

“Who is it?” asked Bowie. Johnny walked off
with Sully back to the Mitsubishi.

“It’s Madison.” Gossitch had forgotten that
Hamilton had paged him earlier. “Come on, let’s find a phone.”

Drip
…
drip
…
drip
…

When Gossitch regained consciousness, he
realized he was bound and gagged. He couldn’t see and it took him a
few seconds to realize he was blindfolded as well. He listened and
thought he could hear labored breathing nearby. There was a muffled
voice near him.

“You wake.” A voice hissed in his ear and the
hair on the back of his neck stood up. The blindfold was ripped off
and a hideous, disfigured visage glared into his eyes, inches from
his own face. He recognized it immediately as the vampire from the
trailer, the one Boone had burned.

“Remember me?” The thing cackled and
disappeared behind Gossitch.

Gossitch steeled himself and forced himself
to breath normally through the gag.

The muffled voice next to him became
recognizable as the gag and blindfold were removed from its
owner.

“You pansy fuckers,” Bowie spat. “Why don’t
you let me up out of this chair. We’ll see how you play!”

“We saw how you ‘play’ yesterday morning.”
The scarred creature’s voice promised cruelty. “And we’ll play
again, very soon.”

The thing leaned around Bowie’s shoulder, its
fetid breath on his face. Gossitch watched his man hold himself
solid, not flinching. Bowie didn’t even wince when the thing
flicked its tongue out and licked the man’s face.

It pulled back and disappeared behind them,
vowing ominously, “We’ll play my game.”

They listened to its steps receding somewhere
behind them.

Gossitch took in his surroundings. He was in
some vast, dark room, the only light that cast by torches that
burned on the walls. His legs, torso and arms were secured to the
chair he sat in. He pulled back against his bonds but they didn’t
give an inch. His forearms were secured to the arm rests, though he
could move his fingers. Little good that would do him.

“Gossitch…where are we?” Madison’s voice was
full of fear.

Bowie was on his right and Madison was on his
left.

“Fuck these fucks, Maddy,” cursed Bowie.
“Fuck ‘em all!”

“What happened?” asked Madison.

“We got a page from you.” Bowie answered
because the gag was still secure in Gossitch’s mouth. “How’d they
get you, Maddy?”

“I got a call from Santa Anna, asked me to
meet him…said it was about Boone.”

Gossitch hung his head. Santa Anna.

Somewhere in the shadows water dripped.

“These ropes are so tight.” When Madison said
it, Gossitch looked down at his own wrists and fingers. His hands
were purpling, the blood cut off. He wiggled his fingers, light
from an ensconced torch reflecting off his wedding band.

“Man up, Maddy.” said Bowie. He was thinking
about his mother. “You gotta be tough now, kid.”

Bowie breathed out, a sigh of resignation.
“We’re not alone, kid.”

Others had filed into the room, standing back
in the gloom, hidden. Gossitch could
feel
them there.

“Hey, Maddy. You smell that? Smells like a
bunch of pussies to me.”

As if on cue they stepped into the
torchlight, nearly three dozen in all. Some of them, Gossitch saw,
were obviously vampires, but the most were human, slaves. A good
number of the slaves were armed with submachine guns. Looked like
Uzis and their cousins, Ruger MP-9s. Gossitch knew the MP-9s had
only hit the market a couple of years ago. He wondered where the
vampires and their slaves got theirs.