The Vampire With the Dragon Tattoo (Spinoza Series #1), Page 2

  I sat back and steepled my fingers in front of me. I had two pending cases sitting on my desk. Both were cheating spouse cases. Oh, joy.

  I had, of course, already made my decision.

  “I will do all I can to help you, Gladys.”

  She nodded and smiled and cried, and finally I was able to force myself to stand and walk around the desk, and give the old woman a deep hug.

  Chapter Two

  I was sitting with Detective Hammer inside a donut shop on Glendale Avenue. Hammer seemed right at home in a donut shop, and I told him as much.

  “Very funny, asshole,” he said.

  Hammer and I had been working missing cases together for the past few years, ever since I got into the business and had made finding missing children my specialty. Hammer was a lead detective at the LAPD Missing Persons Unit, and he was damned good at what he did. I happened to have a knack for it, too, and we made a good team.

  We had also become friends, which is a rarity in the private business. Mostly, cops looked at us private dicks as irritants. Not to mention, I rarely, if ever, went out of my way to make friends, which was partly due to extreme shyness, and partly due to my desire to just be left the hell alone. The fewer the people who knew me, the fewer the people who could remind me about what a fuck-up I was.

  Anyway, Detective Hammer and I were sitting in the far corner booth, which gave the detective a good view of the glass door, and the donut case behind me.

  “How come I never get to watch the door?” I asked.

  “Because you’re not a real cop,” he said.

  “How do I know you’re really watching?” I asked. “And not just planning your next donut?”

  “Because I’m a highly trained detective in the LAPD. I can do both,” he said. “So far, the coast is clear, and I’m thinking I’ll have a maple bar next.”

  And he did just that. A moment later, he returned with said donut and a chocolate milk.

  I said, “When you’re done with that, there’s cubes of sugar over there that you can snack on.”

  “Maybe,” he said, and I wasn’t entirely sure he was joking. “So which case are you working on?”

  I told him about it, although I left out the part about Veronica being a vampire slayer. Which was probably for the best, since I wouldn’t have been able to say it with a straight face, anyway.

  Hammer nodded and took a bite of his donut. “The runaway who’s been living with the old couple.”

  I nodded.

  “We put this case on the back burner,” he said. “We’ve got more important things to do than look for a runaway who ran away again.”

  “Or so it seems.”

  “She’ll turn up alive and well, trust me. Probably out on some party boat in Havasu. She’ll come back to the old folks when she’s partied out.” He finished his donut and sucked on his fingers. “Anyway, to put the old lady’s mind at ease, I told her to go see you, since you’ve got nothing better to do.”

  “That, and I happen to be the best.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. There’s a guy here in town who gives you a run for your money. An old guy. Looks a little like Elvis.”

  “Lucky bastard.”

  “Tell me about it. Anyway, he’s pretty good, too. Maybe better than you.”

  “That’s one thing I don’t mind being second best at. Maybe he and I could touch bases sometime.”

  “Sure,” said Hammer. “I’ll give you his number. Then you and Elvis can solve crimes together—call yourselves Starsky and Hubba-Hubba.”

  “When you’re done clowning around,” I said, “maybe we can think about finding a missing girl. And I don’t give a shit if you think she’s just another runaway. Even so, runaways find themselves in more shit than anyone. She needs help, no matter.”

  “Fine. Quit busting my balls.”

  “Did you do any work on this case?”

  “Enough to know that it looks like she skipped town.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “That’s it. I told grandma to put together as much information as possible on the girl and to give it to you.”

  “She did.”

  “Then you now have twice as much info as we’ve got.”

  We were quiet. As Hammer was about to bite into his maple bar, his bristly mustache sort of quivered in anticipation.

  “When you eat,” I said, “Your cop mustache quivers like a randy mouse.”

  “Does it do it in a sexy way or a creepy way?”

  “A disgusting way.”

  “Probably why my old lady never sleeps with me.” He wiped his mouth. “Did Gladys mention, um, anything else to you?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Something, you know, odd?”

  “Maybe.”

  He said, “You ask me, she’s off her rocker.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You got anything else to say other than maybe? And if you say maybe again, I’m going to go ape shit on you.”

  I grinned. “She might have mentioned something about the girl being into some weird goth shit.”

  “No, it wasn’t weird goth shit,” said Hammer. “And might have and maybe is the same fucking word, asshole.”

  I grinned again.

  “What did she tell you?” I asked.

  “That the girl was some sort of a vampire slasher.”

  “Slayer,” I said. “Vampire slayer.”

  “Thank you for clearing that fucking up,” said Hammer. “Now I can rest well tonight knowing I have it fucking straight.”

  “So what does your gut say about this case,” I said. In this business, instincts were everything, and we often asked this question to each other.

  Hammer, for the first time in quite a while, looked legitimately perplexed; his mustache even sagged a little. “I’ll admit, it’s weird enough that it’s worth looking into, which is why I sent the old lady your way.”

  “That, and because I’m the best.”

  He ignored me and went on, ticking points off on his fingers as he spoke, “So, this girl Veronica shows up at the old lady’s door one day, bleeding and hurt, but won’t tell Gladys where she’s from or how old she is, and warns the old lady not to call the cops or she’s gone. The old folks are so desperate for excitement in their pathetic lives that they happily take on this degenerate.”

  “Way to look on the bright side,” I said.

  “There ain’t no bright side to what I do,” he said.

  “I do it, too,” I said.

  “But not as good.”

  “Go on.”

  He said, “So they take this girl in, treat her as if she’s their own for a few years. Meanwhile she disappears every now and then to hunt werewolves.”

  “Vampires.”

  “Whatever. Look, someone here is clearly nuts.”

  “Nuts or not, we have a missing girl, who’s most likely a minor.”

  “I still say she’s a runaway. A runaway of a runaway is low priority for a prestigious law enforcement agency like the LAPD.”

  “But not for me.”

  “Do I really need to answer that?” he said. “Anyway, since you get paid to do this shit, you’re the lucky bastard who gets to look into it further.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Lucky me.”

  Chapter Three

  I spent the next two hours in my office poring over the file Gladys had given me. I was on my own with this case. The LAPD had effectively shelved the case, and, quite frankly, I was Gladys’s only hope.

  Perhaps Veronica’s only hope, too.

  No pressure or anything.

  There was a time when I was without hope, too. A pathetic, hopeless drunk. There had also been a time when I couldn’t have been happier. A wonderful marriage. A sweet little son. Within a matter of years, two tragic accidents, and a lot of alcohol later, it was all lost to me. My wife, my son, and my freedom. I had spent a year in prison, sobering up.

  Vehicular manslaughter.

  With that afte
rnoon’s donuts still churning sluggishly in my digestive system, I locked up my office and decided to hit the first name on the list.

  According to Gladys’s notes, the first name was Veronica’s best friend. Gladys didn’t have a number for the girl, but she knew where she worked. She car-hopped at Industrial Burger in Hollywood.

  “Oh, goody,” I said to my empty Camry. “More grease.”

  * * *

  I was in luck. And luck is imperative in my business.

  In this case, my luck consisted of catching Veronica’s good friend, Nicole, on the right day at work. According to the manager, (after, of course, I showed him my P.I. license and slipped him a $20 bill), her shift would start in just under an hour.

  Happy that the investigation was off to a good start—not always the case, trust me—I ordered a Diet Coke and sat in my car and waited.

  While I waited, I did some research on my iPhone; in particular, I Googled vampire slayers. I was disheartened to see nearly three million hits came up, most about Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

  I adjusted my search parameters: vampire slayer -Buffy.

  Better. Only five hundred thousand. So I settled in with my diet soda and spent the next hour or so reading about all things undead and those who hunt them.

  My conclusion after an hour of reading?

  Well, outside of popular literature, no one took vampires or vampire hunting very seriously. There seemed, in fact, to be very little evidence of real vampires anywhere. Outside of a vampire hunting kit on display at the Ripley Museum in Niagara Falls, NY, and the ludicrous incident of the Highgate Vampire Hunt in England, which featured a couple of goofballs running around a cemetery claiming to be hunting vampires, there was remarkably little information about honest-to-God vampire hunters. Unlike ghost hunters, whole groups of which numbered in the tens of thousands around the world.

  So what was I to make of this?

  Apparently, more people saw a need to hunt ghosts than vampires. In fact—a quick Google search later—there were no legitimate vampire hunting groups out there.

  Conclusion: obviously more people believed in ghosts than vampires.

  I sat back in my hot seat and thought about it. So why in the hell would a teenage girl claim to be a vampire slayer?

  I opened Gladys’s file next to me and took out the two blown up pictures I had of Veronica. Included with the two pictures was a hand written note apologizing that these were the only two pictures she had.

  The girl in the picture was not small. In fact, the girl seemed to have grown three or four inches between the two pictures. One featured a defiant-looking young teenager at a BBQ, holding a paper plate overflowing with food. She was looking at the camera with a smoldering look, daring the picture taker to take another shot. Her hair was pitch black, short and completely straight. She was wearing shorts and sandals and a lot of attitude.

  The second picture couldn’t have been more different. Her short hair was now long. Gone was the attitude, now replaced with an underlying confidence. In the picture she was standing with Gladys, her arm around the elderly woman’s shoulders. Veronica had perfect posture, shoulders thrown back, back perfectly straight, easily a half a foot taller than her adopted grandmother. Veronica wasn’t smiling in this picture, either. Most interesting, she seemed like a young lady who was very secure in who she was.

  A rare feat if you ask me.

  She also didn’t look crazy. She wasn’t dressed in the typical goth fashion, either, which I had suspected she would. If anything, she looked like the captain of her high school volleyball team or the center for the basketball team. She radiated calm and poise and great inner strength.

  Again, a rare feat for a girl so young

  Hell, if this girl in the picture told me she was a vampire hunter, I’d almost be inclined to believe it.

  Which brought me back to Gladys. The old lady was looking more and more like she was, as Detective Hammer put it so eloquently, off her rocker.

  It was at that moment, as I sat there perplexed and sweating, that a young lady skated smoothly across the baking pavement and rolled expertly up to my window.

  “Bobby said you wanted to speak with me?” she said.

  Nicole was still in high school. She was fit and athletic and seemed to have this skating thing down pat. I would have killed myself many times over.

  I showed her my P.I. license. “I’ve been hired to find your friend Veronica.”

  She leaned down and studied the picture, then looked at me and studied me. She nodded. Apparently, I checked out. Oh, goody.

  “Did Gladys hire you?” she asked.

  “Yes, and please tell me she’s just a crazy old lady whom I shouldn’t take seriously.”

  Despite her youth, the girl smiled at me knowingly. “Unfortunately, she’s probably the sanest of us all.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  She grinned. “I think we need to talk.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  “Then you need to order something, or my boss will be all over my ass.”

  I said sure and she handed me a menu. I scanned it.

  “You have anything here that won’t give me a heart attack before we’re done talking?”

  “We have side salads.”

  “Fine. Then get me two of those with some extra ranch.”

  She laughed and rolled away. The waitresses here all wore bright yellow shiny spandex pants that made them look like life-sized gold statues. Perhaps that was fitting here in Oscarland.

  A few minutes later, Nicole returned with only a single salad and one small container of low-calorie vinaigrette. I looked at the meager offerings.

  “This is what you meant to order,” she said, setting the containers on the window tray.

  “But I thought the customer was always right,” I said.

  “You were right,” she said, “until you opened your mouth and ordered.”

  I sighed and drizzled the dressing over my salad, and while I dug into my rabbit food, she told me what she knew. She and Veronica were pretty close, as they had been for these past few years. Yeah, Veronica was different. I asked how different, and she asked how much did I know about Veronica? I said I knew enough that Veronica was running around telling people she was a vampire slayer. Nicole opened her mouth to reply but then a car pulled up a few slots down. She told me to hold on and I did, finishing off the rest of the salad. Would have been better with cheese and extra ranch.

  I looked down at my gut. Probably not better for my gut, though. It wasn’t a huge gut, granted, but it was big enough to be on my mind. I worked out when I could, jogging and walking and lifting weights at home, but the gut seemed impervious to my efforts.

  It’s hell hitting 38.

  Nicole skated across the parking lot to turn in the driver’s order. She returned a moment later with another Diet Coke.

  “How did you know I had diet?” I asked.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Is my gut that big?” I asked.

  “Big enough.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Where were we?” she said.

  “You were going to tell me the difference between a vampire hunter and a vampire slayer.”

  “There is no difference. But probably slayer is the most accurate.”

  “Accurate in what way?” I asked.

  Nicole leaned a hip against my Camry and seemed to consider what to say next. I’m sure the sheet metal was piping hot in the California sun. Maybe her shiny pants were just as hot. Maybe there was going to be some sort of nuclear reaction. Or not.

  “Slayers kill vampires. And that’s what Veronica does. You know, on the side. Not all the time. Mostly, she’s looking for one vampire in particular.”

  I stared at her. She stared at me. The sun stared down, too.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “Serious as a heart attack.”

  “And Veronica is a vampire slayer?”


  “Yes. Exactly.”

  Another car pulled up, but Nicole ignored it. Luckily, another girl wearing flaming yellow pants appeared to take the order. I could feel the sweat dribbling down between my brows. I studied the young girl’s face. A small film of sweat coated her brow and upper lip. Had it been me out there on skates, I would have been a sweating mess, and would have soaked my yellow spandex pants. Probably why they hired girls and not overweight middle-aged men.

  I finally said, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then maybe you should let this go and walk away.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “A girl is missing.”

  “This girl can take care of herself, trust me.”

  “I’ll decide that for myself, no offense.”

  We sat staring at each other some more. We sweated some more, although her not so much.

  I said, “And why on God’s green earth would she kill vampires?”

  “She has her reasons, apparently.”

  I took a breath. If I hadn’t been given good money by a kindly old lady who really seemed to need help, I would have been certain someone was pulling my leg. Hell, I still wasn’t entirely certain someone wasn’t pulling my leg. I exhaled.

  I asked, “How many people has she told this to?”

  “Not many.”

  I said, “And you believe her?”

  Nicole looked at me hard, and she suddenly looked ten years older. She bit her lower lip, struggling with something internally. Finally, she said, “I’ve seen her when she...returns.”

  “Returns from where?”

  “Doing what she does.”

  “Killing vampires?”

  “Yes. She’s...she’s covered in blood. Everything is covered in blood. It’s disgusting.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think. I did know that I wanted something a lot stronger than a Diet Coke. I drummed my fingers on my steering. I thought some more, then decided to try a different angle.

  “When was the last time you saw Veronica?”

  “A week ago. We were shopping together.”