The Hunger Page 4

  “Just calling to make sure my boy is OK,” said the voice. “You read the paper today? Or watched the news?”

  “No sir,” said Julio. “I’ve been kind of busy with the girls tonight. And you know I sleep during the day.”

  “Well, someone out there is killing my people,” said the voice. “You watch yourself. And make sure to call me if you see anything suspicious on the street, OK. You’re one of my sets of eyes out there.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” said Julio. “Maybe I’ll even get the fuck for you.”

  “You just watch yourself and let me know if you see or hear anything. I’ve got people to take care of this kind of thing. People I pay very well to get rid of…, nuisances like this. You take care, Julio. And stay in touch.”

  “I will, Mr. Giovani. I will. Bye now, sir.”

  Julio folded the phone and put it back in his pocket. He glared for a second at the girl across the street before walking up the short steps to his porch stoop and opening the door, walking into his house and slamming the door behind him.

  Lucinda walked to the back of the building she was on top of and climbed to the top of the wall, looking down at the small fenced in yard below and the triple line of laundry hanging over some cheap plastic children’s playground toys. She listened for a second as her eyes scanned the yard. Nothing moved, to her sight or her hearing. She sniffed the air for a moment. She could smell the dog howling at the night a block down the street. But the dog in the building she stood on was not out in the yard, but still barking in the second floor apartment its owner lived in.

  Lucinda leaped into the air and fell the two stories to the ground, landing lightly on her feet. She ran and leapt at the eight-foot privacy fence, grabbing the top and swinging herself over, landing on the grassy patch between two buildings and waiting for just a moment. After making sure that no one had seen her from the street she walked onto the sidewalk and crossed the road between the sparse traffic. She walked up the steps to her prey's building and pushed the ringer.

  “What do ya want?” called a harsh voice from the first floor apartment to the left.

  “I need to talk to you, sir,” said Lucinda in a quavering voice, trying to put into it a feeling of fright that she did not feel.

  A curtain was drawn and she saw Julio’s face at the window, looking out at the porch and breaking into a smile as his eyes landed on her. Lucinda knew she was beautiful to men, and that she attracted them as a snake attracted a bird. She tried to look nervous as she gazed back at the man, setting an alarmed look on her face. The curtain fell back into place and moments later she heard a door opening and footsteps coming down a hall and up to the door. The door swung open and she found herself looking up at the tall, muscular man.

  “Senorita,” he said to her, licking his lips. “Ain't you a little young to be out this late at night.”

  “I ran away from home, sir,” she said in her frightened, teenage voice. “My daddy was raping me and I couldn’t get mama to believe me. So I ran away from home and came to the city.”

  “You don’t have a place to stay?” asked Julio. “Maybe you’re looking for one?”

  “I heard that you can help girls get…, established on the street,” said Lucinda. “I scared, sir. I would do anything, sir. Anything at all.”

  Julio motioned with his hand and turned to walk down the hall. He turned back when Lucinda did not follow. Lucinda felt as if she were rooted to the spot. She wanted to follow Julio. The Hunger was almost overwhelming at this point of the night. But she couldn’t, yet.

  “My mama taught me to wait until I was invited in before entering a man’s home,” she said, licking her lips nervously.

  “Come in, chica,” said the man. “My casa is su casa.”

  Lucinda felt the barrier that was between her and the house come down as she hurried into the hallway, her movements still showing her to be a frightened child looking for a refuge. She followed the man to the first door on the right of the hall as he pulled it open and motioned her in.

  As she entered the living room she almost gagged on the stench coming from the kitchen. The living room itself had bags of garbage piled up by the door, beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays on the tables. A high-end stereo system on the bookshelves filled with CDs played Latin music, while a baseball game played on the wide screen plasma TV against one of the walls. A couch and a weight pulley machine completed the furnishings. A large mirror was on another wall, and Lucinda looked at it in fascination as it portrayed an image of the room. An image she did not occupy.

  “So,” said Julio, turning as he loomed over her. “What can I do for you? And more important, what can you do for me?”

  Lucinda could smell the lust in him as he looked down at her. See the hunger in his eyes, the hunger that almost matched the hunger that was growing in her. She smiled up at him, a feral smile that made him recoil and step back a bit.

  “Who the hell are you, chica?” he said, reaching behind his back to pull an automatic pistol from his waistband. He started to raise it toward Lucinda in a side reaching gangsta pose.

  Lucinda exploded into a burst of speed. The man seemed to slow to a standstill in front of her. She pulled the gun out of his hand like jerking a toy out of the hands of a child, and then threw the weapon at the mirror. The speed left her and the world returned to normal, as the man backed up from her.

  “What the fuck are you?” he yelled, stooping to pick up a heavy dumbbell from the floor. With a roar he flung it at her, aiming at her head.

  Lucinda reached for the dumbbell and caught it as it flew toward her, tossing it over her shoulder. She took a step toward him as he backed into a corner.

  “I’m your worst nightmare, chico,” she said to him, her hand grabbing the front of his wife beater shirt and twisting the fabric, pulling him toward her. The fabric ripped apart at that moment, exposing the small silver crucifix on the dark skinned chest.

  A feeling of panic overwhelmed her. She dropped the grasp she had on the remnants of the shirt as she stumbled back. Her eyes burned at the sight of the holy symbol, and she flung her hands up to cover her face as she hissed in terror. She wanted to kill him, to drink his blood and feed her hunger. But the holy symbol on the unholy man put a barrier between her and the man. A barrier of animal fear that overrode all of her other instincts.

  “Are you on drugs, cunt,” yelled Julio, grabbing another dumbbell as he watched her out of frightened eyes.

  Lucinda backed away till she was near the door. Her instincts told her to go through the door, to flee into the night. Then her heel struck the dumbbell that had been thrown at her moments before. She fought down the fear for a moment and reached down to grasp the dumbbell, picking it up as she turned back toward Julio. She lifted it over her head and threw it at him with all of her might.

  The dumbbell hit Julio in the stomach, blasting the breath from his body. He went down to his knees, grasping at his stomach as he coughed up the contents of his gut. In that instant the cross on his chest was covered up.

  Lucinda felt the panic ebb as the holy symbol left her sight. The hunger grew in her, building with the rage that was directed at those who enslaved other humans for their own greed and lust for control. She took running steps toward Julio, her left hand grasping his long hair as she pulled him to his feet, her right hand flying to the cross around his neck as she felt the panic begin to come over her again. Her hand enveloped the cross, which burned into her flesh like hellfire. A high pitched scream erupted unbidden from her mouth as she pulled hard with her right hand, jerking the cross from the chain and tossing it behind her. She looked down at her throbbing hand, the red shape of the small cross burned into her palm.

  “You have no right to wear that symbol, you unholy scum,” she growled as she bent his head back with the iron grip she had on his hair. “Now tell me who you work for, scum. Tell me.”

  “Lucian Giovani,” grunted the pimp through pain tight lips. Julio swung a heavy hand into L
ucinda’s face, followed by another. Lucinda rocked from the to her feeble punches and pulled his head to the side, exposing his neck.

  “Now I send you to your true master,” she hissed, baring her fangs. With a thrust of her head she buried the fangs into his neck, her instincts driving the canines unerringly into the pulsing jugular vein under his skin. Blood spurted into her mouth as she closed her lips over the wound, drinking the life force from his body. The life giving fluid flowed down her throat, feeding her hunger.

  He was a big man, and she felt satiated before the last of the blood was sucked from his body. Still she continued to drain him as she sensed his heart fluttering to a stop. She held the heavy man up with her one hand as she sucked till nothing more came into her mouth. She moved her mouth away from the neck and jerked on his hair as she lifted the lifeless body high into the air, his toes trailing the floor. Then she reached her left hand over her shoulder and grasped the hilt of the big knife, pulling it free.

  With a measured swing she took the head from the body. She held the head in her hand by the hair as she kicked the falling body into the weight machine, where it hit limply but heavily and fell over the bench. She tossed the head on top of the piled bags of garbage near the door and walked from the room.

  There were loud voices on the street, people talking about the commotion that had come from Julio’s apartment. Soon there would be police, as well as other hunters, all intent on finding and destroying her.

  The door swung open onto the back yard behind the building and she strode out into the night. She was physically and spiritually satiated as she walked away from the building and into the darkness. She could hear the sirens in the distance as she ran through several yards, putting distance between herself and the site of the murder. In one yard she dodged as a dog on a long chain lunged at her. She fought down the urge to kill a beast that was only doing its job, protecting its master from a perceived threat. She left the barking dog behind as she slowed to a walk and headed down the empty neighborhood street.

  * * *

  Detective Lieutenant Jamal Smith swore softly to himself as he looked at the multitude of gawkers standing on the sidewalks, lit by the rotating blue and red strobe lights of the blue and whites at the scene. Why do these fools always have to come out and get in the way, he thought. Uniformed officers were out on the sidewalk taking statements, three quarters of which he knew were going to result in a waste of time and manpower.

  The forensics van was parked close to the entrance of the building, and a muffled flash seen through the curtains let him know that the cameraman was at work inside. Smith pulled a pad of paper out of its holder in the car and put a couple of mechanical pencils in his jacket pocket. A sergeant walked toward his car as he got out.

  “What’s the word, McCraw?” asked Smith, the sergeant falling in beside him as he walked toward the building.

  “We have several statements from people who were on the street at the time of the murder,” said the sergeant. “Two of them are going to come down to the station tomorrow to do pictures with the police artist.”

  “And what did they say they saw?” asked Smith, stopping to look over the gathered crowd. Whore, addicts, dealers and pimps, he thought. Not the most reliable of witnesses, but all that we’re gonna get.

  “A red haired woman entered the dwelling after talking with the victim,” said McCraw. “About five eight to nine, slender, in solid black clothes that were not too expensive nor too cheap.”

  “And they saw no one else enter the place?”

  “Not until the first unit arrived and the men went inside to find the body.”

  “Decapitated, I assume,” said Smith as he walked up the step to the front door to be waved into the building by the officer guarding the door.

  “Yes sir,” answered the sergeant. “Stephens thinks that it had to be a large, strong man. Not a woman.”

  “Ok,” said Smith, looking back over the crowd as a flash bulb flared, causing him to squint his eyes for a moment. That’s just great, he thought. Now I’ll be on the front page of the Tribune. “Keep the press clear. We don’t need them stepping over our evidence.”

  Smith stepped over the yellow tape that blocked the doorway and walked the few steps into the hall. There were several officers in the hallway, talking about vampires and werewolves and other such nonsense. Smith shook his head as he walked into the ground floor apartment, to the sight of uniformed officers and plainclothes forensics men bustling through the room. He noted that the doorknob had the white powder used to dust for fingerprints, and one of the techs was snapping a picture of a dumbbell near the body that had already been prepped for prints.

  “Lieutenant,” said a soft voice behind him. Smith turned to look into the eyes of Doc Stephens, the chief of the forensics unit, bagging a head as if he were putting his lunch into the plastic container. “Two nights in a row, huh.”

  “Still think it was a man, doc?” asked Smith. “We have witnesses saying that a woman entered the premises about the time this happened.”

  “No way it was a woman,” said Stephens, pointing with his free hand at the chalked outlines of where the body had lain on the bench. “I believe that whoever took our boy’s head off was holding him up high, above his normal height. With one hand, because they needed the other to swing the knife. I got that from the splatter marks on the wall. And then they pushed the falling body against the weight bench. He didn’t fall from where he stood. He weighed about 230 or so, before his head came off. It took a strong man to lift him up by the hair and take his head off with a single swing.”

  “So no way a slender woman could have done this?”

  “No lieutenant. Maybe she let the killer into the house through the kitchen door, which was wide open when the uniformed officers got here, by the way. But a slender woman has nowhere near the strength to do this.”

  “She’s not a normal woman,” said a gravelly voice from the doorway. “I’ve been trying to tell you that.”

  Smith swore under his breath as he turned around to the sight of Jeffrey DeFalco. The agent looked like he hadn’t slept since last night’s murder. His eyes had bags under them, and there was beard stubble on his face.

  “Still sticking with that vampire nonsense, eh Agent DeFalco?”

  “It’s not nonsense,” growled DeFalco as he staggered into the room and closed with Smith. Smith could smell the rancid odor of alcohol on the man’s breath. He frowned in disgust at the agent.

  “It’s not nonsense,” repeated the drunken man. “And she’ll look different the next time she strikes.”

  “It’s a man, Agent DeFalco,” said Smith in DeFalco’s face. “And you are a disgrace.”

  “It’s the dreams,” said DeFalco. “I need to deaden the dreams.”

  Smith waved a uniformed patrolman over to him while he stared at DeFalco’s bloodshot eyes.

  “Take this man back to his hotel,” he ordered the officer.

  “I’m an agent doing his justifiable duty,” slurred DeFalco. “You have no right to send me away from this crime scene.”

  “And place him under arrest if he refuses to go,” ordered Smith. “Drunk and disorderly. And public intoxication.”

  “Just make sure that you send copies of all the transcripts to my office, detective,” said DeFalco in the Brooklyn accent that had taken the Ivy League right out of his voice. The uniformed officer took his arm and started to lead him away. “Everything, you hear me. Don’t you be holding out on me.”

  “A real nutcase,” said Stephens.

  “Yeah,” agreed Smith. “But you don’t think there might be something to what he’s saying, do you?”

  “Vampires,” said Stephens, shaking his head. “I don’t believe in them, or Werewolves, Zombies and Ghouls. No, this was done by a living, breathing human being. A large and strong human being.”

  “OK, doc,” said Smith with a nod. “It was just a thought. Now I’m counting on you to give me what I need to get th
is sick bastard.”

  “The prints are being sent to the FBI in Washington as we speak,” said Stephens. “If our boy left his prints on anything, and he’s been in the military or has an arrest record, we’ll find out who he is at least.”

  “And if he doesn’t have a military or arrest record?”

  “Then you’re just going to have to catch him in the act, detective, before he can leave the scene.”

  And to do that we’re going to have to establish some kind of pattern, thought Smith, in a city of four hundred thousand. And that’s not counting the million and a half people in the entire bay area. Our jurisdiction ends at the city limits. But the killer has no jurisdiction. So we’re probably going to have to count on luck to get this boy.

  “Just find me what you can, doc,” said Smith. “Just find me what I need to catch this maniac before he decides to kill some upstanding citizens.”

  * * *

  Marcus stood outside the building, blending in with the crowd. He knew he appeared calm on the outside, but inwardly he fretted about all of the police in the neighborhood allowing the trail to go cold. He could smell her. The scent of the hunter that he needed to track, before she caused too much damage to the race. But he couldn’t get into the building to pick up the start of the path she had trod. And there were too many police wandering around the neighborhood looking for clues to risk a circumference of the scene to pick up a trail that was getting colder by the minute.

  Marcus growled low in his throat as a reporter tried to stick a microphone in his face. The man turned away to find another victim, as Marcus smelled the fear in his sweat. Marcus cursed to himself as he turned away from the reporter and pushed his way out of the crowd, listening to the protests of the mortals that got in his way.

  I need to be more careful, thought Marcus. Humans get curious about that which makes them afraid. And I can’t afford to bring any more attention to our kind than is already being offered to them on a silver platter.

  Marcus circled the crime scene from several blocks out, blending into the shadows whenever a roving police car or foot patrol came near. At three blocks out and to the north he came across the scent he had been looking for. The scent of a hunter like himself. He followed the scent through backyards and across streets until he came to an alley, where he could scent the change that she had gone through. As a bat she had lifted into the sky at this point, and severed the trail that had been leading the Vampire Lord on.