Zombie Pulp

9

Ninety minutes later, after half a pint of rye, I was back out there.

This time Tommy Albert was with me. Him and about twenty cops, local johns-sheriff’s deputies-and assorted whitecoats from the coroner’s office. The place was wriggling with badges. You know what we found? Squat. Yes, that’s right. The bodies were gone. As were Marianne and the ghoul glee club. But they hadn’t completely sanitized the place. There just wasn’t time.

Downstairs we found the slabs. We also found the room where they did their thing with the stiffs. All the equipment was pretty much in place. We found blood everywhere. Sticky fluids. Scraps of raw animal meat. A linen bag of human bones so fresh they still had red-brown stains on them. But that was pretty much it.

“ It happened,” I was telling Tommy. “Don’t look at me like some kind of freak. I saw it.”

He stopped looking at me. “I believe you. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do.”

I dragged off my cigarette. “These guys never will.”

“ They don’t have to, Vince. What we got out here is more than enough justification for me to call in all these boys.” He stuffed a cigar in his mouth. “I gotta pick up that Portis broad. You know that. She’s behind all this and only she can fill in all the holes.”

Holes? Sure, we could’ve dropped most of the Midwest through the holes there were in this one. Graverobbing. Cannibalism. Murder. Walking dead hoods. Any minute now, I expected Chaney and Lugosi to be brought in for routine questioning. That’s how bad this mess was. It stunk worse than a trucker’s underwear.

A uniform came running in from the outside. “Inspector, we gotta a dead cop,” he said to Tommy. “In the city.”

Then we were back in Tommy’s Ford sedan screaming towards the concrete jungle, lights blaring and siren shrilling. There was no more to do out at the mausoleum. Those already there could handle it. Once we had the streets beneath us and the concrete and brick wrapping us up like mama’s arms, I started to feel better. On the West Side, down near the docks, was where the cop was. He was sprawled in a pool of his own blood.

There was a sheet over his body, reporters barely held at bay by a defensive perimeter of uniforms. Another detective-a thin, asthmatic guy named Skipp-was breathing through a handkerchief. You could smell the wharfs, the docks. That stagnant fishy smell of the bay blowing in with fingers of mist.

Skipp pulled the sheet back. “This your boy?” he said.

Tommy nodded. “That’s Mikey Ryan. He worked vice.”

I knew Ryan. We’d gone to the academy together. We’d pounded a beat together, drank out of the same bottle, raised hell. I was at his wedding. Now he was dead. Another good cop gone in a city that can’t afford to lose too many.

He hadn’t been mutilated. He’d been stabbed, though. Skipp said he’d been stuck at least fifteen or twenty times. “Took the last jab right in the pump,” he told us. “Then as an afterthought, his killer did this.”

Ryan’s neck had been snapped. The side of his throat bulging with a shank of protruding bone. “Wasn’t an easy way to go,” Skipp said and resumed breathing through his hanky. It sounded like there was a whistle lodged in his throat every time he sucked in a breath. “Goddamn night air…it’s not good for me.”

“ It’s even worse for him,” I said.

“ He didn’t die right away, though,” Skipp said.

He held up Ryan’s hand, it was wet with blood. That didn’t mean a lot until you saw what was scratched in blood a few inches away: LUN

“He lived long enough to leave us a message.”

Tommy just kept staring at it, shaking his head. “L-U-N…what in Christ you suppose that means? Could be a plate number…could be just about any goddamn thing.”

But I knew. There was no doubt in my mind. “He was telling us who did this to him,” I pointed out. “LUNA. As in Johnny Luna.”

Tommy looked at me. “He’s in the morgue.”

But I just stared at him, boring holes in his face.