Dead and Kicking Read Free Page A

Trust me. It’s the right thing to
do.”

Chapter Three

    Trust me …Famous last
words. Why is it that the right thing to
do isn’t necessarily the best thing?
After waiting twenty minutes for a squad car to show up, the uniforms
had left me to cool my heels on the same park bench I had occupied before. This wasn’t my first rodeo or even my second
for that matter, when it came to finding a dead body. I knew they would keep me waiting for the
detectives assigned to the case to arrive.
This time though, there seemed to be some confusion because the first
suits that showed up just waited around for another car to arrive. The four men had a little confab then the
first two, looking a little disgruntled, hopped back in their car and took
off. The whole scene smacked of office
politics. Somebody had pulled some
strings to get the second pair of detectives assigned to the case. What had Bryce gotten himself
into? I’d have asked him, but he had
long since dissipated.
    The second set of detectives looked
less than pleased to be called in. They
both looked a little bleary eyed, like they had just woken up, but since it was
now after three in the afternoon, that didn’t seem likely, unless they were on
the night shift or something. The pair
made an odd couple. One was a short,
slim, mixed race-African American with warm mocha skin and short
dreadlocks. His sharp, charcoal grey
suit complete with tie seemed completely antithetical to the dreads. The second of the pair towered over his
partner. He had to be at least six foot
four and had the well-proportioned build of someone who works out and not just
to build upper body bulk for show. He was also wearing a shirt and tie, but had gone for a more casual look,
wearing a black leather jacket instead of a suit, and Dockers that hugged his ass nicely. His short,
light brown hair had that tousled, just got out of bed look that made you want to run your fingers through it.
    “You’re staring at Nash and
licking your lips.”
    “Bryce!” His voice in my ear
practically startled me right off the bench.
“I was not.”
    “You were too.”
    He materialized on the bench beside
me. I cast a furtive look over to the uniform supposedly babysitting me, but he didn’t
appear to have noticed my outburst. “I was not…..hey, wait a minute. Whose ass? You know that guy?”
    “Of course I do. Everyone does.”
    “Well, obviously not everyone. I don’t know him or his partner.”
    “The partner is Dev, Devlin
Mayes. How can you be part of the
Cimmerian and not know Nash and Dev?”
    “The Cimmerian! I’m not a criminal. I don’t associate with them.” The Cimmerian was the collective name for the
darker side of the supernatural community, a community that for the most part,
remained in the closet. Taken from Greek
mythology it meant dwellers of the dark and gloom. That Bryce knew the name for the local
criminal underworld, spoke volumes as to why he ended up beaten into a bloody
pulp. “How were you associated to
them?” I looked at him
suspiciously. “You weren’t a Cutter were
you?”
    “A vamp-wannabe? No way, I try to steer clear of bloodsuckers.”
    Vampires made up the majority of the
Cimmerian society and had a hierarchical power structure. Cutters, basically humans that longed to be
vampires were the lowest in the pecking order, the lackeys and sycophants of
the true vampires. They took their name
from their unnatural habit of sucking each other’s blood. Since they didn’t have fangs, they used razor
blades to slice their skin.
Occasionally, a Cutter who ingratiated himself to a particularly
powerful vampire, a ‘Vlad’, would be granted the right to be turned, which of
course gave all the other Cutters hope of immortality and brought more of the
Goth freaks to the service of the vampires.
    “If you steer clear of vampires how
do you even know about the Cimmerian then?”
    “I said I tried to steer clear of them, but I do work for them or at least I
did. I