The Jake Helman Files Personal Demons Read Free Page B

not know their names. He nodded in response to the woman’s query.
    She lit a cigarette. “Your partner says to stop procrastinating and get your ass upstairs.”
    Jake mustered a faint smile and took a final drag on his Marlboro, which he flicked into the gutter. “How bad is it up there?”
    The Chinese man shook his head, his complexion matching his green Windbreaker.
    “When are you guys gonna catch this freak?” the woman said. Jake shrugged. “‘Where’s Old Nick?’“
    Raising her left hand, the woman showed him a palm-sized digital camera strapped around her wrist. “I took some snaps,” she said in a conspiratorial tone. “I bet I can sell copies on eBay.”
    Jake didn’t respond. He had nothing against city employees scoring a little extra bread on the side, but he loathed serial killer memorabilia, the parasites who bought it, and the ghouls who pushed it.
    Sensing his disapproval, the woman motioned to her partner. “Have a good one,” she told Jake. “If that’s still possible once you see the vic.”
    “You, too.”
    The Chinese man gave Jake a grim nod and followed the woman up the sidewalk to the EMS bus. Jake debated lighting another cigarette and decided against it. He looked up at the windows on the second floor and closed his eyes, listening to the sounds of the children across the street.
    I don’t want to go up there
, he thought.
But I’ve got no choice
. When he opened his eyes, he saw the patrolman at the door staring at him.
    “You okay?”
    “Yeah,” Jake said without conviction. Taking a deep breath, he entered the building. Another day, another corpse.

    The sunlight behind Jake projected his shadow across the lobby’s dusty stairway. He felt pressure building at the base of his skull as he looked up at the second floor and heard muted voices beyond his field of vision. Reaching into the left-hand pocket of his coat, he removed a small jar of vapor rub. He popped the lid, dipped two fingers into the cold, gelatinous substance, and rubbed some inside each nostril. A tingling sensation awakened his senses: the poor man’s fix.
    He grasped the banister and climbed the stairs, un-snapping his coat and tugging at the collar of his black turtleneck. Sheryl, who worked as the buyer and manager for a fashion boutique in Soho, selected all of his clothes. His fellow detectives chided him for being the sharpest dresser in his unit, but he secretly enjoyed the attention.
    He turned left at the landing. At the opposite end of the narrow hall, standing before an open doorway crisscrossed with yellow crime scene tape, a uniformed officer consoled a woman with fiery red hair. As Jake approached them, he saw that the attractive woman was in her twenties. Her open coat revealed a sheer, body-hugging costume and she twisted a pair
of Playboy
bunny ears with her hands, her knuckles turning white. She’d probably just returned home from a long night of partying, Jake reasoned. She uttered a few words between choked sobs and he recognized an Irish accent.
    A sudden flash of light inside the apartment, like distant lightning or the muzzle flash of a pistol, made his heart skip a beat. He found the lack of an accompanying sound unsettling. In his decade on the Job, he had never fired a gun in a crisis, though he had pulled his Glock Nine from its shoulder holster on several occasions. The queasy feeling in his stomach clawed its way up his throat.
    Keep it together, Jake
.
    A diminutive woman lurked in an open doorway to his left, dressed in a dirty blue robe. She had stark white hair and wrinkled, birdlike eyes. The look he shot her sent her scurrying into the bowels of her apartment. The officer nodded to him, a somber expression on his face. Jake averted his eyes to avoid the sobbing woman. He would deal with her when necessary. A second flash of light blossomed inside the apartment.
    Ducking beneath the tape, he came face-to-face with another officer in the kitchen. The well-groomed PO