The Night Beat, From the Necropolis Enforcement Files Read Free Page B

stadium?”
    “Pardon me?” Jack gave me a confused look. I shrugged as best I could.
    “The Chief isn’t upset -- they got there in time to stop a huge riot. But he does want to know how you knew.”
    “Perps gave us a clue,” I managed to get out. The movie idea that werewolves can’t talk when in non-human form is a lie. When you’re younger, you sound like you’re talking with a rolled up cloth in your mouth, but practice does make perfect. Now I just sounded out of breath.
    “Yeah,” Jack said quickly.
    “I’ll relay to the Chief. Do you need assistance with the suspects?”
    Jack and I looked at each other. We had nothing and no one to bring in, back, or even talk about.
    Ken leaned in the passenger’s window. “We need at least six ambulances, Darlene.” He was talking in Jack’s voice again. “Officers down.”
    When you’re a cop, there’s no worse phrase you can hear. When you’re with Necropolis Enforcement, we have and hate that one, but there are worse phrases. Officer engulfed. Officer ingested. Officer staked. Officer doused. Officer dusted. Officer turned. That was the worst one, really. Because that meant one of your friends had given up and given his or her soul to the Prince. And that meant you had to dust them, as fast as possible and with the most extreme prejudice known to undead or human kind.
    Jack hung up our radio, but I could hear Darlene in the background, calling for medical. “Ken, I’m not really down.”
    “I didn’t call them for you,” he said as he pointed towards H.P.
    I got out of the car on all fours and stayed that way. Still hurt too much to go for upright, let alone human. We all walked closer to the carnage.
    Apparently Slimy had swallowed without chewing. Guess they didn’t teach proper eating etiquette in whatever level of Hell he was from. He’d ripped apart the squad cars, but the humans were each in one piece. I trotted over and started sniffing. Amanda and Maurice came with me -- she moved the living ones to H.P. and Maurice moved the dead ones to Ken.
    We were lucky -- the four uniforms were all alive, though just barely. H.P. started doing our form of C.P.R., which consisted of a lot more than chest pounding and the kiss of life. A couple of the hookers were still with us, and, sadly, the one dealer who’d been in the alley was clearly going to recover.
    On the deader side, all the bums were gone. This wasn’t a surprise. By the time someone was living on the streets, their natural resistance to the occult was lowered, let alone their natural resilience. We’d lost three hookers and a couple of junkies as well.
    The mess was unreal, but one area Dirt Corps handled better than anything was toxic cleanup. I chose not to look -- their ways were effective, but unbelievably gross. I don’t care who you are, watching a bunch of mummies, skeletons, liches and worms gobble up gross ick is more than any stomach can handle.
    I went over to watch Ken work and Jack came with me. Ken had one hand on a dead hooker’s head, thumb and forefinger on the temples, with the other on the heart. He was concentrating.
    “What’s he doing?” Jack whispered to me.
    “Seeing if they’re worth reviving.” Ken had a perfect track record so far -- he’d never brought back a potential minion.
    “But they’re dead.”
    “Yeah, well, there are ways. I mean, they won’t come back as human, but being a zombie’s not as bad as it’s cracked up to be. And there are other options. Hookers usually come back as succubae. It’s typecasting, but it works.”
    “What do the junkies and bums come back as?”
    “Bums usually opt for zombie. Junkies…well, junkies rarely come back.”
    “Why so?”
    “They’re already too close to the Prince.” This was true. There were so many sins out there, and everyone indulged in at least one of them, even if they thought they didn’t. But junkies were among the most willful, more so than alcoholics, adulterers, or murderers.