Bloodsucking fiends: a love story

today. In a Laundromat in the Tenderloin. Broken neck and no blood."

Chapter 20 – Angel
    If Inspector Alphonse Rivera had been a bird, he would have been a crow. He was lean and dark, with slick, sharp features and black eyes that shone and shifted with suspicion and guile. Time and again his crowlike looks landed him in the undercover role of coke dealer. Sometimes Cuban, sometimes Mexican, and one time Colombian, he had driven more Mercedes and worn more Armani suits than most real drug dealers, but after twenty years in narcotics, on three different departments, he had transferred to homicide, claiming that he needed to work among a better class of people – namely, dead.
    Oh, the joys of homicide! Simple crimes of passion, most solved within twenty-four hours or not at all. No stings, no suitcases of government money, no pretense, just simple deduction – sometimes very simple: a dead wife in the kitchen; a drunken husband standing in the foyer with a smoking thirty-eight; and Rivera, in his cheap Italian knock-off suit, gently disarming the new widower, who could only say, "Liver and onions." A body, a suspect, a weapon, and a motive: case solved and on to the next one, neat and tidy. Until now.
    Rivera thought, If my luck could be bottled, it would be classified a chemical weapon. He read through the coroner's report again. "Cause of death: compression fracture of the fifth and sixth vertebrae (broken neck). Subject had lost massive amounts of blood – no visible wounds." On its own, it was a uniquely enigmatic report, but it wasn't on its own. It was the second body in a month that had sustained massive blood loss with no visible wounds.
    Rivera looked across the desk to where his partner, Nick Cavuto, was reading a copy of the report.
    "What do you think?" Rivera said.
    Cavuto chewed on an unlit cigar. He was a burly and balding, gravel-voiced, third-generation cop – six degrees tougher than his father and grandfather had been because he was gay. He said, "I think if you have any vacation time coming, this would be the time to take it."
    "So we're fucked."
    "It's too early for us to be fucked. I'd say we've been taken to dinner and slipped the tongue on the good-night kiss."
    Rivera smiled. He liked the way Cavuto tried to make everything sound like dialogue from a Bogart movie. The big detective's pride and joy was a complete set of signed first-edition Dashiell Hammett novels. "Give me the days when police work was done with a snub nose and a lead sap," Cavuto would say. "Computers are for pussies."
    Rivera returned to the report. "It looks like this guy would have been dead in a month anyway: 'a ten-centimeter tumor on the liver.' Malignancy the size of a grapefruit."
    Cavuto shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth. "The old broad at the Van Ness Motel was on her way out too. Congestive heart disease. Too weak for a bypass. She ate nitro pills like they were M&M's."
    "The euthanasia killer," Rivera said.
    "So we're assuming this was the same guy?"
    "Whatever you say, Nick."
    "Two killings with the same MO and no motive. I don't even like the sound of it." Cavuto rubbed his temples as if trying to milk anxiety out through his tear ducts. "You were in San Junipero during the Night Stalker killings. We couldn't take a piss without tripping over a reporter. I say we lock this down. As far as the papers are concerned, the victims were robbed. No connection."
    Rivera nodded. "I need a smoke. Let's go talk to those guys that got hit at the Laundromat a couple of weeks ago. Maybe there's a connection."
    Cavuto pushed himself out of the chair and grabbed his hat off the desk. "Whoever voted for nonsmoking in the station house should be pistol-whipped."
    "Didn't the President sponsor that bill?"
    "All the more reason. The pussy."
    Tommy lay looking at the ceiling, trying to catch his breath and extricate his right foot from a hopeless tangle in the sheets. Jody was drawing a tic-tac-toe in the sweat on his chest with her finger.
    "You don't sweat anymore, do you?" he asked.
    "Don't seem to."
    "And you're not even out of breath. Am I doing something wrong?"
    "No, it was great. I only get breathless when… when I…"
    "When you bite me."
    "Yeah."
    "Did you…"
    "Yes."
    "Are you sure?"
    "Are you?"
    "No, I faked." Tommy grinned.
    "Really?" Jody looked at the wet spot (on her side, of course).
    "Why do you think I'm so winded? It's not easy to fake the ejaculation part."
    "I, for one, was