Raw Deal.

An Amber Farrell Novella.

Prequel to the Bite Back series.

by Mark Henwick.

Chapter 1.

FRIDAY.

"This is Car 148, we got a 510, southbound Lincoln, pa.s.sing Colfax," the radio squawked.

Cars racing. Better than nothing on a slow night. I grabbed the mike before Officer Knight reacted. To be fair, a coffee in one hand and a donut in the other slowed him down.

"This is Car 152, on Humboldt. I'll make Lincoln and 7th in one minute."

I swung the Ford Crown Vic around and let the tires talk to me as I hustled us back to cut them off. At least there wasn't much traffic to worry about in Denver at 4 a.m.

"You said one minute, Farrell," Knight said, dumping his coffee overboard. He switched on the lights and grabbed the chicken grip. "Not five seconds."

p.u.s.s.y.

He took the mike. "Car 152," he said. "Requesting a buddy to help block at Lincoln and 7th."

"Car 142, oh sh-" The call broke off for a second. "We have a 480! 480! Lincoln and 13th."

s.h.i.t, it'd gotten serious quickly. Somehow, one of the racers had found someone to hit.

"Suspect vehicle has turned east on 11th. Car 142 in pursuit, 148 stopped to provide a.s.sistance. Requesting ambulance, Lincoln and 13th."

12th Avenue. I turned hard, tires shrieking protest.

Knight joined them. "What the f.u.c.k? Quit hot d.o.g.g.i.ng," he yelled. "This isn't a friggin' TV show."

"Relax, Knight. I've been trained to handle vehicles at high speeds," I said. And my reflexes were a couple of notches above those of normal people. To be fair, Knight had no way of knowing that, but I wished he'd stop acting like I was your average wet-behind-the-ears police rookie. My military training had given me a clear sense of my own abilities and limitations, and the sooner he learned to trust me, the better partners we'd be.

"On 11th, pa.s.sing Harrison," came from the radio. That was Wilc.o.x in Car 142.

We pa.s.sed Harrison on 12th. I knew what the racer was going to try next. And Knight and I were going to be there to stop him. Thankfully, Knight had decided to shut up and let me drive.

"Turning service road, west of Gerritsen," Wilc.o.x said.

Right on cue.

"s.h.i.t! He's. .h.i.tting dumpsters," Wilc.o.x said. "We're blocked. We're blocked."

I slammed on the brakes and hauled the car, screeching and slipping, around into the southern end of the service road.

"f.u.c.k!" Knight yelled, bracing for a crash. It didn't come. The headlights hurtling toward us in the alley suddenly dived as the racer braked heavily and skidded to a halt, the nose slewing to one side. The doors opened and two guys piled out.

Gotcha!

"This is the police," Knight was saying through the bullhorn. "Come out with-"

I was out of the car and running before he finished his sentence. The alley was long and dimly lit, with plenty of cover from the overturned dumpsters. If these dirtbags were armed and we let them establish a defensible position, they'd be invisible and we'd be silhouetted against the light as we tried to come in. Not to mention all the apartment windows lining the alley-an invitation for stray bullets. But if I could stay close enough, the perps would either have to keep moving and get picked up by Wilc.o.x and his partner, or stop and give me the chance to take them down hand-to-hand. Which I was more than happy to do.

The racers were picked out in our headlights. A tall, skinny guy, with sweats hanging halfway off his a.s.s, fell over the trunk and scrambled mindlessly back up the alley to get away. The driver was a different story entirely-he had a compact, athletic build and he was trotting backwards, head up and looking around, hood up to keep his face hidden. When he saw me coming, though, he abandoned caution and took off.

"Hold it, Farrell," Knight called out after me. He wanted to do this by the book. There wasn't time. It was things like this that made me really miss the instinctive understanding of my old special forces team.

I leapt, hit the hood of the racers' car at full stretch and kicked off, launching myself into the air. Beanpole, for all his frenzied scrabbling, had been outdistanced by his partner. He heard me land behind him and turned, shocked I had gotten so close, so quickly.

Surprise!

I didn't give him time to get over it. I shoulder-charged him against a dumpster, winding him. Sweeping his legs out and dropping him to the ground, I had the cuffs on him before he got enough breath back to even think about struggling.

There was no sign of the driver ahead. Knight was coming up behind me, framed in the headlights.

"Wilc.o.x," I said into my radio. "One of them is heading back toward you, on foot."

I heard Wilc.o.x yell, cut off by the flat sound of a shot echoing up the alley.

c.r.a.p. That wasn't Wilc.o.x or his partner shooting.

I vaulted the dumpster and sprinted into the darkness. Knight could handle Beanpole, and it'd mean he wasn't standing silhouetted in the lights.

The alley was a mess. The racers had sideswiped over half the dumpsters and they'd either spun around and rolled into the middle, or overturned and spilled their contents onto the road. The smell was overpowering.

The driver was scaling a chain-link fence about halfway down. No sign of a gun. Or a hoodie, for that matter.

I jumped up and hauled him back by his belt. He landed on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, balanced and not at all giving up, especially when he saw he'd been caught by a woman.

Unlike other areas, people underestimating my hand-to-hand skills never gets old.

I let his punch slide past me, guiding his momentum with one hand, feeding a little more into his rotation and pulling him off balance. Then I kicked him hard in the back of his knee. As he crumpled, I followed him down, twisting his arm behind his back.

It didn't take him long to figure out that struggling would only dislocate his shoulder.

I didn't have any more cuffs, but Knight or Wilc.o.x would get here eventually and I pa.s.sed the time by reminding my prisoner that even he had some rights.

He chose to remain silent. Probably thinking how to spin it to his homies when they found out he'd been taken down by a girl.

There was no sign of his gun.

Knight arrived with Beanpole in tow and cuffed the driver just as Wilc.o.x and his partner crept in cautiously, guns drawn. I spared a glance to check that their fingers weren't on the triggers and then set about searching for the driver's missing gun.

As I clambered over dumpsters, I saw that Wilc.o.x was claiming the suspects. That was fine by me; they were the ones that witnessed the hit-and-run.

Besides, they took them in, they did the paperwork.

Ha!

Wilc.o.x clapped Knight on the shoulder. Good ole boys.

With my face hidden, I allowed myself one standard roll of the eyes and a small snort. The praise would be for both of us. Of course.

Denver PD had a lot of good police officers, and Wilc.o.x and Knight weren't bad at all. They were solid. They were the kind of guys that would always turn up to the inter-departmental ballgames, they'd always buy their round in the bar, and they'd always make time to drop in on the grieving family. But they had a strong view of how things should be.

Their view included the sort of role rookies should fill. With my background and training, I didn't fit that role. It made it uncomfortable for both sides.

I shook my head. No point in worrying about that now. I stepped up onto an upended dumpster to shine my flashlight into the tall, upright one behind it.

There was a hoodie inside. Out of reach, of course.

I climbed in gingerly. The driver was dumb enough to take a shot at a policeman, but not so dumb as to be caught holding the gun. I took a photo with a pocket camera and then opened the bundle with a pen, careful not to touch the material. He had stripped his hoodie and his gloves off, wrapped them around the gun and tossed it. Not so clever. He might have kept his hands clean of gunshot residue that way, but there would be DNA all over this stuff.

I called Knight. "Got the gun here."

He came over and didn't offer to get in the dumpster with me, so I marked it for CSI and began to carefully make my way out.

I could tell by the silence from Knight that he wasn't happy with the way things had gone tonight, but it was about to get worse.

The largest dumpster that had been knocked over was right behind the one I getting out of. The trash from it had spilled up against a wall. There was something odd about the shapes that made in the shadows. Instead of getting out the way I'd gotten in, I scrambled out of the back onto the large dumpster. Peering over the edge, I shone my flashlight at the spillage and stiffened.

"Knight! Over here."

I jumped down.

Almost hidden beneath the trash was a human hand.

I pulled out a fresh set of latex gloves, snapping them on.

The hand was male, the flesh cool beneath my fingers. I swept the trash from the arm, following it up to the shoulder and neck. He lay on his back, his face contorted in an expression of pain, the eyes staring.

I felt for the neck pulse, knowing it wouldn't be there.

Knight arrived, picking his way through mounds of trash, flashlight beam bobbing as he hopped over the worst of it. "Jeez, Farrell, what now?" he said. The light caught the corpse's face and he sucked in his breath. "Ah, Christ," he muttered. "What a f.u.c.kin' night."

Our beams cross-lit the corpse's head and my hand came away from his neck.

"Oh, s.h.i.t," I said, and rocked back on my heels.

The man's neck had a pattern of gashes that sent a flare of shock through my body. They were deep stab wounds, triangular in shape, as if made by a small ice ax. The flesh around them was as bloodless as supermarket chicken. And the wounds came in evenly-s.p.a.ced pairs.

"What?" Knight said. He followed my gaze. "s.h.i.t," he echoed. "What the h.e.l.l happened to him?"

I was hoping I didn't know.

I'd spent a year looking for evidence like this in Denver, but I realized in that moment that I'd never really expected to find any.

And you don't know that you've found any now, I lectured myself. I could hear the scathing comment of my old special ops instructor: Unverified reports are worse than nothing.

I played my flashlight over the rest of the body and the garbage that still hid most of it. There was almost no blood I could see. I leaned forward as if I was examining the wounds more closely. I was trying to catch the lingering scent that would confirm my suspicions, but the stench of the garbage was overwhelming everything.

"Farrell!" Knight snapped. "Quit s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around. Tape both the scenes and keep the lists until we get some help."

He moved around, shepherding me away from the body. He was already talking to the dispatcher on his radio, calling in CSI, Homicide and more uniform backup.

He had a point. n.o.body wanted me to examine the body before CSI got here. I'd have to get back to it later. Meanwhile, I was the rookie in Car 152, and for all his faults, I had to respect that Knight took his mentoring seriously. If only he could manage to remember that I'd handled more life-or-death situations than a dozen police officers combined.

Or maybe he did remember. Maybe that was the problem.

I taped off the alley at both ends and got two crime scene forms from the patrol car-one for the dead body and one for the racers' car. I took up my post and waited for the crime scene crows to gather.

I'd lived around death for ten years in the army's most covert and lethal special operations battalion. A body was a body, and I had seen plenty. The problem was, this might not be just another body. If this turned out to be a vampire kill, then I had a responsibility to report it-and not to the Denver PD.

Another couple of patrols arrived to help secure the site, leaving me the south end of the alley, next to my patrol car.

"You okay?" Knight said, ducking under the tape to come join me.

I turned. "I'm fine. Thanks."

He scuffed his feet, folded his arms and leaned back against the hood of the Crown Vic.

I knew it was coming and I wasn't patient enough to wait for it.

"Something on your mind?" I said.

He snorted without any humor at all.

"You have to ask?" he said. "You went barreling down that alley without even stopping to think. Those guys could've been armed." He paused for obvious effect. "Oh, wait, they were armed." He rolled his eyes. "You can thank G.o.d they decided to shoot at the veteran cop who had sense enough to find cover, and not at you, bounding over cars and dumpsters like Spidergirl."

I opened my mouth to answer, but he held up his hand and went on. "It's only by blind dumb luck we don't have two stiffs in this alley. Do you know how much paperwork I'd have to do if you got yourself killed?"

Underneath the scathing tone, I could sense real concern. I stopped myself just in time, before I blasted him with a Sergeant Farrell tirade. Instead, I took a deep breath, and then explained my line of reasoning for following the suspects down the alley.

Knight pursed his lips, studying me. "And you were totally confident in your ability to take down both guys?"

I'd served in an unconventional unit, and my training had been unconventional to match, not to mention brutal and thorough. I had no doubts about my ability, but Knight didn't know the full extent of my training, and confidentiality rules meant I couldn't tell him the details.

"I was going to leave you one," I said, trying to make light of it. "Then he started shooting at Wilc.o.x. But, hey, we got both of them, in the alley, with the car and the gun."