Blood Hunt by Lee Killough Page B

lady, this redhead. He ran her name through Records. It came back negative for local and state, negative NCIC. She never had even a traffic ticket. In fact, she had no driver’s license.
    That brought a frown. She said something about not having driven for a while when they talked to her. Had she been only joking?
    “ Do you think she can be thirty-five years old?” he asked Harry. “She looks much younger.”
    “ Lighting in that bar would make Methuselah look like an adolescent.” Harry raised his brows. “Why so concerned about her age? Isn’t that part of the mystique?”
    “ Maybe there’s such a thing as too much mystique.” The first chance he had, Garreth decided, he would ask the lady a few pointed questions and dispel some of it.
     
    7
     
    A voice over Woodhue’s radio said softly, “ It’s going down now .”
    Suddenly the old warehouse filled with narcotics officers. Garreth hung on Woodhue’s heels, remembering his instructions: This is the drill. We’re busting a buy. Chiarelli, who’s going by the name Demesta, will be there. You’re a hot-dog cop along for the fun. When Chiarelli bolts, you go after him .
    The men involved in the buy scattered like cockroaches before a light. Garreth searched among them hurriedly, looking for someone who matched the description Woodhue had given him — a lean runt in an oversize old army jacket — but he could not see Chiarelli. In the melee and half dark, he had trouble distinguishing any particular individual.
    Then Woodhue pointed and barked, “Get Demesta!”
    Garreth saw the army jacket then, faded to pale green, with dark patches where the insignia had been removed. It dwarfed the man inside it, a man who bowled over an officer and was vanishing into the junk littering the building. Garreth took after it.
    Chiarelli went out of a broken window in a shower of flying glass from remaining shards in the frame.
    Trying to avoid cutting his hands as he followed, Garreth swore. See the stupid cop jump out the window, he thought sardonically. See him break his leg.
    Somehow he landed outside without crippling himself and looked up in time to see his quarry scramble across a set of railroad tracks and disappear into a passage between two more warehouses. Garreth pounded after him. At the beginning, good fortune? The hell. It looked more like disorder all day.
    A hand reached out of a narrow doorway to grab Garreth’s coat and jerk him inside the building. “Let’s make this fast, man,” Chiarelli said. “You’re interested in cults?”
    Garreth nodded, panting. “I have two men who’ve been bled to death through needles stuck in their necks. We think maybe a cult did it.”
    “ Like the Zebra murders? Christ!” Chiarelli shuddered and crossed himself. “So you want the names of people or groups who might use blood in their rituals.”
    “ Right. Can you help me?”
    Chiarelli sighed. “I’m not really next to that scene, you know, not unless some group also uses drugs, but...I guess I’ve heard a few things. Give me paper and a pen.”
    Garreth handed him his pen and notebook.
    Chiarelli printed with the speed of a teletype and talked almost as fast as he wrote, passing on more information than he had time to write. “Some is just addresses, not names. There have been weird stories about this house on Geary. Screaming and smells like burning meat.” He had similar comments on every person or address he wrote down. When finished, he handed the notebook back. “Will that help?”
    Garreth glanced over the pages, amazingly legible for the speed at which they had been written. “I hope so. Thanks.” He started to turn away.
    “ Wait a minute,” Chiarelli said. “We have to make it look good for me or I’m blown.”
    “ I’ll just say you outran me.”
    He shook his head. “Not good enough. You don’t look like you’ve been chasing me all this time.”
    “ How do you want to handle it, then?” He saw Chiarelli’s fist double and