The Dirty City by Jim Cogan Page A

there?”
    “Nah, no-one does. Been raided twice and we ain’t found shit – but the word is that the raids were prearranged , we weren’t meant to find anything, but there is stuff going on there.”
    “What about missing persons?”
    “That is an odd one. On average, three or four a week in the vicinity of the Old Portland Bridge and the surrounding area. No trace found yet for any of them.”
    “Word is you’re not exactly carrying out an exhaustive investigation.”
    “We ain’t. The people vanishing are scum, Johnny. Beggars, petty crooks, old winos, hobos and lowlifes. The taxpayer wants us to catch crooks and keep them safe, not commit resources searching for crazy old bag ladies with a gin habit.”
    “You heard of a chick called Shelly Valance?”
    “We’ve heard talk, but we’ve no idea if she’s a real person or just a smokescreen, but word is she is some out of town business woman who has a specialist team of enforcers at her command. She’s thrown her lot in with Vitalli, and it’s her boys who’ve been taking down Vitalli’s rivals. We also assume it’s through her that all the heroin we’re seeing on the streets is getting in.”
    “Any other weird shit happened?”
    “Funnily enough, two very strange things. We stopped a suspicious transport truck a week back, middle of the night. Driver jumps out and is gone in literally seconds, I mean he moved so damn fast it was like he vanished. We searched the truck, it’s stacked out wall to wall with crates. Each crate contains 25,000 vials of human blood.”
    “Really?”
    “But it’s odd – it’s not any one person or group of persons blood, its hundreds of peoples blood, and all different blood groups, just mixed together, and we have no idea where it all came from. None of the hospitals are missing stocks of blood, it’s a complete mystery. And apparently there are trucks like this sited pretty much every night heading out of town.”
    “You managed to catch any of the drivers?”
    “No, they’re sneaky, take all the back routes, they keep out of site. And it’s very likely that most are being deliberately ignored , if you know what I mean? We did manage to corner one suspect, though – we gave pursuit until he wrong-turned down a dead alley, just before dawn.”
    “Did you apprehend him.”
    “What I’m about to tell you is a little hard to believe, but it’s true. Big group of cops head into the alley, this guy goes stir crazy, he tries to fight his way out with his bare hands – I’m told he was doing pretty good 'til the cops opened fire on him. They totally unloaded on the guy, but he doesn’t go down, he takes all these bullets but it’s like they’re passing through him without doing any damage. But then the sun came up.”
    “What happened then?”
    “Well, the witnesses say he just exploded, right there and then.”
    “What?”
    “Literally, he came apart, he blew up. Into pieces.”
    “Bullshit!”
    “Hey, I wasn’t there, but I witnessed the remains being brought to the coroner. In plastic bags.”
    “There must be some reasonable explanation?”
    “Initial thoughts were that it was spontaneous human combustion, SHC. Extremely rare phenomenon – still just a theory, really, a bit of supportive evidence from previous possible cases. But...”
    “But?”
    “It wasn’t consistent with the few documented previous examples. In SHC it’s thought the combustion begins within, typically in the stomach. The body burns from the inside out, often leaving the clothes only mildly scorched. But this guy, his flesh burnt off first, his bones crumbled almost to dust and then his vital organs exploded.”
    I honestly had no response to that.
    “And one more weird thing. When he went pop, blood was sprayed all over the place, but it was all the wrong consistency. It only travelled a few yards from exploding out of the body to hitting walls and shit, but in that short distance it almost completely coagulated, it had