(eng) Niall Teasdale - Sondra Blake 01 by The Vanity Case

Author:The Vanity Case [Case, The Vanity]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part Five: Vanity

New York, NY, 25th February 2017.

The NYPD’s 94th Precinct building was not especially large, but it did look pretty good from the outside. Carved stonework decorated the ground floor and the brickwork above that was clean. The ornate stone casing around the upper-floor windows was a little dirtier, but this was Brooklyn; air pollution was a factor.

Inside it was, well, a police precinct. People generally arrived in the lobby for three reasons: they were a cop, they were being brought in by a cop, or they wanted to complain about something, usually about a cop. People who wanted real help generally dialled 911 – even when that involved opening a pickle jar – so when someone walked into the precinct, it was not because they wanted assistance from the police: it was because they wanted to complain about something. Complaining was always best done face-to-face.

This was why Sergeant Alec Pride liked the night shift. Yes, you still got the odd person walking in to complain that their neighbour’s dog was crapping on their lawn, but the numbers were heavily reduced. You got to do real police paperwork instead of public relations. Booking drunks was not exactly fighting serious crime, but cops had been doing it since the first bobby had walked the streets of London. Plus, Alec’s idea of crisis management was having a mop and bucket behind the desk for the inevitable point when someone vomited on the lobby floor; crime in Brooklyn was down – no matter what the politicians said – and that made for a relatively easy time of it.

That meant that, when a woman struggled in through the panelled doors, Alec was momentarily at a loss for what to do. The woman looked young and was dressed either for a party or for picking up clients on a street corner, but her clothes were soaked with blood. She might have been pretty, but it was difficult to tell, because she was bleeding from so many wounds that Alec was amazed that she had made it to the precinct.

‘Help me,’ she croaked, and then she collapsed onto the tiled floor.

Alec grabbed his phone to call for an ambulance; this looked like something first aid was not going to help with. As he waited for the connection to go through, watching blood pool on the tiles around the fallen woman, he had the thought that his mop and bucket were going to see more than vomit tonight.

~~~

It was six a.m. before the last of the die-hard rioters realised they had been conned by a demon, and the NYPD decided that Orctown was settling back into normality. There would be extra patrols for a few weeks, and there was going to be a lot of clean-up to do, but the Arcane Crimes Unit was not going to be involved in any of that.

It was eight a.m. before Sondra got back to her apartment and flicked on the TV to relax before she went to bed. The

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