Billy Boy

I was on a case one night. A hard, brutal case on a hard, brutal night. The wind in Chicago could strip the skin from a man, but that night it carried with it the soul of the dead hooker before me. The crime scene team snapped photos, the flash blinding me until the girl was eerily spotted over by black dots as if she'd died of bubonic plague. She was pretty, young, probably hadn't been in the business for long. I guess it just wasn't her lucky night. A particularly naughty gust of wind blew her skirt up to reveal silky red panties and trim thighs. I turned away, flicking the ashes from a half-smoked cigarette.


"Sir!"

Turning, I noticed the photographer frantically brushing the ashes from the hooker's black stilettos. "You're getting shit all over her!"

Raising my hands in surrender with the guilty cigarette burning on in my right hand, I stepped back beyond the yellow police line. "Sorry," I told him.

Reaching into my breast pocket for another cigarette, I realized they'd run out. I'd miscounted and didn't have another pack on me. At the end of the dark, close alley was the bright lights of a convenience store. Briefly, I wondered if the hooker had tried to run towards that light. Maybe that's how she'd ended up in an alley in the middle of the night instead of a well lit street corner. Running for help, I thought. Waving my hand at the nearest sergeant, I walked down the alley, flashlight in hand toward the convenience store.

I really needed a smoke. Chain smoking had become a helluva habit since the finalization of the divorce months before. Fifteen years with the woman I loved had ended with no kids, a mediocre apartment, and bitter bickering over my retirement. In the end, she took my pride and half of my damn retirement!

A bell rang as I walked through the large, glass double doors. The noise lifted the head of the kid behind the counter, who idly flipped pages of a People magazine. "Hey," he said, his voice average with nothing overly noticeable involved. Nothing in his appearance was average in my opinion, though perhaps it was average for the typical punk kids of the times. He had longish black and purple hair, deathly pale skin and silver studs sparkling at his eyebrows, ears and nose. One of those Goth kids, I remember thinking. "Need help," he asked politely with a friendly, average smile. Very white teeth, straight with good hygiene. I smiled back.

"Just get me a pack of Marlboro Lights, there, Billy Boy." The Goth kid's name tag said 'Billy'. Nice, all-American name and it really didn't fit the wannabe punk rocker behind the counter.

"Say 'please', Grandpa," he grinned jokingly.

I couldn't help myself. The kid gave me good vibes and a well needed joke, so I let it slide and played along.

"Please, Billy Boy," I said.

He gave me my cigarettes and I paid. A bowl of matchbooks sat on a counter and I grabbed one, just in case my lighter ran out of fluid. Before I left, Billy stopped me. "What's up out there, man? Criminal on the loose?" He pointed to the reflection of blue and red lights on the store window.

"Dead girl," I responded.

"Really," he asked, looking appropriately worried. "Right there in the alley?"

"Yep."

"Damn," he muttered, studying the counter top.

"Yep," I said again. "See anything strange tonight, Billy Boy?"

"No," he said, dark eyes meeting mine. "Nothing out of the ordinary at all." And I believed him.

"See ya around, Billy Boy."

"See ya later, Detective."

I should have thought that was strange, how he knew I was a detective and all. It should have stood out in my mind, but it didn't. It just didn't.

Missing persons said that Anna Jenkins, eighteen years old, had been reported missing by her parents several months earlier from a nearby suburb. I guess Anna was looking for fortune or something. She'd started out stripping in an East End titty bar, but found she made more money turning tricks on the side. Autopsy and blood tests showed levels of cocaine, THC and alcohol in her blood. Her BAC was well over the legal limit at .12, and that was only able to be tested from blood still left in the chambers of her heart. Anna was nearly drained of blood. Cause of death, severe blood loss through two puncture marks to the carotid artery. I read the report over and over again. Reviewed photos of the crime scene, the body, the alley. No blood. No blood spatter, drops, not even on her clothing. How the hell was that possible? I looked again at the close ups of the marks in her neck. Two neat, deep red holes surrounded by harsh purple bruising. What I was thinking wasn't possible! There weren't boogeyman out there, not really. People were killed by other people and that was that. Good humans, bad humans, all fucking human! Then more murders were committed. Same area, same MO. All the same insanity.

The papers tore the story up, terrifying the entire city. Gossip columns were splashing 'Vampires in Chicago' all over the tabloids, blaming the city police for the lack of evidence to catch the monster. Some leak had spilled pictures of the dead girls and my department came under serious and very public scrutiny. And what could we possibly have said. "Don't worry, Mr. John Q. Public! There's no such thing as vampires." But we couldn't say that in all honesty, because even we were suspicious, afraid. The third body had full grown, seasoned beat cops nearly pissing their tighty-whiteys. Something was really wrong in the heart of my city.

Once again, I found myself on the corner lit by the convenience store. I stopped in for smokes and something sweet to snack on. Billy Boy with the black and purple hair stood behind the counter, learning forward with his chin in hand. There was a smooth, close lipped grin on his pale, artful face. "You and your lights are back again, I see, Detective."

"Yeah, Billy Boy. Another girl down the street there."

"Disturbing. Isn't that the third one," he asked, passing the Marlboro Lights across the counter. I added a snickers bar to the pot and slid a twenty back to him before answering.

"Yeah, third one. You seen the papers?"

Billy nodded toward a stack of papers in a neat metal stand by the door. "Can't bloody avoid the things," he answered.

"I don't remember you having an accent, Billy Boy. Not from around here?"

"No, actually. I'm from London, Detective."

"You work here all night?"

"All night, nearly every night."

He gave me my change. The private smile gracing his face remained. "Notice anything different around here lately?"

Once again those bottomless eyes stared into my own and I saw reflected there all that I was now. The job, always the job. And with it came paranoia, stress, obsession. All those things reflected, read back to me like the horrific bold print of the accusing newspaper headlines. "No, Detective. Nothing at all."

I believed him. But the girls kept dying.

The Vampire Serial Killer was the hottest topic since Bundy and Dahmer. Every channel shared my obsession with the case and I couldn't hide from it. I had to solve it, stop the headlines, stop the news broadcasts. God, please bring this shit to an end! Bring us normalcy, I prayed.

I sat in my apartment, midnight ticking away, CNN in the background while I poured over the latest report. Something in the report caught my attention. In the seventh victim's pocket, amongst wrinkled pieces of foil gum wrappers and used tissues, was an object I recognized. A pack of Marlboros, opened, half empty, with a matchbook in the pack. I'd seen the exact matchbooks in a glass dish on the convenience store counter. The one Billy Boy leaned on while flipping through the pages of People magazine. Billy with the black and purple hair. Billy with the many piercings. Billy of the soul reflecting eyes.

I needed cigarettes.

Stupidly, I remember taking my old Buick Towncar, old and ugly, but paid for, all the way across town to the convenience store. Billy Boy was there, behind the counter in all his Billyness.

Why did I know this kid? Why did I think of him so often when my head should have been full of case files and profiles? When I thought of the girls, I thought of Billy. Why? Why? When I thought of the girls... when I thought of them, I thought about...

"What, Detective? Have you made a deduction? Have an epiphany just now?"

"Yeah, I did."

"Oh, how liberating that must be! Me? I'm too old for surprises, I fear. But you! Oh, you do make me feel young again."

"It's impossible, Billy Boy," I said, slowly, thickly. My tongue felt too big in my mouth. It was hard to breath, as if my tongue closed off the airway.

"Is it, now?"

I shook my head, trying to clear the fog of Billy in my mind. How long had he been in my head? Since the first body? No, before that. As if the first body was just a lure, to get the city's attention, my attention.

"Why? Why did you kill those girls?"

"Because, I'm a monster. Nothing personal. It's just what monsters do."

"Just what Vampires do?"

"If you like," Billy said, pulling his lips into a full, fangy smile.

"Damn," I muttered.

"Indeed," Billy replied.

The fog took me completely after that and when I woke I as no longer myself. There was no more Billy with black and purple hair, no more fog. Only the dark and dreadful knowledge that Billy had made me a monster to.

But I'm different than Billy Boy. I'm the detective, the good guy. Billy, that little shit, he's the bad guy. He's the monster. I probably would have gone mad and put a gun to my head someday. Or smoked myself into an early, cancer-riddled grave. But not now. Now, I'll be around for a while, hunting the night like Billy Boy. No, not quite like him. More like I'll be there, whenever he is, wherever he is hunting. I'll be hunting the night for Billy Boy. Because the obsession is there, and those cases await a closing. I'm the good guy. I'm the Detective.