“Or you could stay here,” Domingo said. “You can have my bed.”
Technically it was a mattress on the floor, but he thought it counted as a bed. He even had covers that matched, dark green.
“I’m heading to my place.”
“Okay,” Domingo said. “I just want to grab a few comic books and—”
“Stay here for now.”
“What for? I thought you needed my help, my blood.”
“And some fucking space to breathe,” Atl said, irritated. “Come look for me four hours before sundown, all right?”
He walked her back to the entrance they’d used, which led back to an abandoned building. Atl slipped out without a word or a look at him. He watched her walk away, hands in her pockets.
CHAPTER
13
When she was a kid, Ana had liked watching cowboy movies with her grandma. There was a simplicity about them that appealed to her: good guys win. She always wanted to be a good guy. Or gal. That’s why she got into law enforcement. Unfortunately, real life is not like in the movies. All that Hollywood junk where they have super-advanced tech and clean, heroic cops? Not true. Of course, back when she first donned the uniform she thought she was going to magically clean the force from within. Those hopes had been dashed in Zacatecas, but the faint glimmer of heroism still remained.
Mexico City, they had told her, was different. The police force there was being reformed. Before, women could only aspire to be traffic cops or belong to the incredibly sexist Ladies Auxiliary, which was mainly dedicated to visiting public schools and telling kids how fun it was to be a cop. But not the new Mexico City police, this was going to be a state-of-the-art, modern force. Women would be required. Especially women like Ana Aguirre, a police officer with solid experience in Zacatecas and a letter of recommendation. Detective Aguirre had a nice ring to it. At bare minimum there were no vampires in Mexico City. It was safer, less violent, and with the drug dealers she’d busted Ana hadn’t made many friends in the narco world.
It turned out to be a crock of shit. They had printed manuals with gender-appropriate terminology and the like, but detectives still called gay men “faggots,” women were “bitches,” and if a “lady” was raped the first question to ask was what she’d done to incite the crime. The worst part was that nobody wanted Ana there. Castillo plain detested her. In Zacatecas, Ana had been tolerated, if not fully accepted, because she proved useful. Most of the other police officers had no idea how to deal with vampires, and they didn’t want to learn how to. Ana was willing to go into the neighborhoods with a high concentration of vampires, she was willing to question suspects who made her colleagues wet their pants, and she could handle herself if some sick fuck decided he wanted to take a bite out of her.
It had been her grandma who taught her that. The old woman had lived through the Mexican Revolution and even in her old age she was an excellent shot. A country girl, Ana Aguirre’s grandmother had been exposed to much folklore and superstition. Some of it concerned vampires, and, it turned out, her stories were accurate. The result was that while other humans around the world had grown insulated from these tales, forgotten most of them, and entrusted themselves to modernity, Ana Aguirre’s grandmother had not, and she had been able to lavish her knowledge upon her granddaughter.
But in Mexico City vampire knowledge was not valued. Here she was just an annoying broad, her hair streaked silver as she inched toward fifty, someone to push around rather than respect.
Still. She was trying to do right. When she walked past her desk she tossed her raincoat on her chair and hurried toward Castillo’s office, skipping her customary smoke. He waved her in, looking none too happy to see her.
“All right, Aguirre, what do you want today?” he asked.
“That case, the girl attacked by a vampire behind the club,” she said, not bothering to sit down. She knew this was going to be a brief conversation.
“Yes, yes. What about it? Luna says it’s probably a junkie vampire who went bananas. Didn’t we have a couple of those biting an idiot in San ángel or some place like that?”
Luna? What did Luna know, he couldn’t tell his dick from his thumb. A junkie vampire might have been a prime candidate at the outskirts of the city, not smack in the middle of the Condesa. If human junkies were bad, then vampire junkies were three times worse. They just couldn’t control themselves. A vampire high on Medusa’s Tears or whatever the drug du jour was wouldn’t have passed without notice.
“I think it’s a narco vampire from the North. Actually, two vampires. Necros versus Tlahuelpocmimi.”
“And they’re in Mexico City to do what, go walk around the Alameda and get an ice cream?” Castillo asked, leaning back in his chair and knitting his hands together.
“I don’t know.”