Page 25 of Now or Never

I joined the traffic on Hamilton and headed for the Fleck house on Elm Street. “Spell it.”

“D-j-o-r-d-j-e-v-i-c.”

“Okay, we’ll call him Zoran.”

“He’s Caucasian,” Lula said, “five foot ten, forty-six years old, brown hair, brown eyes, divorced. Owns a laundromat. And he’s a vampire.”

“That’s different,” I said. “We don’t get a lot of vampires.”

“Maybe never,” Lula said. “We had a couple werewolves, but I can’t remember no vampires.”

“What’s the crime?”

“According to the police report, he’s accused of biting a woman in the neck and trying to drink her blood. There’s a picture here of her neck with fang marks in it.”

“Is there a picture of him?”

“Mug shot,” Lula said. “He looks angry. Got a lot of hair. Description said brown but it looks black and shot with gray in the picture.”

“Any priors?”

“Bunch of parking tickets.”

I drove down Elm Street and idled in front of the Fleck house. The white Corolla was parked in the driveway and a silver Nissan Sentra with a bashed-in right fender was parked at the curb. I pulled in behind the Sentra and cut the engine.

“Do you know what would be good?” Lula said. “We should have body cams. GoPros or something. Then we could put this on YouTube and get rich and famous for taking down Robin Hoodie.”

“That would be a nightmare. Remember how you said I’ll be lucky if I don’t get my apartment firebombed again?”

“Oh yeah. I forgot that part. Maybe I can get a selfie with him just for my own personal remembrance. It could be a historic moment.”

“No selfies. No request for an autograph. No sneaking a souvenir into your tote bag. We aren’t arresting Robin Hoodie. We’re arresting Eugene Fleck.”

“But he might be Robin Hoodie,” Lula said.

“Forget Robin Hoodie. Our job is simple here. Eugene isin violation of his bond, and we’re bringing him back into the system.”

“Boy, you aren’t any fun now that you’re pregnant. You got a lot of rules.”

“We don’t know if I’m pregnant.”

“Remember how you said you would marry the baby daddy? Suppose you have twins and they each have a different daddy. It could happen, right? What would you do?”

“I’m pretty sure that only happens with rabbits, but if it did happen, I guess I’d be a single mom with twins,” I said.

“I’d be their auntie,” Lula said.

That kind of choked me up. “Yes,” I said. “You would be their auntie.”

“Okay, now that we got that settled, let’s go ruin the Flecks’ dinnertime.”

I got out of the Trailblazer and went to the sidewalk. “It’s our job.”

“Damn straight it is,” Lula said, joining me. “Are you going to ruin their dinner big-time with cuffs and everything or are you gonna try to be classy?”

“I’m aiming for classy.”

“I got classy in fucking spades.”

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