Free The Blood Detail (Vigil) by Arvin Loudermilk

like Greg Tonell.”
    He did, particularly if you squinted. But I could have cared less.
    “You’re gorgeous like that, too,” she said, unprompted. “Not that you look like someone. But you do have that movie star quality about you. People just don’t look like you in real life. You glow. Guys must be chasing after you all the time.”
    I stared out my window. “Yeah, all the time.”
    Mercifully, the conversation drifted away from my incandescent attractiveness and we returned to the patrol patterns we had sketched out back at the bullpen—around and around ten square blocks, making ourselves as visible as was humanly possible. Our first staged emergency call was at a strip mall where we had to go to the back room of a grocery store to arrest a ‘shoplifter’. While we were there we shared some coffee with two of the guys from the Detail. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, we put one of the guys, the one who was playing the shoplifter, into cuffs and frog-marched him out to the car which was parked out in front of the busy storefront. A couple of streets down, we handed him off to two more of our team in front of the station—my old station. I had to be careful not to be seen, so the exchange was done in a side parking lot. It was completely against procedure—but unless Jessup was a cop in a former life—he’d never be able to tell the difference.
    Our next handful of calls were staged domestics, loaded up with people from the Detail I had yet to meet. All four ‘incidents’ went down as expected, and then Beth and I went back to patrolling. This time out, we were given free rein to swing through as many dark and unsavory neighborhoods as we could before the sun came up. The hope was to draw some kind of visual on Jessup. Once we got back to the bullpen, we found out that we had done just that. The suspect had been spotted three times, observing from assorted rooftops, and up high on an overhanging tree branch.
    Our patience had paid off, which set up the next night perfectly.

The Old Stomping Grounds
    It may not have ended that way, but as of sunset, April the fifteenth felt like the previous night all over again. Such was the monotonous truth of modern, street-level police work.
    Beth and I left the bullpen following another extended briefing, and restarted our patrol. We put some workman-like effort into varying our path through our tiny quadrant of Los Angeles, yet in general terms, we went how we went before. We did not get stopped by any citizens, and we did not take any faked calls. There was only one task for the evening, and if all went well, this would we be the last night of carnal carousing for one Danny Ray Jessup.
    The Detail’s choice for an ensnarement site had my full support. In fact, I was the one who had first suggested it. The Las Rosas townhouse complex made for an ideal location, for no other reason than Jessup might feel safe there. He’d gotten away with killing someone in that particular venue before—and putting ourselves into his mind—he could probably get away with it again. It was all guesswork, but it made a lot of sense. I also liked the idea of getting another shot at him in the complex where I missed snapping the cuffs on the last time out.
    At six minutes after eleven, we received a call on the radio. I didn’t recognize the voice, but we were told to mount up and head to Las Rosas. The operation was already in progress.
    The Detail had emptied the complex out over the course of the day and taken over the site in its entirety. I don’t know how they convinced the occupants to leave without a fuss, but they’d been pulling off similar feats over the course of the week I’d been working for them. Clearing a whole townhouse complex was just the restaurant and the grocery store on a greater scale.
    The plan as written called for seventy-five Detail members in the housing units themselves—all with a second story, bird’s-eye view of the door Beth and I