Blood Crimes: Book One by Dave Zeltserman Page A

men’s room for each transaction.
          
Jim
waited until the drug dealer was approached by another buyer, then made a beeline to the men’s room. The band was playing Some Kind of Wonderful and the place was lively with all the attention turned toward the stage.
Jim
snaked through the crowd unnoticed. He found an empty stall and crouched on the toilet seat, sitting on his heels. A couple of minutes later a small crowd entered the men’s room. From the crack in the stall door,
Jim
saw the money and drugs trade hands. The customer left first while the drug dealer stayed behind to add more money to his roll.
          In a fluid panther-like motion,
Jim
sprung forward, pulling himself head first through the three-foot opening between the stall and the ceiling, and landing inches behind the drug dealer. Before the dealer could react,
Jim
banged his head off the sink. It all happened in the blink of an eye. The sound of the blow made only a dull thud, but it was enough to get one of the bodyguards turning around.
          “What the fuck—” the bodyguard started. Before he could finish his thought,
Jim
clanged his head off his partner’s. The bodyguard slid to the floor. His partner, though, wobbled on his feet, and stared groggily at
Jim
.
          “You’re a fucking dead man,” he mumbled, his words coming out like a punch-drunk boxer’s. He reached clumsily inside his leather jacket, but before he could do anything else,
Jim
grabbed him by the collar and head butted him hard enough to knock him out. Using one hand he half-lifted and half-dragged the guy to the empty stall and propped him on the toilet so he was sitting up.
Jim
stood back and gave the man a hard stare. He didn’t like the fact that the guy had gotten a look at him, but fuck it, getting his head clanged the way he did probably left him too groggy to see straight. Besides,
Jim
didn’t plan on staying in Cleveland long, and as much as the world would be a better place without these three, it wasn’t his call. He left to get the other bodyguard, stacked him on top of the first, then did the same with the drug dealer. He locked the stall from the inside and slid under the opening at the bottom. Glancing under the stall he could only make out one pair of legs.
          The drug dealer’s roll lay on the floor.
Jim
took off the rubber band holding it together and counted over nine thousand dollars.
M
ore than enough to keep him and Carol going for months.
          A window opened up into an alleyway in back of the bar.
Jim
went through it and disappeared into the night. 
 
 
    Chapter 5  
          Faces of the perverts and rapists and sociopaths that
Jim
had killed over the last three years blurred in his mind into something generic, something almost cartoonish. Outside of that first thug who attacked Carol in Newark, it was hard for him to recall any of them. Even the latest one from only several hours before. Their faces just kept fading in and out, never quite coming into focus. He forced himself to concentrate, to try to picture what at least one of them looked like, but couldn’t do it. Whenever he came close, the image would morph into Bluto from those old Popeye cartoons. Giving up, he forced himself to count how many of these predators he had killed since hooking up with Carol. It took a while but he came up with a number—a hundred and ten, plus the two vampires that Serena had sicced on him. Fuck. If this kept up and he lived to a ripe old age he could go down as one of the deadliest serial killers in history, or the most successful vigilante, depending on your point of view. The fact that these were all violent sociopathic thugs, the worst that humanity had to offer, only slightly helped to ease his conscience. No matter how hard he tried convincing himself otherwise, it still came down to that he was robbing them of any chance of redemption. Even though he had to kill them for his survival, he probably