"I'm a vampire."

"Of course you are," Diana Prince said.

"I suck blood."

"Of course you do."

The young woman sitting on the other side of Diana Prince's desk was thin to the point of emaciation, with sharp cheekbones emphasized by fine, black, almost certainly dyed hair sleeked into a severe knot at the back of her head. Her eyebrows, eyelids and lips were painted black, and she wore a high-necked, long-sleeved, ankle-length dress of some dense fabric that seemed to suck up all the available light, which, considering that the ceiling of the post was wall-to-wall fluorescent tubing, was quite a trick. Maybe she really was a vampire.

Then again, Diana was well into overtime, after a day of duty that had had its moments, highlighted by the disarming of an enraged father bent on avenging the defloration of his seventeen-year-old daughter by her fisherman boyfriend, who was a little less than six months older than she was. It was also the last day of what had proven to be a labor-intensive week. Maybe it was just that she was tired, and about to fall face-forward into the now cold bean burrito sitting on her desk.

"Officer Prince," the vampire said, leaning forward in her chair, every line of her gaunt body taut with earnest sincerity, "I don't want to hurt anyone else. So if you will . . ." She proffered the items in her lap in mute appeal.

Diana eyed what looked like a leathercrafter's rubber mallet and a wooden stake that appeared to have been carved from the limb of a very dead spruce, and gave an inward sigh.

From what she could hear, her boss was doing a lot better than she was, and he looked like he was in love.

"So there I was, arms around four bags full of groceries, and coming out of the store I see this guy breaking into my car."

"And that was when you hit him with the jar of tomatoes," Alaska state trooper Sgt. Liam Campbell said, his gaze rapt.

"Sun-dried tomatoes," the woman sitting next to his desk said. She uncrossed and crossed her legs, rearranged the skirt of her blue-flowered housedress, fussed with a short, smooth cap of still-black hair, and smiled at Liam. "And no, or at least not then. I was going to hit him with the two-pound loaf of Tillamook sharp, but it just didn't seem hard enough to stop him. He is a pretty big guy."

They both turned to look at the six feet, five inches and two hundred twenty pounds of Guamanian male, by way of Chicago and Anchorage, handcuffed to the chair on the opposite side of the desk. He was bent over, his free hand cupping the left side of his face. His left eye was swollen shut with the beginnings of what looked to become a shiner of truly fabulous hue. The left shoulder of his blue T-shirt was stained a dark brown. He pulled his hand away from his face and looked at his bloody palm. "Fuck, man, how come you ain't arresting her? How come she ain't in the cuffs? She assaulted me! I'm wounded here, man! I'm bleeding!"

Liam opened a drawer and handed him a Wash'n Dri. "Here, Harvey, see if you can't clean yourself up a little. You look disgusting." He turned back to Mrs. Lydia Tompkins, a seventy-four-year-old housewife, mother of four, grandmother of two, who topped out at four-foot-eight and couldn't have weighed a hundred pounds wringing wet with six-pound lead weights strapped to each ankle. "So," he said, radiating a quiet joy, "instead of hitting him with the cheese, you hit him with the tomatoes -- excuse me, the sun-dried tomatoes."

"Well, yes," said Mrs. Tompkins, "but not yet. I was going to hit him with the artichoke hearts, but it's an awfully big jar -- did you want to see?"

"Absolutely," Liam said.

"Oh, fuck me, man, do I have to sit here and listen to this?"

"Shut up, Harvey," Liam said.

Harvey shut up. He was the bouncer at the Bay View Inn and he and Liam had already met professionally.

Mrs. Tompkins dove headfirst into one of the four plastic shopping bags clustered at her feet. She upset her purse on the way down and a couple of coins rolled out. She pounced on them, holding them up to the light and squinting at them. She frowned. "No good," she said, and caught Liam's eye. "Except to spend."

She dove back into the shopping bag and emerged flushed and triumphant, jar of artichokes in hand. It was a big jar, Liam noted with respect, forty-eight ounces, and always assuming it hit its target, would have put a hell of a dent in Harvey's head. Funny how Harvey didn't look grateful for the reprieve.

"It was too big, I thought," Mrs. Tompkins said with the air of a woman who had right on her side and who knew it. "I mean, I didn't want to kill him; I just wanted to protect my property."

"Of course."

"There he was, breaking into my car, and that car's my property."

"Certainly."

"And I really didn't know how else to stop him."

"Perfectly understandable," Liam said. "So that was when you hit him with the sun-dried tomatoes."

"Yes," said Mrs. Tompkins, and fluttered her eyelashes. She was as taken with Liam as he was with her. "I was going to use the olive oil, but it was a plastic bottle. I figured it'd just bounce off, and then he'd probably hit me."

"Oh, man!" Harvey said, unable to resist. "You see how she's dissing me, man! Did I lift a finger to hurt this woman? Did I?" He appealed to the room at large. There was only Diana Prince and the vampire at the other desk, so the appeal failed. "No! Alls I'm doing is going to the store to buy some smokes and this . . . this feminazi comes along and brains me with a jar of love apples! I want a lawyer!"

"So," Liam said, entering a note in the case file, "that was when you hit him with the sun-dried tomatoes."

The jar in question was smaller than the jar of artichokes but larger than the loaf of Tillamook, all three lined up on Liam's desk. Liam liked the look of them. Mrs. Tompkins' arsenal.

"Yes." Mrs. Tompkins sat back in her chair, eyes bright with militant satisfaction. She crossed her legs again. For legs with that many miles on them, they still looked pretty good. Liam allowed himself an admiring glance. Mrs. Tompkins smiled at him again.

The phone on Diana's desk rang. "Excuse me a minute," she said to Dracula's bride, who gave the rubber mallet a dismissive wave, and raised the receiver. The steady voice of the dispatcher spoke without haste and to the point. "Okay, we'll be right there." She hung up and tried not to sound jubilant when she told Liam, "Sir, somebody tried to rip off the ATM machine down at Last Frontier."

"Again?" Liam was sorry to end the interview but duty called. "Mrs. Tompkins, we've got to go, but I want to say that it's been a real pleasure. We'll be in touch."

"Will I have to testify?" Mrs. Tompkins looked eager to do her civic duty.

The fierce, diminutive woman glowed with family values and middle-class morality and the Boy Scout oath, for crissake, a woman who was every prosecuting attorney's dream and every defense lawyer's nightmare. A slow smile spread across Liam's face. He would love to have her sworn in in front of Bill Billington. It was with real regret that he said, "I doubt it. I have a feeling the public defender will recommend a guilty plea. But I will certainly keep you informed on the progress of the case."

"Thank you." Mrs. Tompkins fluttered her eyelashes at him, gathered up her bags of groceries and marched out of the post on her first-class legs. Liam thought there ought to be a trumpet playing somewhere in the background, or at the very least, a round of applause.

"Come on, Harvey," Liam said, "we'll drop you off at the cop shop on our way."

"Oh, man, you can't put me back there! What are the rest of the guys going to say! Knocked on my ass by a little old lady with a bag of groceries! Campbell, come on, man, have some heart!" Then, when Liam uncuffed him from the chair and steered him toward the back door with a determined hand, he shouted, "I want to talk to my lawyer, goddamn it! I'm constitutionally entitled to a phone call!"

In the meantime, Dracula's bride waited with the calm certainty of one who knew she had eternity at her disposal for someone to put an end to her reign of terror.

Copyright © 2002 by Dana Stabenow