“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.”