Blood Brothers

TG (The Grim Reaper) reports to The Court Of Ghouls, the official bosses of the link between this world and the Afterlife. But TG only tells them what he thinks the Court needs to know. Why bother it with little details, such as the city suffering an epidemic of bank robberies? The Court of Ghouls don’t need to know about problems until TG solves them. Or, rather, until TG has got The Dead Detective, Hank Kane, to solve them, and then TG can take all the credit. That’s how it usually worked.

TG ran his own mega business, The Grim Group Corporation. That was something else he figured The Court of Ghouls didn’t need to know everything about. All they needed to know was that he, as ordered by the Court, collected the souls of everyone who died. Then the Court would decide if which souls went to Heaven or Hell, or remained somewhere in between.

Ghostgo was somewhere in between, a place where ghosts worked hard to impress the Court to get a pass into Heaven. But, that could take days, weeks, decades or even centuries. A lot depended on TG’s recommendation. Want a good recommendation from TG? Do whatever TG wants you to do. Want a bad recommendation? Defy him. And earn a ride on the fiery chute to Hell.

The Court didn’t need to know that TG didn’t personally collect every soul himself. The Grim Group Corporation licenced out the collection of souls to any enterprising ghost with a modicum of ambition in this Ghost Eat Ghost world. See, TG got paid by the Court for every soul brought before it. You didn’t need to be a genius to work out that having an army of soul collectors 24/7 would collect more souls than TG could on his own. Sure, the Court might have some ethical issues with that. But, only if they knew about it.

The Court wasn’t stupid. The judges granted TG had a lot of autonomy, and they figured he was a business man. They knew about The Grim Group Corps. Who couldn’t, with its gigantic gleaming glass head office in the middle of Ghostgo? To anyone not too inquisitive, The Grim Group Corps was simply a company TG had set up to ensure the efficient administration of Ghostgo. But, to someone as inquisitive as Hank Kane, the gleaming windows of the massive Grim Group Corporation represented a façade, in more ways than one.

TG didn’t like inquisitive. It was all TG could do to keep Hank busy. And there was no better way to keep Hank busy than giving him an endless supply of impossible cases to solve. So, working out who was robbing the banks might keep him tied up for a while. These weren’t any ordinary banks, either. These were blood banks.

Trouble was, Hank was good. The best, in fact. Sometimes he’d solve a case quickly, sometimes, it took him a while. But he always solved them.

But, Hank was not without his own flaws. Sure, he always knew who was guilty. He just got tired proving it. That’s why he was in Ghostgo in the first place. When he’d been alive, he took short cuts to solve cases, framing suspects. When he’d first been hauled in front of the Court, he’d pleaded that he’d never framed anyone who wasn’t guilty. While the court admired that honesty, it was enough to deny him permission to enter Detective Heaven, where even the hardest cases are solved easily. So, here he was, stuck in Ghostgo limbo, knowing that the only way out, upwards at least, was to keep TG happy. And, as Hank knew, TG was the greatest crook of them all.

Sure, any fool, thought Hank, could guess that the chief suspects for the blood banks heists would be the vampires, who mostly lived in the Ghostgo Ghetto. They were held in suspicion by other ghosts who complained that vampires aren’t really dead so shouldn’t really be here at all. In fact, anything that went wrong was blamed on the vampires. Hank knew that wasn’t fair, but even he could see the link between tonnes of blood going missing and hungry vampires.

But, it seems like a lot of trouble for vampires to go to when all they needed to do was drift back to earth and bite a few necks. In the old days, their victims would become vampires themselves. But, now the vampires knew there wasn’t enough room for them all. Mostly they just killed their human victims rather than let them become competing vampires. It wasn’t like there wasn’t enough humans to feed on.

Hank Kane realises there’s more to this case than meets the fang. If this was vampires robbing blood blanks, it would be an easy case. But TG never gave Hank an easy case…