Mo’Lock grabbed a dish rag and started to cover Sam’s head until Sam spoke up. “Mojo, Moby . . . whatever the fuck yer name is,” he yelled, “don’t cover me. Look at the cops again.”

Mo’Lock looked out the window once more as the two blues walked slowly up the sidewalk. I watched a slow, almost sinister grin grow across his lips, and I knew what Sam wanted him to see. They were ghouls. LAPD ghouls.

One was clean-cut, tall, and blond with a short crewcut. His badge read Hamm. The other was African-American, clean-cut, with light eyes and a shaved head. His badge read Shooter. The blond looked from me to Mo’Lock to the head on the table and nodded.

“Sam Burnett. We need to talk to you.”

The head on the table was happy as hell to be the center of attention. “Good to see you boys. What’s the rumpus?”

The ghoul cops looked at each other, confused. I stepped up and introduced myself and Mo’Lock and took over the conversation. “What’s the trouble, officer?”

Shooter looked at me. His eyes were bright and dead at the same time, with a cold stare that gave me chills. My guess was that this is what you got when you combined the laid-back ease of a ghoul and the manic reality of a cop. What I couldn’t guess was if it was a good thing. I was used to the East Coast type of ghoul.

“The Griffith Park Observatory,” Shooter said, speaking like a machine. “There’s some sort of disturbance up there. We have significant undead numbers on the force and we’ve managed to keep most of this below the radar of the humans. But if something isn’t done soon, the results could be devastating.”

I gestured for more. “What sort of disturbance?”

Hamm pulled out a Polaroid and flipped it to me. I caught it and looked at the snap as Mo’Lock peered over my shoulder. It was a shot of the observatory. I’d seen it before in films and TV, but now it looked different. The building was completely covered with scaffolding, but I’d heard it was shut down for renovation. No mystery there.

But the something else had no easy explanation: There was a black tear floating in midair, just above the yard of the historic building. A black, floating hole and something was crawling out of it.

Before I could ask what it was, Hamm handed me another photo that showed what the hell that “something” was. It was red, with bat-like wings, horns, and spikes all over its body, and the burning eyes of a demon. I didn’t think I was going out on a limb guessing the floating tear was some sort of portal.

In the second picture, the red demon was airborne just outside the rip. It didn’t take long for me to put two and two together, but Mo’Lock beat me to the punch.

“This would explain what happened to Sheriff Dawson.”