I heard Zerbrowski behind me giving the uniforms at the back door a heads-up and a description of our bad vamp. We’d almost waded through the panicked civilians. I heard different yelling over the high-pitched screams. Men yelling, but not screaming. I brought my gun up as I cleared the side of the door, with as little of my body showing as possible. No, I did not stand in the fucking middle of the doorway and make myself a perfect target. That kind of shit is great for movies, but in real life, take cover, worry about looking like a hero later, after you’ve survived.
There was a fight at the end of the hallway. Our civvies, one dark and one blond, had caught up with the bad guy. They seemed to be winning. They had him on the ground, though the dark-haired civvie was on the ground, too. I cleared the door, gun in a two-handed grip, with Zerbrowski right behind me. He yelled, “Police, everybody freeze!”
The civilians hesitated in the fight, because they were upstanding citizens. Upstanding citizens tend to listen to the cops. It wasn’t much of a hesitation, they just stopped fighting as hard, and they glanced at us. That was it, then they turned right back to the bad guy, but he was a bad guy, and he hadn’t looked at us, or hesitated in the fight. After all, he had nothing to lose. I already had a warrant that let us kill his ass.
The two vampires had him down, but when they hesitated, one of them must have loosened their grip, just a fraction. I saw something silver glint in the bad guy’s hand. I yelled, “Knife!” but it was too late. The blade hit the dark one in the chest. Something about that blow seemed to stagger the blond, because he went to his knees beside his friend. Maybe he thought we had the bad guy covered. He knelt and reached for his fallen friend, and if the bad guy had done the usual and stood up and run through the door, we’d have had clean shots at him. But he didn’t, he pushed the door wide with his hand, and half-crawled, half-rolled through the door. The two civilians were blocking our shots completely.
I yelled, “Fuck!” and started to run.
67
We cleared the far door, me going low, Zerbrowski high. Marconi and Smith a weight at our backs waiting for a clear angle. We were in the parish hall, and in the middle of all those long tables was the vampire. He was using his leather jacket to shield his face from the white-hot glow of the two uniforms’ crosses. They had their guns in one hand, and the crosses in the other, almost like you’d hold flashlights, so that they were able to maintain a two-handed grip and still show the crosses. Training will tell.
I yelled, “He’s got a knife!”
I saw one of the men’s eyes flick to me, but only for a second.
“We’ll cover him, you pat him down.”
“Don’t be a wussy, Roarke,” Smith said, from behind me.
“Call me a wussy when you’re standing this close to him.”
I kept my gun on the vampire and walked slowly toward him. I talked while I moved, “Slowly, drop the knife.”
The vampire didn’t move, except to cower behind his jacket.
I stopped moving and looked down the barrel of my gun at him. I felt myself going quiet inside, slipping away inside my head to that distant strangely peaceful place I went when I killed, and had time to rev up for it. “I’ll ask one more time, Jonah. Drop the knife, or I put a bullet in you. I won’t… ask… again.” All the air slid out of me, and my body went as still and peaceful as my head. I didn’t hear that white noise tonight, that static, it was just quiet. The world had narrowed down to the crouching figure and nothing else. I wasn’t really aware of the police, Zerbrowski behind me, even the glow of the crosses had pulled back, so that my vision was sharpened down to the man I was about to shoot.
Something dropped from that dark figure, something silver that glinted in the white glow, but it didn’t really register. I didn’t think knife. I had passed the point of no return. I was committed.
Zerbrowski’s voice brought me back. “Knife, Anita, he dropped the knife.” His voice was gentle, as if he understood that I was on the edge. The edge where a sharp voice might have pressed that trigger for me.
My breath came back in a sharp hiss of air. I pointed the gun at the ceiling, because I had to stop pointing it at the man. I had to point it elsewhere, or I was going to shoot him. Legally, I could have done it, but we needed him to talk to us. The dead, the true dead, aren’t a chatty bunch.
“I’ve got him,” Zerbrowski said. He had his gun nice and steady on the vampire.
I nodded and pressed the back of my gun to my forehead. It didn’t feel cool, it was warm. Warm from being tucked up under my arm, wedged next to my breast. If I wore the wrong bra I scraped the edge of my breast as I drew, so I’d learned that all those minimizer bras that spread the breast to the side are not my friend wearing a shoulder holster. Push-up bras actually keep your breasts up and out of the way. You just had to make sure that the bra actually covered the front of you, so you could run without falling out of it. Why was I thinking about bras when we had a double murdering vampire still to be subdued?
Because I’d almost killed him. I’d almost shot into the mass of his body, not because it was time, but because that’s what I did. I rarely looked down the barrel of a gun without being able to pull the trigger.
I’d almost killed him before we tried to question him. I’d almost killed him, because my body and mind fell into it. Fall into this is what we do. We look down the barrel of a gun, and we pull the trigger, and we shoot to stop. Dead is stop.
“Anita, how you doing?” Zerbrowski asked.
I nodded and lowered the gun to point at the floor. I trusted Zerbrowski to get a shot off and slow the vamp down. I trusted me to get my gun up in time to finish it. I wasn’t sure in that moment that I trusted me to stand there with a bead on the vampire. Funny, but I didn’t.
“I’m fine, Zerbrowski.”
He kept his eyes on the vampire along with his gun. “Okay. It’s your warrant.”
“Yeah,” I said, “my dime.” I looked at the vampire, still hiding behind his leather jacket, and felt nothing. He was just something that I wanted information from. I couldn’t offer him a deal for it.
The law didn’t allow deals with vampires who had murdered. But that was a problem for another hour.
“Slowly, put your hands on your head and lace your fingers. Now!”
His voice came strangely muffled. “Have them put the crosses up.”
“Do you want to die right this second?”
He was quiet for a moment, then his voice again, “No.”
“Then do what you’re told. Hands on head, fingers laced, right fucking now. Now!”
He tried to keep his face hidden in the jacket, eyes squeezed tight shut as his arms came up and he put his hands on top of his head.
“Lace the fingers.”
He did.
“Now, on your knees.”
“Can I use my hands?”
I had my gun back up and pointed. “You are beginning to get on my nerves. Drop to your fucking knees.”
He did it. Goodie.
“Cross your ankles.”
“What?”
“One ankle over the other, cross your ankles.”
He did it. Which meant it was time to actually pat him down. I hate patting down someone who’s alive, so much easier to search the dead for weapons. How can you tell when you’ve been killing maybe a little too much? When you think it’s a pain in the ass having to pat down someone who can still move.
I put the barrel of my gun against his head. “If you move, I shoot. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” he said in a strained voice.
The other nice thing about only touching them after they’re dead is that you don’t hear the fear in their voices, or feel that fine tremble in their hands and arms. You don’t have to know that what they’re afraid of is you. You don’t have to think about the fact that the person you’re touching is going to have to die, and that nothing they can do, or you can do will stop it. The law isn’t about justice or mercy. The law is about the law, and law didn’t give Jonah NoLastName, or me, options.
He had another knife, this one was at the small of his back in a sheath on the inside of his belt. He had a wrist sheath, empty, and a larger sheath at his neck, hidden by the jacket’s collar. I’d never known a vampire to carry that many weapons. When he dropped the knife, I thought I’d been wrong about seeing the knife in the other vamp’s chest, but no, the bastard had stabbed him and had plenty of knives left. I remembered the knife like an exclamation point in the vamp’s chest.