In spite of myself, I was starting to make a plan.
Cormac spoke softly, adding to the clandestine feel of the conversation. "You'll have to keep this quiet. Avoid the cops. They just mess everything up." Cormac would know all about that. He'd saved me and five others by shooting dead the creature that threatened us. But when it was all over, the police only saw a dead woman and Cormac standing over her with a smoking rifle.
I winced. "The cops are already involved. You remember Detective Hardin?"
"Shit." Make that a yes.
"But still…" The wheels were turning. I had to think about what advantages I had and how I could use them. "She wants to treat this as a gang war. She wants these guys as badly as I do. If I can use her to do some of the dirty work"—like, shooting people—"that'll leave me in the clear."
"That's a tricky gamble to make."
"Yeah." But I could make it work. I started to think I could make it work.
"Do you still have the Jeep?" Cormac said. "Does Ben have it?"
"Yeah, it's at his mom's place."
"Go get it. Pop the hood. On the inside edge, on the left, there's one of those magnetic boxes for spare keys. The key in it is for a storage unit at a place on 287, south of Longmont. Ben knows where."
"Storage unit—storing what?"
"Stuff you might be able to use."
"Cormac—"
"I'd go in and clean up the town myself if I could. But I can't, so I want to make sure you have the tools for it."
Cormac had his own personal armory in a rented storage locker. He never ceased to amaze me.
"Ben took me to a range. Taught me to shoot."
"Good," he said.
"I don't want to be a part of this kind of life," I said.
"Sometimes you don't have a choice," he said. "When you're the only one around who can make a stand, you don't have a choice. Not if you want to be able to sleep at night."
I wasn't thinking of doing this because I wanted to, or because I thought it'd be fun. I was doing this for Jenny, for Ben, for myself, to keep those of us left alive safe. I was doing this for T. J. It was what he'd have done.
Cormac was much better suited for a world where wars happened.
"Can you sleep at night, Cormac?"
"Most of the time. When I'm not thinking about you." He grimaced. "I shouldn't have said that. Sorry."
"No," I said softly. "I'm sorry."
His voice was low, drawn from a dark place. "Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened if I'd shot him. After he was bitten. If I'd killed him like he wanted me to. And then, what if I came to see you. To tell you what happened. You'd be all sympathetic. You'd tell me how sorry you were, you'd start crying, I'd hold you, and then—"
"Cormac, stop. Stop it. You don't actually wish…" I couldn't even say it. Cormac and Ben were like brothers, he couldn't wish Ben dead.
"No," he said. "Only sometimes."
"That's psychotic."
"'Sociopathic' is what the prison psychologist wrote down."
"Geez, Cormac—"
"No, never mind. It's all just thinking." He glanced away, hiding his expression. "I don't think it would have worked out. At the end of the day…it just wouldn't."
That little mischievous bit of my brain reared her catty head. I narrowed my gaze and said, "But it might have been fun finding out."
"Yeah," he said, smiling.
For this moment at least, and maybe for a few future ones, things were all right between us. I'd come to him for help, and he'd given it, and we'd made a few confessions and cracked a few jokes in the meantime. Just like friends are supposed to.
He said, "You look after yourself. Look after Ben. Remember, you're hunting predators. It's different from deer and rabbits. Predators get angry, not scared. You know that."
Then the visit was over. The guard led him away, and I fled the prison.
Back on the road, I hit the interstate and headed north, back to Denver.
As I drove, the first thing I did was call Detective Hardin. She owed me a favor, and if this worked right, she wouldn't even know she was paying me back.
"It's me," I said when she answered her phone.
"Please tell me you've got something for me."
"I do, but you're not going to like it." Or even believe it, for that matter. But Hardin had demonstrated a great capacity for believing the unbelievable.
"I rarely do," she said.
"Mercedes Cook. You heard about her, right?"
"The singer. You had her on your show a week or so ago, announced that she was a vampire."
"She's in the middle of it. She's not the Master or the challenger, but she's been egging them both on. You might not want to confront her directly. Vampires can be kind of manipulative."
"I'll keep that in mind. Is she still in town? Do you know where she's staying?"
"She was staying at the Brown Palace. I don't know if she's still there. She's in the middle of a concert tour, so she should be pretty easy to find wherever she is."
"Thanks. I knew if I gave you a day to think about it, you'd come around."
"Yeah," I said. "That's exactly what happened."
It was suppertime when I got back to Ben's place. I hadn't looked at my watch in hours. I'd spent the whole drive back thinking. Planning.
No police cars waited in the parking lot, no crime scene tape wrapped the building. If Carl and Arturo had moved against us—or rather moved against Ben since I'd abandoned him—it hadn't been here.
Maybe, I hoped, they hadn't known where to find Ben. And if I was really lucky, Ben hadn't gone looking for them. I went in, almost expecting the place to be trashed, with signs of a massive struggle, and Ben dead, torn to bits all over the living room. If I had found that, I would have taken the gun with its silver bullets and gone after Carl myself. It wouldn't have mattered if Meg and the rest of the pack slaughtered me after, as long as I was able to shoot him first. I braced myself for what I would have to do if I found Ben dead.
But the condo was fine. Ben was at the dining-room table, eating some sort of carryout food straight from the carton. He didn't seem particularly surprised to see me.
In fact, he glanced at his watch. Humorlessly, he said, "Back already? It hasn't even been twelve hours. I figured it'd take at least twenty-four to grow your spine back."
Ben was perfectly all right. Why had I even worried? But there was a semiautomatic pistol sitting on the table next to him.
I didn't look, didn't say a word. Didn't even stop. I did not need that kind of crap right now.
I went straight back to the bedroom and looked for the pair of jeans I'd been wearing the last time I saw Rick, when he gave me that phone number that I'd shoved in my pocket. If I was lucky, it hadn't gone through the wash yet.
As it happened, I'd put the jeans in the duffel bag I'd taken on my short-lived retreat I should have done this first thing, right after Hardin's visit, before ever leaving town. Rick was probably dead, but I had to try. Maybe he'd escaped.
It was twilight; the sun had set. I dialed, and the phone rang, and rang. The certainty that Rick had been one of those piles of vampiric remains that Hardin had found settled on me, the weight of doom clenching in my gut. I wasn't surprised, but I was sad.
Then, the phone clicked on. "Yes?"
It was Rick.
"Oh my God, you're alive!"
"So to speak. Kitty—are you all right?"
I didn't know. I didn't want to talk about me. "Detective Hardin came to see me this morning. She had pictures from the warehouse. Arturo and Carl hit your place, didn't they? What happened?"