It wasn’t that Troy looked particularly gruesome in death. Given his now hairless head and thin figure, he resembled a cancer patient more than anything else. And his bulging eyes and scream-frozen mouth didn’t bother me in the slightest, not given all the times I’d put that same shocked and horrified expression on someone’s face. But there was an . . . emptiness in his still body, as though he were nothing more than a brittle, hollow shell, like an egg without a yolk inside. I supposed that was exactly what Troy was now, since Benson had scooped out everything inside him worth taking. Being bitten and drained of blood by a vampire was bad enough, but what Benson had done, well, it wasn’t something I wanted a repeat viewing of—ever.
I slid my knife back up my sleeve, crouched down on my knees, and rifled through Troy’s pockets, even though Silvio had already picked them clean. Sure enough, I came up empty. But my movements shifted Troy’s body to the left, and a gleam of plastic on the concrete caught my eye. I reached down and pulled a bag out from beneath the folds of his jacket.
A single blood-red pill lay inside the plastic.
It was the same pill, stamped with the same crown-and-flame rune, that Troy had given to me at the college. I remembered how Silvio’s hand had dropped down to Troy’s side before he’d driven off with Benson. He’d deliberately left the pill behind. Why? He’d seen me and, no doubt, knew exactly who I was. So why hadn’t he told his boss that I was here? And why leave one of the pills behind? Whatever Silvio Sanchez was up to, it didn’t make any sense.
I got to my feet and held the pill up to the light, turning it this way and that, but there were no other runes or marks on it, and I certainly wasn’t going to swallow it to see what it would do to me. Maybe Bria would find it useful.
I slid the pill into my jeans pocket, then stalked over, grabbed Catalina’s keys from the floor, and rounded the side of the car. The sharp jangle-jangle-jangle of metal cut through her sobs, and she slowly lifted her head. This time, I didn’t take no for an answer. I put my hand on her arm and gently helped her to her feet.
“Come on,” I said, unlocking the car and opening the passenger’s-side door. “We need to get out of here. I’ll drive you home.”
“You’re not—you’re not just going to leave him there, are you?” Catalina croaked out.
She moved away from the car and headed in Troy’s direction.
“You don’t want to look at that,” I called out.
But it was already too late. Catalina’s face paled at the sight of her ex-boyfriend lying on the cold concrete and the horrible way he’d died. She clamped her hand to her mouth, staggered away a few feet, and threw up.
I sighed and leaned against the side of the car. When she finished, Catalina straightened up, pulled a tissue out of her jeans pocket, and used it to wipe off her mouth. I hoped that she would hurry over to the car and that would be the end of things, but instead, she went right back over to Troy’s body, with disgust, guilt, and grief tightening her pretty features as she stared down at him.
“We need to call somebody . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“And tell them what?” I asked, my voice more sarcastic than it should have been. “That we witnessed Beauregard Benson, one of the most dangerous men in Ashland, kill one of his own dealers? It’s not exactly a news flash. What we need to do is get out of here and forget this ever happened.”
Catalina whipped around, her hair flying around her shoulders, her hands balling into fists. “I’m not leaving him!” she screamed.
The concrete around her let out a single sharp wail that melted into low, gravelly mutters of determination. The sound matched the mulish expression on Catalina’s face. I thought about knocking her out, shoving her into her own car, and driving away with her. But I had the feeling that if I took so much as one step toward her, she would start screaming again—or, worse, bolt out of the garage.
If she did that, someone was sure to see her, and word would get out about Catalina running away from the scene of a gruesome murder with me chasing her. Then we’d both be in more trouble than we already were. Maybe I should have been more sympathetic to the trauma Catalina had witnessed, but I had enough problems already without attracting the attention of Beauregard Benson.
Since I couldn’t get Catalina to leave and I didn’t want Benson and his men to come back and find us, that left me with only one option.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll call someone. Look, I’m doing it right now, see?”
Catalina stared at me, still angry and suspicious, so I pulled my phone out of my jeans pocket and hit a number in the speed dial. Three rings later, she picked up.
“Coolidge.”
“Hey, baby sister.”
“Hey, Gin.” Bria paused. “What’s up?”
“Why ever would you think that something’s up?” I said in my best, most innocent, I-haven’t-killed-anybody-in-hours voice.
“Because you never call me at work unless your work has somehow become my work,” she said, a teasing note creeping into her voice. “So who is it this time, and how many bodies are there?”
The fact that she could joke about it was something of a miracle. Detective Bria Coolidge was a good cop, and my being the Spider was something that didn’t exactly sit well with her at times. But we’d slowly come to an agreement ever since she’d returned to Ashland. Bria would never like my being an assassin, but she understood why I did it, the same way that I understood her being a cop and wanting to help people, even if the law was a running joke in our city and the only justice most folks got was what they made for themselves.
“Just one,” I said, answering her question about bodies. “And it isn’t even one of mine.”
“What?” she asked, her voice still light. “Did Finn kill someone instead? I bet he just loved getting his new Fiona Fine suit dirty.”
“No. It wasn’t Finn. It was Beauregard Benson.”
I expected another teasing comment, but Bria went immediately completely quiet, so quiet that I could hear the faint hum of her phone.
“Where are you?” she growled.
I frowned at the odd, intense tone in her voice, but I told her about the parking garage.
“I’ll be there in ten,” she snapped, every word sharper and louder than the last. “Don’t move, don’t let anyone see the body, and don’t touch anything.”
“What—”
I started to ask her what was going on, but she’d already hung up on me.
I stared at my phone, wondering at Bria’s unexpected angry reaction. My sister dealt with criminals on a daily basis, some of whom wore badges and called themselves cops. But the mere mention of Benson’s name had made her go from carefree to nuclear in five seconds flat. What could possibly be going on with Bria and Benson—
“Who was that?” Catalina asked, seeming a little calmer than before.
“Bria. My sister, the cop. You’ve seen her at the restaurant.”
She nodded. “She’s nice. Polite. A good tipper. Pretty too.”
“She’ll be here soon. Probably with Xavier,” I said, referring to Bria’s partner on the force.
Catalina nodded again and looked at Troy. She hesitated, then let out a breath and slowly sank down onto the floor next to his body, not caring about the dirt, oil, and other grime she was smearing all over her jeans. She reached out, as if to touch his withered hand, but thought better of it and ended up resting her palm on the concrete next to his.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” she said. “But I can’t leave him.”