“What do they need from the marshals?” Livingston asked.
“They need them to kill the monster, not contain it, not handcuff it, not put it in a cage or into the back of a cruiser. This job isn’t police work at all. It’s closer to special operations units like SEALs or Delta Force. Or maybe it isn’t even that. Maybe we’re just assassins with badges, like Blake says, but whatever we are, it’s not police. When they nicknamed Blake War, they were being honest about what the preternatural branch does. It’s war. It’s deep, dark, behind-enemy-lines shit that our government is allowing us to do right here on American soil. But you have to want to be a SEAL, and you have to know what one is and what one does. Same for any of the other special operations units. You don’t end up on one of them by accident. They don’t recruit you for regular service and then throw you out into the dark with Delta Force and expect you to be okay.” When Newman finished talking he was not looking at any of us but staring off into space, and whatever he was seeing inside his head wasn’t anything good.
I looked at the side of Newman’s face. I wanted to touch his arm, to let him know he was all right, but it would have been a lie. I caught Livingston looking at him, too. Our eyes met for a second, and I think we both thought the same thing: Newman needed a new job.
“Newman, Win, you can go back to being regular police or transfer to the other side of the Marshals Service,” I said.
“You said ‘back to’ like it’s a step backward, lesser.”
I opened my mouth, closed it, and tried to think of something to say. “I’m an assassin with a badge, Newman. I couldn’t be a regular cop. I don’t have the temperament or training for it.”
“And I don’t have what it takes to be an assassin with a badge,” he said, and looked at me. His eyes were shiny, and if it had been allowed, I’d have said he was nearly in tears. But I pretended I couldn’t see them, and he pretended they weren’t there. Even if the tears started, we’d all pretend we couldn’t see them unless Newman let us know it was okay to acknowledge them.
He excused himself for the bathroom. Olaf and I would have moved, but Kaitlin started the scoot-out first, so we let Livingston and her clear the way for Newman. I watched him walk away until he turned a corner and was lost to sight.
I don’t know what we would have said out loud, because the juice and the food all came at once. The bacon was perfectly crisp, like a hard look would make it fall apart, and Kaitlin was right. The pancakes were great. We all ate as if Newman hadn’t bared his soul moments before. One, we were all hungry and the food was that good. Two, how would it have changed anything to talk about it?
When Newman came back to the table with his face damp but clear, he sat down to his food as if nothing had happened. That was our cue to do the same. We talked about the food and made harmless small talk until the food was gone and Hazel came back to the table to ask if there was anything else we needed. Why, yes, there was. Let’s talk murder.
32
HAZEL DIDN’T WANT to sit down with us. “I have tables to wait on.”
“You know what Kaitlin and I do for a living, Hazel?” Livingston asked.
“Yeah,” she said, and the one word was sullen, like a shadow of the rebellious teenager she might once have been.
“Do you know Marshal Newman?” Livingston nodded toward Newman, and since they were sitting next to each other, it was a small gesture.
“I know him.” Again her demeanor was sullen and instantly guarded. It didn’t mean that she knew a damn thing that we needed to know. A lot of people are just naturally suspicious of the police. Go figure.
“This is Marshal Anita Blake and Marshal Otto Jeffries,” Livingston said, motioning down the table toward us.
I said, “Hi, Hazel.” I was going to try to be the good cop, because Olaf sure as hell couldn’t do it.
She mumbled, “Hi,” before she could stop herself. A lot of people will do automatic social cues if you give them a chance. She frowned harder, showing where some of the harsh lines around her mouth had come from. To get such deep lines, she must have frowned a lot more than she smiled.
“We just want to ask you a few questions, Hazel,” Livingston said.
“I don’t know anything,” she said. She hadn’t asked us what it was about, just gone straight to not knowing anything about it. Either she did know something, or she’d had a run-in with the police before.
“I bet you know lots of things,” I said, smiling.
Hazel frowned harder, looking at me. “I don’t know anything.”
She put a lot of emphasis on don’t, and again there was that echo of sullenness that teenage girls seem to specialize in, as if a part of Hazel was stuck at about fifteen or sixteen. If you have something bad happen to you, sometimes you can get stuck at the age when it happened, and without therapy, you can stay stuck for the rest of your life. I was beginning to want to know more about Hazel’s childhood. If it wouldn’t help us figure out who done it, I’d leave it alone, but if we needed leverage to get her to talk to us, then I was pretty sure her past would give us a lever to move her or at least to try.
“I bet you can figure out the math on a good tip faster than I can.”
She frowned even harder so that the lines in her face looked almost painful, more like scars than lines, as if her unhappiness was a wound that showed on her face.
“And I bet you know this menu backward, forward, and sideways.”
She gave a half smile that softened the pain in her face. “I’ve worked here for over three years, so yeah.”
“Please have a seat, Hazel. We just want to talk to you,” Livingston said.
The smile vanished, and she was back to sullen and wary. “I have other tables, Dave. Sorry.” She actually started to walk away.