Skin Trade (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 17)

Chapter 45

THE NEXT SOUND was gunfire, a lot of it. But the moment I saw the airborne officer, I knew there would be. Martin Bendez was about to die, and there was no way to save him. Whatever information he had was gone. The real kicker was that if I'd been near the front of the line, I'd have helped kill him. When a wereanimal goes a certain level of apeshit, you run out of options fast.

Cox eased forward, and I followed. Shelby brought up the rear. It looked like almost every other officer in Vegas was already clustered at the front area. They'd made a mass around some point I couldn't see. I wasn't tall enough to spot Edward or even Olaf from the back of the crowd, but somehow I knew that Edward, at least, would be near the front.

He was like one of those antitank missiles. Point front toward the enemy, and make sure you know where to stand.

I didn't try to push; Cox did it for me. He just eased us through the crowd. I followed in his wake. Shelby got a little separated, but then he took up more room than I did, so people were more likely to not let him push through. Sometimes smaller is better.

We wormed our way close enough to the front that I glimpsed Olaf towering over everyone. I knew that Edward had to be close to him. I left Cox behind and continued to work my way closer to the big guy. I actually saw Bernardo first, then Edward, all with their guns still out. All still pointed at something I couldn't see on the ground. Most of the rest of the police had eased up; some had even holstered.

"It's dead." I recognized Sergeant Hooper's voice but couldn't see him yet.

"It's not dead until it shifts back to human form," Edward said.

"What are you talking about, Marshal?" another man asked.

I eased up until I was just behind them. I could glimpse a white-and-black-furred body on the ground. "As long as it's furry," I said, "it's still alive. Dead, they turn back to their original shape."

Edward almost looked back at me, but kept his eyes and his gun on the downed tiger. "Better late than never," he said.

I shouldered my way between him and Bernardo, and aimed my gun with theirs. "Sorry I missed it."

"No," Bernardo said, "you're not." Something in the way he said it made me wonder what else I'd missed besides the body on the ground.

"It isn't shifting, just like the tiger in St. Louis," Olaf said.

I settled the MP5 tighter in my arms, but not too tight, and sighted down at the still form. I couldn't see any movement, or sense anything but stillness, but the one in St. Louis had done that, too. That one had nearly killed me and Edward's stepson, Peter. It had killed one of our people.

"I know," I said, and felt my body go still, sinking away into that silence where I went if I had time in a fight. It was a good quiet place to kill things from, the static narrowing inside my head.

Then the body moved. Someone actually shot into it, but it wasn't that kind of movement. The skin receded like the ocean drawing back from the shore. What was left was a pale, nude man lying on his side. I couldn't tell if he'd been handsome or ugly, because there wasn't enough of his face left to answer the question. There was daylight showing through his chest now because the wounds remained the same, but the weretiger's body was so much bigger, bulkier, that once they changed to human shape, the wounds all looked nastier. Less mass, more damage taken, as if once dead the lycanthropy stopped protecting the human host.

It took me a few seconds to draw myself back from that silent place. Almost everyone else in the circle of guns had let go of their tension by the time I shook it off and dropped my own shoulders.

I found Olaf staring at me when I finally looked around. "What?" I asked, and I didn't try to keep the hostility out of my voice.

Those cave-dark eyes gave me a look that held too much weight, and there was nothing sexual about it. I'd thought his attempts at dating me had been creepy enough, but there was something about this look that bothered me almost as much, even though I couldn't have told you what the look meant.

"You reacted like Ed... Ted and me."

"What, am I invisible?" Bernardo asked.

I don't know what I would have said to Olaf's comment, since I didn't understand it, but Sergeant Hooper was at our side, and there were other things to talk about. Thank God.

"I guess we won't be finding out the location of the vampire's lair from this one," he said.

We all stood in the breath-stealing heat and too-bright sunshine and looked down at the body. "I guess not," I said.

I heard someone yell my name. "Blake, what the fuck are you doing here?" It was Shaw striding toward me through the crowd. Great.

"Did you find the missing officers?" I asked.

"Dead," Edward said. He wasn't looking at the body, but outward. He wasn't looking at anything in particular. It was as if he were scanning the horizon for more trouble. It made me look where he was looking, but all I saw was a thin line of small houses and desert beyond, stretching out and out to brown mountains that seemed just as dry and lifeless as everything else outside the city limits. Desert is desert unless you add water. I tried to picture it with the rains and the flowers of the cacti like rainbows scattered across all that brown, but I couldn't. I couldn't see the color that might have been, only the desolation that was, and that was the cop in me. You don't look for what might be in a situation; you take the truth of it and deal. Pretty flowers could wait for the rain, and us catching Vittorio.

I felt Shaw's anger almost like something touchable. It made me turn away from a hand that I hadn't even seen yet. He had reached for me, totally inappropriate, but I'd moved just out of reach without ever having seen his hand.

My moving like that, like magic, put my pulse into my throat, so when I spoke it sounded hoarse and not like me. "No touching."

"Everyone else but me, I guess," and he said it with as much nasty inflection as he could muster.

"Wow," Bernardo said, "what is your problem with Marshal Blake, or do you just not like girls? That the real reason the wife left?" He lowered his sunglasses enough to give me a wink as he faced Shaw. He'd done it on purpose to get Shaw away from me. If I hadn't thought he'd take it totally wrong, I would have hugged him.

Edward started moving away from Shaw's one-sided yelling match with Bernardo. Olaf trailed us like an oversized shadow. Hooper caught up to Edward and me. None of us said a word. It was like we all knew where we were going and what we'd find. I guess the three of them did.

The first body was SWAT, still in gear. He still had his helmet on, so the body was almost anonymous except for general height. On television they take the headgear off so you can see the pretty actors and watch them act, but in real life most of the men are covered pretty much head to toe. It meant that I couldn't see the wounds that were making the spreading pool of blood underneath him. It's supposed to be safer covered head to foot in gear. The man at our feet probably didn't think so anymore. Of course, he wasn't really thinking anything anymore. Dead is dead.

The moment I thought it, I wished I hadn't, because I felt it. The soul, the essence, whatever you want to call it, hovering. I didn't look up. I didn't want to try to see the invisible, because even to me there'd be nothing to see. I knew it was floating there. I could probably have traced its outline in the air, but there was nothing to truly see. Souls don't look like anything to me. Ghosts, those I can see sometimes, but not souls. Most of the time I didn't see the souls at the crime scene. I'd gotten better at shielding because souls aren't helpful. They just hang around for three days, or less, and then they go on. I don't know why some souls hang around longer than others. Most of the time really violent deaths send the soul packing quicker, as if they don't want to wait around for more trauma. Oddly, you will get more ghosts out of violent deaths. Fewer souls, more ghosts; I'd always thought that was interesting, but it did me no damn good as I stood there staring down at our fallen operator. His soul was watching us. It might even follow his body to the morgue before it moved on. I did not share this information with Hooper. He didn't need or, honestly, want to know.

It had been a while since a soul had been this loud psychically. But sometimes violence will be so loud psychically to the victim that it gives them oomph. It makes them so loud to my abilities that I can't not notice them.

I stood in the heat, sweat trickling down my neck, the equipment smothering in the beating weight of the sunlight. People always think you only see spirits at night, or twilight, or shit like that, but spirits don't care. They'll show up any time they can manage to find someone able to see them. Lucky fucking me.

"Not one of your men?" I made it a question. My voice sounded normal, as if I weren't working at not seeing someone's soul floating above us.

"No, it's Glick. He was one of the first psychics we hired."

"That might explain it," I said.

"Explain what?" Hooper asked.

Edward actually brushed my arm with his fingertips, like a warning. "Marshal Blake sometimes picks up impressions from the dead."

"I'm not a psychic like one you'd bring in to help solve a case through visions," I added, "but I feel the dead sometimes, all kinds of dead."

"You can feel Glick?"

"Something like that."

"Talking in your head?"

"No, the dead don't talk that clearly to me. Call it more emotions."

"What kind of emotions? Fear?"

"No," I said.

"Then what?"

I cursed myself for saying that first little comment out loud. I told part of the truth. "Puzzlement. He's puzzled."

"Puzzled about what?"

"About being dead," I said.

Hooper stared at the body. "You mean he's in there thinking?"

"No, not at all," I said.

Edward shook his head. "Tell him; what he's imagining is worse."

"Please don't share with anyone else that I can do this, but sometimes I can sense the souls of the freshly dead."

"Souls; you mean ghosts," Hooper said.

"No, I mean souls. Ghosts come later, and most of the time feel really different."

"So Glick's soul is floating around here?"

"It happens. He'll watch for a while, and then he'll go on."

"You mean to heaven?"

I said the only thing I could. "Yes, that's what I mean."

Olaf, who had been so quiet throughout, said, "Could it not go to hell?"

Shit.

Hooper glanced at Olaf, then back to me. "Well, Blake? Glick was Jewish; does that mean he burns?"

"Was he a good man?"

"Yes. He loved his wife and kids, and he was a good man."

"I believe that good is good, so you go to heaven."

He motioned off toward some scrubby bushes. "Matchett was a bastard. He cheated on his wife. He had a gambling problem and was about to get kicked off the team. Is he in hell?"

I wanted to say, Why ask me? How did I end up having a philosophical discussion over the bodies? "I'm Christian, but if God is truly a God of love, then why would he have a private torture chamber where he put people that he was supposed to love and forgive to be punished forever? If you actually read the Bible, the idea of hell like in the movies and most books was invented by a writer. Dante's Inferno was ripped off by the Church to give people something to be afraid of, to literally scare people into being Christian."

"So, you don't believe in hell."

Philosophically, no. Truthfully, once a Catholic, always a Catholic, but out loud, because it was the answer he needed while staring down at his dead friend, I said, "No, I don't." No lightning bolt struck me. Maybe if you lie for a good reason, you get a pass.