Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I kissed him on the cheek and left to find Bobby Lee. Him, I trusted to be in the line of fire. But it was more than that; I wasn’t sleeping with Bobby Lee. I didn’t love him. Sometimes love makes you selfish. Sometimes it makes you stupid. Sometimes it reminds you why you love your gun.

  34

  I WAS LOOKING through a pair of binoculars at a car parked at the far corner of the Circus of the Damned employee parking lot. Nathaniel was right, it was the same two men, but now they were in a large gold Impala dating to the 1960s, or some such. It was big, old, but in good shape. It was also very different from the shiny new blue Jeep that they’d been in before. They’d switched so the blond was driving. With the binocs I could see that he looked youngish, under forty, over twenty-five. He was clean shaven, wearing a black mock turtleneck and silver frame glasses. His eyes were pale, gray, or grayish blue.

  The dark-haired man had put a billed cap on and changed to a larger pair of sunglasses. His face was thin, clean shaven, with a good-sized mole at one corner of his mouth. What they used to call a beauty mark.

  I watched them sitting there and wondered why they weren’t at least reading a newspaper, or drinking coffee, something, anything.

  They’d done everything they were supposed to do, according to Kasey Krime Stoppers 101. They’d changed vehicles. They’d made small changes to their appearances. All this might have worked, if they weren’t sitting outside Circus of the Damned, doing nothing. No matter how clever you disguise yourself, very few people sit in a car in the middle of the morning and do nothing. Also the employee parking lot was almost empty before noon. Once darkness fell, they could probably have parked and not been noticed so quickly, but this time of morning there was no hiding.

  Bobby Lee was explaining all the Kasey Krime Stoppers tips and more to me. “If they hadn’t changed cars, and they hadn’t done anything to change their appearance, it might mean they didn’t care if you spotted them. Or even that they wanted you to spot them. But they’ve changed enough I think they really are trying to follow you.”

  I handed him back the binoculars. “Why are they following me?”

  “Usually, when people start following you around, you know why.”

  “I thought they might be Renfields working for Musette and company, but I don’t think Renfields would have taken the trouble to change their appearance like this. Most Renfields aren’t the brightest of people.”

  Bobby Lee grinned at me. “How can you be friends with so many bloodsuckers, and still be so damn disdainful of them?”

  I shrugged, and my shrug wasn’t graceful. It never had been. “Just lucky, I guess.”

  The smile stayed, but the eyes began to go serious. “What do you want to do about these two?”

  For a second, I thought he meant Asher and Jean-Claude, then I realized he meant the two yahoos in the Impala. The fact that even for a second I thought he meant something else said just how bad my concentration was. Concentration like that will get you killed in a fire fight.

  I took a deep breath, another, let them out slowly, trying to clear my head. I needed to be here, now, not worrying about my increasingly complex personal life. Here and now with men and women with guns, about to risk their lives because I asked them to do it. Maybe the two men in the car weren’t dangerous at all, but we couldn’t count on that. We had to treat them like they were. If we were wrong, no harm done. If we were right, well, we’d be as prepared as we could be.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling of impending disaster. I looked up at Bobby Lee’s tall frame. “I don’t want to get any of you guys killed.”

  “We’d kind of like to avoid that ourselves.”

  I shook my head. “No, that’s not what I mean.”

  He looked at me, face suddenly very serious. “What’s wrong, Anita?”

  I sighed. “I think I’m losing my nerve for this shit. Not for my own safety, but for everyone else’s. The last time the wererats helped me I got one of you killed, and another one cut up pretty badly.”

  “I healed up pretty good.” Claudia walked towards us all six feet six and serious muscle. Her long black hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail leaving her face clean and unadorned. I’d never seen her wear makeup, and maybe because I’d never seen her in any, she didn’t need it.

  She wore a navy blue sports bra and a pair of dark blue jeans. She usually wore sports bras, I think because she had trouble finding shirts that fit over the spectacular spread of her shoulders and chest. She was a serious weight lifter, but not to that point where you’d ever mistake her for masculine. No, Claudia was definitely all girl.

  The last time I’d seen her she’d had her arm damn near shot off. There was a faint tracery of scars on her right shoulder, pale pink and white. Silver shot will scar even a shape-shifter. There’d even been a faint possibility that the silver could have lost her the use of her arm. But the right arm looked as whole and muscular as the left.

  “You look great, how’s the arm?” I asked, smiling. One of my favorite things about hanging with the monsters is the healing. Straight humans seemed to get killed on me a lot, monsters survived. Let’s hear it for the monsters.

  Claudia flexed the arm, and muscles rippled under her skin. It was downright impressive. I lift weights, but not like that. “Not all the way back to full strength. I still can’t curl more than one hundred and forty pounds with it.”

  I could bench-press my own body weight, plus a few pounds, and until now I’d been pretty impressed with doing reps with forty pounds for curls. Suddenly I felt inadequate.

  I wanted to ask her if she was okay with putting her life, and that impressive body, on the line for me again, but I didn’t. Some questions you just don’t ask. Not out loud.

  I stood there pressed against the black-mirrored glass that, from the outside, looked like part of the wall. I’d always wondered how someone was usually there to meet me at the back door. Now I knew—they had a lookout. We could have watched the bad guys all day, and they’d never have seen us.

  It was part of a narrow loft area up above the main part of the Circus of the Damned, but this one small nook was equipped with binocs, comfortable chairs, and a little table. The rest of the loft area was mostly cables, wires, stored equipment, like the backstage areas at a theater. Most of the ceiling of the Circus was open to girders and beams like the warehouse it originally was, but now that I knew the loft was here, I realized that there was a narrow band of enclosed space that went around the entire top of the building. I’d asked if there were other hidden lookouts, and gotten the answer of course. Ask an obvious question, and you get the obvious answer.

  “Claudia’s going to drive one of the cars for our little plan,” Bobby Lee said.

  “I thought the plan was for someone who looked harmless and normal to drive both cars.”

  Claudia gave me a flat unfriendly look.

  “No offense, but you look anything but ordinary.”

  “She’ll throw a shirt on over the muscles, take out the ponytail, and look like a girl,” Bobby Lee said.

  I looked at him and her. She was taller than he was, hell she was as broad through the shoulders as he was, and she had more bulk. “You know Bobby-boy if I had to choose between arm-wrestling you, or Claudia, I’d pick you.”

  He blinked at me, totally not getting it.

  Claudia got it. “You’re wasting your breath, Anita. No matter how much I work out, I’m still a girl to even the best of them.”

  Bobby Lee was looking from one to the other of us. “What are you two talking about?”

  I tried being very clear, using small words. “Claudia is more muscled and taller than most of the other wererats you have here today. Why are you putting her out in the first car to look normal and harmless? She looks anything but harmless.”

  He blinked at me, frowning. “You won’t see the muscles under the shirt.”

  “She’s six-freaking-feet and six-fucking-inches tall, with a pair of shoulders as broad as yours
. You’re not going to hide that under a shirt.”

  “I’m aware of that, Anita.”

  “Then why put her out in front to look harmless?”

  Bobby Lee tried to wrap his mind around it, but in the end he was a man that had spent most of his life being muscle—smart muscle, but still muscle. “She’s the only girl we have here today, except you, and they’d recognize you.”

  “Are you really telling me that the bad guys would feel less threatened by Claudia than by a short, less-powerfully built man?”

  That was clear enough that Bobby Lee finally got it. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, smiled, and gave a small laugh. “I see your point, but truthfully, yeah, they’ll be less intimidated. Men just don’t see women as a threat, no matter how big they are, and all men are suspect no matter how small.”

  I shook my head. “Why, because we have breasts and you don’t?”

  “Give it up, Anita,” Claudia said, “just give it up. They’re men, they can’t help it.”

  Since I wasn’t a man, I took Bobby Lee’s word that the bad guys would panic less if one of the people involved in our mock accident was a woman. I had to admit that even I was less physically afraid of another woman, but it seemed wrong somehow. Claudia threw a man’s pale blue shirt over her jeans and buttoned it up, even the sleeves. She left enough buttons undone in front to flash some cleavage, then she took the tie out of her hair. She shook her hair out, and it fell around her face, over her shoulders, in a slick, brunette flood. The hair softened the strong lines of her face, and I suddenly had a glimpse of what she might look like if she put any effort into being a traditional girl. Spectacular was the word that came to mind.

  Bobby Lee watched the hair cascade with nearly openmouthed attention. I think I could have shot him twice before he reacted. Shit. I’d thought better of him than that.

  Claudia met my eyes and crooked one shapely eyebrow. It said it all. We had one of those moments of perfect understanding between girls, and I think that for her, like for me, there weren’t that many of them. We both spent far too much time hanging out with the men. But no matter how many times you saved their lives, and they saved yours, no matter how much you could bench-press, no matter how tall, or strong, or competent—you were still a girl. And the fact that you were a girl overshadowed everything else for most men. It wasn’t good or bad, it just was. A woman will forget that a man is male, if they are good enough friends, but men rarely forget that a woman is feminine. Most of the time it bugged the crap out of me, but today we’d use it against the bad guys, because they’d see all that hair, those breasts, and they’d underestimate her, because she was a girl.

  35

  THEY’D ONLY BEEN following me for one day, as far as I knew, so why such determination to find out why? One: It’s usually better to know than not to know when people are following you, and two: I was in a truly foul mood.

  I had no idea what to do about Asher. I didn’t want to lose him, and now I didn’t trust the feeling. In fact I was pretty certain it was really vampire mind tricks. Maybe I’d never really loved him. Maybe that had always been a lie. The logical part of me knew I was kidding myself on that one, but the scared part was happy with the theory. The thing that bothered me the most was I was no longer certain which was the brave thing to do. Was it brave and right to dump Asher for his treachery? Or was he right, and he’d just done what I asked him to do? Was I wrong? And, if I was wrong about this, how many other things had I been wrong about, unfair about? I was losing my sense of rightness about so many things. Without my sense of holier-than-thou anger, I felt shaky and unreal. I didn’t feel like me anymore.

  What if I got Claudia killed, the way I’d gotten her friend Igor killed a few months back? Hell, what if I got Bobby Lee killed like his friend, Cris? I’d killed nearly fifty percent of any wererats that Rafael, their king, had loaned me. No one complained about it, but today, the thought of more losses seemed completely unacceptable.

  If I wasn’t willing to let people risk their lives, then this plan wouldn’t work. We needed four vehicles to block four roads, and make sure there was no place for the bad guys to go. We’d cut off all escape routes and reason with them. That meant a minimum of four people in danger. More, since Bobby Lee wanted shooters hidden among the few cars in the parking lot. The shooters would move out of the Circus when the bad guys were busy driving around trying to figure a way out of the parking lot. Or, that was the plan.

  It was a good plan, unless the bad guys pulled out guns and started shooting. Then we’d have to shoot back, and they might get killed, and I’d be no better off. I still wouldn’t know shit, and I might have gotten some more of Rafael’s people dead.

  “You alright, Anita?” Bobby Lee asked.

  I was rubbing fingertips against my temples and shaking my head. “No, I’m not. I’m really not okay with this.”

  “With what?”

  “This, all of it.” Even as I said it, I saw Claudia driving down the back road, and Fredo coming up the other road. I’d made sure I knew his name. You shouldn’t ask people to die for you if you don’t at least know their name. He was a few inches under six feet, a slender dark man, with large graceful hands, wearing more knives than anyone I’d met in a long time. Bobby Lee said that both Fredo and Claudia could make the accident look real, they were both drivers. He said drivers like it should have been in capital letters. I’d asked to be one of the drivers, and I’d been informed that I didn’t know how to DRIVE, and I couldn’t argue with that. But right that moment, waiting and watching other people take the risks for me was harder than risking myself.

  I trusted Bobby Lee’s judgment. I really did. What I didn’t trust was the bad guys. They were bad guys, so you couldn’t trust them to be anything but unpredictable and dangerous.

  I watched the two cars get closer, and I almost yelled, don’t, don’t do it! But I wanted to know who was following me, and more than that, if I said stop, if my nerve failed here on something so mundane, what good would I be? The trouble was, my nerve had failed. I kept my mouth shut, but I felt like the only thing keeping my pulse in my mouth was the tight line of my lips.

  I prayed, Dear God, don’t let anyone get hurt. Then a thought occurred to me, seconds before the fender bender. If Bobby Lee and company could stage this, they could probably have followed the men, trailed them back to wherever. Following just hadn’t occurred to me, only confrontation. Shit.

  The cars collided; it did look real, accidental. Claudia got out, all tall and feminine even from a distance. Fredo got out, yelling, waving his arms around.

  The bad guys started their car and went for the far entrance of the parking lot, farther down the street that had just been blocked off. They must have smelled a . . . rat.

  The Impala stopped before they’d turned completely onto the road, which meant they’d spotted the third car tucked in beside the Circus, blocking the alley between the Circus and the building next door.

  Bobby Lee led the way to the stairs, and we clattered down, trusting that the fourth vehicle, a truck, had blocked the far alley where the loading dock was located. We’d both sacrificed being one of the first shooters into the parking lot so we could watch the plan unfold.

  By the time we hit the lot, gunmen had sprung up among the few parked cars, like mushrooms after a rainstorm. I felt almost silly drawing my gun and joining the half circle. Claudia, Fredo, and the two other drivers were the other half of the circle, coming in from the other side.

  It wasn’t a perfect circle, a perfect circle would have meant we were firing at each other, so the circle was sort of metaphoric, but the effect was perfect.

  The Impala sat there in our circle of guns, engine on, and no weapons in sight, yet. The blond had his hands very firmly on the top of the steering wheel. It was the dark-haired one in his billed cap who had his hands out of sight.

  There was a lot of shouting on our side, about hands up, and don’t you fucking move. They hadn’t moved
, but the engine was still running, and the one guy’s hands were still out of sight. I kept my gun pointed one-handed, but raised a hand. I don’t know if anyone else saw it, or understood what I wanted, but Bobby Lee did. He held up his hand in almost the same gesture, and the yelling quieted. It was suddenly silent, except for the thrum of the car engine.

  I spoke into that silence, making sure my voice carried, “Turn off the car.”

  The one in the billed cap said something that I couldn’t hear through the windows. The blond very slowly lowered one hand, and the engine died. The ticking of the engine was very loud in the stillness.

  Billed-cap man was obviously unhappy. Even with sunglasses covering his face, it showed in the line of his mouth. His hands were still hidden. The blond had put his hand back on the steering wheel.

  “Hands where we can see them,” I said. “Now.”

  The blond’s hands seemed to vibrate on the steering wheel, as if he would have put his hands where I could see them if they weren’t already there. He said something to his companion, and bill-cap shook his head.

  I lowered my gun, took a deep breath, held it, aimed, let the breath out slow and careful as I squeezed the trigger. The gunshot was loud in the stillness, and it took a moment for me to be able to hear the air hissing out of the tire. I aimed my gun back up at the blond’s window.

  His eyes flashed wide. He was speaking fast and franticly to his friend.

  “Bobby Lee,” I said, “have someone on that side of the car press the barrel of their gun against the passenger side window.”

  “You want them to shoot?”

  “Not yet, and if they do have to shoot I don’t want to chance hitting the blond with the same bullet.” I looked up at him. “Aim accordingly.”