Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “The police think that they might have been forced into another car, maybe with a weapon,” Steve said.

  She was shaking her head over and over. “I can’t bear the thought of someone pointing a gun at them. I just can’t think who would have done such a thing.”

  He patted her shoulder. “Barb, maybe you better wait out in the other room, while I finish talking to Ms. Blake, here.”

  She was still shaking her head. “No, no, she’s going to help us. She’s going to bring Stevie back, and he can tell us who did this to him and to Cathy, and it’ll be all better. We need to know who could do such a horrible thing.” She looked up at me, and her eyes cleared for a moment. “Stevie and Cathy would not have gotten into a car with strangers. We’d talked about it. He knew that if someone pointed a gun at him and tried to force him into a car that they wouldn’t let him live. We’ve talked about that since he was a little boy.” Her breath caught, but she didn’t cry, not yet. “I know he would have done what I’d told him to do. He would have grabbed Cathy and run into the woods. The car was parked right next to the woods. They could have hidden in there. It had to be someone he knew, or she knew. It had to be someone we know, Ms. Blake,” she said, changing her tune from a minute ago. “Our beautiful boy was taken away by one of the people that have been over to our house, eating our food, giving us flowers. Someone we know is a monster and we didn’t know it.” There, that was the true horror. Not just that her son and his girlfriend had been murdered, but the murderer had to be someone Barbara and Steve Brown knew.

  What must it be like to stare into the faces of your friends, your children’s friends, and wonder, was it you? Or you? Which one of you did it?

  I couldn’t even argue with her, because you are more than 80 percent more likely to be killed by someone you know than by a stranger. An ugly statistic, but true.

  “You say ‘monster.’ Do you mean just that they could kill your son, or something about how it was done?” Maybe it had been something supernatural. Maybe there was more than one reason they’d come to me. I could hope there was something I could do for them.

  She put her hands over her face and started to cry, not quietly either.

  Steve Brown spoke over her sobs, as if he’d heard them before. “What was done to them, Ms. Blake, what was done to them was monstrous.” He didn’t look like a man who’d had to say monstrous a lot in his life. I didn’t think it was a word he’d chosen lightly.

  Barbara Brown was rocking back and forth, back and forth, while she wept. Her sobs must have been as loud as I thought they were, because the phone on my desk rang.

  I jumped, but got it. It was Mary, our very good secretary. “Is everything alright?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you need me to pretend you have another client?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” I said.

  “Or sooner if it gets louder?” Mary asked.

  “Yes, that would be fine.” I hung up, promising myself to send Mary flowers, or chocolates, or both.

  Steve Brown was trying to calm his wife. She’d stopped rocking and was leaning in against him. The sobs had quieted, a little. When her blue eyes turned to me again, they contained that promise of violence again. If she knew who had done it, I wasn’t sure what she’d do to them. Looking into her eyes, I wasn’t at all certain that she’d wait for a judge and jury.

  She spoke very fast, her words almost sliding into one another, “They raped Cathy, raped her, and they mutilated Stevie, they cut . . .” She just stopped talking, her hands pressed over her mouth, eyes impossibly wide. There wasn’t a lot of sanity left in that look.

  I kept my eyes on her, while I asked Steve Brown, “So someone gave them a lift after they had car trouble, and then . . .”

  “They found them in a shed in the woods,” he said, “and they’d raped them both.” He said in such a quiet voice, no change of inflection, as if he felt nothing when he said it, and maybe he didn’t, not up where he was aware of it anyway. He’d had to push his pain underground, as far as he could shove it, because Barbara’s pain was more important than his, more all-consuming.

  “They cut him . . .” He almost broke then, but he rallied, and I watched him fight his face to hold it all together. “They castrated him.” One of his eyes gave an involuntary flutter. “While he was still alive.” His voice had gotten softer.

  “The police never found it,” she said, and her voice was shrill, “they can’t find it. The monsters took a piece of him away, and the police can’t find it. We had to bury him without it. They took it, and we couldn’t get it back for him.” Her voice was growing louder and louder, not exactly a scream, but not far from it. The shrill edge of hysteria was in full cry. “They didn’t take anything from Cathy. Why didn’t they cut her up? Why just Stevie? Why that? Why did they take that? Why that?”

  If I’d had a dart gun full of Valium, I’d have used it. But I didn’t. It was awful, horrible, but I couldn’t fix this for them, and I really didn’t need another nightmare to add to my list. I couldn’t help them. It was a human monster, and I wasn’t an expert on that kind of monster.

  I finally went with that. “Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Brown, Barbara!” I yelled it, and it didn’t phase her. She was gone, gone into her pain, her sorrow, her loss. I was yelling, but there was no one home to hear me.

  Mary opened the door and said something twice before I could hear it over Mrs. Brown’s voice. “Your next client is here, Anita. You’ve gone fifteen minutes over already.” Mary was looking at me, but her eyes were a little wide. She’d been a secretary and law clerk once for a criminal attorney, so she’d seen grieving and hysterical clients before, but either this was a new variety, or Mary didn’t like it any better than I did.

  “I’ll use one of the other offices, Mr. Brown. I’ll give you and your wife a few minutes to collect yourselves.”

  Barbara Brown ran to me. “Please, Ms. Blake, please, please help us.” She grabbed the front of my jacket. Her hand brushed the butt of my gun, and that made her pause, but only for a second. Then she wadded her hands tight in the cloth of my jacket. If she’d been a man, she might have jerked me into her, but she didn’t. She just clung to me, and begged, “Please, Steve show her the check.”

  “Barbara, she’s not going to help us.”

  She dug her hands tighter into my jacket, making fists of the cloth. It was a girl’s jacket, not a man’s, and there just wasn’t enough material to treat it that roughly. It pulled my shoulders forward and was limiting my mobility, and she’d made it impossible for me to go for my gun. I didn’t believe she was going to get so out of hand that I’d need the gun, but it was standard policy for me. No one got to compromise my gun, no one. The trouble was, I couldn’t figure a way to get free of her without hurting her physically. And I didn’t want to do that.

  “Steve, show her the check.” She was so close to me, that it was strangely intimate, close enough to kiss, too close to fight.

  “Show me whatever she wants me to see, Mr. Brown,” I kept my voice calm, no anger, no hint of what I was thinking, which was get her the fuck off me. I wasn’t unsympathetic, but a stranger had breached my personal space, and I never liked that.

  His face was all apology as he drew something out of the inner breast pocket of his suit coat. It was one of those oversized checks, a cashier’s check. He held it up so I could see it clearly. The check was for a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, payable to cash.

  “Take the check, Ms. Blake, we’ll sign it over to you, now, today. Right now.”

  I shook my head and put my hands gently over hers, I was going to have to get her off me. “I can’t take your money, Mrs. Brown.” I tried to pry her hands away, but she gripped them tighter. The jacket was going to be permanently wrinkled.

  “It’s our life savings, but we could refiance the house. We could get you more.” Her eyes were so bright right next to mine. Again that unnatural brightness, and I wondered if she was on something, something pr
escribed. If it was prescribed, then it was the wrong medication.

  I couldn’t get her hands off of me without hurting her, and I still wasn’t willing to do that. I patted her hands, I’d try to be friendly. “It isn’t a matter of money, Mrs. Brown. If I could raise your son and find out who did this, I would. Honest to God, I would, but it doesn’t work like that.”

  Nathaniel was at the door. He gave me a look, like is there anything I can do? I couldn’t think of anything, so I gave a small shake of my head.

  Mary must have gone for Bert, because he appeared in the doorway with her behind him. “Mrs. Brown, you need to let Anita go. I told you before you had the meeting how it would go.” His voice was even, almost singsong, as if he’d done this before. He hadn’t done it much for me, but not everyone had my charm and ability to scare people. Usually, the gun made most clients nervous, but Barbara Brown didn’t give a fuck about my gun.

  She glanced at Bert, but then turned immediately back to me, her hands still strangling my jacket. “You can’t say no, Ms. Blake, if you say no, then it’s over, and it can’t be over.” She began to give me a little shake with every other word. “And it,” shake, “can’t be,” shake, “over.” Shake.

  Mother of God, how do I help her, and how do I get her off me without making it all worse. We had grief counselors on file, but I doubted she’d go to one. She wasn’t at that therapy-will-be-helpful stage. She was at that I’m-going-crazy stage.

  I stopped trying to pry her off me, but I was tired of being shaken. I decided for truth. “A murdered zombie kills its killer.”

  “I want them dead,” she almost screamed it, and tightened her grip so that she spit in my face, just a little, accidentally.

  “The zombie cuts a path of destruction through everything and everyone in its way until it kills its killer. I’ve seen zombies kill innocent bystanders by accident.”

  “Stevie wouldn’t do that,” she said, and her face was so close to mine I wanted to draw my face back to focus on her, but she had too much of my jacket in her hands, so that I was effectively trapped. “Stevie was such a gentle person. He’d never hurt anyone. He’d just tell us who did this awful thing.”

  “Mrs. Brown, Barbara,” I said, and she looked at me, there was a hint of sanity in there somewhere. “It won’t be Stevie, Barbara. It will be the walking dead. He won’t be your son, he’ll just be an animated corpse.”

  She lowered her face, so that I was looking down at the top of her blond head. Her shoulders slumped, and I thought I’d gotten through to her.

  Bert said, “Mrs. Brown, if you’d come into my office for a few minutes, so we can all calm down, so we can all get on with our day.”

  I think it was the “get on with our day.” She stiffened, and I had a second to decide whether I was willing to really hurt her, or not. I hesitated, and that was enough. She had me held too close with the jacket, I couldn’t move back, and I couldn’t raise a hand until she let me go. She scratched my face. But to do it she let go with one hand. I raised the freed arm up, and blocked her next attempt to scratch my eyes out. She let go with the other arm, but I grabbed her wrist and stepped away, pulling on the wrist at the same time. And used her own momentum to turn her around, and she ended up on her knees with one of her arms behind her back and my other arm across her shoulders. I didn’t make it a true choke hold, because I was hoping that someone might drag her off me before it got that far.

  My face was burning sharply, from just below my left eye to mid-cheek. Even before I felt the first trickle, I knew it was going to bleed, it just had that feel to it.

  She was screaming, loud, ragged screams.

  Steve Brown was closest to us, and he said, “You’re hurting her.”

  “I’m hurting her,” I said, “she tried to take out my eye.”

  I didn’t have as good a hold on her as I should have, I was still trying to be nice to the poor bereaved crazy woman. She twisted in my grip and dug her nails across my hand. I tucked my elbow tight across her throat and pulled up sharp on her arm behind her back. She cried out, but it stopped abruptly because I was applying pressure to her neck. I knew how to do a choke hold so that all it did was make you pass out. I knew not to crush the Adam’s apple or anything stupid. And I admit I was pissed by this point, but Mr. Brown shouldn’t have done what he did.

  He yelled, “Let her go!”

  I said, calmly, I thought, “If you can’t control her, I will.”

  She struggled, and I tucked my head down tight to her. Then two things happened at once: Nathaniel said, “Anita look out,” and Mary screamed. I looked up, in time to see Steve Brown hit me in the face.

  It rocked my head back and made reality shift just a little to the side, like a televison that isn’t quite in focus. It didn’t really hurt immediately, not like the scratches at all. You can usually judge how bad an injury is by how long it takes for you to feel the pain. Quick pain, small to medium injury; long pain, not good.

  It was a good hit, nice and solid. I think he’d expected me to go down, because he had this surprised look on his face. Or maybe he hadn’t ever hit a woman that hard before, or maybe at all. We had one of those long seconds that seem to last forever, but are really just the blink of an eye, to look at each other over his wife’s head.

  I saw his lips move, but couldn’t hear what he said. The only sound was a high, white, buzzing, static, and the taste of blood in my mouth. It didn’t matter that it was my own blood. It only mattered that it was blood, and I was angry.

  I had a moment, a heartbeat, where I smelled Barbara Brown’s skin underneath the sweetness of her perfume. A moment where I could smell her skin, salty, sick, almost, sick with her grief like some poison coming out of her skin. She was wounded, she was hurt, I could end that suffering. I tucked myself tight in against her body, tight enough that her husband couldn’t hit me without risking her. I still couldn’t hear his voice, but I could hear something else. I could hear her heartbeat. So loud, so very loud. It was a thick, meaty sound, not like that fragile tinny sound you get through a stethoscope. This was what a heart would sound like, if you could put your ear inside someone’s chest. This was what someone’s life sounded like, beating inside their body, beating fast and faster. Barbara Brown had smelled like food before, but now that first flush of adrenaline kicked through her system. Some part of her that she couldn’t even name knew something was wrong. Knew that danger was very, very close.

  I must have closed my eyes, because I felt him looming over me. I opened my eyes to see Steve Brown about to touch me. I think he was going for my hair to pull me off his wife. But I saw the hand, and I grabbed it, just stopped it with my hand. My hand looked small around his bigger one, but my arm was solid, and when he tried to pull away, he couldn’t do it.

  I still had his wife on her knees with my other hand around her wrist and her arm up almost to her shoulders. Distantly, I thought, if I kept pulling I’d dislocate her shoulder. But another part of me, which felt much closer, thought, that’s alright, we’d have to pull her apart to eat her anyway. True, if we were going to eat her. Were we?

  I’d always thought that the beast was a thing of passion, because passionate emotions could bring it on. This wasn’t passionate, this was passionless. There was no right or wrong in my head. No sympathy, no sense that these two people were fellow human beings, and it would be wrong to hurt them. That wasn’t even in my head. They’d hurt me, and I was hungry, and she smelled so good, and so bad at the same time. She smelled of sickness, and I realized it was drugs. I could smell them in her sweat—acrid, bitter.

  I let her go so abruptly she fell forward on the carpet, but I kept my hand on Steve Brown, and I drew him past his wife, because he had bent to see to her, and I’d pulled him off balance. He smelled of fear and anger, but nothing else. He was clean.

  He stumbled, and I put a hand in his shirt, while the other used his arm to bring him in closer. I could hear his heart now, thudding, thudding, so thick, so m
eaty, so . . . so good.

  I felt movement behind me, and I whirled, taking Steve Brown with me, tripping him without thinking about it, so that he was on the ground at my feet, with me still gripping his arm. Food should be on the ground.

  Nathaniel was there, touching my face. I jerked back, as if he’d hit me, but with that one touch sound roared back into my head. A woman was screaming. Mary was asking, “Should I call the police?”

  “No,” Bert was saying, “no, we can handle this.”

  I doubted that. But the moment I thought that, I looked down at Mr. Brown. He was staring up at me, eyes wide, and he was afraid. I let him go as if his skin burned mine. I backed up, until I bumped into Nathaniel. I grabbed for his hand without looking, and clung to it. Just touching him helped me think. Usually all touching Nathaniel made me think about was sex or food, but today, it helped me remember that I was human and what that meant.

  “Help me,” I whispered.

  “Everybody out,” he said.

  Everyone stared at him.

  I screamed it, “Out, get out, all of you out!” I started to rush at them, but Nathaniel caught me around the waist, and I let him pick me up. I fought not to struggle. But I kept screaming, “Get them out! Get them out!”

  Steve Brown grabbed his wife’s arm and started dragging her toward the door. Bert finally moved, taking her other arm, and helping. He was looking at me as if he’d never seen me before, and maybe he hadn’t. Bert had a gift for only seeing what he wanted to see.

  Mary’s pale face was the last thing I saw before the door shut, and the words, get them out, changed to a wordless, formless scream. One ragged scream after another, until my throat went raw and I sagged in Nathaniel’s arms.

  Before I’d only felt the beast like it was some huge pet that rubbed itself against my body and my mind, but today, I knew that that wasn’t the most dangerous part of the beast. The most dangerous part was that it was an animal, and true animals have absolutely no sense of right and wrong. I screamed, because to stop and do anything else was to risk that mind coming back up through me, and I wasn’t sure I could stop it again.