“Shit,” Wilkes said.
“Look at that poor little girl, Billy Wilkes,” Millie said. “You going to take her before Judge Henry. What do you think he’s going to do to the rest of these hooligans? He’s got a daughter about her age.”
“Shit,” Wilkes said again with more force. “Let’s get everybody down to the hospital. We’ll sort it out there.”
“Ambulance is on its way,” Maiden said.
“One won’t be enough,” Wilkes said.
Maiden laughed low and deep. “There aren’t enough ambulances in the county for this many bodies.”
“There would have been enough for three,” Wilkes said.
I tensed in Shang-Da’s arms. He tightened around me, one hand pressed against the side of my head firmly enough that raising up would have hurt my face. I let the breath ease out of my body and concentrated on being still, but I’d remember what Wilkes had said. We’d see who got the ambulance ride next time.
8
IT TOOK ONE ambulance, one pickup truck, two squad cars, Santa’s sleigh, and me riding in the van for everyone to get to the hospital. Okay, not Santa’s sleigh, but we did look like a parade. Nearly six hours later, we were back in Myerton in the only interrogation room they had. I’d been the only one of the injured that got to leave the hospital.
The guy that Jason had thrown into the truck might have permanent spine damage. They’d know when the swelling went down. Two of the three that Shang-Da had knocked unconscious had regained consciousness. They had concussions but would recover. The third was still out for the count, and the doctors were talking about swelling of the brain and skull fractures. Shang-Da had also done the bad guy with the compound fracture. I only had Mel to my credit, but he was in worse shape than the compound fracture. It takes a hell of a lot of work to heal a joint break. Sometimes you never recover full use of the limb. I felt sort of bad about that, but he had pulled the knife.
Belisarius had been a busy little lawyer. He’d not only arranged bail for Richard, but he’d also been representing us for the last hour or so. Richard was a free man, temporarily. If Belisarius could keep the rest of us out of jail, he was worth the money.
Wilkes didn’t want to arrest us, but he wanted to take our fingerprints. I didn’t have a problem with that until Shang-Da did. He really didn’t want his prints taken, which made both Wilkes and me suspicious. But if Shang-Da wouldn’t do it, then none of us would. I told Wilkes if he wanted our prints, he had to charge us with something. He seemed reluctant to do that.
Maybe it was because I’d used my one phone call to contact a cop I knew, who in turn had contacted an FBI agent I knew. Having a call from the feds made Wilkes jumpy as hell. The bad guys had ambushed us across from the police station. You didn’t do a planned attack right next door to the cops unless you were pretty sure they wouldn’t spoil the fun. The bad guys had known the police wouldn’t help us. They’d said as much during the fight, challenging Millie to call Wilkes, like it wouldn’t help. But Wilkes’s reaction to the call from the feds sort of clinched it for me. Policemen are very territorial. No federal laws had been broken. The FBI had no business in a simple assault case. Wilkes should have been pissed, and he wasn’t. Oh, he made noises like he was angry, and he was, but he should have raised hell, and he didn’t. His reaction to everything was just a little bit off—a little bit less convincing than it should have been.
I was betting he was dirty. I just couldn’t prove it yet. Of course, it wasn’t my job to prove it. I’d come down here to get Richard out of jail, and we’d done that.
Wilkes finally asked to speak with me alone. Belisarius didn’t like it, but he left with the others. I sat at the little table and looked at Wilkes.
It was the cleanest interrogation room I’d ever been in. The table was pale pine and looked handmade. The walls were white and clean. Even the linoleum on the floor was hospital bright. I didn’t think Myerton got a lot of use for the room. It’d probably started life as a storage closet. It had been almost too small to hold five of us, but there was room for two.
Wilkes pulled a chair out and sat across from me. He clasped his hands in front of him and looked at me. There was a band around his head where the hair had been pressed flat from the hat. There was a plain gold wedding band on his left hand and one of those watches that joggers use, big and black and utilitarian. Since I had the lady’s version of the same watch on my left wrist, it was hard to criticize.
“What?” I said. “You going to give me the silent treatment until I scream for mercy?”
He gave a very small smile. “Made some phone calls about you, Blake. There’s a lot of talk that you’ll bend the law if you need to. That maybe you’ve murdered people.”
I just looked at him. I could feel my face thinning out, blanking. Once upon a time, every emotion I’d felt had played along my face, but that was a while ago. I’d perfected my blank cop stare, and it showed nothing.
“Is there a point to this conversation?” I asked.
The smile this time was bigger. “I just like to know who I’m dealing with, Blake, that’s all.”
“Good to be thorough,” I said.
He nodded. “I got calls from a Saint Louis cop, a fed, and a state cop. The state cop says you’re a pain in the ass and will bend the law six ways to Sunday.”
“Bet that was Freemount,” I said. “She’s still pissed about a case we worked together.”
He nodded, smiling pleasantly. “The fed sort of hinted that if you were detained, he might find a reason to have the local federal office to come take a look around.”
I smiled. “Bet you really enjoyed that.”
His brown eyes went hard and dark. “I don’t want the feebies down here messing in my pond.”
“I’ll bet you don’t, Wilkes.”
His face tightened, letting me see just how angry he was. “What the fuck do you care?”
I leaned across the table on my elbows. “You should be more careful who you do a frame-up job on, Wilkes.”
“He’s a fucking junior high science teacher. How was I supposed to know he was shacking up with the fucking Executioner?”
“We’re not shacking up,” I said automatically. I sat back in my seat. “What do you want, Wilkes? Why the private talk?”
He ran his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, and for the first time, I realized how nervous he was. He was scared. Why? What the hell was happening in this tiny town?
“If the rape charges disappear, Zeeman is free to leave town. You and everybody go with him. No harm, no foul.”
A sport’s metaphor—ooh, I was all a-tingle. “I didn’t come down here to sniff around your mess, Wilkes. I’m not a cop. I came down here to get Richard out of trouble.”
“He’s out of trouble if he leaves.”
“I’m not his keeper, Wilkes. I can’t promise what Richard will do.”
“Why does a schoolteacher have bodyguards?” Wilkes asked.
I shrugged. “Why do you want the schoolteacher out of the way bad enough to frame him for rape?”
“We’ve all got our secrets, Blake. You make sure he leaves town and takes his assassins with him, and we can all keep our secrets.”
I looked at my hands spread on the smooth tabletop. I looked back up, met his eyes. “I’ll talk to Richard, see what I can do. But I can’t promise anything until after I’ve talked to him.”
“Make him listen, Blake. Zeeman is so clean he squeaks, but you and I know the score.”
I shook my head. “Yeah, I know the score, and I know what people say about me.” I stood up.
He stood up. We looked at each other.
“I don’t always pay attention to the letter of the law, that’s true. One of the reasons Richard and I aren’t dating anymore is that he is so fucking squeaking clean it makes my teeth hurt. But we have one thing in common.”
“What’s that?” Wilkes asked.
“Push us, and we push back. Richard usually for moral
grounds, because it’s the right thing to do. Me, because I am just that unpleasant.”
“Unpleasant,” Wilkes said. “Mel Cooper may never walk right again or have the full use of his left arm.”
“He shouldn’t have pulled a knife on me,” I said.
“If there hadn’t been witnesses, would you have killed him?”
I smiled, and even to me, it felt like a strange smile, not humorous, unpleasant maybe. “I’ll talk to Richard. Hopefully, we’ll be out of your hair before tomorrow night.”
“I wasn’t always a small-town cop, Blake. Don’t let the surroundings fool you. I will not let you and your people fuck with me.”
“Funny,” I said. “I was thinking the very same thing.”
“Well,” Wilkes said, “we know where we stand.”
“I guess we do,” I said.
“I hope come dark tomorrow you and your friends are on your way out of town.”
I stared into his brown eyes. I’d looked into scarier eyes, blanker, more dead. He didn’t have the eyes of a professional killer. He didn’t even have good cop eyes. I could see the fear shiny and almost panicked around the edges. No, I’d seen scarier eyes. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill me if he got the chance. Make even a good man scared enough, and you never know what he’ll do. Make a bad man scared, and you are in trouble. Wilkes probably hadn’t killed anybody yet or they wouldn’t have framed Richard for rape. They’d have framed him for murder or just killed him. So Wilkes hadn’t slid completely down into the abyss. But once you embrace the screaming darkness, eventually, you kill. Maybe Wilkes didn’t know that yet, but if we pushed hard enough, he’d figure it out.
9
BY THE TIME I got back to the cabins, it was after seven. It was August, so it was still daylight, but you could tell it was late. There was a softness to the light, a tiredness to the heat as if the day itself was eager for night. Or maybe it was just me that was tired.
My face hurt. At least I hadn’t had to have stitches in my mouth. The EMS guy on the ambulance had said I’d need a couple of stitches. When I got to the hospital, the doctor said I didn’t. A very bright spot for me. I’m sort of phobic about needles. But I’ve taken stitches with no painkiller and that ain’t fun, either.
Jamil was standing in front of the cabins. He’d changed into black jeans and a T-shirt with a smiley face on it. The T-shirt was cut across the middle so his abs showed. Though my dance card was full of attractive men, Jamil did have one of the nicest stomachs I’d ever seen. The muscles stood out under the tight smoothness of his skin like shingles on a roof. It didn’t even look real. Somehow, I didn’t think you needed cobblestone abs to be a good bodyguard. But hey, everyone needs a hobby.
“I’m sorry I missed the fun,” he said. He touched my bruised lip gently. It still made me wince. “I’m surprised you let anyone mark you.”
“She did it on purpose,” Shang-Da said.
Jamil looked at him.
“Anita pretended to faint,” Jason said. “She looked really pitiful.”
Jamil looked back at me.
I shrugged. “I didn’t let someone kick me in the face on purpose. But once I was down, I did play up how hurt I was. This way, we could press our own assault charges.”
“I didn’t think you lied that well,” Jamil said.
“Live and learn,” I said. “Where’s Richard? I need to talk to him.”
Jamil glanced behind him at one of the cabins, then back to me. There was a look on his face that I couldn’t read. “He’s cleaning up. He’s been in the same clothes for two days.”
I stared at his so-careful face, trying to figure out what he wasn’t telling me. “What’s going on, Jamil?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Don’t give me grief, Jamil. I need to talk to Richard—now.”
“He’s in the shower.”
I shook my head, and it made my head hurt. “Screw this. What cabin is he in?”
Jamil shook his head. “Give him a few minutes.”
“Longer,” Shang-Da said, his voice very bland.
Jason looked from one to the other of them, eyes just a touch wide.
“What is going on?” I asked.
The cabin door behind Jamil opened. A woman appeared in the doorway. Richard had her arms and seemed to be trying to push her, gently but firmly, out the door.
The woman turned and saw me. She had pale brown hair in one of those hairdos that seem artless and simple yet actually take hours to do. She pulled away from Richard and stalked towards us. No, towards me. Her dark eyes were all for me.
“Lucy, don’t,” Richard said.
“I just want to smell her,” Lucy said.
It was the kind of comment a dog might make if it could speak. Smell me, not see me. We primates tend to forget that a lot of other mammals consider smell more important than vision.
Lucy and I had time to study each other as she walked towards me. She was only a little taller than me, maybe five foot six. Her walk was an exaggerated sway so that the short, plum-colored skirt bloused around her and you got glimpses of the hose and garters she was wearing underneath. She was carrying a pair of black heels but walked towards us in a graceful, almost tiptoe movement. Her blouse was a paler purple, unbuttoned so that you glimpsed enough of the bra to know it was black and matched the rest of the undies that you could see. And either the bra was a wonderbra or she was, well, stacked. She was wearing more makeup than I ever wore, but it was well-applied and made her skin look smooth and perfect. Her dark lipstick was smeared.
I glanced behind her at Richard. He was wearing a pair of blue jeans and nothing else. Water still beaded on his naked chest. His thick hair clung to his face and shoulders in wet strands. He had her dark lipstick smeared across his mouth like a plum-colored bruise.
We looked at each other, and I don’t think either of us knew what to say.
The woman knew exactly what to say. “So you’re Richard’s human bitch.”
It was so hostile, it made me smile.
She didn’t like the smile. She stepped into me so close, I’d have to step back to keep the edge of her skirt from brushing my legs. If I’d had any doubt what she was, this close, her power danced over my skin like insects swarming over my body. She was powerful.
I shook my head. “Look, before we get into any arcane werewolf shit or worse, personal shit, I need to talk to Richard about jail and why the local cops went to the trouble of framing him for rape.”
She blinked at me. “My name is Lucy Winston. Remember it.”
I looked into her pale brown eyes from inches away. I was close enough to see the small imperfections in her eyeliner. Richard had mentioned a Lucy in jail. He couldn’t be dating two of them, could he? “Lucy—Richard mentioned you,” I said.
She blinked again, but this time she was puzzled. She took a step back from me to glance at Richard. “You mentioned me to her?”
Richard nodded.
She backed up and looked on the verge of tears. “Then why . . .”
I glanced from one to the other of them. Why what, is what I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. I’d been enjoying disliking Lucy. If she cried, it might spoil my fun.
I put my hands up like I was surrendering and stepped around her. I walked towards Richard because we had to talk, but seeing Lucy in her garters and hose had taken a lot of the fun out of it.
It was none of my business what he did. I was sleeping with Jean-Claude. I was all out of stones to throw. So why was I having such a hard time not being pissed? Maybe that was a question better left unanswered.
Richard stepped back out of the doorway so I could walk past him. He closed the door behind me, leaning against it. We were suddenly alone, really alone, and I didn’t know what to say.
He leaned against the door with his hands behind his back. Water beaded on his naked upper body. He’d always had a nice chest, but he had been lifting weights since last I’d seen him without his shirt. His
upper body was almost aggressively masculine, though still short of that overdone look that bodybuilders strive so hard for. He was slumped against the door. It made his stomach muscles bunch. Once upon a time, I could have helped him dry off. His hair was starting to dry in a wavy mass. If he didn’t do something soon, he’d have to wet it and start over.
“Lucy drag you out of the shower without a towel?” The moment I said it, I wished I hadn’t. I put my hand up and said, “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I don’t have the right to be catty with you.”
He smiled, almost sadly. “I think that’s the second time I’ve ever heard you admit you were wrong.”
“Oh, I’m wrong a lot. I just don’t admit it out loud.”
That made him smile again, and it was almost his normal smile. That bright flash of perfect teeth in the permanent tan of his face. Most people thought Richard was tanned. I knew it was skin color because I’d seen the whole package. He was white bread, all Middle American, with a family that made the Waltons look unfriendly, but a generation or so back was something not so white bread.
Richard pushed away from the door. He walked towards me on his bare feet. I was more aware than was polite of the line of hair running down the center of his lower abdomen.
I turned away and said, “Why did they want you in jail?” Business, concentrate on business.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “May I get a towel and finish drying off while we talk?”
“It’s your cabin. Help yourself,” I said.
He disappeared into the bathroom. I was left to look around. The cabin was almost identical to mine except that it was yellow and it was more lived in. The cheerful comforter was pushed onto the floor in a sunny heap. The white sheets were wrinkled. Richard was almost fantical about making the bed. Somehow Lucy didn’t strike me as the neat type. I was betting she had mussed the bed. Of course, there was a wet spot on one side, so maybe she’d had help.
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