I half-smiled. “Believe me, Detective, when I’m mad at you, you’ll know it.”
“Detective. Not even Ramirez. Now I know you’re upset. What did I do?”
I looked at him, studying that open, honest fact. “Why didn’t you tell me what Marks said about me? What he was telling the other cops about me? It could carry a death sentence.”
“No way was Marks going to push that through, Anita.”
“You still should have told me.”
He looked puzzled for a moment, then shrugged. “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”
I frowned. “I guess not.” But I wasn’t happy with his answer.
He touched my arm again, every so lightly. “I didn’t believe that Marks could get you arrested. I was right. Isn’t that enough?”
“No,” I said.
He let his hand fall away from me. “What good would it have done to tell you? You’d have worried for nothing.”
“I don’t need my feelings protected. I need to feel that I can trust you.”
“You don’t trust me because I didn’t tell you everything that Marks said?”
“Not as much as I trusted you before.”
The first hint of anger hardened his eyes. “And you told me everything that happened in Los Duendos? You didn’t hold anything back about your interview with Nicky Baco?” His eyes weren’t kind now. They were cool and searching, cop eyes.
I looked down once, then fought to maintain eye contact when what I desperately wanted to do was duck my head and say, aw shucks, you caught me. Push me into a corner, and I usually get angry. But somehow looking into his deep brown eyes, I couldn’t pull up much moral indignation. Maybe it was having no moral high ground to stand on. Yeah, that might be it.
“I didn’t kill anybody, if that’s what you’re implying.” It was one of my usual comments with less than my usual force.
“That’s not what I’m implying and you know it, Anita.”
There was something familiar, almost intimate about the conversation. We’d known each other for two days, and yet we interacted as if we’d known each other much longer. It was unnerving. I didn’t usually bond this quickly with people or monsters.
But if it had been my longtime police friend Sergeant Rudolph Storr himself standing in front of me, I’d have lied. If Nicky Baco got a whiff of cops, he’d back off, and he’d never trust me again. People like Baco don’t give second chances when it comes to the police.
“Baco knew you and Rigby were outside the bar, Hernando. He has the entire area wired with magical . . .” I waffled my hand back and forth, seeking the right word “. . . wards, spells. He knows what happens in his streets. If I go back in with police as backup, no matter how distant, he won’t help us.”
“Are you so sure he can help?” Ramirez asked. “He may just be stringing you along, trying to find out what you know.”
“He’s scared, Hernando. Baco is scared. Call it a feeling, but I don’t think much frightens him.”
“You’ve just told me you’re withholding information from an ongoing murder investigation.”
“If you wire me up or insist on sending someone undercover with me, we’ll lose Baco. You know I’m right on this.”
“We may lose Baco, but you’re not right,” he said, and the anger was back. A frustrated anger that I’d seen before in other men that I’d known longer and in more intimate ways. That anger that I can’t just be a good girl and play by their rules, and be what they want me to be. It made me tired to hear that thread in Ramirez’s voice after only two days.
“The most important thing to me right this second is stopping these murders. That is my goal. That is my only goal.” I thought about what I’d said, and added, “And staying alive. But other than that I don’t have any other agenda. Stop the bad guys. Stay alive. It makes things simple, Hernando.”
“You told me earlier that you wanted your life to change, to be more than blood and horror. If you want that to change, you are going to have to complicate your life, Anita. And you are going to have to start trusting people, really trusting them again.”
I shook my head. “Thanks for using my moment of weakness against me. Now I remember why I don’t confide in strangers.” I was finally angry myself. It felt good. It felt familiar. If I could just stay angry, I could stop being so damned confused.
He grabbed my arm, and the grip wasn’t gentle this time. It didn’t hurt, but I could feel the press of his fingers in my flesh. For the first time since I’d met him, he let me see the hardness underneath. That core of harshness that you either have or acquire if you stay with the cops. Without that core to protect yourself, you may stay on the job, but you won’t thrive.
I smiled. “What next, rubber hoses and bright lights?” It was meant to be a joke, but my voice wasn’t light when I said it. We were both angry now. Underneath all those smiles and mild manners was a temper. We’d see whose was worse, his or mine.
He spoke low and carefully, the way I do sometimes when to do anything else will start me yelling. “I could just tell Marks about the meeting. Tell him you’re holding out on us.”
“Fine,” I said, “do it. Marks will probably have him arrested, search his bar. He might even find enough magical paraphernalia to get him jailed on suspicion of magical malfeasance. And what will that get us, Detective? Baco in jail, and a few days from now more people dead. More bodies gutted.” I leaned into his angry face and whispered, “How will your dreams be then, Hernando?”
He let me go so abruptly that I stumbled. “You really are a bitch, aren’t you?”
I nodded. “If the situation warrants it, you bet.”
He shook his head, rubbing his hands up and down his arms. “If I hold out on this and it goes wrong, it could be my career.”
“Just say you didn’t know.”
He shook his head. “Too many people know I was your police escort.” He managed to make the last two words heavy with irony. “You’ve got another meeting planned with him, haven’t you?”
I tried to keep the surprise off my face, but a blank face was just as bad. It was like when you were asked if you were sleeping with someone, and you refused to answer. Not answering was as good as a yes.
He stalked from one side of the hallway to the other. “Dammit, Anita, I can’t sit on this.”
I realized he meant it. I stood in his path, so he had to stop pacing and look at me. “You can’t tell Marks. He’ll screw it up. If he thinks I’m dancing with the devil, he’ll have hysterics when he meets Nicky Baco.”
The anger was beginning to leak from his eyes. “When’s the meeting?”
I shook my head. “Promise first that you won’t tell Marks.”
“He’s in charge of the investigation. If I don’t tell him and he finds out, I might as well hand in my badge.”
“He doesn’t seem very popular around here,” I said.
“He’s still my superior.”
“He’s your boss,” I said. “He is in no way your superior.”
That earned me a smile. “Flattery will get you nowhere with me.”
“It’s not flattery, Hernando. It’s the truth.”
He was finally quiet, standing there looking at me. His expression was almost his normal one, or what I thought was normal for him. For all I knew he dissected puppies in his spare time. All right, I didn’t believe that, but I didn’t really know him. We were strangers, and I was having to remind myself of that. I kept wanting to treat him like a friend or better. What was the matter with me?
“When is the meeting, Anita?”
“If I won’t tell you, then what?”
A shadow of that hardness seeped into his eyes. “Then I tell Marks you’re withholding evidence.”
“And if I tell you?”
“Then I’ll go with you.”
I shook my head. “No way.”
“I promise not to show up looking like a cop.”
I looked at him from shined shoes to short, clean
hair. “In what alternate reality would you NOT look like a cop?”
I heard the door open behind us, but neither of us turned. We were too busy making major eye contact.
Jarman yelled, “Ramirez!”
There was a tone in that one word that whirled us both around. Doctor Evans was leaning against the wall, holding his wrist upright. Blood gleamed like a scarlet bracelet around his arm.
Ramirez and I started running at the same time down that short space of hallway as if we had farther to go and less time to get there. Jarman and Jakes were disappearing through the door. Bernardo hesitated at the door, holding it open long enough for the screams to cut through the hospital silence. Low and wordless and panicked, and I knew without knowing that it was a man screaming. I was almost at the door, almost to Bernardo, Ramirez pacing me like a shadow.
Bernardo said, “This is a bad idea.” But he went through the door, a heartbeat before we reached it. God, I hated being right all the time.
39
THE WHITE STERILE ROOM had been a quiet corner of hell. Now it was a loud, chaotic corner of hell. A skinless hand snatched at me. I slashed at it with the big blade that I’d pulled from the spine sheath. The hand bled and jerked back. They could feel pain. They bled. Good.
I had the blade raised for a neck blow as the corpse came at me again. Ramirez blocked my arms. “They’re civilians!”
I looked at him, then back at that raw thing that was held to the bed only by one last wrist restraint. It launched at me again, slashing the air with its bloody hand, screaming wordlessly, butchered tongue flopping like a worm in the lipless ruin of its mouth.
“Just stay out of reach,” he said and pulled me past it.
I had time to say, “They’re corpses, Ramirez, just corpses.”
He held up the asp. “Don’t kill them.” He moved into the fight, though it wasn’t a fight yet. Most of the corpses were still restrained to the beds. They struggled, screaming, wailing, jerking their ruined flesh to bloodier ruin against the restraints, bodies bucking as they thrashed to free themselves.
Ben the nurse was beating at the head of one patient. It had sunk teeth into his arm so deeply that he couldn’t free himself. Jarman was with him, beating the thing’s head with his baton from far back like you’d hit a baseball. You could hear the soft, melon-like thunk even over the screaming.
Jakes and Bernardo were at the last bed near the windows. The African-American nurse was held in the embrace of a corpse that still had one hand and one ankle attached to the bed. Its head was buried into her chest. Blood plastered her gown to her body like someone had spilled a can of red paint down her. Where the thing was gnawing shouldn’t have been a killing spot, but there was too much blood. It had reached something vital.
Jakes was beating at the thing’s head so hard that he was rising on tiptoe, his body almost leaving the ground with each blow. The corpse’s head was bleeding, cracking, but it wasn’t letting go. Its head was buried into her chest like a monstrous child, feeding.
Bernardo was stabbing the corpse in the back over and over. The blade came free in a spray of blood, but it didn’t matter. The one by the door had reacted to pain, but once they started feeding, they were just meat. You couldn’t hurt meat, and you sure as hell couldn’t kill it.
I walked between the beds with the corpses screaming, bodies writhing, and all the eyes looked the same. It was as if there was only one personality looking out of every pair of eyes. Their master, whatever that was, watched me walk between the beds, watching me go to the far bed, away from Ramirez, and his cautions. He still didn’t understand what was about to happen when they all freed themselves. We had to be out of this room before that happened.
I moved in beside Bernardo, moving him back a step. I wiggled the blade underneath the thing’s jaw. I took a deep breath, centered myself the way you do in martial arts class just before you break something big and permanent-looking. I pictured the blade coming out the top of the skull, and that’s what I tried for. I tried to shove it through its head. The blade went through the soft tissue under the jaw with a sharp, wet movement, then the tip hit the bone at the roof of the mouth, and kept going. The blade didn’t come out of the top of its head, but I felt it shove into the strange emptiness of the sinus cavities.
It reared back from the woman, its jaws trying to open around the gleam of the blade. It clawed at its mouth with the one free hand, letting the nurse fall back onto the bed. We got our first glimpse of the wound. There was a hole in the middle of her chest. Broken ribs jutted outward like the broken sides of a frame. The hole was just the size for a human face to shove deep. I stared down into that dark, wet hole, and half her heart was gone, eaten away.
“Oh, God!” Jakes said.
The thing in the bed had freed its other hand. It was tugging at the hilt of the blade, trying to pull it free. Jakes, Bernardo, and I exchanged a look between us. One look, no words, and we turned towards the rest of the room with one goal in mind: get to the door any way we could. There was nothing human in this room but us.
I looked up and found Ramirez and Jarman at the far door with the male nurse sagging between them. Great. I yelled, “Run!”
We tried. I sensed movement and turned in time for the corpse to hit me full on and send us both crashing to the floor. I stabbed for the jaw, trying to pin its teeth like I had the other one, but it moved and I only got the throat. Blood splashed across my face in a hot liquid rush. It blinded me for a second. I could feel it moving over my body, legs straddling my waist. I kept my hand pushed into raw shoulder, holding it back, while it strained over me. I wiped the blood out of my eyes with the back of my hand that held the knife. It snapped at me like a dog, and I screamed. I cut its cheek so deep the blade scraped on teeth. It screamed and sank its teeth into my hand. I screamed as it shook its head like a dog with a bone. My hand opened, and the knife fell.
It came at me, mouth open, pale blue eyes so impossibly wide. It went for my throat. There was no time to try for the last knife. I went for its eyes. I plunged my thumbs into its eyes, and its own momentum pushed them deeper than I could have gotten them. I felt the eyeballs rupture, exploding in warm fluid and thicker things.
It screamed, whipping its head back and forth, hands clawing at its face. Bernardo was suddenly there, pulling it backwards, throwing it one-armed across the room to skid into the wall. Amazing what you can do when you’re terrified.
I was on my knees, drawing the last knife. Bernardo dragged me to my feet, and we were almost to the door. Rigby was there with an ax, hacking at the corpses. Hands and less identifiable bits littered the ground around him. Ramirez shoved his asp into one’s mouth, so hard the dull tip showed through the back of its throat.
Jakes was dragging Jarman by his wrists, leaving a thick red trail behind him. Jarman’s body was wedged in the door. Rigby’s ax had chopped two of the corpses into enough pieces that they were down. Two of the corpses were still held to the bed with one last restraint. Ramirez was wrestling with the one that was trying to swallow his asp. A corpse threw itself at Rigby, and the ax sliced air.
I heard the scrambling behind me before Bernardo yelled, “Behind . . .”
I was on the way down to the floor with the thing riding my back, before I heard Bernardo yell, “. . . you.”
I tucked my head, trying to protect my neck. Teeth bit through my shirt, drawing blood, but had trouble gnawing through the strap of the shoulder holster and spine sheath. It dug its teeth into my flesh, but the leather straps acted like a sort of armor. I drove the knife back into its thigh, once, twice. It didn’t care.
Suddenly, there was a wash of air, and a heavy blow, blood spilled across my hair, shoulders, and back, in a scalding wash. I scrambled out from under the corpse and found it was headless.
Rigby stood over it with the bloody ax and a wild look in his eyes. “Go, get out. I’ll cover your back.” His voice was high-pitched, fear dripping from it, but he stood his ground and started
moving us all towards the door.
One of the corpses was on Bernardo’s back, but it wasn’t trying to eat him. It pounded his head twice into the floor, hard. It looked up at me. There was something in its eyes that hadn’t been in any of the others. It was afraid. Afraid of us. Afraid of being stopped. Afraid, just maybe, of dying.
It scrambled through the open glass doors and brushed past Jakes, as if it had somewhere to go and something else to do. And I knew it had to be stopped, knew if it escaped that it would be very bad. But I put a hand under Bernardo’s arm and started dragging him for the door. Ramirez took his other arm and it was suddenly easy to drag him through that glass door.
There was a sudden rush in the room behind us. Rigby stumbled back against the button that closed the door. It slid closed with Ramirez beating on it. I saw Rigby swing the ax, then a corpse came in from both sides. Ramirez reached for the button to open the door, but either Rigby’s weight had jammed it or something else had.
Ramirez screamed, “Rigby!”
There was a gigantic whoosh of air as if a giant had drawn a breath, and the room filled with fire. Flames licked the glass like orange-gold water through the glass of an aquarium. I could feel the heat beating against the glass. Fire alarms went off with a high-pitched scream. I threw myself to the floor on top of Bernardo, covering my face, waiting for that tremendous heat to crack the glass and spill over all of us.
But it wasn’t heat that spilled over me. It was coolness, water. I raised my head to the sprinklers that were filling the room. The glass was blackened, and smoke and steam curled against the glass like fog as the water killed the fire.
Ramirez reached for the button, and the doors opened in a sound of rushing water. The alarm was louder now, and I realized that it was two different alarms now, mixing together in one nerve-jangling screech. Ramirez stepped into the room, and I heard his voice over the maddening noise. “Madre de Dios.”
I stood with the water pounding me, soaking my hair, clothing. I didn’t follow him into the room. Rigby was beyond any help I could give him. We still had one more corpse on the run. I laid my fingertips on Bernardo’s neck just under the jaw. The screech of the fire alarms seemed to make it hard to feel his pulse, but it was there, strong and sure. He was down for the count, but he was alive. Jakes was kneeling beside Jarman, tears streaming down his face. He was trying to stop a wound in Jarman’s neck with his bare hands. The pool of blood that had spilled to either side of Jarman’s head was being washed away by the sprinklers. His eyes were fixed and staring, unblinking as the water poured down on him.
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