“So you’re saying I should only shoot him if it’s raining? I don’t have that option.” She shook her head. “I need firepower.”
“And I am most happy to oblige. I don’t get to bring these out near as often as I’d like.” The armorer’s small eyes burned with glee as he opened the first box. Inside lay a revolver with a ten-and-a-half-inch barrel—twice as long as the barrel on her Beretta. It was made of stainless steel and had a thick rubberized grip designed to help cut down on recoil. She lifted it with both hands and almost gasped. It must have weighed five pounds. It felt like she was holding some massive machine part, and she wondered if she would be able to even draw it comfortably.
“What’s this one?” she asked.
“Smith & Wesson Model 500. 500H, to be precise. It loads .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum rounds, some of the most powerful in the world. The gun-control lobby calls that round the vest-buster.”
“What do other people call it?”
The armorer shrugged. “The NRA claims it can’t actually penetrate a trauma plate. They say they have ballistic tests to prove it. You can choose who you believe. What I do know is that this round is recommended for stopping a charging grizzly bear before it can gets its claws in you.”
Caxton’s eyes went wide. She reached for a pair of earplugs. The armorer handed her a pair of cup-style ear protectors as well. “You’ll want both,” he told her.
She lined up a shot on a paper target at twenty yards, adjusted her stance, leaned into the shot. Squeezed the trigger. A jet of flame burst from the gun as it squirmed and pushed—her arm leaped up and the gun nearly hit her in the face. It felt like someone had kicked her in the shoulder. “Jesus,” she squeaked. Her ears were still ringing when she put the weapon down and removed her ear protectors.
“You didn’t flinch,” the armorer said, admiringly. “Most women when they take their first shot with that kind of power, they close their eyes and turn away from the blast.”
She picked up the handgun again and studied it. “Double action, at least. But this looks wrong.” Most revolvers carried six shots in a cylinder behind the barrel. “There are only five chambers.”
“The bullets were too big to fit six,” the armorer explained. He pressed a button to bring in the target. The round she’d fired had made a sizable hole near the shoulder of the silhouette on the target, and she hated to think what that bullet could have done to a human body. Still—it hadn’t even come close to the target’s heart, and Caxton was a good shot. She practiced religiously and she had been trained by her father, who had been a sheriff up in coal country and who had been an excellent shot. That meant she knew her limits. She knew that the first round she fired from a new gun was never going to be a bull’s-eye. She also knew she’d had a lot of trouble controlling the weapon.
“I’m not strong enough for that,” she said. “I think maybe if I was Arnold Schwarzenegger. But I’m not.”
“With enough time and practice you’d be fine,” the armorer said.
“Time is something I’m short on.”
The armorer frowned sympathetically and put it back in its box. He had another gun for her to try, one she recognized right away. She’d seen it in plenty of movies and TV shows—a Mark XIX Desert Eagle, an Israeli-made gun that she’d always thought was perfect for men with especially small penises. It had a thick triangular barrel and a massive grip she could barely get her hand around. Its barrel was almost comically long—fourteen inches, even longer than the Model 500, and when she held it she felt like she had picked up some kind of movie prop. It made her Beretta look like a cap gun.
She checked the safety, then ejected the magazine. It held seven rounds. Better than the five in the revolver, but her Beretta held fifteen.
The armorer fingered one of the bullets. “That’s your .50AE round. Pretty nasty. Very powerful.”
“Okay.”
He took the weapon from her and reloaded it. “Usually, with ammo this big you’d use a revolver. The Desert Eagle’s a little different. It’s built more like a rifle than a handgun, especially with this barrel. Gas operated. Polygonal rifling. The rotating bolt is pretty close to what you’d find on an M16.”
“Cool.” Caxton replaced her ear protection, called to clear the range, then sighted and fired. The recoil wasn’t as bad as with the Model 500, but still she nearly lost control of the gun after it discharged. When the target fluttered up to her she saw she’d gotten a little closer to the heart, but not much. “Not so cool.” She sighed and put the weapon down. “Bigger bullets isn’t going to do the trick. What about a different kind of bullet—hollow-points or something.”
“Hollow-point bullets actually decrease penetration,” the armorer told her. “They’re designed for maximum tissue damage inside your target, but they’ll never get through a trauma plate. If you’re looking for a magic bullet what you’d really want is depleted uranium rounds.”
“Really?” Caxton asked, raising her eyebrows.
“Sure. Much denser than lead, so they hit harder. DU rounds are just about perfect for armor piercing. Plus they’re pyrophoric, so when they deform on impact they tend to catch on fire and explode. They’re also a little bit radioactive, so if you don’t blow up your target you still give him cancer. Just one problem, though.”
“What’s that?”
“You’d have to be in the Army even to see a DU round, and even the Army doesn’t make small-arms ammunition out of the stuff anymore. They did back in the nineties, but then somebody realized that we were shooting radioactive slugs into every bunker, hut, and hospital in the Middle East. The political blowback on that could have been enormous, so they stopped producing them. The UN is trying to get people to stop using DU of any kind.”
“So you don’t have a box of it lying around,” Caxton inferred.
“No.” He ran his fingers along his mustache for a while and then opened an unmarked cardboard box and set it before her. “I do have these. Highly illegal, of course. We took them in evidence during a big drug raid a couple years back.”
Caxton drew one of the bullets out of the box. It was the same size and shape as the rounds she loaded in her Beretta 92. The only apparent difference was that it had a smooth green coating on the tip. She ran her finger over it and wondered why it felt so familiar. Then she looked up at the armorer. “What are they?”
He wasn’t meeting her gaze. Instead he was looking at the box of bullets. He was looking at it as if the box were full of poisonous snakes. Eventually he shifted his weight to a different foot and told her what she was looking at. “Cop-killers.”
“No shit?” she asked. She examined the bullet again. It was lighter than a normal bullet, strangely enough. “These are Teflon bullets?”
He shrugged. “That name’s misleading. The Teflon coating is just to protect your gun. It doesn’t make them any more deadly. The real improvement comes from using a brass slug instead of a lead one. Brass is a lot harder than lead, so when it hits the target—say, your trauma plate—it doesn’t squish or melt. It keeps going in one piece, with all of its energy intact. Theoretically that bullet can punch through any police vest.”
“Does it work?”
The armorer shrugged again. “Depends on who you ask. Again, I’ve seen ballistics reports from both sides. No one has ever been shot with one of these—they were made illegal about ten minutes after they were invented—so we just don’t know. Even I’ve never seen any, other than what’s in that box. Theoretically law enforcement can buy them, but you should see the paperwork the ATF requires. Personally I’ve only fired a couple of rounds of that stuff. I can tell you those will penetrate a steel car door without any trouble. One thing I do know, which is that once that box is gone, I won’t be able to get any more for a long time. So use them carefully.”
Caxton nodded. She scooped the box up and put it in her pocket. “Thanks,” she said.
He nodded, still not looking at her. “I’ve got something else for you, too. Yo
u carry a Beretta 92, right? There’s an upgrade for that model.”
“Yeah?” She drew her sidearm and laid it on the bench in front of her. “This one’s been pretty good to me.”
“Here, try this,” he said, and opened another of his boxes. Inside was a gun almost identical to hers—except it might have come out of the future. The grips were more ergonomic, the entire pistol was slightly lighter, and it had a small flashlight slung under the barrel. “This is the Beretta 90-Two.” He spelled it out for her, and showed her the name embossed on the receiver. “It’s improved in a whole bunch of ways, but let me show you my favorite parts. Here,” he said, indicating three pale green dots, “are your glow-in-the-dark sights. So you can shoot at night. There’s a red tab here that pops up when there’s a round in the chamber, so you never have to retract the slide to find out. Then there’s this attachment, which might come in handy, considering the places you end up.” He flicked two switches on the flashlight. The beam was bright enough to see even in winter daylight. That would be useful when she was hunting vampires on moonless nights. Even better, just below the flashlight lens was a tiny red lens that projected a sighting laser. “With the flashlight and laser on at the same time, you’ve got about an hour of battery time. Keep that in mind. Also, you’ll need to sight the laser in manually. With the flashlight it won’t fit in your current holster, but I have a new one you can have that’ll work.” He watched her point the gun downrange, then lower it and whip it up again. “Best part: the magazine holds seventeen rounds. Two more than you’re used to. Do you like it?”
It felt just about perfect in her hand. “I’ll take it,” Caxton said. “Wrap it up.”
35.
Caxton had two more stops to make before she could leave for Syracuse. The first was going to be the hardest: she had to go home.
It wasn’t a long commute to the house she shared with Clara. When she arrived she pulled into the drive and switched off the Mazda and just sat there for a while, staring at her own kitchen window. When she’d decided she’d put it off long enough, she got out of the car and walked up to the door. It was unlocked, which meant Clara was there. Caxton was not surprised to find her lover sitting at the kitchen table reading a book.
“Hey,” Clara said, barely looking up. “Long time no see.”
Caxton stiffened. Then she forced herself to relax and pull up a chair opposite Clara so they could talk.
Eventually Clara looked up again. She put her finger in her book to hold her place and closed the cover. “So,” she said. “Did you ever find out what a Twaron fiber was good for?”
“Yes,” Caxton said. She placed both hands on the table and started picking at the laminate on the edge. “It’s used in ballistic vests. Arkeley was wearing one.”
Clara’s eyes went wide. “That would protect his heart and—”
“Make it next to impossible for me to kill him. That’s…that’s something it would really have helped me to know, before he came after Raleigh last night.” Clara started to react, but Caxton held up one hand. “Raleigh’s fine. Another girl didn’t make it, though. If I’d known what I was facing maybe it could have been—different.”
Clara’s mouth trembled. “I’d never heard of Twaron before. I’ve only ever heard of Kevlar. If the report had said it was Kevlar, I could have made that connection. Hey! Come on, you can’t blame me for some girl’s death just because I didn’t know what Twaron was. Come on!”
“I don’t blame you. I blame myself. You told me you weren’t trained for forensics work. I should have listened to you.”
Clara jumped up and wrapped her arms around her chest. Her face was a neutral mask. Caxton had been with her long enough to know what that meant—she felt like she was being attacked.
“All I’m saying, Clara, is that you could have Googled it. What I needed from you, when I put you in charge of this stuff, was information. Fetlock’s experts are smart people and they do a certain job very well, but all they can give you is raw data. They were going to send me their report anyway, but I needed somebody to actually read it and give me the key points. You could have gone that extra distance. Next time—”
“Next time? So you’re not firing me? Oh, thank you so much.” Clara stomped over to the window and stared out at the snow. “I can’t believe this, Laura. You really got me this time, didn’t you? It used to just be guilt you held over my head. Now you need to make me feel stupid, too.”
“What are you talking about? Guilt?”
“Jesus! Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Our relationship is falling apart. I should have dumped you a long time ago. But how could I? I keep asking for more time together, for more intimacy. But no, you’re too busy saving the world. I can’t exactly compete with that, and I feel guilty about wanting to. So I hang in there, I keep being patient and loving and making your fucking breakfast every morning. Then you come along with this job offer and I think hey, maybe you actually do care. Maybe you understand. So I jump into something I have no training for, something I’d never even considered. Now you’re laying some girl’s death on me, too? Jesus!”
“It’s not like that,” Caxton said, but Clara was already storming out of the room. She hurried to the bedroom and slammed the door behind her.
For a time Caxton just sat at the table, hoping her girlfriend would come back. She didn’t. There was too much to do, too many lives at stake to wait for very much longer, she decided. She would try to patch things up later. Before she left, though, she picked up the book Clara had been reading. It was a thick hardcover with the title on the cover in big block letters: FUNDAMENTALS OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, SEVENTH EDITION.
She laid it gently back on the table and returned to her car.
Her next stop was Mechanicsburg, and the local jail there. The cops and corrections officers that ran the place were surprised to see her, but when she flashed her silver star they fell into line. One grabbed up a heavy key ring and led her down into the basement, to the secure cells.
“He screamed every time we tried to put him in a cell with a window,” the CO explained, sorting through his keys. “These are our solitary confinement units, which we save for the worst kind. Padded walls, no furniture but a suicide-proof toilet. Electric lights we keep on twenty-four/seven so we can see what they’re up to.”
“What has he been doing?” Caxton asked.
The CO shrugged. “At night he sits staring into space, or sometimes he’ll pace back and forth. The cell’s only three paces wide, but he’ll do that for hours. During the day—from dawn until sundown, every time—he just sleeps. It’s funny.”
“What is?” Caxton asked.
“Down here,” the CO said, “there’s really no way for him to see whether the sun is up or down. But somehow, he knows. He’ll be sleeping now, of course, but I can wake him up if you want.”
“I do,” Caxton said.
The CO unlocked a heavy reinforced door and opened it wide. Inside Dylan Carboy lay stretched out on the floor, his head turned to one side, looking like nothing so much as a lifeless corpse. His hands were secured behind his back with nylon restraints and his feet were bare.
“Come on, kid. Come on. You got a visitor.”
The boy didn’t move.
“This might take a while,” the CO said, then grabbed Carboy under the arms and grunted and strained to get him sitting upright. “You’re a U.S. Marshal, huh? You come to transfer him?”
She understood why he would think that—prisoner transport across state lines was one of the primary functions of the USMS. “No,” she said. “I just want to talk to him. It’s pertinent to an open investigation.”
The CO shrugged. “Hell, I was hoping we were going to get rid of him. Little bastard creeps me out. You want to talk, feel free. I don’t know if he’ll answer.”
Caxton squatted down next to Carboy and studied his face. He was just a kid, even younger-looking than she remembered from when she’d hauled him in. At t
he time, of course, he’d been made up like a vampire. He was still pale, but not deathly pale, and his ears were round and normal. A thin fuzz of stubble coated the top of his head where his hair had started to grow back in. His eyes were open, but they didn’t track, just stared vacantly forward.
“I can get him on his feet, if you want,” the CO said. “We can drag him down to an interrogation room.”
“No need,” Caxton said. “Tell me—has he asked for a lawyer?”
The CO shook his head. “We offered, a bunch of times. After dark, when he was talking, even. He wants vengeance, he says. He wants blood. He says that a lot. But lawyers he can do without.”
“Okay, then. I’ll speak with him awhile and then get out of your hair,” she said. The CO nodded and moved to stand by the door, hands held behind him, waiting for her to do what she needed to do. Caxton knew better than to ask to be left alone with the prisoner. That would never be allowed, not with someone as violent and unstable as Carboy.
“Do you remember me?” she asked. The boy’s face didn’t change. He was supposed to be a vampire, and of course vampires didn’t talk during daylight hours. It seemed he was going to prolong the ruse even when no one else believed in it. “I’m Laura Caxton. You wanted to kill me. Remember?” Caxton frowned. “It was all over your notebooks.”
The corner of Carboy’s upper lip twitched. Just a tic, but enough that Caxton caught it. Maybe that was what she needed: an in. The secret to police interrogations wasn’t knowing when someone was lying to you. You had to assume everything a subject said was a lie. No, the secret was finding the button you could push, the one thing that bothered the subject so much it threw him off his game enough to get his carefully prepared facts tangled up. In this case it was finding something that would get Carboy to talk at all.
“We found your notebooks in your house. You remember, the house where you strangled your sister.” The tic came again when she mentioned finding the notebooks but didn’t recur when she mentioned his sister. Yeah, she had him. Those notebooks were important to him. “I didn’t bother reading them all,” she said. “They were kind of repetitive, and not very well written. So I gave them to one of my officers. He had to pull one of them apart because blood had stuck all the pages together. Completely ruined them.”
Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale Page 18