Under the Gun

by Hannah Jayne

  “Lawson!”

  Alex was at the bluff running toward me. I had pushed myself onto my butt and was shivering, my teeth chattering. I tried to tell him, tried to warn him, but all I could do was point. Two women had been torn limb from limb twenty feet from me and there, in the trees, their killer lurked.

  “What?” Alex turned, eyes squinted, looking toward the trees.

  “There’s a person there!” It was barely a croak, barely audible.

  Alex stood up to his full six-foot height, still staring toward the trees. “I don’t see anything. Are you sure?”

  I pumped my head—then stopped. Was I sure? I gingerly touched my forehead. The cut was sticky and throbbing.

  “I hit my head.”

  “Yeah.” Alex turned to me, slid an arm under my shoulders to help me up. “Looks like you banged it pretty hard. Can you stand on your own?”

  I strained to look over Alex’s shoulder while he supported me. “Did you see him? Did he get away?”

  “Lawson, there’s no one there. You hit your head.” He went to touch it but recoiled. “You really did a number on it.”

  I tried to squirm out of Alex’s arms but he held me firm. “So you’re saying I’m seeing things?”

  “No,” Alex said, pushing me farther up the bank, “I’m saying you fell and hit your head and that there is nothing over there now, okay? Don’t make this bigger than it is.”

  “There was someone there, I’m sure of it. He was watching me. Watching the crime scene.”

  I looked at Alex hard and his eyes softened as he relented. “Okay. Can we get a medic over here?” he called. “Romero, Tibbs—Lawson thinks she saw someone.”

  I pointed. “There. About fifty feet down.”

  The guys took off running and I sunk down on the back of the ambulance tailgate. Thank you, I mouthed to Alex. He nodded.

  The paramedic began cleaning my wound and I tried not to wince, tried not to squirm away, but I wanted to turn and stare in the direction the officers ran. “Do you think it was the killer?”

  “Do I think who was the killer?” Alex asked, not looking up from his iPhone.

  “The guy that I just saw!” I huffed.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, Lawson.”

  I frowned, my eyes sweeping the bluff, then looking back at Alex, at the grizzly crime scene behind him. My stomach went to liquid as I tried not to look toward the coroner gathering up the ruined remains of the second body. My muscles tightened involuntarily; probably in a show of solitary gladness that they were still attached to my limbs.

  “I hope it wasn’t him.” I rambled on, “But who else would it be? Don’t psychopaths enjoy injecting themselves into an active investigation? Or returning to the scene of the crime to re-experience the joy or whatever?”

  Alex cocked a half smile before looking away from me. “Glad to see you’re still a TV junkie.”

  “Hey. I probably watch as much Discovery Channel as I do The Bachelor, okay? There’s real learning there. Cut me a little slack.”

  I would keep the fact that the Discovery Channel had just come out with another version of Hoarders my personal secret.

  Alex and I both snapped to attention when Romero and Tibbs came lumbering through the grasses. “We couldn’t find a thing,” one of them muttered. “There was nothing out there.”

  Heat washed over my cheeks. “He was there, I swear. I know I saw something.”

  Alex looked down at me, his eyes fierce. “Are you sure you checked everywhere, guys?”

  Ever since a brush with my half-sister—a fallen angel called Ophelia who was hell-bent on ruining my life, in a very serious way—I’ve been a little sensitive to the idea of my seeing things. Mainly because she had the unfortunate (for me) ability to make me see things—horrible things, like maggots and blood-bathed murder weapons. It wasn’t so much the images that bothered me, however; it was the idea of those images making me feel one-hundred-percent, grade-A, bat-shit crazy.

  “I know I didn’t imagine it.”

  “We checked everything. There weren’t even any trails in the grass. Sorry, Sophie, but maybe you just saw a shadow or something.”

  A shadow? I clenched my teeth and tried my hardest to focus, but the pain in my head was like a humming, buzzing swarm of bees, making it incessantly hard to concentrate. A standard murder, I told myself, not my jurisdiction.

  I gingerly touched the bandage the paramedic had just finished winding around my head. “Any nausea or dizziness?” he asked me.

  I gazed back toward the bodies, caught sight of the river of spilled blood. “Nothing unexpected,” I murmured. I watched Alex as he stepped away from me, leaning in toward Romero and Tibbs as they talked, each cutting the other off, flailing their arms and pointing toward either the crime scene or the crest of forest they had just searched. I bobbed away from my paramedic as I tried to listen in on the officers’ conversation.

  “Desecration,” I heard. “Wild animal.”

  The paramedic turned my palms facing up and began swabbing. “Hold still,” he said without looking at me.

  “Who called an ambulance? I mean, those girls were already . . .” I let my voice trail off, unable to say the word.

  The paramedic, whose name badge said N. TORRES, glanced through his lowered lashes at me. “I guess someone was hoping.”

  I wanted to be professional—stone-faced, matter-of-fact. But I knew that somewhere, someone was hoping that the police report was wrong, that the body under the sheet wasn’t their daughter, wasn’t their girlfriend, that she wasn’t dead. I swallowed back a tortured sob.

  “One sick fuck,” I heard the chief say. “Can’t possibly be human.”

  Alex turned slightly and caught me staring at him from the corner of his eye. I knew what he was thinking and it made my stomach burn.

  Once the chief had left, Alex came toward me. “Is she ready?”

  N. Torres nodded and I bristled.

  “She can speak for herself.”

  Alex went on, unaffected. “Great. Are you ready?”

  “Let’s go,” I said, brushing off the back of my pants. We took a few steps. “So, what’s the official thought on the attacker?”

  “There isn’t one yet. Once everything gets processed, we’ll have a better idea.”

  “Okay,” I tried, “what’s the unofficial thought?”

  Alex swung his head and blew out a long breath. “I thought that one of these days I’d walk into a crime scene that wouldn’t surprise me. Guess today wasn’t that day.”

  I sighed. “I’ll say.”

  We walked the rest of the way up the bluff in silence. I fell behind and trailed Alex until we reached the crest. “Geez,” he muttered. “Doesn’t anyone work anymore?”

  I followed his gaze to the looky-loos being herded back by the police and their ineffectual metal fencing. The crowd size had at least doubled while we’d been checking out the bodies, and a steady stream of cars was clogging the street and the mouth of the parking lot.

  I opened my mouth to respond but froze dead when the girl at the very front of the crowd caught my eye. Her long, dark hair was impossibly straight and glossy, barely rustled by the wind. She stood still, her back ramrod straight, her knuckles white from her death grip on the metal top of the fence. Everything about her said she was ready to jump, to fight, that at the slightest provocation this woman would snap. Everything about her was on high alert.

  “Feng,” I whispered.

  Feng turned as though she’d heard me and her razor-sharp gaze split me in half. There was fire in her eyes and a determined angle to her mouth.

  “Did you say something, Lawson?”

  “Uh—” I stumbled. “Nah. Nothing.” I pulled open the car door and slid into the warm cab; Alex did the same. “I just think I know someone in the crowd.”

  Alex dipped his key in the ignition and the car roared to life. “Demon or breather?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Nice with the lingo. Sh
e’s a breather.” I gestured toward Feng with my chin. “Right there. Up front. She’s Chinese with the long hair.”

  Alex shook his head appraisingly. “She’s pretty.”

  I got a weird stab of jealously but shrugged it off. “She’s an assassin.”

  Alex clicked the engine off and he turned in his seat. “An assassin?”

  I nodded, my eyes still on Feng, who had lost interest in me and was staring back toward the crime scene. She looked incredibly calm and statuesque among the other onlookers; most were shuffling, moving, jockeying for a better view. But Feng stood still, her eyes focused as if she could see something no one else in the crowd could.

  I swallowed and faced Alex. “She hunts werewolves. Her family makes silver bullets and is responsible for slaughtering pretty much every wolf in San Francisco.”

  “So she’s like a werewolf slayer?”

  “Not like, is,” I said morbidly. Alex seemed supremely unaffected by the disgust I felt when talking about the Du family’s “work.” “They work out of a deli in Chinatown.”

  “I wonder what she’s doing all the way out here. And, you know, here.”

  I shrugged and Alex went for the ignition again and then stopped. He looked at me and the flick of the muscle in his chin made my heart sink. I knew that flick. It was the “I’m not letting this go” flick. “Why do you think a werewolf hunter would come out to a crime scene?”

  I crossed my arms in front of my chest, giving Alex a hard look. “I have no idea. Maybe she did it. Maybe she wanted something else to hunt since the family business is going through a bit of a dry spell.”

  “You mean because they killed all the werewolves in town?”

  I didn’t say anything, but Alex still didn’t start the car, still didn’t break his gaze. “Are there any new werewolves in town, Lawson?”

  I shook my head. “Haven’t processed any in I don’t know how long.”

  I saw Alex’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed slowly. “How about a werewolf who isn’t new in town?”

  A wire of heat snaked up the back of my neck. I stared out the windshield and focused on the line of trees edging the scene in front of me. “What are you talking about? And can we get going? I have to get back to work.” I checked my wrist bone, hoping Alex wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t wearing a watch. Or possibly hoping that he would notice and change the subject. Instead, I felt his hand on my shoulder, his fingers warm on my cool flesh. Unwillingly, I turned to face Alex, to look into those earnest cobalt eyes. Eyes that a girl could fall into.

  He is an angel. . . .

  “Is he back, Lawson? Is Pete Sampson back in San Francisco?”

  I looked out the window, doing my best to focus on a crushed Starbuck’s cup in the parking space next to ours. I knew Alex could read minds. I also knew that he rarely did it to me, likely because the few times he did, my mind was full of him, wearing nothing but coconut oil and a cocktail umbrella. But I couldn’t afford for him to do it now.

  “I’m not going to read your mind, Lawson.”

  I bristled in an attempt to hide my fear. “Then how did you know what I was thinking?”

  “Because I know you.”

  My heart throbbed, caught between wanting to tell Alex everything and wanting to protect Sampson.

  “And I guess I’m just supposed to trust your angelic promises,” I said, arms crossed in front of my chest.

  Alex looked away. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”

  “What? What are you talking about? You did it before.” Heat rose to my cheeks, remembering his slick grin after the coconut oil thing.

  “Something’s changed now. Something’s different.”

  I was genuinely curious. “What’s different?”

  His shoulders rose. “I don’t know.” He sighed, turning to me, and the look in his eyes truly wounded me. “I wish I did.”

  I felt the need to confess to everything I’ve ever done that may have hurt him, but he went on. “I tried to reach you when I was gone, and all I got was static.”

  “You tried to reach me?” It was a mere whisper, the words sticking in my throat. Tears stung at my eyes. He had reached out. He had tried . . .

  Sampson. Focus. I let a little niggle of anger boil up, reminding myself that Alex wasn’t trying to reach me: he was trying to read my mind. And a telephone was readily available and a hell of a lot more reliable than the “loving” mind dip.

  I broke his gaze, seeing the tip of his police badge winking on his belt. “No, Alex,” I said, shaking my head. “Pete Sampson is not back in San Francisco.”

  Alex started the car and I tried to quash down the guilt that welled up inside me.

  I generally have two complexion colors: impossibly pale or lobster red. But as I drove home from the Underworld Detection Agency—and the heinous crime scene on the bluff—I realized there was a new hue to add when I checked myself in the rearview mirror: ashen. It was the complexion equivalent of the way that I felt. Murder, I was sadly getting used to. Ditto with crime scenes. But lying—scratch that—lying to Alex, was a different thing entirely.

  I trudged up the stairs and brightened when I stepped into my apartment and ChaCha, in a bout of spastically happy yips, tossed herself at my ankles. I scooped her up and she gave me a comforting nuzzle.

  “Wow, Soph,” Sampson said, stepping out of the bathroom. “You don’t look so well. Everything okay?”

  I pinched my bottom lip, trying to think of a better greeting than, “I saw the gnarled remains of a pair of college coeds on the Point; what did you do today?”

  “I need chocolate” was my kindly response.

  In a matter of moments I was stationed at the kitchen table wearing a stack of chocolate marshmallow pinwheels on my index finger. I was eating them like candied apples and dumping the remains of a chilly chardonnay in my Carrie for Prom Queen coffee mug.

  “It was awful,” I said to Sampson, shuddering so that a spray of chocolate fell into my cleavage. “The destruction was . . . complete.”

  “Did Alex have any leads? Did anyone?”

  I frowned, shaking my head. “Nothing. But . . .” I let my word trail off as I bit into my cookie, hoping the chocolate-marshmallow goodness would dull the ache of those sightless eyes.

  “But what?”

  “Well, I wandered away a little bit—and ended up sliding in the—in the blood.”

  Sampson gestured to my turban of gauze. “I was wondering when you were going to mention that.”

  “I just hit my head. But before that, I’m almost certain I saw something. A figure or something in the bushes.”

  “Something or someone?”

  I looked at Sampson and was taken aback by the intensity of his gaze. “I’m not sure. It was hard to tell.”

  He nodded and there was something unreadable in his expression. It was almost heartwarming, the way he focused on me, on my wound, on my story.

  I gulped my mug of wine. “It may have been after I fell. But I felt it watching me. I felt it—or him—watching the whole crime scene.”

  Sampson bristled. “Does Alex know about this?”

  I nodded, bit into another cookie ring. “I told him, but I think that he thinks—” I paused, picked at a chunk of chocolate on the table. “I think that he thinks I was seeing things.”

  I saw the question in Sampson’s eyes, and I immediately changed the subject. “No leads. They found some hair, but I’m not sure what came of it.”

  “Hair?” Sampson’s brows went up. “Victim or perp?”

  I grinned. “You sound like a real detective!”

  “Well, I did spend the afternoon watching Law & Order.”

  “Same detective school I graduated from,” I said, glugging the remains of my wine. I stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to scrape the crime scene from me, now that I’ve been fortified. Oh—” I paused, turning slowly to face Sampson. “There was one thing that was weird though.”

  Sampson was gathering
up my cookie crumbs with a napkin. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “Feng was there.”

  Sampson stiffened and I saw the tremble go through his body. He tried to hide it, tried to brush it off, but I noticed the crumbs he had just palmed were sprinkled back on the table. “Feng? The werewolf hunter?”

  I nodded.

  “Sophie, why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

  I looked from Sampson’s pinched expression to my empty wine mug. “I—I only thought it was weird—not important.”

  Sampson let out a long sigh and lowered himself to the dining chair. I could see the cogs turning in his head.

  “She doesn’t know you’re here, Sampson. She was at the crime scene—miles from here.”

  “You said that they found hair?”

  “Yeah,” I stumbled, confused, “one of the officers was bagging it.”

  “Do you know anything about it? Were they planning on running it for DNA?”

  I smiled. “You must have caught a couple of CSI episodes, too.”

  Sampson avoided my gaze. “I’m not joking.”

  I was taken aback. There was nothing overtly angry in his statement, but the way he kept his eyes averted from me let me know that, suddenly, a wall was up between us.

  I gripped the back of the dining chair.

  “She’s looking for us, Sophie.”

  I straightened. “She saw me. She didn’t try to talk to me. I really don’t think she knows you’re here. And if she did—I know her, Sampson. Why don’t you just let me talk to her? I can tell her about you, explain that you’re not a threat to her. Or to anyone else.”

  “No!” Sampson’s eyes flashed with a rage that was buried in fear. My breath caught and I saw his expression immediately shift from surprise to sadness. He reached out and patted my hand, used his other hand to rake his sand-colored hair back from his forehead. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to startle you. I just—please, don’t contact Feng. Don’t say anything to her until I can figure out what we’re going to do.”