Sucker Punch

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “Have you changed your mind? Do you think he murdered Ray now?” Newman asked.

  “No, I still think he was framed, but that doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.”

  “You did this to him bare-handed?” Olaf asked.

  “She hit him with one of the prettiest uppercuts I’ve seen in years,” Duke said.

  “I used mostly my elbows and knees, but no weapons, no,” I said.

  Olaf smiled at me as if I’d spoken sweet nothings. He always reacted like that to the weirdest shit.

  “I’ve never seen anyone move as fast as she did,” Kaitlin said.

  “You’ve never seen a real shapeshifter move,” I said.

  “No, I haven’t, but if they’re faster than you, I’m not sure I want to.”

  “If Blake had been any slower, we’d have been putting her into an ambulance,” Livingston said.

  “You can’t just let him die like this,” Wagner said.

  “Shut up, Troy. You’re in enough trouble,” Duke said.

  “Troy’s right,” Newman said. “We can’t just let him die.”

  “Boy, you have a warrant in your pocket that says you can shoot him full of holes until he dies. You saw him in the cell. You were afraid for Blake’s life, too. Don’t tell me you weren’t.”

  “Yes, I thought he was going to hurt Blake, but that doesn’t give us the right to let him bleed out like this.”

  “We don’t even know that’s what’s happening,” I said.

  “Then why hasn’t he moved? If he hasn’t got a concussion or a damaged spine, then why hasn’t he come to?” Newman moved toward me, hands in fists at his sides. He wasn’t going to start a fight. He was just upset, and it was coming out in his body.

  “I don’t know, Newman!” I had to swallow my own anger down before I lost it. My voice was calmer as I said, “I would never have hit him like I did if I hadn’t thought he would heal.”

  “You are used to the shapeshifters in St. Louis,” Olaf said.

  I looked at him. “What does that mean?”

  “All of them would have healed by now.”

  “Are you saying that Bobby won’t heal?”

  “He should heal, but it will not be one of the miracles of healing that you are used to at home.”

  “Why won’t he heal like that?”

  “First, he is not part of any group, so he does not share in their larger energy. Second, he has only one small beast form, which proves he is not a powerful shapeshifter in and of himself. Third, he is not tied to a master vampire, so he doesn’t have that energy to draw upon. I do not think you understand how unique St. Louis is for all these reasons and more.”

  Olaf looked at me very pointedly when he said the last part. He seemed to be trying to tell me something with that look, but I had no idea what he was hinting at. I’d ask him later in private, or maybe I wouldn’t. I focused on what was in front of me, one problem at a time or they gang up on you.

  “Fine. So I play with too many big dogs to play nice with the small ones. How do we help Bobby here and now?”

  Olaf shrugged. “I do not know.”

  “Open the damn cell, Duke,” Newman said, and the anger was back. I couldn’t really blame him. We were working so hard to save Bobby, and now it might all have been for nothing.

  “Who goes inside with him?” Duke asked.

  “I will,” I said.

  “You’ll need backup,” Livingston said.

  “No,” Newman said. “He’s not a danger to anyone like this.”

  “If he wakes up suddenly and sees you bending over him—” Duke started to say, but Newman cut him off.

  “Open the fucking cell, Duke!”

  Livingston got his shotgun again, and once he had it ready to aim, Duke opened the cell.

  “It’s your funeral,” Duke said again as Newman pushed past him.

  I followed him into the cell. He’d called me for backup, so I’d have his back. Olaf stayed in the cell doorway so that Leduc couldn’t close it behind us. Good, I was tired of being locked in this damn cell.

  27

  LIVINGSTON HAD HIS shotgun to his shoulder, though it was aimed at the ceiling while Newman knelt to check Bobby’s pulse on the side of his neck. I stood on the other side of Bobby from him. Bobby looked so pale and so still. I held my breath as if that would help Newman find a pulse. Bobby’s face was a bloody mess, and I’d done that to him. Had I done more? Had he died while we tried to call the judge, slowly bleeding to death inside his head? Or maybe I’d broken his spine badly enough that the trauma had acted like a decapitation. Yeah, Olaf said Bobby’s heart was still beating, but I couldn’t hear it. In all the years I’d been hunting, fighting, and dating people with lycanthropy, I’d never heard of one of them dying from a spinal injury or a concussion. I thought you had to see brains on the outside of the skull for the brain to be injured enough to kill. It was going to be a hell of a time to be wrong.

  “Pulse seems slow, but it’s there.”

  I let out the breath I’d been holding, but the tightness in my chest wasn’t fooled. It knew that a pulse just meant Bobby wasn’t dead yet.

  “I told you he was not dead,” Olaf said from the door, where the sheriff was still trying to get him to move so he could lock the door again.

  “If that monster comes to and rushes the door, he could kill us all before we get him,” Leduc said.

  “No,” Olaf said.

  “You hunt these things. You know how fast they can be,” Leduc said.

  Newman was opening one of Bobby’s eyes. I prayed that the pupils weren’t uneven and fixed, because if either of those things was true, then I’d killed him. It was just going to take him longer than normal to die.

  “Anita would slow him down until I could join the fight. He would never reach you and the others,” Olaf said.

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Blake beat him without help last time, Duke. I think we’re safe to leave the cell open,” Livingston said.

  “Pupils are even and reacting to light,” Newman said.

  The tightness in my chest loosened. “Good,” I managed to say, and I sounded breathless, as if I still couldn’t get enough air. Killing someone on purpose was one thing; doing it by accident was something else. It’s funny how you don’t know what will bother you until it does.

  Newman looked up at me. “I still want to call an ambulance.”

  “If we can get some paramedics that are willing to look at him, I’m good with that,” I said.

  “They have to do their job if we call them,” Newman said.

  I shook my head. “Not if it will endanger them. Legally they can refuse.”

  “They’d just let him die because they’re afraid?” he asked, sounding outraged. He suddenly seemed years younger than I knew he was, or maybe I just felt years more cynical.

  “If they think he’ll kill them, yeah,” I said.

  “He’s unconscious,” Newman said.

  “Even if they look at him here, they won’t transport him.”

  “They might,” he said, and again I felt so much older than he was, not in years, but in experience. That will age you faster than any number of birthdays.

  “She’s right, Newman,” Livingston said.

  Newman glanced back at him, a hand protectively on Bobby’s shoulder. “We could take him to the hospital ourselves.”

  “You’d have to take him all the way to the county hospital. It’s the closest one with a trauma unit that could hold him,” Duke said.

  “Fine. We’ll do that,” Newman said. “Help me move him, Blake.”

  I thought about being in Newman’s car when Bobby came to and how close the fight had been in the cell. I realized I didn’t want to be in the car with him if he started to shift. “On one condition.”

 
; Newman gave me outraged eyes. “Conditions? You nearly beat him to death, and you want to give conditions for saving his life?”

  “Maybe condition was the wrong word, but I want you to understand one thing before we start for the hospital. If he starts to shift in the car like he did in the cell, I’m going to shoot him in the head, probably multiple times.”

  “He’d never survive that.”

  “That would be the idea.”

  “You think he’s a murdering monster now?”

  “No, but I think he would have killed me if I hadn’t stopped him. I’m glad I didn’t kill him by accident, defending myself. I hope we prove that he’s innocent and find out who really killed Ray Marchand, and if Bobby just wakes up in the car like normal, then we’ll take him to the hospital. But I will have a weapon drawn and aimed at him in the car. If he goes apeshit again, I won’t risk fighting hand to hand with him.”

  “You can’t blame Blake for that, Newman,” Livingston said. He was still holding the shotgun at the ready.

  “Yeah, I can.”

  “Newman,” I said.

  He looked up at me with angry eyes.

  “If it had been you in the cell with Bobby when he started to shapeshift, what would you have done?” I asked.

  The anger started to fade in Newman’s eyes as he said, “I’d have gone for my gun.”

  “You’d have shot him to save your life,” I said.

  He sighed and nodded. “I guess I would have.”

  “Then don’t blame me for not wanting to push my luck and try to survive a second slugfest with a shapeshifter.”

  Newman looked down at Bobby, still touching him protectively. “Who am I fooling? I’d never have gotten my gun out in time. It’s why you didn’t draw yours. There wasn’t time. I don’t have your fight training, Blake, or your speed. If I’d been the one standing next to Bobby when he went animalistic, you’d have been taking me to the hospital or the morgue.”

  “And we’d have had to shoot Bobby to save you,” I said.

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “Do you think he’ll go crazy when he wakes up like he did before?” Kaitlin asked from near the door to the offices. She hadn’t come too far into the cell area this time. I think she’d decided that she didn’t want a repeat performance with Bobby. Me either.

  “There’s no way to tell until he wakes up,” I said.

  “He had to have control of his change before this,” Newman said, “or his family wouldn’t have let him walk around the house in leopard form.”

  “He was trying to suicide by cop when he started to shift,” I said. “He may have carried that thought over as he started to change.”

  “Would that have been enough to make him lose control like that?” Newman asked.

  “I think it was,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Olaf. When the others looked at him, he explained, “If he were a normal person that was intent on suicide by police, he would raise his gun instead of putting it down, so we would have to shoot him. His beast is his gun. That is the only difference.”

  “Win, don’t put yourself and Blake in a car with him. I don’t want to have to explain that to Haley,” Duke said.

  “Don’t do that, Duke. Don’t bring Haley into this.”

  “I know you want to help Bobby, and I know you believe he didn’t kill Ray, but is any of that worth not having a lifetime with the woman you love?” Duke seemed so reasonable, even caring and gentle. It was another glimpse of a good person, a good cop who was in there somewhere. Maybe I really hadn’t seen him at his best.

  “Damn it, Duke,” Newman said.

  “I’ll call an ambulance and see if they’re willing to look him over. Okay, Win?”

  Newman nodded and lowered his head until it was almost touching Bobby’s. If the wereleopard woke up now, it could go badly. But Newman was as aware of that as I was, so I let him be. Duke went into the office to call for an ambulance just as Bobby took a long, shuddering breath.

  28

  NEWMAN STARTLED SO badly, he sat down hard beside Bobby. I was beside Newman before I’d thought about it, grabbing him under the arm and pulling him to his feet and moving both of us toward the door. Even though he had been damn near crying over Bobby a second before, he didn’t fight me. He wanted to save Bobby, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t scared of him. Livingston moved smoothly away from the door so that the two of us could get out. Olaf closed the door behind us, and we all watched as Bobby coughed and sputtered awake.

  “You broke my nose,” Bobby said in a voice that was thick with blood and all the things that happened when someone smashed your nose into their knee repeatedly.

  “You’re alive,” I said from the safety of the cage bars.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Bobby asked as he lay on his side, raising his manacled hands up to touch his face. He winced and jerked his hands back from his nose.

  “Do you remember anything about the fight?” I asked.

  He rolled onto one elbow, but apparently having his head hanging down was bad, because he moved so his face was pointed more upward. He pushed stiffly to a sitting position, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders. If we didn’t kill him soon, we really needed to give him some clothes.

  “No,” he said.

  “Nothing?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “You said, ‘You broke my nose,’” Newman said. “Who broke it?”

  “She did.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Her,” Bobby said, and pointed toward me.

  “If you don’t remember anything, how do you know I broke it?” I asked.

  That seemed to stop him, his blue eyes blinking confused in their mask of fresh blood. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying, Bobby,” I said.

  “Wait,” Olaf said.

  I hadn’t expected him to join in much, so that one word made me look up at him. He was studying Bobby. “Wait for what?”

  “Let me try.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Tell us exactly what you see in your mind.”

  “I don’t know,” Bobby said. “It’s darkness and flashes.”

  “Tell us what you see. Do not edit yourself. Just talk.”

  Bobby frowned and then winced again as if even frowning hurt. “Anger. I was angry, and then I started seeing in leopard vision.”

  “What the hell does that even mean, leopard vision?” Leduc said from the doorway to the offices. I think he’d delayed the ambulance call now that our suspect was awake and talking.

  “My leopard eyes don’t see color the way my human eyes do. That’s usually my first clue that I’m changing.”

  “What do you remember next?” Olaf asked.

  Bobby drew the blanket around him as close as he could and shivered. I wasn’t sure if it was from coldness or from what he saw in his own head. “I could smell the gun, feel it against my head. It scared the animal part, but the human part wanted it.” He stared up at Olaf with confusion in his eyes. “I tried to get . . . I wanted to die for what I’d done to Uncle Ray.”

  Bobby tried to wipe his hands over his face like he was going to hide, but it hurt too much, and his blanket began to slide down. He seemed very serious about the blanket staying in place. Again, it made me wonder about some kind of abuse background. He could have just been that modest, but he was a good-looking, fit man in his early thirties. I hadn’t met many of them who were this modest. If he’d just tried to keep his groin covered, maybe. But he seemed equally intent on keeping his upper body covered, which was usually more a woman’s problem unless something had happened to make the man self-conscious of his body.

  “Do you remember the fight now?” Olaf asked, his deep voice as serious and calm as I’d ever heard it.

  “Yes, most of it. I’ll
remember all of it in a few minutes.”

  I looked up at Olaf. “How did you know to question him like that?”

  He met my gaze with his own, but for once the eyes were thoughtful and serious, nothing more. “Even the best of us sometimes need a few minutes to reorient ourselves when we awake.”

  “Are you saying that I didn’t knock him out? He just passed out from the change?”

  “No, but even a partial change can be disorienting. Add several blows to the head and even a human might have trouble remembering the last few minutes.”

  Olaf was right. “Damn it, you’re right. I was so busy thinking of him as a wereleopard that I forgot that his human half could be knocked silly, too.”

  “If you hadn’t been here to help us question Bobby, I might have thought he was lying about not remembering,” Newman said.

  “Which would have made us doubt his whole story,” I said.

  Kaitlin piped up from the doorway. “Guess he’s not just a pretty face after all.”

  It startled me that she was referring to Olaf. Pretty was so not an adjective that I would ever have used for him.

  “I am not a pretty face,” Olaf said. He made it a statement.

  “Handsome, then,” she said.

  I nodded. “If you like.”

  “I like,” she said, and I realized she was flirting with him.

  He seemed to realize it, too, because he scowled; frown just didn’t cover that look. He’d reacted badly to compliments from women when I’d first met him, but I knew he could flirt and pretend because I’d seen it. I wondered if the reason he didn’t bother was that Kaitlin wasn’t his victim preference. I mean type. He liked petite women with dark hair, and preferred darker eyes. Yeah, I fit his type to a T. The only thing Kaitlin fit was the petite part, so she was safe and apparently held no interest for him. He didn’t even pretend to flirt back. He ignored her. Kaitlin would probably take that as a snub, but she didn’t know how lucky she was that he wasn’t interested in her. I wondered if dyeing my hair blond would make him lose interest. I’d never dyed my hair before, but to get Olaf off my back, I’d dye it Technicolor rainbow. If I did it before the wedding, Jean-Claude would never forgive me, but afterward he might agree. Anything to move me off Olaf’s dating menu seemed like a great idea.