Sucker Punch

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Giselle looked at me as if I’d said something interesting and nodded. “How do you know that?”

  “I’m engaged to a dancer.” I said it just like that, no explanation that it was male, or more than one.

  She gave me her first real smile. “You must have spent a lot of time in the club back home.”

  “Enough,” I said, and smiled, letting her make of it what she would.

  She was friendlier after that, more relaxed. We learned that the night had been planned a couple of months out, because of Jocelyn having to coordinate with her two married friends. Lap dances were planned for all, but only Jocelyn had planned to get onstage.

  “It must have rained money,” I said, smiling again.

  Giselle nodded, face happy and satisfied like the cat that ate a big fat canary. “Best night I ever had.”

  “Jocelyn must be a regular for you to trust her up onstage like that,” I said.

  She nodded again. “She’s here at least a couple of times a month.”

  “Always a lap dance with you?” I asked.

  Giselle frowned then. “No, not always. Sometimes I’m busy when she comes in, and then she’ll find another dancer, but she always comes to me before she leaves for the night.”

  “I’ll bet she does,” I said, and again let her turn my smile into anything she wanted it to be.

  Newman started asking timing questions, but like Phoenix, Giselle confirmed that Jocelyn’s alibi was solid. Most normal people rarely have good alibis when they need them, because they aren’t planning on needing one. It’s actually more suspicious sometimes when the alibi is too good, like this one, but two strippers and an entire club full of people had watched Jocelyn all night. There was no way to put her at the scene of the murder. Strike one murder suspect, which put us back to Bobby as our prime. Fuck.

  Giselle had gotten so comfortable that she bumped her shoulder against mine as if I’d been another dancer, and then she said, “All the other dancers were so jealous of me that night. You get women in the clubs, and they usually take the attention away from us, but these were all mine.”

  “The other dancers must have been pissed.”

  She nodded happily as if it were the best thing.

  Newman said, “Let me walk you to your car.”

  The change was so abrupt that I would have said something, but he looked at me and I trusted he had his reasons. He beeped the Jeep so it was unlocked and asked me to open the doors and let the heat out. It wasn’t that hot, but I didn’t argue. I just went to the car and opened both front doors. I’d finished the French fries a while ago, so I found a trash can in the parking lot and put the garbage in it while the car aired out or whatever.

  Newman found me sitting in the passenger seat with the doors open. “Why the abrupt end?” I asked him.

  “I didn’t want you to bewitch another dancer.”

  “I’m in control now, Newman. Promise.”

  “Let me see your eyes.”

  I didn’t argue. I just lowered my sunglasses enough for him to see.

  He sighed as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. “Normal again.”

  I put the glasses back on because, well, sunlight, but said, “Good.”

  “Giselle started touching you and being all chummy. I just didn’t want to see you roll another dancer. Besides, we’d learned what we came to learn.”

  “That Jocelyn’s alibi is airtight,” I said.

  He closed his door, so I did the same. He started the engine and got the air going. “What happened in the club, Blake? I know you have some supernatural abilities, but I thought that was from the lycanthropy. What you did in there was vampire, not shapeshifter.”

  Newman and I were work friends, not friend friends. I trusted him with my life, but I wasn’t sure I could trust him with all my secrets. “I usually carry protein bars and water with me, but I forgot this trip. I need to eat real food, not just coffee, about every four hours to keep the other metaphysical hungers under control.”

  “Other metaphysical hungers? What does that even mean?”

  “It means that I’ve been dealing with the supernatural a lot longer than you have, and the more time I spend with it, the more of it seems to rub off on me.”

  He gripped the steering wheel. “Jeffries and Karlton both caught lycanthropy on the job on the same damn case. It was Karlton’s and my first time in the field on an active hunt. It could have been me.”

  “They both got to keep their badges and their jobs,” I said.

  “I don’t want to keep this badge enough to give up my humanity, Blake.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I let the silence grow until he filled it. “What I saw in the club, you with that dancer, that wasn’t human, Blake.”

  “One should be careful fighting monsters, lest you become one,” I said.

  “You’re going to quote Nietzsche to me, really?”

  “It seemed appropriate.”

  “Tell me what happened in the club, Blake,” he almost yelled.

  “There are other things you can catch on the job besides lycanthropy, Newman. What you saw in there was one of them.”

  “What was it? Give it a name, Blake.”

  I told the truth up to a point. “There isn’t a test for it like there is for lycanthropy, Newman. What you saw inside is a side effect of being around too many vampires for too many years.”

  “So it’s a type of vampirism?”

  “Not according to my medical file, and trust me, they take blood and check me out regularly just like everyone else in the preternatural branch.”

  “The regular marshals don’t get all the medical checkups that we do. They’re looking for . . . what?”

  “Scary things,” I said.

  “What does that mean, Blake?”

  “It means that the quote from Nietzsche wasn’t just me trying to avoid answering your questions.”

  “So you’re saying that to be good at this job, you have to become one of the monsters?”

  “Yeah, most of the time. Yeah.”

  Newman leaned over the wheel, hands gripping it so tight they mottled. I let him sit there like that without saying anything. This was his moment of crisis, and I’d known it was coming. He needed out of this branch of the Marshals Service, but he needed to decide for himself.

  He looked up and his face was so raw with emotion that I had to fight not to look away, but if he could feel it, I could look at it. “I don’t want to become one of the monsters, Blake. I don’t want to have to kill people any more as my job. I liked being a cop. I liked helping people, protecting people. I never had to draw my gun on the job until I joined the preternatural branch.”

  “I didn’t start out wanting to be one of the monsters, Newman. I just did what was necessary to finish the job.”

  “I don’t want to kill Bobby,” he said.

  “I don’t either.”

  “If I sign the warrant over to you, will you do it?”

  I thought for a minute and then finally shook my head. “If I was the only one here besides you, I’d do it, because it’s my job. But I’ve got Ted and Otto, so I don’t have to take this one for the team.”

  “But if you had to do it, you could look Bobby in the eyes and do it?”

  I let all the air out in a long sigh and then nodded. “I could if there was no other choice.”

  “But it would cost you, hurt you to do it?”

  “A little piece of my soul would be cut off, yeah.”

  “I would never ask you to do that for me.”

  “Like I said, Ted and Otto are here. It won’t cost either of them what it would cost me.”

  “I wouldn’t sign it over to Jeffries. He enjoys the kill too much for me to give Bobby to him.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

&n
bsp; “Do you want me to sign it over to Forrester or you?”

  “Me. I can give it to him later if it comes to that.”

  “It’s going to come to that unless someone else finds a clue or someone confesses,” Newman said.

  “Then we pray for a clue.”

  “You prayed in there, and it worked. How can you be able to use your eyes like a vampire and still have your cross glow and work?”

  “I’m a special snowflake.”

  “That’s not an answer,” he said.

  “It’s the only answer I have. God doesn’t see my abilities as evil, and my faith is strong enough that my cross works just fine.”

  “Then you can’t be a monster.”

  “Pretty to think so,” I said.

  “‘If God be for me, then who can be against me?’” he said.

  I smiled then. “Yeah, that.”

  “How about we pray that we get some help on this case and save Bobby’s life?”

  “I can help you pray for the truth to come out and for us to find the real murderer.”

  “Do you still believe that Bobby could have done this?”

  “I’ve been in this business too long not to believe that good people do bad things.”

  “Would you pray with me that we don’t have to kill Bobby if he’s innocent?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We’d started to bow our heads but hadn’t quite gotten there when Newman’s phone rang. “Captain Livingston. Afternoon, sir.” Newman managed not to sound as surprised as his face showed for a second. It’s not every day a captain in any police branch calls you on a case without it being for a bad reason. Usually it meant you’d screwed up big-time, but a captain in one law enforcement agency didn’t mean or do the same job as in another.

  Newman said, “May I put you on speaker, sir, so Marshal Blake can hear the information?”

  Apparently, Livingston said yes, because I was suddenly listening to his voice over the phone. “Marshal Blake,” he said.

  “Captain Livingston.” I had to fight not to say I presume. I was sure he’d heard it a million times since I’d been tempted twice already.

  “My people are helping the insurance investigator run an inventory of items in the Marchand house that might have gone missing in the robbery.”

  I almost asked what robbery, but realized that legally what Muriel and Todd Babington had done might have been burglary or breaking and entering or robbery or a mix of the above. The definition would differ from state to state. The more I learned about regular police work, the more confusing it seemed. Usually my job was much simpler.

  “You said you may have found something that could have been used in the murder,” Newman prompted Livingston.

  “Is either of you familiar with a bagh nakha?”

  We both said no.

  “It’s like reverse brass knuckles with concealable claws that fit against your palm. It has rings that go over the little and index fingers to hold it in place. This particular one supposedly has papers proving it originally belonged to a maharaja. Story goes he used it to assassinate his rivals.”

  “I’m still having trouble visualizing it,” I said.

  “It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen either. I’ve sent some pictures,” Livingston said.

  Newman’s phone pinged, and he made the pictures fill the screen. The first things that caught my attention were the jewels. Seriously large, richly colored stones glittered in the photo. Once upon a time, I wouldn’t have known they were real and how much money I was looking at, but thanks to helping pick out stones for the wedding rings that were being made for Jean-Claude and me, I knew how much rubies of that size and color would go for. I also knew the stones in the photo had to be antique because of their color and size. People just didn’t find new rubies of that color anymore. The diamonds that encircled the smaller of the two rubies looked like carved ice caught in brilliant sunlight. The larger ruby was encircled with gold, emeralds, and other things I wasn’t sure enough about to name, but it was all beautiful and as flashy as hell. The rings seemed to be attached by a metal bar between them.

  “That’s a small to medium fortune in just the jewels,” I said.

  Livingston’s voice on the phone said, “With the provenance paperwork and history attached to it, it’s worth even more.”

  Newman swiped to the next picture. This one showed the metal claws underneath the bar. “So the rings fit over your fingers and the claws are against the upper part of your palm?”

  “Swipe to the next picture. It shows the bagh nakha being worn.”

  We swiped, and there was a man’s hand with two brilliant rings on his fingers: the illusion was perfect. It just looked like he was wearing two rings. One was all ruby and diamond, and the other had a larger ruby encircled by a colorful mosaic of smaller jewels and gold.

  “Someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure the rings didn’t look like a matched set,” I said.

  “The bagh nakha was designed to be undetectable until it was used either as last-ditch self-defense or to assassinate someone,” Livingston said.

  Newman swiped to the next photo. This one showed the claws curled tight against the palm of a hand. They weren’t gold. I was betting they were good-quality steel or the equivalent mix. The top of the weapon was a work of art, but the bottom was all utilitarian and meant for only one thing.

  “Bagh nakha translates to tiger claw,” Livingston said.

  “It’s beautiful and deadly, just like a big cat,” I said.

  “And so far it’s the only high-ticket item that we can’t find. There may be others, but when my people told me about it, I figured I should let you and Duke know ASAP.”

  “Really appreciate that, Captain Livingston.”

  “It’s the least I can do, Marshal Newman. I wouldn’t want to do your job, but if I had to, I’d want to make damn certain that I was executing the right person.”

  “This could be our murder weapon,” I said.

  “It could. We need to find it before they dispose of it,” Newman said.

  “If you’re thinking the same they as I am, then they won’t throw it away. They’ll take the jewels out of it and sell them,” Livingston said.

  “Can I just say who we’re all thinking is they?” I asked.

  “We’re all thinking it,” Livingston said.

  “The wicked aunt and uncle who were trying to take every high-end item that wasn’t nailed down with the body barely out of the house,” I said.

  “Muriel and Todd Babington,” Newman said.

  “If it was just a murder weapon, then they’d throw it in the nearest lake or river, and we’d never find it,” Livingston said.

  “But they’re desperate for money,” Newman said. “They’ll try to keep the precious stones.”

  “If you find the stones, it’ll be enough to prove they had the bagh nakha in their possession,” Livingston said.

  “Rubies can take a beating and keep on ticking, but emeralds can’t,” I said. “If Aunt Muriel and Uncle Todd know their stones, then they will want an expert to help them take the thing apart, and they may not have had time to find one yet.”

  “How do you know so much about precious stones, Blake?”

  “I just finished helping design wedding rings. I thought emeralds were pretty until I learned that they’re only a seven to eight on the Mohs scale of hardness, and that it’s a soft eight that doesn’t always stand up to everyday wear. Rubies and sapphires are a nine, and diamonds are a ten—one of the hardest substances on the planet. I’m hard on everything I wear, so there went the emeralds.”

  “You’re just full of surprises, Blake,” Livingston said.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “We’ll need a search warrant for the Babingtons’ house ASAP,” Newman said.

&
nbsp; “Well, luckily we already started the ball rolling on that when they got caught in the middle of robbing the Marchand house.”

  “Do we have the search warrant?” Newman asked.

  “We do. Duke’s people and mine are driving to the Babingtons’ house as we speak.”

  “We’ll join them at the house,” Newman said, and smiled. He looked more like the man I’d met a couple of years ago. Younger and fresher to the job.

  “I figured you would. Happy hunting,” Livingston said, and hung up. Most cops don’t say good-bye, at least not to one another.

  I buckled my seat belt and Newman started the car. He looked at me sideways. “Did you pray silently already?”

  “Not me,” I said.

  He grinned. “Don’t tell the other marshals I asked you to pray for a clue.”

  “Mum’s the word,” I said, smiling back. But I offered a silent prayer of thanks, just in case. God really does work in mysterious ways, and it never hurts to say thank you when good things happen.

  64

  NEWMAN PUT THE car in gear, and I had to tell him to stop. “We have to wait for Nicky and Ethan to at least get here.”

  He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Why are they coming here?”

  “Shit, I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry, Newman. They’re meeting us here.”

  “Leduc was clear, Anita. None of your people can be involved with this investigation.”

  “They’re bringing me some protein bars and stuff.”

  “We’re not going to go look for the murder weapon because your boyfriends are bringing us snacks?”

  “We’ll join the search for the possible murder weapon, Newman, but I just need to make sure I don’t forget to eat again.”

  “You just ate,” he said.

  “It was only my second meal of the day, and it should have been my third. It’s not good when I skip meals.”

  “Are you saying that what happened in the club just now was because you skipped a meal?”

  “Not exactly, but it may have contributed to it.”

  “Okay, we can wait a few minutes.”

  “They want to follow us around the rest of the time.”