Skin Trade

45

THE NEXT SOUND was gunfire, a lot of it. But the moment I saw the airborne officer, I knew there would be. Martin Bendez was about to die, and there was no way to save him. Whatever information he had was gone. The real kicker was that if I’d been near the front of the line, I’d have helped kill him. When a wereanimal goes a certain level of apeshit, you run out of options fast.

Cox eased forward, and I followed. Shelby brought up the rear. It looked like almost every other officer in Vegas was already clustered at the front area. They’d made a mass around some point I couldn’t see. I wasn’t tall enough to spot Edward or even Olaf from the back of the crowd, but somehow I knew that Edward, at least, would be near the front.

He was like one of those antitank missiles. Point front toward the enemy, and make sure you know where to stand.

I didn’t try to push; Cox did it for me. He just eased us through the crowd. I followed in his wake. Shelby got a little separated, but then he took up more room than I did, so people were more likely to not let him push through. Sometimes smaller is better.

We wormed our way close enough to the front that I glimpsed Olaf towering over everyone. I knew that Edward had to be close to him. I left Cox behind and continued to work my way closer to the big guy. I actually saw Bernardo first, then Edward, all with their guns still out. All still pointed at something I couldn’t see on the ground. Most of the rest of the police had eased up; some had even holstered.

“It’s dead.” I recognized Sergeant Hooper’s voice but couldn’t see him yet.

“It’s not dead until it shifts back to human form,” Edward said.

“What are you talking about, Marshal?” another man asked.

I eased up until I was just behind them. I could glimpse a white-and-black-furred body on the ground. “As long as it’s furry,” I said, “it’s still alive. Dead, they turn back to their original shape.”

Edward almost looked back at me, but kept his eyes and his gun on the downed tiger. “Better late than never,” he said.

I shouldered my way between him and Bernardo, and aimed my gun with theirs. “Sorry I missed it.”

“No,” Bernardo said, “you’re not.” Something in the way he said it made me wonder what else I’d missed besides the body on the ground.

“It isn’t shifting, just like the tiger in St. Louis,” Olaf said.

I settled the MP5 tighter in my arms, but not too tight, and sighted down at the still form. I couldn’t see any movement, or sense anything but stillness, but the one in St. Louis had done that, too. That one had nearly killed me and Edward’s stepson, Peter. It had killed one of our people.

“I know,” I said, and felt my body go still, sinking away into that silence where I went if I had time in a fight. It was a good quiet place to kill things from, the static narrowing inside my head.

Then the body moved. Someone actually shot into it, but it wasn’t that kind of movement. The skin receded like the ocean drawing back from the shore. What was left was a pale, nude man lying on his side. I couldn’t tell if he’d been handsome or ugly, because there wasn’t enough of his face left to answer the question. There was daylight showing through his chest now because the wounds remained the same, but the weretiger’s body was so much bigger, bulkier, that once they changed to human shape, the wounds all looked nastier. Less mass, more damage taken, as if once dead the lycanthropy stopped protecting the human host.

It took me a few seconds to draw myself back from that silent place. Almost everyone else in the circle of guns had let go of their tension by the time I shook it off and dropped my own shoulders.

I found Olaf staring at me when I finally looked around. “What?” I asked, and I didn’t try to keep the hostility out of my voice.

Those cave-dark eyes gave me a look that held too much weight, and there was nothing sexual about it. I’d thought his attempts at dating me had been creepy enough, but there was something about this look that bothered me almost as much, even though I couldn’t have told you what the look meant.

“You reacted like Ed… Ted and me.”

“What, am I invisible?” Bernardo asked.

I don’t know what I would have said to Olaf’s comment, since I didn’t understand it, but Sergeant Hooper was at our side, and there were other things to talk about. Thank God.

“I guess we won’t be finding out the location of the vampire’s lair from this one,” he said.

We all stood in the breath-stealing heat and too-bright sunshine and looked down at the body. “I guess not,” I said.

I heard someone yell my name. “Blake, what the fuck are you doing here?” It was Shaw striding toward me through the crowd. Great.

“Did you find the missing officers?” I asked.

“Dead,” Edward said. He wasn’t looking at the body, but outward. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular. It was as if he were sca

I felt Shaw’s anger almost like something touchable. It made me turn away from a hand that I hadn’t even seen yet. He had reached for me, totally inappropriate, but I’d moved just out of reach without ever having seen his hand.

My moving like that, like magic, put my pulse into my throat, so when I spoke it sounded hoarse and not like me. “No touching.”

“Everyone else but me, I guess,” and he said it with as much nasty inflection as he could muster.

“Wow,” Bernardo said, “what is your problem with Marshal Blake, or do you just not like girls? That the real reason the wife left?” He lowered his sunglasses enough to give me a wink as he faced Shaw. He’d done it on purpose to get Shaw away from me. If I hadn’t thought he’d take it totally wrong, I would have hugged him.

Edward started moving away from Shaw’s one-sided yelling match with Bernardo. Olaf trailed us like an oversized shadow. Hooper caught up to Edward and me. None of us said a word. It was like we all knew where we were going and what we’d find. I guess the three of them did.

The first body was SWAT, still in gear. He still had his helmet on, so the body was almost anonymous except for general height. On television they take the headgear off so you can see the pretty actors and watch them act, but in real life most of the men are covered pretty much head to toe. It meant that I couldn’t see the wounds that were making the spreading pool of blood underneath him. It’s supposed to be safer covered head to foot in gear. The man at our feet probably didn’t think so anymore. Of course, he wasn’t really thinking anything anymore. Dead is dead.

The moment I thought it, I wished I hadn’t, because I felt it. The soul, the essence, whatever you want to call it, hovering. I didn’t look up. I didn’t want to try to see the invisible, because even to me there’d be nothing to see. I knew it was floating there. I could probably have traced its outline in the air, but there was nothing to truly see. Souls don’t look like anything to me. Ghosts, those I can see sometimes, but not souls. Most of the time I didn’t see the souls at the crime scene. I’d gotten better at shielding because souls aren’t helpful. They just hang around for three days, or less, and then they go on. I don’t know why some souls hang around longer than others. Most of the time really violent deaths send the soul packing quicker, as if they don’t want to wait around for more trauma. Oddly, you will get more ghosts out of violent deaths. Fewer souls, more ghosts; I’d always thought that was interesting, but it did me no damn good as I stood there staring down at our fallen operator. His soul was watching us. It might even follow his body to the morgue before it moved on. I did not share this information with Hooper. He didn’t need or, honestly, want to know.