They handcuffed me to the stretcher and drove me straight to the hospital in an ambulance. In no time the area was turned into a law enforcement and crime scene circus. None of it mattered to me because I’d seen two things which filled me with inexpressible gratitude. One was my mother, IV bag attached, being hoisted into another waiting ambulance. The other had been Bones, running unharmed after Switch. The bullet wounds would heal and he would catch him. Everything inside me believed it. What was a little multiple murder count compared to that?
A white-faced officer read me my rights and then burst into tears. Guess the sight of the living dead absorbing bullets like bubbles and still tearing throats out unnerved him. Not to mention the other vamps turning into shriveled mummies before his eyes. In my quick assessment, two had gotten away in addition to Switch, but I didn’t worry about them. We’d get them later. It shouldn’t be too hard since Bones now knew who they were. Switch was our first priority, and Bones wouldn’t let him get away. After all, he had promised me vengeance, and I knew he’d deliver.
The rescue workers treating me were also perplexed by my condition. I was covered in multiple slashes, stab wounds, bite marks, bruises, bashed ribs, scrapes, and oh yeah, a bullet hole. Yet when the young attendant took my vital signs, he blanched in confusion.
“Heart rate… normal. Blood pressure… normal. Pulse… normal. That can’t be right.”
“Sorry, buddy,” I murmured, enjoying the painkillers they’d injected into my IV. While the medication didn’t affect me as profoundly as it should have, it still took the edge off the sting.
“Look at your arm. The bullet is extruding toward the point of entry. Holy shit, Tom, come see this!” Forgetting his professionalism, the tech pointed excitedly at my shoulder.
Another face peered at the wound. “Not possible,” Tom stated flatly.
A strangled laugh escaped me. “That’s what I’ve been saying my whole life, fellas.”
“I can see the goddamn bullet crowning! Give me some Steri-Pads…”
Even in the midst of their awe, they still worked. Admirable quality. The bullet was pulled free from my flesh. When they unloaded me at the hospital under guard, I could hear them still mumbling to themselves dazedly.
“Did you see that? The tissue’s already coapted at the edges. The goddamn tissue’s coapted at the edges, Tom!”
Daylight lightened the sky with mauve and amber streaks. Sunrise. In the brief moments before the emergency room’s automatic doors excluded it from my view, I looked over at the horizon and smiled. We had lived through the night after all, all of us. It was the most beautiful sunrise I’d ever seen.
***
I now knew how a celebrity felt when they had something wrong with them which required hospitalization. There were multiple guards posted at my room, and doctors came in droves to gape and gasp over me. Aside from being handcuffed to the bed, it would have been flattering.
The dawn brought weariness, with reinforcements. I slept through most of the poking, prodding, and futile attempts at stitches that were promptly removed when my skin closed over the sutures at my accelerated healing rates. None of this concerned me. Bones would come for me. Let them gawk at me and scratch their heads while they had the chance.
As it turned out, by noon I had my first visitor, and it wasn’t my undead lover.
Detective Black entered the room with a nurse at his side. He smiled when he saw me. “Hello again, Catherine.”
Both of his wrists were bandaged from where my knives had punched through them. Frankly, I was surprised to see him at all, let alone in a good mood.
“Well, hiya,” I said, cursorily noticing the nurse fill a syringe from a tiny bottle on her tray. “Didn’t know you could speak, Detective Black. You didn’t say a word yesterday. Sorry about your wrists, but I didn’t feel like getting shot. Happened anyway though, as you can see. How’s my mother?”
He came near my bed. The nurse gave him a look as she tapped the syringe in a professional manner to get any bubbles out.
“No hard feelings, Catherine,” he said genially, holding up his thickly bandaged wrists. His eyes were peat colored and not nearly as friendly as his tone. “I’m getting promoted because of you. My career’s on the fast track, but Mansfield already mentioned that. Damn, is that old man annoying or what? I couldn’t wait for him to retire, and thanks to you, he finally has.”
“My mother?” I prodded, unnerved all of a sudden by how he smelled. There was something familiar about it. I wasn’t used to diagnosing things by scent, however, so I couldn’t quite place it.
“She’s our next stop,” was his reply.
The nurse motioned him out of the way of my IV. Irritably I wondered what they were injecting me with now. I’d even been given a tetanus shot.
He stared at me. “She and the other five girls they pulled out of that house are on the floor below you since none of them have been arrested like you have. Tragic, isn’t it? How a young girl like you ran a human trafficking ring and even killed your grandparents to cover it up.”
That pissed me off. “You shouldn’t even be given the title detective since obviously you’re a moron. My grandparents were killed right about the time you and Mansfield were chatting me up, as the medical examiner will soon confirm, and…”
His fingers were tapping impatiently on his leg as the nurse carefully stuck the needle into my catheter port. I watched his fingers, my gaze narrowing, and suddenly it all clicked into place. There was no way he could have such dexterity less than a day after being impaled through the tendons, and I knew what that smell was now. Vampire.
I ripped the IV out of my arm even as that bright pink liquid was snaking toward my vein. With all of my new speed, I catapulted out of bed, landing behind the two of them and throttling Black with one hand while I jammed the half-empty syringe into the nurse with the other.
The force of that action emptied it into her. I watched with harsh satisfaction as she dropped. Her heart had stopped before she even hit the floor.
“Well now, Detective.” My grip tightened to prevent him from screaming. After all, a guard was stationed outside my room. “Looks like you brought me a female Dr. Kevorkian. My, my, that stuff must have been potent. She’s as dead as Hennessey, or didn’t you know that? Vampires all do look the same when they’re shriveled.”
“…ddnnt knww att alking outtt…”
It came in garbles. I relaxed my hold only a trifle.
“You speak above a whisper and you’re getting the rest of what’s in that bottle,” I hissed, kicking the fallen glass container for emphasis. “Nice disguise with those bandages on your wrists. I bet you don’t even have a scratch under them. Somebody pumped you full of vampire blood—you stink of it. Who sent you?”
“Fuck you.”
At least he said it softly. I smiled. “Fuck me? Are you in the mood? Let’s find out.”
And I reached down and squeezed his nuts like they were stress-relieving orbs. Knowing how he’d react, I clapped a hand over his mouth at the same time. All that came out through my fingers was a frantic, tormented wheeze. The cop outside didn’t even budge.
“Ooohh, squishy,” I said pitilessly. “Now, I’m going to ask you again, and don’t disappoint me. Who sent you?”
“Oliver,” came the pained reply. “It was Oliver!”
That wasn’t the mayor’s name. In fact, it wasn’t anyone on our list of human or vampire suspects.
“You’d better make me a believer. Oliver who?”
I hadn’t let go of his parts. That’s probably why his voice was about three octaves higher when he answered me.
“Ethan Oliver!”
I froze, stunned.
Black let out a gasping snicker. “You didn’t know? Hennessey was sure Francesca told Bones. He wondered why he hadn’t moved on him yet. We didn’t know what he was planning, and we were scrambling for any edge we could get. When I found Danny’s police report, I knew a vampire did it. And when Danny described him and his ex-girlfriend, we knew we had Bones at last.”
“Ethan Oliver,” I whispered. “Governor Ethan Oliver? My God, I voted for him! He’s Hennessey’s shadow partner? Why?”
“Let go of my balls!” Black rasped.
I got a firmer grip on them instead. “I’ll let go when you make sense, and the clock’s ticking. Every minute that goes by, I squeeze harder. You won’t have any left inside of five.”
“He wants to run for president, and he’s using Ohio as his podium,” Black rushed out in one breath. “He stumbled across Hennessey a few years ago. Think it was when he was buying pussy on the side. Hennessey came up with this idea to harvest people for feedings, like he did in Mexico, and Oliver loved it. Problem is, it’s only the pretty young girls who sell the most, but things get messy when a bunch of them go missing. So they made a deal. Hennessey cleans the streets of the homeless, drug dealers, prostitutes, and degenerates as his end of the bargain, and Oliver makes sure the paperwork disappears on any of the high-end tail that Hennessey needs to keep his clients happy. But that got to be a lot of work, so Hennessey began getting the girls’ addresses and stopping the reports before they started. Made my job easier. Crime rate goes down, economy goes up, voters are happy, Oliver looks like Ohio’s savior… and Hennessey makes a bundle.”
I was shaking my head in disbelief at the sheer callousness of it all. Frankly I didn’t know who was worse—Hennessey for doing it, or Oliver for making himself out as a hero on the bones of hundreds of victims.
“And this afternoon? Oliver sent you to kill me, obviously. What about my mother and the other girls? What were you going to do with them, and I dare you to lie to me.”
My new clench got a squeak out of him, but it also made my point. What he told me next was no candy-coated fabrication.
“I was planting a bomb on the second floor,” he croaked. “In the back wing where they all are. Then Oliver was going to pin it on Muslim extremists. Leave a hate note, et cetera. He saw how Bush’s numbers spiked right after 9-11. He thought it would push him over the top as the next presidential candidate.”
“You fucker,” I growled. “Where’s the bomb?”
“In the morgue. Shelly hid it there. We were getting it later, after someone found you. No one goes in there. No one who talks, anyway.”
I thought rapidly. Oliver would be expecting a kaboom within the next couple of hours, and when it didn’t come, he’d send someone else to finish the job. A man like that didn’t leave loose ends.
“Black,” I said in a perfectly pleasant tone, “you’re coming with me. I’m revoking my vote.”
His eyes slid to mine and then to the door. “You’ll never make it.”
I laughed nastily. “You’re right. Not that way we won’t. Pick up your girl, what’s her name? Shelly?” I pointed at the nurse.
His mouth curled in distaste. “Ew. She’s dead.”
That made me laugh even more viciously. “Want to join her? If I have to tell you again, you will.”
He bent down in slow, wounded movements since I still had his balls. When he had her hefted in his arms, I changed my grip to hug him from behind.
“Ever been bungee jumping?”
His head turned. “What?”
“Me neither,” I went on. “Who needs the bungee cord, anyway? I say it’s for pussies.” And I shoved him toward the vertical window, picking up speed as he started to scream. The door opened behind us right as Shelly, Black, and I crashed through the window, free-falling three stories to the grass below.
We landed on Shelly. Or at least Black did. I landed on him, to be specific, rolling us immediately to limit the impact. Glass was all around us, and more than a few bystanders began to scream louder than Black was.
“You crazy bitch! You lunatic—”
It came out in noisy wheezes. His ribs were probably broken. I couldn’t seem to care.
“You die as soon as you lose your usefulness, so I suggest you get us to your car right now.”
“Around… around the fountain! Ohh, my leg. My leg!”
In the interest of time, I swung him over my shoulder, leaving Shelly where she was. My hospital gown gave the shocked onlookers something else to see as I dashed off in the direction of the fountain, Black bobbing with every step. We made it to his car in less than a minute, and it was his good luck that his left leg was broken instead of his right, because I made him drive.