Sucker Punch

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Her hair was as black as mine, but straight and tied back in a neat ponytail. My curls never went back into a ponytail that neatly, which is why my fiancé had helped me French-braid it before I got on the plane. Sheriff Leduc introduced her as his deputy, Frances (call her Frankie) Anthony.

  We all shook hands as if there wasn’t another person in the room—well, in the cell. You don’t have to have a badge long before you start to think differently about prisoners. It’s partially self-preservation, especially for marshals in the preternatural branch like Newman and me. It’s harder to kill someone if you think of them as people just like you and me. Everyone but me knew this prisoner, and yet they still introduced me to the deputy first as if Bobby Marchand weren’t within hearing distance. I wondered if they even knew they’d done it.

  Newman turned to the cell without introducing me to the man inside it. “How are you doing, Bobby?”

  Bobby Marchand blinked at us with blue eyes so large that they dominated his face to the point they were all you saw at first, like he was an anime character. Of course, it might have been the mask of dried blood surrounding his baby blues that made them so startling. The contrast must have been even more extreme when the blood had been fresh and red. Now it was a tired sort of brick red heading toward brown; most people would have thought it was dried mud. They’d never have guessed it was blood until they saw what happened in a shower. Water would bring it back to life, and suddenly the mud would look like something far more liquid than dirt. Bobby’s short blond hair had one spot of drying blood in it; the rest was disheveled but clean. He had a gray blanket wrapped around himself, so most of him was covered. The hint of chest that showed had blood drying on it, but the shoulders and arms that were holding the blanket in place were clean; his hands were not. There was even blood dried on the cuff around his right wrist. The chain from it went to the metal frame of the bed beside him. The bed was chained to the concrete floor, and there was a second chain that trailed underneath the blanket toward the leg of the bed, so he was shackled on at least one ankle, too. They looked like ordinary restraints, not the new stuff specifically designed for supernatural prisoners with their supernatural strength, which meant that if Bobby wanted to break his chains, he could, even in human form. Even the bars wouldn’t hold if he really wanted out, but it would take longer—long enough for the officer on guard duty to shoot him and hope they could kill him before he could finish shifting into his even stronger other half. That they had the deputy on watch outside the cell with a shotgun meant they understood some of it, and they probably didn’t have the budget for the new special restraints. Even some major cities couldn’t afford more than a couple of full sets.

  Bobby fidgeted, clutching his blanket tighter. He’d tried to clean his hands by wiping them on the blanket in a few places, but the blood had embedded around his nails and into the pores of his skin. Even a shower wouldn’t get it all now. I knew from experience that if you didn’t wear gloves when there was that much blood, it was a serious bitch to get it cleaned out from around your nails. Under your nails you could do, but the cuticles and the edges of the nails were the challenge. It was just his hands that were covered in dried blood; it didn’t go past either wrist. In that moment I believed that Bobby Marchand was being framed. Whoever had done the blood evidence on him hadn’t known that if someone plunged bare hands into a still living body, or even a freshly dead one, the blood wouldn’t stop neatly at the wrists. It would climb up the arms, and there would be blood spatter on the chest, not the thick coating that someone had painted on Bobby. It was all wrong, but unless you’d seen as many lycanthrope kills as I had, or waded through enough gory murder scenes, you wouldn’t think about the right things. You wouldn’t know where to put the blood.

  “How am I supposed to be, Win? I killed Uncle Ray.”

  “We’re not convinced of that, Bobby. I’m still gathering evidence,” Newman said.

  Bobby turned those blue eyes in their gory mask to the sheriff. “Duke, you told me I did it. You told me I killed Uncle Ray.”

  “I’m sorry, Bobby. I’m really sorry, but we found you covered in his blood, and you’re the only wereanimal in these parts.”

  Bobby looked back at Newman. “Duke is right. If a wereanimal killed Uncle Ray, then it has to be me. There isn’t another shapeshifter for a hundred miles.”

  “Let us worry about finding other suspects, Bobby. I just need to make sure you don’t do anything stupid while I’m out there trying to prove you’re innocent.”

  “Now, Win,” Leduc said, “don’t get the boy’s hopes up like that.”

  I debated on whether to remark on the blood evidence now, but I wanted to tell Newman in private first. He’d known the blood wasn’t right, but he didn’t have my field experience to say exactly why it was wrong. This was his warrant, his case, and, almost more important, his hometown, his friends. I didn’t want to undercut his authority here. I wanted to know only one thing: Had they photographed the blood patterns on the prisoner? I wasn’t besmirching Leduc and his people’s police work, but when you know a warrant of execution has been issued, sometimes even the best officers don’t collect evidence like they would in a regular murder case. I mean, what’s the point? There’s never going to be a trial.

  “I don’t mean to get your hopes up, Bobby, but I believe there’s a chance you didn’t do this. That’s why I called in a more experienced marshal to look over your case.”

  “It’s commendable that you want to be sure, Win, but you wasted Marshal Blake’s time getting her up here,” Leduc said.

  Deputy Anthony and Bobby both said, “Blake,” at the same time. They looked at each other, then back at me as she said, “Anita Blake?” and he said, “Not Anita Blake?”

  “Yeah, that’s me.” I was the scourge of the supernatural set, so it wasn’t entirely surprising that Bobby Marchand recognized my name, but I wasn’t always on the hit parade for nonmarshal local law enforcement, especially for local law enforcement, LEOs, in more rural areas.

  “You’re here to kill me, because Win doesn’t want to have to do it,” Bobby said, and he seemed completely defeated. There wasn’t even any fear that I could detect, and there should have been. Even guilty people are afraid to die. The sheriff might be right about the suicide risk after all.

  “How do the two of you know Marshal Blake?” Leduc asked.

  “She’s our bogeyman. If you break the law, she’s who they send to kill you,” Bobby said, voice thick with sorrow, but still no nervousness, just a hopelessness as if it were already over.

  “I’m just one marshal from the preternatural branch, not the only one,” I said.

  Deputy Anthony said, “You still have the highest number of successful executions in the entire preternatural branch.”

  “I was part of the old vampire hunter system years before I got grandfathered into the Marshals Service, so I had a head start.”

  She shook her head. “Even Death doesn’t have as high a kill count as you do, and he started earlier than you did.”

  If Marshal Ted (Edward) Forrester and I weren’t best friends and partners, it would probably bother him that he, Death, was behind me on legal kills. Of course, if you added in illegal kills, he was ahead of me. Short of a true apocalypse, I’d never catch up with his numbers if you included all of them.

  “Death gets everyone in the end, Frankie, so what the hell are you talking about? No one has bigger numbers than death,” Leduc said, and he sounded frustrated, bordering on angry. He was more on edge than he was showing, but then I think they all were. I was the only one without a personal stake in the murder.

  “The other police nicknamed four of the preternatural marshals the Four Horsemen: Death, War, Hunger, and Plague,” she said.

  Leduc made a humph sound. “I know what the Four Horsemen are called. I know my Bible, and Marshal Blake isn’t in it.”

  “Of
course not, sir. I didn’t mean the real Four Horsemen.”

  Leduc looked at me, and it was a slightly different look now, more appraising—not the way that a man looks at an attractive woman, but the way a man looks at another man when he’s wondering if he could take him in a fight. Leduc decided he could take me in a fair fight and didn’t try to keep the knowledge off his face and out of his body language. I was okay with him thinking he would win. I knew better, and that was enough.

  “So, if someone else is Death, who are you, Plague or Hunger?”

  “I’m War,” I said.

  That made him frown harder and then he laughed. “You’re too small to be War, Blake.”

  “Even a little war is a very bad thing,” I said, and smiled.

  3

  NEWMAN LAUGHED. DEPUTY Anthony laughed. Sheriff Leduc did not. Apparently, I did not amuse him. That was okay. My sense of humor didn’t work for a lot of people.

  “Did anyone take pictures of the prisoner when he was brought in?” I asked.

  “No need,” Leduc said.

  I knew what he meant, but I took him out of earshot of the prisoner, which meant out in the office area. Newman trailed us, leaving Anthony alone with the prisoner again. I really didn’t think he was going to try to escape. He seemed to have given up completely. The thought of this jail holding a shapeshifter who hadn’t given up and still wanted to live was just such a bad idea. They’d gotten lucky this time. Hopefully there wouldn’t be another time if, like they all said, this was the only lycanthrope within a hundred miles.

  Leduc leaned against the edge of his desk as I talked, so that he didn’t tower over me. “Photographs will help us get size for the wounds and stuff later, just in case there’s any questions about us going ahead with the warrant.”

  “Why should there be any questions about that?” he asked.

  “From what Newman told me, the Marchands are the family around here for money and power. It’s not fair, but that can mean more lawyers get involved. I’d rather cover all our asses.”

  That seemed reasonable to Leduc; if it didn’t to Newman, he didn’t show it. Either he’d learned to hide his emotions in the years since I’d met him, or he trusted my more experienced call. Either way, he agreed to help me take pictures of the prisoner that we could use as reference photos at the crime scene. It was pretty much bullshit. Even in half-man form, the size of hands, feet, teeth, mouth, everything is different from the full human form. The only reason these photos would be useful was if there was a regular trial later, and they could be used as proof that someone had tried to inexpertly frame Bobby Marchand. I was almost certain that Newman understood why we wanted the extra photos. I’d ask him in private later, because if he didn’t, I’d share the info, and if he did, then his level of trust in me was a little scary. Trust but verify, even if it’s me.

  It’s standard procedure in any “prison system,” no matter how small, that you never take weapons into a cell with you. You just don’t want to run the risk of a prisoner grabbing your gun and using it against you. There are exceptions to all rules, but tonight wouldn’t be one of them. I gave my .45, Gerber folder, and both wrist sheath blades to Anthony. The sheriff got impatient and said, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, you’re disarmed enough. Get in there and take your pictures or measurements or whatever so I can drive you out to the house.”

  I was actually done disarming myself, but I didn’t bother to explain that to Leduc. Let him wonder what else I might be carrying.

  “We can find the house on our own, Duke. I told you that,” Newman said.

  “And I told you that I’d take you out there,” Leduc said, sounding defensive, or angry, or just cranky.

  Anthony asked, “Can I put some of your stuff on the floor, Marshal Blake?”

  I looked at her and realized the pile was a little unwieldy to carry in your arms. “Sure. Just don’t scuff anything.”

  “Oh, I’ll be careful,” she said, and she sounded way too earnest about it. I shaved a few years off her age. You just don’t stay that eager much over the age of twenty-five.

  The sheriff unlocked the cell, and Newman and I walked in voluntarily. I’m never a fan of disarming myself and walking into a cage. It just seems bad on principle. The big metal door cha-chunking behind us didn’t make me like it any more, but over the years, I’d learned not to startle when it happened.

  We’d already explained to Bobby that we wanted to take pictures of him for evidence later. He was fine with that. His reaction had been so flat, it made me want to ask him something outrageous to see if he’d react more.

  Newman helped Bobby hold the blanket and put his arms out to his sides at the same time. Apparently, they hadn’t given him anything to wear but the blanket, and either Newman was modest, or he knew that Bobby was, because they worked hard at making sure that he didn’t flash me or the deputy. What glimpses I did get showed that Bobby Marchand worked out and kept himself in good shape. Some people believe that becoming a wereanimal or a vampire automatically gives them washboard abs and a lean, muscled body, but it doesn’t. Yes, supernaturals are stronger than human normal, but they don’t automatically come with bigger muscles. Those you still have to go to the gym and create yourself even if you’re a shapeshifter. If you’re a vampire, you can’t even do that. If you want a good-looking corpse, you have to do the work before you cross over, because once you become one, you’re stuck with what you look like on the day of your death for all eternity. Some vampires, my fiancé Jean-Claude being one of them, are powerful enough that exercise can cause the same changes to their bodies that humans experience, but it’s an enormous use of energy. And even if you’re willing to use the power, most master vampires still can’t do it. Jean-Claude is the exception to a lot of vampy rules.

  Something about the blanket moving let me see Bobby’s feet and one leg, which made me say, “I need to see anywhere there’s blood, Mr. Marchand.”

  “Call me Bobby. Everyone does,” he said automatically without even making eye contact.

  I didn’t really want to call him Bobby, just in case I had to pull the trigger on him later, but I’d already looked into his eyes from inches away. He was becoming real to me and not just a job, so why not?

  “Okay, Bobby, I need to see anywhere there’s blood evidence. I got your feet, but I saw some higher on your legs on one side. I need a picture of it, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said in that same emotionless voice he’d had the whole time. He gathered the blanket close to his body and lifted it up almost like an overly long dress. There was blood smeared on his right lower leg. I got an image of it.

  “Is this all the evidence?”

  He nodded without looking at me. He had avoided eye contact the whole time. He didn’t remind me of a criminal; he was reacting more like a victim. If he’d been a woman, or even a man under other circumstances, I’d have wondered if he’d killed in self-defense after an attack. That was the sort of vibe I was getting off of him and his reactions. I couldn’t figure out how to ask if his uncle, the man who’d raised him from a toddler, had molested him. Had he fought back finally? No, that didn’t feel right, and that wouldn’t explain the blood evidence on him being so wrong. A shapeshifter would know that his human form wouldn’t have blood on it from the kill. Only someone who didn’t know much about wereanimals would do it this way.

  “Are you sure these are all the pictures I need?”

  He nodded again but stared at the floor.

  “Bobby,” I said, “what aren’t you telling me?”

  He shook his head this time, still staring at the floor.

  “Bobby, is there blood evidence somewhere else on your body?”

  He went very still in the way that trauma victims can go deep inside themselves as if they believe that if they’re still enough, quiet enough, they won’t have to answer any more questions. If they go away in plain si
ght, then the worst thing won’t happen or won’t have to be shared. Everything about him screamed victim, not perpetrator. What the hell was going on here? What had happened to Bobby Marchand to make him react like this? I’d ask Newman later in private if Bobby was usually this quiet and withdrawn; if he was, then that usually indicated long-term abuse. If it wasn’t normal for him, then something bad had happened to him very recently, like yesterday recently. Maybe waking up covered in blood and being accused of murdering the only father you’ve ever known would be enough? Yeah, that sounded like enough. I was just used to looking for horrors, as if tragedy alone wasn’t enough.

  “Bobby, we’re trying to help prove that you didn’t kill your uncle. Don’t you want us to prove that?” I asked softly, gently, the way you do with victims when you don’t want to spook them.

  He answered, still staring at the floor, “If I killed Uncle Ray, I don’t want you to save me.”

  “But if you didn’t kill your uncle Ray, then someone else did, Bobby. Don’t you want to catch them?”

  He looked at me then, eyes startled, but trying to see me, really see me. He looked into my eyes—trying to see if I meant it, I think.

  Sheriff Leduc said, “Don’t you go lying to him, Marshal. He did it, and he’s going to have to die for it. Giving him false hope is just . . . cruel.”

  Bobby looked at Leduc. “You know I did it, don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, Bobby. I’m truly sorry, but I know what I know. I know what I saw at your house.”

  Bobby started to look down at the ground again, but I waved a hand in front of his face so close that he startled back from it. He frowned at me, a moment of anger flashing through his eyes. And with that anger came the faintest warmth of his beast, like the hint of heat when you walk too close to an oven. There’s no need to open the door to know it’ll burn you.