Anita Blake 20 - Hit List (25 page)

It seemed almost stupid to be thinking of that while he was still hugging me so normally, or as normally as I’d ever seen him interact with me.

“I’m stepping back now, Olaf,” I said, and started moving out of the hug, though I kept the gun barrel hard against his body. That would be the last thing I moved.

I thought he’d fight me, but he didn’t. He hadn’t done anything I’d expected him to do since I stepped into the room. Then the gun was the only thing touching him. I wasn’t looking at the center of his body like they teach you in boxing; I was more looking to one side. It was like being in the woods and looking for movement among the leaves; you see more by not looking.

The gun barrel left the side of his body but was still pointed at his center mass. I felt him move almost before he did it. I couldn’t have told you what moved, or what clued me, but I knew what he was going to do. He tried to disarm me and if I’d been human-slow, he’d have done it. He was that fast, that good.

I moved to one side, let his hand pass by my gun, my arm, my side, and hit his wrist with the butt of my gun as he missed me. I could have kicked his knee and dislocated it, but he was supposed to be on our side. I didn’t want him crippled for the hunt. When he wasn’t being all serial killer weird, he was a good man in a fight.

He came back at me with his other hand, and I had the gun pointed at his heart, and one of the sheath knives pressed to his groin.

Edward yelled, “Enough!”

I froze, Olaf ’s life in my hands twice. “If he behaves, so will I.” “You’re faster than I remember,” Olaf said.

“Funny, that’s what the weretiger spy said.”

“I told you she’s faster,” Edward said.

“I needed to see it for myself,” Olaf said. I could feel the weight of his gaze, but I didn’t look away from my two targets. He could stare all he wanted to; I had my priorities.

I spoke low and carefully, afraid my tense muscles would drive the knife a little into his flesh. If I ever stabbed him in the groin I knew it would have to be a killing blow, not an accident. “If you keep testing my limits, Olaf, one of us will get hurt.”

“I will step back if you lower the weapons,” he said.

“I’ll lower the weapons if you step back.”

“We are at an impasse then.”

Edward said, “I’m behind you, Anita. I’m going to step between you both, and you will both back the fuck up.” He came into my view, and then he did what he said he’d do, and began to step between us.

I let him back me up, and so did Olaf. We stood staring at each other. With Edward between us I was finally willing to look up into Olaf’s face, and what I saw there wasn’t comforting. He was excited: his eyes alight with it, his mouth half parted. He’d enjoyed being close to me, and the danger, or maybe he’d enjoyed something I didn’t even understand, but calling him a sick fuck seemed counterproductive to us working together, so I just thought it really hard.

“Now,” Edward said, glaring from one to the other of us, “we’re going to meet Anita’s backup and go hunt bad guys, not each other.”

“I will need a side trip,” Olaf said.

“Why?” Edward asked.

Bernardo answered from near the door, where he’d moved, apparently, when Olaf and I started our dance. “Hospital emergency room. She broke his wrist.”

Edward and I both looked at Olaf, and at his wrist. It wasn’t at an odd angle, so it wasn’t a bad break, but he was holding it still, and a little stiff against his side.

“Is it broken?” Edward asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“How bad?” Edward asked.

“Not too bad.”

“Will you be able to use a gun?”

“It’s why we all practice left-handed, isn’t it?” Olaf said. Which meant no.

“Fuck,” I said.

“You didn’t mean to break his wrist, did you?” Edward asked, looking at me.

I shook my head.

“I saw in the woods how much faster you are. I think you’re stronger than you realize, too. I’d be careful how hard I hit people if I were you.” The look on his face was so not happy with me. I couldn’t blame him. I’d just crippled one of his backups, and one of our most dangerous marshals. And I hadn’t done it on purpose. I lived with, trained with, sparred with, hunted, and killed shapeshifters and vampires. When was the last time I’d worked out with someone who was human? I couldn’t remember. Shit.

“I’ll take him to the hospital,” Bernardo said, “but what do we put on the paperwork?”

“Tell them it was a lover’s quarrel,” Olaf said.

“Over my dead body,” I said.

“Eventually,” he said.

“Don’t be a sick fuck, Olaf,” I said.

“I know what I am, Anita,” he said. “It’s you who keeps fighting the truth.”

“What truth is that?” I asked.

“Don’t do this,” Edward said, and I wasn’t sure which of us he was talking to.

“You hunt and kill just like I do, like we all do. There is no one in this room who is not a murderer.”

“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know,” and my voice showed the truth of it.

I had the satisfaction of Olaf looking surprised. “Then what makes you different from me?”

“I don’t enjoy killing; you do.”

“If that is the only difference between us, Anita, then we should date.”

I shook my head and stepped back. “Take him to the hospital, Bernardo; get him a cast, get him a pill, get him fixed, just get him out of here.”

Bernardo looked at Edward. He nodded and said, “Do it. Call me from the hospital and let me know how bad it is.”

Bernardo left, shaking his head. Olaf said, “I owe you for this, Anita.”

“Is that a threat?” I asked.

“Of course it is,” Edward said. “Now you get the fuck out of here. You”—he pointed at me—

“stop talking to him.”

We did what Edward said. The question was, how long could I work with Olaf and not talk to him, and what would he see as payback for the wrist? Had I finally made him stop thinking of me as his girlfriend and just as a victim, or had some weird rivalry set in? Either choice was a bad one. Multiple choice should have at least one right answer, but some people only come with wrong answers. Some people are like rigged tests where you can only fail. One way or the other, I was going to fail with Olaf and one of us was going to die. Great; the Harlequin were trying to capture me, Mommie Darkest wanted to destroy my soul and take over my body, and now one of the people on our side wanted to either fuck me, kill me, or a combination of both. Could things get any worse? Wait, don’t answer that, I know the answer. The answer is always yes. It can always get worse. Right now the Harlequin hadn’t captured me, Mommie Darkest hadn’t possessed me, and Olaf and I were both still alive and hadn’t fucked each other; when I looked at it that way, it wasn’t a half bad day.

WE WERE ALL set to go hunt the bad guys our way, with muscle from home to back us, and then we both got phone calls. We were called into the office to explain ourselves. I’d never been called by any marshal brass to explain myself before. When I asked Edward if it was a first for him, too, he just nodded. We were actually going to ignore the calls, but some police officers in marked cars showed up with orders to escort us to the “meeting.”

“Who’d you piss off while I was unconscious?” I asked Edward.

“To my knowledge, I haven’t done anything to anyone.”

“I was unconscious, so it couldn’t have been me.”

He’d shrugged, and we’d gotten in his SUV to follow the nice officers to talk to our superior officer. Technically, we could have refused, but it would have put the uniformed officers in a really awkward spot. We tried to leave my homeboys out of it. Edward and I would go down to talk to the other marshals, and my guys could settle into their hotel rooms. But the uniforms had orders to bring in Marshals Forrester and Blake and the illegal backup. The moment they said it that way, we got a clue as to why we were being called to explain ourselves.

It was Marshal Raborn who had tattled on us to Teacher. It wasn’t his warrant, so it wasn’t his business. But just because it wasn’t Raborn’s warrant didn’t mean he wasn’t being a pain in our ass. He’d made enough fuss that we were back at the local marshal offices discussing things, rather than trying to track down the killers. My “illegal” backup was out in the hallway like high school kids waiting for their turn to get yelled at by the principal. It was a colossal waste of time and resources. Night would fall, the vampires would rise, and we were stuck playing departmental politics. Perfect.

“You can’t just let her bring in a bunch of hired muscle and say they represent the Marshals Service,” Raborn said. He was talking to his immediate supervisor, Marshal Rita Clark. She was tall for a woman, but not as tall as Raborn’s six feet. She was in better shape, though; there was no extra weight on her lean frame. Her brown hair was cut just above the shoulders in a careless mass of curls that was less a hairstyle and more just the way the curl worked that morning. Sun had tanned her brown and given her lines around the eyes and mouth, but they suited her, as if every smile or laugh she’d ever had was there on her face, so you just knew that she would rather laugh than frown. But the look in her gray eyes let us all know that though she preferred to laugh, she didn’t have to. The fact that she was Raborn’s boss was nice. One of the things I liked about the Marshals Service was that the normal branch had more women than any other law enforcement unit in the country. They had also been one of the first to allow women to join them.

I liked that a lot.

She said, “Marshal Forrester ran their names by us before Marshal Blake’s backup landed.

We’ve done background checks on all of them. They don’t have criminal records, and technically under the new law it wouldn’t matter anyway.”

“It should matter,” Raborn said, and he was standing again, pacing to the side of her office, which was enough bigger than his that he had room to pace, if he was careful.

“Perhaps,” she said, watching him pace, “but the way the law is written, it doesn’t.” She looked from his nervous, angry pacing to Edward and me in the chairs in front of her desk. Edward gave her the good-ol’-boy Ted smile. I gave her calm, patient face. If I were a boss, who would I like better, the angry man pacing in the corner like a problem about to happen, or the two calm, smiling people who seemed reasonable? I knew what my vote would be, and looking into Marshal Clark’s serious gray eyes I was betting she would agree with me.

Raborn came to lean his hands on her desk and sort of loom over her. I watched her eyes narrow so the smile lines deepened. If I’d had that look aimed at me by someone who could fuck up my day, I might have backed off. “Look at them out there; they are thugs, or worse. Just because they’ve never been convicted of a crime doesn’t make them innocent.”

I fought the urge to look out in the hallway where my backup was lingering. I knew what they looked like, andinnocent wasn’t a word that anyone would have used to describe them.

“First, Raborn, that is exactly what innocence means under the law, you should know that.” Her voice was going quieter with each word, but the heat in each syllable was notching up. Again, I would have seen the warning signs and acted accordingly, but Raborn seemed past that. He’d let his anger take him to a place that his ass might have trouble getting out of, or maybe I just didn’t understand the normal branch of the service whose badge I carried.

She put her elbows on the arms of her chair, her hands like a double fist in front of her lips.

“Second, get the fuck off my desk.” Oh, I did understand the normal branch of the service. It worked just like all the others.

He startled, visibly, back straightening, as if he’d just realized he had touched her desk. He didn’t know me well enough to hate me this much personally, but he had enough of a problem with me that he was hurting his career. What the hell was going on?

She stood, slowly, carefully, and at five-eight she was tall enough in her boots to back him up a little. She managed to loom and seem much taller just by her presence. I’ve been told I can do the same thing, but it was nifty watching it from the other end.

“Marshal Blake is within her rights as a U.S. Marshal of the preternatural branch to deputize people she believes will aid her in executing her warrant in the most efficient and lifesaving manner possible.”

“The law was written for emergency situations in the field,” Raborn said, “when a marshal doesn’t have access to other marshals for backup. It was never intended to allow us to pick and choose whom we deputize for a given job when there are enough marshals to get the job done.”

“There were three branches of the government last I checked, Raborn. We’re the branch that carries out the law as written and given to us. If the legislative and judicial branches decide at a later date that the law as written needs to be changed, they’ll change it, and then you can come bitch to me about Marshal Blake’s choice in deputies, but until then, we will uphold the law as written and act within its confines. Is that clear, Marshal Raborn?”

A hint of red was creeping up his neck—not a blush, more an angry flush, I thought. Through tight lips he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

She looked at us, “You two go do your job.” She looked back at Raborn. “You get the fuck out of my office and stay the fuck out of their way.”

Edward and I stood, and did as we were told. Raborn hesitated behind us. I heard him intake a breath and wondered if he was going to keep pushing, but it was no longer my problem. Clark had backed me, and that was good enough.

My backup was waiting in the hallway outside the office. The other people with badges watched them covertly and were probably just as unhappy as Raborn, but they were smart enough to let it go. You could pick out which of my backup was ex-military. They stood a little straighter, as if fighting not to come to attention as we stepped up. Bobby Lee had grown thinner and somewhere the sun had turned his blond hair paler and tanned him deep brown, darker than most blonds could get. His brown eyes watched me from behind gold-framed glasses. He was older than the rest of us, but it only showed in fine lines around his eyes, an extra line here and there on his face. He’d always been tall and fairly lean, but he’d been out of the country on some secret assignment for the wererats for a long time, and wherever he’d been, it had carved him down.