Dead But Not Forgotten (2 page)

Kenya let out a wordless yell and fired, but the man was damn fast as well as damn strong, and she missed him as he smashed through the cloudy back window of the kitchen, launching himself out to the straggly grass of the lawn. He was already at a dead run when Kevin staggered forward to look. He couldn't seem to get his lungs to work, and for a panicked second or two he thought his chest had been crushed . . . and then his paralyzed solar plexus let go, and he whooped in a hungry breath.

Kenya was right there, holding him up while he got his legs under him again. “You all right?” she asked, and he nodded without speaking and motioned her on. She gave him a doubting look but kicked open the back door and sprinted after the intruder, who had already vaulted the back fence.

Get it together,
Kevin told himself, and stumbled through the mess of the living room out to the front yard, then to the cruiser. Once inside, he caught his breath and turned the key. It was as if gunning the engine started something inside him, too, and he snapped back into focus with a vengeance. Still shaking, but this time it was with pure, white-hot rage.

You're not going anywhere, you fucker,
he thought. He'd never say it out loud, because he'd been raised polite, but he meant every word.

He whipped the cruiser into a roaring turn and hit the sirens and lights, taking the next corner at a skid. Up ahead, Kenya was running hard and gaining on the intruder, who was just crossing the block up ahead. Kevin missed the man as he dodged and went sharply left up a narrow alley—too narrow for the cruiser. Kenya waved him on around, and he hit the gas again and took a left to run parallel with their fleeing cat-killer. It was a long block. His radio crackled as he took the turn to cut the man off, and he heard Kenya's voice say, “Kevin, he's got a truck, repeat, he's in a—”

Too late.

Kevin saw the truck in a blur as it headed straight for the front quarter panel of the cruiser. The next second he was spinning, and the impact knocked him sideways. The cruiser jerked hard right and tipped, but didn't quite topple over on its side, and then the truck pushed it out of the way and sped off, leaving a greasy smoke of burning tires behind it.

“Shit,” Kevin gasped, and let go of the wheel. “Shit!” He tried to steer away from the curb he'd landed against, but the cruiser made a grinding metal groan, and he heard the left front tire shred and pop. “Shit!”

It hurt to slam his hands down on the wheel, but he did it anyway.

Kenya yanked his door open from the outside—it took three tries—and looked him in the face. “You're bleeding,” she said. Her voice sounded flat and professional, but there was a look in her eyes that said something different. She popped the trunk and got the first-aid kit. “Here, put some pressure on it.”

He didn't realize how much he was bleeding until he glanced in the rearview mirror. There was a wide cut on his left temple, probably from broken glass, and a swath of red down his cheek. It had already dripped onto his shirt collar. “Guess this shirt's done for sure,” he said, which seemed an odd thing to say when he thought about it, but he was a little disconnected. Too much, too fast. And twinges of pain were starting to make themselves felt, like sparks flying up from a fire.

While he fumbled a gauze pack out of the first-aid kit, Kenya was calling in on her shoulder radio, rattling off pursuit information and requesting an ambulance. She'd gotten the plate number of the truck, which was a damn good thing; Kevin had been too busy spinning to manage it. “We need a new car,” he said. “This one's not going anywhere.”

“Only place you're going is the hospital,” she told him. “Hush.”

“Did you just tell me to hush?”

“Hush,” she said again, and crouched down to eye level. She took the gauze from him and swabbed at the blood on his face. “Just hush.”

He did.

He was still sitting on a table in the emergency room getting stitches when Kenya came back in with a fresh undershirt and uniform shirt she must have taken out of his locker. Once the doc had tied off all his knots and headed to the next crisis, Kevin stripped off the stained clothes and put on the new ones. Kenya watched him without comment. He could tell she was thinking of something else.

“Thanks,” he told her. She nodded, but she looked tense and guarded and clearly was arguing with herself about something.

Finally, she said, “He ditched the pickup about fifteen minutes ago at a truck stop on the way to Shreveport.”

“And?”

“And he killed a nineteen-year-old to steal his car. Word from the scene is he was headed west,” she said. Her shoulders slumped a little. “Kid got torn apart, Kevin. We should have got him.”

“Yeah,” he said, and swallowed. “Not your fault.”

“Not yours, either. I should have taken Marie more seriously from the get-go. We need to get her in a room and find out who he is, right now.”

“Yep.” Kevin slid off the table and tucked the crisp new uniform shirt into his pants. It still had sharp creases in it from his momma's ironing, and it smelled of some scent she'd started adding to the laundry. She'd started out with lavender, but he'd talked her out of that; who takes a lavender-scented cop seriously? Not that spring-fresh was much better.

Kenya sniffed him as he moved past her. “Better than swamp water,” she said, and he laughed. Just a little. It died as Kenya's radio crackled and spat out their call number. She unhooked it and answered.

“It's Dearborn,” the voice on the other end said. “Where you at?”

When Bud Dearborn got on the line personally, it was almost never good news. “Hospital, sir,” Kenya said. “Kevin's getting stitched up.”

“He okay?”

“Yes, sir, he's fine.”

“Good. Alcee Beck questioned your witness, and he's got a name for your guy: Quentin Glick. He's got a good long record of assaults, possessions, robberies, the usual stuff. I'll send it to your e-mail along with his mug shots.”

“Yes, sir,” she repeated. There was a line grooving into her forehead between her slowly flattening eyebrows. “We're on our way in.”

“No, you're not,” he said. “I need you two to go up to that truck stop and talk with the detectives out there. Shreveport's none too happy that we sent them our problem, and they want everything you know.”

Kenya opened her mouth, and Kevin knew she was about to protest, so he quickly grabbed the mike from her and said, “Yes, sir, on our way. Pryor out.”

Dearborn didn't even bother to acknowledge. Yeah, he was pissed. Deserved to be, too.

Kevin pinned the mike back on Kenya's shoulder. “Let's go.”

The truck stop was still a busy crime scene, and the arrival of their cruiser and uniforms only added to the circus. The news crews focused on them briefly before deciding they weren't as photogenic as the lumpy, bloody sheet under which the victim lay dead. Kevin and Kenya got looked over by the local detective and were ordered inside the truck stop Hardee's to wait. It was three more long, boring hours, and dark had fallen, before someone walked in, ordered his own drink, and sat down across from the two of them.

He nodded and took out a notebook. The cup beside him steamed vapor into the air, but it had a funny smell that wasn't coffee. That was when Kevin noticed that instead of the standard
REG
or
DECAF
boxes being checked on the side, someone had written in grease marker
B+
.

His gaze went back to the detective. Pale, thin, a coarse five-o'clock shadow. Long horsey face and big dark eyes under a mop of wavy black hair.

Not just pale after all. The detective was a vampire.

Kevin shot a look at his partner, but she'd already twigged to it, too; he saw it in the cautious, steady gaze she was leveling on the man.

“I'm Detective Wallace,” the man said. He had a faint accent, something East Coast, maybe. “You're the ones who let him get away.”

Kevin kept his silence. So did Kenya. If Wallace felt at all disconcerted by that, or their stares, he didn't show it, but then vampires weren't long on empathy. Kevin had always gotten along with Bon Temps's vampire celebrity, Bill Compton; he was a tolerant man by nature—live and let live. But there was something about Detective Wallace that raised the hackles on the back of his neck.

“What can you tell me about him?” Wallace asked. He tapped his pencil on the pad. It had chew marks. Kevin wondered if they were fang marks, technically.

“His name is Quentin Glick,” Kenya said. “He's five eleven, about one fifty, greasy shoulder-length hair. He's on something.”

“He's on a lot of things,” Wallace said, “but in particular he's on vampire blood. The drainers must have got their hands on something special, and we're trying to track down everyone who bought it. This Glick's the last, as far as we know.”

“We heard he tore somebody apart,” Kevin said. “That wasn't literal, was it?”

Wallace shrugged, as if it weren't any nevermind to him. “One arm, one leg. Kid died of blood loss and shock.”

The detective sounded disgusted by it, but Kevin had the feeling it wasn't because of the loss of the boy's life. More the waste of a good blood supply. “So this thing he's on, it makes him stronger.” Kevin remembered the impact of what would have probably been a light shove from Glick that had sent him slamming into the refrigerator. He'd gotten off damn lucky.

“Faster, too,” Kenya said. “He ran like he was heading for the gold medal. Junkie usually has no stamina to speak of.”

That turned Kevin cold from the spine out, the idea that Kenya might have caught up with a man capable of ripping off limbs. He couldn't help but imagine it, and a sick feeling welled up inside him that he didn't want to properly identify.

“Do you know where he's heading?” Kevin asked. The detective hadn't taken any notes, and it looked to him as if the pencil and notebook were just props, there to make him look more normal. As the pencil's untouched eraser tapped the paper, Kevin found himself focusing on the letters on the side:
The Bat's Wing
. He'd never heard of it, but it sounded like the name of some vampire-themed bar, like Fangtasia in Shreveport.

“No idea,” Wallace said. He sounded bland and bored, and he took a deep gulp of his not-likely-to-be-coffee. “You ever met this Glick before?”

Kevin shook his head, but Kenya said, “Once. I booked him for aggravated assault years back. Just another drunk, back then. He had the two-beer answer.” Wallace gave her a questioning look. “Ask a drunk how much he's had, he'll always say two beers, even if he's falling down. That was Glick. Mr. Two Beers.”

“He's hit the big time now,” Wallace said. “What can you tell me about friends, associates, relatives?”

“Not too damn much. I looked into his files while we were waiting. He was pretty much a loner.”

“You discovered him in the house of a local in Bon Temps. What was he doing there?”

“Eating a cat,” Kevin said. “When he took the dead kid's car, which way was he heading?”

“My information is he was headed south. Why?” Wallace asked. His eyes met Kevin's, and there was something so darkly alien in them that it was hard not to break the stare. “Were you planning on going after him in hot pursuit?”

Yes,
Kevin thought. “No, sir,” he said. “Just curious. Wanted to make sure he wasn't going back to Bon Temps.”

“Doesn't look like he is, so it's none of your business from this point on,” Wallace said. “You can go. Thanks for the information.”

He snapped the notebook shut, chugged down the rest of his blood, and left them with the empty cup sitting on the table as he headed out.

A few seconds later came another detective, overweight, tired, and in a terrible mood. He didn't bother to sit down, and he damn sure wasn't a vampire. He barked rapid-fire questions at them about Glick, and after the first three, Kenya held up her hand. “We already answered all this,” she said. “Your Detective Wallace was in here first.”