13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1) Page 22

Clara knelt down on the pavement to get a picture of the teenaged girl's hand. There was a bloodless laceration running down the side of her palm. "This looks like a defensive wound," she said, her uniform tie dangling between her knees. "Don't you think?"

"I'm not really trained for that sort of stuff," Caxton apologized. She wasn't entirely sure what she was still doing in Bitumen Hollow except waiting for a ride home. She checked her watch and was surprised to find it was only half past eight. The fight with the half-deads had felt like it took all night but in fact little more than an hour had passed, even with all the time they spent waiting on the camp's roof. She had been following Clara around because the photographer was a familiar face, the only member of the Lancaster county sheriff's department that she knew by name. Supposedly she was keeping control of the crime scene, which technically belonged to Arkeley and the US Marshals Service. From time to time one of the sheriff's detectives would come up to her and get her to sign off on a form or a waiver. She didn't even bother reading them. It was pretty clear Arkeley wasn't interested in traditional police work. His modus operandi was to put himself (and everyone around him) in danger and the let violence work everything out. Where he had gone-by himself, in a state police patrol car that she was responsible for-remained a mystery to her. She recalled him talking about torturing half-deads for information. She had said she couldn't sit by and watch that happen and he had suggested he would just do it while she wasn't looking. Yet there were no half-deads in police custody. Where would he find one?

She might have been more diligent in trying to unravel his mystery if she hadn't been so tired. She sank down on a bench in front of the Christian bookstore and rubbed at her eyes. Clara came and stood next to her. "Do you need something?"

she asked. "I've got a whole pharmacy in my purse. It's back in my car-I'll go get it."

"No, no," Caxton said, waving one hand at the photographer. "I'll be fine. I've just been running on fumes for a while. A good night's sleep and I'll be one hundred per cent." She smiled at the sheriff's deputy, who just shrugged. Clara went over to the corpse of a farmer in a leather jacket who lay sprawled across the pavement not ten feet away. One of the farmer's arms had been torn off and thrown in a trash can. Much of his chest was missing altogether, as well as all of his throat. Clara hovered over him, not eighteen inches from the slack white skin of his face, and took a picture with her digital camera. "You're fearless," Caxton said, admiring the other woman a little. "I can't handle the gore."

Clara stood up and stared at her. "I thought you were in on that vampire kill last night on 322?"

"That's different. When you're fighting for your life the adrenaline keeps you going. But when it's dead bodies just lying there I can't handle it. Too many traumatic memories, you know?"

Clara nodded and came over to the bench again. "It used to bother me too, and I mean a lot. Let me show you a trick, though." She handed Caxton the camera and mimed taking a picture. Caxton pointed the camera at the dead man in the road and studied the small LCD screen on the back of the camera. She wanted to turn away but Clara stopped her. "No. Look. Is the picture too dark?"

"Well, yeah," Caxton said. "It's night time. You need the flash."

"Right." Clara indicated the flash button and Caxton turned it on. "Now try to frame the picture better. Get all the details in, but without too much background. Now, how's the color balance?"

Caxton got the point all at once. "Yeah. Okay. It's not a human being anymore. It's a picture of a human being. That's not so bad."

Clara nodded happily. "It's all just colors and shadows and composition. I worry more about getting the color of the blood right than how much blood there is. Now,"

she said, but she stopped and turned her head as if she'd heard something. Caxton jumped up. "What? What is it?" But then she heard it too. It wasn't difficult. It was the sound of someone screaming, a man, screaming, distant and muffled as if he were trapped underground. Caxton followed the sound until she saw a manhole cover in the middle of the street. Shouting for help, she and Clara got down on the road surface and tried to pry open the cover with their fingers. It was like trying to push a dead patrol car uphill. A sheriff's deputy with a crowbar rushed up and shifted the lid with a lot of grunting and straining. When the lid came off the streetlights revealed a rusted metal ladder leading downward into pure black darkness. Caxton took the lead, her feet dancing down the groaning rungs until she reached the bottom. She felt sewage squishing under her feet and the smell nearly overpowered her but she just reached into her pocket and found her mag-lite. Its narrow beam showed her weathered brick walls that curved up over her head and felt as if they would close in on her at any moment.

She shone the light farther down the passage and it caught the shaking figure of a man clutching a large wooden cross in his arms, maybe three feet long and two wide. His eyes flashed terror when the light hit him and he screamed again. "No, no," he said, "No, no, no," he gibbered. "Keep away, keep away from me, behind me, get behind me, the Lord, the Lord, the Lord!"

Caxton moved toward him slowly, one hand held out to show him it was empty, the other holding the light. He was no vampire and no half-dead but he clearly wasn't thinking straight, either.

"I didn't mean to scream," he whispered. "I didn't want to give away my position! Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord. They can't have me. They can't have my blood!"

"I'm with the State Police, sir," she said, her voice low and soft and almost crooning. "Everything's okay now. The vampires are gone." She was close enough to touch him, almost. She reached out to touch his shoulder, the way she'd been trained. A nice reassuring touch that wouldn't threaten anyone.

"The power of Christ compels you!" he shouted, and swung his crucifix at her like a baseball bat. It caught her in the stomach and knocked the wind right out of her. She dropped her mag-lite in the muck and doubled over, the sudden darkness falling on her like a cave-in. "The power of Christ preserves me!" he screamed, and tried to hit her again. She heard the cross whistling through the dark air and shot out her hand to stop it. Twisting from the waist she pulled it away from him. The effort made her see stars, little traces of light that shot through her vision. She dropped the cross and grabbed him around the waist, catching both of his arms in her grapple. She really hoped he didn't try to bite her. She brought her knee up into his groin, hard enough to do serious damage.

Someone came up behind her with a more powerful light and she saw the man's pupils constrict wildly. His face was inches from her own, his mouth open wide, his teeth glinting with saliva. But they were human teeth. He was gasping for breath-she had squeezed him so hard he couldn't fully inhale.

Dumb, she thought. Fighting with vampires had made her forget everything she knew about subduing human beings. She could have really hurt the guy, whose only really crime was being scared. She released him and sheriff's deputies pushed past her to cuff him and check him for weapons. "He's not a perp," she said, one hand over her face, deeply ashamed. "He's a survivor."

Up top, up on the street level again, she examined her own injury. Just a bruise on her stomach but it was tender and it would be yellow and purple come morning. Well, she thought, she could just add it to the cut on her hand and the shovel wound on her shoulder, and call it a night's work.

"Listen, somebody else can take the pictures," Clara said. "I'll take you home, now."

Caxton nodded but she wasn't quite finished with Bitumen Hollow. "Who is he?"

she asked.

"The assistant manager of the bookstore," Clara told her. "He calmed down once we got him out of the sewer. As far as we can tell he's the only one in the entire town who made it." She frowned in anger. "He says he doesn't remember how he got down in that sewer. The deputies are with him right now, working the virtual Identikit on the sheriff's laptop."

There had been no ID on the vampire they'd killed. What if they got a facial recognition match on one of the others? It could be a good break, just the kind they needed. "I need whatever they find sent right to my PDA, okay?" she said.

"Yeah, sure," Clara told her. "I'll send you the full report and all my pictures if you have the bandwidth."

Caxton nodded. The state police were testing out new handhelds that had more memory and better wireless internet connections than the laptops in the patrol cars.

"I can handle it. Now," she said, scratching her nose, "let's get me out of here."

"I'll just sign out with the sheriff." Clara dashed off and left Caxton there to nurse her new bruise. When she returned she'd taken off her tie and undone the top button of her uniform shirt. "Come on," she said. "You can sleep in the car."