Broken Soul

CHAPTER 13 Who Was That Masked Man?

I woke with a jolt, the dream slipping away. Which totally sucked, because when a dream-thought slipped away, it was always vitally important. All I could remember was Jodi saying something about penguins. No. Wait. It was Peregrinus. The old vamp in town, along with his partner, Batildis, and the blood-servant the Devil. The blood-servant who had hurt Reach.

If Reach was telling the truth. Was Reach really hurt? Would he have made up something like being tortured by the Devil? The dream was about the vamp and the Devil—a blood-servant so terrifying she had no name, only a title, who had built a bomb and put it at my door. Maybe. Or perhaps it had been her master, Batildis. Where were the Devil and her vamps? In New Orleans? Was the Devil acting alone or with the help of other human followers, other blood-servants? What the heck had they gotten from Reach? I was having a hard time putting things together, because the bad guys had all the intel.

These bad guys were vamps, so being here in New Orleans probably wasn’t because of just one reason, but many reasons, multilayered and overlapping. That felt right, but logic wasn’t pulling the dream any closer; rather, it was tearing at the dream like talons until there was nothing left but a feeling of disquiet. A feeling that I was missing something important, some instigating event that brought the attention of Satan’s Three to New Orleans. Unless that event had been publicized all over the world on TV. Yeah. I gave a mental sigh. It was looking more and more like this was all my fault. Again.

My cell buzzed and I rolled over in bed to grab up the phone. It was a text from Soul, saying she was clearing her calendar. It was about time. I closed my heavy cell, staring up at the ceiling as the overhead fan twirled lazily above me.

I heard footsteps in the foyer and a soft tap on my door. “Hold on,” I said. I flipped the covers away and looked for my black robe, which was nowhere to be seen, so I pulled on the wrinkled clothes I’d dropped to the floor. When I opened the door, Eli stood there, his dark skin appearing even darker in the shadowed foyer. He was wearing his business face, which meant even less emotional expression than usual.

“Someone’s watching the house,” he said.

The gnawing worry ramped up. “Again?”

“You’re popular in the whacked-out fangy crowd.”

“Thanks, I’m sure. But it’s daylight. Not a vamp.”

“Okay. But my money’s on the vamps anyway. Maybe a vamp’s blood-meal, but still a vamp.”

“No argument.” I slipped my bedroom shoes back on my feet and left my room, following Eli. “Where?”

“Not the usual place.” The usual place was the house cater-cornered, across the street. It had a small nook at the door and low, wide porch walls supporting the posts holding up the porch roof, making it perfect for pots of plants or for a watcher to sit and observe. I’d found more than one spy there. “This one is actually in a house. Directly across the street.” He stopped to the side of the kitchen window, which was small and obscure, but looked out over the front street. I leaned over to get a better view.

“See the window to the left of the door, second story?” he asked. “That curtain’s never been open before. It’s just a crack, but there’s a small round object, like the end of a scope, in the opening.” Eli handed me a pair of binoculars and I reshaped them to my face.

I found the window and the corner of the drapery that had been folded back. Sure enough, there was a round thing in it, pointed directly at my house. “Who owns the property?”

“Alex is checking now.”

With very few exceptions, like me, few people lived in the houses in the French Quarter. The property values were so high and the tourist attention was so acute, that the buildings and houses were often rented out as artist’s studios, small shops, bars, and restaurants rather than used as homes. I handed Eli the eyes and went back to my room, saying, “I need a shower and a few minutes to think.”

Behind closed doors, I stripped, dropping the clothes again as I made my way to the shower. I wasn’t dirty, but I was sleepy, my brain was sluggish, and all I could think to do about the spy was to go over there and slap him silly. Physical force might be my specialty, but it wasn’t always the most effective means of problem solving.

Ten minutes later I turned off the cold water and stepped out of the bathroom. Five minutes after that, I was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a jean jacket over it all to hide my weapons. I yanked on an old pair of scuffed and worn Lucchese Western boots and left my room. To Alex, who was sitting at his small desk, surrounded by electronic tablets, I asked, “Who owns the house?”

“A woman named Margery Thibodaux. According to records, she’s lived there for sixty years. Recluse, drives a 1972 Ford Galaxie, has a net worth of two million, some of it in conservative stocks and bonds. Her husband and she bought into Walmart the same year they bought the Ford, and that’s where most of the money came from. She has a daughter in Dallas and a son in Connecticut. I found contact numbers and neither adult child has seen or heard from her in forty-eight hours. Both have, by now, called the police.”

I dropped on the couch and let a tired grin on my face. “The police. Now, why didn’t I think of that?”

From the kitchen window, Eli said, “A marked car just pulled up. Female officer, going to the door.”

I closed my eyes and let my head fall back. “I coulda stayed in bed.”

The sound of automatic gunfire shot me to my feet. I made the side door and was outside before Eli finished his turn. Beast butted in close, sharing her speed and strength. Behind me, I heard the Kid shouting into his cell phone, “Officer down, Officer down! Automatic gunfire! Request backup and medic!” He started shouting the address as I rounded the house.

I didn’t bother with the wrought-iron gate. There wasn’t time. I leaped, grabbed the horizontal bar to the side of the fleur-de-lis at the gate top, and vaulted over, landing in a crouch. Behind me, Eli cursed and rattled the gate lock. Another burst of gunfire erupted from across the street.

I leaned into the side of the house and looked around the corner. The officer was lying in the street, bloody, but crawling for the protection of her unit. She had her service weapon in one hand and from her body came the sound of a steady beep—the “officer in trouble” alarm and GPS that cops pressed when they were in danger. Already I could hear sirens from all around.

I looked up at the window where we had spotted the surveillance and saw the glass was busted out. The barrel of a weapon was trained down, directly at the cop. With no thought at all, I raced across the street, seeing the barrel rise toward me. And realized that was exactly what the shooter had been trying for—me in the line of fire.

Time did that weird slow-down thing that happened often when I was in danger of getting dead. I jerked my body left, then right, the barrel in the window following. Behind me I heard the distinctive sound of a nine-mil as Eli laid down cover fire. Puny shots in the aftermath of the automatic weapon fire.

The shooter fired again, rounds hitting the street just behind me. I dove for the cop, grabbed her as I landed, and rolled her behind the car. I lay atop her as the cop car was riddled with bullets. What hearing I had was lost to the concussive battering.

NOPD units started to arrive, sirens and lights flashing. A car swerved up to me and screeched to a halt. Suddenly I was surrounded by three cops, all with their weapons pointed at me. “Not me!” I screamed and pointed, deafened. “The window!”

Two cops fell, hit by the shooter before they could take cover. One was dead before he hit the street, the back of his head gone. The unwounded cop pulled him and the other officer out of the line of fire. He started doing CPR on the dead guy. I rolled off the female officer and applied pressure to the bloody place in her left shoulder. The blood was pouring, not spurting, but no telling what was happening inside her.

More cop cars arrived. “Around back!” the officer shouted, and pointed at the house. “Seal off the streets!”

“Got him!” someone screamed. “Down on your knees! Down on your knees. Hands behind your head!”

Eli. They had Eli. Cops in a panic, three of their own down. “He’s with me!” I shouted.

The cop beneath me added her voice to mine. “Not him! Not him! The house.” She pointed, and coughed blood. I knew instantly what that meant. A round had hit a lung. The lung was collapsing and her chest cavity was filling up with blood. The officer was drowning in her own blood. My emergency medical training was years old, but it came back to me now with absolute clarity.

I angled the cop against the cruiser door. Looked up into the eyes of a paramedic who dropped to his knees beside me. “GSW,” I said. “Left lung. Probable hemothorax.”

The medic stuck his ear pieces in and listened to her chest with his stethoscope. “Yeah. Lung is down,” he said, already cutting through her uniform shirt. “We have to get her transferred stat.” He started removing the Kevlar vest that hadn’t protected the officer. The bullet had gone in just above the vest at a downward angle.

The cop coughed and sucked blood and coughed again. Blood splattered over all of us. She was wearing a T-shirt under the vest. It was scarlet and sopping. I felt her heart stutter under my hands. If my hearing hadn’t been compromised by the concussive gunfire, I knew I could have heard the heart in distress. Beast’s hearing is that good, even over the sirens squalling.

“She needs a chest tube. She won’t make it to the hospital,” I said. Paramedics weren’t certified to insert chest tubes in the field. Only doctors could do that. Meaning that this cop was dead. I looked at her for the first time. She was brown haired, brown-but-pasty-skinned, brown eyed. Maybe Latina. Maybe one of the mixed races found so commonly in the Deep South. And she was seeing her death, her eyes wide and panicked and knowing.

With a pair of scissors, the paramedic cut her T-shirt open. The wound was bad.

Eli dropped to his knees beside me. Eli. He was a Ranger. Rangers have to do all sorts of things in the field. Like save one another, or themselves. I asked the paramedic, “If you were to stick a large bore needle into her chest beneath her left arm, well around her chest wall from the bleeding bullet hole, where exactly would you stick it?”

The paramedic looked back and forth between us, understanding what I was asking. He couldn’t help her, but a bystander could. “I’d stick it right here.” He touched the cop’s skin. It was icy, sweating. She was going into shock.

I slapped her face, and she looked at me, pulling back from the brink. “We can try to save you, or we can be smart and avoid a lawsuit and let you die. You want us to try to save you? Nod once for yes.”

The cop nodded once, then again, and again. Coughing. Blood going everywhere.

Eli handed me an oversized Betadine swab. I swiped her chest at the site the paramedic had pointed to. Eli tore a paper-and-plastic package and removed the plastic top from a needle. It looked like a ten-penny nail with a hole bored through. It was huge. There wasn’t time for gloves or better cleaning. There wasn’t time for anything.

Eli’s fingers pushed between two of the cop’s ribs, pressing into the . . . intercostal space. I remembered the word. Useless now, that memory. He jammed the needle through the flesh. The injured cop didn’t even flinch. Blood flushed through the needle end and out into the street. Eli secured the needle in place with a wad of gauze and taped it down.

I looked at him and said, “Get outta here.” He understood. So did the paramedic and the cops around us. Civilians don’t do stuff like this. The official types all looked away. Eli grabbed a blue absorbent pad, stood, and walked away, head down, wiping his hands and hiding the blood all at once. He moved down the street away from my house, away from the shooting.

I looked at the cop and saw her badge. Her name was Officer Swelling. She was maybe twenty-five. Was wearing a wedding ring. She took a breath and exhaled, the sound of air gargling and thick, her eyes on me. She didn’t cough, but it was a near thing. She mouthed the words, Thank you. I shrugged at her and she added, her words a whisper, “Who was that masked man?”

I laughed. So did Swelling, as well as she was able. Moments later, the cop was inside an ambulance, hooked up to fluids and being transported down the street toward the nearest hospital. A second ambulance was departing with the other injured cop. The coroner was standing over the third one. The paramedics were still doing CPR but everyone knew it was just a formality. The officer was familiar, but I couldn’t think of his name at the moment. A face I’d seen at NOPD or on a scene. An older guy, midfifties, one who’d eaten one too many beignets and sipped one too many sugared drinks. White guy. Dead white guy.

I looked up at the broken window pane where the shots had come from. Other panes were busted out from where Eli had fired back. I looked down at myself. I was covered in sticky, drying blood. I opened and closed my hands; the blood was tacky and cold in the warm air.

I had blood on my hands. Again. Maybe this time I should have felt good about it, good because I’d maybe saved an officer’s life. But I had a feeling that Swelling would be uninjured and going about her life just fine had I not lived across the street from the house.

I might be War Woman, but my past was still alive and well inside me. My old enemy guilt rose up and wrapped cold, slimy arms around me, a death stench rising from inside me.

Around us all, a breeze gusted, cooler than the midday air. Overhead, clouds were moving in. Rain on the wind and the threat of lightning in the ozone scent.

I felt a tap and looked down at Jodi, my friend on NOPD. The vamps’ best friend at cop central. “He fired from up there,” I said, nodding to the busted window. “Did the unknown person who offered me cover while I pulled Swelling to safety hit him?”

“Blood at the scene,” Jodi said. “No one there. Trail out the back door, across the alley and the garden behind the house, through the next alley to the street; then it stops. Shooter got into a vehicle and disappeared.”

“The old lady?” The name came to me. “Margery Thibodaux? Is she okay?”

“Dead. Single GSW to the head. Maybe two days ago. Before the bomb incident.” Her voice lowered. “What are you mixed up in, Jane?”

My ears hadn’t returned to normal. There was a hum of damaged eardrums that made her voice sound tinny. And then I realized that her voice also sounded odd because of the dead cop. There was horror and anger on the faces all around me. Explosive anger, needing only a spark to set them all off.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know. Except there’s this vamp, looking for trouble, and an old friend sent him to me.”

“Friend?” The word was skeptical. “This friend have a name?”

“Yeah. Reach. That’s all I know him by. The vamp tortured him to get to me. Supposedly. And no, I don’t have an address; our only contact was through e-mail and cell.” I gave her both his e-mail addy and his cell number. “But don’t expect to find him. He’s gone to ground.”

She grunted, unimpressed, taking down the info on her tablet. “You’re part of a crime scene. I need your clothes and a statement.” Jodi pointed me at an unmarked cop car. “Sit there and wait until Crime Scene can get to you. Don’t touch anything. Preserve the trace evidence.”

That meant sitting in drying blood, no shower, no breakfast, no water, probably all day. I didn’t complain. Not with a dead cop at my feet.

It started to rain an hour later and I ended up back at cop central, in a small room where a female crime scene tech removed trace evidence from me, took samples of the cracked and dried blood all over me, did a trace-gunshot residue test, which came back negative, clearing me of being the person who fired the shots back at the shooter. She took my clothes but let me wash up and put on fresh clothing delivered by Alex, who had nothing to add, saying that he had been playing video games when the shooting started. He hadn’t seen anyone fire back. Neither had I. All truth. I didn’t volunteer that the person who returned fire was my partner, Eli Younger, nor that he had gone after the suspect. I hadn’t seen him do any of that.

I finally got to head home before sunset, a cloudy, rainy afternoon leading into a cooler, wet evening, taking a cab back to the house. I was so tired I was swaying on my feet, standing on my front porch as I watched the cab roll away. I remembered only then that I had a cabdriver friend of sorts, and I hadn’t called Rinaldo recently. So many things I needed to do, including sleeping and eating and maybe drinking water. I’d taken nothing in me all day. But I stood at the side gate in a puddle of rain and stared out at the world.

The front door across from my house was sealed by crime scene tape. I could get in, if I was willing to cut the tape or go around back for a little B&E. I needed to sniff the shooter’s blood to see whether I recognized it. But I just couldn’t make myself.

The street between our houses had been scrubbed free of blood, any final traces washed away by rain. I swiveled and looked at my house. The wood was pocked in several places, holes that had been enlarged by CSI retrieving evidence.

On the cooling evening breeze, I smelled exhaust, steak from inside my house, water from the Mississippi, blooming flowers, Creole and Cajun restaurant cooking with a high percentage of seafood, coffee—the usual French Quarter smells, rich and layered and intense. A spatter of rain pounded down, pebbling the water on the street. Because of the heavy clouds, the streetlights came on early, the sensors claiming night was falling. The old-fashioned globes cast homey yellowed light into the false dusk, but I didn’t feel homey. I felt numb and worn. Tired beyond anything I’d felt in recent months. It would be smarter to move my partners to vamp HQ, and leave myself out as bait. I wondered whether I’d be able to talk them into it.

Our hunting territory, Beast thought at me. We will not run. We will fight.

Neither one of us is very bright, I thought back.

I went inside.

Over a steak and a beer—which made me feel a little better—I made the suggestion that the boys go to HQ, “to keep Leo safer,” I said, trying for nonchalant.

Eli paused, a bite halfway to his mouth. “So you can be bait and fight Satan’s Three alone?” Eli said, his tone so mild that I instantly realized I had insulted him. Carefully, as if his fork and steak knife were made of glass, he set them onto the plate, the bite of steak forgotten. “No.”

“Not even Alex?”

“That would be up to him,” my partner said, his words measured and precise, his tone and expression giving nothing at all away. “He’s over eighteen.”

“No,” Alex said shortly.

“Okay. It’s what I expected. But I had to ask. It’s”—I shrugged—“polite.”

“Bugger polite,” Eli said. And with that he picked up his fork and shoved the bite into his mouth.

“What my brother said,” Alex said.

I decided this was not the time to discuss house rules and, after a moment, nodded. “Okay. Let’s compare stories.”

I learned that Eli had shown up at NOPD and been taken in to give a statement. He had gunshot residue on his hands, but no blood on his clothes because he had managed to change before he appeared at NOPD. He had admitted that he was the one who returned fire and had turned over the weapon that he’d used. He had been questioned to within an inch of his life before being released with the usual order not to leave town.

I told them all about my day at cop central. Eli shared a few details about his time there too. His Q&A had included Jodi and lunch with the cops—who wanted to say thank you to the man who had saved a cop’s life.

Alex told us about his research and about the dead cop. Everett Semer had been fifty-five and heading to retirement in a little more than a year, with a wife and two kids and grandkids. We watched the coverage on TV and social media and sent a donation in to help the family. And we were relieved to learn that the injured cops were expected to survive.

Sobered, Eli turned off the news and called vamp HQ. I listened, silent and feeling a bit managed and outmaneuvered as he told someone that we would not be in tonight. I stared at him, surprised but not stopping him. When he hung up, he raised his eyebrows. “What? We need to figure out who’s targeting us. And we need a day off from fangheads, which you never take.”

I gave him a dismal smile. “What’s this of which you speak, ‘day off’?”

Instead of answering, he said, “Coke floats for dessert,” which cheered me considerably. Sweets were not Eli’s drug of choice. Eli had no drugs of choice—it was an all-healthy lifestyle for the Ranger.

Over dessert, served in tall glasses with vanilla ice cream and Coke and lots of the resulting foam, Eli turned the conversation to the shooter. “According to what I learned through Jodi, the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the bomb builder and the shooter were the same person. Fingerprints match.”

“No way,” Alex said. “Bomb makers and shooters have distinct and different personalities.”

Eli settled hard eyes on his brother, which had to be uncomfortable. Alex jutted out his jaw and stared back. “You’re a shooter,” the Kid said. “You’ve got all the personality markers for a shooter, including high markers for survival, tenacity, independent action, and patience. Bomb makers have different personalities, with lower markers for survival and independence, but higher markers for single-mindedness.”

“You’ve been playing shrink on me?” The question contained no overt emotions, but Eli’s scent changed, with aggressive pheromones tainting the air.

“I have an IQ considerably higher than yours,” Alex said seriously, “with personality markers for insatiable curiosity. It isn’t my fault.”

“Everyone has to take responsibility for our own decisions, actions, and inactions, Kid.”

“Stop,” I said. “We’re not talking about your pasts. We’re talking about the shooter and bomb maker who targeted this house. If it’s a blood-servant, and we think it is, he’s had a lot of years to learn all sorts of things, including how to beat any personality test or even grow a new personality if he needs one. You live long enough, you can overcome most anything, including your own disposition.”

“That from personal experience?” Eli asked.

I stabbed him with a look and let Beast rise in my eyes, just a bit. “You got questions about me, Eli? ’Cause if we start asking questions, we’re all gonna have to answer them.” I let my eyes fall to his collarbone and the scarring there, scarring he had never talked about, scarring that had ended his military career, or had been the impetus for his voluntary honorable discharge, or whatever they called it.

“Maybe it’s time to clear the air,” Eli said, and my heart jumped in surprise before he went on. “But not until after we catch this guy. Then I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours.”

It was a challenge that Eli clearly didn’t expect me to accept. So I did. “Okeydokey.” He didn’t gape like a fish on land, but it was a near thing, and I grinned at him to show I knew I had scored a point. To drive it home, I licked my fingertip and drew a vertical line in the air. “Until then, you got any of the shooter’s blood for me to sniff?”

Eli frowned, actually had a tiny line form between his brows. “Yeah. How’d you know I collected some of the blood?”

“You were too quick to disappear. I figured you followed him and collected some spatter for me.”

“I did.”

I held out my hand. “That blood spatter, please?”

Eli retrieved a plastic Ziploc bag from the counter and opened it before handing it to me. I bent my nose over the opening and sniffed. And rocked my head back in surprise.

“What?” Eli said, knees in a crouch, one hand behind him, going for his weapon. Eli always had a weapon on him, and drawing one was his first action of choice.

I waved away his gun and the stink at the same time. “Nothing. Just, I never smelled a blood-servant like this one. I don’t even need to shift.” I took another sniff and wrinkled my nose. “Ick. Angry, cold and purposed, been drinking from a very old vamp for a lot of years. Old blood-servant, maybe the oldest I’ve ever smelled.” I raised my eyes to Eli as he settled back into his chair. “And our shooter is a she.”

Eli didn’t seem terribly surprised. “Women make good shooters: steady, dependable, and reliable. Good hand-to-eye. Until they have families. Then different instincts kick in and they have a harder time following orders. They think too much.”

My feminist side wanted to stick up her head and disagree, but maybe he had a point. What did I know? I took another sniff. The blood was starting to break down and smelled a bit rank, but I caught a whiff of something else. Something almost familiar, but not quite there, not quite envisioned. But whatever it was, little alarm bells went off inside my brain. I resealed the baggie, thinking.

“Are you going to change shape to sniff it?” Alex blurted. “I want to watch!”

“No,” Eli said.

“Yes, I’m going to change. And it’s the same answer you will always get to that question. No, you can’t watch. It’s private,” I said. “Sorry.” But I wasn’t really sorry. Changing, even in extremis, always involved a certain amount of nudity, and no way was I willing to share that with a nineteen-year-old boy/man, no matter how high his IQ was. “I’ll be right back.”

I went to my room and closed the door.

I took my box of fetishes from the top shelf of the closet and removed the one I wanted, bones and teeth strung on a length of jewelry wire. I stripped, sat on my bed, and held the necklace in my lap. Beast had been unusually quiet until I settled down to meditate; then she said, Good nose. Ugly dog.

“Yeah. I know. Sorry.” And I entered the gray place of the change.