Kiss The Dead

11

HELP WAS U.S. Marshal Larry Kirkland. He was my size, small for a guy, with blue eyes, freckles, and short red-orange hair grown just long enough that it was curling in soft ringlets all over his head. He usually kept it short enough that there were no curls, which meant he almost had to shave it. His two-year-old daughter had his curls, but with her mother’s darker brown color. They let Angelica’s hair grow into ringlets that touched her tiny shoulders. Larry still looked like a grown-up Howdy Doody, but there were lines around his mouth, as if he spent too much time frowning, or being serious. When he came in as my sort-of apprentice in the execution business, he’d smiled more. I had warned him that this job can eat you, if you let it.

We were standing near the bodies as we talked. “I staked all the ones that didn’t have enough damage to be reliably dead. Stake the rest, and then join us upstairs.”

“Join you for what?” he asked, and he sounded positively suspicious. He’d learned that on the job, too.

I’d already told him what I was going to do to help break the suspects down. “You can work in one room with one suspect while I do someone else. It’ll cut our time in half, and increase the odds that we get usable information before dawn.”

His face set in familiar stubborn lines, his mouth turning down at the edges. This was part of where he got his frown lines, this stubborn cynicism. I’d been getting my share of those years back, but the last few years I’d turned any lines on my face into smile ones. I smiled, shook my head, and sighed.

“What are you smiling at?” he asked, and his voice matched the suspicion on his face.

“You, me, nothing, everything.”

“What does that even mean, Anita?” The frown softened, but he looked tired, not of hours worked, but just the situation, I think. We were both tired of it.

“It means I can read your face, the set of your shoulders. All we’re doing is our job, Larry.”

“It’s my job to take the head and heart of dead vampires so they won’t rise from the grave. It’s my job to execute vampires that are legally sanctioned for death, but it’s not my job to help the police terrify suspects. It would be like electrocuting a dead body in front of a condemned human prisoner. The body is still dead, so you don’t kill it in front of them, but they’d still smell the meat cooking. It’s barbaric, Anita. I won’t be Zerbrowski’s monster in the closet.”

I sighed. We’d had similar philosophical disagreements before, not about this particular issue since I’d never done an interrogation like this one either, but… “So it’s okay for me to be the monster, but not you?”

“If doing this makes you feel like a monster, Anita, then you know it’s wrong. If you know it’s wrong, then don’t do it. It’s as simple as that.” He looked so serious, so convinced he was right. He always did.

“And if I don’t do it, and you won’t do it, then who does do it?”

“Don’t you understand, Anita, no one should do this. It’s a horrible thing, and it shouldn’t be done at all, and it really shouldn’t have people with badges doing it. We’re the good guys, and good guys don’t do things like this.”

“We need to locate the vampires before they kill again.”

“We interrogate these suspects the way we do anyone else,” he said.

“Regular interrogation takes time, Larry, and by nightfall tomorrow the vampires will be hungry again. They’ve killed. They’ve killed police officers. They know they’re dead meat, which means they don’t have a damn thing to lose. It will make them even more dangerous.”

“There’s got to be a way that doesn’t make us the bad guys, Anita.”

I shook my head, and fought off the beginnings of anger like a warm flush of memory back when everything seemed to make me angry, and I didn’t have the control I had now. “If I wasn’t here you’d have to do the bad stuff yourself, Larry.”

“If you hadn’t been here, I still wouldn’t have done it.” He sounded so sure of himself, so sure he was right.

I counted to ten, forcing myself to breathe even, and slow. “How many times did my willingness to be the bad guy save civilian lives?”

He glared at me, letting me see the beginnings of his own temper. “I don’t know.”

“Twice,” I said.

“You know it’s more than that,” he said.

“Four times, five, ten, a dozen? How many times do you acknowledge that my shooting or hurting someone saved lives?”

Others would have lied to themselves, but Larry held to his convictions, and still understood the cost of them. It was one of his saving graces. “Twenty times, maybe thirty, where I know you went over the line, but I do acknowledge that it saved lives.”

“How many lives saved by my being a monster?” I asked.

“I never called you that.”

“How many lives saved by my being the bad guy, then?” I said.

“Dozens, maybe hundreds,” he said. He looked me in the eyes and said it.

“So, if I hadn’t been here to do your dirty work for you, you’d have just let hundreds of innocent people die?”

His hands clenched into fists, but he held my gaze and said, “I won’t torture someone. I won’t kill if I don’t have to.”

“Even if your morals cost hundreds of lives?” I asked.

He nodded. “Morals aren’t just for when it’s easy, Anita. They aren’t morals if you throw them aside every time it’s convenient.”

“Are you calling me immoral?” I asked.

“No, I’m just saying we have a different standard, that’s all. We both believe we’re right.”

“No, Larry,” I said. “I don’t believe I’m right. I’ve done things that give me nightmares. I’ll probably dream about this tonight, too.”

“That means you know this is wrong; it’s your conscience talking to you-yelling at you.”

“I know that.”

“Then how can you do it?” he asked.

“Because I’d rather have new nightmares than look a family in the eyes because their father, their brother, their mother, their daughter, their grandfather, is dead because we didn’t get these vampires in time.”

“I’d rather make the condolence call than do something that I know is this wrong, this…” He stopped.

“Say it,” I said, and whispered it then, “Say it.”

“Evil,” he said, “I’d rather do the condolence call than do something this evil.”

I nodded, not agreeing, just nodding. “Good that we have me here, then, so I can be evil, because I’d rather cut up the bodies, terrify the prisoners, than have to see one more grieving family, or explain to anyone why these bloodsuckers killed again, because we were too good, too righteous to get the information we needed.”

“You and I are never going to agree on this,” he said, voice quiet but very firm.

“No,” I said, “we’re not.”

“You go be Zerbrowski’s bogeyman, and I’ll stake the bodies down here.”

“I’m not the bogeyman, Larry. He’s not real and I am.”

“Just go, Anita, just let’s stop this.”

I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said.

“Anita…” he said.

I stopped him by holding up my hand. “I’m the monster, Larry, not the bogeyman.”

“Same thing,” he said.

“No, it’s not. Like I said, the bogeyman isn’t real, but the monsters are real, so I’m the cop’s pet monster.”

“You’re no one’s pet, Anita; if anyone makes you a monster, it’s you.”

And to that, there was nothing to say. I got my equipment and I went for the building, because when a friendship breaks this badly it doesn’t turn to hatred; it turns to pain.