Night Shift

Chapter Four

The morgue's chemical reek and fluorescent glare closed around me, and I was glad for the weight of my heavy leather coat. No matter how many autopsies I attend, the cold always seems to linger.

Still, I'll take an autopsy over a scene any day. The dispassionate light and medical terminology helps distance the ordinary horror of death a little bit. Just a little, just enough.

Sometimes.

Stanton was whey-faced too, wheezing asthmatically as he shuffled down the corridor behind us, his white coat flapping from his scarecrow-thin shoulders. His hair stuck up in birdlike tufts as well, and he was fighting a miserable cold. "It looks weird, Kismet." His nose was so stuffed the sentence came out mangled. Ith lookth weirdy Kithmet.

"How weird?" Am I going to have to kill them again? Please don't let it be scurf, or an Assyrian demon. I'm too tired for that shit. "And if it looks this weird, why weren't the bodies left onsite for me? You all know the rules."

"They're cops." Montaigne hurried to keep up, his slippers shuffling. I kept lengthening my stride to keep him slightly behind me, just in case. "We couldn't leave 'em out there in the middle of the freeway."

"Freeway?" This just keeps getting better and better. "Take it from the top and give me a vowel, Montaigne."

The corridor was thankfully deserted, stretching through infinity to a pair of swinging doors at the end. Stanton's shoes squeaked against the flooring. He'd put on sneakers from two different pairs, as well as two different colors of socks—acid green and dark blue. Whatever had happened, both Monty and Stan had been dragged out of bed in a hell of a hurry.

Of course, matching his shoes wasn't really something Stan was too concerned about. Geniuses are like that.

"A pair of traffic cops reported something odd and called for backup at about 0200. The backup got there and reported seeing the first squad car sitting on the side of the road. After that, no communication. Dispatch kept trying to raise both of them, got no response. So another black and white goes out. By this time they called me, and I got in about 0300. The third fucking car had a rookie in it; for some reason the vet had the rookie stay in the car and went to go look for the others. Everyone was converging at that point, looked like a real cluster-fuck in progress." Montaigne stopped for a breath, his pulse thundering audibly, and dropped behind me. I slowed a little. "Four other cars got there at once and found the rookie bleeding quarts. Something had opened up the car like a soda can and dragged him out. He's at Luz General in trauma and last I heard it wasn't looking good. The other five—the first two teams and the vet—are all in pieces."

Pieces? The scar was hard and throbbing against my skin, burrowing in. It never got any deeper, but the uncomfortable wondering of what it would be like if it ever did hit bone often showed up in the middle of long sleepless stakeouts, keeping me company along with Mikhail's ghost.

"Pieces?" I sounded only mildly curious. I couldn't make any sort of guess until I'd seen the evidence, and maybe not even then. A hunter is trained thoroughly not to make any conjectures in the initial stages. You can blind yourself pretty quickly by starting out with the wrong assumption.

A hunter blinded by assumption doesn't live long.

"Yeah, pieces. Whatever killed them tossed them out on the Drag like garbage. In pieces. Bleeding pieces." Montaigne's voice dropped.

We reached the swinging door, and I stopped short, forcing the other two to skid to a halt. "Before or after it carved the rookie up?"

An acrid stink of fear wafted out from Montaigne as he and Stan paused, following procedure now. They shouldn't have brought the bodies in until I'd been able to make sure they were truly dead and not just incubating something.

Monty reached across his wide chest, touched his sidearm, clasped in its holster under his armpit. "We don't know."

Jesus Christ I took a deep breath, motioned them both back. "All right, boys. Let big bad Kismet go in and see what the monster left us."

Montaigne actually flinched, but he understood. It sounds brutal and callous, but a hunter learns mighty quick to take the gallows humor where she finds it. Just like a cop.

It's the only way to keep from suicide or weeping, and sometimes it doesn't work. That's when you start drinking, or getting some random sex.

See what I mean?

I came through low and sweeping with both guns as the swinging doors banged against the walls on either side. Nothing but the tables and hard tiled floor of a ghastly-lit body bay, each table now full. It had been a busy night in Santa Luz. The five bags on the left-hand side were all shapeless, looking wrong even through heavy vinyl. The bodies on the right were bagged and normal, if there is any such thing as a normal dead body.

It used to bother me that each bag was a life, the sum of someone's breathing and walking around carrying a soul. Then the things that bothered me were details. Hair left crusted with blood, a missing earring, a bruise that had half-healed and would never fade now, or—worst of all—the smaller bags.

The ones for children.

I took a deep breath and smelled something I didn't expect—the sweetish brackish rotting of hellbreed, added to another smell I hadn't expected. A dry smell, blazing with heat and spoiled musk, like matted fur and unhealthy dandruff-clotted skin. My nose wrinkled. I took another deep whiff, sniffing all the way down to the bottom of my lungs and examining the bags with both eyes. My smart eye, the blue one, saw no stirring or unevenness hovering in the ether over the bodies. My dumb eye, the brown one, ticked over their contours and returned a few impressions I wasn't sure I liked.

"Clear," I called, and holstered my guns. Montaigne's gusty sigh of relief preceded him through the door.

"Are you staying for the slicing, Jill?" Stan sniffed, and his bleary gaze skittered away from my breasts, roved over the five bodies on the right-hand side, and came back up to touch my face, uncertain.

Five autopsies take a lot of time. "I'll take a look, but I'll leave the deli work to you and Monty. I'll need the report. This is one of mine."

Stan's face fell. So did Monty's. They both looked sallow, and it wasn't just the fluorescents.

"Christ." Monty didn't quite reel, but he did take a step to one side, like a bull pawing the grass, uncertain what to charge. "What the fuck is it?"

"Don't know yet." That was the truth. "I'll go by the scene, see if I can pick up a trail. From what you're telling me, it either got what it wanted or was scared off by the black and whites. I'm guessing they didn't come in silently."

He rolled his eyes as Stan rocked back on his heels, stuffing his hands in his lab coat pockets and eyeing both of us. "Suppose you can't tell me anything useful."

Not yet I haven't even looked at the bodies. "This is hunter's work, Monty. How much do you want me to tell you?"

Monty shook his head fiercely. If he could have clapped his hands over his ears like a five-year-old, he might have tried to do it.

Wise man.

"I'll take a look," I repeated, "and then I'll hit the street and try to find a trail. Nobody gets away with killing our brave blue boys in my city, gentlemen. Stan?"

He shrugged his thin shoulders, the pens in his breast pocket clicking against each other. "Be my guest."

He very pointedly didn't offer to unzip the bags for me, or caution me not to destroy any evidence. I couldn't even feel triumphant. Maybe it was just his cold.

I set my back teeth, the charms in my hair tinkling against each other, and paced cautiously up to the first body bag. Nothing stirred, and none of my senses quivered. I touched the zipper and let out a soft breath, glad the two men were behind me.

I pulled the zipper down. I have never figured out if it's easier to do it in one quick swipe, like tearing off a Band-Aid, or slowly, giving yourself time to adjust.

I usually go with the quick tear. Call it a personality quirk.

The body had been savaged, great chunks torn out. The face had been taken off, and his short cop-buzz haircut had beads of dried blood sticking to its bristly ends. The only thing left intact was the curve of a jaw, slightly fuzzed with stubble. He hadn't shaved, this man.

"That one's Sanders." Monty shifted his weight, his slippers squeaking a little against the tile. "About forty-five. Retiring next month, early."

A lifer. And before my time. Now he'd never retire. I drew the zipper down more, studying the mass of meat. His feet were stacked neatly between his knees, and his right arm was missing. The ribs were snapped, and the smell boiled up into my nose and down into my stomach, turning into sourness.

That's hellbreed, and something else. Something I should know. A reek like that is distinctive, and I should be up on it, dammit. Are we looking at a hellbreed working in concert with something else? They're not like that, most of them are jealous fucks. Still, it's possible. But nothing a hellbreed can control smells like this. The shudder bolted down my spine. I drew the zipper up, went to the next one.

"Kincaid," Monty supplied. "Twenty-eight. Good solid cop."

I nodded, pulled the zipper down in one swipe.

This one had a face. A round, blond, good-natured, blood-speckled face. I swallowed hard. The rags of his uniform couldn't hide the massive damage done to this body either—the purple of the torn esophagus, white bits of bone, a flicker of cervical vertebra peering up at me. His throat had been torn out and his viscera scattered. The bathroom stink of cut bowel flooded the chilly air. Both his femurs were snapped.

Marlow, the third, had been savaged. He'd been the driver in the first traffic unit, and whatever had attacked him had plenty of time to do its work. There was barely enough left to be recognizable as human.

The fourth—Anderson, Marlow's partner—was the worst. His arm had been torn off, something exerting terrific force to break the humerus just below the shoulder. The force had to have been applied at an angle for the bone to yield before the shoulder dislocated. His other limbs hung by strips of meat. All of them. And his head.

There wasn't enough of any of them left for an open-casket service.

As always, the shudder passed and the bodies became a puzzle. Where did this piece go, where did that piece go?

Then I would catch myself, horrified. These were human beings. Each one of them had gotten up out of bed this morning expecting to see sundown. Nobody is ever really prepared to die, no matter what you see in movies or read in fairytales.

My stomach churned, a hole of heat opening right behind my breastbone. Marty's Turns were starting to look pretty good. He bought them by the case, he wouldn't miss a few hundred.

I zipped Anderson's bag back up. Turned to find both Stan and Marty staring at me. "I'll drop in later for the files." My eyes burned, stinging, from disinfectant married to the smell of death. "What exactly did the first on-site traffic unit report?"

"Just 'something weird. There wasn't a code for it." Monty's paleness had long since passed from cheese to paper. "Jill?"

"I don't know yet, Monty. Give me a little time to work this thing. Have traffic units take precautions; if it's weird and there's not a code, don't stop. Tell the beat cops too—they're vulnerable. If they see anything weird, they're to report so I can get a pattern of movement, but they are not to pursue. Got it?"

He nodded. "Do you have an idea, at least? I don't want to know," he added hurriedly. "But…"

But you feel better when the hunter at least has an idea. I know, Monty. I know. I could have given a com-foiling lie. "No." I looked at the bodies, lying slumped under their rubber blankets. All safe and snug, never having to worry about the job or the cold winter again.

Bile rose in my throat. "No. But I'm going to find out."

Because whatever this is smells like hellbreed and rips things up like no hellbreed should. The claw shape is strange. If I didn't know better I'd think it was a Were. But no Were, even a rogue, would go near anything hellbreed.

Great.