13 Bullets Part 2

He lead her up to the Commissioner's office, a corner office with two

windows on the top floor. The other two walls were lined with the deer antlers and the head of one very large twelve-point buck. A rack of antique fowling guns sat immediately behind the desk as if the Commissioner wanted to be able to perforate anyone who brought him news he didn't like.

Arkeley would have been a good candidate. After she'd finished giving her report and Arkeley had made an introductory statement the Commissioner gave him a look of pure hatred. "I don't like this, but you probably already guessed as much. The nastiest, ugliest multiple homicide in decades and you just come in and take it away from us. A US Marshal. You guys guard courthouses," he said, leaning way back in his chair. He was bald on top but it hadn't reached his forehead yet. The bottom b.u.t.ton of his uniform strained a little at keeping his gut in. He had a full Colonel's birds on his shoulders, though, so Caxton stood at attention the whole time he was talking.

Arkeley sat in his chair as if his anatomy was constructed for some other kind of conveyance, as if his spine didn't bend properly. "We also capture the majority of federal fugitives," he told the Commissioner.

"Trooper," the Commissioner said, without looking at her. "What do you think of this piece of s.h.i.t? Should I run him out of town?"

She was pretty sure it was a rhetorical question but she answered anyway. "Sir," she said, "he's the only living American to have successfully hunted vampires, Sir." She stayed at attention, staring up at the brim of her hat like she'd been taught.

The Commissioner sighed. "I could block this." He gestured at the paperwork spread across his desk. Most of it was signed by the Lieutenant Governor. "I could hold it all up, demand verification, demand copies in triplicate. I could stall your investigation long enough for my own boys to take care of the vampire."

"In which case, young man, more than a few people would die. Not only that, they would die in a truly horrible way." Arkeley wasn't smiling when he said it. "There's a cycle to these things. At first the vampires try to hide among us. They disguise themselves and bury their kills in privacy and seclusion. But over time the bloodl.u.s.t grows. They need more and more blood every night to maintain their un-life. Soon they forget why they were trying to be discrete. And then they just start killing wholesale, with no moral compunction and no mercy. Until this vampire is brought down the body count will continue to rise."

"Why have you got such a hard-on for this?" the Commissioner demanded. "You're willing to make enemies, just so you can horn in on this."

"If you're asking why I chose to take this case I have my own reasons and I'm not going to share them with you." Arkeley stood up and picked his papers off the desk one at a time. "Now, if you're done p.i.s.sing on my shoes, there are some things I need. I'd like to speak with your armorer. I need a vehicle, preferably a patrol car. And I need a liaison, someone who can coordinate operations between the various local police agencies. A partner, if you will."

"Yeah, alright." The Commissioner leaned forward and tapped a few keys on his computer. "I've got a couple guys for you, real hotshots from the Criminal Investigations Unit. Cowboy types, grew up in the mountains and learned how to shoot before they started playing with themselves. I've got six names to start-"

"No," Arkeley said. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. At least it felt that way to Caxton. "You misunderstood. I didn't ask to be a.s.signed someone. I've already picked my liaison. I'm taking her."

Caxton was looking at her hat. She didn't see Arkeley point. It took her way too long to realize he meant he wanted her to ride with him. "Beg your pardon, sir," she said, when the rushing in her ears had pa.s.sed, "but I'm a Patrol Unit. Highway Patrol," she reiterated. "I don't feel I'd be appropriate for what you want."

For once at least it seemed he was willing to explain a decision. "You said I was the only living American to kill a vampire. You must have read something about me," he told her.

She'd read everything she could find while she waited for him to show up. It wasn't much. "I read your incident report on the Piter Lares case, yes, sir."

"Then you're the second-best informed person in this building. Commissioner, I want you to release her from her current duties."

"For how long?" the Commissioner asked.

"Until I'm done with her. Now. You," he said, looking at Caxton, "follow me and stay close. I keep a certain steady pace and I expect you to match me or you'll forever be asking me to slow down."

She looked at the Commissioner but he just shrugged. "He's a Fed," his expression seemed to say. "What are you going to do?"

Arkeley lead her down to the Area Response Team's firing range out back. The ART was the anti-terrorism squad, but they were also the ones who were called in to break up protests in the Capital. They had the equipment and the tactics for ma.s.s arrests and crowd control and they had a sizeable budget for less lethal weapons. Which Caxton knew used to be called non-lethal weapons, until somebody got accidentally killed. The ART guys were all gun nuts and gadget freaks and had an experimental weapons firing range behind the HQ where they could test out their toys before they actually had to deploy them. It also let them get in a little target shooting whenever they got the itch. Caxton kept her hands over her ears as they came up on the range officer, who was firing what looked like an antique musket. It was loud enough to make her think he must be using black powder.

Arkeley eventually yelled loud enough to get the ranger officer's attention. The RO took off his ear protectors and the two men had a brief discussion. Whatever Arkeley said made the RO snort in laughter, but he disappeared into an ammunition shed and came back out with a box of bullets.

Arkeley lined up thirteen of them on the firing stand and carefully, methodically loaded the magazine of his weapon. It was a Glock 23, Caxton saw. More firepower than most police handguns but it was no hand cannon. "You only load thirteen?" she asked, looking over his shoulder.

"That's the capacity of the magazine," he said, his voice thick with condescension. It was going to take a lot to warm up to this guy.

"Most people would load an extra round in the chamber, so they're ready to shoot at a second's notice. I do," she said, patting the Beretta 92 on her belt.

"Tell me, do you not wear a seat belt while you're driving, so you can save half a second when you get in and out of your car?"

Caxton frowned and wanted to spit. She dug one of the bullets out of the box and studied it. The slugs were semi-jacketed lead, about what she had expected and not enough to make the Range Officer so excited. Two perpendicular cuts had been made in the nose of each round, forming a perfect cross. She thought maybe she'd caught him in a mistake. "I read your report-you said crosses had no effects on vampires."

"Luckily for me they work wonders on bullets." Arkeley shouted to clear the range and sighted on a target thirty yards away, a paper target stapled to a plywood two-by-four. Caxton covered her ears. He fired one round and the target shredded. The two-by-four exploded in a cloud of wood chips. "The slug mushrooms and breaks apart inside the target," he explained to her. "Each piece of shrapnel has its own wound track and its own momentum. It's like every bullet is a little fragmentation grenade."

As much as she hated him, she had to let out a low whistle at that. So this was what you shot vampires with, she thought. She asked the RO to bring out another box in 9mm for herself.

"I can do that," he said, his voice low enough to count as a whisper, "but they won't be parabellum. Cross Points are against the Hague convention." "I'll never tell," Arkeley said. "Load her up."

"Down here, take the next right," Arkeley said, stabbing one finger at the windshield. He settled back in the pa.s.senger seat, looking more comfortable there than he had on the chair in the Commissioner's office. Maybe he spent more time in cars than offices, she thought. Yeah, that was probably right.

Caxton wheeled their unmarked patrol car around a stand of ailanthus saplings that bounced and shimmered over the hood. Twilight was about to be over: the night was just starting. According to the map they were right in the middle of the township of Arabella Furnace, named after a cold blast pig iron furnace that would once have employed the whole population of the town. There was nothing left of the furnace itself except a square foundation of ancient bricks, most of them crumbled down to dust. There was a visitor's center there and Caxton had learned all about the history of cold blast furnaces while Arkeley took a pit stop.

Other than barking out directions he had very little to say. She had tried talking to him about the skinless face in her window the night before. She had not presented it as something that scared her. Though it still did, especially as the daylight dwindled in her rear-view mirror. She presented it as part of the case. He grunted affirmatively at her suggestion that he should know what had happened. But then he failed to add so much as a comment.

"What do you think it was about?" she asked. "Why was it there?" "It sounds," he said, "as if the half-dead wanted to scare you. If it had wanted to hurt or kill you it probably could have." Any attempt on her part to get anything further out of him resulted in shrugs or, worse, complete apathy.

"Jesus," she shouted, finally, and stopped the car short so they both hit their seatbelts. "A freak with a torn-up face follows me home and all you can say is that it probably just wanted to scare me? Does this happen so often in your life that you can be so jaded about it?"

"It used to," he said.

"But not anymore? What did you do? How did you stop it?"

"I killed a bunch of vampires. Can we continue, please? We haven't got a lot

of time before the bodies start showing up in heaps." She studied him the whole length of the drive. She wanted to get the drop on him at least once, to prove that she wasn't a complete child. So far she'd failed. "You're from West Virginia," she had suggested. It was the best she had. "There's a hint of a drawl in your voice." Plus she had read that his investigation in the Lares case had begun in Wheeling, but she left out that detail.

"North Carolina, originally," he had replied. "Make a left." Fuming a little she crept forward onto the road he'd indicated. It looked more like a nature trail. In the headlights she could see it had been paved once with cobble stones but time had turned them into jagged rocks that could pop a tire if she drove too quickly. The drive wound between two copses of whispering trees, mixed maple and ash. Leaves had fallen in great sweeps across the way, suggesting that this road lead nowhere but the ancient past. Yet perhaps not-the way was never actually blocked. Someone might have tried to make the place look forbidding but they had stopped short of actually cutting off access.

"There's no parking lot, there hasn't been for fifty years. You can just drive up onto the main lawn and stop somewhere un.o.btrusive," Arkeley told her.

Main lawn? All she could see was increasingly dense forest, the thick dark woods that had given Pennsylvania its name centuries earlier. The trees rose sixty feet high in places, in places even higher. She switched on her headlights-and then she saw the lawn.

It was not the manicured stretch of bluegra.s.s she had expected. More like a fallow field aggressively reclaimed by weeds. Yet she could make out low stone walls and even, in the distance, a dry fountain streaked green and black by algae. She stopped the car and they got out. Darkness closed around them like a fog once the car's lights flicked off. Arkeley started at once toward the fountain and she followed him, and then she saw their destination looming up in the starlight. A great Victorian pile, a gabled brick mound with wings stretching away from its central ma.s.s. On one side stood a greenhouse with almost no gla.s.s left in it at all, leaving just a skeletal iron frame festooned with vines. A wing on the far side had completely collapsed and partially burned, perhaps having been struck by lightning. A concrete bas relief above the main entrance named the place:

ARABELLA FURNACE.

STATE HOSPITAL.

"Let me guess," Caxton said. "You've brought me to an abandoned lunatic asylum." "You couldn't be less correct," he told her. The smile on his face was different this time. It almost looked wistful, as if he wished it was an asylum. They approached the fountain and he laid a hand on the broken stone. Together they looked up at the statue of a woman pouring out a great urn that rested on her hip. The urn had gone dry years before. Caxton could see rust inside its mouth where the waterworks must have been. The statue's free arm, maybe twice the size of a human appendage, stretched toward them in benediction or perhaps just welcome. Her face, whatever expression it may once have offered to visitors, was completely eroded. Acid rain, time, maybe vandalism had effaced it until the front of her head was just a rough mask of featureless stone.