Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [541]
Zerbrowski was already on his phone.
“Who are you calling?” I asked.
“Mobile Reserve. We’ll want the fire power.”
“Wait,” I said.
Zerbrowski hit the button on his phone, killed it. “Wait for what?”
“If we give them the address, they may go in tonight. We don’t want that.”
“We want to catch these bastards,” Smith said.
“Yeah, but they’re out hunting now. They won’t be home, or at least most of them won’t be. We’ll miss some of them, or all of them, and once we’ve got that many police around the place, they’ll know it. They’ll never come back to the place again, and we won’t know where to look for them.”
“We can’t withhold the address,” Roarke said, “not if we’re asked.”
“If the address leaves this room, more women are going to die. If the address leaves this room, maybe cops are going to die. His master is someone so powerful that no master vamp in this city sensed him. That means he’s really, really good. Mobile Reserve is who I want in a firefight, but they aren’t immune to vampire powers. They go in at night when he’s at his best, and they may all die.”
Everyone was looking at me, except Zerbrowski. He had already moved on and didn’t need convincing. Marconi would be cool, it was the uniforms and Smith I had to convince.
“Zerbrowski, call Mobile Reserve, get me Captain Parker.”
Zerbrowski raised an eyebrow at me. “You sure that’s a good idea?”
“No, but he knows me. And he’s the man in charge of Mobile Reserve. Get him for me.”
Zerbrowski made a face. “Your funeral.”
“Let’s hope not,” I said.
I looked down at Jonah Cooper, vampire, ex-vamp executioner. He blinked up at me. He’d have probably had something to say to me, but a broken jaw cuts down on the chit-chat.
Zerbrowski clicked his phone shut. “I’ve left a message. He’ll get back.”
I nodded. I looked down at Jonah again. I had everything he knew, all of it. I’d seen him helping murder women. I’d seen his own memory of it. I sighed.
“While we wait for the call back, help me move our prisoner outside.”
Zerbrowski gave me a look. I gave him one back. It was his turn to sigh. “Smith, take his other arm. We’re going to escort him outside.”
Smith was looking at us sort of funny, but he helped Zerbrowski lift the vampire to his feet. Cooper made small protesting noises and hissed curses under his breath. Maybe I hadn’t broken his jaw, or at least not badly.
Zerbrowski and Smith got him on his feet and started him for the door. I got my gun out and followed them. One of the uniforms said, “What are they going to do?”
“Go outside if you want to see the show,” Marconi said, “I’ve seen it.” He sounded tired.
Roarke and the other uniform, whose name I couldn’t remember, followed me. It was like a parade. I’ve got over eighty kills. Most of them actually legal. But I usually whack the bad guys when they’re dead to the world. I usually haven’t had to question them, touch them. I usually don’t know who they were in life, or if I do, I feel like I’m putting them out of their misery, or did once, when I believed vampires were truly dead. Jonah Cooper had been what I am, and he had betrayed everything he stood for. He’d sacrificed law enforcement officers that had gone in as his backup. He’d murdered innocent women for kicks. I knew all that, but I’d have liked it better if I didn’t know that his hair had nice texture, or that he’d gotten a hero’s funeral. There’s a reason that executioners through history usually only come in at the end when it’s time to kill. If he’d run for it or fought, then the other cops could have shot him, killed him for me. But he wasn’t going to run now, and no one else here had the legal authority to do what I was about to do.
We were outside in a small side area near the far parking lot. Cooper had figured out what was happening, because even with an injured jaw he was trying to talk to me. The words started