Hit List - Laurell K. Hamilton [59]
Lorenzo’s partner, Detective Jane Stavros, was helping me guard the two men, both the unconscious one and the one who had his head down tending the wounded one.
The police Windbreaker swam on Detective Stavros’s thin frame. The pantsuit that was showing was cheap, black, and too large for her. She was at least five-ten in her sensible and ugly black lace-up shoes. If she’d been dressed better I might have thought she was a professional model, but she had dieted too much for her bone structure, so she looked starved, and she’d dieted away all her curves so she was built like a man. Her straight brunette hair was back in a loose ponytail. Some women on the job try to dress like the men, to fit in, to pretend that they aren’t women. I hadn’t seen any woman who had been on the job long enough to get a detective’s shield carry it to this extreme. Maybe she was a newly minted detective; sometimes that can throw you back to old issues. But it wasn’t just the men’s clothing; it was that she was sloppy, as if she’d rolled out of bed and put on someone else’s clothes by mistake. Nothing fit her right, as if she were wearing someone else’s skin.
But she held her gun like she knew what she was doing, and she watched the darkness and her partner’s back. She hadn’t done anything to make me think less of her except buy into the whole guy thing a little too much, and who was I to bitch about that? But there was almost a starved feeling to her, as if she’d never had enough. Enough food, enough love, enough anything worth having. An air of jaded tiredness and wariness hung over her like a dark cloud. It was an interesting mix of that ten-year blasé that cops get, and the nervousness that usually goes away by then, as if she’d seen it all, but instead of being bored it had spooked her.
Edward had gone ahead with the line, because we wanted one of us with the group; besides, my right arm wasn’t very happy with me. My right arm, my main shooting arm, was twitching so badly from the overly rapid healing that I couldn’t have used it to shoot anything. Moments like these were why I practiced everything left-handed. I wasn’t as good on the left as I was on the right, but I was still better than average, and it would have to do. I’d forgotten how much it hurt to have the muscles fighting against each other, as if my arm were at war with itself. A little sex would have kept it from happening, but I’d been stubborn, and the red tiger Harlequin had interfered, but I should never have left off feeding for days. It was stupid, but until Seattle there hadn’t been anyone in town for me to feed on. Okay, no one I was willing to feed on. I was paying for my rule of no strangers now. My arm was twitching so badly it could no longer help me hold the MP5 in place for shooting.
“What’s wrong with your arm?” she asked.
“I’m healing faster than the muscles can keep up.”
She gave me a disbelieving glance. There was enough predawn light for me to see her expression now.
Lorenzo said, “You’re hurt more than you let on, Blake.”
I shrugged, and just concentrated on breathing through the pain of my arm being at war with itself.
It was Raborn who tramped back through the trees, “They’re not here, Blake.”
“Probably not,” I said.
He put his gun over one shoulder so the barrel was pointed up at the sky. “That kind of twitching means you’ve damaged nerves. You need to go to the hospital when they take Newman.”
“You bully Newman into passing out, but me you’ll send to the hospital? Why, so you can say, ‘See, she’s just a wimpy girl’?”
I watched Raborn