Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [323]
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 out stiff, but got faster as he talked. Fear will override pain. “You’re Jean-Claude’s human servant. How is what I’m doing any different from that?”
“I haven’t killed innocent civilians because my master doesn’t like strippers.”
“I killed more people as a hunter than I’ve killed as a vampire,” he said. He tried to turn around and look at me, but apparently that hurt too much.
We were on a plot of grass, with flowers to one side and the parking lot to the other. “Good enough,” I said.
Zerbrowski turned, and Smith moved with him. They turned the vamp around so I could see his face. “I kill because the law says I can, not because I want to,” I said.
“Liar.”
“Knees,” I said.
He fought them, and I didn’t blame him. I shot him in the leg, and he collapsed to the ground. I hadn’t expected to have to shoot him so soon, or for wounding. The echo of the gun up my arm thrilled through my body, like the gun was where all the adrenaline