Hit List(81)

“You mean make me one of his victims,” I said.

“Yes.”

We looked at each other. “So I don’t check on him at the hospital when I talk to Karlton?”

He shook his head, took off his hat, and ran his hands through his hair. He put the hat back on and moved it until it was back at the same comfortable angle it started at. He was being Ted more than himself the last few years; maybe Edward liked hats, too, now?

“I don’t like you being at the hospital at all with Olaf there, Anita.”

“You’re not asking me to skip the talk with Karlton, are you?”

He shook his head. “I know better.”

“Because I can’t let fear of Olaf prevent me from doing my job.”

“Holding Karlton’s hand isn’t your job, Anita.”

“No, but I don’t want Micah in this city with the Harle . . . shit, them here. He’d be a hostage, or a target.”

“Agreed,” Edward said.

“Then that leaves me to do it.”

“I know you’ll be careful.”

“Like a virgin on her wedding night,” I said.

He smiled, but it left his blue eyes untouched. He reached back and unhooked his sunglasses from the back of his shirt. He slid the glasses over his eyes so I couldn’t see how cold and unhappy they were. “I don’t want to kill Olaf until after he’s helped us catch these bastards.”

It was perfectly him to say he didn’t want to kill him until after, not that he didn’t want to kill Olaf, but just not now, not before the big man had been useful on the case.

“You do your bleeding-heart routine for Karlton. I’ll try to send Newman with you, and you try to leave both of them at the hospital.”

“He wasn’t useless in the woods, Edward.”

“No, but he’s new, fresh out of training, which means he won’t bend the rules like we do.”

“No one bends the rules like we do,” I said.

“Not true, a lot of the old-time marshals do it.”

I thought about it and nodded. “Fair enough.”

“If you count Bernardo and Olaf with us, then no one is as ruthless about bending the rules than we are,” he said.

I grinned. “I’ll include them.”

He smiled again. I wondered if his eyes were smiling behind the dark glasses. “I’ll go try to track the big, bad vampires while you waste time at the hospital.” He started walking away from me.

“Edward,” I said.

He spoke without turning around. “Sorry, I’m sorry, but until I know what Olaf’s intentions are toward you, Anita, I don’t like you away from me.”

I touched his arm, made him look at me. “Are you really more frightened by the idea of Olaf kidnapping me than the . . . Those Who Shan’t Be Named?”

He took in a lot of air, let it out slow, and then nodded.

“They’ll try to let the Wicked Bitch of the World possess my body, Edward. I’ll be worse than dead.”

“But they won’t torture you first, and I trust you to be strong enough psychically that you’ll still be in there, which means we might be able to get you back. If Olaf takes you, Anita, there won’t be anything left to save. You have no idea what he does to his victims.”

“And you do?” I asked.

He nodded. He looked pale through his summer tan.

“You’ve seen it in person?”

He nodded, again. “We’d finished a job, and we were all celebrating. We’d gone to a brothel, and I didn’t know Olaf’s rule that he waits until after a job to indulge.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Another customer was drunk and went in the wrong room, and started screaming. The sound stopped, abruptly. All of us who weren’t drunk came out of our rooms, armed; you just knew the sound of screams being cut off like that.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“The man who had screamed was dead in the doorway. The girl was tied to the bed.”

“She was dead?” I asked.

“No.” He said it softly.

I gave him wide eyes.

“We thought she was dead, but she wasn’t. I wished she were dead when we found them. I would have killed him, but he was standing there pointing a gun at me, at all of us. He bargained with us.”

“Bargained how?”

“We could all die, or we could we all live. We lived.”

“Why would you ever work with him again after that?” I asked.

“There aren’t that many people as good as I am, Anita. He’s one of them. Besides, part of the bargain was that he’d never indulge himself again, if he was working with me.”

“So you made a deal to dance with the devil to keep him from killing more women?”