Skin Trade(112)

It took me a few seconds to draw myself back from that silent place. Almost everyone else in the circle of guns had let go of their tension by the time I shook it off and dropped my own shoulders.

I found Olaf staring at me when I finally looked around. “What?” I asked, and I didn’t try to keep the hostility out of my voice.

Those cave-dark eyes gave me a look that held too much weight, and there was nothing sexual about it. I’d thought his attempts at dating me had been creepy enough, but there was something about this look that bothered me almost as much, even though I couldn’t have told you what the look meant.

“You reacted like Ed… Ted and me.”

“What, am I invisible?” Bernardo asked.

I don’t know what I would have said to Olaf’s comment, since I didn’t understand it, but Sergeant Hooper was at our side, and there were other things to talk about. Thank God.

“I guess we won’t be finding out the location of the vampire’s lair from this one,” he said.

We all stood in the breath-stealing heat and too-bright sunshine and looked down at the body. “I guess not,” I said.

I heard someone yell my name. “Blake, what the fuck are you doing here?” It was Shaw striding toward me through the crowd. Great.

“Did you find the missing officers?” I asked.

“Dead,” Edward said. He wasn’t looking at the body, but outward. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular. It was as if he were scanning the horizon for more trouble. It made me look where he was looking, but all I saw was a thin line of small houses and desert beyond, stretching out and out to brown mountains that seemed just as dry and lifeless as everything else outside the city limits. Desert is desert unless you add water. I tried to picture it with the rains and the flowers of the cacti like rainbows scattered across all that brown, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see the color that might have been, only the desolation that was, and that was the cop in me. You don’t look for what might be in a situation; you take the truth of it and deal. Pretty flowers could wait for the rain, and us catching Vittorio.

I felt Shaw’s anger almost like something touchable. It made me turn away from a hand that I hadn’t even seen yet. He had reached for me, totally inappropriate, but I’d moved just out of reach without ever having seen his hand.

My moving like that, like magic, put my pulse into my throat, so when I spoke it sounded hoarse and not like me. “No touching.”

“Everyone else but me, I guess,” and he said it with as much nasty inflection as he could muster.

“Wow,” Bernardo said, “what is your problem with Marshal Blake, or do you just not like girls? That the real reason the wife left?” He lowered his sunglasses enough to give me a wink as he faced Shaw. He’d done it on purpose to get Shaw away from me. If I hadn’t thought he’d take it totally wrong, I would have hugged him.

Edward started moving away from Shaw’s one-sided yelling match with Bernardo. Olaf trailed us like an oversized shadow. Hooper caught up to Edward and me. None of us said a word. It was like we all knew where we were going and what we’d find. I guess the three of them did.

The first body was SWAT, still in gear. He still had his helmet on, so the body was almost anonymous except for general height. On television they take the headgear off so you can see the pretty actors and watch them act, but in real life most of the men are covered pretty much head to toe. It meant that I couldn’t see the wounds that were making the spreading pool of blood underneath him. It’s supposed to be safer covered head to foot in gear. The man at our feet probably didn’t think so anymore. Of course, he wasn’t really thinking anything anymore. Dead is dead.

The moment I thought it, I wished I hadn’t, because I felt it. The soul, the essence, whatever you want to call it, hovering. I didn’t look up. I didn’t want to try to see the invisible, because even to me there’d be nothing to see. I knew it was floating there. I could probably have traced its outline in the air, but there was nothing to truly see. Souls don’t look like anything to me. Ghosts, those I can see sometimes, but not souls. Most of the time I didn’t see the souls at the crime scene. I’d gotten better at shielding because souls aren’t helpful. They just hang around for three days, or less, and then they go on. I don’t know why some souls hang around longer than others. Most of the time really violent deaths send the soul packing quicker, as if they don’t want to wait around for more trauma. Oddly, you will get more ghosts out of violent deaths. Fewer souls, more ghosts; I’d always thought that was interesting, but it did me no damn good as I stood there staring down at our fallen operator. His soul was watching us. It might even follow his body to the morgue before it moved on. I did not share this information with Hooper. He didn’t need or, honestly, want to know.