“Of course I didn’t,” she whispered. “The union must have been ten seconds behind you. They recovered them first.”
“So you don’t know if executing people is union procedure or if they’d been hired to kill us?”
“Executing people?” Suzy’s eyes went wide and round. Her fists clutched my lapels. “For fuck’s sake, Cèsar, what the fuck? Who would have hired Eduardo and Joey as assassins anyway? They’re dumbasses!” She shook her head. “No. They’re good. They wouldn’t—it couldn’t have been bribes or something. They wouldn’t do that.”
Either Suzy didn’t know her friends as well as I now did or it really was union procedure to shoot people in the head the second they became nuisances. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
She pressed her face to my chest, wrapped her arms around me for a tight squeeze, and then pulled back to punch me in the stomach. Damn, Suzy was a violent hugger. “Fuck, Cèsar. My texts are monitored. You stole a fucking union SUV. You—” She cut off. She had finally noticed that I wasn’t alone. “Who’s that?”
Isobel was coming up the sidewalk. I opened my mouth to respond.
“You brought the necrocognitive to my house?” Suzy interrupted. “What the flying fuck is wrong with you, Cèsar?”
Leaning my shoulder against her doorway to block her view, I shrugged. “Bet if you asked Pops, he’d tell you he dropped me a few times as a kid. Look, Suzy, like I was saying, we need your help.”
“We?”
Did she need to shout everything at me? “We need to find Erin Karwell’s remains so we can talk to her and clear my name.”
“We?”
Okay, she’d already said that.
Isobel touched my back. “Hey,” she said. “Is everything okay? You guys are…loud.”
Suzy’s expression shuttered. She looked between me and Isobel and the SUV with a weird look, brow furrowed, lips frowning. “I told you to get on a bus, Cèsar. I told you to run. I’m not going to help you serve your balls to the union on a platter. We’re done with this bullshit.”
And then she slammed the door in my face.
“That was helpful,” Isobel said brightly.
No fucking kidding.
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
We got stuck in traffic after leaving Suzy’s. I didn’t know where we were going, so it didn’t really matter. I just drove without stopping, creeping down The Five slowly enough that I might as well have walked it.
The union was probably tracking us now. We’d have to ditch the car soon—find another one. Where and how, I didn’t know. I was exhausted and annoyed and my ability to plan had been left behind in the desert. I’d expected Suzy to have the answers—and access to Erin’s body. Without either of those, I had no idea what to do next.
“Do you know where the OPA takes victims for autopsy?” Isobel asked.
Guess my aimlessness was obvious. “No,” I admitted. “I never deal with murder. I specialize in picking up witches who’ve been getting into trouble, but generally not the homicidal type.”
“More like the ‘talking to the dead’ type?” she asked with a teasing smile.
“If you’re asking if you’re one of my cases, yes. You are.” I huffed out a breath. “Were.” But she had the gears in my skull turning. Where did we take the dead? I’d never seen body bags hauled into my office building, but I had seen ambulances around. They probably went somewhere on the OPA campus.
The idea of breaking into one of our buildings was laughably bad. We had hundreds of magical and physical alarms—I’d have gotten arrested before I made it past the Starbucks between the Magical Violations and Infernal Relations buildings.
But maybe if someone could bring Erin’s body out…
“How much body do you need?” I asked. “The whole thing, or would an arm or a finger work?”
Isobel pulled a face. “I don’t know. I suppose I could do it with any part of the body.”
Any part?
I cast my mind back to the blood in my bathroom. It might not have been cleaned up yet. And Erin had to have left some tissue behind, too.
We were almost past the exit closest to my apartment. I changed lanes without signaling, slicing through the narrow space between cars. Horns blared at me.
Isobel grabbed the leather arm of her chair. “What are you doing?”