Witch Hunt(6)

Then there was a haunted, hungry look in her eyes. Just for a second. Nothing more than a flash of it.
“I’ll think about it,” she’d said.
Suzy had found me, dragged me back to drinking. We’d played a few more games. I noticed at some point that Fritz had left and thought that was probably my cue to leave, too. Whenever the director thinks it’s time to get home and sleep, it’s time to sleep. But Suzy had talked me into staying.
Erin brought me a drink toward the end of the night. When she’d dropped it off, she kissed me on the cheek, slipped me a note. “I’ll tell you after my shift. Maybe you can help. But not here. Your place.”
When she’d left, I checked what she had given me.
Her phone number.
Then I’d tossed back the fireball she’d given me. I’d felt hot and excited at the thought of having Erin in my apartment. Suzy had been talking to me but I’d barely even seen her lips moving, much less understood what she was saying. My head was filled with liquored haze and the buzz of knowing I’d be taking a beautiful woman home.
After that…well, I guess Erin had come home with me, and I think we might have had sex.
I knew I hadn’t helped her.
I couldn’t remember that part.
You always thought if you got in trouble working for the OPA, it was going to be when you crossed someone like Black Jack. You thought it was going to be having a curse slipped under your desk or a demon assassin crawling out of the darkest alleys of Helltown.
I’d never thought it would be like this.






 
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CHAPTER FOUR

They got the other guys out of the holding cell before they came for me. I was alone with my view of the drizzly spring day for about an hour. Just me and my thoughts and a determined sparrow shrieking. It was kind of nice. Meditative.
Then life was moving again. There were people at my door and the halls were sliding past me. More desks, lots of guards, locked doors.
They dropped in an interview room.
It was hot in there. It couldn’t have been more than sixty degrees outside, but it was ninety between those four unremarkable walls, and I was immediately sweating. Hard to say if the discomfort was meant to be a technique to loosen me up or if the LAPD just didn’t have a budget for fixing the A/C. Either way, I didn’t like it. I still wanted my phone call.
Instead, they were gonna interrogate me.
You couldn’t call them “interrogations” anymore, though, because we didn’t “interrogate” people. That was too aggressive. That assumed too much guilt. We interviewed suspects these days.
Whatever we called it—whatever the LAPD called it—I knew exactly where I was and what was about to happen to me. And I knew it wasn’t going to be fun or pretty.
Back at OPA headquarters, we had several interview rooms. One of them had a silver-reinforced door and silver chains and a silver chair, just in case we crossed paths with a werewolf and needed to “interview” them. One of them was warded against magic, nullifying any witch that might sneak a charm in with her. Another had crosses and the pendant of St. Benedict engraved into the concrete floor—that one was for the demon-possessed perps.
But this place was almost hilariously normal. One-way mirror. Table in the middle with two chairs on one side and a single chair on the other—that was for me. The door wasn’t magicked or silver or anything. I got a good look at the completely normal lock as they guided me inside. They didn’t even have wards to nullify the magic in the poultice I had consumed that morning.
Two detectives came in to talk with me. I wondered how many were on the other side of the window. I wondered if they were scared of how big I was, how messy Erin’s body had been, how little they could find about me with a background check.
“You like to drink, Mr. Hawke?” asked the first detective. Her name was Kearney.
“I’d like a water, yeah,” I said.
That wasn’t what they meant, but they got me a glass of water anyway. Tasted like it had been sitting in a plastic jug for months.
“You drank a lot last night,” Kearney went on. She was an intense woman with a square jaw and no waistline. Fists clenched on top of the table. “When we tested you this afternoon, your blood alcohol level was still above legal limits for driving.”#p#分页标题#e#
I didn’t want to talk about my drinking habits. I didn’t have drinking habits.
“I need my phone call,” I said again. Felt like I’d been saying nothing else since they’d brought me here.