Лорел Гамильтон - Circus of the Damned

Sounded good to me.

Dolph went off yelling orders. The men scrambled to obey. I slid into Dolph's car and called Bert.

He answered on the first ring; not a good sign. "This better be you, Anita."

"And if it's not?" I said.

"Where the hell are you?"

"Murder scene with a fresh body," I said.

That stopped him for a second. "You're missing your first appointment."

"Yeah."

"But I'm not going to yell."

"You're being reasonable," I said. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing except that the newest member of Animators, Inc., is taking your first two appointments. His name is Lawrence Kirkland. Just meet him at the third appointment, and you can take the last three appointments and show him the ropes."

"You hired someone? How'd you find someone so fast? Animators are pretty rare. Especially one who could do two zombies in one night."

"It's my job to find talent."

Dolph slid into the car, and I slid into the passenger seat.

"Tell your boss you've got to go."

"I've got to go, Bert."

"Wait, you have an emergency vampire staking at St. Louis City Hospital."

My stomach clenched up. "What name?"

He paused, reading the name, "Calvin Rupert."

"Shit."

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"When did the call come in?"

"Around three this afternoon, why?"

"Shit, shit, shit."

"What's wrong, Anita?" Bert asked.

"Why was it marked urgent?" Zerbrowski slipped into the back of the unmarked car. Dolph put the car in gear and hit the sirens and lights. A marked car fell into line behind us, lights strobing into the dark. Lights and sirens, wowee.

"Rupert had one of those dying wills," Bert said. "If he even had one vampire bite, he wanted to be staked."

That was consistent with someone who was a member of HAV. Hell, I had it in my will. "Do we have a court order of execution?"

"You only need that after the guy rises as a vampire. We've got permission from the next of kin; just go stake him."

I grabbed the dashboard as we bounced over the narrow road. Gravel pinged against the underside of the car. I cradled the phone receiver between shoulder and chin and slipped into a seat belt.

"I'm on my way to the morgue now," I said.

"I sent John ahead when I couldn't get you," Bert said.

"How long ago?"

"I called him after you didn't answer your beeper."

"Call him back, tell him not to go."

There must have been something in my voice, because he said, "What's wrong, Anita?"

"We can't get any answer at the morgue, Bert."

"So?"

"The vampire may have already risen and killed everybody, and John's walking right into it."

"I'll call him," Bert said. The connection broke, and I shoved the receiver down as we spilled out onto New Highway 21.

"We can kill the vampire when we get there," I said.

"That's murder," Dolph said.

I shook my head. "Not if Calvin Rupert had a dying will."

"Did he?"

"Yeah."

Zerbrowski slammed his fist into the back of the seat. "Then we'll pop the son of a bitch."

"Yeah," I said.

Dolph just nodded.

Zerbrowski was grinning. He had a shotgun in his hands.

"Does that thing have silver shot in it?" I asked.

Zerbrowski glanced at the gun. "No."

"Please, tell me I'm not the only one in this car with silver bullets."

Zerbrowski grinned. Dolph said, "Silver's more expensive than gold. City doesn't have that kind of money."

I knew that, but I was hoping I was wrong. "What do you do when you're up against vampires and lycanthropes?"

Zerbrowski leaned over the back seat. "Same thing we do when we're up against a gang with Uzi pistols."

"Which is?" I said.

"Be outgunned," he said. He didn't look happy about it. I wasn't too happy about it, either. I was hoping that the morgue attendants had just run, gotten out, but I wasn't counting on it.

My vampire kit included a sawed-off shotgun with silver shot, stakes, mallet, and enough crosses and holy water to drown a vampire. Unfortunately, my vampire kit was sitting in my bedroom closet. I used to carry it in the trunk, minus the sawed-off shotgun, which has always been illegal. If I was caught carrying the vampire kit without a court order of execution on me, it was an automatic jail term. The new law had kicked in only weeks before. It was to keep certain overzealous executioners from killing someone and saying, "Gee, sorry." I, by the way, am not one of the overzealous. Honest.

Dolph had cut the sirens about a mile from the hospital. We cruised into the parking lot dark and quiet. The marked car behind us had followed our lead. There was already one marked car waiting for us. The two officers were crouched beside the car, guns in hand.

We all spilled out of the dark cars, guns out. I felt like I'd been shanghaied into a Clint Eastwood movie. I couldn't see John Burke's car. Which meant John checked his beeper more than I did. If the vampire was safely behind metal walls, I promised to answer all beeper messages immediately. Please, just don't let me have cost lives. Amen.

One of the uniforms who had been waiting for us duck-walked to Dolph and said, "Nothing's moved since we got here, Sergeant."

Dolph nodded. "Good. Special forces will be here when they can get to it. We're on the list."

"What do you mean, we're on the list?" I asked.

Dolph looked at me. "Special forces has the silver bullets, and they'll get here as soon as they can."

"We're going to wait for them?" I said.

"No."

"Sergeant, we are supposed to wait for special forces when going into a preternatural situation," the uniform said.

"Not if you're the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team," he said.

"You should have silver bullets," I said.

"I've got a requisition in," Dolph said.

"A requisition, that's real helpful."

"You're a civvie. You get to wait outside. So don't bitch," he said.

"I'm also the legal vampire executioner for the State of Missouri. If I'd answered my beeper instead of ignoring it to irritate Bert, the vampire would be staked already, and we wouldn't be doing this. You can't leave me out of it. It's more my job than it is yours."

Dolph stared at me for a minute or two, then nodded very slowly.

"You should have kept your mouth shut," Zerbrowski said. "And you'd get to wait in the car."

"I don't want to wait in the car."

He just looked at me. "I do."

Dolph started walking towards the doors. Zerbrowski followed. I brought up the rear. I was the police's preternatural expert. If things went badly tonight, I'd earn my retainer.

All vampire victims were brought to the basement of the old St. Louis City Hospital, even those who die in a different county. There just aren't that many morgues equipped to handle freshly risen vampires. They've got a special vault room with a steel reinforced everything and crosses laid on the outside of the door. There's even a feeding tank to take the edge off that first blood lust. Rats, rabbits, guinea pigs. Just a snack to calm the newly risen.

Under normal circumstances the man's body would have been in the vampire room, and there would have been no problem, but I had promised them that he was safe. I was their expert, the one they called to stake the dead. If I said a body was safe, they believed me. And I'd been wrong. God help me, I'd been wrong.

St. Louis City Hospital sat like a stubby brick giant in the middle of a combat zone. Walk a few blocks south and you could see Tony Award-winning musicals straight from Broadway. But here we could have been on the dark side of the moon. If the moon had slums.

Broken windows decorated the ground like shattered teeth.

The hospital, like a lot of inner-city hospitals, had lost money, so they had closed it down. But the morgue stayed open because they couldn't afford to move the vampire room.