13 Bullets

A stretcher rolled past Caxton's face, not three inches away. It was being pushed at high speed up the main ramp to the Emergency Room entrance but to her it seemed to float unattended through boundless space, taking its time. The body on the stretcher was just a pile of blood-stained rags. She couldn't even see a face. But then the body reached out a hand to her. The skin was scorched and falling away in places. Thick clotted blood was smeared across the fingers. She couldn't even tell if it was a male or female hand.



Still. She reached out, touched it. The fingers curled around hers but then the hand was ripped away from her, the stretcher flying up the ramp. Somebody shouted for plasma and she squinted and tried to clear her head. She'd been sitting in the hallway for hours and hours with no stimulation except the constant parade of mutilated bodies that flew by. She shouldn't have been in the hallway at all-there was a waiting room for people like her, complete with six TV



sets and a couple hundred pounds of straight women's magazines-but being a cop had its privileges. Most of the EMTs and nurses who passed by didn't even give her a second glance, they assumed she was just guarding the entrance. In fact it just let her be a couple hundred feet closer to Deanna. They wouldn't let her into the operating room or the recovery room. The hallway was as close as she was going to get.



That hand. It had been like something out of a dream but she knew it was real. It had touched her. She looked down and saw real blood on her fingers. Her hand smelled like gasoline and shit, a smell she knew all too well. The smell of a really bad car accident. The hand had been real and warm and alive.



Unlike the half-dead she had tortured and executed on her bedroom floor. Unlike the vampires who were coming to destroy her life.



Caxton sighed and crossed her arms and waited. She had tried reading a magazine but she was too distracted. Images and words jumped into her head unbidden. Not even things related to the investigation, not even memories of Deanna, just weird little scraps of thought. She kept wondering if the milk was sitting out on the kitchen counter, if it was going to go bad. The kitchen had to be as cold as the outside air since the window was completely gone. Pretty much anybody could climb in through the hole where the window had been-should she call someone, have them check the house, have them put cardboard, at least, over the window? If she did that should she ask them to go inside and put the milk back in the fridge?



She couldn't shut her mind down. It didn't work that way. Only sleep could turn off the brain and she was a long way from sleep. The banal thoughts, the endless, cycling inanities had their purpose, as excruciating as they were. They kept her from thinking the big thoughts, the real thoughts. The things that scared her. Thoughts like, the fact that vampires wanted her dead. So badly they would send their minions to kill everyone in her house. Everyone. The half-deads would have killed her dogs, probably, just to be thorough about it.



Thoughts like, Arkeley had turned his back on her. She couldn't even count on him to defend her against the dark things that wanted her life. He wasn't done with her, he had some purpose for her, but she wasn't going to be an active part of his investigation.



Thoughts like, is there really any difference between someone being hypnotized into breaking a window and impaling themselves on broken glass... and someone whose brain chemistry stops working one day, and they hang themselves in their bedroom? Her mother had had a good job and plenty of money. She had a perfectly good daughter to live for, a nice house, partners for bridge, church socials, potluck dinners. Holidays. Family. Vacations. Retirement. Her suicide had been a complete mystery to everyone who knew her. It had been a mistake, really, it had to have been. Deanna had nothing to keep her living. No job, family who loathed her for what she was. A partner who cared and who tried but just didn't have the time to be there for her. No future. Art that nobody understood.



Was it still suicide, if you had an excuse? If you were driven to it?



"Officer," someone said, nearby. It was like the ghost that had called her in Urie Polder's barn, a directionless, bodiless voice. "Officer," the voice said again. Caxton frowned and turned her head. A nurse stood there in blood-stained scrubs, a middle-aged woman with white hair up in a bun on top of her head. She wore heavy gloves, the kind you wear when you wash dishes. "Officer, she's awake," the nurse said.



Caxton followed her through halls, around corners, up stairs. She could not have found her way back if she was called upon to do so. They came to a room, a semi-private room with two beds. One held a morbidly obese woman whose entire lower body and thighs were wrapped up in plaster. A surgical gown had been draped over her breasts. The other bed held something that had been stitched together out of spare parts.



Jesus, Caxton realized, it was Deanna. "You look like Frankenstein's monster,"



Caxton said.



Deanna tried to smile but the stitches in her jaw line kept her from moving her mouth too much. "Pumpkin... you left me," she mumbled. Caxton took off her hat and leaned down to kiss Deanna's puffy lips. The obese woman in the other bed let out a half-gasp, half-cluck of disdain but Caxton had learned to ignore that sound a long time before. She stood back up and took a better look at Deanna. The view didn't improve the second time around. Glinting staples held the side of Deanna's face together. The sharp ends of stitches, black and coarse like horsehair, stuck up out of the flesh of her chest and shoulders while bandages wrapped her hands until she looked like she was wearing bloody mittens. "You left me all alone," Deanna said.



"Don't talk, Dee. Just rest." Caxton reached down and gently brushed the staples in Deanna's face. They were real, solid, and the flesh underneath was red and inflamed.



A doctor came into the room. Caxton didn't even look at him. She held Deanna's eyes with her own and refused to let go.



"I'd like to bring in someone to talk with her. I know you probably don't want to hear that but I'm not sure you have the right to stop me, either-do you have a civil union?"



They didn't. They'd never bothered, since it wouldn't be legally recognized anyway. It didn't matter.



"I don't object," Caxton said. She started to reach for Deanna's hands but they were so badly damaged she didn't want to touch them. She held onto the railing on the side of the bed instead.



Deanna started to protest but Caxton just moved her chin back and forth a little and said, "Shh, it's just to talk."



"She's pretty lucky, all things considered. She could easily have died. She lost a lot of blood and some of the fragments of glass went pretty deep. We'll wait and see if there's any nerve damage to her hands. The cut in her face is going to require reconstructive surgery and even then there will be scarring."



Caxton held onto the railing as if she would be swept away on a dark sea if she lost her grip. It didn't matter, she told herself. Deanna was going to live. At least, she would live until the next time someone tried to kill her. Maybe the next time Reyes would come for her himself. "I'm going to call in for a guard to stand watch outside this room, Doctor. This was an attempted murder." The words sounded ridiculous coming out of her mouth, like something she'd made up. It was real, though, she needed to convince herself it was real. "I'll stay with her until the first shift arrives."



"Very well." The doctor moved to check on the obese woman in the next bed over. "It's almost two o'clock now but I'll call down to the desk and have them set something up."



"Two o'clock?" Caxton asked, surprised. She glanced down at her watch and saw he was correct. "Shit. Dee, honey," she said, "I have to go."



"Whuh?" Deanna asked.



"There's some place I have to be." It was something she'd figured out in those long hours in the hallway. It was her next move.