"Whose?"
"Claire - "
"It doesn't matter. We got it reversed. It's not an issue anymore."
"I delivered it. I have a right to know."
For answer, Joe dug into the pocket of his sports jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, still curling at the edges, with fragments of wax clinging to the outside. He held it out to her.
Claire unfolded it. The paper was stiff and crackly, old paper, with a faintly moldy smell to it. The handwriting - Bishop's - was spiky and hard to read, but the name was done larger and underlined.
Eve Rosser.
"That's not happening," Joe said. "I just wanted you to know that. If he tells you about it, I wanted you to understand that Eve is perfectly safe, all right? Nothing will happen to her. Claire, do you understand me?"
She'd carried an order to him to kill her best friend.
Claire couldn't think. Couldn't feel anything except a vast, echoing sense of shock. She tried to read the rest of the paper, but her eyes kept moving back to Eve's name, going over and over it.
She folded up the paper and held it clutched tightly in one hand. Breathe. She felt light-headed and a little sick.
"Why you?" she asked faintly. "Why give it to you?"
"That's Bishop's style. He picks out people least likely to do what he wants, so he can punish them when they refuse to carry out the order. Object lessons for the rest of Morganville. He knew I wouldn't kill Eve. Not a chance. This was less about his wanting to get rid of Eve than to get rid of me."
She still felt cold. Sure, Detective Hess wouldn't have done it, but what if she'd been told to take it to someone else? Monica, maybe?
Eve might be dead right now, and it would have been all her fault.
She felt the death warrant being tugged out of her fingers. When she opened her eyes, fighting back tears, Detective Hess was slipping it back into his pocket. "I just wanted you to understand what we're up against," he said. "And to understand that no matter what happens, some of us will never do what he wants."
Claire realized that she couldn't count herself in that club. She'd already done what Bishop wanted.
More than once.
God, she really didn't want to think about how far she'd wandered into that swamp, but she was definitely up to her butt in alligators.
"All right, back to business." Hess handed her a piece of paper. "These are the people we still need to find," he said. "I heard about what happened with Frank Collins. You and Shane were there?"
She really wasn't up to talking about that. "Dr. Mills is with Amelie," she said. "You can cross him off this list. She isn't going to send him out of town."
All around Morganville, as they drove, there were signs things were happening - people gathering in groups, whispering at fences, and pausing to stare hard at the passing car. No vampires in sight, but then Claire wouldn't expect there to be so close to noon. "What is this?" she asked. Hess shook his head.
"There's still a pretty strong antivampire movement in town," he said. "It got stronger these last few months. I've been trying to keep them calmed down, because if they start this now, they'll just get themselves killed. And most of them aren't looking at Amelie's side as anything but another target. We can't afford that until Bishop's gone."
"So what do we do about it?"
"Nothing. Nothing we can do right now. Bishop's the one pushing the agenda, not us. If he wants a fight tonight, he's going to get one. Maybe bigger than he wants."
The fourth address on the list was an apartment - there weren't many apartment buildings in Morganville, since most people lived in single-family houses, but there were a few. Like in any small town, the complexes varied from crappy to less crappy; there was no such thing as luxury multifamily housing.
The apartment complex they stopped at was on the crappy end of the short spectrum. It was stucco over brick, painted a sun-faded pink, with two stories of apartments built into an open square on a central . . . well, Claire guessed you could call it a courtyard, if you liked a view that included a dry swimming pool with dark scum at one end, some spiky, untrimmed bushes, and an overflowing trash can.
Joe Hess checked apartment numbers. If the run-down appearance of the place bothered him, he didn't show it. When they reached number twenty-two, he banged loudly on the door. "Police, open up!" he yelled, and pushed Claire out of the way when she tried to stand next to him. He gave her a silent stay there gesture, and listened. She couldn't hear a thing from inside.
Neither could he, apparently. He shook his head, but as they turned to go, Claire clearly heard someone inside the apartment say, "Help."
She froze, staring at Detective Hess. He'd heard it, too, and he gestured her even farther back as he pulled his gun from the holster under his jacket. "Willie Combs? You okay in there? It's Joe Hess. Answer me, Willie!"