Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,40

and death are more important than any emotion. If you don’t survive, then what the fuck does it matter? I was one of the boys in more ways than one. I’d teach Newman how to survive; any emotional damage from the survival was someone else’s job.

13

NEWMAN AND I, along with some of the state police and Sheriff Leduc, were almost having a fight in the living room of the Marchand mansion, aka the crime scene. The living room was the size of my first three apartments combined, with elegant furniture done in silky-looking brocade in shades of pink, cream, and pale mint green. The carpet was deep burgundy with hints of the same pale colors swirling in shapes that I think were supposed to be flowers. There were real oil paintings on the walls, and I’d have bet that all the knickknacks were real antiques. It looked more like a movie set than any living room I’d ever seen, so maybe it was a drawing room. There were chairs, two couches, and a love seat, but none of us was sitting down. I think we were all afraid to muss the furniture.

“You cannot put one of our people in the cell with a wereanimal that is already suspected of killing someone,” Captain Dave Livingston of the state cops declared loudly. He wasn’t quite yelling yet, but he was getting more forceful every time he said no.

The urge to say Captain Livingston, I presume was very strong. His parents had actually named him David Livingston, like the famous missionary and explorer, even though the last names weren’t spelled the same. The original was Livingstone, but they were pronounced the same, so he’d probably heard the joke a bajillion times. It made it easier for me to resist.

It had seemed like such a simple idea to get prints from Bobby Marchand to compare to the ones at the house, and half of it was simple. The forensic team from the state police was happy to collect evidence at the house, but we needed evidence from Bobby’s body. At minimum we needed his feet to be printed, and that meant either one of the techs went inside the cell with him, or he came out of the cell to us.

“I will not let that monster out of the cell and endanger anyone else,” Sheriff Leduc said, also not quite yelling.

“Well, you’re not endangering one of my people by sending them in with a shapeshifter,” Livingston said.

He was looming over the sheriff, not from height since he was only a couple of inches taller, but where Duke had let himself go after getting out of the military, Livingston had not. The captain was big, lean, and if his short, nearly buzzed hair hadn’t been mostly gray, I’d have thought he was at least ten years younger. Once he took his hat off and I could see the hair, I’d known to notice the extra smile lines near his steel gray eyes and the parentheses around his mouth, which suggested that every sentence he’d spoken had left its mark around his lips. His mouth was wider than it looked, because the angrier he got, the thinner his lips seemed. I was never sure how some people’s mouths did that when they were angry or sad.

I was letting the sheriff and the captain argue with each other, because neither of their viewpoints was going to help us gain more time on Bobby Marchand’s execution warrant. Until I figured out a way to get what we wanted, I was content to let the men yell at each other rather than me, because anyone who interrupted the “discussion” was going to have both of them angry with them. I really didn’t want to fight with both the sheriff and the captain until it would gain us something. Of course, Newman was newer at this than I was in every way. He still thought he could save the world if only the world would let him.

“Marshal Blake and I will be in the cell with drawn weapons,” Newman said. “If Bobby tries to hurt anyone, we will take care of it.”

Livingston turned on him, happy to have another target for his aggression. “Why haven’t you executed your warrant, Marshal Newman? If you had done your job, we wouldn’t need to be having this discussion.”

Leduc moved in beside Livingston. “I’ve already had to save Blake’s ass from that damn wereleopard once.”

“That’s not what happened,” Newman said.

“Duke already told me that