Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,7

kill me, and I was fine, but shooting chained-up fish in a jail cell, that would be a new one even for me. I did not want to speak with the prisoner, not if I was going to have to shoot him later, but when Newman went through the door in the back wall, I followed him. It took a lot more courage than I’d have admitted out loud. There was no win here for me, or for Newman. Hell, there was no win for anyone.

2

THERE WERE TWO cells, with a narrow hallway leading to a closed door at the end. A deputy sat in a chair by the wall with a shotgun across her lap. She stood as we entered, the shotgun held loose in one hand, the barrel pointed safely at the concrete floor. All the skin that showed around the uniform was a deep brown. I thought she might be Mexican like my mother, or at least some flavor of Hispanic, but a second look showed that the nice dark skin tone didn’t come from south of the border but somewhere more east.

Her hair was as black as mine, but straight and tied back in a neat ponytail. My curls never went back into a ponytail that neatly, which is why my fiancé had helped me French-braid it before I got on the plane. Sheriff Leduc introduced her as his deputy, Frances (call her Frankie) Anthony.

We all shook hands as if there wasn’t another person in the room—well, in the cell. You don’t have to have a badge long before you start to think differently about prisoners. It’s partially self-preservation, especially for marshals in the preternatural branch like Newman and me. It’s harder to kill someone if you think of them as people just like you and me. Everyone but me knew this prisoner, and yet they still introduced me to the deputy first as if Bobby Marchand weren’t within hearing distance. I wondered if they even knew they’d done it.

Newman turned to the cell without introducing me to the man inside it. “How are you doing, Bobby?”

Bobby Marchand blinked at us with blue eyes so large that they dominated his face to the point they were all you saw at first, like he was an anime character. Of course, it might have been the mask of dried blood surrounding his baby blues that made them so startling. The contrast must have been even more extreme when the blood had been fresh and red. Now it was a tired sort of brick red heading toward brown; most people would have thought it was dried mud. They’d never have guessed it was blood until they saw what happened in a shower. Water would bring it back to life, and suddenly the mud would look like something far more liquid than dirt. Bobby’s short blond hair had one spot of drying blood in it; the rest was disheveled but clean. He had a gray blanket wrapped around himself, so most of him was covered. The hint of chest that showed had blood drying on it, but the shoulders and arms that were holding the blanket in place were clean; his hands were not. There was even blood dried on the cuff around his right wrist. The chain from it went to the metal frame of the bed beside him. The bed was chained to the concrete floor, and there was a second chain that trailed underneath the blanket toward the leg of the bed, so he was shackled on at least one ankle, too. They looked like ordinary restraints, not the new stuff specifically designed for supernatural prisoners with their supernatural strength, which meant that if Bobby wanted to break his chains, he could, even in human form. Even the bars wouldn’t hold if he really wanted out, but it would take longer—long enough for the officer on guard duty to shoot him and hope they could kill him before he could finish shifting into his even stronger other half. That they had the deputy on watch outside the cell with a shotgun meant they understood some of it, and they probably didn’t have the budget for the new special restraints. Even some major cities couldn’t afford more than a couple of full sets.

Bobby fidgeted, clutching his blanket tighter. He’d tried to clean his hands by wiping them on the blanket in a few places, but the blood had embedded around his nails and into the pores of his