Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,74

he saw on our faces didn’t reassure him. “That doesn’t seem right.”

“See, Duke, you don’t want to shoot someone you know either,” Newman said.

“It’s not my job to do it.”

“It’s my job to kill dangerous supernaturals, not to kill innocent ones that have been framed using the law as a weapon,” Newman said.

“Let’s call the judge and see if Newman can get an extension on the deadline,” Livingston said.

“And if I can’t?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Livingston said.

“Is the shapeshifter a close friend of yours, Newman?” Olaf asked.

“Not really,” Newman said.

Olaf looked at him, shaking his head. “Then why do you care about him?”

“Wouldn’t it bother you if you had to kill someone you believed was innocent?” Newman asked.

“No,” Olaf said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care if you believe me.”

“Newman, you have to make the call to the judge to get the ball rolling,” I said, trying to derail the conversation. It was going to go somewhere creepy with Olaf involved. I was kind of done with his creepiness for tonight.

“Have you lost your taste for killing?” Olaf asked Newman.

“I’ll kill people if I have to, but I won’t let someone use me to do their murder.”

“So, you object to them using you,” Olaf said.

“Yes. Wouldn’t you?”

Olaf took a sip of coffee and then nodded. “I would.”

“Then let’s see if we can buy ourselves enough time to figure out who’s framing Bobby,” I said.

“We aren’t a hundred percent sure that anyone is framing him,” Livingston said.

“Fine. Time to figure out if someone is framing Bobby.”

“And to avoid killing him if he’s innocent of the crime,” Newman added.

“That, too,” I said.

Newman went for his phone to call the judge who’d put his name on the warrant. I went to get the last cup of coffee out of the pot. Maybe I could persuade Leduc to make a second pot. We were going to get to see the sunrise, and no one was talking about sleep. We were going to need more coffee.

25

LEDUC MADE COFFEE, and we helped him finish off a second pot before Newman got anyone to answer a phone at any of the numbers that he had for this area. They were all still asleep an hour past dawn on a Sunday, lazy bastards, and we still hadn’t gotten the actual judge on the phone. Clerks were useful, but they couldn’t change the parameters of the warrant; only the judge who signed it could do that. In all the time I’d been hunting monsters, I’d never tried to get a judge to change a warrant, so I had no idea how it worked or even if there was a step in the legal system to cover it. Surely there was, or if not, there needed to be, but I honestly didn’t know. I wasn’t used to this much downtime when I was hunting monsters. It had given me enough time to text Edward and let him know Olaf was here. Since he hadn’t texted back or called, I had to assume he was on a plane on his way here.

Olaf came to stand next to me against the wall. I tensed up, waiting for something creepy, or at least sexist, but he asked, “Do you normally just wait like this?”

“Wait like what?”

He motioned with his coffee mug at Newman trying yet another phone call and Kaitlin trying to get the images of the two very different footprints up on the computer so they could be sent to the judge when he finally returned the call. Livingston and Duke were talking quietly together in the far corner.

“While they gather evidence and talk to lawyers, do you just wait and do nothing?”

“I don’t know.”

He frowned down at me.

“I’ve never been on a case like this. I come into town, round up the bad guys, hang ’em high, and get out of Dodge.”

His frown became a scowl. “You meant that as a metaphor of some kind, didn’t you?”

I had a minute to remember that his first language wasn’t English, though he spoke it perfectly now. The one thing that travels least well between languages is slang. I’d grown up watching old Westerns, and he probably hadn’t.

“Even I have never hung one of my victims,” he said.

I sighed. He just couldn’t help himself; he always had to push it to the next level of disturbing.

He noticed my expression and knew it wasn’t happy. “Have you hung one of yours? Vampires can’t even die from suffocation. It seems very inefficient