Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,79

so pale and so still. I held my breath as if that would help Newman find a pulse. Bobby’s face was a bloody mess, and I’d done that to him. Had I done more? Had he died while we tried to call the judge, slowly bleeding to death inside his head? Or maybe I’d broken his spine badly enough that the trauma had acted like a decapitation. Yeah, Olaf said Bobby’s heart was still beating, but I couldn’t hear it. In all the years I’d been hunting, fighting, and dating people with lycanthropy, I’d never heard of one of them dying from a spinal injury or a concussion. I thought you had to see brains on the outside of the skull for the brain to be injured enough to kill. It was going to be a hell of a time to be wrong.

“Pulse seems slow, but it’s there.”

I let out the breath I’d been holding, but the tightness in my chest wasn’t fooled. It knew that a pulse just meant Bobby wasn’t dead yet.

“I told you he was not dead,” Olaf said from the door, where the sheriff was still trying to get him to move so he could lock the door again.

“If that monster comes to and rushes the door, he could kill us all before we get him,” Leduc said.

“No,” Olaf said.

“You hunt these things. You know how fast they can be,” Leduc said.

Newman was opening one of Bobby’s eyes. I prayed that the pupils weren’t uneven and fixed, because if either of those things was true, then I’d killed him. It was just going to take him longer than normal to die.

“Anita would slow him down until I could join the fight. He would never reach you and the others,” Olaf said.

“You can’t know that.”

“Blake beat him without help last time, Duke. I think we’re safe to leave the cell open,” Livingston said.

“Pupils are even and reacting to light,” Newman said.

The tightness in my chest loosened. “Good,” I managed to say, and I sounded breathless, as if I still couldn’t get enough air. Killing someone on purpose was one thing; doing it by accident was something else. It’s funny how you don’t know what will bother you until it does.

Newman looked up at me. “I still want to call an ambulance.”

“If we can get some paramedics that are willing to look at him, I’m good with that,” I said.

“They have to do their job if we call them,” Newman said.

I shook my head. “Not if it will endanger them. Legally they can refuse.”

“They’d just let him die because they’re afraid?” he asked, sounding outraged. He suddenly seemed years younger than I knew he was, or maybe I just felt years more cynical.

“If they think he’ll kill them, yeah,” I said.

“He’s unconscious,” Newman said.

“Even if they look at him here, they won’t transport him.”

“They might,” he said, and again I felt so much older than he was, not in years, but in experience. That will age you faster than any number of birthdays.

“She’s right, Newman,” Livingston said.

Newman glanced back at him, a hand protectively on Bobby’s shoulder. “We could take him to the hospital ourselves.”

“You’d have to take him all the way to the county hospital. It’s the closest one with a trauma unit that could hold him,” Duke said.

“Fine. We’ll do that,” Newman said. “Help me move him, Blake.”

I thought about being in Newman’s car when Bobby came to and how close the fight had been in the cell. I realized I didn’t want to be in the car with him if he started to shift. “On one condition.”

Newman gave me outraged eyes. “Conditions? You nearly beat him to death, and you want to give conditions for saving his life?”

“Maybe condition was the wrong word, but I want you to understand one thing before we start for the hospital. If he starts to shift in the car like he did in the cell, I’m going to shoot him in the head, probably multiple times.”

“He’d never survive that.”

“That would be the idea.”

“You think he’s a murdering monster now?”

“No, but I think he would have killed me if I hadn’t stopped him. I’m glad I didn’t kill him by accident, defending myself. I hope we prove that he’s innocent and find out who really killed Ray Marchand, and if Bobby just wakes up in the car like normal, then we’ll take him to the hospital. But I will have a weapon drawn and aimed at him in the car.