Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,95

into words—“but if you don’t train and train hard, you won’t make it in this job.”

“Do you mean you’ll fail when you get retested?” Kaitlin asked.

“No, I mean if you can’t run, fight, just have the stamina to make it through a hunt, you’ll get hurt or worse.”

“It’s not just that, Anita,” Olaf said. “The new executioners lack mentorship. They have only classroom experience with the monsters and no one to show them how to stay alive in the field.”

“They are sending the newest marshals out with older marshals now,” Newman said.

“They haven’t asked me to babysit anyone, so who are they asking?” I said.

“They contacted me,” Newman said.

“You’ve been doing this barely two years.”

“I know. That’s why I told them that I didn’t feel I had the experience to help anyone newer than myself. I told them that I’d found you, Forrester, Jeffries, and Spotted-Horse to be the most help to me. They didn’t like me crediting working with all of you as a reason I was better than most of the marshals that joined at the same time I did.”

“Why don’t they send out the Four Horsemen with the new recruits?” Livingston asked.

“They do not trust us,” Olaf said.

I nodded and said, “Yeah, what he said.”

“Don’t trust you how?” Kaitlin asked.

“They think we will corrupt the recruits,” Olaf said.

I glanced up at him. “Not the word I’d have chosen, but yeah, that’s sort of it. They think we’ll train the new marshals to be as independent and lone wolf as we are.”

“Will you?” Livingston asked.

“Probably. Almost all of us that were grandfathered in were freelance operatives that were only marginally with the police. I was a consultant with the police, but a lot of the other marshals were bounty hunters before they got badges. Those of us that passed fitness training and the firearms test were grandfathered in, but that didn’t make us police officers. We don’t have the training, and most of us don’t even have a police background.”

“What background do you have?”

“Military,” Olaf said.

“Magic,” I said, “or technically psychic gifts that made us good with the undead or shapeshifters or both.”

“So none of the people grandfathered in was a cop first?” Livingston asked.

“Not to my knowledge.”

“No,” Olaf said.

“Surely some police were hunting vampires before the laws changed and made them legal citizens,” Livingston said.

“They were some of the first, actually,” I said.

“So why weren’t they grandfathered in?” Kaitlin asked.

“One, cops weren’t allowed to be bounty hunters. Two, they were dead.”

“So you’re saying that you’re better at this job than regular police,” Livingston said.

“Yes,” Olaf and I said together.

“That’s just insulting all your brothers and sisters in blue,” Livingston said.

“I’m not insulting them. I’m stating that police are trained to save lives. Most officers can do their twenty years without ever having to shoot anyone. I know every shooting makes the news now, but if you do the math between how many police are in this country and how many people die by gun violence, it’s mostly civilian-on-civilian crime. Police are trained to keep the peace. You need to think very differently to do our job.”

“You were a cop before you became a marshal, right, Newman?” Livingston asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re good at the job.”

Newman shook his head. “My first hunt in the field was with the Four Horsemen. I got to see how the job is supposed to be done, not what our bosses want the job to be.”

“What do they want it to be?” Livingston asked.

“They want cops that kill on command like the dog half of a canine team attacks, but the rest of the time, we’re supposed to be good dogs, man’s best friend, until they tell us to kill again.” His face as he talked got more and more unhappy.

“Wow,” Kaitlin said, “that’s grim.”

“It feels grim,” Newman said.

“But you’re not dogs. You’re police officers,” Livingston said.

“And that’s the problem, sir. Part of the time, they want most of us to be regular marshals, but then they push the button, and we’re supposed to become something else—something that I don’t understand how to be. And the fighting you saw Blake do in the cell, that’s her training with Forrester and Jeffries and others like them. No one is teaching that to the rest of us.”

“You’re saying that you need to be more like SWAT than regular police,” Livingston said.

Newman shook his head. “No, sir. SWAT is still about saving lives, containing the violence, but that’s not what the preternatural branch does.”

“Preternatural branch goes out with SWAT