“Geez, Cormac—”
“No, never mind. It’s all just thinking.” He glanced away, hiding his expression. “I don’t think it would have worked out. At the end of the day . . . it just wouldn’t.”
That little mischievous bit of my brain reared her catty head. I narrowed my gaze and said, “But it might have been fun finding out.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling.
For this moment at least, and maybe for a few future ones, things were all right between us. I’d come to him for help, and he’d given it, and we’d made a few confessions and cracked a few jokes in the meantime. Just like friends are supposed to.
He said, “You look after yourself. Look after Ben. Remember, you’re hunting predators. It’s different from deer and rabbits. Predators get angry, not scared. You know that.”
Then the visit was over. The guard led him away, and I fled the prison.
Back on the road, I hit the interstate and headed north, back to Denver.
As I drove, the first thing I did was call Detective Hardin. She owed me a favor, and if this worked right, she wouldn’t even know she was paying me back.
“It’s me,” I said when she answered her phone.
“Please tell me you’ve got something for me.”
“I do, but you’re not going to like it.” Or even believe it, for that matter. But Hardin had demonstrated a great capacity for believing the unbelievable.
“I rarely do,” she said.
“Mercedes Cook. You heard about her, right?”
“The singer. You had her on your show a week or so ago, announced that she was a vampire.”
“She’s in the middle of it. She’s not the Master or the challenger, but she’s been egging them both on. You might not want to confront her directly. Vampires can be kind of manipulative.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Is she still in town? Do you know where she’s staying?”
“She was staying at the Brown Palace. I don’t know if she’s still there. She’s in the middle of a concert tour, so she should be pretty easy to find wherever she is.”
“Thanks. I knew if I gave you a day to think about it, you’d come around.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what happened.”
It was suppertime when I got back to Ben’s place. I hadn’t looked at my watch in hours. I’d spent the whole drive back thinking. Planning.
No police cars waited in the parking lot, no crime scene tape wrapped the building. If Carl and Arturo had moved against us—or rather moved against Ben since I’d abandoned him—it hadn’t been here.
Maybe, I hoped, they hadn’t known where to find Ben. And if I was really lucky, Ben hadn’t gone looking for them. I went in, almost expecting the place to be trashed, with signs of a massive struggle, and Ben dead, torn to bits all over the living room. If I had found that, I would have taken the gun with its silver bullets and gone after Carl myself. It wouldn’t have mattered if Meg and the rest of the pack slaughtered me after, as long as I was able to shoot him first. I braced myself for what I would have to do if I found Ben dead.
But the condo was fine. Ben was at the dining-room table, eating some sort of carryout food straight from the carton. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see me.
In fact, he glanced at his watch. Humorlessly, he said, “Back already? It hasn’t even been twelve hours. I figured it’d take at least twenty-four to grow your spine back.”
Ben was perfectly all right. Why had I even worried? But there was a semiautomatic pistol sitting on the table next to him.
I didn’t look, didn’t say a word. Didn’t even stop. I did not need that kind of crap right now.
I went straight back to the bedroom and looked for the pair of jeans I’d been wearing the last time I saw Rick, when he gave me that phone number that I’d shoved in my pocket. If I was lucky, it hadn’t gone through the wash yet.
As it happened, I’d put the jeans in the duffel bag I’d taken on my short-lived retreat. I should have done this first thing, right after Hardin’s visit, before ever leaving town. Rick was probably dead, but I had to try. Maybe he’d escaped.
It was twilight; the sun had set. I dialed, and the phone rang, and rang. The certainty that Rick had been one of those piles of vampiric remains that Hardin had found settled on me, the weight of doom clenching in my gut. I wasn’t surprised, but I was sad.