Annie of the Undead (33 page)

“Did you use it to dispose of the body? Where is
it?”

The pair looked at each other. They didn’t like
that they were doing all the talking.

“You’d better talk to us, Annie.”

And they were using my first name
regular-like.

“This is not going to be good for you. You are
not just going to sit there all smug with your little smart-Alec
smirk and your little convict swag and get away with any of this.
This is all going to be bad for you. You’d better cooperate with
us.”

Was I smiling? I made an effort to stop straight
away.

“What happened to Trisha Danes?”

Lopez sighed and stood up. Then he spun and
slammed his fist on the table.

“Answer the question. What happened to the
little college girl you had a fight with in front of everyone at
that party, whose nose you, a trained fighter, broke. Tell us where
she is.”

“This is your last chance.”

I looked at them, trying very hard to make sure
I wasn’t inadvertently smiling. I didn’t literally spell it out for
them, but I said it as clearly and concisely as I could.

“I am waiting for my lawyer.”

They looked at each other again. Neither one of
them was going to enjoy this, and they knew it, but their job
description said that they didn’t get to quit for a long time yet.
Cops think themselves the unstoppable force. They had no idea just
how stubborn, how intractable, how unmovable an object I could be.
I would have felt sorry for them, if I hadn’t hated them so god
damn much. It was going to be a very, very long afternoon for all
three of us.

And the night? Who knew what the night would
bring, but something told me it was going to be full of
surprises.

The cops took a break from grilling me after a
while. They let me sit cooling my sandspur-perforated heels, while
they sat discussing me on the other side of the one-way mirror. I
was beat –not by them, by action. I’d spent the morning with Mark
and part of the afternoon running barefoot in a bathrobe all over
the city. I lay down on the floor and took a nap.

Problem was, they realized I was taking a nap.
They didn’t like that much.

“Get up, Annie,” came Lopez’s familiar voice
overhead. “No sleeping in here.”

What? No rest for the completely innocent?

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Time to get up and face the music.”

“Is it nighttime yet? It feels so late.”

“Don’t play all tired with me. Get up.”

He reached down to take my arm and hoist me up,
but I don’t much like being hoisted (manhandled) by cops, and I
managed to jump to my feet on my own…and with apparently
threatening quickness. The man almost drew his gun.

Schmidt wasn’t coming in this time. It was going
to be just the mean one and me. Earlier in my life/criminal career,
they had sent the nice one in by himself, but I had noticed in the
last few years that shift that denotes the system has labeled you
as something different than they thought you were before, something
harder.

But Lopez didn’t start grilling me on his own.
He didn’t break it down for me in words I could, with my impaired
criminal brain, understand. Instead, he introduced a friend of his
who had just come through the door.

“Annie, this is Detective Psalter. He is going
to have a talk with you now. I wouldn’t mess with him if I were
you.”

Ooh, and coming from the tough guy that was
supposed to really scare me.

Lopez left the room, leaving me and Mister
Psalter. The man stepped forward. He took off his suit jacket and
hung it over the back of the chair, slowly, deliberately. He was
saying, “I am a professional. I am in control. I have all the time
in the world.”

He ran his hand across the table’s surface,
fingered the file with my name and all kinds of bad in it. He was
looking in the direction of it, but didn’t really seem to be
looking at it. Finally, after much slow procedure, he sat down.
Slowly.

He eased himself into place, lifted his hands
and folded them on the table –not cozily as Detective Schmidt had
done, but gracefully, threateningly, as a praying mantis might. He
steepled his fingers. His nails were long and perfect.

“Annie,” he said smoothly, “you’re quite the
difficult girl to pin down, they tell me.”

I was still looking at his nails.

“But I know you’re going to talk to me, Annie. I
know because I want what you want.”

“I doubt that. I want a lawyer, and I suspect,
if you wanted me to have one, I’d have one by now. So, you don’t
want me to have one, I deduce.”

“Smart girl,” he said, looking out at me from
deep-set eyes, “Because you’re smart, I know we are going to
understand each other very well.”

“Oh, good. Then understand this: I’ll take the
court-appointed guy, if you can scrounge one up, and until you do,
no talkie.”

“You should know we have a shortage of those
right now, the way we have a shortage of all the professionals a
city needs to function. The storm drove them out, but it wasn’t
just the storm. The chaos was always here, beneath the surface. The
storm merely uncovered it. This city is a mess, but there are some
good people working hard to bring it back from the brink, to lead
it from a dirty past into a glorious future.”

Why was he telling me this? To throw me off the
scent? He moved slowly, he talked slowly, he even took his good old
time getting around to the subject. It was so staged, like he was
deliberately trying the opposite tact of the other guys to the nth
degree.

“This city will not tolerate people like you
anymore, and the kind you associate with, muddying the waters. We
need order, control. You bring chaos.”

I just didn’t have anything to say to that.

“What about this girl, Yoki Hayashi. Nice girl.
Good student. Lots of friends. Member of a political club, star
ballet dancer. What is your connection with her?”

“Lawyer.”

He tapped a nail on the metal tabletop. Tap.
Tap. Tap.

“Let me rephrase the question.”

He bared his teeth, ran his tongue across them,
and regarded me with an intensity of the eyes that was intended to
be both menacing and meaningful. The gesture was quick and would
not have been visible to the people behind the mirror or the camera
in the corner of the ceiling. His back was to them. They were all
focused on me.

“What does she mean to you?”

Though I wouldn’t have answered his question
anyway, I was stunned speechless. Was he a witch? Something else?
He didn’t have any fangs, if that’s what he was getting at. I
somehow doubted he was sexually harassing me. I scanned his person:
nothing remarkable. Just some guy, albeit creepy. Did he work for
someone with fangs or magic? But who among the superpeople would be
in on the police force here and why? Why in hell did they want
anything to do with any of this bullshit? Yoki, of all people. The
guy that had followed us home? My crimes?

And then it struck me, like a ham hock, because
it was so obvious. It had to be Miguel. It had to be. Whoever this
guy was, whoever he represented, they must be trying to get to him
through me, and to me through Yoki. This had to be about Miguel.
Had to be.

But what about New Orleans being an “open city”?
What the hell about that? I was so going to kick Miguel for that
later.

“There are people who want to hurt her, are
there not? We can’t hold her. There’s no evidence she committed a
crime. When she is released, tomorrow maybe, she’ll be in as much
danger as she was before. They’ll get to her, unless you tell us
what we want to know.”

Another meaningful/menacing look. I didn’t
appreciate it.

“You know what?” I said. “I don’t give a god
damn what you or the bad people out there do. That’s not my
problem. My problem is belligerent cops who do not produce lawyers
when they’re required. Habeas the lawyer’s fucking corpus. I want a
warm, breathing body in here with a law degree. And then maybe
–MAYBE I’ll talk.”

I was trying to buy time –time for Yoki, time
for Miguel to do something. Jesus, it suddenly occurred to me that
I had no idea at all what he would do. I didn’t know him that well.
I didn’t even know how old he was or when his birthday was, or his
deathday. Maybe he’d get me a lawyer.

“Your situation is very simple,” the man went
on. “You are back in the judicial system, soon to be the penal
system. You have a friend who is highly sought after by someone who
intends her harm. But she doesn’t have to get hurt. She can walk
away from all of this, if, and only if, you give us exactly –and I
do mean exactly, the information we ask you for.”

With that, he reached into his pocket and
brought out an evidence bag. Inside was an unassuming black cell
phone. My cell phone.

“So,” he said, “Tell me about Richard
Albertson.”

I blinked. I mean, I think I blinked. It was
long enough after he’d said what he’d said and before anything even
remotely useful came to my brain for me to have blinked. I had no
idea who he was talking about –but I wasn’t going to tell him that,
not without a lawyer.

“The man who gave you this phone. Richard
Albertson. Is he the same man who owns the McLaren?”

Ohhhh.
That
Richard Albertson.

“I want you to tell me about your relationship
with him. Do you live with him? Is he your boyfriend?”

So the ham hock had hit the right head. This guy
did want to know about Miguel, and he honestly thought he could get
me to tell him. Ha! If he knew anything about vampires, he’d know
that you don’t just get their people to talk. I couldn’t see Mark
talking, and from the little I knew of Max I didn’t figure him for
the squawking kind. I doubted that any of the other Ms would nark
on their boy either. Andy wasn’t stupid. He was a fifty-karat ass,
but after seeing his place and meeting his people, I knew he wasn’t
stupid, and Miguel wasn’t stupid either. And both of them were
very, very dangerous.

I suddenly got the overwhelming feeling –it was
weird, that despite this prick cop’s air of evil intrigue and
power, he didn’t have the slightest idea what he was dealing with.
I was handcuffed and in jail with all kinds of charges pending
against me, a friend whose life was in danger, and the guy who
represented the bad people –on the police force, no less, sitting
right in front of me with who knew what kind of power, and I
suddenly felt confident, almost cocky. Again, I say, it was
weird.

But I felt it, deep down –not in my soul,
because I’m not sure I had one, but deep, deep down somewhere that
I hadn’t glimpsed the tip of the iceberg of what Miguel could do,
and if he started doing any of it, this whole ship of theirs was
going to go down like the freakin’ Titanic.

Now I smiled, and I let it be just as smug and
defiant and damn proud as I wanted it to be.

“You should have gotten me that lawyer,” I said,
by way of letting him and whoever the fuck his people were know
that if they weren’t going to play this game the human way, they
were stepping right into the web of someone who was going to play
the nonhuman way like a master. It may sound convoluted, but, trust
me, he got it.

The man who called himself Psalter frowned an
ugly frown and leered at me.

“If you think that I don’t represent the
meanest, most God-fearing, merciless organization in the South, you
are going to suffer its full wrath, and anyone else involved with
you is going to be prosecuted,” he enunciated the final words for
effect, “to the fullest extent of our law.”

At that moment, the overhead light went out. The
lights in the hall and the little red dot that should signal the
camera was in operation had gone out too.

“What’s –?”

I heard Psalter stand up in the dark. He was as
surprised as I was, which meant this wasn’t his trick, which meant
it was…

There was some noise in the hall, a door
opening, people talking to each other, asking questions. Calm
voices, worried ones. I heard Lopez’s voice. The people from the
adjacent room had emerged. I saw the flicker of a flashlight sweep
under the crack in the door.

“What’s going on?”

“Power’s out all down the hall –all of the
rooms.”

“Nothing’s worked right since that damn
hurricane.”

“I’ll go check it out.”

Receding footsteps.

“Fred, you okay in there?”

“I’m fine,” Psalter answered. “Just find out
what’s going on.”

“I’ll open the door and get you out of
there.”

“No. I don’t want to risk her slipping out. Just
figure this out.”

“Okay,” Lopez replied. The flashlight began to
recede.

“I can see you,” Psalter said quietly. “Don’t
try anything. I have you exactly where I want you.”

I’d been in a jail when the power went out once
before. It was creepy then, knowing there might be someone out
there in the dark who’d like to take this opportunity to stab you
in the back, but it was creepier now, with a man whispering at you
like that and not being so certain that he was just as blind as you
were.

But the backup power had kicked in after a
minute that other time. That didn’t happen now. There was something
wrong. People were calling to each other out there, discussing the
problem, spreading the word that the outage was widespread in the
building. There apparently weren’t any lights anywhere. Someone
else trotted down the hall with a flashlight, this one brighter
than Lopez’s had been. It flashed under the door and was gone.

A moment later, I heard Miguel’s voice.

“Annie, get under the table!”

I didn’t hesitate a nanosecond. I dropped to the
floor just as the door blew in.

“Where is your master? Where is your master,
vermin?”

It was Miguel’s voice, and he sounded like a
wolverine. He was right across from me in the dark, and he was
doing something unpleasant to Psalter. The crazy thing was that no
time had seemed to pass from the moment the door collided with the
table and the moment I heard his words. He had moved that fast.