Vampire Moon (18 page)

 
      
 
“You want me to leave my wife alone?” he said evenly into the phone. He didn’t take his eyes off me.

 
      
 
“Your
ex
-wife, and yes.”

 
      
 
“Why would I do that?”

 
      
 
“Because I said so.”

 
      
 
He stared at me blankly, and then laughed. A single burst of sound into the phone. He laughed again, longer this time.

 
      
 
“You’re funny.”

 
      
 
“When I want to be.”

 
      
 
“You’ve got balls coming in here,” he said. “I’ll give you that much.”

 
      
 
“The world’s worst compliment to a woman.”

 
      
 
“What?”

 
      
 
“Never mind. So will you leave her alone?”

 
      
 
He stared at me some more. I heard guards talking to each other out in the hallway. Ira and I were alone in the visiting room, since it was after hours and I had been given special access. A clock ticked behind me. Somewhere I thought I heard someone scream, but that could have just been my imagination. Or my hypersensitive hearing.

 
      
 
Ira cocked his head a little, and then said, “It’s too late.”

 
      
 
“Too late for what?”

 
      
 
“Never mind that. The bitch shouldn’t have left me. I told her to never leave me.”

 
      
 
“Gee, you’re such a sweetheart, Ira. How could anyone ever leave you?”

 
      
 
He barely heard me. Or heard what he wanted to hear. “Exactly. I gave her everything. The ungrateful bitch never had to work a day in her life.”

 
      
 
“People leave each other every day, Ira. It happens.”

 
      
 
“Not to me it don’t.”

 
      
 
Ira had gotten himself worked up. I knew this because the skin along his slightly misshapen forehead had flushed a little, and he was holding the phone so tight that his knuckles looked like some weird prehistoric spine running along the back of the receiver.

 
      
 
Breathing harder, he said, “I will do everything within my power to make sure the bitch dies. No one leaves me. Ever.”

 
      
 
I realized this was going nowhere fast. I honestly hadn’t expected anything different, but it had been worth a shot.

 
      
 
“I beg to differ,” I said, gathering my stuff together.

 
      
 
“You beg to differ what?”

 
      
 
“Monica very much left you, just as I’m doing now.”

 
      
 
“I’m going to remember you, cunt.”

 
      
 
“Lucky me.”

 
      
 
I was about to hang up when he added, perhaps fatally, “And not just you, Samantha Moon, private investigator and bodyguard. Everyone you know and love. You have kids?”

 
      
 
I heard the sound of boots moving along the hallway outside. Apparently, someone listening to us had heard enough. I took in some air and closed my eyes and did all I could to control myself.

 
      
 
But dumbass wasn’t done. He went on, saying, “I see I hit a nerve. So Samantha Moon
is
a mom.”

 
      
 
“Did you just threaten my kids?”

 
      
 
“You catch on quick.”

 
      
 
I opened my eyes and saw red. In fact, I couldn’t really see at all. All I could see was a blurred image of the man behind the bulletproof glass. And I heard pounding. Loud pounding. In my skull.

 
      
 
The sun, I knew, had set thirty or forty minutes ago. I was at full strength. I sat forward in my chair and leaned close to the thick
Plexiglass
that separated us. I motioned with my index finger for Ira Lane to come closer, too. He grinned, cocky and confident, and as he leaned forward, something very dark and very twisted danced disturbingly just behind his dead eyes.

 
      
 
His face was inches from mine when he said, “Is there something you want to tell me, you stupid bitch? I bet you’re wishing right about now you never fucked with—”

 
      
 
I punched the bulletproof glass as hard as I could. My hand burst through in a shower of glass and polycarbonate and whatever the hell else these things are made out of.

 
      
 
Bulletproof but not vampire-proof.

 
      
 
Ira screamed and would have fallen backward if I hadn’t grabbed him by the collar through the fist-sized hole in the thick glass. In one motion, I yanked the motherfucker out of his chair and over the counter and slammed into the clear glass barrier. His nose broke instantly, spraying blood over the glass, and two or three of his front upper teeth had broken back into his mouth. His lips were split clean through.

 
      
 
He flailed at my hand, struggling to free himself, but I wasn’t done with him.

 
      
 
Not by a long shot.

 
      
 
Still holding him by the collar, as his warm blood spilled over the back of my hand, I proceeded to slam his face again and again into the glass, breaking more teeth, breaking his face, his skull, his cheekbones, anything and everything, and I kept smashing him into the now blood-smeared glass until I was finally tackled from behind.

 
      
 
Chapter Twenty-seven

 
      
 
I nearly killed a man tonight.

 
      
 
Tell me about it.

 
      
 
And so I wrote it up for Fang, telling him everything from my first impressions of Ira Lang, to the bastard being hauled off on a stretcher. It took three huge blocks of text to get the whole story written, and when I had posted the final segment, Fang answered nearly instantly. How he could read so fast, I had no clue.

 
      
 
Were there any cameras in the visiting room?
he asked.

 
      
 
No.

 
      
 
So there is no visual record of what you did?

 
      
 
Not that I’m aware of.

 
      
 
Don’t most prisons have surveillance cameras in the visiting rooms?

 
      
 
Not all of them. It’s up to the discretion of the warden.

 
      
 
So no one saw your little, ah, outburst?

 
      
 
No.

 
      
 
When you broke the bullet-resistant glass, did you leave behind any of your own blood?

 
      
 
That was a good question. I had cut my arm while reaching through the shattered glass. However, I hadn’t bled at all, as far as I was aware. I explained that to Fang.

 
      
 
So you don’t bleed?

 
      
 
Maybe,
I wrote.
But apparently not from cuts along my forearm.

 
      
 
Did the medical staff look at you?

 
      
 
They tried to, but I had wrapped my sweater around my arm, and since there wasn’t any blood, they assumed, perhaps, I wasn’t in need of any medical attention.

 
      
 
Was he in need of dire medical attention?

 
      
 
According to the warden, with whom I had had a long meeting after the incident, the prison doctors had determined that I had broken Ira’s jaw, nose, right orbital ridge, his sinus cavity, and broken out seven teeth. He was going to need countless stitches in his mouth and hours of surgery. I related all this to Fang.

 
      
 
There was a long pause. I looked over at my hotel bed where Monica lay sleeping contentedly on her side. It had, of course, been a long and emotional night for her. She had visited her abusive and murderous ex-husband’s prison. She had waited for me anxiously while the warden pieced together what had happened. She had been given snippets of news from the prison staff, and, she told me later, could hardly believe what she was hearing—that I had put the son-of-bitch in the hospital...even more than that, I had nearly killed him. Later that night, she sat staring at me during the entire ride home from the prison. At one point she reached out and held my hand tightly. She didn’t ask me how I punched through the glass. Or how I had the strength to grab a grown man and bash his face repeatedly against the glass. She simply held my hand and stared at me, and I held hers for as long as I could before I became self-conscious of my cold flesh and gently released my grip. I saw that she was crying, but she didn’t make a federal case of it. What those tears were for, I didn’t know, but I suspected this had been a hell of an emotional night for her. I didn’t tell her the bastard had threatened my kids. She had enough to deal with.