Dead of Night

The woman snarled and snapped her teeth together — and lunged.

Dez fired.

The bullet caught the woman in the upper chest, punching a black hole through the breastbone an inch below the clavicle. The force sent the woman reeling back on her knees, arms flailing like a supplicant in the throes of a religious mania. There was no pain on her face, no sign that she even noticed the.44 round that had punched through her body. Her lips curled back from bloody teeth and she dove once more at Dez.

Dez screamed and fired.

The second round caught the woman on the side of the chin and blew a hole out past her ear, spraying the sofa with blood and flecks of gray matter.

The woman paused, her feral expression dissolving into vacuity, her mouth losing the firmness of its snarl.

And still she did not go down.

Dez felt the world spin around her. Two shots at this range. Two shots. Chest and face. There was bone and brain tissue on the goddamn couch. This was impossible.

It could not be the truth.

With bizarre slowness, the woman came on, throwing herself at Dez’s legs, grabbing at her thighs, teeth apart to bite.

Dez bent forward and slammed the hot barrel against the woman’s forehead.

“Fucking die!”

She squeezed the trigger. Once. Twice. The woman’s head exploded. Skull fragments and strips of dura mater and brain pulp blew back against the sofa and the wall and the floor lamp.

The woman … collapsed.

All at once.

Just as JT burst through the door from the prep room with the shotgun.

CHAPTER NINE

HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE

“Dez — are you all right?” JT demanded as he rushed to her.

“I…” Dez’s voice faltered on the first word as she saw the gore that was splattered on her legs and gun hand. She saw the squirming larvae and went into a hysterical fit, slapping the stuff off her clothes. “God!”

“Are you hurt?”

“No — help me the fuck up!”

JT hooked a hand under her armpit and pulled her out from under the corpse. Dez’s heels scrabbled at the blood-soaked floor as she backpedaled into JT. He lost his grip on her ten feet from the corpse, and Dez fell hard on her ass and sat there, staring, mouth open, shaking her head. Her gun fell from her hand and she made no move to pick it up; so JT did.

“What happened?”

His question seemed to be coming from another room; it was tinny and distant and Dez wasn’t sure if he was really there. JT came around and squatted down in front of her. His face twisted into a frown of doubt and he snapped his fingers the same way she had done to him — God, was it only a few minutes ago? On some remote level Dez understood that she was in shock, just as she was aware that she was thinking about being in shock. Her mind was fragmented as it tried to crawl away from the precise reality of what just happened.

“I…” Dez began again, but didn’t know where to go with it. She shook her head.

JT rose and helped Dez carefully to her feet, took her by the elbow and guided her across the room to a niche filled with filing cabinets. He still held her Glock in his other hand.

“Dez,” he said softly, “what happened?”

“She attacked me,” gasped Dez.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Listen to me, Dez … the chief and the forensics people are going to be here soon. We need to have a story. We need to tell them something they’re going to believe, so I need you to tell me what really happened. Why did you discharge your weapon? Was it accidental? No,” he corrected himself, “I heard four shots. We can’t sell that as accidental. Dez — did you see the perp? Did he come back? Is that what happened — you saw him and fired?”

Dez kept shaking her head. She pushed a strand of hair from her eyes with trembling fingers.

“Give me something, Dez,” pleaded JT, his eyes clouding with the beginnings of panic. “We have to make sense of—”

“She fucking attacked me!” snarled Dez.

JT took a step backward. He looked at her, his eyes searching hers, then he turned and looked at the woman. When he turned back, his eyes kept meeting hers and darting away.

“Dez…”

“No, goddamn it. That Russian bitch attacked me.”

“Okay, okay, I hear you. She attacked you. But … how?”

“What do you mean, ‘how’?”

“Come on, Dez … She was dead. She—”

“Of course she wasn’t dead, dumb-ass!”

“Dez, her whole throat was torn open. We both saw it—”

“Then we saw it wrong.” Dez took a steadying breath. “Look, JT, I did not imagine that woman tackling me, and I sure as hell didn’t put four rounds into her for shits and giggles. She. Came. After. Me.” She spaced the words, slow and loud.

JT raised his head into an attitude of listening. Dez heard it, too. Sirens. “Look, Dez, you know I have your back, right? That’s unquestioned. I’ll tell any story you want me to tell. Screw the chief and screw everyone else … but you got to give me something to work with. We can’t spin a fairy tale.”

“JT…”

“They’re going to blood test you,” he said. He dropped the magazine and ejected the round from the chamber, then thumbed the round back into the magazine and slid it back into the receiver. He didn’t return her weapon, however. “What’s your blood alcohol—”

“Fuck you.”

“No,” he said firmly. “Don’t close me out. I’m on your side, remember? How many ways do I have to say it? But you have to tell me what happened here.”

Dez pointed a finger at the corpse.

“She could not have been dead, JT. No way. I don’t care how it looked. We made a bad call on that. You want a story, then that’s the story, and it’s the truth. She tried to fucking bite me.”

“Bite you,” JT repeated without inflection. He crossed to the corpse, squatted down and touched the backs of his fingers to her cheek, her forearm, the inside of her wrist. As he rose he flicked back toward the prep room where Doc Hartnup lay. He walked back slowly to Dez, his dark features lined with concern and doubt.

“Yes, she tried to bite me. Guess biting’s a frigging theme around here.”

“Her skin’s pretty cold, Dez.”

“I don’t care if she’s packed in ice, JT. She had me pinned down and I punched the shit out of her and told her to back down and I might as well have been pissing up a rope. She came after me and tried to tear my throat out.”

“So you shot her.”

“Yes, I fucking shot her.”

“An unarmed woman.”

“Yes,” Dez snapped.

“A seriously injured unarmed woman.”

“Ah — Christ, JT.”

The sirens were close. Turning off of the highway onto the access road.