take on an entire barracks of troopers, but he’s too smart to try to find out. You should be okay as long as you don’t make any stupid mistakes.”
“I said I could handle it,” he grunted. “There’s nothing magic about you, either.”
Caxton watched his face. Had she hurt his feelings? “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“It means you aren’t the only person in the world who can fight vampires. I know we’ve watched a lot of cops get killed trying. But that was because they weren’t trained for this kind of work. I’ve been learning from you for two months now.”
She tried to stare him down, with her best cop look. He didn’t break eye contact with her. After a minute or so, she blinked.
She had learned how to fight vampires by watching Jameson. He’d never thought she was ready to do it on her own. She’d been about to say the same thing about Glauer—but then, Jameson had been wrong about her. Maybe she was wrong about Glauer. “Fair enough.” Then she turned to look at Raleigh.
“Officer Glauer’s going to see to your needs,” she said. The girl looked up with wide eyes. “He’ll protect you. Just do everything he says and you’ll be alright.”
Raleigh’s mouth fell open. “What about you? Aren’t you going to stay with me? You said you would keep me safe. You said that!”
“I have to go collect your brother,” Caxton said, going over to kneel next to the frightened girl. “I’ll bring him back here and you’ll both be safe.”
“You’re worried my father will attack Simon?”
Chapter 34.
The state police armorer broke into a very wide grin when she told him what she needed. He disappeared into a Quonset hut at the side of the target range and when he came back his arms were full of cardboard boxes. Some contained ammunition—bullets fatter and heavier than any Caxton had seen before. Others held a variety of pistols.
“So you don’t want to carry around a high-powered rifle,” he said, twirling the ends of his mustache.
“That’s the best way to defeat body armor.”
She shook her head. “I do a lot of close-quarters fighting inside of buildings. I’ll keep a rifle in the trunk of my car, but for most situations I need a handgun.”
“Now, if this were some normal bad guy,” he told her, “I’d say don’t bother with toys. I’d tell you to put more time in on the range until you could reliably take him down with a head shot.”
Caxton shook her head. “A vampire’s only vulnerable point is his heart. He’s got a IIIA ballistic vest and over that a steel trauma plate.”
The armorer rubbed his chin. “Vests aren’t perfect. They don’t do anything against knives or, say, wooden stakes.” Before she could even react the man waved one hand in the air. “Just a little joke. And anyway, you don’t want to go into this with a knife. By the time you got close enough to stab him you’d already be dead. Okay. Next thought. The ballistic fabric loses its effectiveness when it gets wet.”
“So you’re saying I should only shoot him if it’s raining? I don’t have that option.” She shook her head. “I need firepower.”
“And I am most happy to oblige. I don’t get to bring these out near as often as I’d like.” The armorer’s small eyes burned with glee as he opened the first box. Inside lay a revolver with a ten-and-a-half-inch barrel—twice as long as the barrel on her Beretta. It was made of stainless steel and had a thick rubberized grip designed to help cut down on recoil. She lifted it with both hands and almost gasped. It must have weighed five pounds. It felt like she was holding some massive machine part, and she wondered if she would be able to even draw it comfortably.
“What’s this one?” she asked.
“Smith & Wesson Model 500. 500H, to be precise. It loads .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum rounds, some of the most powerful in the world. The gun-control lobby calls that round the vest-buster.”
“What do other people call it?”
The armorer shrugged. “The NRA claims it can’t actually penetrate a trauma plate. They say they have ballistic tests to prove it. You can choose who you believe. What I do know is that this round is recommended for stopping a charging grizzly bear before it can gets its claws in you.”
Caxton’s eyes went wide. She reached for a pair of earplugs. The armorer handed her a pair of cup-style ear protectors as well. “You’ll want both,” he told her.
She lined up a shot on a paper target at twenty yards, adjusted her stance, leaned into the shot.
Squeezed the trigger. A jet of flame burst from the gun as it squirmed and pushed—her arm leaped up and the gun nearly hit her in the face. It felt like someone had kicked her in the shoulder. “Jesus,” she squeaked. Her ears were still ringing when she put the weapon down and removed her ear protectors.
“You didn’t flinch,” the armorer said, admiringly. “Most women when they take their first shot with that kind of power, they close their eyes and turn away from the blast.”
She picked up the handgun again and studied it. “Double action, at least. But this looks wrong.” Most revolvers carried six shots in a cylinder behind the barrel. “There are only five chambers.”
“The bullets were too big to fit six,” the armorer explained. He pressed a button to bring in the target.
The round she’d fired had made a sizable hole near the shoulder of the silhouette on the target, and she hated to think what that bullet could have done to a human body. Still—it hadn’t even come close to the target’s heart, and Caxton was a good shot. She practiced religiously and she had been trained by her father, who had been a sheriff up in coal country and who had been an excellent shot. That meant she knew her limits. She knew that the first round she fired from a new gun was never going to be a bull’s-eye. She also knew she’d had a lot of trouble controlling the weapon.
“I’m not strong enough for that,” she said. “I think maybe if I was Arnold Schwarzenegger. But I’m not.”
“With enough time and practice you’d be fine,” the armorer said.
“Time is something I’m short on.”
The armorer frowned sympathetically and put it back in its box. He had another gun for her to try, one she recognized right away. She’d seen it in plenty of movies and TV shows—a Mark XIX Desert Eagle, an Israeli-made gun that she’d always thought was perfect for men with especially small penises. It had a thick triangular barrel and a massive grip she could barely get her hand around. Its barrel was almost comically long—fourteen inches, even longer than the Model 500, and when she held it she felt like she had picked up some kind of movie prop. It made her Beretta look like a cap gun.
She checked the safety, then ejected the magazine. It held seven rounds. Better than the five in the revolver, but her Beretta held fifteen.
The armorer fingered one of the bullets. “That’s your .50AE round. Pretty nasty. Very powerful.”
“Okay.”
He took the weapon from her and reloaded it. “Usually, with ammo this big you’d use a revolver. The Desert Eagle’s a little different. It’s built more like a rifle than a handgun, especially with this barrel. Gas operated. Polygonal rifling. The rotating bolt is pretty close to what you’d find on an M16.”
“Cool.” Caxton replaced her ear protection, called to clear the range, then sighted and fired. The recoil wasn’t as bad as with the Model 500, but still she nearly lost control of the gun after it discharged. When the target fluttered up to her she saw she’d gotten a little closer to the heart, but not much. “Not so cool.”
She sighed and put the weapon down. “Bigger bullets isn’t going to do the trick. What about a different kind of bullet—hollow-points or something.”
“Hollow-point bullets actually decrease penetration,” the armorer told her. “They’re designed for maximum tissue damage inside your target, but they’ll never get through a trauma plate. If you’re looking for a magic bullet what you’d really want is depleted uranium rounds.”
“Really?” Caxton asked, raising her eyebrows.
