13 Bullets

Chapter 24

In the morning she played with the dogs for a while. It was so cold outside and the kennels were so well-heated they didn't want to go out, so she stayed with them and let them dance around her, snapping their teeth at her hair and her face, the way greyhounds showed affection. They were so beautiful, the lines of their bodies so sleek and perfect. Wilbur, who only had three legs but a truly beautiful blue fawn coat, kept curling up in her lap, twisting around and around as if trying to tie himself in a knot before just plopping down on her folded legs. She rubbed him behind his ears and told him he was a good dog. Lola, an Italian greyhound who already had a good home lined up in upstate New York, kept pressing her long nose against the door but whenever Caxton would push it open she would dance backwards from the frosty gust that burst in, snapping at the air with her teeth and rearing up on her hind legs to fight off the wind.
When Deanna found her there, covered in greyhounds, Caxton felt almost human again. Deanna just smirked at her as if she'd been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She handed Caxton her PDA and disappeared again without a word. She had a new email from "[email protected]", which she figured had to be Clara. Her hand trembled as she opened it up-what if Deanna had seen it? What if Clara had called instead of emailing, and Deanna had picked up? But she was just being paranoid. For one thing, she'd done nothing wrong. She had stopped Clara before anything real could happen. For another, Clara's email wasn't embarrassing at all. It was one of the most professional correspondences she'd ever read and it contained nothing except the sheriff's department report from Bitumen Hollow. There wasn't so much as a cordial salutation.
She actually felt a little let down. Clara coming on to her was a problem, really, but still... it had been so nice. She put that thought out of her mind and studied the report. What she read was cold and clinical and she tried to keep it that way, refusing to feel the horror of the people who had died in the sleepy village the night before. Most of the report was based on the eyewitness testimony of the assistant manager of the Christian bookstore, the one who had hit her with the big cross. Once he'd calmed down he had turned out to be a pretty good observer. He'd seen the vampires enter the main street of the town, both of them dressed in black overcoats with the collars turned up to hide their mouths. If they'd been trying to pass as human they needn't have bothered. Everyone in Bitumen Hollow knew everyone else-the two giant vampires (both well over six feet tall) stuck out like torn-off thumbs. Their first to die had been the teenaged girl, Victim #1, Helena Saunders. One of them picked her bodily up off the ground while the other one tore open the sleeve of her coat and bit into her arm, in the words of the survivor, "like you would gnaw on a ear of corn." From there things just got nasty. There had been no attempt to defend the town. No one had even fought back though a loaded hunting rifle was found under the counter of the coffeeshop and the woman who ran the post office (Victim #4) had a licensed handgun in her car. No police presence reached the town until it was far too late. It didn't surprise Caxton too much. A town that small wouldn't have a police department of its own, instead relying on the local sheriff.
Caxton skimmed through a lot of the report. There had been fourteen victims total and she really didn't need to know how they all died. Fourteen. It was a much higher number than she'd expected. The two vampires that attacked Bitumen Hollow were pretty fresh. Their need for blood should have been easily quenched-at most they might have required a single victim each. Yet they had completely depopulated the village. Why? She thought about Piter Lares, who had intentionally overfed and stuffed himself full of blood so he could feed his elders, including Justinia Malvern. The new assailants (the report listed them as Actor #1 and Actor #2, police-speak for the person who "acted" upon the victims) could have been gorging themselves to feed Malvern, but no, they needed four vampires to restore her. Anyway, she was still safely behind stone walls at Arabella Furnace.
As far as she knew.
A cold finger ran down her spine at the thought that the vampires might have attacked the abandoned sanatorium, that even now Malvern might be free, but no, surely Arkeley would have called her to tell her as much.
Unless they had attacked, and Arkeley had been killed.
She fed and watered the dogs and headed back into the house. She didn't want to jump the gun on a paranoid whim but she had to know. There was no listing for Arabella Furnace State Hospital in the phonebook, and the state police databases she had access to via the internet didn't even list it. While she dressed she called the Bureau of Prisons to ask for the number but they said any such inquiries had to go through official channels. The man on the other end of the phone wouldn't even admit that such a place existed, of course.
"Look, the people there could be in danger. I know all about the place, I've even been there. It's like a hospital for just one patient, and she's a vampire."
"Calm down, lady," he said. "Look, we don't do hospitals. We do prisons."
She managed not to yell at him somehow. He said he would pass on her message but that wasn't good enough. Hanging up the phone she stormed into the bedroom.
"Dee?" she yelled. "Dee? I need to borrow your car."
Deanna was in the living room, lying on the couch watching television, the remote clutched in one arm that spilled down onto the floor and lay half-buried in the shag carpet. "I had one of my dreams about you last night," she said when Caxton came storming in. "You were tied to a post and Roman soldiers were whipping your naked back. Blood was trickling down your hips in long, red tracks that looked kind of like chocolate syrup. I don't think you should go anywhere today."
Caxton made a fist and shoved it into her pocket. She didn't have time for this. "I really, really need to borrow your car."
"Why?" she asked. "Maybe I have things to do today."
"Were you?" Caxton asked. It wasn't the day Deanna did the shopping. Most days her car sat unused in the driveway. "Look, this is super important. Seriously, or I wouldn't even ask."
Deanna shrugged and looked at the TV. "Alright, if you want me to be a prisoner in my own home."
Caxton was holding her breath, she realized. She blew it out slowly and then inhaled, just as slowly. Deanna's keys were hanging on a hook in the kitchen, right next to the closet where she kept her pistol. She fetched them both. Outside the air was a little more than crisp. She pulled her uniform jacket around her chest and jumped into Deanna's little red Mazda. She took off her hat and went to put it on the passenger seat but the remains of a take-out lunch from McDonald's, including half a hamburger, were spread across the already-stained fabric. The narrow backseat was full of cans of paint and unopened packages of brushes and rollers, even though Deanna hadn't painted anything in six months. She'd been restricting herself to the untitled project in the shed.
Caxton balanced her hat on top of an open can of paint that had dried to the consistency of hard plastic and hoped for the best. Backing out of the driveway she adjusted the mirrors and in minutes she was on the highway, headed for Arabella Furnace.
On the way she played with the car's radio, looking for a news report. There was another IED explosion in Iraq and some kind of golf scandal-Caxton didn't really follow sports and didn't understand what they were saying. There were no reports of vampire attacks on abandoned tuberculosis rest homes, no bugles playing Taps for a Fed who had died in the course of his duty, but the lack of news failed to reassure her.
By the time she arrived it was well past noon and sprinkling rain. The sun was blinking on the wet leaves that dotted the road and the narrow track that lead to the hospital had gone to mud. The little Mazda nearly got stuck but Caxton had years of training in getting cars through bad patches of road. She pulled up on the lawn below the faceless statue of Health or Hygiene or whatever and was a little bit relieved, but just a little, to see her own patrol car parked on the same stretch of grass. Arkeley had at least come to Arabella Furnace the night before. When he'd indicated he wanted to be alone he must have gone to see Malvern.
It occurred to her that maybe he had taken one look at Bitumen Hollow and known the vampires were gorging themselves, and therefore known they would attack that night. But then why would he have gone alone, and left her behind?
Because he didn't trust her, of course. Because she'd acted like a wimp when she got stabbed with a shovel. Because she's said she couldn't watch him torture a half-dead. He must have decided she was a liability.
The corrections officer at the front desk recognized her but he still made her sign in. When she saw him she knew her worst fears hadn't come true. The vampires hadn't successfully freed Malvern.
"What happened here last night?" she asked, laying down the pen on his sign-in sheet.
"Something happened, something big," he told her, his eyes wide.
"Something? What kind of something?" she demanded.
He shrugged. "I just work days. This place, at night? You'd have to nail my feet to the floor to keep me from running away."
She wanted to ask him a million more questions but she figured there might be better informants. From memory she tried to find Malvern's ward, only to get lost and have to circle back. Finally she retraced her steps, took a left instead of a right, and saw the plastic curtain that sealed off the ward. The hospital was immense and most of it was dark-she could easily have gotten lost for hours if she hadn't been shown the way before.
She pushed through the plastic and into the blue light and there, of course, was Arkeley, sitting patiently in a chair. He looked healthy enough, though his hair was greasy. Presumably he hadn't showered since she'd seen him last. Malvern was nowhere to be seen but the lid of her coffin was closed tightly shut. Caxton went straight to Arkeley. "Are you alright?" she demanded.
"Of course I am, trooper. I've been having a lovely chat with my old friend." He knocked on the lid of the coffin. There was no answer but Caxton assumed Malvern was safely inside. "Why don't you sit down?"
Caxton nodded. She looked around but didn't see Hazlitt. Maybe he slept during the day, she decided. "I though-I know it sounds crazy but I had this idea. The vampires that slaughtered everyone in Bitumen Hollow last night were gorging on blood. I thought maybe they were going to attack this place, that they were gathering blood for her. I guess I jumped to a dumb conclusion."
"Hardly," he told her. "They did exactly as you suggest. Or at least they tried."