I took the roads slowly, back into the city as the rain slanted and the wind thrashed the earth. Microscopic droplets beat back up into the sky, broken from impact with the ground. Rain collected and ran, filling the ditches and bayous and every low place, ponding up in the streets.
Just before I got to the Mississippi River, I was stopped by the sight of a twelve-foot-long alligator, stretched across the street, jaw open, belly on the still-warm asphalt, taking a shower. I sat there, laughing at the sight, Bitsa growling beneath me. Beast shoved up into my consciousness, thinking, Big teeth. Hard kill. Tough food. I like doe better. Then she looked up at the rain and hissed. Disgusted with the gator and the weather, she curled up inside me, tucking her paws close and wrapping her stubby tail around her for warmth. Beast did not like rain.
I pulled out my camera and snapped a few shots of the gator, which took surprisingly well with the flash. Molly was gonna love this.
Back home, the house was dark. I stripped and hung the plastics and leathers up to dry in the shower, ate, and went online to find a huge zipped file from Reach, waiting in my e-mail box. He’d come through on a host of things, like the list of numbers Rick had called before his phone went dead. I recognized two numbers as belonging to police—Jodi and Sloan—but no others. None to me, for instance. Reach also sent a series of satellite photos of the vamp council headquarters for twenty-four hours before and during the vamp-and-were get-together. It was informative, not only because it showed that someone was willing to pay for satellite time to surveil the vamps but because the surveillance was paid for on the same local bank account that my retainer checks were drawn upon. Interesting. The vamps were paying good money to watch themselves.
And, more important, using Rick’s phone, Reach had narrowed the possible hotels where Rick had been photographed kissing the wigged Safia down to two in East New Orleans. He couldn’t rule out either, but Rick had been there for twenty-four hours before his phone died.
I input the addresses on my handy-dandy cell and got GPS directions on a city map and map app. I wanted to go in right now, guns blazing, and find him, but that would be stupid. It was raining, dark, and I hadn’t reconnoitered either place. I might get Rick or myself killed.
I could call Sloan. Maybe the cops would go in, or maybe they’d just sit outside and watch the place to keep from blowing Rick’s cover. There was no guessing with cops. I had more options than law enforcement officers. I could do things they couldn’t. Lots of things they couldn’t. But not if they were watching. So I didn’t call them.
And that was when the real storm hit. All the rain and wind of the last few hours was only a prelude to the bona fide mama tempest, with gale force winds and rain that beat into the house like the entire Blue Man drum corp. No way was I going back out on Bitsa in this. And Beast didn’t even hint that she wanted to shift. I fell asleep with the raging fury of nature like a lullaby in my ears.
CHAPTER 20
Dang. Brass Knuckles are Cool!
It was Sunday, and I left for church in plenty of time for the early service. I hadn’t gone since Rick and I started dating, maybe because he was Roman Catholic and I was nondenominational, or maybe because I was sleeping with him without the benefit of a ring on my finger and guilt pricked me every time I thought about God. Guilt was one big drawback of religion, I thought sourly as Bitsa pootered along.
I got there at sunrise and parked under the tree in the little parking lot of the strip mall where the church rented space, set Bitsa’s kickstand, pulled my Bible out of the saddlebag, and went inside, using the little ladies’ room to change from riding jeans into a skirt. Not that anyone would have said anything about my jeans, even on Sunday morning, but I hadn’t been brought up that way.
The church was empty and dim, though I could smell the preacher, an earnest, slender little guy who looked about twelve, so he was here someplace. I sat in the third row and closed my eyes, the Bible on my lap. I had a lot to repent of before I’d be clean enough inside to take the sacrament. And some of the things I’d done, like fighting, saying a few cuss-words that had seemed appropriate at the time, and sleeping with Rick, I didn’t really want to repent of, so I had some praying and thinking to do. I’d been brought up to be better than the person I had become. I knew my housemother never imagined, not in her wildest dreams, that I’d be a rogue vamp killer for hire, sleeping with a cop outside of wedlock, making out with a blood-servant in my shower, letting a witch live under my roof . . . Yeah. She’d be unhappy with me. I was unhappy with myself, especially the part about making out with Bruiser.
Light was diffuse in the small church, let in by high windows blocked by overgrown foliage, shrubs that had been left unpruned until they had grown into small trees. The building smelled of paint, dust, mice living in the walls, and the fainter scents of the previous worshippers. The muffled engines of cars going by was the only sound, even the mice were quiet.