Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (2 page)

“Does, uh, anyone else know about this date?” de Cabrera asked carefully, wary of Hood’s looming presence over my shoulder.

What he wanted to ask was:
Does Batten know?
But I was fighting
my not-so-secret addiction to Special Agent Mark “Kill-Notch”
Batten with impressive fortitude lately. Batten and I had been working on a system of trying not to hate-fuck each other to death. So far, that required an aggressive regimen of rubber-band snapping against my wrist, and a total hands-off approach. The ol' Nookie Cold Turkey,
or “NCT” as I dubbed it in my new Moleskine diary – this one
sporting a totally unsexy orange cover. Batten and I had no viable future, other than the occasional, breathless, wall-shaking tryst, and I was trying to forget those and get on with my life so I could keep my job and my sanity.

“Don’t figure my love life is anyone’s business but mine.”
And Harry’s,
I thought.
If it doesn’t bother Harry, then everyone else can suck
it.
That jogged my memory about something else I needed to excise from my sex life; the bond of my long-suffering
dhaugir
. “Where’s Chapel?”

Hood spoke up, following close. “He was unavailable.”

I stopped with a squawk. “So was I! I was very unavailable. I was, like, maybe an hour away from getting lucky.”

“What can I say, Baranuik? He’s the boss.” Hood shrugged.

Supervisory Special Agent Gary Chapel was technically
my
boss, not Hood’s, but pointing that out would change nothing about my current situation. I inhaled deeply and let the air out the side of my mouth in several cheeky duck noises to express my unhappiness.

De Cabrera added, “Assistant Director Johnston’s in town.”
Ah; the boss’s boss.

“Don’t worry. Batten’s on his way,” Hood said.

“Is that supposed to cheer me up?” I asked.

Hood elbowed me and ducked his head closer to my ear. “Go on, you love the abuse. He’s five minutes out.”

“Goody gumdrops.” I marched to the back bumper, ignoring the new hot roar in my veins. I pictured battle-hardened Batten in his worn Wranglers and reached down under the cuff of my parka to snap the elastic band against my wrist to distract myself with the sting. “I’ll try to contain my bliss. Is the victim human?”

The Sheriff stared at my wrist for a second, was kind enough not to react to my negative reinforcement strategy, and gestured for me to take a look underneath the truck. “No. We need you to tell us what it
is
, since we know what it
isn't
.”

“You want me to
look?
” I felt my upper lip curl. “What am I,
some kind of monster expert?” I looked at the gaggle of state troopers who had stopped what they were doing to stare me down. “Oh. Right.” Then, under my breath, “Balls.”

De Cabrera cleared his throat and gave me the stink-eye. He’d
been trying to encourage me to develop the power of positive
thinking since he’d got wound up by some self-help book a year or so before. He was the type who learned a new buzzword and then had to teach everyone else about it or he'd explode from having nobody to annoy. It was easier not to fight him on it, and I thought I was handling the lessons quite nicely.

I told him, “This
positively
sucks balls.”

His answer was a snort.

When I lowered myself next to the truck the frigid grit dug into
the knees of my jeans and to my gloved palms, stones scuffing
leather. I
turned my face to look under the truck, not really wanting to see,
knowing it was my job. My stupid, stupid job.

As Hood had said on the phone, the body had been chained by the neck to the back of the semi's frame and dragged along beneath the trailer. Flesh and bone and viscera had been abraded nearly as far up as the rib cage, and I had to stifle an unladylike urge to vomit at the thought of what kind of person would do that to someone else, followed by a competing urge to take Hood's gun and try to do the
driver better than he'd done himself, and I was pretty sure Hood
kept a clip loaded with sliver rounds handy. Where the remains now lay, it looked like a horror movie prop boy had tripped with a Bucket o’
Guts, wasting a whole day’s budget. Despite the gory mess, there
was a thing or two that were not quite right.

Without looking up I told de Cabrera, “When Batten gets here, tell him I quit.”

“When’s the last time you quit?”

“Yesterday,” I said. “Noonish.”

“Think he’ll ever buy it?”

“Hey, a girl can dream.” And, in some cases, have job-related nightmares, whether she was awake or not. Was this really better
than an awkward, stilted lunch with a self-centered blowhard? I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against a clean patch of asphalt,
and admitted the truth.
Yeah, it probably was
. No wonder I couldn't
get a date; I thought half of a degloved corpse was more attractive than a forty-dollar dessert crepe.

De Cabrera held a hand down as if anticipating my answer
before he asked, “Want your biohazard bins?”

“My trunk, thanks.” I handed the keys to the new-to-me Buick back at him. “Better get me two or three, and some neoprene gloves. I’m not mucking up my leather with this shit. Where’s Golden?”

De Cabrera played with the keys until he found the right one. “Still off sick.”

“Think I should make her some soup?”

“Can you cook?”

“Not remotely.”

“You don’t want to kill off the only female friend you’ve got
here,” he advised.

“Hey!” I objected, though his assessment was unfortunately dead-on. There had been the older woman who lived in the cabin
next to mine, but her and her Labradoodles had become zombies and tried
to eat me, so that’s not chummy. There was Claire, the proprietress
of the Early Bird coffee shop in Ten Springs, but even I would be hard-pressed to call “hasn't tried to poison me yet” friendship.

De Cabrera marched away from us in the direction of my car, and Hood took his place. I squinted up at him against the glare as the sun slipped below the edge of the cloud cover.

“The driver’s definitely not a revenant,” he said. “Getting sun now. No
poof.
”

I nodded, not really that surprised, and tried to figure out what was hinky about the partial corpse that hung like a pathetic, broken toy off the silvery chain that bound it.

“There’s about two miles of gore behind the truck.” He planted both hands on his athletic thighs and squatted beside me fluidly, bouncing slightly; always ready for action, though there seemed no danger. “A motorist noticed a pile of intestines fly out from under the truck, thought it looked too big to be roadkill, and called 911.”

Good call, innocent bystander
. “Where’s he?”

 “Ambulance, chest pains. Need to see him?”

I shook my head; the ever-patient Agent Chapel didn’t like me using my psychic Talents on witnesses without him first approving it. I’d been both an Empath and a Psychometrist ever since becoming
a DaySitter when I was seventeen, and had been using my Talents to
help law enforcement for the last few years. It’s not nearly as
glamorous as it sounds; most of the time, it’s downright awful. If Chapel didn’t need my Talents, I didn’t volunteer them. I stuck to the business of
preternatural science, and the occasional corpse-ogling under a
truck. Like you do.

“First cop on the scene thought it must have been an elk until he saw the hand half a mile back.” Hood’s exhale fogged. “It’s been bagged and tagged. I can get it for you, if you need it.”

I breathed in through my nostrils so I didn’t
yurp
up all over the crime scene. “Gee, that’s quite all right,” I smiled tightly.

“Cavalry’s here,” Hood reported, meaning the tires crunching in the distance must belong to an FBI SUV.

“Is it Batten?” I asked him, ignoring a hopelessly aroused flutter
in my stomach. I snapped my wrist-elastic. “Tell me he brought
coffee, keeping in mind I’ll die if you say no.”

Hood made a non-committal noise. “I’ll find you some.
Anything else you need?”

Willpower? Booze? A good shrink and a new job?
I shook my head,
studying the remaining entrails. Something about the color seemed
wrong. Greenish. Like the insides of a lifelong alcoholic, pickled.
When Hood’s footsteps receded and a second, louder set took their place, I closed one eye against the glare of the winter sun and peered up.

Batten moved to shadow my face. He was pure manly
perfection, from the tips of his oddly beautiful feet, all the way to his deep lake-water blue eyes framed strikingly by lush, black lashes and playful
eyebrows prone to darting upward at my antics. I knew firsthand that his body was a hard, muscular six-foot journey of the most
heavenly delights known to womankind. His only flaw was a tendency to be an asshole, but even that had no power to cool my hormones most days, and most nights I had impure fantasies about him being an
even bigger jerk in just the right way. I had not forgotten how
delicious forbidden sex was; it was especially hard to ignore when it was standing right in front of me. Clean-shaven, he was a knockout. With a goatee, he was soul-crushingly sexy.

Today, alas, he was sporting the early signs of a push-broom
style mustache. Faced with Charlie Chaplin, I expected ragtime
piano music to start any second, and my libido mercifully snuffed out like a cheap candle.

“Wow,” I noted, crinkling my nose, taking my gloved fingers off my wrist-elastic. “Thanks for the comic relief, Groucho.”

He wilted. “It’s Movember. I take it you disapprove.”

“Was it your intention to morph from MegaHunk to
Manstrosity?
Ooh, I bet that's SyFy's next dating show!” I could see the terrible
CGI intro graphics already.

Batten glared down at me, hands on hips. The hands and hips and everything in between still looked rock-hard and sexy as ever, but there was no way I'd be turning down the chance to mock him.

“Is it real?” I asked.

“Of course it’s—” He sputtered into silence, eyes seeking
patience in the distance before returning to me. “As opposed to what?”

“Maybe you had a tragic accident with a toothbrush and some bootblack.”

His jaw did a clench-unclench dance, muscles rippling with displeasure.

“Is it a stick-on? It
looks
like a stick-on,” I said helpfully.

“It’s not a stick-on. Stop saying stick-on,” he ordered.

“You look like the dude from
Jeopardy
,” I continued. “There’s grey in it.”

“I’m almost forty,” he said through his teeth. “What’s the goddamned case?”

“I’ll take What’s Under The Truck for five hundred, Alex.” I crooked one finger toward the shaded body. “Careful getting under here, old-timer. I hear a hip replacement’s costly.”

He hunkered next to me with a feral, vital fluidity that almost made me forget his ridiculous facial accoutrement, but I saw the flinch around his eyes as his knees popped.

“It’s awesome, truly,” I assured him. “For the first time in my life, I feel hotter than you.”

“Please,” he muttered. “Grasp reality with both hands firmly.”

Reality is not being allowed to grasp Kill-Notch firmly with both hands
, my brain taunted. “Reality and I aren’t on speaking terms at the moment. We’ve got half a corpse under here.”

“What the—” He made a grab at my ass, and if I hadn’t rolled to one side, he would have had my Beretta mini Cougar. “How many times have I told you, you do not need a gun?”

“Think I’ll keep it, Wyatt Earp. I wanna live. It’s this new thing I’m trying.” I waited until I was sure he wasn’t going to grab for it again before shimmying closer to the body under the truck. “Besides, Chapel said I’m allowed. Got my papers and everything, so you can stop trying to ineptly cop a feel any time now.” I shot him a warning look, because that was the extent of self-control I had.

“You shouldn’t be allowed to carry anything more dangerous than a feather duster.”

My eyes narrowed further. “Are you picturing me in a French maid’s outfit?”

He surprised me with a twitch-smile of admission and got down on his knees beside me to look under the truck. His humor promptly dissolved as he considered the scene for a moment, then popped to his feet with easy agility and went back to walk the gore trail along the markers, placing his boots carefully, eyes sharp, his darting gaze missing nothing. He crooked a finger at me and, feeling a bit like an obedient pet, I rose and went to his side.

“What’s that?” He stabbed a finger at an organic smear.

“Blue gunk.”

“Thank you, Doctor Baranuik.”

“It appears to be…” I took a deep sniff, leaning over and
wiggling my nose bunny-style. The smell didn’t make sense at first, that warm stink of molasses swimming up from the streaks of ink-blue goop. I lowered myself down on the asphalt once more and got my face near
it, one gloved hand keeping my hair up out of the mess. “Revenant nectar.”

“Vampire blood,” he translated, using the V-word, whether for his own comfort or to annoy me, I could never tell.

It wasn’t until I heard the winch on the jumbo-size tow truck that I put it together. Batten was two steps ahead of me.

“No, no, no!” I bolted back to the truck. “Don’t move the truck! Don’t touch that body!”

Batten sprinted ahead, hollering “Hold up!” over the squeal of the winch.

“What’s wrong?” Hood said, waving the activity to full stop.
“The medical examiner is waiting.”

I shoved past him and flung myself to ground, belly hitting gravel. I elbow-crawled beneath the trailer as far as I dared. There,
where the shade of the truck made the road dark, was a yawning emptiness I recognized now, as the revenant’s VK-Delta sleep lightened and he began to stir. Batten must have noted some movement; he flinched, and his hand sank to his ankle, where I knew he’d have a sheathed rowan wood stake.