Page 3 of The Undead

“You aren’t a goddamn psychic, Mikey, and you aren’t the police. Lighten up.” Carl was in a rare bitter mood, but he sighed and forced some cheer into his voice. “Anyhow, I thought you ought to know rather than hear it from some flat-foot out to take a statement—or worse, some bloodsucking journalist.”

“Yeah, the vampires will be out in force. Thanks, Carl. Hey —the bodies are in the morgue?”

“Yep, I checked them in with Adam about fifteen minutes ago.”

“Okay. Thanks for calling.” I hung up and sat there for a long while, watching drops of water run off the smooth plastic of the handset. The room smelled of Maggie’s sweet perfume and orange potpourri.

Julio Ramos had been seventeen years old. His girlfriend—well, she hadn’t looked more than sixteen. God only knew how young she really was.

“Fuck, I hate this,” I whispered. It came up directly out of the black weight under my heart, bypassing my brain. The words surprised me, and so did the anger coating them.

“Mike?” Maggie asked. I looked up to find her standing there in the bath doorway, wrapped in a big towel. The shower had stopped. I’d been too wrapped up in my thoughts to even notice.

“Sorry. I was—thinking.” My voice got lost. I didn’t try to find it. I just stared at her, at the damp glittering blonde hair and big blue eyes and china-smooth curve of her body, and I thought about making the wrong decisions. Somewhere, eight years ago, I’d made the right one.

Oh, thank God. Thank God there were still things in the world that survived, like my love for her.

“Don’t think,” she advised me quietly. “What happened?”

I told her, flatly. She didn’t flinch. She rarely talked about work, but when it did come spilling out of her it was a thousand times worse than my little honor stories, and I knew she saw a hundred Julios a year.

“Nasty” Maggie sat down next to me on the bed and stared at her fingernails. “And you fed responsible.”

“I knew the son of a bitch was dangerous.”

“Nobody knew that better than the kid” she put in softly. Her voice was very steady, a cop’s voice. Cops and doctors, models of professional detachment. “You want I should take a look at it, make sure everything gets done by the book?”

“I didn’t mean for you to punch the dock, Maggie.” It was a halfhearted apology, at best, and she smiled at it. At me.

“Bullshit, but thanks.” Maggie looked up at me, and her face was gentle and earnest. “Hey, I mean it, Mikey. I’ll trade for the case. What’s the kid’s name?”

“Julio Ramos.” I swallowed hard. The chief of staff would be appalled, I thought.Dr. Bowman, you’re taking this personally, back off and take a good look at yourself.I could almost see his walnut-withered little face pucker up in disapproval; there was only one sin deadlier than not caring about your patients, and that was caring about your patients. I pulled in a deep breath. “Only if you can. Understand?”

“Yeah. You let go of it, huh? We both need to punch the dock now”

I forced a smile and tackled her backward onto the Laura Ashley bedspread. She raised her eyebrows comically high, but she didn’t fight me. Didn’t, apparently, feel inclined to fight.

“I’m damned sorry, sweetheart,” I whispered against her hair. It smelled dean and a little fruity from the shampoo. She put her arms around me and ran her fingernails lightly down my spine.

Oooohhhhh … very nice.

“No apologies, Doctor. I’m off duty—unless you’d care to have an intimate little interrogation session—just the two of us?”

“Nah,” I pretended to think while I pulled the towel open around her body. “Let’s play doctor.”

“I get to be the doctor.”

“Says who?” My voice was muffled by the smooth weight of her breasts. She laughed, a deep, throaty laugh, and pulled me back up for a long, long kiss. I’d almost forgotten how very good it was to kiss her.

“All right, Doctor,” she finally gasped, “it’s your turn to operate. Make it good.”

All modesty aside, it was. Very good. But after we’d eaten our delivered pizza and had our wine and made love again and again, my mind kept skipping over the pleasure and returning to the pain—to Julio Ramos.

I wasn’t able to sleep. I slid out of bed at two a.m., careful not to wake my wife, and threw on a warmup suit and shoes. It was only a short walk through the park to the hospital, and I needed the exercise.

Chapter Two

The Dead

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