Witch Hunt (3 page)

You always thought if you got in trouble working for the OPA, it was going to be when you crossed someone like Black Jack. You thought it was going to be having a curse slipped under your desk or a demon assassin crawling out of the darkest alleys of Helltown.

I’d never thought it would be like this.

THEY GOT THE OTHER guys out of the holding cell before they came for me. I was alone with my view of the drizzly spring day for about an hour. Just me and my thoughts and a determined sparrow shrieking. It was kind of nice. Meditative.

Then life was moving again. There were people at my door and the halls were sliding past me. More desks, lots of guards, locked doors.

They dropped in an interview room.

It was hot in there. It couldn’t have been more than sixty degrees outside, but it was ninety between those four unremarkable walls, and I was immediately sweating. Hard to say if the discomfort was meant to be a technique to loosen me up or if the LAPD just didn’t have a budget for fixing the A/C. Either way, I didn’t like it. I still wanted my phone call.

Instead, they were gonna interrogate me.

You couldn’t call them “interrogations” anymore, though, because we didn’t “interrogate” people. That was too aggressive. That assumed too much guilt. We
interviewed
suspects these days.

Whatever we called it—whatever the LAPD called it—I knew exactly where I was and what was about to happen to me. And I knew it wasn’t going to be fun or pretty.

Back at OPA headquarters, we had several interview rooms. One of them had a silver-reinforced door and silver chains and a silver chair, just in case we crossed paths with a werewolf and needed to “interview” them. One of them was warded against magic, nullifying any witch that might sneak a charm in with her. Another had crosses and the pendant of St. Benedict engraved into the concrete floor—that one was for the demon-possessed perps.

But this place was almost hilariously normal. One-way mirror. Table in the middle with two chairs on one side and a single chair on the other—that was for me. The door wasn’t magicked or silver or anything. I got a good look at the completely normal lock as they guided me inside. They didn’t even have wards to nullify the magic in the poultice I had consumed that morning.

Two detectives came in to talk with me. I wondered how many were on the other side of the window. I wondered if they were scared of how big I was, how messy Erin’s body had been, how little they could find about me with a background check.

“You like to drink, Mr. Hawke?” asked the first detective. Her name was Kearney.

“I’d like a water, yeah,” I said.

That wasn’t what they meant, but they got me a glass of water anyway. Tasted like it had been sitting in a plastic jug for months.

“You drank a lot last night,” Kearney went on. She was an intense woman with a square jaw and no waistline. Fists clenched on top of the table. “When we tested you this afternoon, your blood alcohol level was still above legal limits for driving.”

I didn’t want to talk about my drinking habits. I didn’t
have
drinking habits.

“I need my phone call,” I said again. Felt like I’d been saying nothing else since they’d brought me here.

“Where do you work?” asked the other detective, Ramirez. He was a skinny man with gray hair.

I didn’t even have to think about the fake answer. It was habit now. “I work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

They didn’t look surprised by that answer, so someone had already found my fake FBI badge.

“What do you do for the FBI, exactly?”

“It’s classified.” So much more classified than they could ever know. They lived in a small world, an ordinary world. They didn’t know anything.

Identifying myself as an FBI agent was usually enough to get me out of any degree of trouble. It didn’t work that day. Not after Erin, and not with Kearney shooting daggers out of her eyeballs at me. “I’m sure that must be stressful,” she said. “Working for the FBI, doing secret work. You have to unwind somehow. Who can blame you?”

I kept my mouth shut.

“How often do you think you go to the bar called The Olive Pit? Three times a week, four times? Every day? Just on Fridays? How much does it take to help you unwind, Mr. Hawke?”

I knew this routine. I’d done it a few times myself. They were trying to establish a narrative. They would try to set me up as a woman-beating alcoholic, tell me I got piss-drunk and killed Erin, try to sneak into it sideways so that I wouldn’t even realize I was agreeing until I’d signed the confession. You’d be surprised how easily people would admit guilt when they thought someone understood them.

But I wasn’t going to give them anything. They knew that I could ask for a lawyer at any minute and the interview would come to an end.

Thing is, I didn’t want my lawyer. I had nothing to defend.

I wanted the men in black suits to roll in here and erase me.

“Who does the Glock belong to?” I asked Kearney, addressing her directly. “Did you check the serial numbers?”

“Don’t you think it’s kind of strange to have a gun on your coffee table and no idea whom it belongs to?”

“Yeah, I sure do,” I said.

“You have a gun safe in your apartment.”

And I had a gun in it, too. A Desert Eagle. They wouldn’t know that, though, because I’d warded the safe with the help of some of the OPA’s best witches, and nobody could open it but me. Seeing the stuff in there would have made Kearney grow chest hair.

“I use it for my china collection.” I didn’t smile when I said it.

Disbelief was etched all over their faces, but they didn’t challenge me on it. Why bother pushing? They thought they had all day. Really, they only had until Suzy came in with her backup.

I hoped Suzy was close.

“A heavy-drinking FBI agent with a china collection,” Kearney said.

“I like breaking stereotypes.”

“Tell me about how you got the scratches on your arms.” The order came rapid-fire, almost talking over me. Trying to startle me into answering.

I turned my arms over so I could look at them. They had swabbed the scratches when I’d first arrived. Took a DNA sample out of my mouth and a vial of blood, too. The scratches had hurt the most. They were still tender.

I didn’t have an answer for them, and I wouldn’t have given it if I did.

“How long have you been thinking about killing Erin Karwell?” asked Kearney.

I slammed my fists on the table. I knew better, but I couldn’t help it. “I didn’t kill Erin.”

“Relax, Agent Hawke,” Ramirez said. “It seems like you’ve got a lot of pent-up aggression.”

Yeah, I was feeding right into the damn narrative.

The way he said “agent,” it sounded like he was referring to a piece of shit stuck to the sole of his shoe. He didn’t think much of federal agents, did he?

The pissing contest between local and federal government was an eternal battle. I’d seen it play out in a dozen different states—any time that I had to cooperate with the cops and deal with all the bullshit that followed.

They didn’t like having the feds fuck with their business, and they were taking it out on me.

It had to be that because there was no way anyone would really believe I’d kill a woman.

Problem was, I wasn’t who they thought I was. And I shouldn’t have even been there.

Where the hell was Suzy?

Kearney opened her mouth to ask another question, but I was tired of questions.

“I want my lawyer,” I said.

Interview over.

I DIDN’T CALL MY lawyer. I didn’t even
have
a lawyer. Who needed one when the OPA had the best legal department that taxpayer dollars could buy?

Instead, I called Suzy. I was ticked off when she was at her desk to answer it. I’d been imagining her leading the cavalry to come and save me, riding in on her metaphoric white horse, and instead she was in our damn cubicle.

“Cèsar. It’s you.” Her tone didn’t inspire confidence.

I took a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure Kearney wasn’t on my ass. She was at the nearby desk filling out paperwork. Ramirez was watching me, eyes wary, patiently watchful, but too distant to hear a whisper.

I twisted my wrists, trying to get comfortable with the phone. My wrists were cuffed again and I was getting real sick of it. “What’s going on, Suzy? Why am I still here?”

It took her a long time to answer.

“I’m sorry, Cèsar.”

My heart sank all the way down to my sneakers. Her tone was enough to tell me that the OPA wasn’t coming. No men in black to make me disappear. Nobody to say that I was innocent, this had all been a misunderstanding, their files were forfeit.

“Do you have guys at my apartment? Are they investigating?”

“Yeah. We’ve gotten involved, but the Union is handling the investigation.”

Bad sign. Union procedure was a secret, even to me, but they only got called in when the shit had hit the fan more than usual. “And?”

A sigh. “It looks bad. Real bad.”

“You know I didn’t do this, Suzy.”

“It doesn’t matter what I know. It matters what everyone else thinks. Look, I can hook you up with my lawyer. He’s a good guy. He’s done criminal law before, and if anyone can get you out of there on bail—”

“I don’t need a fucking lawyer!”

That part I’d said too loud. Kearney was staring at me. Ramirez was moving in.

“I’m sorry, Cèsar,” Suzy said again. I was real sick of hearing those words. I didn’t think I could hear them again without losing it.

The police station was so loud, so crowded. I was trapped in a sea of desks and concrete walls. Erin was still reaching for me with her cracked manicure, gazing at my ceiling with a look of postmortem horror, and I could smell that meaty scent of blood.

I didn’t even feel it when Ramirez took the phone from me and hung it up.

The Office of Preternatural Affairs thought I was guilty and they were shaking me loose before I dragged them down with me.

I was on my own.

The holding cell was a temporary thing. Wouldn’t be long at all before I got face time in front of a judge and found myself in real deep shit—an actual jail, not a room with bars in the back of a police station.

I still wasn’t worried about being found guilty. I hadn’t killed Erin and the evidence would prove it. It wasn’t my Glock on the table—it wouldn’t even have my fingerprints on it. Plus, there were security cameras around the apartment complex.

We would find out that someone had come home with us. It would prove that I had struggled with the attacker, making the wreckage in my living room and kitchen. And then they would be able to prove that the attacker had knocked me out and shot Erin.

It was the only story that made sense. The only possible explanation.

But they would determine all of that after I’d been in jail for months. After I’d had a lawyer assigned to me and been dragged over the coals in a long trial.

By that time, my life would already be ruined. The killer long gone.

It wouldn’t be any justice for Erin.

No, I wasn’t going on trial. I wasn’t following the Bloody Douchebag Gang into prison. It wasn’t happening.

Someone had messed with Erin—had messed with
me
—and I was going to find out who.

That was the decision I’d come to after five minutes of pacing in the holding cell. It only took a split second after that to decide how I’d escape.

You see, I’d been able to escape this whole time. But Suzy had asked me to cooperate, so I had been cooperating. Why not? Someone had been going to save me anyway.

But since the OPA thought I was guilty too, there was no point in sticking around. There was only one person that could prove my innocence, and that guy was me. I wouldn’t be able to do it if I was stuck behind bars.

I climbed up on the bench. It had been bolted to the wall so that it couldn’t be used as a weapon. It wasn’t directly below the narrow barred window, but it was only a foot or two to the right, and I could reach it. I had long arms. And not just long—but muscular.

Three days a week at the gym hadn’t built me up like a bear. I mostly went to do the cardio machines. A few hours on the treadmill to help make sure that I could catch a suspect on foot.

What had given me these insane shoulders were the foul-tasting poultices that I chewed every morning, the potions brewed on my stovetop in Walmart cookware, and the charms I kept hidden in my gun safe.

I wasn’t a normal human. Not like these cops were, and not like the people they usually arrested were.

They weren’t ready for someone like me.

My hands tightened on the bars. My forearms flexed and the muscles bulged like steel cable under the skin. The scratches from wrist to elbow twisted and distorted. Magic surged in my veins.

Crunch
.

I was holding the window in my hands. Pulled it free of the brick, steel frame and all. I dropped it to the bench and didn’t look behind me. I knew the cops were coming—that hadn’t been a quiet noise. I could hear them shouting, and I had about three seconds before someone freaked out and shot me in the back.

Hauling myself into the window frame, I wriggled my shoulders through. They almost got stuck, like a snake that had eaten a mouse too big for its maw. But once I had that part out, the rest of me was no problem. It was an easy drop to the ground outside.

I was in a parking lot. It was raining hard. There were police cruisers around—a lot of police cruisers. The fence was twice my height and topped with barbed wire.

It only took a second for a skull-shattering alarm to go off.

Jesus, my hangover wasn’t loving that.

Three long strides and I’d reached the fence. Dug my fingers into the chain-link, found a toehold, started climbing. Domingo would be proud to see how fast I moved.

At the joint where the fence formed a right angle, there were two posts right next to each other without barbed wire on top. Good handholds. Nothing sharp that could cut me open.

I leveraged myself over the top and dropped onto the street.

The alarm had gone off quickly, but the men who were following me were slow, sluggish humans, unprepared for a magically juiced witch on the run. I wondered what they thought of what they saw—how quickly I had crossed the parking lot and scaled the fence, how little the fall to the other side had fazed me. I wonder if they might have been thinking that something supernatural had been going on or if they just thought I was on speed or something.