Dead Beat

"Must be tough," I said cautiously.

He shook his head. "I can handle it. But a lot of people don’t. And if it looks like you’re starting to crack under the pressure, they’ll pull you out. Word gets around that I’m telling fairy tales about things I’ve seen, they’ll have me on psychiatric disability by tomorrow." He turned to go.

"Wait," I said. I touched his arm lightly. I didn’t grab him. You don’t go unexpectedly grabbing former marines if you want your fingers to stay in the same shape. "Look, Mr. Lamar. I just want to hear about it. I’m not going to repeat it to anyone. I’m not a reporter or-"

He paused. "You’re the wizard," he said. "Saw you on Larry Fowler once. People say you’re crazy."

"Yeah," I said. "So it isn’t as if they’d believe me, even if I did talk about you. Which I won’t."

"You’re the one they arrested in the nursery a few years back," he said. "You broke in during a blackout. They found you in the middle of a wrecked room with all those babies."

I took a deep breath. "Yeah."

Lamar was silent for a second. Then he said, "You know that the year before, the SIDS rate there was the highest in the nation? They averaged one case every ten days. No one could explain it."

"I didn’t know that," I said.

"Since they arrested you there, they haven’t lost one," he said. He turned back to me. "You did something."

"Yeah. Do you like ghost stories?"

He snorted out a breath through his nose. "I don’t like any of this crap, man. Why do you want me to tell you what I saw?"

"Because what you know might help me keep more people from getting hurt."

He nodded, frowning. "All right," he said after a moment. "But I’m not saying this right now. You understand me? I’m not going to say this again. To anyone. Only reason I’ll tell you is that you helped those babies."

I nodded.

He sat down on the edge of the gurney. "We got the call around midnight. Headed over to Wacker. The cops were there already. Found this guy on the street, all busted up. Two hits in the chest and two in the abdomen. He was bleeding bad."

I nodded, listening.

"We tried to stabilize him. But there wasn’t much point to it. Simmons and me both knew that. But we tried. It’s what you do, you know? He was awake for it. Scared as hell. Screaming some. Kept begging us not to let him die. Said he had a little girl to look after."

"What happened?"

"He died," Lamar said, his voice flat. "I’ve seen it before. Here in town. In action while I was in the corps. You get to where you can recognize death when he comes knocking." He rubbed his large, rather slender hands together. "We tried to resuscitate, but he was gone. That’s when it happened."

"Go on."

"This woman shows up. I don’t know from where. We just looked up and she was standing over us looking down."

I leaned forward. "What did she look like?"

"I don’t know," Lamar answered. "She was… like, wearing this costume, right? Like those people at Renaissance fairs. Big old black robe with a hood over her head. I didn’t see much of her face. Just her chin and her throat. She was white."

"What did you do?"

"I figured she was a nut. You get them a lot this time of year. Or maybe going to a costume party or something. Hell, it’s almost Halloween. She looks at me and tells me to back up and let her help him."

How many women in a black hooded robe could have been running around town last night? Kumori. That would have been maybe forty-five minutes or an hour before I saw her at Bock’s.

Lamar peered at my face. "You know her," he said.

"Not personally. But yeah. What did she do?"

His face grew more remote. "She knelt down over him. Like, straddling the stretcher. Then she leaned down. The robe and the hood fell over them both, right. Like, I couldn’t see what she was doing." He licked his lips. "And it got cold. I mean, ice started forming on the sidewalk and the stretcher and on our truck. I swear to you, it happened."

"I believe it," I said.

"And the victim all of a sudden starts coughing. Trying to scream. I mean, it wasn’t like the wounds were gone, but… I don’t know how to describe it. He was holding on." His face twisted with a sickened expression. "He was in agony, and he was stable. It was like… like he wasn’t being allowed to die.

"So the woman stands up. She tells us we’ve got less than an hour to save him. And then she’s gone. Like, poof, gone. Like she was all in my imagination."

I shook my head. "Then?"

"We get him brought in. The docs patched him up and got fresh blood into him. He passed out about an hour later. But he made it."

Lamar was silent for a long moment.

"That couldn’t have happened," he said then. "I mean, I’ve seen people pull through some bad stuff. But not like that. He should have been dead. Everything I know tells me so. But he kept going."

"Sometimes miracles happen," I said quietly.

He shuddered. "This wasn’t a miracle. There wasn’t any angel choir singing. My skin tried to crawl away and hide." He shook his head. "I don’t want to think about it."

"What about your partner?" I asked.

"He drank himself under the table twenty minutes after our shift ended. Hell, only reason I wasn’t with him was that I was teaching a CPR class this morning." He looked at me. "That help?"

"It might," I said. "Thank you."

"Sure."

"What are you going to do now?" I asked.

"Gonna go find my own table." Lamar stood up and said, "Good luck, man."

"Thanks."

The big man left, and while I got my prescriptions and filled out the last forms, I thought about what he’d had to say. I got the prescriptions filled at the hospital pharmacy, called a cab, and told him to take me to Mike’s to pick up the Blue Beetle.

I sat in the backseat with my eyes closed and thought about what I’d learned. Kumori had saved the gunshot victim’s life. If everything Lamar had said was accurate, it meant that she had gone out of her way to do it. And whatever she’d done, it had been an extremely difficult working to leave a mystic impression as intense as it did. That might explain why Kumori had done very little during the altercation with Cowl. I had expected her to be nearly as strong as her partner, but when she tried to take the book from me, her power hadn’t been stronger than my own muscles and limbs.

But the Kemmler Alumni Association was in town with some vicious competition in mind. Why would Kumori have expended her strength for a stranger, rather than saving it for battling rival necromancers? Could the shooting victim have been important to her plans in some way?