“How is this going to save them from a spell?” Lila asked.
“It’s supposed to be imbued with a counterspell that protects from most magic or psychic interference.”
“It doesn’t feel like an enchanted or holy item, I mean I don’t feel any power coming off the gear,” I said.
“Me either, but it’s like most equipment—you won’t know until it gets tested in the field.”
I looked at the hallway full of the suited evidence techs, police, new hospital staff that I didn’t know on sight. “Glad the elevators are working again,” I said.
He glanced back at some of the officers in our own unit, frowning. “Yeah, because not everyone made it up the stairs in time for the action. Maybe I should put through mandatory cardio as a prerequisite for being on our unit.”
I shrugged without commenting just in case some of my fellow officers were listening. They gave me enough shit about how much I worked out. If it was work out or be home alone in the small apartment without my family . . . the gym was a lot less lonely.
Charleston flashed a grin at me and patted my back like we were on a sports team and I’d scored a point. “You’re already doing more cardio than I am, Havoc, so not your problem.”
Lila came over and said, “He hangs out with Richardson too much.”
“Yeah, Havoc, way to overachieve, having one of the SWAT guys as your workout partner,” Detective Carlos Antero said. He damn near waddled over to us with his gut leading the way.
“He wasn’t in SWAT when we started working out together,” I said. In my head, I thought Hash, short for Hashim, had wanted a workout partner to help him get in shape to make SWAT, and I was freshly separated. Working out with Hash had saved my sanity and gotten him into SWAT. Now I was working out with him and some of the other SWAT guys. I was in the best shape of my life, better than in the army. I was also depressed and homesick in a way I hadn’t been even on deployment in the army.
“You said you were working out with Richardson until he made SWAT,” Lila said.
“I like the workout,” I said.
“You’re making us look bad, Havoc,” Carlos said.
“You give us old guys a bad rep, Antero,” Charleston said, patting his own flat abs.
Carlos just grinned and rubbed his stomach in a way that was almost sexual. “My Carla knows how to cook for a man, it’s one of the reasons I married her.”
“I think she’s trying to feed you into a heart attack, so she gets your life insurance and then she can marry some young Hispanic stud,” Lila said.
“She eats as much as I do, but she’s still my colibrí.”
I knew colibrí was Spanish for hummingbird because Carlos called his wife that more than her real name. She was still fit and trim and looked twenty years younger than he did. She was also a Pilates and yoga instructor at the gym she co-owned with her twin sister. They both kept trying to fix me up with unmarried nieces and cousins. They considered being separated a prelude to divorce, so why wait? I hadn’t told anyone at work that Reggie had said we should both try dating other people; it would have made them work even harder to find me someone.
“Did you find Cookson’s body yet?” I asked.
The smiles left everyone’s faces, which meant whatever they’d found was bad. It was just a matter of how bad; maybe I’d be rethinking whether I preferred the emotional violence of Kate’s pain or the physical violence of the fight scene once I saw what was left of him.
“Yes and no,” Charleston said at last.
I just looked at him and then the others. Carlos said, “I’m going to go finish questioning the uni that could see through angel magic.”
“I already did that,” Lila said.
He shuddered as he turned away.
“I thought you were tougher than this, Carlos,” Lila said to his back, which was four times as wide as her slender form.
“I got nothing to prove anymore, Lila. Games like that are for the young guys—sorry, young people. I saw it once, that was enough.”
“Scaredy-cat,” she said.
“Ball-busting bitch,” he said, but kept walking.
She opened her mouth to say more, but Charleston said, “That’s enough, Bridges, you don’t have kids yet.”
She looked up at him. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“The boy was the same age as Carlos’s youngest.”
“The one who . . .”
He nodded.
“Jeez, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize the age thing.”
“Like I said, Bridges, you don’t have kids yet, and Havoc doesn’t have any teenagers. You’ve got to have grown-ass kids to understand that they never stop being your little boy, and you never stop wanting to protect them just like you did when they were babies.”
I swallowed hard. “Connery is only three, I thought it got better as they got older.”
“It gets better in some ways, harder in others as they get older, and teenagers through their twenties is a minefield I don’t envy any parent.”
“I thought eighteen and they were grown-ups,” I said.
Charleston laughed.
“I am never having children,” Lila said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The skin fragments were so thin they were like cloudy plastic that you could see shadows through. “Are you sure that this is human skin?” I asked.
Charleston held the piece delicately between his gloved fingertips. You’d think someone with fingers that thick would be clumsy, but his hands were just as delicate as they had been when he was catching footballs in the NFL.
“There’s a piece that they already bagged and tagged that’s got what’s left of the tattoo from his hip. DNA will tell us for sure that it’s Cookson, but the nurses remember the tattoo, and it’s distinctive.”
“What was it, the tattoo, I mean?”
“The usual devil shit,” Lila said.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
Charleston answered, “Upside-down pentagram with a devil-goat-head-looking thing above it. Terrible tattoo, the kind you’ll cover up in a few years if you can find someone willing to try.”
“At least it was small, that’s an easier cover-up than a big one,” Lila said.
“I don’t think he has to worry about bad ink now,” I said, staring at the piece of skin.
“Yeah, I guess not,” Lila said, and she looked sad now, as if the cocky, wisecracking mask had slipped.
“Possessed individuals do not turn into full demon form, and they sure as hell don’t shed their skins like a damn snake,” Charleston said.
“His skin was reddish in the hallway, like whoever’s imagination had turned him into the movie demon, so why does the skin left behind look like it was just Cookson’s body in this room?” I asked.
“Excellent question,” Charleston said.
“Could it have been a really good illusion like most demonic powers?” Lila asked.
“Illusion can make you hurt yourself, or somebody else hurt you, but it can’t hurt you,” Charleston said.
One of the techs came up gloved and covered head to foot in protective gear. “We need that now, Lieutenant.”