Page 46 of Booked for Murder

“About your serious injuries involving your brain?”

“It’s either laugh or cry. I’m done with crying. I’m disabled. I’ve accepted that. I’m doing my best to beat it, but the hard reality is? It’s entirely possible I can’t. Because of my current rating and the fact I can walk, however painfully and unreliably, I simply don’t qualify for disability. They have some pretty strict rules about who gets a paycheck from the government. I’m one of the lucky ones. The library is willing to accommodate my disability. And don’t you even think about telling me it’s not a disability. It is. Get used to it and accept it, because you’ll have to work with me. I do as much as I can around my circumstances, but I do have limitations. Qualifying for the shooter position will be a problem. I recognize this. If the testing is that stringent, I’ll have to do it without painkillers, too. The boot will let me, but afterwards? I probably won’t be able to walk for a few days.”

I’d hate it, as I’d done my best to graduate to stubbornly refusing a wheelchair. I no longer owned one, as most places in the city just weren’t designed for the physically impaired. Handicap ramps were a dream within a dream, although my branch of the library had a ramp, and if a patron couldn’t access something on another floor due to the building’s ancient design, we fetched it for them and made them as welcome as we could on the first floor.

It usually worked.

I still hated New York’s endless steps.

The silence dragged on, and I slapped my leg with the papers I held. “Shit happens. Life isn’t fair, and it never will be fair. We can just do the best we can and hope it’s enough. Right now, we have a job to do. And if it means I have to cover my disability for a few hours and hope I don’t do irreversible damage to my foot, so be it. I need to qualify as the shooter, and I’m the one most likely to qualify. End of story. If we want to get Mr. Tawnlen in on this, we need to stop goofing off and get to work. We have six murders with all of the victims killed in the same way. The way is complicated, meant to emulate an exsanguinator. They might be hiding an exsanguinator’s work for all we know by adding other abilities into the fray to help cover their tracks. We need to know who did it, why they did it, how they did it, and when they did it. Once we have that information, we have to prove it without a shadow of a doubt—and hope that we can stop them before they strike again. That’ll be the hard part, because until we know the answers to all of those questions, we can’t really begin to guess who might be next.”

“Senator Smithhall, Senator Paulsonelli, and Senator Westonhaus. Representative Halle, Representative Islanney, and Representative Dougherty are possibilities as well, although the past victims have all had closer ties to the Senate rather than the House of Representatives. We don’t know if the attacks have primarily affected the Senate because of general political affiliations or not. The House of Representatives is generally warmer to the idea of major changes to the government in terms of civil rights for those with moderate magical aptitude.” Bradley wrinkled his nose. “President Greene is also a supporter of substantial change to the current political landscape.”

I avoided politics and news as much as my job allowed due to my constant exposure to politicians at work. “Can you elaborate on that somewhat? Frankly, I see politicians at work most days of the week, and I don’t want to take my work home with me.”

“He won the vote because he appealed to the lower ratings, and they outnumber adepts by a significant number. His campaign promised improved rights to those with lower ratings. In some ways, he’s delivered, but in many other ways, all he’s actually done is widen the divide between the various talent groups within our society. He is an adept, but he has a reputation of disapproving of how adepts function in society.”

“Well, we’re assholes and act like the lower talents are there to do what we need or make us money. Many sensible people won’t like that. It’s a very unfair distribution of power. A lot of adepts build their fortunes on the backs of others, and most don’t have the decency to compensate them fairly. That’s been a trait in society long before people realized we used magic in our day-to-day lives.” I shrugged, sifting through my stack of papers until I found the historic timeline of the use of magic. “There are records indicating magic has been used in society even in prehistory. We just didn’t know what it was until recent times. Society has always taken advantage of the people. Society likely always will. But in our current age, adepts rule the roost and gain a lot of resentment from those beneath them. Not all adepts are like that, but so many are that the general population does believe we’re all like that.”

The possibility of rebellion worried me, as in raw numbers those with lower ratings significantly outnumbered adepts.

Adepts, however, could kill thousands with a sweep of a perfectly manicured hand. Had I been drafted, I’d be in the front lines expected to kill people in the hundreds or more. A single burst vessel in the right place in the body killed. I could kill quickly, and I could kill often.

The Hampton family had spared me from the possibility of being drafted. The government had to buy a for life contract for a minimum of three times the lifetime value of the contract, and should death occur, the payment jumped to a staggering twenty times the lifetime value of the contract.

The Hamptons had paid a ridiculous amount of money for my life, and I doubted any one of the Hamptons would sign off on the sale.

Then, even if the government got through the Hamptons as a hurdle, I had to consent to the sale, the one right I had left. I couldn’t realistically sever the contract, but I could refuse a sale of my contract.

An ice cube would thrive in hell long before I agreed to such a transfer.

Bradley sighed. “However much I hate to admit it, you’re right. Politically, everything is a mess. There are people involved on all sides of the fence who aren’t unhappy those men and women died. They took too much of a hardline to represent too narrow of a demographic. As a result, they’ve upset everyone because only a very narrow percentage of people benefit from their work. My family would benefit. Yours wouldn’t. You’d be a target, and your family would be a target. And that sort of divide hurts the nation as a whole. For the record, my family has publicly spoken against the specific bill that likely led to their deaths, so we could become a target, too.”

Ah. With them owning my contract, they could easily be accused of using me to commit the crimes. “But my coma would make it very difficult for them to pin the crime on me.”

“Right. The first killing happened shortly after the accident. You were already being airlifted out west to continue treatments. While I walked, I was under observation here because of concerns about a concussion. I had one, but it was mild. The broken wrist was more dangerous than the concussion according to my primary physician. The broken bone came close to severing a rather important artery.”

I grimaced. While it took some time for a severed artery in the wrist to kill somebody, it was entirely possible for someone to bleed out after a car accident should it go untreated. “That could have ended poorly.”

“Yeah. Mom wasn’t thrilled when she found out you dodged death by a centimeter, and I’d dodged it measured in millimeters. The operation to nudge the bone back to where it belonged without nicking that artery tested the surgeon’s patience and skills. You might find this amusing, but after he patched me up, he complained that the best person for the job was you. He cursed the driver of the other car for a solid hour. I’ve spent my fair share of time cursing him, truth be told.”

I bet he had. “The second killing happened a month and a half later, approximately. At that point in time, was the media aware I’d been involved in the accident and in a coma?”

“No. The media kept you out of it at our family’s request. More accurately, the police didn’t talk to the media; you saved one of their own at the ER, they knew it, and they wanted to keep you out of the limelight.”

I’d done what? “Repeat that?”

“One of your patients in your volunteer ER work was a cop shot in the line of duty while undercover. He would have died if you hadn’t been working on him. The gunshot wounds severely damaged the aorta and one of his lungs, so his blood oxygen levels dived below what the hospital could handle. You stood in for his lungs, allowing the surgeons to work without intubation. That ultimately saved his life, as they were able to crack his chest and operate on all damaged organs at one time while you handled oxygenation.”

Right. That happened a lot with me on duty. I could prevent the organs from dying while the surgeons worked. I could even force blood to flow through severed veins and arteries, working around the surgeons and nurses while they put the victims back together. I struggled to remember the times I’d worked in the ER, discovering there’d been several similar incidents. “Apparently, New York has a few too many cases of damaged aortas and lungs due to gunfire.”

“Well, maybe you don’t remember the man, but his cop friends certainly do. He’s now a chief.”

My eyes widened. “Really?”

“Really.”

Huh. I set my papers aside and scratched my head. “Are you saying I could go knock on this chief’s door and ask questions, and he might give me the time of day?”