“You don’t have a warrant of execution, so you’ve lost your chance to shoot me in the head.”

“Oh, Max, you should know that when it comes to people using magic to kill people, I’ll get another chance at blowing your head off. But if you tell us how to free Estrella’s soul, to give her peace, maybe they won’t give me a warrant for you. Judges still don’t like putting out execution warrants on humans.”

“I want her afraid. I want her to know what is happening to her.”

“She doesn’t believe she’s a zombie, Max. She doesn’t really know what’s happening to her, does she?”

“Maximiliano,” he said.

“What?” Hudson asked.

“My name is Maximiliano.” He wasn’t having any trouble breathing, though he had three bullet holes in his chest.

“Okay, Maximiliano, I’ll play,” I said. “How do we free her soul?”

“You’ll never find what contains her soul, and even if you do, you won’t know how to free her.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“We can just sit here and watch you bleed out,” I said. Actually, technically, police weren’t allowed to do that. They could triage the victims over the perpetrators, but they had to give medical aid where needed. Ironically, if the first bullet killed the bad guy, then it was done, but if you just wounded him you could go from trying to kill him, to having to try to save his life. Sometimes the rules for regular cops were just too confusing for me.

“I’ll still be alive when the ambulance gets here,” he said.

I hunkered in a little closer to him, my boots in his blood. The last time I’d seen another animator that could heal like a zombie, or a vampire, he’d had a spell helping him. “What have you done to yourself, Maximiliano? Am I going to find a gris-gris on you somewhere?”

His eyes widened just a touch, his shoulders reacting to it.

“What’s a gris-gris?” Hudson asked.

“It’ll be something he wears, so probably a bracelet, or armband. It’ll never come off, because it needs to touch his skin at all times to work, doesn’t it, Maximiliano?”

He was watching me now, and not nearly as happy with himself.

“It’s a spell, and it’s what let him take three bullets to the chest and keep on ticking. But they’ll cut your clothes and jewelry off at the emergency room, so they can treat your wounds. What happens when they cut the gris-gris off, Max?”

“Maximiliano, and you will stop them from cutting it off of me, because you know it is keeping me alive. It would be the same as shooting me in the head now that I am handcuffed and no longer a danger to anyone.”

He was right, unfortunately, but I still didn’t hear the second ambulance so we had time to play with him. If I played well enough maybe he’d help us stop the zombie that was sobbing behind us.

I drew one of the smaller silver-edged blades from a wrist sheath.

“What are you going to do, Blake?” Hudson asked.

“Search him for magic. If he has a gris-gris to help heal himself, he could have other things on him that could harm us.”

“We patted him down,” Hill said.

“Magic can hide better than a gun,” I said. I moved closer to him, and he started struggling so that Hill and Montague had to kneel down and hold him for me. Sutton finally knelt on his legs, because Max didn’t want me near him with the knife. There had to be more than just the gris-gris for him to be this upset, or there had to be something about the gris-gris that he didn’t want me to see. Either way, I was going to search him for dangerous magical objects, and I was going to make it thorough.

“Hold him still, boys, I wouldn’t want to cut him by accident.” I started at the shoulder of his shirt, along the seam. I wanted his sleeves off first. I kept my blades sharp; it didn’t take much to slice through the seams and start peeling down the cloth to expose the smooth skin of his arms. He kept trying to move, but he had three large men sitting on him who knew how to subdue and hold someone. His right arm was clean, no jewelry at all.

I duck walked to his left side and he tried to struggle harder. They leaned on him more, forcing his face down into the pool of his own blood. He was afraid now. Why? I couldn’t cut it off him now that we all knew it was helping keep him alive; he was right about that. It would take weeks or longer of court hearings to get permission to take the gris-gris off him, and by that time his body would have healed enough that he might not die when it was removed, unfortunately. But he knew that, so why was he afraid? Was there something else on him that he didn’t want us to see?

I peeled his left sleeve down and there it was on his upper arm, snugged in tight so it dimpled his flesh. “That’s a gris-gris. They don’t have to be armbands. A lot of them are small bags on a cord, but for magic that keeps you this alive when you’re this hurt, you’ll want it attached to you.”

I put up my knife and started to fish for the small flashlight I kept in one of the many pockets on the tac pants. Most of them held extra ammo, but not all of them. Hudson figured out what I was doing and hunkered down beside me with his own flashlight.

It was a band made of black hair woven together. I looked at his short black hair. It wasn’t long enough to do this. Then the light picked up a strand of blond hair, and paler brown, and another shade of brown, and another blond. I touched Hudson’s wrist and used it to move the light. There was hair to match every zombie I’d seen on the videos.

“You son of a bitch,” I said.

“What is it, Blake?” Sutton asked.

“The smaller pieces of hair woven around the main band match all the zombies on the sex tapes. DNA will double-check that it belongs to all his victims, but the main hair is going to be Estrella’s, isn’t it, you fucking son of a bitch?”

He was quiet now.

“Not so chatty now, are you, Max?”

“I am Maximiliano,” he said, though his voice was strained, because Hill was forcing his face down into the grass and blood.

“I don’t care if you’re Mother Teresa, you are going to die for this.”

“I took hair from them, that doesn’t prove I killed anyone.”

“The hair doesn’t, but a few voodoo expert witnesses, and all the practitioners of your faith will tell the truth, Max. They won’t want to be anywhere near this kind of soul debt to the loa, or whatever else you invoked to do this piece of evil shit.”

“Tell us what you see, Blake,” Hudson said.

“He didn’t tell us we wouldn’t find the bottle that held Estrella’s soul. He said I’d never find what contains her soul, and if I did, I wouldn’t know how to free her.”

“What’s the significance?” Hill asked.

“Yeah, I don’t understand,” Montague said.

“He’s the bottle.”

“What?” Montague asked.

“He’s tied Estrella’s soul to that gris-gris and him.”

“That’s not possible,” Maximiliano said. “Everyone will tell you it’s not possible.”

“They will, but you figured it out anyway, didn’t you, you evil piece of shit?”