Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels) Read Free Page B

in here, dancing with a bunch of actual zombies and I scared you ?”
    “Yes, well...” He turned and waved a hand across the room. “ Dormite ,” he commanded. His zombies shambled off to lean their foreheads against the wall and he went to draw a curtain over them.
    He was walking a fine line with the existing law, keeping zombies. There wasn't a law against it, I supposed, except for all the old abuse of a corpse laws. Whether or not zombies qualified as corpses, though, was a matter still being decided in the courts. In fact, almost everything regarding zombies was still being argued in the courts. Unlike vampires, werewolves and most varieties of the fae, they weren't yet afforded any rights at all. I could have double tapped each and every one of them and walked away clean.
    “Isn't it a little redundant?” I asked, crossing my arms. “Teaching a bunch of zombies to dance to that particular song?”
    He gave me a deer in the headlights look. “Why?”
    “Never mind.”
    “Sorry I'm not ready. It's just that there's this show coming up and it has us all in a bother. I've got less than a month to get them ready. If we win...” He stopped bumbling around with the gurney that held the body bag to smile to himself. “Think of the difference we can make, the attention they can draw to their own cause.”
    “Dancing zombie activists,” I muttered. “What'll they think of next?”
    “Make light if you want but it won't change the fact that their rights are still limited. They might be undead but they're capable of doing a lot of things and deserve the same rights as every other supernatural out there. If it's legal for vampires to buy blood, then why can't we legalize tissue donation for zombies?” He put on a pair of latex gloves and held another pair out to me. “I know what you're thinking. Why dance? Well, they can't very well speak. They'd been too long without a proper feeding for the language center of the brain to be salvaged. The poor idiot that had them kept them in a cage and used them for target practice. Target practice .” He shook his head. “You have no idea how far they've come.”
    I cleared my throat, eager to redirect him to my purpose so I could get out of there. “Eugene? Doctor Ramis?”
    “Doctor Ramis was my father,” he said with a snort. “And I hate my first name. Doc will do just fine.” I started to introduce myself but he cut me off. “You're Judah Black with BSI. Tindall told me to expect you.”
    “You do a lot of autopsies out here, Doc?”
    “Not really. I mean, I did a few in medical school. You have to in order to get your license. Here, I do maybe one or two a year, mostly exsanguination. You know, vampire kills? They get a little overzealous sometimes.”
    I wasn't sure I would call drinking a person's blood to the point of death overzealousness. The casual attitude with which Doc approached death was more than a little unsettling and it made me wonder just how many crimes had slipped by without ever making it to the state authorities.
    He pulled and tugged at the body bag until it was free of the body and then tossed it to the floor. “This is going to be a fun one. The change makes their organs go all screwy until they balance out on the other side. Going to have to do some digging.” He started poking at the body. My stomach twisted. “You okay?”
    “Yeah,” I lied and tried to ignore the cold sweat I'd broken into. “Do you recognize him?”
    Doc took the corpse's chin in his hand and turned his head stiffly from one side to the other. “Nope. Of course, being half changed, making a positive ID is going to be hard. He won't even have the same prints.” He went to a filing cabinet on the other side of the room and pulled out a digital camera, a small produce scale, a tool belt full of sharp things and a zippered pouch that was labeled: phlebotomy kit. He tossed the last item to me and then retrieved a pen and paper that he also passed to me. “I'll