Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (2 page)

“Call in all the favors you need
to,” he said. “But none from skeeters. This job is humans only. None of
your buddies in the Area Governor’s Office, no skeeter cops. Skeeters find
out what’s going on, things will get out of hand real goddamn
quick.”

I stood. “Look, you want me to do
this, you can’t tie my...” I stopped when I saw the blood starting to pool
beside his foot. His left pants leg was soaked with it. “You’re bleeding on
my office floor.”

Red smiled thinly. “Yeah. I got a
leak I need to get plugged. This was more important.” He paused. “I’ll tell
you again. Humans only. You bring the skeeters into this, you’re only going
to trigger what I’m trying to prevent.”

“Maybe you ought to leave before
you die here.”

“Do we have a deal?”

“I’ll see what I can
do.”

“Six days,” he said. “Midnight on
the 24
^th
is the end of the line. If Schleu is still alive at
12:01, get in your Jeep and drive.”

“Drive where?”

“Anyplace but here.” He looked
down. “Your money’s there. Keep the change.” He looked up at me and smiled.
“Sorry about the blood, but it’ll be easier to clean up than the brains you
mentioned earlier.”

He was silent for moment, then
said, “I’ll see you around, Welles.”

As he turned to the door, I said,
“So when the job’s done, how do I let you know?”

“I’ll know,” he said, his back to
me. He opened the door and went out, closing it behind him.

I turned and went to the window
behind my desk. It looked out mostly to the northwest, at Expedition
Avenue, Hennessy Street, Gibson Street and the west side of Expedition
Square. But if I looked down to the right, I could just see the sidewalk in
front of the Triangle Building, where we had our offices.

Red didn’t look like he was in
shape to do anything fancy like use a fire escape. When he left the
building, he’d be going out the front door.

There was a white panel van idling
on Hennessy in front of the building, the exhaust visible in the cold
December air. I figured that was his ride.

Behind me, the office door opened.
“Charlie?” Cynthia said. She paused. “God, is that blood all over the
floor?”

“Yeah,” I said, my eyes still on
the sidewalk below. “Would you please get some paper towels? I’ll clean it
up in just a minute.”

The door closed. I continued to
look down.

About a minute later, Red stepped
onto the sidewalk, a guy in a black leather jacket beside him, holding
Red’s arm. I couldn’t see his face. As they approached the white van, the
side door opened and the man inside hopped out. His face I saw and
recognized. Red had called him Billy the last time we’d met.

The two of them helped Red into the
van and climbed in behind him, closing the door. I tried to get a look at
the license plate, but they made the quick right off Hennessy onto Second,
on the other side of the building.

The door opened again and I turned.
Cynthia had a roll of paper towels in her hand. “I’ll get this,” she
said.

As she went down on her knees and
began to sop up the blood on the wooden floor, I watched her. Cynthia
DiPierro. Mid-thirties, jet black hair that she always wore short, pretty
face. And scary thin. She’d need to put on ten or fifteen pounds to be just
plain thin, not scary thin.

Part of it was probably natural. I
hadn’t known her before the war, and I doubt she’d ever been beefy. But she
was a bundle of nerves. That tends to keep weight off.

Her husband, Jerry, had joined one
of the neighborhood militias that went out one night to man the barricades,
towards the end, before the city fell to the Vees surging in. Holding the
line was a nice thought. But a couple of hundred Vees rushing twenty guys
with rifles and shotguns behind a row of cars was never going to end well.
Those who fought either died or were turned.

Jerry was turned. And before the
sun came up at the end of that night, he came home for his wife.

Cynthia managed to keep him out of
their apartment and fled the next morning. Eventually she ended up in an
internment camp, like all of us on the losing side. And like most, she
returned to the city and tried to put her life back together when they
released us.

But she was never quite right after
that. She imagined Jerry down on the street or peering in at her through
her barred windows. While we were investigating Joshua’s murder, Tiffany
Takeda, commander of the Security Force, had Jerry DiPierro transferred to
Montana. She felt that it would promote harmony in the office while we
hunted for Joshua’s killer. It helped, but Cynthia was still pretty twitchy
when the sun went down.

Miss Takeda. Her assistance on this
case would make it a whole lot easier, but for the moment, I’d follow Red’s
request to keep Vees out of it.

“What’s in the envelope?” Cynthia
asked.

“Money,” I said. “Ten thousand
bucks. Payment for a case we’re starting today.”

“But we’re closed for the next two
weeks,” she said.

She was right. From the beginning,
we’d always shut down for two weeks in December. From a week before
Christmas to New Years Day. It gave Cynthia and Sara, the night secretary,
their paid vacation for the year. It gave Joshua the opportunity to enjoy
his Christmas Eve celebration. It gave me a lot of nothing. No living
family. A handful of close friends. I usually worked through if we had any
cases that didn’t require office support.

I figured this job would play out
on the street. I wouldn’t need the secretaries or Harvey Browne, the latest
in a string of investigator trainees sent to replace Joshua by Phillip
Bain, the Deputy Area Governor.

Bain had been Joshua’s bloodfather,
the Vee who’d turned Joshua. His bloodson’s death had brought us together
and he’d saved my neck when corrupt cops tried to pin Joshua’s murder on
me. But there was a price. And part of that price was that I train rookie
investigators for Bain. Browne was number ten.

In the beginning, the investigators
had come and gone, some barely staying a month before Bain replaced them
with somebody else. But the revolving door had slowed over the past five
months, and Brownie, as he liked to be called, had been occupying Joshua’s
desk for almost three months now.

He was a good detective, with some
experience working for a big security company before the war as a fraud
investigator. After six weeks of training, I was comfortable turning him
loose to work the night cases without supervision. Unfortunately, there was
no place for Brownie on this case. As Red had said, no skeeters.

“Yeah, we’re closed. You’ll get
your vacation. I’ll fly solo on this one. It’s just a missing person case,
and it’ll be solved through legwork.”

“I didn’t like that man,” she said,
finishing up with the blood on the floor. “Or his friend who stayed out
there with me while he talked to you.”

“Not much there to like,” I said.
“But a case is a case, and somebody has to pay the bills so you can take
two relaxing weeks off.”

Cynthia doesn’t have much of a
sense of humor, and she didn’t appreciate the comment. She pursed her lips
and squinted at the floor as she dabbed up the last few drops of
blood.

“I’m just kidding with you,
Cynthia” I said. “You’ve earned your vacation. Anyway, this job will be
over in a week or less.” If it took longer, Armageddon.

“You should just be happy that you
have a hardwood floor in here,” Cynthia said. “If it was carpet, you’d
never get this blood out.”

“I’m sure you’d find a way,” I said
with a grin.

She stood and stared at me. She
wasn’t smiling. “Do you need anything else or can I go back to my
desk?”

“Thank you for the help, Cynthia,”
I said.

She nodded and retreated to the
front office, closing the door behind her.

I went around the desk and walked
to where the envelope lay on the floor. There were a couple of spots of
blood soaking into one corner.

As I bent to pick it up, I noticed
something written on the bottom of the envelope in small letters. East
side. Did it mean something, a hint from Red about where to start my search
for the woman, or was he just reusing an envelope.

I opened it and rifled through the
bills. Some hundreds, a couple of fifties, but mostly twenties. I could
have counted it, but why bother. At a glance, there was plenty to cover the
six days I had to find her.

When I got back to my desk, I
dropped the envelope in a drawer and locked it. I’d stick it in the bank
later. For now, I had to figure out how I was going to find a woman I knew
nothing about in a city of nearly half a million.

The east side might be one place to
start.

Uptown was always the nicest place
to live in the city. I’d scrimped and saved to get a little one-bedroom
condo uptown. It was in a nice building, probably the best apartment I ever
lived in. Doorman, concierge to handle dry cleaning and get you a cab if
you needed one, in-building free laundromat. I sometimes wonder if the Vee
who moved in while I was in the internment camp enjoys the amenities as
much as I did.

Midtown is the commercial district.
Hotels, restaurants, office buildings. When river traffic brought in most
of the goods, downtown had been a busy commercial area as well, but by the
time I moved to town, river traffic had long ago been replaced by
interstate highways and downtown was the working class part of the city. It
still was.

West side had it’s share of working
class residents too, but it was mostly just square miles of warehouses ,
some empty, most still in use. The trucks and boxcars coming into the city
still stored their goods in the west side warehouses for distribution to
the rest of town.

And then there’s the east
side.

In my last years in the police
department, before the war kept me from the gold detective badge I wanted,
I’d worked on the east side. Plainclothes with the Robbery-Homicide squad
in the 83
^rd
Street Station.

We were probably the busiest
Robbery-Homicide squad in the city. The east side of town was, as they say,
a concrete jungle. And it hadn’t changed. If I didn’t want to be found, I’d
find a flop on the east side.

Drab rows of apartment buildings
were already making the transition to slum by the time I transferred from
the Tremont Avenue station to 83
^rd
Street. Occupied by new
arrivals in the city, immigrants, and the people who preyed on them. And
sometimes on each other. East side street cops learned early that you had
to be ready to use your fists and occasionally your gun to keep the
peace.

We were cocky on the east side. The
worst street hoods worked the east side, and we worked them. In other parts
of town, cops might occasionally run up against somebody crazy enough to
draw down on a police officer. On the east side, it was a weekly event.
Sometimes twice a week.

In 83
^rd
Street
Robbery-Homicide, we called the squadroom Fort Cunningham, in honor of
Captain Vince Cunningham, the Robbery-Homicide skipper. Cunningham had
stayed behind to hold the fort alone when he kicked us loose to make a
break for it, just before the city was overrun. Tough bastard. He’d spent
his entire career on the east side. He’d faced the worst criminals in the
worst part of town. He wasn’t going to run from a bunch of
bloodsuckers.

I still have friends at Eastside
District Station, and they might be able to provide some help finding this
woman. But I wouldn’t get anywhere without knowing at least something about
her.

The police department has an
Intelligence Squad, and I’d been told that they kept an ear to the ground
when it came to the Resistance. Red was Resistance. From the way he’d
talked, there was a good chance the woman, Katarina whatever, was also
somehow connected to the Resistance.

It might be worthwhile to tap into
what the Intelligence Squad knew. And fortunately, I had a hook.

I picked up the phone and dialed
police headquarters at Central Station. When the operator answered, I said,
“Chief Northport, please. Tell him it’s Charlie Welles.”

Chapter
Two

Central District Station is
big.

That’s not really surprising, since
it houses both the police station for Central District and Metro Police
Headquarters. But the sheer scale of it is. It’s a windowless five-story
beige concrete box that fills a full square city block, the building taking
up about two-thirds of the space, a parking and impound lot taking up the
rest.

While the city’s humans were in
internment camps after the war, the Vees spent the time remaking the halls
of power in their own image. They had a top-down, authoritarian structure
in their society, and so everything from the Sanitation Department to the
Police Department was organized along those same lines.

For the police department, it meant
closing the neighborhood police stations in the city and consolidating
them. Uptown, Central, Downtown, Eastside, Westside. Five big stations
instead of thirteen smaller ones.