Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (21 page)

His smile faded and he looked at
the three guys who’d dragged Mr. Sensitive in, now standing in a line
against the wall. “Somebody wake him up.”

One of them stepped forward, took
an ammonia capsule from his pocket and snapped it under Mr. Sensitive’s
nose. He jerked back, his head hitting the slats. “Fuck!” he
muttered.

Werkle nodded and the guy backed
away.

Angelo removed his coat and hung it
on a hook on the wall, then pulled off his suit jacket and hung it beside
the coat. Last was the shoulder holster, which went on a third hook. He
rolled up his shirt sleeves and walked to the front of the
chair.

Mr. Sensitive blinked his eyes and
looked around the room. Me. Angelo. Werkle.

“How ya doin’?” Werkle said with a
nasty grin.

They guy jerked, then looked down
at the straps holding him in the chair. “What is this shit?”

Angelo stepped forward. Slap.
Backhand. Slap. Backhand. Just hard enough to finish waking him up and get
his attention.

“Hey, get offa me,” Mr. Sensitive
said angrily. He stared at Angelo. “What are you, some kinda sand nigger or
somethin’?”

“No, Sicilian,” Angelo
said.

Werkle laughed and the guy looked
at him. “What are you laughin’ at, fat boy?”

Werkle laughed again.

Slap. Backhand. A little harder
this time and the guy’s head rocked with each blow. When Angelo was done,
Mr. Sensitive strained forward against the leather straps. “You don’t know
who you’re messin’ with, boy. They gonna run your ass through a wood
chipper.”

“Mr. Welles is going to ask you
some questions,” Angelo said, his voice even and calm.

That was my cue. “What’s your name,
buddy?” I asked.

“Fuck you,” he muttered.

Angelo hit him again. Harder. Slap.
Backhand.

“Your name,” I repeated.

“Fuck. You.”

Angelo leaned forward and closed
his hand around Mr. Sensitive’s throat. “You want to answer the questions,”
he said.

Mr. Sensitive’s face got red pretty
quick and his body began to jerk and heave against the straps. Then Angelo
released his grip and stepped back.

“Name?” I asked.

He coughed and hesitated. Angelo
moved in again. He looked at Angelo, then at me. “Jimmy Joe,” he said
quickly.

“Okay, Jimmy Joe,” I said. “Where
are you from?”

“Yer momma’s nice warm bed,” he
said with a crooked smile.

Angelo hit him hard, right in the
nose. I heard it break, and blood poured out like it was an open spigot,
streaming down over Jimmy Joe’s mouth and chin.

“If you’re looking for pain, you
might hold off with the smart answers till I start asking the real questions,” I
said. “Don’t want to get too beat up in the getting-to-know-you part of
this.”

He stared at me through narrowed
eyes.

“So where are you from?”

“Jefferson,” he said.
“Georgia.”

“Good,” I said.

“Go fuck yourself,” he
said.

“How long have you been working
with Katarina Schleu?”

“Go fuck yourself,” he
repeated.

Angelo leaned forward and I held up
my hand. He stopped and took a step back.

This wasn’t going well. The whole
point of asking preliminary questions was to get him into the habit of
answering. I was never going to build a rapport with this peckerwood, but
as long as I could keep him talking, there was at least a chance I could
get some useful information out of him.

But Jimmy Joe wasn’t buying into
it, and beating the answers out of him would only be effective to a certain
point. Eventually he’d get beyond where pain was a motivator. But I didn’t
have any other way to compel him to talk.

I hesitated.

I didn’t have any other way. But
Werkle did.

“Turn him,” I said to
Werkle.

“What?”

“Turn him. Then tell him to answer
my questions. He’ll have no choice.”

Vees have this thing called the
blood obligation. It’s part of the change in their physical makeup after
they’re turned. They’re forced into complete, total obedience to the Vee
that turned them.

They may not like it, but they
don’t get a vote. Their bloodparent tells them to do something, they’ll do
it.

Werkle smiled. “Like I told you,
you’re a smart boy,” he said.

Not so smart, actually. I’d almost
been turned once to get me to spill my guts.

 If I’d been smart, I would
have suggested it at the beginning and saved some time. But it’s not
something I like to think about, because my experience ended with a good
man getting turned and me blowing his heart out his back.

Werkle took a small silver penknife
from his pocket. He opened it and stepped up to Jimmy Joe.

“Whatcha gonna do with that?” Jimmy
Joe asked.

“First, I’m gonna do this,” Werkle
said. He made a two inch cut on Jimmy Joe’s arm.

“Fuck!” He strained against the
leather straps.

“Then, I’m gonna take a little
taste,” Werkle continued. “Not much, just a sample.” He laughed. “Call it
quality control.”

Werkle ran a finger along the
bleeding wound and stuck it in his mouth.

“Fuckin’ skeeter!” Jimmy Joe
yelled.

Werkle frowned and looked at
me.

“It’s what they call vampires,” I
said. “Short for mosquito.”

“That’s a good one,” Werkle said
with a chuckle. He looked down at Jimmy Joe. “I gotta tell ya, shit for
brains, you just ain’t table ready.” He paused. “Good thing you weren’t on
the menu.”

“Get the fuck away from me!” Jimmy
Joe hollered, pressing back in the chair. But he didn’t have anyplace to
go.

“And the third thing I’m gonna do
is this,” Werkle said. He stuck out his tongue, bit down hard, then leaned
over and spat into the open wound on Jimmy Joe’s arm.

“Now we wait,” Werkle said. He
glanced at me. “Gotta do that part quick,” he said. “Tongue heals up real
fast and your mouth absorbs the blood in your spit if you don’t get it
out.”

I nodded and looked down at Jimmy
Joe. He was beginning to convulse as the Vee blood moved relentlessly into
his body, devouring the natural blood in his veins as fuel for the
change.

I’d seen it before, twice, though
never all the way to the end. First time was during the war, right before
the group of cops I was with got caught trying to escape across the Parker
Bridge. We got jumped by a Vee, a woman, inside a building and she tore
into Jamie O’Toole’s throat. Left a little of herself in the wound. He was
a couple of minutes into the change when we put him down.

And then there was Dick Nedelmann.
A good man, a street cop who was helping me find my partner’s killers. Dick
got jumped outside my office, and when I went down to help him, I got
jumped too. They didn’t want to kill us. They wanted to turn us, so we’d
have to tell them everything we knew about the case.

A bullet from the building security
guard kept me from getting bit. Dick wasn’t so lucky. He was maybe halfway
through the change when I put a bullet into his heart to stop
it.

The cut on Jimmy Joe’s arm was
already closing up. He jerked and strained against the leather straps, his
eyes wide, bulging as if they were going to pop out of his eye sockets.
Though his mouth was open, there was no sound coming out.

“How long does this take?” Angelo
asked, staring down at him.

“About ten minutes,” Werkle said.
“Not long at all.”

“What happens then?”

“Then I tell him to answer
Charlie’s questions, and he does.” Werkle laughed. “I could tell him to rip
his own
cazzo
off and he’d do it. Ain’t got no choice.”

Angelo didn’t say anything, but his
lips were pressed together and his eyes narrow. It wasn’t easy to watch,
especially if you hadn’t seen it before.

“So what about Terry Legs?” Werkle
asked Angelo.

“He’s in the trunk,” Angelo
replied, still watching Jimmy Joe. “Along with the other one we
got.”

“Two,” Werkle said. “Boys are gonna
eat good tonight.”

“I had some ideas about that,” I
said. “Though I wasn’t really expecting this one to get turned.” I paused.
“What are you going to do with him after we’re done with him.”

“I don’t know,” Werkle said. “Kill
him.” He paused and smiled. “Maybe send him back to that
pucchiacha
and let him go on a rampage, kill a bunch of them before they take him
down. Maybe her too.”

“That might work,” I
said.

Or it might be a disaster. If Jimmy
Joe came back as a vampire, she might think the Vees were on to her.
Security Force, Area Government. And she might move her holiday plans
forward.

“Let me give you an alternate
plan,” I continued. “This guy might get nowhere. Maybe they test people
when they come back from being outside, see if they’re vampires. We might
be wasting him.”

“Don’t matter, I don’t need him,”
Werkle said. “I got my own boys and this jamook wouldn’t fit in. And it
ain’t like we can eat him. It don’t work that way. Only human
blood.”

“We can still use him,” I said.
“Him and his buddy in the trunk. We take them back to the Floresta and dump
them, just like they did with Eichhorn and Pirelli. They won’t like it, but
they won’t be suspicious either. They’ll think it’s just tit for tat. And
Schleu will be dead before she can do anything about it.”

“Yeah, and what’s she gonna think
when we dump a vampire on her front steps.”

I was silent for a moment,
thinking. “Okay, we torch him.”

“Torch him?”

“Yeah, kill him, soak him down with
gasoline and light a match. Just the body, not the face. Let it burn good
for a while, then put it out. If they don’t notice a bullet hole in the
chest that didn’t bleed, they won’t go any further. They’ll figure you set
him on fire as a message.”

Werkle smiled. “And we still got
Terry Legs for the supper table. Yeah, sure, we can do that. Plenty of
Terry to go around.” He laughed. “Everybody gets a drumstick.”

I nodded and looked back down at
Jimmy Joe. The convulsions were beginning to subside and the cut on his arm
was fully healed, like it was never there. It wouldn’t be long till he was
a vampire.

A minute or so later, it was done.
Jimmy Joe leaned forward against the straps, his head on his chest.
Motionless. Not breathing.

If you didn’t know what you were
looking at, you would have thought he was dead. Maybe that’s where the
whole thing about vampires being the undead came from. They looked dead.
And then they started moving again.

The truth was that Vees didn’t need
to breath. After the change, their bodies don’t require oxygen. They breath
when they talk. Some, like Werkle, huff and puff when they get angry or
stressed, probably more out of habit that anything else. But they don’t
need to breath to live. Jimmy Joe looked dead, but he was very much
alive.

Werkle stepped forward and slapped
his face. “Hey,
gavone
, rise and shine, meet the new
you.”

Jimmy Joe opened his eyes and
raised his head. “What did you do to me?”

“I solved all your problems,”
Werkle said. “Now answer Charlie’s questions.”

“Wait,” I said. “Tell him to stick
his tongue out.”

“What?”

“Just humor me,” I said. “I want to
make sure he’s going to do what you tell him to.”

“Of course he’s gonna do what I
tell him to,” Werkle said with a laugh. “He’s my boy now.”

“Please,” I said. The blood
obligation doesn’t take with some Vees when they’re turned. Some kind of
genetic anomaly, very rare. They call them Unbounds. They’re vampires, but
they go their own way. Werkle might not know about them, but I did. My dead
partner Joshua had been one.

“Yeah, sure,” Werkle said. “Hey,
Billy Bob or whatever the fuck your name is. Stick out your tongue at
Charlie.”

Jimmy Joe turned to me. He
grimaced, then opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue.

“Good,” I said.

His tongue remained out. I looked
at Werkle. “He can stop now.”

Werkle laughed. “Get your tongue
back in your mouth.”

“What the fuck,” Jimmy Joe said.
“Why’d I do that?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Werkle
said. “Just listen to Charlie’s questions and answer them. A hundred
percent truthful, okay?”

“Fuck you,” he said. “I ain’t
sayin’ nothin’ to any of you.”

“How long have you been with
Schleu?” I asked.

He looked at me, and for a moment,
I thought he was going to fight it. Then he said, “Since the beginnin’.
Hooked up with Cap’n Kat in Charlie-17 outside Atlanta after the skeeters
got me.”