Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (34 page)

“Gus and Zach,” Lee said. “Brought
him and this fella in around one o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

Schleu stared at him for a moment,
then nodded. “Gus goes in the basement. Put Zachariah on sentry duty,
effective immediately. I want him outside within the hour. Loss of all
privileges and move him down to a single on the first floor.”

“You want Barney to handle
it?”

She shook her head. “No, I’ll deal
with Barney later. I want you to do it.” She paused. “And make sure that
Zachariah understands why this is being done. Being one of the First
Nineteen doesn’t give him the right to be sloppy.”

“Anything else?” Lee
asked.

“Get the woman in here.”

Lee nodded. He left the office,
closing the door behind him.

The woman. That meant Nancy. I was
kind of uneasy about Schleu and Lee talking shop in front of me. Like I
wasn’t there. Or maybe like I wasn’t going to be there for long.

But I wasn’t ready to give up just
yet. Maybe I could make it all seem like a misunderstanding.

“What woman?” I asked.

Schleu lit a cigarette and stared
at me through the smoke. She said nothing for about thirty seconds. Then
she asked, “What’s your connection to that other recruit? The one I shot,
Ricci. Friends? Family? A lover?”

“No real connection,” I said. “I
guess you’d call him an acquaintance. I live downtown, he lived downtown.
He was a knock-around kid in the neighborhood, usually up to no good. We
didn’t exactly move in the same circles.”

“Yes, I saw his record,” she said.
“Small time. Lots of petty offenses.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But in my
business, you sometimes have some work for small time guys like Johnny.” I
paused. “I threw him a bone now and then, got him in on a little
action.”
 

She continued to stare at me. “That
was a pretty ballsy gesture for a kid you threw a bone to, now and then.”
She didn’t sound convinced.

“Johnny had issues with Captain
Konrad,” I said. “Konrad sucker-punched him yesterday for whispering to me.
No warning, just bam. Johnny might have been small time, but he was proud.
Took shit like that seriously.”

She did have a point, though. It
was extreme. I didn’t know what the hell Johnny thought he was doing. Maybe
he was just so focused on Eddie Gabriel’s instruction to watch my back that
nothing else mattered.

Too bad Johnny wasn’t smart enough
to realize that Konrad was never going to kill me. At least not till Schleu
told him to.

I’d never liked the kid Johnny had
been. He was nasty, he was arrogant, and he thought he was a lot more
important than he was. But I felt kind of bad that I didn’t have a chance
to get to know the man he’d become.

“Konrad was a bully,” Schleu said.
“But he was an effective bully and he was my bully. We’re not exactly
recruiting from the cream of the east side, if you hadn’t noticed. Konrad
took the scum that we skimmed off the street and turned them into tolerable
soldiers.” She took another hit on the cigarette. “The only bright spot is
that his work was almost done. Your group was the last.” She paused. “Lucky
you, Officer Welles.”

“What is all this cop shit?” I
asked. It was time to start trying to save my life. “Last time I carried a
badge was almost six years ago, the day the skeeters rolled into town and
we ran.”

She continued to smoke and stare at
me, but she didn’t reply.

A knock at the door. “Come,” she
said.

Nancy Haynes slipped into the
office. She stopped by the door and looked at me. I looked back.

“Close the door,” Schleu
said.

Nancy closed it and leaned against
the wall, arms folded across her chest. I’d seen that posture before in
interrogation rooms. Defensive. Unsure. She looked from me to
Schleu.

“Is this the man you told me
about?” Schleu asked.

“That’s him,” Nancy said with a
sneer. “Fucking cop.”

“You recognized him this morning,
when you told Dave about it and he came and reported it to me?”

Nancy hesitated for a moment, then
said, “Well, I really first saw him yesterday, when him and the others in
his group came in. Just after noon. I was sitting on the stairs with
Franklin. You know. Franklin, my boyfriend.”

Schleu didn’t say anything. She
just sat and smoked.

“So anyway, I was sitting with
Franklin on the stairs, and when then brought them in, I looked, you know?
See if I saw anybody I knew from the neighborhood.” She paused and looked
at me. “I thought I recognized this guy, this cop. And I told Franklin and
Franklin said I should make sure before I told you. I mean, you have all
kinds of checks and stuff to make sure the wrong people don’t get in.” She
smiled at me. “Like cops.”

“Get on with it,” Schleu
said.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Nancy said quickly,
looking back at her. “So I knew that the latest group of recruits would
have their second training this morning. I got up early and went downstairs
so I could get a better look and make sure I was right about him before I
told you.” She looked at me again. “I saw him and I was right. He’s a cop.
I remember him. So I told Dave, and Dave went and told you.”

“I don’t know this woman,” I said.
“Never seen her before.”

“Silence,” Schleu said with a quick
glance in my direction. “When I want to hear from you, I’ll let you know.
Until then, keep your mouth shut.”

Nancy smiled happily.

“Explain how you remember
him?”

“Oh, I had dealings with him one
time,” Nancy said. “He was supposed to help me after a robbery. Somebody
stole my goddamn purse and he was the cop who came to take the report. And
this son-of-a-bitch was more interested in getting in my goddamn pants than
in finding who stole my purse. It was disgusting. He kept touching me and
making lewd suggestions. I couldn’t wait for him to finish taking the
report and go.”

I laughed softly.

“Ain’t gonna be laughing when they
put you in the basement, cop,” she said angrily. “Where you
belong.”

“When did all of this happen?”
Schleu asked.

“I don’t know the exact date,”
Nancy said. “It was six or seven years ago, back before the skeeters
came.”

Schleu nodded. “Have you seem him
since? Around the neighborhood, at the police station?”

Nancy hesitated for a moment, then
shook her head. “No, I stay away from cops since the war,” she said. “Too
many of them are skeeter-lovers.”

Schleu took a final drag on the
cigarette and dropped it on the floor. “Thank you,” she said. “You can go.
Close the door behind you.”

Nancy pushed away from the wall,
made a half-hearted effort to spit in my direction, then left.

“Comment?” Schleu asked.

“As far as I know, I’ve never seen
her. Or spoken to her. But it’s possible that I took a report from her
once, a long time ago. Took a lot of reports, for a lot of things. Big
things, little things. A purse snatch isn’t the kind of case that would
stick in my mind.” I paused. “I can tell you one thing, though. No doubt. I
never tried to get into her pants.” I paused again. “I’m not saying I’m a
saint, but I do have some minimum standards for women I’d sleep with. That
one doesn’t make the grade.”

“Then you don’t deny that you’re a
police officer?”

“Was a police officer, commander” I
said. “Past-tense. Was.” I paused. “Of course I’m not going to deny it. Why
would I? I was a Metro cop for fifteen years. That ended the day the
skeeters overran the city.”

“It seems kind of odd to me that
your employment with the police department wasn’t reflected on your
report,” she said. “Almost like it had been removed by somebody.” She
paused. “You know the report I’m talking about. That one you tried so hard
to read yesterday, on my desk.”

I grinned. “Guilty,” I said. “The
Metro PD shield at the top of the page caught my eye. I looked. So shoot
me.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,”
she said. “As I said, there was nothing about your police department
service on the report.”

“Take it up with Metro PD,” I said.
“Or whoever you deal with over there. Maybe they erased the files when the
skeeters came. Maybe they can’t get good help since the war.”

“I intend to do that,” she said.
“So you were a cop. Uniform officer, detective?”

“Plainclothes officer,
Robbery-Homicide,” I said. “Stationed at the 83
^rd
Street station
here on the east side. It’s closed down now.”

“And you didn’t go back to the
police department after you were released from the internment
camp?”

“No,” I said. “I could have, of
course. They were looking for experienced cops, humans for the day shift.
But it wasn’t the same police department I’d been part of. Human cops are
nothing but peacekeepers anymore. They don’t prevent crimes or arrest
criminals. They’re on the streets to keep the human civilians from feeling
like they’re second-class. Which of course they are. All the major crimes,
the real crimes, go to the skeeter cops on night shift.” I paused. “To tell
you the truth, I’d get more action as a security guard.”

“What I find interesting is that
you didn’t mention your service with the police department yesterday, when
we talked.”

“You didn’t ask,” I said. “I
answered every question you asked me. There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t
mention. I didn’t tell you about my time in the Army, or playing on my high
school soccer team, or the name of the girl I lost my cherry to.” I paused.
“I figured if you cared about what I’d been doing before the war, you would
have asked.”

“In my mind, having been a police
officer would be a little more important than the first girl you
fucked.”

“That’s you, maybe, but not me,” I
said. “The police department is behind me. If I had wanted to stay a cop,
if it was important to me, I could have gone back.” I paused. “Hell, some
of the detectives in my unit bought into the bullshit that the skeeter
recruiters in the camp were selling, and rejoined early. As skeeters. I
wasn’t interested in that either.” I paused again. “I was done carrying a
badge, commander, so I went my own way when they cut us loose.”

“To a life of odd jobs,” she said.
“And not even enough of those to make a decent living in your own
neighborhood.”

“To work for myself,” I said. “Not
for some suit-wearing skeeter district chief in a police station or some
skeeter police commissioner sitting downtown in Metro
headquarters.”

Schleu sighed. “You know, I feel
like there’s something not quite right about you, Charlie,” she said. “I’m
not sure what it is yet, but you can count on one thing.” She paused. “I
will find out.”

That wasn’t what I wanted to
hear.

“Look, commander,” I said. “I’ll be
up-front with you. Yesterday, when we were talking, I thought about
mentioning the cop thing. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t know how
you’d react.”

I laughed. Keep it light, natural,
and heart-felt. “I guess I thought you’d react like this.” I paused. “I saw
that uniform cop in the lobby yesterday after training, talking to you, and
you had that report from Metro PD. So I knew you had cops on the inside.” I
paused again. “But those are your people, right? People you trust. What am
I? Just some guy you pulled in off the street. I start talking about having
been a cop, you’re going to think that maybe I’m still a cop. Like you do
now. And not one of yours.”

“So you thought it was a better to
just lie to me?”

“Not lie,” I said, my voice hard.
“I didn’t lie. I don’t lie. Don’t try and dump that on me.” I paused. “If
you’d asked me about what I did before the war, I would have told you, all
of it, anything you wanted to know. You didn’t ask. So I didn’t say
anything. There’s a big difference between that and lying.”

“Perhaps to you,” she said softly.
“In any case, we’ll have the truth soon enough.”

Schleu had me taken to a small,
empty room in the hall that ran off the lobby next to the staircase. It was
tiny, not much larger than a decent-sized closet. Which is what it had
probably been, a storage closet of some kind back when the Floresta was
open for business, before Papa Lazaro moved in.

In the distance, I could hear the
sounds of pots clanging. Occasional yells and laughter. A cart going past
the door. The communal kitchen was probably pretty close.

I felt like I’d explained myself
pretty well about the pre-war police stuff. Unless I was reading Schleu
totally wrong, that wasn’t going to be a problem for her. She clearly
didn’t like the fact that I hadn’t mentioned it before, so that hurt me.
But I thought I’d made a good case for why I’d kept
quiet.
 

So unless she just decided to plant
me in the basement for the hell of it, there was a better than even chance
that I might get past this.

What worried me was her comment
about having the truth soon enough. What truth? About my time in the police
department, or something else?