Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (4 page)

I shook my head. “This is the first
I’ve heard about it.”

Daryl studied me for a moment. “So
you need some information. This for yourself, or are you workin’ for the
Area Governor’s Office again?”

“No, this is my case. Just a
missing person job, but the client thinks that the woman I’m looking for
might have gotten herself mixed up with the Resistance. Probably not, but I
figured I’d run it down anyway. Cover all the bases, see what your
Intelligence Squad might have on her, if anything.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t trust
Daryl. I did. Well, as much as I trust most people. But until I had a
better handle on what was going on, who she was, what she was doing, and
why Red wanted her dead, I figured the best way to play it was to keep my
mouth shut. If it turned out I needed more from the police than just some
information, I could always come back.

Northport was watching me
carefully. “You ain’t tryin’ to run a con on ol’ Daryl, are you Charlie? I
wouldn’t appreciate that.”

“It’s a missing person case,” I
repeated. That was true. “My client wants me to find a woman. Maybe an
ex-girlfriend, maybe a relative, maybe just a friend.” Partially true. Call
the rest speculation. “He thinks she might be connected to the Resistance.”
Red didn’t exactly say that, but it followed from what he did say. “What
can I tell you, that’s all it is.” Now that was a lie, but I’d been mostly
truthful up to that point. So it wasn’t strictly a con.

“And you’re not workin’ for
Bain?”

“Haven’t seen General Bain since
June.”

“Or Miss Takeda?”

“Haven’t seen her since June
either.” I paused. “What’s with all the questions, Daryl? Even if I was
working for Bain, what do you care? I thought you and the Area Governor’s
Office were on the same side when it comes to the Resistance.”

“We are,” he said. “In a manner of
speakin’. Technically the Resistance is a vampire problem. The Resistance
don’t wanna get rid of the police department. Just the vampires.” He
paused. “Of course, we do have a slight problem with that, since we got
vampires in the department. But as long as they don’t start targetin’
vampire police officers, it’s a area government problem, not a city
problem.”

“But you still keep an eye on
them.”

“We keep tabs on ‘em, sure. Keep
tabs on a lot of different people. Gather information, listen to phone
calls, take pictures. Intelligence Squad needs to do somethin’ to keep
their budget from bein’ cut. But we don’t take any action, and won’t unless
they start crappin’ in our nest. They haven’t, up to now, so we just watch
and listen.”

He paused. “Of course, there’s
somethin’ else to consider when it comes to the Resistance. You remember
those cops on the payrolls of the uptown gangs?”

I nodded. “Holstein, Martinez,
Fields.” All dead now. Daryl had personally used a shotgun on Martinez and
Fields.

“And a few you never heard about,”
he said. “All gone now. They were dirty cops, workin’ for criminals for
pay.” He tapped the four gold stars on his collar. “I got these for rootin’
‘em out. But rootin’ out greedy, corrupt cops is damn easy compared to
rootin’ out cops who believe they’re doin’ the right thing for
humanity.”

“You mean cops in the
Resistance.”

“Correct-a-mundo,” he said. “There
are some of ‘em out there. Don’t know how many, don’t know how widespread.
But they’re around. Intelligence Squad picked up on a couple, and we
quietly reassigned ‘em or fired ‘em. But it makes it kinda touchy for
us.”

“How so?”

“Security Force don’t care who you
are or what you do for a livin’. If you’re in the Resistance, it’s a death
sentence. No arrest, no trial, no judge or jury. They find ya, they kill ya
on the spot.”

“Yeah, they can be pretty
heavy-handed. But as much as I don’t like it, I can’t blame them. It’s not
like the Resistance doesn’t do the same thing if you’re a Vee.”

“I ain’t sayin’ I blame them,” he
said. “Hell, we both been in the situation where somebody wanted to kill
us, and the only way to stop it was to kill them first. But once you start
sharin’ information, it gets real easy to share the wrong thing. And I
wouldn’t like to see the Security Force comin’ after any of my officers.
That would make my job harder than it already is, and it ain’t easy
now.”

“Have any suspects in the
Intelligence Squad?” Red hadn’t said anything about not talking to the
cops, but my rule is the client gets the final results, not the process
that got those results. If there were Resistance people in the police
Intelligence Squad, I’d have to be careful about what I said and who I said
it to.

Daryl laughed. “I been runnin’ the
Intelligence Squad for two years, since they gave me the Organized Crime
Task Force. I’ve had plenty of time to clean out the shitbirds and anybody
I didn’t trust. They’re all good people. They gather information and we
keep it inside the department. If the Area Governor’s Office wants a peek
at that information, they can ask me for it themselves, and I’ll decide
exactly what they see.”

“Like I told you, this is my case.
No Vees involved.” That much was definitely true.

“Okay, CW” he said. “You can go on
down and ask your questions. The officer you wanna talk to is Alex Olsen.
Lead on the squad for Resistance intelligence. Alex can probably tell ya
anything you wanna know about the Resistance.” He grinned. “And probably
more.”

“Appreciate it.”

“Intelligence Squad is in the
basement. When you come outta the elevator, turn right and go ‘bout three
doors down. That’s the squad office. Ask anybody you see and they’ll direct
you to Alex.”

He paused for a moment. “You know,
CW, if I find out you’re yankin’ my chain ‘bout area government being
involved...” He shook his head slowly. “Well, lemme just say that I’ll yank
back. And I got big, strong arms.”

Chapter
Three

The last time I’d been in the
basement of Central station, I’d been hunting my partner’s killers and my
destination was the morgue, where a friend was lying on a slab. The morgue
and crime lab were to the left when I came out of the elevator. I turned
right.

The hall was short, with a couple
of doors on the right side. The third one was the last one. No plaque on
the door to indicate what was behind it. Just an electronic passcard
swiper, a small speaker grill and a button. I pressed the
button.

“Yeah?”

“Charlie Welles.
Chief...”

Before I could finish, I heard a
buzz and the clunk of the door’s lock. I opened it and stepped
through.

It was a small room, barely large
enough for the desk that filled it. Behind the desk, a rat-faced man with a
thin mustache. “Northport’s office called down, said you were coming. You
want to see Sgt. Olsen, right?”

I nodded.

“Through the squad, hall at the
back, last door on the left.” He moved his hand below the desktop and I
heard the lock click on the door behind him.

“Thanks.”

On the other side of the door was a
typical Metro police squadroom. Big square room, a dozen desks scattered
across it. What wasn’t typical, at least in my experience, was the
ambience.

When I’d been at 83
^rd
Street, the Robbery-Homicide squadroom had been like a three-ring circus
with Vince Cunningham as the ringmaster. Cops shouting into phones, cops
shouting at suspects, cops shouting at each other and tossing files back
and forth. It was loud and chaotic. Live police work.

The Intelligence Squad squadroom
had none of that life. Most of the desks were occupied, but the officers
behind them were hunched over computer screens or listening to headphones
while they typed. Other than the squeak of chairs and the occasional
ham-handed smack at the keyboard, it was silent.

As I threaded my way through the
desks to the short hall at the back of the room, a couple of the cops
glanced up at me for a moment, their eyes on the yellow TRUSTED VISITOR
card clipped to my coat. Then they went back to whatever they were
doing.

There were two doors in the short
hall. The first had a white strip that said CAPTAIN. The second was
unmarked. I knocked. No response. I knocked again. Still no response. So I
opened it.

The office itself was about what I
expected to see. Rectangular, standard government-issue metal desk up
front, a computer bench with a couple of monitors in the back, some chairs
along the right wall.

The woman standing at the desk, her
back to me, was not what I expected to see. At a glance, it was hard to be
sure that it actually was a woman, but the clothing gave her away. White
flip-flops, lime-green stretch pants, and a long-sleeve shirt with tiny
green and red Santa heads. Not a good look, but clearly a feminine one. Her
dirty-blonde hair fell limply to her shoulders.

And she was big. Not overweight so
much as just plain big-boned. Which made her head seem a little too small
for her body.

She held the phone to her ear with
her left hand, and as I closed the door, pointed with her right hand to one
of the chairs against the wall.

As I walked to the chair, I heard
her say, “Yes.” A pause. “Yes.” Another pause. “Yes.”

I sat down and watched her. Her
right hand was slowly rubbing her belly, up and down. She had an oval face,
big lips, small nose, pale blue or gray eyes. “Yes,” she said
again.

Her eyes never moved in my
direction. “Yes, I will,” she said. She hung up the phone.

“I’m looking for Alex Olsen,” I
said.

“I am Sgt. Alexandra Olsen,” she
said, her eyes focused a few feet to my right, hand still rubbing her
stomach. “What do you want?”

“My names is Charlie Welles. Chief
Northport suggested I talk to you about the Resistance.”

“Yes, Chief Northport’s office
called and said you were coming.” She paused, still staring somewhere to my
right. “Are you a human?”

“Yes, I am,” I replied.

“I am a human as well,” she
said.

Some seconds ticked by as she
stared at the wall and slowly rubbed her stomach. Finally I said, “Excuse
me for asking, but are you blind?”

“No, I have perfect vision,” she
said.

Some more seconds passed. “So,
you’re the person to talk to on the Intelligence Squad for questions about
the Resistance.”

“The Resistance is my primary
focus, though I am well versed in other intelligence targets. Do you
require general or specific information?”

“Probably a little of both,” I
said.

She came around the desk, her walk
uncoordinated, just this side of awkward, and started toward the computer
bench in the back of the room. She also began to talk.

“The transition point between
active warfare against the vampires and resistance to the vampire
occupation came during the period of human internment. The transition was
immediate, spearheaded by active-duty military personnel as they were
interned, but unsuccessful due to the overall poor morale of the civilian
population in the internment camps.”

As she reached the computer bench,
she pointed to a chair next to the big one in front of the keyboard. I took
the cue and stood. She sat and kept on talking.

“Months later, a more organic
resistance movement began as the internees recovered from the shock of
defeat, with this new organization sowing the seeds of the current
Resistance. In this city, the center of this activity was Internment Camp
Bravo-8 and Internment Camp Delta-5.”

“Yeah, I was in Delta-5,” I said as
I sat beside her.

She didn’t make any sign she heard
me. Her eyes on the computer monitor, her right hand slowly rubbing her
stomach, she continued to speak.

“In both of these camps, Resistance
activity was generally confined to organizing and did not involve direct
action against the internment camp guards or administration. Based on the
outcome of the Internment Camp Charlie-17 uprising outside Atlanta, the
strategy followed by the Resistance in the camps here appears to have been
the correct one to further their aims. The Resistance in Atlanta never
recovered from the seven thousand human deaths that occurred when the
Internment Camp Charlie-17 uprising was put down. After the internment
policy ended, those few Atlanta Resistance members who survived the
uprising and its aftermath moved on to other cities, including this
one.”

“As interesting as this is, maybe
it’s a little more general...” I began.

She continued as if she hadn’t or
didn’t want to hear me. “The end of the internment policy allowed the
Resistance movement here to quickly grow, though it was nearly six months
before they began active military action against the vampires. During those
months, power was consolidated in a Resistance Council, made up of the
leaders of the various groups and factions that had joined the movement
during and after internment. These groups included racist organizations,
political organizations, and militia groups. The Resistance Council was
often split by the disparate motivations of its members, and eight months
ago a three-person Executive Council was formed, each member representing
three or more groups within the Resistance. That Executive Council was
dissolved twenty days ago because of unknown policy disagreements and at
this time, the Resistance in this city is without overall
leadership.”