Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (6 page)

After that, I went home, cleaned my
gun, and went to bed.

Chapter
Four

Cold.

Growing up in Kansas, I had my fill
of the cold. We didn’t get the sub-zero weather and mountains of snow that
those further north had to deal with, but it got plenty cold enough.
December through February could be pretty brutal, with a stiff freezing
wind that blew across the flat land and right through your
bones.

It was almost enough to make you
yearn for tornado season.

I’d gone a bit south when I joined
the Army and was stationed in Kentucky. And even further south when my
enlistment ended and I joined the Metro police department.

But it gets cold here too during
the winter. Which usually isn’t a problem. Throw on a coat, maybe a pair of
gloves if you’re working outside on a cold night, and it’s fine.
Unfortunately, a coat and gloves weren’t going to cut it for what I had
coming up.

There was at least a fifty-fifty
chance that Katarina Schleu was at or around the Floresta in Eastside
District. It was where her Resistance faction was based, and when a woman’s
alias is ‘The Commander’, you can usually count on her being where there
are people to command.

So that’s where I’d start hunting
for her. First find her, then find out what she was up to. And then figure
out what to do with her.

I couldn’t exactly go into the
Floresta, ask for her apartment, and knock on the door. My life isn’t the
greatest sometimes, but as bad as it gets, it always beats a face full of
lead.

The only alternative was a stakeout
outside the building, keep it under surveillance for a while and see if I
spotted her. I had six days. I could probably afford to burn at least one
day just watching. Maybe two.

If I’d had some lead time, I could
have tried to set-up someplace indoors to watch the Floresta. A vacant
apartment across the street, an empty office. But I had a fixed deadline,
and I couldn’t afford to spend time on a lot of preparation. I’d have to
stick to what I could do on the fly.

Foot surveillance of a fixed
location is okay for an hour or two. After that, you begin to stick out,
that guy who’s been leaning against a wall across the street all day. With
the kind of cold we were forecast to have for the next week, foot
surveillance was inviting only because it would give me the opportunity to
move around and stay a little warmer. But I would probably need to watch
the building for a lot more than a couple of hours.

That meant using my Jeep. With the
engine turned off, so the vapor from the exhaust system wouldn’t attract
attention. An car idling for hours is as noticeable as a guy loitering
across the street for hours. Maybe more so. Gasoline is expensive and
rationed. Not something you waste.

Without a running engine, there
would be no heater. And there are few things worse than sitting in a car
without heat for eight plus hours when it’s around the freezing point
outside.

The trick was to dress for the
weather. In my case, that meant thermal underwear, two pairs of socks,
hiking boots, thick jeans, a flannel shirt, a wool turtleneck, and a
leather bomber jacket with a fleece lining. Topped with a heavy billed cap
to cut down on heat loss from my head.

When I was done layering myself up,
I felt bulky but warm. The only problem was my pistol. I couldn’t wear it
in my usual place on my right hip with all of the clothing I had
on.

 With luck, I wouldn’t need
it. But luck can be elusive when you’re sitting alone in a car for hours in
the worst part of town. And I sure as hell didn’t want to go digging under
the jacket, sweater and shirt if luck had an appointment
elsewhere.

So I pulled my rarely-used shoulder
holster from the bedroom closet and slipped it over the sweater. If I saw trouble
heading my way, I could unzip the jacket and be ready to yank the pistol
from under my left arm to deal with it.

My surveillance go-bag was in the
living room closet. I grabbed it and headed for the door. It’s a duffle bag
with a dozen energy bars, six pint-sized bottles of water, a small
transistor radio with fresh batteries and a couple of empty 32-ounce
plastic mayonnaise jars. The jars were for the water after it had passed
through my system. When you gotta go, you gotta go, and the whole point of
surveillance was to keep your eyes on the target all the time.

I thought about skipping breakfast
at Hanritty’s. Coffee, eggs and sausage probably wasn’t the right meal
before hours in a car with no facilities other than the mayonnaise jars.
But my stomach was growling, and an energy bar wasn’t going to shut it up.
So I drove up to Expedition Square and parked on Gibson across the street
from Hanritty’s.

It’‘s a your typical
hole-in-the-wall diner. Counter with stools on the right, four booths on
the left. I know how to cook, but I still take almost all of my meals at
Hanritty’s. When you work a schedule like mine, cooking is the last thing
you want to do when you get home.

Hanritty had my coffee waiting on
the chipped Formica counter when I came through the door. He laughed when
he saw me.

“Gonna catch a flight to Alaska,
Charlie, or did they just turn off your power at home?” he
asked.

“Gotta be out in the cold all day,
Han,” I said, grabbing the cup and heading to the booth in the back corner.
My regular table.

“Well, you look like you should be
warm enough for it,” he said with another laugh as he headed back to the
big griddle behind the counter. “What’ll it be today? They say a big bowl
of oatmeal will keep you warm.”

Gutbomb. “Let’s go with the bacon,”
I said. “And white toast, not wheat.” I’d read somewhere that white bread
had less fiber than wheat, and as much as I like my fiber, it wouldn’t be
helpful if I was stuck in a car all day.

“Regular with bacon and white
toast,” he said. I heard the eggs splatter as they hit the
griddle.

He’d left the newspaper on the
table for me, as usual. I picked it up and flipped through the pages,
looking for a story on the Beacon Street shooting the morning before. I’d
heard the basics from Sgt. Olsen, but I was hoping for a little more, the
kind of human interest stuff that wouldn’t make it into a police
report.

Nothing. No mention of it. It was
as if it never happened. Which was about par for the course. The news,
whether in the newspaper or on television, was filtered. Anything that
didn’t fit in with the narrative that we were all one big happy family,
human and Vee, living together as one, got the hook.

The news people had probably gotten
wind of the fact that it might be Resistance related, and that was an
automatic kill for the story. The Resistance doesn’t exist. There were
so-called bandits, that preyed on Vees and the occasional human, who
sometimes called themselves the Resistance. But it was an illusion. There
was no Resistance. You can’t have a Resistance if there’s nothing to resist
against.

I tossed the paper aside as
Hanritty brought the plate of food from around the counter. “So Debbie
heard there was some kind of shooting over on the west side yesterday
morning,” he said, putting the plate on the table. “You hear anything about
it?”

Debbie was Hanritty’s wife. She was
probably a very nice woman, and they’d apparently been married a long time.
But she had a mouth on her that would make a hyena puke. Non-stop
profanity, sometimes crude, sometimes imaginative. I was hoping that I’d be
done with breakfast and gone before she made her morning appearance
sometime in the next half hour.

“Yeah, I heard a warehouse on
Beacon got shot up,” I said, picking up a fork. “They didn’t find any
victims inside.” Though there was an excellent chance that one of them had
shown up at my office a couple of hours later.

Hanritty’s eyes flickered to my
still-full cup. “Something wrong with the coffee?”

I put down the fork and took a sip.
“Nope, just as good as it always is,” I said. His coffee was good, even if
it was strong enough to cut into slices. But as much as the caffeine would
have been welcome, coffee makes you pee, and I’d be filling the mayo jars
just fine without any help.

“Okay,” he said. He didn’t sound
convinced, but he walked back around the counter.

Hanritty’s was where I’d first
encountered Michael Redmond. He’d been a regular, sitting in the booth next
to mine, his back to me as he ate the same chicken salad sandwich and home
fries every morning. At the time, I’d figured him for bent, a thief, a
hustler, a guy who took his chances on the streets after dark. I’d never
thought that he might be part of the Resistance.

Until about a year ago, I’d
considered the Resistance a bad joke. Kids playing with sticks and
pretending they were guns. I’d met a few people who said they were part of
the Resistance when I was interned at Delta-5. And only one of them seemed
like he had a brain.

Finding out from Redmond that Dick
Nedelmann was in the Resistance changed my opinion, just a bit. Dick was a
Metro cop I’d recruited to help me find my partner Joshua’s killers. He was
a smart guy, a good man, a good police officer. He might have even been a
good Resistance fighter. But I never found out. Involving Dick Nedelmann in
the case had gotten him killed.

I’d run into Redmond again last
summer, him and his crew. Or more accurately, he’d run into me. That
experience had proved that whatever else they might be, the Resistance
wasn’t just a bunch of toy soldiers.

I finished my eggs, shoved the last
piece of bacon in my mouth, and slid out of the booth. I would probably
hear about the full cup of coffee I was leaving behind when I came in
tomorrow morning.

“Seeya tomorrow morning, Han,” I
said, laying a five dollar bill on the counter.

“No dinner tonight?”

“Gonna be busy till well after
you’re closed,” I said, heading for the door. “There’s only five shopping
days till Christmas.”

To get to the east side from
downtown, you have to go through midtown. My crack about shopping days to
Hanritty didn’t seem as amusing as I crawled through the city’s commercial
district.

It wasn’t quite eight in the
morning, but the traffic was already bumper-to-bumper on Second Street.
Since the war, most people crammed their whole day into the time between
sunrise and sunset. Because after the sun went down, they’d have to share
the streets with Vees. Not appealing to a lot of humans, even six years
after the war.

But there was no escaping the
reminders of the war, the defeat, the Vees. Not in this week before
Christmas. Which was also the week before Christmas Eve, the Vee
celebration of the start of the war.

Santas, candy canes, and Christmas
trees dominated the holiday decorations, on the street and in the store
windows. But now and then I saw something else. Something very
non-Christmasy. A blood red banner with a man’s face.

Colonel Wright.

I didn’t know exactly who Colonel
Wright was. Joshua had told me the name when I asked, but wouldn’t give me
any more information. We were tight, partners and best friends, but he was
a vampire and I was a human. And there were things that Vees didn’t discuss
with humans, no matter how close the relationship.

Last summer I’d heard from a couple
of people that the vampire takeover of the U.S. had probably started with
one Vee. My guess is that one Vee was the same Colonel Wright that stared
down at me from the banners on Second Street.

I caught a break after I got north
of Regis. The percentage of high-end department stores and trendy boutiques
dropped as you got closer to the mostly-residential uptown part of the
city, and with it the holiday traffic. When I made the right turn onto
Fowler, I knew it would be clear sailing into the heart of the east
side.

Part of me wanted to make a quick
drive-by of the Floresta. Just to see what it looked like these days, and
maybe get an idea of where I might be able to park for my
stake-out.

That wasn’t a smart play. If
Schleu’s Resistance buddies were camped out there, my guess was they’d have
people watching the street. Sharp people if they had any tactical sense. A
dark-gray Jeep Cherokee cruising by might not mean much, though any car
going by would get a good look. That same dark-gray Jeep Cherokee
returning, parking down the block and staying there would get a lot more
than just a good look.

So the drive-by was out. When I
went to Tuxedo Avenue, it would be to settle in. And I wasn’t quite ready
to do that. I needed some up-to-date information on the Floresta, and I
knew where I could get it.

I parked down the block from
Eastside District station, and walked to the front doors.

Eastside station isn’t exactly a
new station. Unlike the Central District station, they hadn’t leveled
everything and built a new police station on the empty land. The
68
^th
Street station had previously occupied that spot, and
they’d just done some renovations. Bricked up all the windows, added a
second windowless floor to the existing building.