Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (7 page)

They hadn’t replaced the double
glass doors at the front of the lobby, but that would probably change when
Daryl’s integration plan was fully implemented. Clear glass was fine when
Vee officers were only in the lobby after sunset. Less fine if they were
going to be in the lobby during the day.

I pushed one of the doors open. No
security station, no metal detectors, just an open rectangular room with a
high desk at the far end. The desk sergeant watched as I approached. He
wasn’t much older than thirty-five or so, but most of the hair on the top
of his head was gone.

“Help you?” he asked.

“Is Detective James around?” With
luck, it wasn’t her day off, and that she wasn’t out on a job.

“Lemme check,” the desk sergeant
said. He picked up the phone and tapped in a couple of numbers.

After a few seconds, he said,
“Somebody down here to see you, Becca.” He listened for a moment, then hung
up. “She’ll be down in a minute.”

I nodded. “Thanks.”

“You from Florida or something?” he
asked.

I hesitated for a moment, then
said, “No. Why?”

“You’re dressed like a tourist,” he
said. He paused. “It ain’t that cold.”

I was about to reply when I heard a
familiar laugh from the stairs to the right. “Well, look at what the cat
dragged in. How are you, stud?”

I turned to see her coming down the
stairs to my right. Becca James. Formerly a plainclothes officer, like me,
at 83
^rd
Street, attached to the Vice Squad. Now a detective at
Eastside station.

 Becca had come south from
Michigan with her two brothers, Steve and Kenny. Becca ended up in the
police department, Steve in the fire department, and Kenny in the
sanitation department.

Kenny was the smart one of the
three. He spent six months on the back of a garbage truck, but he had too
much on the ball to stay there. He moved up to driver, then supervisor,
then manager. By the time the war started, he was the assistant director of
the sanitation department.

Steve eventually made
driver-engineer with the fire department, and seemed happy enough there. He
could be a fireman, drive the big red truck, and not have to worry about
the headaches that came with command.

And then there was Becca. She’d
been a uniform officer at the Thaxton Drive station downtown for a few
years till somebody got a look at her and decided she had the right
combination of girl-next-door looks and silver-tongued charm. Those
attributes would be useful in many ways to the Vice Squad.

They’d offered her plainclothes
vice at 83
^rd
Street station and she jumped at it. Her specialty
was playing a hooker in john stings, and she was in big demand, not just on
the east side. Becca was constantly on loan to other stations. She’d go in,
do her thing until the hookers figured out she wasn’t just a new freelancer
working the streets. When they began busting up her action, warning off the
johns before they could make an offer of money for sex, she’d come back to
83
^rd
Street for a while before another vice squad at another
station needed her.

I don’t know what happened to Steve
and Kenny, and I don’t think Becca knows either. They’d packed up and split
as the Vees closed in on the city, off to parts unknown. Maybe back to
Michigan, maybe someplace else.

Running wasn’t an option for those
of us in Metro PD. At least not till the very end.

After a stint in Camp Delta-5, like
me, Becca went back to the police department. And after another year as a
plainclothes officer, she got her gold detective badge.

“How are you, Becca?” I asked as
she reached the foot of the stairs.

She crossed the floor and wrapped
her arms around me in a bear hug. Becca was a hugger.

Then she released me and stepped
back. “I’m good, stud,” she said. “Living the high life in eastside. How
have you been doing?”

Becca always called me ‘stud’. When
I asked her about it once, she told me that she did it because it amused
her. I didn’t go any further with it. No reason to ask why she found it
amusing.

“Working. The usual.”

“So what brings you over to this
side of town? Getting bored downtown, looking for some real
action?”

“If I wanted real action, I
wouldn’t have become a private investigator,” I said with a smile. “Had
enough action in eastside to last a lifetime.” I paused. “Actually, I’m
working a missing person case in the district and thought I could pick your
brain.”

“You know I’m always happy to help
you out, stud,” Becca said. “Talk upstairs in the squad?”

I hesitated for a moment, then
said, “Someplace else, if you can get away.” I didn’t want to be talking
about the Floresta around a bunch of nosy detectives. And I‘d already
planned to be careful about what I said to Becca. Her intentions were good,
but she was a talker, and sometimes her mouth got ahead of her
brain.

“My time is your time,” she said.
She smiled. “Name the movie.”

Becca was a movie buff, and always
looking to one-up me.

“THX-1138,” I said. “George Lucas.
19....”

“1971,” she said. “You’re correct.
Follow me.”

She turned and walked out of the
station. I followed. As we crossed the street, I saw that we were making a
bee-line for Dulcinea’s Bar and Grill on the other side of
68
^th
.

“Little early for a drink, isn’t
it?” I asked as we stepped up on the sidewalk.

“It’s a cop bar,” she said. “Most
civilians give it a pass. Ginny likes the cop business, so she’ll serve you
anything you want, from a Manhattan to a milkshake. Food, too, if you’re
hungry.”

“I just want some talk,” I said as
we went inside.

It was a real bar. Not a lounge.
Not a club. A dark, sticky-floor bar. The kind of place I liked to drink in
when I was still a drinking man.

The bar itself was wooden and ran
down the left side of the small room. There were tables scattered around
the middle of the room, booths against the other wall. Neil Diamond blaring
from a jukebox in the back. Becca headed for a booth.

“Becca!” a thin, older woman with
badly-dyed bright red hair called from behind the bar.

“I ain’t talkin’ to you till you
give up this life of sin and run away with me back to Michigan, Ginny,” she
yelled back as she slid into the booth. I sat down opposite her.

Ginny laughed. “Oh, I wish, baby.
So what can I get for you?”

“Just some coffee for me,” Becca
said.

“Coffee, black,” she said. “How
about you, Mr. Eskimo?”

I smiled. “Club soda with a twist,
thanks.”

“Pair of cheap charlies,” she said
with a shake of her head. She turned away.

“Don’t say anything about the
music,” Becca said softly. “That woman dearly loves Neil Diamond, and it’s
all she got in the jukebox. Say a bad word about it and you’ll be out on
your ass and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.”

“I’m a big fan myself,” I said. Not
strictly true, but I do like music, even if it’s not this particular
music.

Ginny brought the coffee and club
soda over. “No charge for cops and Eskimoes,” she said with a
grin.

As she retreated back behind the
bar, Becca took a sip of the black coffee and said, “So what can I do for
you, Charlie?”

“Like I said, I’m working a missing
person case in the district, and I’m probably going to have to do a
stake-out in my car for at least a day, maybe longer. How’s that going to
work out for me?”

“Depends on if your surveillance
skills have improved since you worked here,” she said with a
smile.

“I got burned one time,” I said.
“Let it go.” I paused. “How about the natives?”

“Restless, but they behave most of
the time. You should be okay. District is still rough, but it’s getting
better. A large proportion of the undesirables didn’t respond well to
captivity.” She paused. “So to speak. They didn’t come home from the
camp.”

“Good to hear,” I said. “Nothing
ruins a stakeout like getting into a hassle with people who want to roll
you.”

“Where’s the stake-out?” she asked.
“Some places are more peaceful than others.”

“The Floresta,” I said.

She stared at me hard, then took
another sip of coffee. “Let me give you a word of advice, stud. Get in your
car and drive back to your office. Return the money to your client and
enjoy the holiday season.” She paused. “You do not want to mess with the
folks at the Floresta. Not if you want to see the new year.”

Chapter
Five

Becca continued to stare at me. “No
bullshit, Charlie. You do not want to be anywhere near the Floresta if you
value your life.”

I laughed. “Kind of dramatic, don’t
you think, Becca?”

She didn’t smile. “Lemme tell you a
little story, stud,” he said. “You remember what the Floresta was like,
back before the bloodsuckers showed up, right? Five floors of thieves,
whores, killers. All part of good old Papa Lazaro’s familia.”

Papa Lazaro Fernandez. Mexican
immigrant who’d fled one of the cartels back home. Not because he was
having problems with the cartel. His only problem was that he wasn’t moving
up the ladder fast enough.

He’d struck out to make his fortune
north of the border and ended up here. Where he settled right in at the
Floresta, eventually adding about a hundred soldiers to his little crime
army.

And he was untouchable. From the
Police Commissioner on down, nobody wanted to do what it would take to
clean out the Floresta. They would have needed the help of the National
Guard to do it right, and there would be collateral civilian casualties and
dead cops. So they left Papa alone.

Not that Lazaro had any real
problem with cops. He was fine with us, as long as we knew our
place.

You could make an arrest in the
Floresta if you had Papa’s blessing. Not alone, of course. You still had to
take a tactical squad inside with you, to deal with whoever you were
arresting and to watch your back. But it could be done, as long as Lazaro
had okayed it.

I’d had coffee with Papa Lazaro a
couple of times, at a tiny café just down Tuxedo Avenue from the Floresta
called La Pequeña Rosa. The Little Rose. Named for the owner, not the
flower. That was where Lazaro did his business.

You’d put the word out that you
wanted to speak to Papa. A day and time would come back. You’d show up at
the La Pequeña Rosa at the appointed time. Papa would be sitting at a table
in back, a big guy with salt and pepper hair, a bushy moustache and a pair
of gleaming gold grills, one on his top teeth, the other on the bottom.
You’d sit down at the table and a cup of coffee would appear in front of
you.

And you’d make your
pitch.

Papa Lazaro had rules. He didn’t
like his people killing or raping kids. He didn’t like his people killing
cops. He didn’t like his people stealing from churches. If your request
fell into one of those categories, it was an automatic approval. He’d
smile, give you a nod, and cover his coffee cup with his hand. That meant
you were good to go.

If your request wasn’t about his
people breaking his rules, you had to convince Lazaro that it was in his
best interests to let you make the arrest. Sometimes the hand went over the
coffee cup, sometimes it didn’t. Either way, his decision was final. No
appeal. You could try to make the arrest anyway, but it would have to be
outside of the Floresta. Not inside.

Becca was still staring at me.
“When the bloodsuckers showed up, Lazaro decided that his familia was going
to stand their ground. I didn’t see it myself, since I’d already been
scooped up and shipped to Delta-5, same as you. But I’ve talked to people
who were there. They held out for almost three nights, fighting floor by
floor. Then into the camp for the survivors. There weren’t a whole
lot.”

“Lazaro?”

“Oh, yeah, Papa survived just fine.
Soon as the bloodsuckers got close to him, personally, the familia gave
up.”

She took another sip of her coffee.
“Lazaro and his people were model internees. Didn’t give the guards any
trouble at all. Got through it fine. And when they kicked us loose, Lazaro
and what was left of his familia came back to the Floresta, tossed out some
squatters, and started rebuilding the organization.”

“I can hear that ‘until’ at the
end, Becca,” I said with a grin.

No smile. “Until a little over
month or so later, when this new group shows up. There were about sixty of
them. Hard. Well-armed. And they wanted the Floresta. So one day, they took
it. Hit the front door just after sunrise, had it cleaned out before it got
dark. Killed everybody inside. Including Papa Lazaro.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Lazaro
was a gold-plated piece of shit, but at least you knew where you stood.” I
paused. “So what you’re telling me is that there was a bunch of bad hombres
in the Floresta before the war, which I already knew, and now there’s a
different bad bunch there. I don’t see the difference.”