Shrouds of Darkness (25 page)

I feel the bullets slam into me the same instant I hear the shots. Round after round punishes me even through my jacket as the shooter squeezes off his entire clip in mere seconds. A few of the wild shots find vulnerable spots in my Miguel Caballero jacket and manage to punch through into the flesh beneath. One even strikes my exposed lower left leg and staggers me.

The shooter is a middle-aged Latino that runs out of bullets less than ten feet away from me. I swing Shalonda around and squeeze off a round that strikes him dead in the chest, making a hole big enough to see through. My second shot removes the greater portion of his skull.

The leader of this meeting of morons must have been counting my shots because the instant I fire off my fifth round he comes flying out of nowhere, sword leading. The attack is swift and well timed. I am barely able to block it, but the force of the strike still sends me sprawling. I roll with the impact and swiftly regain my feet just in time to fend off a flurry of the vampire’s pressing attacks.

I quickly conclude that my attacker’s skill is not on par with my own. It takes me only a moment to find my own rhythm, and once I am set into my own attack routine, I quickly put him on the defensive.

I alternate my strikes from high to low, creating a pattern that even an amateur should quickly recognize. I pick my timing and make a feint. My foe anticipates my next strike based upon my previous pattern and leaves himself open. My slashing blow cuts a deep line through his heavy leather coat and the softer tissue beneath. Dark blood wells out from the wound and he takes several retreating steps backward, clasping a hand over the gruesome but nonlethal wound.

Possibly taking a page from my own playbook, he reaches into a pocket and tosses a small flash grenade at my feet. I leap away as it explodes and start to pursue him as he runs as swiftly as he can out of the massive hole my satchel bomb made, but two lesser vampires foolishly seek to impede my progress.

I leap and turn a somersault over the head of the leading vampire. I come down between them, landing with a two-handed downward stroke that splits the trailing vamp from crown to collar. I instantly wrench my sword free, spin, and thrust it into the base of other vamp’s neck before he can even turn around. Another slash and I finish the job.

I want to chase after the masked man but he has too much of a head start and I can already hear sirens in the distance. Explosions tend to bring the cops pretty fast. A low moaning catches my attention as I survey the carnage around me.

“You should have stayed home, Mikey,” I tell the young vampire as I stand over him.

“Please, please don’t kill me. I’ll talk. Whatever you want,” he pleads.

“Can you tell me who the guy in the mask is?”

“No, but I can find out. I swear I will.”

“It doesn’t matter. I already know who it is.”

“Please, I am just following orders! I have nothing against you!”

“That defense was over-used in the Nuremberg trials. It didn’t work for them either.”

“What?”

“I weep for our education system. I let you off once. That was like a coupon—limit one per customer,” I inform him then relieve him of the burden of a continued existence.

I am able to leap high enough to grab a hanging steel rafter then bound through the hole I made in the roof to recover my bag of goodies. I drop back down through the hole and quickly pile up all the bodies before setting off three thermal grenades, also bearing my personal customization. They burn hot but create more fire by adding several ounces of fuel gel to the can.

Even if I trusted the cleanup crew, which I don’t since they too are part of the Sheriff corps, there simply is not enough time for them to get here so I do my best to destroy as much of the evidence as I can.

I want to head straight home but I need to feed. I spent a lot of energy in that fight and I’m not walking away unwounded. At least three bullets found their way to my softer bits and a couple of slashes have drawn blood, but they have already closed up. If I have to fight some Sheriffs, I need to stay on top my game and that means a full feeding.

My old Yamaha gets me across town in short order without breaking any major traffic laws. The last thing I need is to be stopped tonight. I also do not want to do the deed anywhere near the battle so I ride to the east side and find a bum near JFK. I prefer criminals when I have to take a life but time is not a luxury I have just now and besides, no one will miss one more of New York’s fifty thousand or so homeless people.

The battle is an hour or more in the past by the time I get home. I key my alarm system and am just about to open the door when I hear a sound and catch a strange scent from inside. As quietly as only a vampire can achieve, I ascend the steel stairs to my office and slip through the upstairs door. I jump from the upper landing to the steel beams that make up the structural support of the roof.

My keen eyesight easily picks out my intruder from the surrounding darkness as he crosses directly below me. I should cut him in half but I want to find out how he got past my security system first.

I drop from my perch, land directly in front of him, lift him an arm’s length off the ground, and slam him against a support beam.

“What the hell are you doing in my house, Marvin?” I snarl in unfeigned fury.

Marvin tries to respond but can only clutch at his throat and mimic a landed fish due to inhaling whatever it is he was eating. I watch him for a moment, curious to see what shades of color a suffocating black kid turns. Seeing that it’s not as entertaining as watching a white guy choke, and still needing him to do some work for me, I punch him hard in stomach with my free hand then drop him to the floor as the chunk of food becomes a projectile.

Marvin is still failing to take in air since I just knocked out whatever wind he had in his lungs, so I lift him by his arms then make him touch his toes. I do this a few times and he begins to breathe again.

“Oh shit, Leo, you almost killed me,” he gasps out. “Why’d you have to do that?”

“Why are you in my house? And how did you even find it?” I demand back.

It’s not as if I advertise my services in the yellow pages. You have to know people to find me.

“I found it by hacking the police records. They really don’t like you. That Castillo woman really has a hard on for you. She put all kinds of disparaging remarks in your file. Oh my God, I can’t believe you almost killed me.”

“The night’s still young. Why are you here?”

“Well, I figured that you might be calling me and that it could be a late night so I went out to that twenty-four hour pizza joint nearby. Oh, you want some pizza? I looked in your fridge and saw that you have no food in this place. It’s a good thing I brought my pizza with me.”

“You looked in my refrigerator?” I ask, concerned that Marvin may have just outlived his usefulness.

“Yeah. Why do you have blood in your fridge, man?”

“I have a medical condition,” I tell him. “So you got pizza and decided you would come over and share it with me?”

“No, it was because of the dudes in my apartment!”

“Who was in your apartment?”

“I don’t know. I was coming up with my pizza and saw my door open so I peeked in and saw these dudes tearing up my stuff. So I snapped a pic with my phone and got my black ass out of there.”

“You got a picture?”

“Yeah, man,” Marvin replies excitedly and hands me his phone. “Check that shit out! I don’t know if they’re feds or mafia or what, but when I put this on Facebook, my street cred is going to go through the roof, boy!”

I study the picture but I don’t recognize anyone in the room. One is wearing a long, black coat but his back is to me, but I bet money it is a Sheriff with some of his lackeys.

“If I hadn’t gone out for pizza those guys would have found me and busted me up just like my stuff. Do you realize the irony here?” Marvin continues. “The very same pizza that saved my life back at my apartment damned near killed me in yours. I’m not superstitious or nothing, but that’s gotta be a bad omen or something.”

I delete the picture and hand the phone back to Marvin.

“Aw, man, why’d you do that?” Marvin complains loudly.

“This is not a game, Marvin, and posting stuff like that is only going to draw more attention. Now how did you get in here?”

“Oh that was easy. Your alarm system is made by LaRoche Security Corporation and it still has the old software. I can’t believe it wasn’t updated after that huge blow up and class action lawsuit two years ago.”

“Wait a minute. Are you taking about Percy LaRoche’s firm?”

“Yeah. Why, do you know him?”

“He’s kind of a friend of mine.”

Marvin looks surprised and exclaims, “Damn, how can you roll with rich cats like that and live in a shit hole like this? There are Al-Qaeda terrorists living in caves that would consider this place primitive.”

“What about this lawsuit?” I ask, ignoring his disparaging remark about my humble abode.

“There was a major flaw in his encryption and core coding. I bunch of Chinese hackers got into several DOD databases and corporate file servers. He lost his ass in court along with most of his contracts. They had to downsize like ninety percent of the company just to keep it limping along—corporate life support.”

“Hm, I can see why he is so intent on getting that city-wide security camera contract,” I muse aloud.

  “So if you want me to keep working on that stuff, you need to set me up here.”

“Here? Why do you have to stay here?” I ask, not liking the prospect in the least.

“One, I got nowhere else to go. Two, if bad-ass thugs want me dead I need somewhere secure and this place is like Fort Knox—if Fort Knox had a shitty alarm system.”

I cannot deny his logic—no matter how irrational I want to be right now. “Fine, but you fix my alarm and if you think I made for a hostile work environment before, get on my nerves here and you will see hostility of a biblical level. What do you need to start working again?”

“Well I can see this is going to be just a joy. A lamp would be a good start. It’s darker than a BMA after party in here. I also need a laptop, a server tower running dual Xeon processors, a hundred and twenty-eight gigabytes of ram, and five two-terabyte hard drives in a RAID configuration. And internet, really, really fast internet.”

Marvin is already giving me a headache. “Make a list. I need to go make a call.”

“About that blood in the refrigerator,” Marvin calls out at me as walk away. “You’re not like some crazy Jeffery Dahmer guy that’s gonna rape me, kill me, and eat me are you—or any variation thereof?”

“Not exactly,” I answer as I walk out.

“What you mean not exactly? What part is not exactly—the killing part or raping part? I gotta tell you, I am not cool with either of those. Leo? Leo!” I hear Marvin drop to his knees and start praying as I step out to grab my bike. “Please, black Jesus, watch over this young fool and protect him from crazy-ass white people, amen.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Whenever I need something quick, I call Yuri and that is what I am doing now. “Yuri, it’s Leo. I need some stuff.

“What de fock is a Xeon processor?” Yuri asks as I read off Marvin’s list to him. “It sounds like something from Star Trek”

“I honestly don’t know. I also need an internet connection using multi-mode fiber optic cable to the ISP and I don’t know what that means either but apparently it is important.”

“I’m kingpin, not focking cable provider! You think I am Comcast or AT&T or something? Is this going to get my accountant back?”