Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (10 page)

In a normal case, I could go back
to the client, say ‘She’s at the Floresta’, and be done. But this wasn’t a
normal case, and finding Katarina Schleu was only part of what the client
wanted. Redmond wanted her dead.

I hadn’t really given a lot of
thought to that part of the job. First things first. And the first thing I
needed were answers.

Why did Redmond want her dead? What
did she have planned for Christmas Eve? Who was Eichhorn and why was he
watching the Floresta? How did he know Schleu?

Last summer, while doing a job for
area government, I’d run up against what the Vees called Special
Collections. Mixed teams of humans and Vees. Hunters. Killers. And one of
the things they hunted and killed was Resistance leaders.

Was that what Eichhorn was, part of
a Special Collections team? Were they staking out the Floresta to kill
Schleu? Or just keeping an eye on the place until a Security Force strike
force could show up and level the place?

There were people I could call for
the answer, and maybe even get it. Tiffany Takeda, commander of the Area
Three Security Force. Even Deputy Area Governor Bain himself if it came to
that.

But if Eichhorn wasn’t connected
with the Vees, if he really was FBI or something else, that would only open
up a bigger can of worms. I wanted to keep the Vees out of this until I
knew what the hell was going on. If Redmond had been right, maybe keep them
out for the duration.

I was cold and I was tired. Finding
the answers to my questions would have to wait till morning. I’d found
where Schleu was. Now I had to get close to her. And I’d start that in the
morning. I still had five days to go.

It was still dark when the pounding
at my door woke me from a dead sleep.

I sat up and grabbed the pistol
from under my pillow, then rolled out of bed and rummaged through the pile
of clothing on the floor till my fingers found the jeans. I pulled them on
and went into the living room.

The pounding continued.

I left the lights off. If anybody
was going to be a perfectly-silhouetted target, it wasn’t going to be me. I
moved to the side of the door, away from a bullet through the door and
raised the pistol.

I’m not normally so careful about
my personal safety. I’ve made enemies along the way, and the day may come
when one of them decides that some payback is in order. Frankly, it’s not
something that keeps me up at night.

But right now, I was swimming in an
ocean filled with sharks. Redmond. Schleu. Maybe Eichhorn. One thing you
don’t do in that situation is pull open their mouths and check for tooth
decay.

“Yeah?” I yelled.

“Open the goddamn door, Charlie.
It’s freezin’ out here.”

Daryl Northport.

I unlocked the door and opened it.
Daryl stood on the front porch, wearing a heavy fur-lined parka with a
hood. He pushed past me without a word. I closed and locked it, then
flipped on the overhead light in the living room.

“Where the hell have you been?” he
asked. “I been tryin’ to get hold of you since yesterday mornin’. Left
messages on your answerin’ service, even went by your damn
office.”

“We’re closed for two weeks,” I
said as I walked back to the bedroom for a shirt. While there, I tossed my
pistol on the bed and grabbed my watch. A little after five in the
morning.

When I came back into the living
room, he’d taken off the parka and was settling into a chair. My chair. The
only really comfortable chair in the living room.

I continued past him to the
kitchen. “You want some coffee?”

“What I want is some answers,” he
said. “What the hell are you doin’ messin’ with Michael Redmond and
Katarina Schleu?”

“I want some coffee,” I said. If
Daryl had been trying to find me for almost twenty-four hours, he’d be
steaming. Delay the discussion, even for a minute or two, and maybe some of
that steam would bleed off.

I filled a cup with water and stuck
it in the microwave. When the oven dinged, I pulled out the cup and spooned
some instant coffee in, followed by a couple of spoonfuls of sugar. I’m not
an instant coffee kind of guy, but I have it on-hand for those mornings
when I can’t get the real stuff at Hanritty’s.

When I came back into the living
room, Daryl’s position hadn’t changed. He sat in my chair, staring at the
wall. I went around the coffee table and dropped onto the couch.

His eyes met mine.
“Well?”

“Good morning, Daryl,” I said.
“What a wonderful surprise this is, you stopping by. And so early,
too.”

“Cut the shit, Charlie,” he said.
“I told you that if you were yankin’ my chain, I was gonna yank right
back.”

I took a sip of coffee. It was
awful. “No chain-yanking,” I said. “I told you the truth. I’m working a
missing person case. And I told you that missing person is mixed up with
the Resistance.”

“Who’s your client?” he
asked.

I hesitated for a moment. Daryl and
I went back a lot of years, but I knew he wouldn’t think twice about having
me hauled in for questioning. I didn’t have time for that. “Michael
Redmond,” I said.

“And the person you’re looking
for?”

“Katarina Schleu.” I paused. “But
you probably figured that out already, right?”

“Goddamn right I figured it out,”
he said. “Olsen filled me in on what you and her talked about. Didn’t take
Sherlock fuckin’ Holmes to put the pieces together.”

“So you want to hear the story?” I
asked.

“Get to it,” he said. “And it
better be pretty goddamn good.”

So I told him. Redmond bleeding on
my floor and telling me what he wanted. Christmas Eve. Armageddon. I left
out the part about Eichhorn and his buddies for the moment. No need to
spill everything just yet.

“So you’re tellin’ me that one
Resistance asshole hired to you kill another Resistance
asshole.”

“There’s more to it than that,
Daryl.”

“No, Charlie, you want there to be
more.” He shook his head. “You bought into Redmond’s horseshit about
Christmas Eve and the rest of it. You were played. Schleu probably tried to
kill Redmond Thursday mornin’. She failed. Redmond wanted revenge. So he
pulled your name out of the phone book or wherever the hell he got it, and
he told you a scary story so you’d give him what he wanted, and quick.
Schleu’s head.”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s cause you ain’t lookin’ at
this thing objectively.”

“Let me give you what I’ve got so
far, and you tell me where my objectivity is missing,” I said. “Let’s start
three weeks back. Redmond and Schleu are on the Resistance Executive
Council. Which suddenly gets dissolved. Why?”

“How the hell should I know,” he
said. “They’re violent wack-jobs with a hankerin’ to kill vampires. Could
be any number of reasons.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Including
the possibility that Schleu and her especially violent group of Humans
First Front wack-jobs have something cooking. Something big. Something bad.
Planned for Christmas Eve.”

“You’re reachin’.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But accept for
the moment that I’m right. Schleu has something planned and Redmond and the
third person on the Executive Council say no. Maybe Schleu’s operation is
so crazy that it could trigger what Redmond called Armageddon.” I paused.
“By the way, what’s the story with the third person on the Executive
Council? Where’s he or she in all this?”

“Justin Russell,” he said. “We
don’t know. Dropped off the grid three weeks ago.”

And probably into a shallow grave
arranged by Katarina Schleu. “So let’s say that I’m right, that Schleu has
some big, violent, dangerous plan. Who’s best equipped to jam a stick in
her spokes and stop her?”

“The Security Force,” he said
flatly.

“Yeah, that’s true, but if you’re
Redmond or Russell, you probably don’t have the Security Force on
speed-dial. And if the plan is really big and really nasty and aimed at the
Vees, that might be a bad idea. You don’t want to stir the hornet’s nest.”
I shook my head. “No, the best people to stop her are other people in the
Resistance. They know the plan, they know the players. People like Redmond
and the missing Justin Russell.”

“So why didn’t they do
it?”

“Maybe they tried,” I said. “Maybe
they were working on it. Maybe they ran out of time. Thursday morning,
Schleu sends some of her violent wack-jobs to punch Redmond’s ticket and
take her last obstacle out of play.”

“Okay, I’ll grant you that it’s
possible,” Daryl said. “But no more possible than some Resistance spat that
makes Redmond want Schleu dead.”

“Then you do agree that Schleu was
behind the drive-by on Beacon?”

“I think it’s likely.”

“Good.” I was silent for a moment,
then said, “So Redmond’s shot. No idea how bad, but his pants leg was
soaked with blood and there was more dripping out of him. What does he
do?”

“Comes to you, asks you to find and
kill Schleu,” he said. “And you, for some reason I can’t wrap my head
around, take the job.”

“Why didn’t he go to a doctor first
and get his wound taken care of?”

“He had revenge on his
mind.”

“Now who’s shoveling shit,” I said.
“The man was wounded, Daryl. He’d lost a lot of blood. His guys had to help
him walk, help him get into their van. Hell, I’m not even sure Redmond
survived the day. But rather than line up a doctor, Resistance or
otherwise, and get himself patched up, he came to my office to make sure
that there was somebody to stop Schleu’s plan.”

“You have no idea how serious his
wound was,” Daryl said. “Maybe the whole was just a con. Fake blood, fake
wound, to sell his story.”

“You think I don’t know real blood
from fake, Daryl?”

He didn’t say anything.

“And let’s not forget that it might
be a whole lot of work for some fake blood I might not even see before I
threw him out of my office. He didn’t come in and say, ‘Look at me, I’m
shot’. I just happened to see the bleeding, and that was only after he told
me what he wanted done, and what would happen if I didn’t take the case. He
could have just as easily left the office and I wouldn’t have known a thing
about the wound until I saw the blood he left on the floor.”

Daryl continued to stare at me
silently.

“And there’s one more thing,” I
said softly. “I was there. I talked to him.” I paused. “I’ve had experts
try to con me.” I paused again. “He told me that what was going to happen
would be bad for Vees, but worse for humans. It wasn’t a con. He was
scared. And I believe for good reason.”

He didn’t say anything for about a
minute. Then Daryl sighed and shook his head. “Goddammit, Charlie, even if
everything you say is true, what the hell am I supposed to do about
it?”

“Right now, I don’t need you to do
a thing,” I said. “I know Schleu is operating out of the Floresta building
in Eastside District. A buddy at Eastside station says the cops keep that
building and the people inside at arm’s length.” I paused. “And I don’t
want that to change. It changes, Schleu gets suspicious. Schleu gets
suspicious, maybe she moves her plans up a few days. So for at least the
next couple of days, I need you to let it rest and let me figure out what I
can do on my own.”

“You ain’t hearin’ me right,
Charlie,” Daryl said with another sigh. “Katarina Schleu is a vicious,
dangerous wack-job. I know that because I know her. And if you’re gonna go
nosin’ around on your lonesome, you ain’t gonna be alive come Christmas
Eve.”

Chapter
Seven

It was disturbingly close to what
Becca James had told me the day before. But I was more interested in
something else he’d said.

“What do you mean, you know her?” I
asked.

“Where do you think I ended up,
when they kicked us loose from the internment camps?”

I’d never given it much thought.
He’d been working his personal career path to the top before the war.
Plainclothes in Violent Crimes. Detective sergeant in the Organized Crime
Unit. We’d known each other back in Kansas, but weren’t especially good
friends, and that didn’t change when I found out he was on the department
here. We didn’t hang out together. He had his life, I had mine.

When I ran into him again about a
year ago, he was the Deputy Chief in charge of the Organized Crime Task
Force. His success with that was the boost he needed to get to where he was
now, Chief of Police Operations. How he got from Sergeant Northport before
the war to Deputy Chief Northport almost five years later was irrelevant to
me.

“No idea, Daryl,” I said. “But I’m
sure you’ll tell me.”

“Eastside District,” he said.
“Started off as day shift watch lieutenant. Davie Grooms was the watch
captain. Real go-getter. Been a chief somewhere up north, New York, Chicago,
someplace like that. When Schleu and her buddies showed up and took over
the Floresta, Davie wasn’t havin’ none of it. Papa Lazaro was bad enough.
Schleu was worse. So he started makin’ plans to take ‘em out.”