Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (11 page)

He paused. “Davie woke up to the
wrong end of a bullet one mornin’. Him, his wife, his two daughters. Gunned
down in their own home. There wasn’t no proof, of course, but everybody
knew it was Schleu and the Humans First Front. Then I got word from Central
that I was lookin’ at a promotion, new day shift watch captain. And Schleu
was my problem.”

“Why didn’t Grooms just call in the
Security Force?” I asked. “They have the resources and the Resistance is
their problem.” I paused. “Or why didn’t you call them after they killed
Grooms?”

“Davie thought about it,” he said
after a few seconds. “But he wanted to try it on our own first. Security
Force was Plan B. After Davie was gunned down...”

Daryl shook his head. “How’d Schleu
know that we were comin’ after her? It was pretty goddamn clear. Schleu had
ears inside Eastside District station. I told ya the other day, we got cops
who are in the Resistance. Maybe not a lot, but enough. Enough to get Davie
Grooms and his family killed. And anybody else who went after
Schleu.”

“So you didn’t want the same bullet
sandwich as Grooms.”

“Wasn’t about me, CW,” he said.
“This business, you make your play, you take your chances. But I didn’t
want the officers on the street to be just poker chips in the pot. If
Schleu was willin’ to shoot down a police captain and his family, she
wouldn’t have no trouble shootin’ a patrolman or detective, day shift or
night shift.” He paused. “The Floresta was an ant hill, and it wasn’t the
only one in the city. The Security Force might kick it over, but some of
the ants were gonna survive. When the Security Force left, they’d be back.
Lookin’ for payment for their dead.” He paused again. “Payment in
lives.”

Daryl occasionally had a taste for
the dramatic, but he was right. You could kill some of them, even most of
them, but the ones you didn’t kill would be a problem. In that way, they
were a lot like Vees.

“I talked about it with Scottie
Smith, the night shift watch captain. Even ran it by Kiley, district chief
in Eastside at the time. Both of ‘em were reasonable fellas and good cops,
even if they were vampires. Remember, we was tryin’ to get the city up and
runnin’ again. Last thing we needed was a war with the Resistance. So I
made it known that we wanted to talk. And a few days later, I got an invite
to stop by the Floresta. Alone.”

He was silent for a moment. Maybe
deciding how much to tell me, or maybe just remembering.

“I gotta tell ya, Charlie, I was
shit-scared,” he finally said. “Schleu had already gunned down the guy
before me, and now she wanted me to walk into the Floresta for a sitdown.
But in the end, I didn’t have no choice. It was that or start a fight
without no end. So I drove over there.”

Daryl stared at me. “That woman is
flat-out nuts. First thing she tells me is that she wants all the black
cops and Asian cops and Hispanic cops shipped out of the district. Wants
the vampire cops gone. She thinks Eastside District station should be all
white and all human.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “Olsen
told me that the Humans First Front includes people with...” I shrugged.
“Funny ideas. Stands to reason that their boss might share those
ideas.”

“I gotta say, it wasn’t easy
tellin’ her that her wish wasn’t gonna become reality. Not with half a
dozen people with AKs, M-16s, Uzis and whatnot standing around me. But no
point makin’ promises I couldn’t keep, so I told her no.”

“How’d she take it?”

“Better than I expected. Just
wanted to know why I was there if I wasn’t gonna do what she
wanted.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her the truth,” Daryl said.
“I wanted to come to an arrangement between her people and Metro PD. A
simple one. We leave them alone, they leave us alone. We don’t mess with
them, they don’t mess with cops or civilians. Humans or vampires, Eastside
District or anyplace else in the city. A truce.”

“That doesn’t sound like the kind
of deal the Area Governor’s Office would like.” I paused. “You’re telling
me that this arrangement is such a well-guarded secret that nobody has
mentioned it to the Security Force since then?”

“Not from the department, not
officially,” he said. “It wasn’t an easy sell to the Deputy Commissioner or
Joe Napier. But they were in the same boat as we were in Eastside District.
Commissioner Napier was tryin’ to put together a functional police
department. Vampires and humans, day shifts and night shifts that at best
didn’t respect each other, and at worst were at each other’s throats. Last
thing he needed was the Resistance prowlin’ the streets, killin’ cops and
citizens. So he gave the okay.”

He paused. “Now, unofficially,
let’s just say that it’s my personal opinion that the Security Force knows
what’s goin’ on at the Floresta and they’re content, for the time bein’ at
least, to let it be. It’s a big area, bunch of cities, and even if they got
a lot of men and a lot of guns, they ain’t got enough to go to war with
every Resistance group in every city. They gotta pick their fights. And up
to now, maybe Schleu ain’t been important enough.”

I thought about Eichhorn again.
Maybe the Vees were rethinking Schleu’s importance.

“You want a suggestion?” Daryl
said. “If you’re right about Schleu, and frankly that’s a big goddamn ‘if’
that I ain’t totally buyin’, then pick up the phone. Talk to Miss Takeda.
Talk to General Bain. Tell ‘em what you know, what you think. Let ‘em
handle it.” He paused. “At least they have the manpower to do it right,
even if it eventually blows up in our faces.”

“That’s
my
Plan B,” I said.
“After I get a better handle on what Schleu has on tap for Christmas
Eve.”

“Goddammit, Charlie, you just don’t
listen,” Daryl said. He was starting to get angry again. “This ain’t
somethin’ you can do on your own. And I can’t help you. The department gets
involved, forget about Christmas Eve. We’re gonna have a war on our hands
with the Resistance right now, and it ain’t one we can win.”

“I don’t remember asking for help,”
I said. “The information Olsen gave me was very useful, but I’m not asking
for anything else. I can take it from here.”

“Right into the fuckin’ grave is
where you can take it,” he said.

“My problem.”

“No, it ain’t,” he said. “You start
somethin’ you can’t finish, you’re just lightin’ a fuse, and it don’t
matter if you’re around to see the bomb go off or not” He was silent for a
few moments. “I can’t let you do that.”

“Gonna arrest me,
Daryl?”

“I’d like to,” he said.
“Unfortunately there ain’t no law against being stupid. So I got no choice.
Gotta do something else.”

“What’s that?”

“Make a call. Then you go see a
man.”

“What man?”

“Eddie Gabriel,” he
said.

I laughed. “Is that a
joke?”

It wasn’t a joke. And in a twisted
kind of way, it made sense.

Eddie Gabriel was a mobster, the
self-proclaimed Mayor of Downtown. Known around the neighborhood as Eddie
Gee. A con man before the war who ended up at the top of the smallish heap
in downtown.

I had history with Eddie, back
before the war when he was conning old ladies on the eastside, later when
he moved on to thieving and dealing there, and finally after the camps,
when he saw an opportunity in downtown and moved in. He was still thieving
and dealing, and he’d added whores and protection to his portfolio. But he
no longer did it by himself. Eddie had people who did the work. He just
collected the profits.

There was something else about
Eddie. Something only a handful of people knew. He was Chief Daryl
Northport’s personal snitch.

Of course, Eddie wouldn’t call
himself a snitch. He was a businessman and his business was crime. So like
any businessman, why not do what you can to hurt the competition and help
yourself? Especially when it kept the Downtown District cops off your
back.

My friend Jimmy Mutz, the Downtown
District day shift watch captain, hated Eddie with a passion. He could take
Eddie’s whores and drug dealers off the street, bust his thieves. But he
couldn’t touch Eddie. It was something that he complained about all the
time to Northport.

I saw both sides, and took
neither.

Gabriel was the root cause of a lot
of downtown crime. Take him off the street, his part of the crime problem
goes away. Not all crime, of course, but a nice chunk

But Gabriel was also a good source
of information, about organized crime in the city and related matters. He
wasn’t at the top of the mob ladder, but when the Organized Crime Task
Force broke the back of the uptown mobs, Eddie had definitely moved up a
few rungs. The higher he got, the more he knew. The more he knew, the more
Daryl knew, and the easier it got to make arrests citywide.

For me, Eddie Gabriel was just part
of downtown. He’d been helpful to me a couple of times and in return, I’d
helped him out once or twice. Not friends, but we got along. I knew where
he stood, he knew where I stood. And we both knew how hard we could
push.

Calling Eddie made sense because
Eddie had an organization. He had contacts on the eastside. And there was a
good chance that they knew about things that cops and nosy private
investigators wouldn’t.

The last time I’d tracked down
Eddie Gee, he was operating out of an old tire warehouse on First, south of
Market, near the docks. But I guess a warehouse wasn’t suitable anymore for
an important guy like Eddie. According to Daryl, he’d moved his
headquarters to a café that he’d turned into a private social club on
Broome, half a block from St. Joseph. Somebody must have told him that’s
the way the real mobsters in New York used to do it, back in the
day.

As I turned off St. Joseph, I
didn’t have to scan the storefronts looking for Eddie’s social club. The
big, black pre-war Cadillac, Eddie’s pride and joy, was parked at the curb
about halfway down the block.

Vic, his driver, leaned against the
car, wearing a long leather jacket, a cigarette hanging from the corner of
his mouth. He eyed me as I pulled in behind the Caddy and
stopped.

I knew Vic’s weren’t the only eyes
on me. There was undoubtedly police Intelligence Squad surveillance on
Eddie’s club, maybe even detectives from Downtown District watching
it.

Vic didn’t return the smile I
flashed him as I got out of the Jeep and crossed the sidewalk to the solid
wooden door of the social club. Tried the doorknob. Locked. I pounded on it
a couple of times.

The door opened. It took me a few
seconds to recognize the guy who opened it.

The last time I’d seen Johnny
Three-legs, he was a scrawny, spiky-haired kid with a three-inch blade in
his pocket and a rumored third ‘leg’ in his pants that made the ladies
swoon. A punk. And not a smart one. He ran errands for Eddie, and that was
about all he was good for. Eddie thought of him as little more than a
pet.

It looked like things had changed.
Johnny had filled out, gotten a haircut and found a new tailor. And if I
wasn’t mistaken, there was the bulge of a pistol under the left arm of his
sports coat. A year ago, Eddie would never have let Johnny carry a
gun.

He’d also learned some manners.
“Mr. Welles,” he said. “Can I help you?”

“You’re looking good, Johnny,” I
said. “I’d like to see Eddie.”

“Let me see if Mr. Gabriel has some
time for you. Please wait.”

He closed the door in my face. I
turned to Vic on the other side of the sidewalk and said, “Big change for
Johnny. He almost seems human.”

Vic smiled but didn’t say
anything.

A moment later, the door opened
again and Johnny said, “This way.”

The interior of the social club was
pretty plain, though somebody had hung some red and green ribbons across
the ceiling. A little holiday cheer. There was a big coffee urn in the back
corner, a stack of paper cups next to it. The dozen or so small tables were
scattered haphazardly around the room, most unoccupied.

Against the wall I spotted Kim, one
of Eddie’s working girls, sitting with a couple of guys. I’d seen her
walking Second, south of Jackson Square, whenever I was in the area. It was
a few blocks away. Maybe she was on a break.

She saw me but didn’t smile. Nobody
in the place was smiling. The seven or eight people sitting at the tables
all gave me a quick glance and then looked away. Not a very welcoming
atmosphere.

In the back of the room, Angelo,
Eddie’s bodyguard, sat at a small table next to a door. He nodded to me as
Johnny brought me back.

“Angelo,” I said, returning the
nod.

Johnny stepped to one side of the
door. “Go on in,” he said. “Mr. Gabriel is expecting you.”

“Thanks,” I said as I opened the
door.

Eddie’s office in the tire
warehouse had been utilitarian at best. Big desk, little desk, old armchair
that they’d probably found on the curb, waiting for the garbage men to pick
up. Not exactly the right kind of digs for the man who viewed himself as the
Godfather of Downtown.