Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (22 page)

Charlie-17. That was the camp where
Sgt. Olsen said the Resistance had tried to fight back against the Vee
guards.

“Were you in Charlie-17 during the
uprising?”

The words were coming easier to
him. “Yeah, but we didn’t get involved with it. Cap’n Kat said it was too
early, that the time weren’t right. So we sat it out.”

“And then?”

“Then they kicked us loose and
Cap’n Kat took us here. Said the skeeters would be on the lookout for
problems in Atlanta. Got here, killed the fuckin’ mud people in the
Floresta and moved in.”

“Mud people?”

He nodded. “You know, niggers,
spics, half-breeds. Human garbage. Mud people.”

Charming. When we were done, I
might light that match myself.

“So what’s going on at The Hole?”
It was time to get to what I really wanted to know.

“Dunno,” he said.

“What do you mean, you don’t
know?”

“I’m security,” he said. “Got other
people workin’ over at The Hole. I do sentry duty, take eight hours off,
then do it again. Two on, eight off. It sucks, but I ain’t got a
choice.”

“Don’t you talk to others in the
Floresta about work?”

He laughed. “I guess you don’t know
Cap’n Kat,” he said. “You don’t talk about shit in our outfit. Not to
nobody. She says it’s all need to know. You don’t need to know, you don’t.
Flap your gums about what you’re doin’ and they take you to the
basement.”

“What does that mean?”

“We got a garden planted down
there,” Jimmy Joe said with a sly grin. “Garden of people who couldn’t keep
their mouths shut or fucked up some other way. Dig a hole, make ‘em lie
down in it, put a bullet in their head, cover ‘em with quicklime, close the
hole. Got guys who only do plantin’ duty.”

I sighed. “How about bar
duty?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I know all
‘bout that. That was my job, till my partner screwed up and brought some
mulatto bitch back to the building. I mean, she looked white to me, but
Cap’n Kat’s got the eye and she weren’t fooled. Cap’n planted both her and
ol’ Sammy and put me on sentry duty.”

“Tell me about bar
duty.”

“Well, it’s pretty easy work. Call
it bar duty cause you spend most of your time in bars, sometimes
restaurants too. You go in, find a quiet place to sit, nurse a beer and you
listen to what folks are talkin’ about. Most of it’s bullshit, of course,
bar talk, and sometimes there ain’t nothin’ but niggers and spics. But you
can usually find one or two good white people. Sometimes more if you get
there early. People who ain’t got no work and ain’t got no family show up
at bars when the doors open.”

“You find one or two for
what?”

“Recruits,” he said. He paused.
“Well, I mean they ain’t real recruits. It ain’t like they’re part of the
outfit. But Cap’n Kat has a job for ‘em so I guess they’re sorta part of
the outfit.”

“Those are the people that you
bring back to the Floresta, the groups?”

He nodded. “Yes, usually you stay
out until you have at least ten or fifteen. Sometimes you do it for eight
or ten hours and you only got six. So you come back with six. But she likes
to see more.” He laughed. “More the merrier, ain’t that what they
say?”

“It sure is,” I said with a thin
smile. “You say Cap’n Kat has a job for them. What job?”

“Hell if I know,” he said. “I ain’t
got nothin’ to do with that and didn’t when I was on bar duty. Bring ‘em
in, she talks to ‘em for a few minutes on the steps, gives ‘em a chance to
leave, then brings ‘em inside. Takes ‘em someplace in the back. That’s all
I know.”

I thought for a moment. “What
criteria do you use to choose them?”

“What what?”

“How do you choose the good
ones?”

“Oh, well, they gotta be white, of
course, man or woman,” he said. “And they can’t be too old and feeble, or
too young. Course when you’re recruitin’ in a bar, you don’t see a lot of
kids.”

“That’s all?”

“No, that ain’t all,” he said.
“That’s just who you pay attention to.”

I sighed. Jimmy Joe wasn’t too
quick. “And what are you looking for when you pay attention to
somebody?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “They
gotta hate skeeters. I mean really hate ‘em. You get some feel for it when
you’re listenin’, and if they seem like they might be right, you slide on
up to ‘em and talk. That’s how you find the right ones. Then you bring ‘em
back and turn ‘em over to Cap’n Kat.”

I was beginning to see a way to get
close to Katarina Schleu inside the Floresta. The only snag was that it
might be a one-way trip.

Chapter
Fourteen

Jimmy Joe didn’t have much more to
add. Like Eichhorn had said, bar duty had ended Thursday morning, the same
morning Redmond’s warehouse on Beacon had been shot up. Which also happened
to be the day after his partner Sammy brought in a ‘mulatto’, which got
Sammy planted in the basement and Jimmy Joe reassigned to sentry duty. Then
Saturday morning, it started up again. Not as many groups, not as
frequently.

It was questionable whether it
meant anything. Had bar duty ended because of the shooting Thursday
morning, or because of Sammy’s mistake bringing a ‘mud person’ to their
exclusive all-white party? Or for another reason altogether? And why had
they started gathering recruits again after the break?

Finding the answers to questions is
a big part of what I do. Every case has questions. Some have a lot. This
job seemed to be mostly questions, with very few answers. It looked like
the only place to find more answers was inside the Floresta. And the only
way to get in was to get recruited.

During my six years in plainclothes
with 83
^rd
Street Robbery-Homicide, I’d gone undercover a few
times, never for very long, and always with plenty of backup nearby. I
wasn’t one of those deep-cover guys who checked in once a month and lived
the cover life.

To find out what Schleu had
planned, I’d have to get recruited by one of her guys on bar duty. That was
the easy part. Find a bar they were watching, go in, badmouth the Vees
until they took the bait. Angelo, helped by Werkle’s soldiers, would
probably be able to point me to the right bar.

The hard part would be getting
useful information in her compartmentalized organization. And getting out
alive. There wouldn’t be any backup waiting to rescue me if things turned
to shit.

I told Werkle I was going home to
get a good night’s sleep in my own bed before we moved on to phase two of
the plan.

The last thing I heard Jimmy Joe
say was “What are you doin’?”

Then I heard a shot as the woodshed
door closed behind me.

There was one thing bothering me,
on my drive back to my apartment and after I got into bed.

I didn’t think it was a good idea
for Schleu and her people to know that I was a private investigator. A lot
of people viewed private investigators as hired guns who work for anybody
if the price is right. Some think of us as barely a step above
lawyers.

And if I would work for anybody,
there was no telling if I was on a job, and who that job was for. Maybe the
Vees. Or Redmond. Or Werkle. If Schleu found out that I was a private
investigator, I had a feeling I might get planted in her
basement.

I didn’t plan to tell her, of
course. But Daryl Northport had been pretty clear that Schleu had people
inside the police department in Eastside District. Fellow travelers, if not
full-on race-baiting members of the Humans First Front. And Schleu seemed
security-conscious enough to do background checks, or at least spot checks,
on her new recruits. Performed, no doubt, by her friends in Metro
PD.

Given enough time, I had contacts
downtown who could put together a fake identity for me and back it up with
paper. It wouldn’t be perfect, but good enough to pass a cursory background
check. Lots of records had been lost during the war, and lots of people
displaced. Most didn’t have the paper trail behind them that they’d had
before the war.

But I didn’t have the time for
that. In two days, it would be December 24
^th
.

So I’d have to go in as myself.
Leave my private investigator ID card behind. That would probably cover me,
as long as there was no background check. But if my name got passed to a
friend at Eastside District, there was no telling what they’d
find.

Or maybe there was.

I lay there for a moment, then
rolled out of bed, turned on the lamp, and went to the dresser at the foot
of the bed. Sitting there was a white card, kind of crumpled, that I’d left
Thursday afternoon. Sergeant Alexandra Olsen’s name and a phone
number.

It was late. She’d told me she
could be reached at that number at all times, but I considered it a long
shot on a Sunday night. But worth a try.

I went back to the living room,
grabbed the phone and dialed the number. It rang six times, and I was just
about to hang up when I heard, “Yes?”

“Sgt. Olsen?”

“Yes.”

“Hi, it’s Charlie
Welles.”

No response. “You remember, the
private investigator? We spoke Thursday?”

“Yes.”

“You told me that I could call if I
had questions, or needed assistance.”

“Yes.” She paused. “I told you that
you could call if you had questions or if you located Michael J. Redmond or
Katarina S. Schleu. You took my card with this number.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And
actually, I have located Katarina Schleu. I also have a
question.”

“Yes,” she said. “One moment while
I switch to the wireless headset that was issued to me by Captain Miller,
the commander of the Intelligence Squad. I am the only officer in the
Intelligence Squad who has been issued a wireless headset.”

The phone seemed to go dead for a
moment. Then she said, “Wait while I go to my workstation.”

“You’re still at your
office?”

“Yes.”

I could hear her settling into her
chair, followed by the thud of fingers on a keyboard. “What is the current
location of Katarina S. Schleu?” she asked.

“As you thought, she’s at the
Floresta building.”

“Nine-five-five-one Tuxedo Avenue,”
she said. “When did you last visually observe Katarina S. Schleu at that
location?”

“Earlier today.” It wasn’t strictly
true. I hadn’t visually observed Schleu, at least not directly. But I’d
seen photos. And I had no reason to believe that she’d left the Floresta
since the last pictures were taken Saturday. So it was mostly true. True
enough.

Olsen’s fingers slapped the
keyboard. “I have added a new entry to the log file. Did you observe any
persons who might have been Katarina S. Schleu’s new deputy commander, and
if so, describe them.”

“New deputy?”

“Yes.”

“Why does she have a new
deputy?”

“Katarina S. Schleu’s former
deputy commander, Randall Sheppard, was killed by an unknown assailant or
assailants during an exchange of gunfire in the Ryer Avenue subway station
on Wednesday, December 17
^th
at approximately zero-eight-hundred
hours. A preliminary identification of Randall Sheppard was made on
Thursday, December 18
^th
based on fingerprint comparison with
Area Government records from Internment Camp Charlie-17. Because of changes
to his physical appearance, a positive identification of Randall Sheppard
was withheld until Saturday, December 20
^th
, and his death was
not reported to me until this morning.”

“Changes to his physical
appearance?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of changes?”

“Randall Sheppard had gained
approximately sixty pounds since his release from Internment Camp
Charlie-17. He had also shaved his head and grown a full beard. Morgue
attendant Herman Wilkowitz shaved the beard at the instruction of day shift
watch lieutenant Samuel Iverson which allowed for a facial comparison with
the Internment Camp Charlie-17 photograph and, with the fingerprint
comparison, provided an acceptable positive identification.”

It wasn’t easy finding the right
question to ask Olsen, but when you found it, or even happened on it, the
floodgates opened. Sometimes you learned things you didn’t know were there
to be learned.

Wednesday, Sheppard is killed by
unknown assailants. Did Schleu know who they were? Was the drive-by on
Beacon payback for the murder of her deputy? And if so, had Redmond killed
Sheppard trying to stop Schleu’s plan before he came to me? Or was it just
coincidence?

And what about Sheppard himself?
The late Terry Legs had described a meeting between the guy who killed
Ralphie Suarez and somebody at The Hole. A somebody that Terry had
described as a gorilla with a bald head and a beard. Was it Sheppard, four
days away from being shot down in a subway station? Or some other bald,
bearded gorilla on the payroll?