Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (25 page)

It was an opening and I took it.
“You know where he lives?” I asked.

“Yeah, uptown,” he said. “On
Barnes, just down the street from Oakley. He had a couple of us come over
there on a Saturday night and clean his fucking townhouse.”

“Why not pay him a little visit,
today or tomorrow,” I said. “Or better yet, on Wednesday. They celebrate
Christmas Eve, right? Why not give him one to remember?”

Johnny grinned. “Yeah,” he said
slowly. “A last Christmas Eve. Shove the pendant up his ass and a stake
into his chest.”

“I’m in for that,” I
said.

“Might want to keep that kind of
talk to yourself,” the black guy at the bar muttered, still staring at the
wall. He tapped his right ear with an index finger.

“What, we offend you?” I asked.
“You some kind of Vee lover, maybe got a bloodsucking honey at home to cut
and lick you all over?”

“I’m not looking for trouble, pal,”
he said, never looking in my direction. “I’m just saying that talk like
that can be dangerous.”

“Maybe if more people talked like
this, we wouldn’t be where we are now,” Johnny said angrily. “Maybe if more
people were willing to stand up to the bloodsuckers, a man would feel safe
on the street after the sun goes down.”

The guy took a small sip of his
beer and didn’t reply.

“Forget about him,” I said, turning
back to Johnny. “City’s full of people like him. So happy they’re still
alive that they don’t realize they might as well be dead.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said, taking a
mouthful of beer. “Just pisses me off, that’s all.”

A chair scraped behind me to the
left. Footsteps on the wood floor. Then a hand came down on my shoulder.
“Don’t pay him no nevermind,” a man said softly into my ear. “Niggers never
stood up for nothin’.” He paused. “That’s why they made such good
slaves.”

As far as I’m concerned, that kind
of thinking should have gone out the window after the war. White, black,
brown, yellow, whatever. People might have a different skin color, but we
were all the same to the Vees, and that’s what mattered.

 But I guess old habits die
hard.

I took a sip of my beer. “Yeah,” I
said. “One thing at a time.”

He laughed. “Why don’t you and your
friend come on over to our table. We might have a solution to your friend’s
skeeter problem.”

Bingo. Like I’d told Werkle, the
Resistance called vampires ‘skeeters’, short for mosquitos. Out west,
people called them leeches. Bloodsuckers seemed to be pretty universal
locally. In Camp Delta-5, a lot of us started calling them Vees, because
nobody really wanted to call them what they were. Vampires.

But the Resistance always called
them skeeters. I guess they liked to think of them as insects.

I looked up at the guy standing
over me. Curly blond hair, a big, fleshy face. Little soul patch below his
lower lip, though I imagine he called it something else. He smiled.
Gleaming white teeth, but just a little too small for his mouth. “Hey,
barkeep, another round for my friends here. Bring it to our table. We’ll
take a couple of beers too.” He paused. “And wipe the foam off the top.
We’re payin’ for beer, not bubbles.”

He slapped a five dollar bill on
the bar.

“Sure,” the bartender
said.

He turned to me. “Well, come
on.”

I grabbed my beer and stood. Behind
me, I heard Johnny push off from the stool. We followed the guy back to the
table.

As we sat down, he said, “I’m Zach,
and my partner here is Gus. Short for Augustus or some shit.”

“Name of a Roman emperor,” Gus said
slowly. He was a little guy, maybe five and a half feet tall, and slender.
His voice was so low it almost rumbled.

“Charlie,” I said. “My buddy is
Johnny.”

“Pleased to meet the both of you,”
Zach said. “What you boys doin’ in a bar before noon?”

I laughed. “Well, for Johnny it’s
an after-work drink,” I said. “Or an after quitting-work drink.”

“How ‘bout for you?”

I laughed again. “A lookin’ for
work drink,” I said.

The bartender came around the bar
with our beers. As he put the three glasses down on the table, I saw that
he’d kept the head to a reasonable size. A clean glass covered the open
mouth of Johnny’s beer bottle.

Zach watched him go back behind the
bar, then looked at me. “So, Charlie, you live ‘round here?”

“Downtown,” I said, draining the
inch or so left of my first beer. “No daytime work over there, and I’ll be
fucked if I’ll work for a bloodsucker.”

He smiled and glanced at Johnny.
“I’m a downtowner too,” Johnny said. “Had a job in midtown cleaning an
office building, but currently unemployed.” He held up the pendant and
dropped it on the table.

“Awww, but your poor skeeter boss
has to make a livin’,” Zach said with a smile.

“Fuck him,” Johnny said. “Fuck all
of them.”

“Gotta agree with you there,” Zach
said.

“You know, if you’re interested, we
got room for a couple more when we make our run to uptown Wednesday
afternoon,” I said. “I’m sure Mr. Sumner has bloodsucking neighbors we
could visit after we’re done with him.”

“I think we can go you one better,
Charlie,” Zach said. “Don’t think so small. Think big, my man.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you ain’t the only one with
them kinda ideas. Whadda you call ‘em, kindred spirits.” He laughed.
“There’s a whole bunch of kindred spirits right here on the east side.” He
paused. “Sound like people you might wanna meet?”

“What’s the catch,” Johnny
asked.

“No catch,” Zach replied. “No
bullshit. You come over, you hear what they got to say, and make up your
own mind. Sounds good, you can maybe hook up with us. Don’t sound good, you
go your own way. Totally up to you.”

“It already sounds good,” I said
with a smile as I took a sip of the fresh beer.

Zach studied me for a moment, then
looked at Johnny. “How ‘bout you?”

Johnny was silent for a few
seconds, then nodded. “Yeah, why not. Don’t cost nothing to listen to what
they got to say.”

“Good,” Zach said. “Me and Gus have
a couple of more stops to make before we head back. Why don’t you and
Charlie just park your asses here, relax, have another beer. We’ll be back
in an hour or so and we’ll head on over there.”

Zach thought he had us on the line,
but he was the one with the hook in his mouth. Time to give it a little
tug, make sure it was in tight. “You sure that you and Gus aren’t just
pulling some kind of con on us?” I asked, staring at him.

He smiled. “You always this
suspicious, Charlie?”

“Just cautious,” I said. “Lot out there looking to get over on people.”

“Maybe, but not us,” Zach said,
standing. Gus stood too. They walked to the bar and Zach put a bill on the
counter. “We gotta run, but make sure our friends don’t get dry before we
come back,” he said. He gave us a smile as he and Gus went out the
door.

Chapter
Sixteen

I waited a few seconds, to make
sure Zach and Gus weren’t coming back, then leaned in toward Johnny and
said, “So what, exactly, are you doing here?”

“I told you, watching your back,”
he said. “I don’t know what you have on the boss, but Eddie definitely
doesn’t want you walking into a hole. Angelo neither. So they sent me to
make sure nothing happened to you.”

Whatever Daryl Northport had said
to Eddie Gabriel when he told him to help me, it must have been pretty
good.

“Angelo’s in on this?”

He nodded. “Yeah, Angelo suggested
Eddie send me.” He paused. “And hey, I thought I did good there.” He paused
again. “But I didn’t get what he was saying about moolies?”

“About what?”

“Moolies,” he repeated. “You know,
mulignan
s. Coloreds.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, these guys
don’t just hate Vees. They also hate anybody who isn’t white. If it wasn’t
for the war, they’d probably be back in some north-Georgia shack trying to
figure out how they could string up some...moolies without being
caught.”

“That’s pretty fucked, man,” Johnny
said.

“It is,” I said. “And yeah, you did
a good job.” A lot better than I would have done on my own. “So why don’t
you take off. When they come back, I’ll tell them that you had second
thoughts. Big talk, no action. They’re not gonna care.”

“No can do,” he said. “Eddie told
me to stick with you, and that’s what I’m going to do.” He paused. “Look,
Mr. Welles, I need this.”

“What does that mean?”

“You remember the way I was a year
ago, right?”

I remembered all too well. “Yeah,
you were a street rat.”

“Exactly,” Johnny said. “A punk
kid. And that’s all I was ever going to be. What did Eddie call me that
time when he was talking to you? A faithful mutt.”

“I remember,” I said.

“But I’m not a faithful mutt. I may
not be the smartest guy around, but I’m better than that. And Eddie knew
it. So he sent me to charm school in Atlanta last spring.”

“Charm school?” I was up on a lot
of mob slang, but that was a new one.

“Yeah, you know, a place where they
teach you to talk right and dress right?”

“An actual charm
school?”

“They aren’t just for girls,” he
said. There was a defensive edge in his voice. “I spent four months there,
learned plenty. How to talk to people, how to dress, how to act. Now Eddie
lets me work at the social club, sometimes I go with him and Angelo on
meetings. But never on my own. See, he remembers how I used to be, and he
thinks I might do something stupid.” He paused. “This is my chance to show
him that I’m somebody he can trust, not just a faithful mutt.”

“I hear what you’re saying,
Johnny,” I said. “And you’ve come a long way in the past year.” I paused.
“But this isn’t the job to show your stuff. These are bad people. And it
could be a one-way ride.”

“That’s why I’m here,” he said with
a quick smile. “Like I keep telling you, I got your back.”

I shook my head. “I have to do
this. You don’t. Take off. Make your bones another day.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I can’t, Mr.
Welles. Eddie told me to do this, and I’m going to. And there’s nothing you
can say to change my mind.”

I didn’t say anything and he
continued, “Look, we’re already there, right? We made the play and they
bought it. So we go where they take us, you do whatever you need to do, and
I make sure they don’t do you. Simple.”

His optimism wasn’t contagious. I
was resigned to the fact that the only way to stop Schleu might put me into
a bad place. A no-coming-home place. I didn’t think that having Johnny
there to watch my back would change that.

But he had me pinned. If he
wouldn’t bail out willingly, there was no way I could make him
go.

“You’re making a mistake, Johnny,”
I said.

“Nah,” he said with a big smile.
“You’ll see, this is going to work out just fine.”

Zach came into Artie’s about half
an hour later. He looked over at us, then at the bartender. The bartender
shook his head.

Zach grinned and came over to the
table. “You boys done passed the first test with flyin’ colors,” he said.
“Lotta fellas, you leave ‘em money for beer, they get nine kinds of drunk.
Just shit-faced. But you kept your heads. That’s real good. So you ‘bout
ready?”

“Just so we’re clear,” Johnny said.
“We listen to what you got to say, we don’t like it, we walk,
right?”

“Absolutely,” Zach said. He smiled.
“You’re a suspicious one, Johnny, but that’s a good thing. You got every
right to ask that question. And I like to hear that, cause it lets me show
you that I’m talkin’ straight.” He paused for a second. “Now come on, van’s
waitin’.”

We followed him out of the bar. A
black van was idling at the curb, the side door open, Gus standing next to
it. I could see people inside.

As we reached the van, Zach turned
to me and said, “I am going to have to relieve you of that side-arm I
noticed under your coat, Charlie.”

“Why’s that?”

He smiled. “Rules. Things work out,
you’ll have all the hardware you need. They don’t, you get your pistol
back.”

“Just so I get it back,” I
said.

“Sure,” he said. He looked both
ways on the sidewalk, then quickly slid his left hand under my coat and
came out with the holstered pistol. It went into the pocket of his faded
green fatigue jacket.

Then he turned to Johnny. “How
‘bout you?”

“I’m clean.”

“You sure?” Zach asked. “Looks like
you might have something stuffed down the front of your pants.” He grinned.
“If it’s a gun, that’s a bad place to put it, boy. Blow your damn nuts
off.”