Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (30 page)

“The skeeters who live in uptown
are professionals. Bankers, lawyers, white-collar workers, company owners.”
I nodded at Johnny. “Like the prick that he was working for. I’m not saying
that somebody couldn’t hit a townhouse or an apartment, break in, and kill
whatever skeeters were inside.” I paused. “That’s what me and Johnny were
talking about when you interrupted us in that bar.” I paused again. “But
hunker down? Six hundred people in who knows how many apartments?” I shook
my head. “That isn’t going to happen.”

“Why not?”

“You ever work a regular job,
Zach?”

“I worked at McDonalds in
Orangeburg, over by the interstate highway, one summer,” he said. “Didn’t
like it much. Had a nigger manager.”

“Okay, and if you didn’t show up
for work one day, what would have happened?”

“Woulda got fired,” he said.
“That’s what I did. Just didn’t go one day. They slapped me with a no-call,
no-show and suspended me. Called to tell me I was suspended. Didn’t answer.
So they fired me.”

“Right,” I said. “Only if a bank
president doesn’t show up for work and doesn’t call in, they don’t slap him
with a no-call no-show. They call. If he doesn’t answer, they call somebody
else.”

“Who?”

“Cops,” I said. “The cops up there
are real protective of their citizens, skeeter cops and human cops. They do
stop and checks on trucks coming in, and if they see you on the street,
they’re just as likely to question you and run your ID as look at you. They
don’t mess around. They get a call that one of their citizens might be in
distress, they do a welfare check. Somebody doesn’t come to the door,
they’re going in.” I paused. “I’ve been told that they have keys to ninety
percent of the homes at the Uptown District station. When the skeeters go
on vacation or out of town, they let the cops know so they can do house
checks while the owners are gone.”

“I ain’t sayin’ that’s exactly
what’s happenin’,” Zach said. “I told you, it’s an educated guess. Uptown
is where the skeeters are, we got a powerful lot of skeeter killers. Seems
natural that Cap’n Kat wants to put the two together.”

“I can see how it would make sense
to you, but the reality on the ground is that it wouldn’t
happen.”

“So maybe they ain’t there,” he
said. “But they’re somewhere. And I know we’re gettin’ close to the
Lexington Project, ‘cause they’ve slowed down with recruitin’. That says to
me that they got enough people, and are just waitin’ for the right
time.”

I froze. “Close to the
what?”

“The Lexington Project,” Zach said.
“I heard that’s what they’re callin’ this, what Cap’n Kat has
planned.”

“But you don’t know what it
is.”

“Damn, you sure ask a lot of
question, Charlie.”

“Sorry,” I said quickly. I smiled.
“Just excited, I guess. Hearing the commander talk about cleaning out the
skeeters and Captain Konrad telling us that we’d be the hammer that breaks
humanity’s chains.” I paused. “I guess I’m just really glad to be here,
right now, when all of this is about to happen. Like a kid on Christmas
Eve, you know? Keeps asking questions, can’t wait till Christmas
morning.”

I’d deliberately mentioned
Christmas Eve, hoping for a reaction. I got none.

“Oh, I understand,” he said. “It is
an excitin’ time, and we’re all real lucky to part of it. Maybe I just been
doin’ this for too long to get all revved up about it. More than three and
a half years now. But I am happy that it’s gonna happen, and soon, so we
can get started on rebuildin’ the country and makin’ it a white, Christian
nation again, like it was in the beginnin’.”

“Amen to that,” Johnny
said.

It was a nice touch, and I nodded
in agreement.

But I was thinking about what he’d
called the Lexington Project.

Chapter
Nineteen

I had some trouble getting to sleep
that night.

Part of it was the knowledge that
in little more than twenty-four hours, it would be Christmas Eve, the day
of what Redmond called Armageddon, for vampires and for humans. And though
I knew a lot more about some parts of it, I didn’t have enough to put it
all together.

If Zach was right, Schleu had six
hundred new recruits, trained to some extent, ready and waiting to kill
Vees on command. Plus her own people. But where were they? And what was the
plan?

I also didn’t know if being inside
the Floresta was going help me do what I needed to. I might get my shot at
Schleu, take her out, and almost certainly be dead shortly after. But would
that stop whatever was in motion? Or was it so far along that it would
continue on, like a car with a dead man behind the wheel hurtling into a
crowd?

Maybe Daryl Northport had been
right. Maybe I should have called the Area Governor’s Office and dumped it
in Phillip Bain’s lap. Too late for that now.

And if that wasn’t enough to keep
me lying awake on the thin mattress, I had Johnny sleeping on the other
mattress, his snoring as loud as an idling tank. It took some real
self-control to keep from smothering him with a pillow.

But I did finally fall
asleep.

Sometime later in the night, they
came for us.

I don’t know if it was the ceiling
light coming on or the shout of “Up, up, up!” that woke me. I opened my
eyes to see two guys in black fatigues leaning in on me. They grabbed my
arms and pulled me up.

“What the fuck?” Johnny muttered
sleepily from behind me. I looked over my shoulder. He had one on either
arm as well.

“Move it!” a fifth man in the
doorway yelled. “Get your asses in gear!”

I was still wearing the clothes I’d
worn the day before. The building was warmer than it was outside, but it
wasn’t exactly toasty, so I’d kept the sweater and jeans on while I slept.
Johnny was in boxer shorts and a tee-shirt. Apparently that was dressed
enough for wherever we were going. Shoes weren’t required.

I half-walked, half-stumbled
between my two escorts. Out the door, down the hall, then left through the
living room and into the second floor hallway.

“Where the hell are we going?”
Johnny demanded.

“Quiet,” the man in the lead
said.

When we reached the first stairway,
I tried to pull my arms free to go down the stairs under my own power. The
grips of the men on either side tightened and we started down.

They were moving fast, and halfway
to the first floor, I stumbled. The two guys kept moving, dragging me until
I regained my footing at the base of the stairs.

The lobby was deserted as we came
down the wide main staircase. When we reached the bottom, the man in front
turned, looked from me to Johnny, then pointed at Johnny. “You. Sit. No
talking.”

The two guys on either side pressed
him down and stood over him, watching. Johnny rubbed his arms, his eyes on
me.

The leader started across the lobby
to the leasing office, and I was forced along behind him. He opened the
door and stepped to one side. My escorts gave me a shove inside and closed
the door.

Katarina Schleu sat on the other
side of a pair of six-foot folding tables that had been pushed together,
smoking a cigarette, staring at me without expression.

It was maybe my only chance to be
alone with her, my only chance to take her out and just maybe make a break
for it, no matter how futile. But the width of the two tables, together,
was about five feet. A little too long for a lunge that would end with
my hands around her throat.

And then there was the heavy
automatic pistol on the table next to her right hand to
consider.

“Sit,” she said. She took a long
drag on the cigarette.

I sat in the folding metal chair on
my side of the table.

Schleu continued to stare at me for
a moment, then glanced down at the open file folder in front of her. From
where I was, it looked like there was one sheet. I couldn’t read what was
written. Some was typed, some handwritten. But I recognized the photo from
my driver’s license. I also recognized the Metro PD shield at the top of
the page.

“Welles, Charles Lawrence,” she
said. “What do you prefer? Charles? Charlie? Chuck?”

“Charlie’s fine, ma’am,” I
said.

She smiled, but continued to look
at the sheet of paper. “You can cut the ‘ma’am’ bullshit,” she said without
looking up. “I sense that it doesn’t come naturally to you, and this is all
about honesty.”

I didn’t say anything.

She looked up. “You live downtown,
Charlie,” she said. “What are you doing here on the east side?”

“Looking for work,” I said. “Not a
lot of that downtown.”

Schleu nodded. “Not a lot of that
anywhere,” she said. “Unless you want to work for skeeters.”

I was silent for a moment, then
said, “I agree.”

“So what kind of work do you do,
Charlie?”

It was the question I was waiting
for. My chance to toss out the line and hope she went for the bait. “Little
of this, little of that,” I said. “Whatever seems like it might be
interesting.”

She took a final hit of the
cigarette and dropped it on the floor. Bad for the carpet, but then, it was
her carpet. “You might want to be a little more specific in your answers,”
she said. “I don’t like asking twice.”

“Bodyguard work,” I said.
“Protection. Muscle.”

“For?”

“For whoever pays me,” I
said.

She continued to stare. “I won’t
ask you to be specific a second time,” she said softly.

“I guess you’d call them
businessmen,” I said. “Smugglers, fences, people with problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Usually problems with skeeters,” I
said. “Competitors, Security Force, sometimes skeeter cops. I do a lot of
work at night.”

“Ever do any work for the
Resistance?” she asked. “Maybe for a guy who called himself
Red?”

The first trap. I was glad to get
it out of the way early. If I said yes, I was done. But I had to say no the
right way.

I shook my head. “Probably would
have, but I never got asked. I’m not much of a joiner, so unless there was
a paycheck at the other end...well, I don’t believe in working for
free.”

“And yet here you are,” she
said.

“Work’s been slow,” I said. “And I
don’t like skeeters. This sounds like it might be fun. Why kill them one at
a time, when you can kill them all?”

“Indeed,” she said. “When you
joined us, you had a...” She looked down at the page. “.38 caliber Taurus
Model 85.” She paused. “That’s your preferred weapon?”

I shook my head and laughed. “No, I
like more rounds in the stack and a bigger bullet. But it’s the only small
piece I could get my hands on when I had to ditch my Glock on a job a month
or so ago.”

“What kind of Glock?”

“A 29,” I said. “Small enough that
it doesn’t announce that you’re carrying when you’re not supposed to.” I
paused. “And ten rounds is usually enough to at least get the party off to
a good start.”

She nodded. “Fine choice,” she
said.

“You know firearms?”

Schleu nodded again. “Intimately,”
she said. “I see you have a driver’s license. Do you also own a
car?”

I shook my head. “Are you kidding?
Gas is hard to get and expensive as hell. And to tell you the truth, I
don’t doubt that the skeeters track purchases.”

“Then why get a license? With no
car, a state ID card is just as good.”

“Sometimes the jobs involve
driving,” I said. “If you happen to get pulled over by the cops, always
better to have a legit license. I don’t want trouble with cops.” I paused.
“Even skeeter cops. You shoot a cop, you spend a lot of time looking over
your shoulder.”

“You seem to have been successful
at avoiding problems with the police,” she said, glancing back down at the
piece of paper. “Refreshingly so. Most of our better recruits have some
kind of record.”

I grinned. “You may consider that
better,” I said. “All that says to me is they were so dumb they got caught.
I like working with people with clean records.”

She looked up and moved her right
hand close to the pistol beside the folder. “So, Charlie, we both know
you’re feeding me a line of bullshit. And I hate liars. So tell me why I
shouldn’t just put a bullet through your head?”

I glanced at her hand and the
pistol, then up into her eyes. It was probably a bluff, part of her
routine. Or she might know everything about me. Either way, I had no choice
but to continue my play and hope for the best.

I smiled. “No offense, commander,
but the only bullshit being fed around here is what I’ve been getting from
your people,” I said. “Everybody talks about killing skeeters, but it seems
like a lot of words and no action. In fact, the only skeeter I’ve seen is
Captain Konrad’s little pet.”