Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (35 page)

She had spies inside Metro PD, and
according to Zach, not just in Eastside District. She had people in all of
the districts. And I was pretty-well known in the Downtown District
station.

If she had people there, and ran my
name past them, I was done. She’d find out what I did for a living. And
she’d probably find out about my dead Vee partner. Schleu didn’t seem to be
open-minded enough to overlook the job or Joshua.

There wasn’t anything I could do
about that. At least not for the moment. And if she did find out, and
confront me with the information, I hoped that I’d be in her office with
her, alone, when she told me. There was next to no chance I’d be
successful, but I’d certainly try to get across the table and snap her neck
before she put a bullet in my head.

I don’t know how much time passed.
It was at least an hour, maybe more. I hadn’t been keeping an eye on my
watch. But eventually the door swung open and the guy with the Braves cap
and the AK-47 stood there, his face grim.

“Let’s go,” he said. Since I’d last
seen him, he’d managed to find a white tee-shirt.

I stood and he stepped away from
the door, then fell in behind me as we went out into the lobby. On the
stairs, I saw Nancy sitting next to the big guy she’d been with the day
before. That, apparently, was Franklin, her ‘boyfriend’.

She grinned at me, then said
something to Franklin and laughed. He stared at me without
smiling.

My escort stopped at the door.
“Inside,” he said.

I opened the door. Schleu wasn’t
alone.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Becca James
said with a big grin. “Charlie Welles. Long time no see,
stud.”

Chapter
Twenty-Two

“Hello, Becca,” I said. “This is a
surprise.”

It was, but not a good surprise. If
Becca was part of the Humans First Front, I was dead. The only open
question was if Schleu would do it here or do it in the
basement.

“Don’t know why,” Becca said with a
smile. “You’re here.” She paused. “You think you’re the only one who wants
to kick the skeeters out of town?”

“No, it’s just...”

“Come on, stud,” Becca said. “Are
you gonna bark all day, little doggie? Or are you gonna bite?” She smiled.
“Name it.”

I thought for a few seconds. Then I
got it.

“Tarantino,” I said. “Reservoir
Dogs. 1992.”

What I got was not the movie. That
was easy. It was what Becca was telling me.

Reservoir Dogs is about a cop,
undercover with a crew of violent robbers. And it wasn’t a quote that Becca
would have tossed at me unless she was trying to tell me
something.

“You are correct,” she
said.

“Enough with the movie bullshit,
Becca,” Schleu said. “You obviously know him.”

“Oh yeah,” Becca said, looking down
at her. “Charlie was at the 83
^rd
Street station when I
transferred in from downtown. Knew him for, I don’t know, maybe five odd
years before the skeeters showed up.”

“How well did you know him?” she
asked.

“Well enough,” Becca said. “I was
in Vice, he was in Robbery-Homicide, but we were both plainclothes
officers, not detectives.” She paused. “There was what you might call a
kind of pyramid system in the police department in those days. You had your
uniform officers at the bottom. Step up was the plainclothes officers.
Didn’t have to wear a uniform, and we got to play with the big boys. Do
most of their work for them too.” She paused again. “And at the pointy end
was the detectives. They had the gold badge that we all wanted.” She paused
again. “Like the one in my bag.”

“Congrats, Becca,” I said. “I’m
happy for you.”

“Don’t lie, stud,” she said with a
smile. “You’re jealous. Of course, you would have probably got one too if
you’d come back to the department after the camps.” Her smile widened.
“Maybe.”

“Would you answer the question,
Becca,” Schleu said to her. “How well did you know this man?”

“I was getting there,” Becca said.
“Like I said, we were both plainclothes officers. Step down from detective.
Detectives liked to hang with other detectives, not so much with us. So
most of the plainclothes tended to stick with their peers, no matter what
unit they were with. Me and Charlie were good buddies, back in the
day.”

“Just buddies?” Schleu
asked.

Becca laughed. “Please, Kat. Look
at him. He was a couple of pounds lighter, and didn’t have the ratty gray
hair at the temples, but he hasn’t changed that much. Would
you
want
to wake up next to him?”

Schleu smiled. “Point made. And
since?”

Becca shook her head. “Nah, I have
be honest with you, This is the first time I’ve seen Charlie since the last
days before the skeeters overran the city. What was it, stud, the day
before they gave us permission to bug out?”

“Two days for me,” I said. “As I
remember, Captain Verhaag released you guys in Vice a day before Vince
Cunningham kicked us loose.” I paused. “Vince was always an
optimist.”

“One day, two days, all the same,”
Becca said. “None of us got far before the skeeters rounded us
up.”

“You haven’t seen him since?”
Schleu asked. “Not in a camp, not on the east side, not
anywhere?”

“Honestly, I didn’t even know he
was still alive. A lot of the guys from the station aren’t.” She paused.
“Like I said, he’s put on a couple of pounds, so I guess he’s living pretty
good.”

I smiled. “And the years haven’t
touched you, Becca.”

Razzle-dazzle. Becca was tossing me
easy pitches and I was hitting them. Just a couple of old friends, trying
to catch up. Selling the relationship to Schleu. Selling my story to
her.

“And you checked him out as I
requested?”

Becca nodded. “Sure did,” he said.
“You said he was living downtown, so I called some friends at Downtown
District. They didn’t know him or know of him. Guess he’s been keeping his
nose clean since he moved there.”

“Let’s just say that I’m smart
enough to be off their radar,” I said.

“What I don’t get is why the hell
you’re even living downtown,” Becca said. “It’s not as bad as the east
side, but it’s hardly up to your high standards. I mean, you had that nice
place on Norwood before the war.”

“Stop!” Schleu said sharply. She
looked up at Becca. “Explain.”

“Charlie owned a one bedroom condo
in a good building on Norwood before the war,” Becca said. “Bought it,
what. Two years before the war?”

“About that,” I said.

“That place was sweet,” Becca
said.

Becca couldn’t have guided the
conversation better if I’d written the script myself. I figured that
Schleu’s Lexington Project had to have an uptown component. I’d been
wondering how to slip in my own uptown connection without being obvious
about it. Becca had done that for me.

Of course, that told me two things.
First, Becca was deliberately putting me in play as part of her own
assignment. And second, she needed me in play because she wasn’t as inside
Schleu’s operation as I was.

Schleu stared at me. “Wasn’t an
uptown condo too expensive for somebody living on a police officer’s
salary?”

I laughed. “You know, one of the
Internal Affairs assholes asked me that very same question not long after I
bought it. I think he thought he’d caught himself a bad cop.”

“And what did you tell
him?”

“That I wanted to live there, so I
did what it took to make it happen,” I said. “I had my eye on a condo in
that building for most of the nine years I was at the Tremont Avenue
station.” I paused. “Which is now the Uptown District station. So I
scrimped and saved for about six years, lived like a dog some months, till
I had enough together to buy a one bedroom place outright. One came
available, I grabbed it. And it was worth it. Best place I ever
lived.”

“You were a police officer
uptown?”

“Yeah, that’s where I started in
the department,” I said. “Nine years uniform.”

“Why didn’t you go back to your
condo after you were released from the internment camp?” she
asked.

“I did,” I said. “Problem was that
a skeeter had moved in while I was away, and he liked it too.” I paused.
“So I found a place downtown.”

She looked at Becca. “You can
confirm this?”

“I know that he worked uniform
uptown before he came to 83
^rd
Street.” She looked at me. “He
talked about it endlessly. And I was in his condo a few times. It made a
good place to relax after a midtown shopping spree. But what happened after
the war, I can’t tell you. Like I said, I haven’t talked to him
since.”

“You have somebody you can call,
see what they might have on him uptown?”

“I think there’s a person or two I
can talk to,” Becca said. “You know me, Kat, got a boy in every port and a
friend in every station.”

“I’d rather not use you like this,
Becca, but there was no record of his police department service on his
report. I found that unusual.”

Becca laughed. “It’s not one bit
unusual,” she said. “If you ran me, you wouldn’t find my pre-war time in
the department neither.”

“Why?”

“You remember my friend Willie at
Central?” she asked. “The one who gave me what you wanted to know about
that thing we talked about?”

Schleu nodded.

“Willie was assigned to
headquarters before the war, the old building on Blanchard, not the new one
on Cypress. Worked in IT, just like he does now. A couple of days before
the city fell, they got orders direct from Commissioner Carnahan, told them
to wipe the employment database and make sure the information couldn’t be
recovered. So they deleted the database, turned off the fire suppression
system and burned up the server room.”

“Why?”

“Carnahan was smart, not like that
boob that’s sitting in the commissioner’s office these days,” Becca said.
“He saw what was happening and knew we were going to lose. But he figured
that sooner or later, somebody was going to start up a resistance movement
against the skeeters. And that cops would probably be first in line to sign
up.” She paused. “Because Carnahan was smart, he knew that the skeeters
would figure out the same thing, and might put extra eyes on former cops,
use them to find the resistance.” She paused again. “Wipe the information,
protect the cops. Protect the resistance.”

“Wish we’d gotten that memo in
Robbery-Homicide,” I said. “We were all carrying our department ID when we
got picked up.”

“So was I,” Becca said.

“What happened to Carnahan anyway?”
I asked.

“Pulled the headquarters staff back
to a sheriff’s substation in Smithville,” Becca said. “Skeeters got there
before he could get things organized. Killed every man and woman in the
building.”

I looked at Schleu. “Next time, you
might run people through the Area Operations Center,” I said. “Betcha the
skeeters have records of every cop on the force. At least those that they
caught.”

“Soon enough,” she said. “Anything
else you can tell me about Charlie, Becca?”

“He was a good cop,” she said,
looking at me. She smiled. “Not as good as me, but that’s setting the bar a
little too high, right?” She looked back at Schleu. “I never worked a case
with him, but people talk, and the word was that he was a good man to have
if things went south on you.”

“Check with your friends uptown,”
Schleu said. “Get back to me by this evening, if you can.”

Becca nodded. “Will do,” she said.
She looked at me. “I’ll catch up with you after the big party, stud. Hear
what you’ve been up to since the last time I saw you.”

“I look forward to it, Becca” I
said.

“Give you a call later, Kat,” she
said over her shoulder as she left the office.

Schleu removed a cigarette from the
pack on the table next to her pistol and lit it. She studied me through the
cloud of smoke.

“I guess Becca is still a pain in
the ass around smokers,” I said. “I used to enjoy a cigar now and then,
before the war, when I could afford good ones. But never around Becca. Her
dad or uncle or somebody died of cancer, and she could be a real bitch when
it came to smoking.”

She exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Can
I trust you, Charlie?” she asked.

I laughed. “I think I’m the one who
should be asking that question,” I said. “Since I got here, I’ve been
manhandled, had guns shoved in my face and poked in my back, had my life
threatened, been thrown into a fucking closet.” I shook my head. “All over
the word of some woman I don’t even know.”

“Are you looking for an apology?”
she asked. She took a deep drag on the cigarette and let the smoke roll out
her nostrils. “Forget it. We’re on the eve of taking this city back from
the skeeters. When we do that, other cities will rise up. In the end, we’ll
take our whole country back.”