Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (43 page)

It was now or never. No guards.
Just Schleu, Lee, and me.

“Yeah,” I said. My hand came out of
my jacket pocket with the pistol. I’m not sure she even had time to
understand what was happening before I raised it and fired.

The bullet caught her on the bridge
of her nose. Her head snapped back and she collapsed.

Before she had fully hit the
ground, I turned to Lee, pistol still raised. He was looking down at
Schleu’s corpse. His head came up. His eyes met mine.

“Security Force?” he
asked.

I shook my head.

“Cop?”

I shook my head again. “Private
investigator.”

He nodded slowly. “Why?”

“Think about it,” I said. “Did you
actually believe this was going to happen the way she said?”

He hesitated a moment, then said,
“I told you, I hoped that it would.”

“But did you believe it? Did you
think that this was the start of some great cleansing? That the humans of
the city would rise up and join the crusade? That this was the beginning of
the end for the Vees?”

“No,” he said after a few seconds.
“Not really. But it’s all we have. Like I said, I thought it was worth a
shot.”

“It was never going to work,” I
said flatly. “She might kill a few thousand Vees, but in the process she
would have brought hell down on all of us. Not just here. Everywhere.” I
paused. “I’ve worked with Area Government, Lee. I know how they think. They
want to co-exist. They do. And they honestly believe that humans and Vees
can live together. But if we’re not interested in co-existence, they can go
another way. Crush those that fight, put those that don’t fight back in
camps.” I paused. “And if we go into camps a second time, I guarantee you
that we’ll never see the outside again.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said,
looking down at the corpse in the snow. “Doesn’t matter now anyway, does
it.”

He looked up at me. “So what’s
next? Going to kill me too?”

“That’s up to you,” I said. “There
are six hundred people with machetes back in that tunnel, waiting. Another
hundred people between here and the Floresta, and in the midtown strike
team. They’re as much a threat to our continued existence as Schleu was if
they go forward with this thing.”

“What’s the
alternative?”

“Go back to the tunnel, send all
those people home. Tell them the party is off, use the guards to herd them
back to the east side. Tell everybody who’s still at the Floresta that it’s
all over, that they need to get out now before the cops or Security Force
shows up.” I paused. “And get word to the City Barracks strike team. Tell
them to abort.” I paused again. “Their information was wrong. There’s not a
single Security Force company of Vees sleeping at the barracks, watched
over by a handful of human troopers. There’s two companies of Vees, and two
companies of human troopers there. If the strike team goes in, they’re all
going to die.”

He nodded. “Okay, I can do
that.”

“Then do it,” I said.
“Now.”

Lee sighed. “You know, it’s too
bad,” he said. “It would have been something to see.”

I thought back to what Redmond had
said. “It would have been Armageddon,” I said. “Get going.”

He turned and walked away, across
Ryer, back toward the subway entrance. I slowly lowered the pistol and
looked down at Schleu. The blood had formed a frozen halo around her head
in the snow. There was still the faintest trace of a smile on her
lips.

I slipped the pistol into my jacket
pocket and watched Lee disappear down the stairs to the subway
platform.

The street was still empty, but
that wouldn’t last long. Eventually an uptown cop would backtrack to the
sound of my gunshot, and find Schleu.

Before that happened, I needed to
be long gone. It was twenty blocks to the north end of midtown. I’d stick
to side streets, stay out of sight. In midtown, I’d find a taxi, go home.
Make a couple of calls. Go to bed.

Maybe I’d be able to
sleep.

Epilogue

The first time the phone rang, I
stayed in bed and ignored it. Whoever was calling would give up
eventually.

The ringing stopped. I closed my
eyes.

A minute later, the ringing started
again.

It had been harder than I thought
to find a taxi in midtown. The combination of the snow and Christmas kept
the streets pretty empty. I finally went into the lobby of one of the upper
midtown boutique hotels to make a call.

The guy behind the registration
desk wasn’t interested in the unshaven bum who’d just wandered in off the
street, but I finally convinced him to call me a cab. I think he did it
just to get me out of his lobby before a guest saw me.

When I got back to my apartment, I
made two calls. The first was to Angelo. I let him know that Schleu was
dead, that her people would be vacating the Floresta. That was to keep
No-Neck Al Werkle happy. Then I told him about what happened to
Johnny.

He had only one
question.

“Did the kid die good?” he
asked.

“There’s no good way to die,” I
said. “But he died doing what you told him to do. He was watching my
back.”

Angelo was silent for a moment,
then said, “You’re wrong, Mr. Welles, There’s a good death and a bad death.
Johnny died good. I’ll let Eddie know.”

My second call was to Sgt.
Alexandra Olsen. I told her that Schleu was dead, that the body had
probably been recovered by Uptown District already, and that she could
restore the information she’d removed from my police file.

She didn’t have any questions. I
figured the questions would come when Daryl Northport got back from his
little vacation. He wouldn’t be happy. He’d get over it.

Then I stripped down, stuck my
pistol under my pillow, and crawled into bed. But I didn’t sleep. Every
time I closed my eyes, I saw Schleu’s smile the second before I fired a
bullet into her face. I think it was the only time I’d seen her look
happy.

When the phone rang the second
time, I sighed and rolled out of bed.

I grabbed the phone off the kitchen
counter and carried it into the living room. “Yeah,” I said as I dropped
into the chair.

“You did a good job,
Welles.”

Redmond.

“I see you managed to survive your
wound.”

He laughed softly. “Yeah, it was a
bleeder, not a killer.”

“Why are you calling
me?”

“I just wanted to thank you for
doing what I paid you to, even if you waited till the last possible minute”
he said. “I have to admit, I was getting a little worried.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said.
“You knew where Schleu was and what she was planning, right? So why didn’t
you just tell me?”

“Thought you’d be more personally
invested in the job if you figured things out for yourself.” He paused. “I
could have told you where she was. I could have even given you chapter and
verse of her plan. God knows I heard it enough times. But you might have
decided to just turn it over to your cop buddies, or maybe your skeeter
friends in the Security Force. That Jap bitch with the sword, for
instance.” He paused again. “I needed you to get into it all the way, up to
your neck, so you’d understand why Kat had to die.”

“If you knew her plan, why didn’t
you just take her out yourself.”

He laughed. “I didn’t have anything
like the manpower required to go up against Kat’s group,” he said. “Best we
could do was kill Sheppard last week, hope that would slow her down a
little bit. And as you’ve probably figured out, all I got out of that was a
bullet.” He paused. “No, it had to be close. It had to be one-on-one. And
it had to be an outsider, somebody unconnected with my people or any other
Resistance group. Can’t have people thinking that we eat our own.” He
paused again. “And that’s where you came in.”

Charlie Welles. Killer for
hire.

“Yeah, well, it’s done. Anything
else or can I get back to my life?

“You ever think of working with us
on a regular basis?” he asked. “Can’t promise that we’d pay you all that
well, but the cause is worthwhile.”

“No,” I said. “As far as I’m
concerned, you and Schleu are just two sides of the same coin. Same
hopeless cause. She was just a little crazier than you are. But not by
much.”

Redmond laughed. “Too bad,” he
said. “We could use somebody like you. Good contacts, fast on your feet,
and you get the job done.”

“Not interested. Not in working
with you on a regular basis, not in working with you at all. Next time,
find somebody else.”

“It was worth asking,” he said.
“Take care of yourself, Welles. Maybe we’ll bump into each other again some
time.”

“Don’t count on it,” I
said.

He laughed again and hung
up.

I put the phone down and went back
to the bedroom.

I was dead tired.

Sooner or later I’d be able to get
her smile out of my mind and fall asleep.

Coming June 2014

Blood
for Blood

Night
and Day Book 4

It seemed like an
easy assignment. Three or four nights, pretending to be a vampire’s human
fiancé. Not a normal kind of job for private investigator Charlie Welles,
but there were worse ways to earn his pay.

Dinner with the
parents. Light conversation. Things are fine until Welles realizes that not
everything is what he believes it to be. And then the bullets start to fly
and the bodies start to fall.

An easy
assignment. The hard part for Welles will be surviving to see the end of
it.