Night and Day (44 page)

The threats to Heymann and his staff? The human Resistance to the vampire occupation of
the country. And elements inside the vampire hierarchy who oppose normal diplomatic relations
with the rest of the world.

The problem? Nobody is quite who they seem to be...

Chapter One

“Too close?”

I shook my head. “No, three car lengths is about right. Always try to keep at least one car
between you and the target, especially when you hit a stop sign or red light. Two is better, as long as
you can still keep your eyes locked on the other car.”

His name was Brenner and he was my latest trainee. I’d gotten a call a week earlier that he
was coming. Goodbye Sandy Tsu, hello Johnny Brenner. He was the fifth trainee in eight months.
General Bain liked to move them in and move them out.

“What if the car between us turns off?”

“Then you keep your distance and be a helpful driver,” I said. “Somebody wants to get in
front of you, let them.”

Brenner was a quick study, one of the quickest that Bain had sent me. We’d started off with
foot surveillance, and he had that down in three days. Vehicle surveillance was a little trickier, but he
was smart, paid attention to what I told him and learned from it.

When he came aboard, he said he didn’t have any previous investigative experience, but he
picked it up too fast for that to be strictly true.

“So what’s your real story, Brenner? You’re too good at this to be a complete novice.”

“Shouldn’t I be concentrating on the target instead of gabbing?”

“You need to be so comfortable with tailing another vehicle that it becomes instinctual,” I
said. “Your mind shouldn’t be focused only on staying behind the other car. You should be running
through scenarios. What happens if the target vehicle hits another car? What happens if the target
subject suddenly stops, jumps out of the car, and starts walking toward you? What happens if a cop
sees you tailing the target and decides to pull you over?”

He smiled. “If the target’s in a crash, I go past, pull over a good distance ahead, watch and
wait. If the subject gets out and starts toward me, I keep driving and do not make eye contact. If a
cop stops me, I break off the surveillance and pick it up tomorrow night.”

“Very nice. Like I said, you’re too good to be a novice. You’ve done this before.”

“No,” he said. “Not this, exactly. I was in Special Collections in Area One before I got my
transfer orders.”

“Special Collections?”

Brenner was silent for a moment. “Sorry. Can’t really talk about it.”

There was always something that a vampire couldn’t talk about. It had been more than five
years since the war between humans and vampires began, a war that we lost. Quickly. And
decisively. Even now, the Vees were still playing their cards close to the vest.

It made sense, I guess. The more humans knew about them, the easier it would be to find
and exploit weaknesses. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in this city, there almost half
a million humans and maybe thirty or forty thousand vampires. If we decided to rise up, they’d be
easy prey from sunrise to sunset.

Of course, after the sun went down, the tables would turn. They can only be killed in very
specific ways, and one can turn ten or twenty humans in a night. That’s why we lost the war. Every
human who fought them became a new recruit.

I’d been a Metro cop, plainclothes out of the 83
^rd
Street station. Some of the uniforms went
out to man the barricades when they descended on the city, but most just hunkered down at home
or ran. At 83
^rd
Street Robbery-Homicide, we’d run. Only to get picked up and tossed in the Delta-5
internment camp outside town for almost three years.

Some of the guys in the unit had taken the opportunity to get out when the Vee recruiters
came around in the last few months of internment. Somebody high in the Vee food chain had
decided that internment wasn’t working, or was no longer desirable. But before they released us
back to the city, they wanted a working police department. Specifically a working night shift.

Becoming a Vee wasn’t attractive, and doing it willingly even less so. I saw a lot of casual
brutality from the guards at Delta-5. It happened too many times for them all to have been
sociopaths before they turned. Turning did something to them, changed them. And not just in the
obvious ways. Their minds and attitudes changed too.

So I stuck it out in the camp for another few months. Met a Vee named Joshua Thomas, the
recently-assigned new commanding officer of Delta-5, who was different, somehow more human.
We struck up a friendship, which became a partnership in a private investigation agency called Night
and Day.

Me and Joshua never really went into the whole vampire thing. He was a Vee, I was human.
I ate food, he drank blood. I worked cases during the day, he worked them at night. We didn’t talk
about our differences when we had enough downtime to actually socialize. And we didn’t socialize
as much as I would have liked. He couldn’t take me out for a drink at one of the slurp-clubs that
opened in the uptown part of the city, where the Vees tended to live. And they didn’t serve his
brand in the downtown bars.

Then about eight months ago, Joshua was murdered. A bad cap tried to pin the murder on
me, but I survived, thanks to Phillip Bain, Deputy Area Governor for Administrative Area Three.
Joshua was his bloodson, turned by Bain during the war, and he wanted justice. With Bain’s
assistance and that of his Security Force commander, Tiffany Takeda, I’d helped him get it.

But my deal with Bain required me to take on trainee investigators he selected to fill the
night side of Night and Day. It wouldn’t have been a problem if he left the trainees in place long
enough for the agency to actually get some use out of them, but he didn’t. Every month or two, I’d
get a call and have to watch the Vee I’d just trained leave and a new one arrive.

At least Brenner was picking it up quickly. With any luck, I’d get three or four weeks of
useful work out of him before he was replaced by somebody else.

“Nothing personal, Charlie,” he said after a few seconds of silence. “Certain assignments in
Area offices are sensitive, and Special Collections is one of them. I can’t even talk about it with most
vampires.”

“Not a problem. I’ve run into the wall of silence before.” I paused. “So, this transfer. Was it
because they needed somebody for Special Collections down here in Area Three?”

“Yeah, they had an opening, and it’s a position they like to keep fully staffed. Area Governor
One called me into his office and gave me my marching orders. Met Area Governor Three, he let
Mr. Bain know I was coming, and off I went. Had about three days notice before my transport was
arranged and I was out of there.”

“The Area Three Governor was there?”

Brenner smiled. “They’re all there, at the Governor General’s headquarters. Operational
command is run through Deputy Area Governors, like Mr. Bain. Area Governors have their offices
in the Governor General’s headquarters outside Grand Forks and rule from afar.” He paused.
“Don’t get excited. It’s not really a secret, at least not to vampires. I’m not sharing something with
you that I shouldn’t.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t do that.”

You’re right,” he said. The smile was long gone.

“So where’s the target now?

“Four car lengths ahead of us, two cars between us. She’s heading for the boyfriend’s
house.”

“Probably, but don’t make assumptions. Her husband isn’t paying us for speculation. Just for
provable facts.”

“Come on, she goes there every night. Husband goes to work, she waits half an hour, then
hops in the car and heads to midtown.”

I nodded. “True. So far.”

“So how long do we keep following her to the same place?”

“Her husband paid us for five nights, up front. This is night four. Tomorrow night, he’ll be
at the office to get his money’s worth. We lay the report and pictures on him, he decides if we’ve
given him what he wants.”

“I’m sure we will.”

“Don’t be sure,” I said. “Sometimes it takes a lot of convincing.”

“Yeah, I guess. But I’m not really sure what his problem is anyway. I mean, she’s cheating on
him, but it’s not like....”

I laughed. “It’s okay. Sara told me about the problem that male Vees have.” Sara is the night
secretary at Night and Day. As a female Vee, I figured she knew what she was talking about.

“Permanent erectile dysfunction,” he said. “And all the meds in the world won’t change it.”

“Who knows what Maxwell wants. Pride, love, commitment.” I paused. “Best not to go too
deep into why a client wants answers. Just get the answers and let it play out.”

“Turn signal. She’s turning onto the boyfriend’s street.”

“Head up to the corner. If she parks in front of his apartment, park on the other side of
Burnside and we’ll do a walk-by.”

“Right,” he said.

We rolled up to Burnside Avenue and I glanced to the right. Mrs. Sandra Maxwell was out of
her car and climbing the steps to Tom Garcia’s first-floor apartment.

“Okay, park it and let’s go for a walk.”

As we climbed out of the car, Brenner asked, “Why do this on foot?”

“We’ve driven past three nights in a row. If she’s suspicious, she might have made us.”

“So? What’s she going to do? Tell her husband?”

“She might call the cops,” I said.

“So what? We’re licensed private investigators on a job. They’re not going to give us any
problems.”

I sighed. “Okay, some more for your education. I used to be a Metro cop here. I still have
friends in the department in Downtown District. I know how they think. They generally don’t have
a lot of love for guys on the private side of the street. Plus we’re in Central District now, and I don’t
have any friends on the night shift here.”

“Yeah, but they’re not going to arrest us.”

“No, but they can make it harder to work in this district at night if we don’t answer their
questions. They’re going to want details, client name, that kind of thing. I don’t think Mr. Maxwell
wants his marital situation to become common knowledge around the Central Station squadroom.”
I paused. “Low profile, all the time. It gets the job done with a minimum of complications.”

We went around the corner onto Burnside and started down the street. “Eyes front, ears
open. We go around the block, back to the car, and head to the office. She usually leaves for home a
little after midnight. We’ll come back, follow her home, and call it a night.”

“Got it.”

Ahead of us, Tom Garcia’s door opened and he came out onto the stoop. Garcia was big,
football player big. He stared at us for a moment, then started down the steps.

“Trouble.”

“Just let me do the talking,” I said.

Garcia propelled himself across the street like an angry attack dog. As he hit the sidewalk on
our side of the street and barreled toward us, I realized that his face bore some similarity to a pit
bull’s.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, coming to a stop a few feet in front of us.

“I don’t understand,” I said, throwing a little bit of confusion into my voice. “We’re just
taking a walk.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit. You been hanging around the neighborhood all week.” I could
see his hands were clenched into fists. Big fists. “And you’ve been following my girl.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think you’re confusing us with somebody else. We haven’t been
following anybody.”

If we were blown, we were blown. Couldn’t change that. And it wasn’t really a big deal. We
already had the reports and the pictures for Maxwell. If he decided he didn’t get his full five days, I’d
kick back a day’s rate to him.

But I didn’t want to see this escalate on the street. Like I’d told Brenner, I didn’t want the
cops to show up.

Garcia stared at me, the veins in his neck bulging. If it was a show, he was a damn fine actor.
Then he stepped forward, his face a few inches from mine and he shoved me. “You calling me a
liar?”

I stumbled back a few feet. It was a solid shove, but not enough to send me down on my ass
on the sidewalk. If I was downtown, and it was daylight, I might have pulled the pistol on my hip,
get him to back off. I don’t like being shoved.

But I wasn’t downtown and it wasn’t daylight. If I pulled the gun, he might just get really
mad. Then I might have to actually shoot him. He wouldn’t want that and neither did I.

“Look...” I began.

Before I could finish, Brenner turned to Garcia, closed one hand around the front of his
throat and lifted him. Then he pivoted and slammed Garcia against the wall of the building next to
the sidewalk.

“Listen, bloodsac,” Brenner said, his voice barely above a whisper. “You touch my friend
again and I’m gonna pull your head off. Do you understand?

Garcia was a pit bull at the end of a choke chain. Eyes wide, mouth working without any
sound.

“My friend and I live in this neighborhood, down the street and around the block,” Brenner
continued, his voice still soft. “If you or your girl have noticed us, that’s why.” He paused.
“Neighbor.”

Garcia was making anxious little grunts in the back of his throat.

“So do you have a problem with us taking a walk down the street, neighbor?”

Brenner opened his hand and Garcia dropped the couple of feet to the ground. He
staggered, gasping as he sucked some air in. “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ve had problems with
prowlers in the neighborhood.”

Brenner stared at him silently.

“I won’t bother you again. Enjoy your evening.” Garcia turned and hurried back across the
street, rubbing his throat.

“That was nicely done,” I said softly. “Good improv.”

“Just following your instructions,” Brenner said. “You told me to run through scenarios.
There was always a possibility that Garcia or Mrs. Maxwell might confront us, so I gave it some
thought.”