Night and Day (10 page)

“Some.”

He nodded and continued smoking, staring at me all the while. A moment later, the door
behind me opened and somebody came into the room.

The man behind the desk gestured at me with his cigar.

A tall, slender guy with a neatly-trimmed red beard stepped in front of me and looked down.
There was a small black bag in his hand. He dropped the bag and crouched down, his eyes level
with mine. This was apparently McKenna.

He seemed to be studying my face. Then he stood and gently grabbed my shoulder. I jerked
at the sudden pain and he leaned in close to me. “I know it hurts,” he said softly. “Try to relax
and let me do my job, okay?”

I nodded. He moved his hands down my arm, then back up across my shoulders and down
the other, probing gently with his fingers. It took him for about ten minutes to check me out
completely. Most of his time was spent probing my torso.

When he was done, he straightened and turned to the man behind the desk. “It was a
thorough, very specific beating,” McKenna said. “Nothing broken, and there don’t seem to be
any internal injuries. I’d need to give him a full work-up to be sure. As you can see
, he’s
extensively bruised,.”

The other man nodded. “Bruises heal,” he said. “My orders were to keep him alive. The
policemen clearly felt they were obeying those orders, to the letter if not the spirit.” His eyes
flickered to me. “Will he require hospitalization or further medical attention?”

McKenna shook his head. “As long as he doesn’t have internal injuries, he’ll be fine. Pain
for the next few days, severe in the beginning, less so as time passes. Once the bruising begins to
heal, he should be okay.”

“Can you give him something for the pain?” the older man said. “An injection or something
of that nature. Nothing that will cloud his mind, of course. I need him lucid.”

“Yes, sir,” McKenna said. He dropped to one knee and rummaged through the small black
bag on the floor, coming up with a syringe. He stood and leaned over me. “This will stop the
pain, more or less. I’ll see what I can come up with for later, after it wears off.”

“Thanks,” I said.

McKenna rolled up the sleeve of my tattered shirt and easily hit a vein with the needle. In
under a minute, the pain was all but gone.

It’s a funny thing, pain. When you’re dealing with it for a while, and it’s taken away, you
immediately find yourself in a good mood, even if nothing else has changed. I was sitting in the
office of a powerful Vee, charged with three murders, and I felt better than I had in a week.

“How’s that?” McKenna asked.

“Good,” I replied. “Appreciate it.”

McKenna turned to the man behind the desk and nodded. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

The older man shook his head. “Not right now. Thanks, Mac. I’ll call if I need you.”

McKenna picked up his black bag and left through the door behind me. I stared at the man
behind the desk. He stared back.

Smiling faintly, he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a folder bound in red. Opening it,
he took a puff of his cigar and started to read. “Charles Lawrence Welles. Forty-three years old.
Born in Paola, Kansas to Allen and Meredith Welles.” He looked up at me. “They call you
Charlie, don’t they?”

I nodded.

He looked back at the folder. “A year of junior college, then six years in the Army, posted
to the 716
^th
Military Police Battalion at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Honorably discharged, joined
the city police department here, assigned to the Tremont Avenue station. Eight years as a
patrolman. Four commendations. One medal for valor. Transferred to the 83
^rd
Street station as
a plainclothes officer with Robbery-Homicide. Five years, five commendations, two medals for
valor.”

He nodded slightly and looked over at me. “You had a nice career going, Mr. Welles. I take
it you were expecting a detective badge?”

“That was the plan,” I said. Nothing he’d read from the file was difficult information to get.
What I didn’t understand was why he had the file at all.

He looked down at the file again. “Then came the war. Almost three years internment in
Camp Delta-5.” He paused for a moment, reading the file, then looked up. “Tell me about the
man you killed at Delta-5, Mr. Welles.”

I froze. There weren’t more than a handful of people who knew what had happened that
night in Delta-5, none of them Vees. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

He smiled and glanced down at the file. “His name was Francisco Rojas. His alias was
Frankie Roe. Like the fish eggs. Does that help? You cut his throat and threw his corpse into a
latrine.”

I said nothing.

He took another pull on the cigar. “Mr. Welles, this isn’t about Rojas. I don’t intend to pull
him out of the muck and parade him around. I’m only interested in why you killed him. You’d
been a police officer for most of your adult life. On the face of it, killing a man was very much
out of character.”

“Clearly you weren’t in a camp,” I said evenly. “At least not on my side of the fence. It
might be difficult for you to understand.”

“Try me,” the man said.

“Sure,” I replied. “Delta-5 held almost half a million detainees. We lived in barracks, big
concrete block buildings, 400 people in each one. Very hot in the summer, very cold in the
winter. Open latrines out back. In that kind of situation, the wolves usually prey on the lambs.
Frankie Roe was one of the wolves. A small-time thug, kissing up to the guards, taking
advantage of the detainees.”

“That doesn’t sound like a reason to kill him.”

“You’re right, it’s not,” I said. “There were a couple of us who’d been cops in my barrack.
Frankie steered clear of us. I didn’t have a personal score to settle.”

“Continue,” he said.

I didn’t know who this guy was, or why he was laying out my life story for me. I had no
reason to trust him. But I went ahead and told him what he wanted to know, because in the end,
it didn’t matter. If it was a trick of some kind, I’d rather die for something I did instead of
something I didn’t do.

“Not everyone in the barrack . . . accepted our situation,” I said. “Some people wanted to go
under the wire, get to South America, Europe, somewhere. Anywhere your kind weren’t. Others
wanted to take more direct action. Storm the guard towers, tear down the fence, kill the guards,
that sort of thing. Fight.”

“Which group were you in, Mr. Welles?” he asked me. “The escapees or the fighters?”

“Neither,” I replied. “We were isolated. We didn’t know the situation outside the fence.
Maybe you’d overrun the whole world. Life inside the camp wasn’t a treat, but I remembered
what it was like during the war, before I got scooped up. That was worse. As for the those who
wanted to attack the guards . . .” I laughed bitterly. “Suicide. They were never going to get
enough people to charge armed guards with empty hands and win.”

“Where did Francisco Rojas fit in?”

“Frankie Roe heard things. About the plan to attack the guards. He also heard a couple of
names attached to the plan. Being the scumbag rat that he was, he thought the information would
be useful to his buddies guarding the camp. So he told them everything he’d heard.”

I was silent for a moment, seeing it all in my mind as clearly as that day almost five years
earlier. “The next night, some guards came in and pulled four men out of their bunks. Took
them outside the wire, strung them up, and bled them. The guards stood around them, catching
their blood in beer steins as it ran down their legs. It was a real party. Lot of laughing and
joking. Only thing missing was a band.”

“I remember that incident,” he said. “There was a change in the guard command after that.”

“Yeah, about a week later.” I shrugged. “Anyway, I caught Frankie Roe down by the
latrines a couple of days later, cut his throat with piece of broken glass, and tossed him in the
shitter. They didn’t find him for a week or two. By that time, his buddies in the guard unit had
been transferred out and nobody was much interested in another dead detainee.”

He nodded and glanced at the file folder again. “Eight months later, the internment policy
was revisited, the decision was made to close the camps and repatriate the detainees. You
returned to the city, applied for and received a private investigator’s license, and went into
business.”

“Right. With Joshua Thomas.”

He seemed to stiffen at the name, but continued to stare down at the folder. “A couple of
years as a private investigator. Some considerable success leavened with the occasional failure.
Many who know you speak highly of you, as a man and as an investigator. Even some vampires
have good things to say about you. You’re considered very . . . impartial. Does that surprise you, Mr.
Welles?”

I shook my head. “I don’t care who a person is, or what he is, for that matter. I’ve known good
and bad, your kind and mine. Every client deserves the best I can give them. If I don’t like the
case, I don’t take it. If I take it, I go where it goes. No sides, no favorites.”

He closed the folder and took a long pull on the cigar. “Very black and white,” he said.
“What about the shades of gray?”

I shook my head. “People have shades of gray. There’s no gray in right and wrong. If you
see one, it’s time to look for another line of work.”

“I agree,” he said curtly, pushing the folder aside and dropping the stub of his cigar in a cut
glass ashtray at his left hand. “Do you know who I am, Mr. Welles?”

“No clue,” I said, shaking my head. “Obviously somebody pretty high up the food chain.”

“My name is Phillip Bain. Deputy Area Governor for this region.” He paused. “Joshua
Thomas was my bloodchild.” He paused again. “I want the men who killed him. And I want
you to find them.”

Chapter Nine

Joshua’s bloodfather was the Deputy Area Governor, second only to the Area Governor in
the pecking order. One of the fifteen most powerful vampires in the country, probably the
world. And he wanted me to find Joshua’s killer.

It was a lot to swallow at once. Bain stared at me intently. Clearly he expected me to say
something.

“The police think I killed Joshua,” I said. Not exactly the brightest thing to say, but I needed
to stall while I worked to get my mind around the situation.

“They’re wrong,” he snapped, standing. “That was obvious from the moment they called
last night to tell me they’d arrested you. That detective who dropped you off didn’t know, but all
charges against you have been dropped.”

I shifted in the chair. “No disrespect intended, Mr. Bain, but I have to ask why. Why are
you so sure? We’ve never met. You don’t know me at all.” I jerked my chin at the folder on his
desk. “You’ve read my file, and maybe that’s a good start. But files don’t tell the full story.”

“Are you arguing with me, Mr. Welles?”

“No, sir,” I said quickly. “I didn’t kill Joshua. I just don’t understand why you’re so
certain.”

Bain was silent for a moment, then nodded. “A fair question.”

I waited. Thirty seconds passed in silence, him staring at me, me staring back at him.

He nodded again and began to pace. Back and forth behind the desk. Eyes straight ahead.
Almost like a sentry on guard duty.

“Joshua and I were not . . .” He shook his head. “Joshua was not close to me. That doesn’t
mean we didn’t speak, regularly. As his bloodfather, I had an obvious interest in the life he’d
made for himself. His friendship with you figured prominently in that life.”

Bain stopped and turned to me. “What do you know about our society, Mr. Welles, vampire
society?”

“Some. Not a lot. It wasn’t something Joshua and I talked about. We were
friends, we worked together when our cases intersected, or when we needed a fresh eye on
something. Outside of work, we moved in different circles. For obvious reasons.”

He turned away and began to pace again. “Joshua’s friendship with you was strong, Mr.
Welles. Uniquely strong. As strong as that between two humans.”

“Why is that unique?”

“After the change, vampires don’t retain the same . . .attitudes they had before. Especially
not when it comes to humans.”

“I don’t understand,” I said slowly. “You mean because we’re . . . prey?”

“Not entirely,” he said, continuing to walk. “But that’s perhaps the easiest way to explain
it.”

He stopped and turned to me, leaning forward, his knuckles on the desk. “When you pass a
herd of cows, you don’t see potential friends. You see a potential meal.” He paused. “But let’s
go beyond that. Let’s say you took a liking to one of those cows, brought it home to live
with you. Could it ever truly be your friend? Would you depend on it to help you when you
needed help, give you support, be a sounding board? Would you make it a part of your life, and
expect the same?

Bain leaned even closer. “Or let’s go a step further. Would you stake your life on that
cow’s actions? Would you proclaim to all that the cow was your friend, that you condoned
everything it did, that you were willing to accept full responsibility for any misdeed the cow
committed?”