All Knight Long

by John G. Hartness

  I still wanted to strangle him most of the time, and if he ever crashed another date of mine, I was going to compel him to walk down Tryon Street at noon with his pants around his ankles singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I feel bad for the guy, but I’m not bucking for sainthood.

  Sabrina came back to the table and grabbed her jacket and purse. “Let’s go, partner. We got a body.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, whispering “sorry” into my ear. “Jimmy, can you get the check?”

  “No problem. Go fight crime. Catch The Joker, or Clayface, or Doc Ock, or whoever is terrorizing Metropolis this week,” I said, waving the waitress over. She looked more than a little relieved to see Sabrina and Fitzpatrick weaving through tables on the way to the door.

  I gave her a little smile as I asked for the check, and pulled out my phone to text Greg that I was on the way home and that I had dibs on the big TV and Breath of the Wild. As I did, the old flip phone fell out of my pocket onto the floor with a clatter. I picked it up, frowning a little. I wonder if I have a charger for this thing at home. Be interesting to see who tried to call me this afternoon.

  I WALKED IN through my front door and hung my jacket in the closet, then looked at the stairs leading down to the war room/video-game lounge where I could hear Greg shouting at some faceless opponent in Injustice 2. He was still pissed we didn’t get the ability to turn into bats when we became vampires, and the best way for him to take out those frustrations was by pretending to be a superhero in the fighter video game. I didn’t give him too much crap about it, but I did razz him about his seemingly excessive interest in playing as Supergirl. I’d seen my partner in spandex. It wasn’t pretty.

  I decided to leave the TV and game system to Greg for a little while and did the moderately responsible thing and went upstairs to my room. I knelt in the floor of the closet and hauled out a couple of smoky- smelling cardboard boxes of junk left over from when we first moved in to this UNC-Charlotte frat house. Our old place had burned down, and killing the nest of vampires that used to live here left a convenient and much-needed new lair. Our old lair was pretty much toast. I didn’t have a lot from those days, but the box in front of me held a few knickknacks that mostly survived the fire. If a charger for this old flip phone existed, it would be in here.

  Five minutes later, I was surrounded by action figures, classic Nintendo cartridges, a couple of charred Sandman trade paperbacks, and one slightly melted belt buckle. But no phone charger. I scowled at the useless phone in my hand and tossed all the other crap back in the box. Just as I was about to shove the whole mess back into the floor of the closet, I stopped myself. “Nope,” I said. “You do not pass the one-year test, so you are outta here.” Then I shoved the phone back in my pocket, closed the flaps on the box, and carried it down to the game room.

  “What’s that?” Greg asked from the couch, pausing in his war against the heroes of the DC Universe long enough to glance over at me.

  “Bunch of crap left over from the fire. I was looking for a phone charger, and figured I’d throw this stuff out. Haven’t touched this box since we moved in here; no point in keeping it any longer.”

  “Oh my God, Jimmy Black makes a mature decision! Alert the media. This whole Master of the City thing must be taking a real toll on you.”

  “Kiss my ass,” I grumbled, putting the box on the floor by the secret door that led into the Morlock tunnels. I pulled out the old phone and tossed it to him. “You got anything that will charge this?”

  He caught the phone in midair—vampire reflexes making us both much more dexterous than we ever were in life—and raised an eyebrow at me. “Probably, but why? I mean, you still run through a lot of iPhones, but going back to a flip seems a little extreme. Or are you going street-level with your criminal enterprises now?”

  “Ha ha. It rang today, and I want to know who in the hell still has that number. That’s all.”

  “This thing rang? How the hell was this thing still charged?”

  “I blame William,” I said. “He probably charged it for me when he transferred my crap to Tiram’s office, then we both forgot about it. It was buried in a desk drawer.”

  Greg’s face took on a thoughtful expression. “Yeah, that makes sense. He is more organized than any three people I’ve ever met. Well, let’s see if I’ve got a charger in my Desk of Many Things.” He tossed the Xbox controller on the couch and walked over to his desk. He opened the bottom drawer and started rooting around in what could pass as a techno-archeological dig. I watched in silent amazement as he pulled out one of every generation of iPod, two Zune MP3 players, and some silver-and-blue thing that looked about the size of a pack of cigarettes and made a resounding thump as he set it on the desk. Wires, adaptors, and various miniature disk drives and card readers piled up around him, and I started to worry that he’d opened up a dimensional rift inside the drawer when finally he emerged from the depths with a black cord attached to a wall transformer. “Eureka! I have found it!” he shouted, just before everything on the desk shifted and the entire mountain of technical artifacts toppled over, burying my partner in the most important entertainment advances of every one of the last twenty years.

  Chapter 3

  TWO HOURS LATER, after charging the prepaid cell and listening to the voice mail, Greg and I stood on the sidewalk outside a modest split-level in the East Charlotte area called Sheffield. Real estate agents carefully labeled it a “transitional” neighborhood, which meant that a lot of brown people lived there. The demographic was mostly working- class families. You’d find a lot of white panel vans with paint and construction company logos on them, a lot of minivans and sedans, but not a ton of brand-new SUVs. In short, people bought homes in Sheffield when they needed to be close to town but couldn’t afford the snazzy subdivisions with names that sounded like words pulled out of a hat. I felt comfortable here, near where I lived growing up, ice-skating at the old Eastland Mall and riding bikes around the tree-lined streets. Greg’s family had more money, and he’d grown up in the more posh South Park neighborhoods. We only met because we both were huge comic book nerds and ended up at the same magnet school.

  “Man, what are we doing here? I feel like I’m going to get mugged any minute,” Greg whined. That’s my partner, the apex predator. At least he left the spandex at home this time.

  “The kid’s message sounded like he needed help. We help people, it’s what we do. Right?”

  “Jimmy, I don’t know if this slipped your mind, but you’re the Master of the friggin’ City. BKI has been mostly defunct for a couple years now.”

  “Yeah, I know, but Black Knight Investigations was a pretty cool gig, and from his voice mail, it sounds like this kid isn’t getting any help from the local cops. I have a little influence there nowadays, so maybe I can get Lieutenant McDaniel to give the case another look. Or a first look, if what this voice mail said is true. And nobody’s going to mug you. They just think you’re another dumbass trying to score weed in the wrong neighborhood. Now come on.” With that, I walked up to the front door. The lawn was neat, with the grass needing a trim, but no toys or bikes littered the front yard. I walked up the three brick steps onto the postage stamp-sized porch and pressed the glowing button by the knob on the storm door. A faint chime sounded inside, and I heard a young male voice shout, “I got it!”

  A few seconds later, the door opened a crack and a face appeared behind a security chain. “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Terry O’Connell?” I asked.

  “Who’s asking?” the kid shot back. I recognized the voice from my phone.

  “I’m Jimmy Black, of Black Knight Investigations. You called this afternoon about a case.”

  The kid’s eyes widened, and he took a step back. The door closed, I heard the rattle of a chain being disengaged, then it opened again, fully this time. Before me stood a young man of about fourteen. H
e was skinny, but nothing like I was at that age, and his blond hair was neatly combed. He wore a Garinger High School Wildcats sweatshirt, jeans, and no shoes. “Um . . . hi. I didn’t expect you to just . . . show up. I thought you’d call. And how’d you find me anyway? I didn’t give my address on the message.”

  “You did give us your name, and the fact that your sister is missing,” Greg said from behind me, still on the ground in front of the steps. “Didn’t take much Google-fu to track down your home address.”

  I chimed in. “We are detectives, after all. If we couldn’t find you, what are the odds we’d be able to find your sister?” I gave him my best easygoing smile, working hard to keep my fangs in. I forgot to have a blood bag before leaving home, and I was getting a little peckish.

  “Fair enough,” he said, stepping back from the door. He turned back into the house and yelled, “Mom! The detectives I called are here!” Turning back to us, he held the door open wide. “Come on in. Mom’ll meet us in the den.”

  Invitation granted, I felt the natural barrier of the home part for me, and I stepped in. I didn’t go into private residences very often, so barrier magic wasn’t something I ran into every day. But it tingled as it passed over my skin, like the tickling feeling people incorrectly call a goose walking over their grave. I actually have a grave, and geese walk over it fairly often. I sometimes go hang out in the cemetery and watch them. It’s soothing, until one of them decides to crap all over my eternal resting place. I know I shouldn’t be bothered by it, since I’m obviously not dead. I mean, I am, but I’m also standing right there watching them, so it’s not like the goose is really pooping on me, but poop still feels a little disrespectful. Though none of the geese I’ve ever encountered gave a damn about the respect level of their defecation.

  Greg followed me into the house, rubbing his arms as he passed the barrier. We followed the kid down a short flight of stairs into a cozy wood-paneled den. We sat on the couch while Terry went upstairs to get his mother. A couple minutes later, a frazzled-looking woman in sweatpants and a Duke Blue Devils T-shirt came down the stairs. Her long hair frizzed out of a loose ponytail, and I could smell from across the room that she hadn’t showered in a few days. That coupled with the pungent aroma of exceptional marijuana had me cocking an eyebrow at Greg.

  “Lay off,” he whispered, voice pitched so low that nobody without enhanced senses would even know he was speaking. “If my kid was missing, I’d get stoned as hell, too.”

  I nodded and vowed to reserve judgement until I heard her—and Terry—out. He led his mom to an overstuffed armchair at one end of the sofa, and he pulled up a small brown ottoman to sit next to her. “You guys need anything? I forgot to ask, but I can get you some water, or coke, or whatever. I mean, we don’t have everything, and there’s no beer, but . . .” He trailed off as I raised a hand to him.

  “It’s fine, Terry. We’re good. Why don’t you give a little more info, and we can talk about taking your case,” I said.

  “We don’t have money for private detectives,” his mother said. Her voice was timid, as if it were a thing made of glass that would shatter at the slightest resistance.

  “I’m sure we can work something out,” Greg said. I could tell from the moment the woman sat down that we were taking this case. Greg’s a big softy, and he’d been champing at the bit even more than I had lately, looking for something to do that didn’t involve micromanaging weed dealers or punching out the local criminal element. It would be nice to actually help people for a change, and by the looks of it, this lady could use some help.

  Kara O’Connell was a small woman, a little north of forty. She had the careworn look of a woman whose life had rubbed all the sharp edges off her and left a general world-weariness that told her story better than words of her bio—two kids, at least two jobs, and a constant struggle to make ends meet. She reminded me of Winona Ryder on Stranger Things, only without the constant jitteriness. We were missing middle-aged Sean Astin, but Greg made a pretty good stand-in, at least as far as stature. Anyway, Terry’s mom looked like she’d been put through an emotional wringer, and I guess she had, what with one kid missing and the other one bringing private detectives into her home unexpectedly. So I wasn’t surprised that she wasn’t in our corner from the get-go.

  “Mrs. O’Connell—” I started, but she cut me off with a wave of her hand.

  “Kara. I’m not going to be hiring you, so we don’t have to be all professional.”

  “Kara, then. I’m Jimmy Black and this is Greg Knightwood. We run a small company called Black Knight Investigations. We specialize in helping people who have limited resources but who need professional, experienced detective work. We like to think we have resources at our disposal that other firms, and the police, do not.”

  She didn’t laugh. I was pretty impressed by that, but I could tell she wanted to. Real Bad. “What kind of resources, kid? And what are you talking about, experienced? I’ve got socks older than you two! Hell, you’re closer to Julia’s age than you are to mine. In what world am I going to pay a couple of cut-rate Hardy Boys to look for my daughter, when the police can’t even turn up any leads?”

  Why couldn’t I have been turned at thirty-five instead of twenty- two? Because at thirty-five you probably wouldn’t have cluelessly hooked up with a woman so obviously out of your league, gotten turned into a vampire by her, then drained your best friend of blood, trapping him in a nocturnal existence with you. Maybe. I took a deep breath, but Greg cut me off.

  He held out an iPad to the woman. “Mrs. O’Connell, these are a few testimonials from our website. As you can see, both a detective from the Charlotte-Meck Police Department and the Lieutenant of the Downtown Precinct have very high praise for our work. We’ve consulted with the police several times, and I have no doubt that we have the skills to help you find your daughter. We’re not anywhere close to as young as we look, and we’re very good at what we do. Ma’am, if we can’t find Julia, no one can.”

  She stared at my partner for a few seconds, then drew in a ragged breath. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, Mr. Black. That no one can find my Julia.” The tears that had threatened since the moment she sat down came then, and Terry rushed over to sit by his mother.

  “It’s okay, mom. These guys are real good. I read all the reviews on their website, and on Yelp and everything.”

  I looked over at Greg and mouthed the word “Yelp?” to him. I knew what the online review site was, of course, but I didn’t know we had a listing. He didn’t seem surprised by the kid’s words, so apparently he did know. Hell, he probably set the profile up and wrote all the reviews using proxy ISPs so the glowing reviews looked like they all came from legitimate customers. My partner, the computer genius.

  “We’ve read the police report,” I said. “Can you give us any details that might not be in the official records? Anything like where Julia was supposed to be, when she was supposed to home, that kind of thing.”

  “I told all of that to the police when I reported her missing,” Kara said with a twisted lip. Obviously, her reporting hadn’t gone well. “For all the good it did me. The jerk behind the desk just kept saying that since Julia turned eighteen a few weeks ago, that she’s an adult and has to be missing forty-eight hours before they can file a report.”

  “Well, technically that’s true,” Greg said. “When did she go missing?”

  “Monday night. She got off work at Landmark at midnight, and I always wait up for her. When she wasn’t home by twelve-thirty, I called the restaurant. Angelo said she left on time, and I got in the car right away to go looking for her. There were no accidents between here and there, and no sign of Julia. It was like she just vanished.”

  “That’s not a lot of time—” Greg started.

  “Or distance,” I continued.

  “For her to vanish in,” Greg finished. He was right, too. Lan
dmark Diner was less than three miles from the living room where we sat, a Charlotte landmark, pun fully intended, known for late hours and good food any time of day or night. There were only two routes to take from the restaurant to the O’Connell house, Central Avenue, one of the busier surface streets in town, or meandering through the neighborhoods off Kilborne. Neither path should take more than ten minutes in heavy traffic, and neither route would be busy at midnight on a Monday.

  Julia O’Connell either ran for the hills, or something very bad happened in East Charlotte. Looking at the distraught family, and trusting my instincts, my money was on something very bad.

  Chapter 4

  SINCE WE WERE almost at the forty-eight-hour mark where the police would get involved, I gave Mrs. O’Connell the direct number for Lieutenant McDaniel. Her house wasn’t in his precinct, but at least this way she would have a direct contact with someone in the police department, someone who was guaranteed to give at least a little bit of a damn about her daughter. After a half hour of questions about Julia, her school life, friends, and dating history, Greg and I got in his car and headed to Landmark to talk to Julia’s co-workers. Maybe we’d get lucky, and she’d just be off doing ecstasy with a disreputable boyfriend her family knew nothing about. Yeah, I’m a regular Pollyanna.

  “You see anything weird about this?” Greg asked as he backed out of the O’Connells’ driveway.

  “You mean besides your complete inability to use your mirrors to back up? No. Why? What hit you funny?”

  “Just that she’s working so late at a restaurant at that age. On a Monday. Shouldn’t she be home studying for finals or something?”