Black And Blue (Quentin Black Mystery #5)

by JC Andrijeski

  The Colonel’s eyes got wider and wider as I spoke.

  “And where, exactly, will this operation take place?” he said.

  “Here,” I said. “In Los Angeles. Konstantin has a home here. I’m told he is in town right now, possibly due to this same operation. Our window is relatively small, though, thus the decision to move tonight.”

  He stared at me. I could feel him reassessing me as he looked me over.

  “What is it you desire from me, Mrs. Black?” he said finally.

  “I was pretty clear on that. I’d like to be included in the deal you have with Black. In terms of what that means for tonight, I would like intelligence support.”

  “What kind of intelligence?” he said warily.

  I fought impatience again. Did he really think I didn’t know about his and Black’s deal at this point?

  “I want the same access you’ve given Black over the years,” I said, sharper. “Satellite feeds. Any intel you have on specific names or photographs I feed you, including during and following the op. We’d like real-time, on the ground support, if possible... including any information you can provide on buildings we may try to breach, local or private security in place... including military, intelligence and police in Los Angeles itself. I have a few contacts there, but frankly, after what happened at the Port Authority, I’m wary of trusting too many people in Los Angeles.”

  “But you just said you’re psychic,” he said, frowning.

  “So is my husband,” I said, my voice harder. “It didn’t keep him from being kidnapped. I have to assume they have some way of blocking or circumventing our abilities.”

  I watched him think about that for a few seconds, then nod.

  I added, “I was also told by Detective Andrew Mozar in LAPD homicide that there was some chance that the federal agencies have a mole who works for the Konstantin Group, and also works out of LAPD. If you could find out the identity of that person, all the better. I know you have access to mobile phones, internet searches, emails...”

  He raised his hand, waving me off, frowning.

  Even so, I could feel the alarm emanating off him.

  For a few seconds, he just sat there, thinking as he stared at me.

  “If you’re telling me all this, you obviously think I’ll cooperate.” He paused, studying my face warily. “So what if I don’t? What if I decide I am required by law and my office to prevent you from doing this crazy thing, Mrs. Black?” His jaw hardened as he looked me over again. “Not to mention my loyalty to your husband. Or did it not occur to you he might not thank me for allowing his wife to get herself killed?”

  I held out my hands, not realizing it was a Black gesture until I’d already completed it. I saw him follow the motion with his eyes though, disbelief touching his expression.

  “Then you won’t remember this conversation ever took place, Colonel.” My words drew his eyes sharply back up to mine. “You’ll find yourself in a room comforting the distraught wife of an abducted vet who used to work under you. I’ll leave a few minutes later, and you won’t see me again. You’ll be worried about Black, of course, and you’ll probably go through channels to try and find him on your own. Meanwhile, I’ll be breaking into Konstantin’s mansion tonight, with one less advantage I might have had.”

  His eyes grew visibly harder. “Are you threatening me, Mrs. Black?”

  I shook my head, once, but it wasn’t really a no.

  “I’m impressing upon you my determination to get my husband back alive, regardless of your willingness to help.” The voice coming out of me verged on my professional one now, the one Black called my “doc” voice. “If you don’t feel comfortable being involved in that, I absolutely respect your decision, sir... but I don’t intend to let you get in my way.”

  The Colonel’s eyebrows lifted higher and higher, the longer I spoke. When I finished, he was aiming that appraising stare over me once more, his lips pursed.

  “You really are Black’s wife,” he muttered, his voice holding a kind of wonder.

  “I’ve mentioned that, yes.”

  He shook his head, smiling ruefully. “Pardon me. I never thought you were lying exactly, but I also had trouble picturing it until now.”

  Leaning back in his seat, he cleared his throat, folding his arms across his chest. I found myself thinking he’d been an even bigger man once, and he was hardly small now.

  “All right,” he said, after another pause. “Likely you have surmised you’ve piqued my interest significantly, Mrs. Black. So there’s no need to have the psychic hitmen throw a cloth hood over my head just yet.”

  He paused. I watched him look at me, obviously still thinking. Whatever he saw in my face, he seemed to make up his mind.

  Leaning back in the chair, he continued to watch me with that measured stare.

  “Mrs. Black,” he said finally. “You are being frank with me, so I will be frank as I can with you. I get away with what I do with your husband because I have a powerful ally in the Pentagon who trusts me implicitly. How I sleep at night is by reminding myself that, whatever my feelings may be for Mr. Black himself, I am obligated to monitor such a dangerous asset, and to protect that asset from falling into the wrong hands. My superiors agree with me, from what they know of Black’s record... although all but one is entirely unaware of the extent of his abilities. Black has held up his end of that deal without fail over the years, primarily by taking contracts with us, as needed... and providing us with valuable intel.”

  Pausing, he continued to gauge my face.

  “He’s canceled a lot of those contracts of late.”

  I frowned. “Are you trying to blackmail me into Black renewing those contracts?”

  The Colonel held up a hand. “I am simply observing the timing of those contracts being canceled and my new discovery that Black went and got himself married. I cannot help but wonder if the two things are related.”

  I felt my jaw harden so much it hurt. “I’m not promising you Black’s labor,” I said. “Only he can do that. If that’s your condition for help––”

  “It’s not, Mrs. Black,” he said at once. “But it might be a topic for discussion between myself and your husband in the event he is returned safely to both of us.”

  Again, I stared at him, reading him openly now. He kept his mind frustratingly blank though, blank enough that I found myself thinking Black must have trained him how to do it.

  “My interest is piqued, as I said,” the Colonel continued, his voice still carefully polite. “Of course, I feel compelled to remind you in no uncertain terms that the United States government will strenuously denounce any incursion against private residences, businesses, or persons operating legally inside the borders of the United States, whether the involved individuals are citizens or not. Obviously, we would never support such a thing utilizing government resources, for any reason...”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  “Further,” he added, holding up a hand. “In the event of your capture, I would never admit to knowing anything about you, or your relationship to Mr. Black. My interest would be solely due to the official relationship I maintained with your husband while he was an enlisted member of the armed services... and it would end with me saluting at his funeral.”

  I let out a humorless sound. “Got it.”

  “You also must know that, even having said those words, I’m risking my ass by not officially providing the support you are requesting.”

  I nodded at that, too. “Yes. And if that risk is too high, I understand, as I said.”

  He nodded, still watching me thoughtfully.

  “All right,” he said. “You’d better walk me through this plan of yours.”

  I felt myself exhale, and not just from my lungs.

  “...Before you do that, however,” the Colonel said, his voice holding a harder meaning. “I think you need to tell me what it is we’re up against exactly, Mrs. Black. I strongly get the feeling there’s something you’re not
telling me in that regard.”

  “Like what?”

  “What would render psychics less effective?” he said pointedly.

  Looking at him, I studied his expression, noting how convincing his pointed expression was as he stared back at me. After another pause, I shook my head, smiling humorlessly.

  “Is that a no?” he said, his voice harder. “You’re not going to tell me?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “...It’s not a no, Colonel, and I’m happy to discuss the matter with you. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons I need your help. I’m simply finding myself amused by the idea that you think I’m the one keeping things from you in that area... given that I had no idea about any of this until very recently.”

  I met his gaze, fighting a harder flush of anger that coiled through my light.

  “So why don’t you tell me,” I said, my voice significantly colder. “Just how long has the United States government been aware that vampires are real, Colonel Holmes? And why the hell didn’t you tell my husband?”

  Fifteen

  COWBOY

  “MAAAN, THAT WHOLE scene was ugly.” Dog shook his long dark hair, leaning his tanned arms on the metal bars of the fence overlooking the yard. “Ug-ly. I thought I’d seen some fucked up shit in my life. Between here and outside, I would have said I’d seen the worst of the worst. But I never want to see anything like that again.”

  He grimaced, looking Black over when he turned his head.

  “It wasn’t even just those Aryan assholes by the end,” he added. “Other guys were getting in on it... those fucking stormtroopers just stood there, watching.”

  Black didn’t answer.

  He really wanted to tell Dog to shut the fuck up.

  He didn’t do that, either.

  “Who did you piss off, anyway, wasichu?” Dog said, his expression growing shrewder. “That had to be a paid gig, man, with all those pigs involved. It had to be. Someone put a big red mark by your name, and it must have been someone on the outside. Not cigarettes... cash. I haven’t seen anything like that since one of the gang leaders got killed right in front of a guard... and that was nothing compared to what they did to you.”

  Black didn’t answer that, either.

  Dog shook his head, shuddering. “We thought you were dead, man. We were sure of it. All of us were saying you had to be dead. So when they broke it up and dragged you back to De-Seg, we were like, what the fuck? We thought they were just going to let you bleed to death in there... but then it passes around you’re in the infirmary, like two days later.”

  Black felt his jaw continue to harden, the longer Dog talked.

  He’d only gotten out of the infirmary the day before.

  While there, three of those red-eyed things had looked him over. He hadn’t seen an honest-to-gaos human once, the whole time he was in there. Normally, that would be a relief, given his fears around his biology being noticed.

  Here, it wasn’t a relief. Something about those red-eyed things made his fucking skin crawl... even beyond what they’d done to him since he’d encountered them.

  Even so, he tried to talk to them.

  He tried to lower their guard, get them to tell him something about what they were, what they wanted with him, but he might as well have been talking to himself. Someone had clearly given them strict instructions. They ignored every question he asked. The only words they spoke to him directly were to instruct him on what to do, mainly where to move his body while they examined and cared for him.

  Lie here. Lean forward. Hold out your arm. Breathe deeply. Cough.

  After the first four or five days, the instructions changed slightly.

  Drink this. Eat this. Swallow this. Sleep now.

  He’d been handcuffed to the bed whenever they hadn’t needed him to move. When he started feeling better, he made a lunge at one of them when he had one arm free, hoping if he caught one captive, he might be able to convince them to talk.

  They dropped him with the collar so fast he didn’t know what happened to him.

  He regained consciousness a few hours later.

  After that, he just watched them.

  They’d kept him in the infirmary for what had to be a few weeks––definitely longer than Black suspected they would have held an ordinary prisoner in there. He surmised it had to do with what their leader, Brick, told him. They wanted him healthy. They wanted him to be able to survive that fucked up lab where they intended to send him.

  He had no idea how long he’d been in here now.

  He’d been unconscious for too much of it to even have an educated guess.

  He didn’t want to go to that lab, but he also knew it might be his only prayer of getting out of here... unless Miri found him.

  The thought brought up a ribbon of pain, so he pushed it out of the forefront of his mind. If he let the pain get to him too much, the collar would get set off by that, too. He’d already been woken up by it, more than once, when he’d been looking for Miri in his dreams.

  Stroking the part of his arm where the RFID chip used to live, he frowned.

  His attention got pulled by the sight of a familiar-looking form slouching his way across one of the metal risers across from where he and Dog stood. Black watched as the man used both hands to push his blunt-cut, dirty blond hair out of his face. Those strangely predatory eyes assessed the space around him, right before he raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. He studied the clouds intently, like he was reading his fortune in those slow-moving shapes.

  Black distinctly felt himself being watched.

  “What about him?” Black said to Dog, jerking his chin in that direction.

  Dog followed his gaze, frowning. “Cowboy? What about him?”

  “He take a run at me, too?”

  Dog shook his head.

  “No. No way. Cowboy was behind the shields, like the chiefs and a bunch of others. He saw it, of course... all of us did. But he walked away after awhile. I don’t know where he went, but maybe he just didn’t want to watch no more, so went back to the field.”

  Black nodded, still watching Cowboy as he plunked himself down on the bench. He noticed then that the other man held a book the thickness of a dictionary in one hand, a different one than he’d had with him the first time Black saw him.

  “What’s his job here?” Black said, still watching the other man. “What does he do, work-wise? He in one of the road crews?”

  “Naw.” Dog shook his head. “He works in the machine shop. He’s some kind of mechanic.”

  That pretty much decided things for Black.

  “Introduce me to him, Dog.”

  “Introduce you?” Dog looked over, his eyes wide. “Why? He’s not one of us, man.”

  “I don’t care. I want to talk to him.”

  “So introduce yourself,” Dog said, his voice rising somewhat. “You know him as well as I do. That’s one white dude I don’t want to piss off.”

  Black glanced at him, then grunted, nodding.

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  Pulling his weight off the metal bar, he began walking towards the bleachers. He felt eyes following him as he did, so made sure he walked heavy, didn’t limp, and kept his head up. He felt more or less like himself again, although he badly needed exercise.

  Out of his periphery, he felt the Aryans watching him more than the other groups. Or maybe they just watched him more aggressively.

  Walking up to only man in the yard who sat alone, he stopped a few feet away from the bench and folded his arms, looking down at him.

  Cowboy glanced up from his book, as if only just noticing him for the first time, but Black knew he’d been watching him approach. The man’s casual posture was also likely more than a little misleading. He wondered again how the guy got away with doing his own thing. Being a good fighter wasn’t enough. He must have connections, like Dog said.

  Cowboy looked up at Black, and Black noted that those light-colored eyes of his were gray. />
  “‘Afternoon,” the other man said, when Black didn’t speak.

  His voice was polite, thick with yet another deep Southern accent. Black couldn’t pinpoint the region but it sounded rural. It wasn’t an accent one normally associated with an education in the United States, but Black had been in the military long enough to know that was horseshit. Friends of his had even used that particular prejudice as camouflage.

  He wondered if this guy did the same.

  “Help you with something, brother?” Cowboy said, still polite.

  Black smiled, in spite of himself. “Maybe. You’re Cowboy, right?”

  “Ayah. That’s me.”

  Black nodded. This guy was definitely playing dumb.

  “I hear you’re good with machines,” he said, meeting his gaze a second time.

  The other man raised a hand, shielding his eyes as he studied Black more closely.

  He wasn’t staring at Black’s face that time, though. He was staring at the collar Black wore. Once he noticed, Black had to fight not to smile for real. Fucker was smart, that’s for sure. He’d followed Black just fine, and he’d barely said two words.

  “Yeah,” Black said. “What do you think? Any ideas?”

  “Would help to know what it is, brother.”

  Black grunted, nodding. “Well. You saw some of the effects. In the yard that day.”

  Cowboy nodded back, expressionless. “I wondered. You were holding your own just fine... until you weren’t.”

  “So you see my predicament?”

  “I do.” Cowboy frowned slightly then, craning his neck slightly to look around Black’s form. “You might have that issue again, shortly.”

  “Guards tell me they won’t knock me out again,” Black said.

  Cowboy blinked, the only sign Black’s words might have surprised him at all. “Ah,” he said. “That’s neighborly of them.”

  “Yeah,” Black said. “But they still have the option. I’m not crazy about that.”

  “Nor would I be, brother. Nor would I.”

  Black wondered again if the man had been military. He assessed him with his eyes, and this time, he couldn’t make up his mind. He still leaned more towards no than yes, but there was something there, an affinity of some kind.