Manny only smiled, tilting his head sideways in a noncommittal way.
The detective had hung back somewhat during their embrace, but now followed Black into the house and shut the door behind all three of them. He took off his black cowboy hat and hung it on a peg in the wall, then walked directly to a long-haired little girl, maybe six years old, who emerged from what was likely the kitchen, gripping a cookie in one pudgy fist.
She had to be a daughter of Manny’s––or, much more likely, Black realized with a start––a granddaughter, given the similarities in their features. She even had Manny’s eyes. Hers were the exact same color and shape as his old friend’s, although she wore them differently in her much rounder, darker face.
Glancing at Red, Black realized she kind of looked like him, too. Something about her mouth and jaw and the shape of her cheekbones.
Black only glanced at the two of them long enough to see the little girl wave the cookie and say something to Natani in that other language, what must be Navajo, he realized.
Black looked back at Manny, aiming a thumb at the two of them.
“Are you related to this shit-head?” Black asked his friend.
Manny broke out in a laugh.
“Son-in-law,” he said. “That’s his daughter, Mai. One of my granddaughters. I babysit sometimes. I also make cookies.” He gave Black a mock scowl, still gripping Black’s shoulder in a bony hand. “And don’t mess with my grandkids… at least two of them are good shots. My grandson is also pretty handy with a butcher’s knife.”
Black’s eyebrows went up. He opened his mouth, but Manny cut him off before he could speak, glancing past him at Natani.
“What did I tell you, Red? He’s a prickly son of a bitch, isn’t he?”
When Red didn’t answer, Black glanced over at where the other man had been talking to his daughter. The girl disappeared as he watched, running down a short hall and off to the right, maybe into one of the bedrooms. She moved quietly, her mind so soft and quiet, Black didn’t hear a damned thing––which was more than a little unusual for a girl that age.
She’d definitely inherited some of her father’s mind tricks.
“Okay if she takes a nap back there?” Natani said. “I’ll take her to Elsie later, but I don’t want her getting too tired while we talk.”
“Of course,” Manny said easily.
Natani nodded, then went back to watching Black warily, like he was some kind of maybe-dangerous animal, or someone who’d wandered in off the street and might murder him and Manny and his daughter just for the hell of it.
Winking at his son-in-law, Manny looked back at Black, affection softening his eyes.
“Red, calm down. Black’s fine. It’s all an act anyway,” he said, giving Black a smack on the chest, surprisingly strong for his wiry arms. “…He’s a big softie, this one.”
Black didn’t bother to comment.
Neither did Red.
“So you called me here?” Black said, glancing around the small house.
It was cozy. Weirdly cozy, he found himself thinking, as he did a quick scan of the front living room. Being in here felt like being enveloped inside someone’s family.
“Why, Manny?” He turned back, studying his old friend’s face. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, but…” He glanced at the hall leading to the back of the house, then at Red, before his eyes returned to his friend. “Can we talk alone?”
“You can talk in front of Red,” Manny said, waving a hand dismissively. “You can talk in front of anyone in my family… my daughter Elsie, too, when we see her.”
Black shook his head. “No. I can’t.”
Manny gave him a harder look. “Yes. You can. Red works with people like you. And I tell my daughter everything.”
Black leveled a stare at Manny’s son-in-law.
Then he grunted.
“No. He doesn’t work with people like me.” He let the contempt in his voice be audible, looking back at Manny. “Your daughter can listen in later, if she wants.”
When Manny’s sharp-eyed smile didn’t waver, Black sighed and decided fuck it.
He’d just erase the guy if it turned out he couldn’t trust him.
“Jesus, Manny,” he said. “Just what is it you think I am exactly? Because this jackass thinks he’s hunting werewolves or Cthulhu or some such bullshit.” His humor faded after he studied Manny’s expression. “Jesus. Not you, too.”
Clicking under his breath, he rested his hands on his hips.
“Manny, Manny, Manny. You’re forgetting how weird and fucked up regular-old, run-of-the-mill humanity can be. Remember some of the crap we came across in ‘Nam? Whatever is happening out here, I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation…”
That explanation just better not be fucking vampires, his mind muttered.
“Is it true you’re married now?” Manny said.
Black scowled for real.
“Ouch.” Manny chuckled. “Trouble in paradise, Black? Your friend Nick says she works for you. Where is she? Did you bring her to Santa Fe, or––”
“Why did you call me, Manny?” Black cut in, his voice harder. “Why didn’t you talk to the Colonel first? You know he’s into weird shit. He probably would have sent a whole unit out here to deal with whatever this is.” Glancing at Red, then back at Manny, he added, “And he’s still in that line of work. Unlike me.”
Manny broke out in a laugh.
It was a deep laugh, holding real amusement.
“You’re going to dodge my questions about your marriage, and now you’re going to play skeptic, Black? The guy who looks thirty when I know he’s got to be at least a decade older than me? The guy who reads minds, who used to be able to push people into thinking they’d said and done things they most definitely hadn’t said and done? Who could push them to do things they didn’t want to––”
“Manny.” Black’s voice grew cold. “Shut the fuck up.”
Black glared at his friend in disbelief, then glanced at Red, who only stood there, listening. Black turned back to Manny, scowling.
“Why am I here, Mañuelito?”
“We have a problem.”
“Clearly.” Black snorted, still annoyed, and for multiple reasons now. “You know they have drugs for that. There’ve been huge advances in psychotropics since the war––”
“We have a problem that’s killing our kids,” Manny said, his voice sober.
Black hesitated, halfway towards another crack, then shut his mouth.
Assessing his expression, Manny went on.
“They’ve been coming down out of the mountains for months. Picking off our kids mostly, like I said, but they’ve taken a number of adults, too. We don’t have anyone like you out here. A few shamans, but none with true sight outside of hallucinations with peyote in rituals, and that kind of thing. None with your exact skills.”
Walking over to the couch, he sank into the worn cowhide, sprawling his legs.
Looking up at Black, he added, “They look human. We’re getting better at ID’ing them now, but when they first appeared, we couldn’t tell them from people, since they mostly came at night. We’ve found a few bodies, but not all of them. From bite marks and other… things… it appears that they’re eating the people they’re attacking.”
Black grimaced, even as that sick feeling in his gut worsened.
Manny paused, then added,
“Red’s tried to talk to them, on behalf of his department––”
“His supernatural monsters department,” Black said, giving Red a disparaging look. “And ‘negotiate’? Really? Didn’t you say they’re eating kids?”
Manny nodded, going on almost as if Black hadn’t spoken, or as if he hadn’t noticed the sarcasm, anyway.
“Yeah, negotiate.” Manny’s voice and expression turned grim. “Red’s people wanted to see if they could figure out what these things want––”
“Food, maybe?” Black suggested, his voice colder.
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“––But they’re hard to track, and they don’t seem to speak or understand English, or Navajo. We think they’re hiding up in the bluffs somewhere, but no one’s found a nest or a settlement, despite Red here having some of the most skilled trackers in the rez on his team. Even though they’re hunting us, they run away if one of us gets too near, meaning an adult, especially if they wear a uniform. We’ve had a hell of a time even engaging them in a real way.”
“Definitely sounds like a group of people you want to party with,” Black said. “Nothing like chilling out and downing a few beers with someone who views you as their main food source.”
“Black.” Manny exhaled patiently, glancing at Red, then back at Black. “Like you said, Red here works for a special department in B.I.A. law enforcement. They’ve had these problems before. They keep it low-key when they can. I don’t know if secret is the right word…”
He glanced at Red, who gave Black a warning stare.
“Secret is the right word,” Natani said.
“I don’t know why this is so hard for you to swallow,” Manny added, looking at Black and frowning, hands on his narrow hips. “It’s not much different than what we had in Vietnam, with that Lucky Lucifer guy we were chasing.”
Pausing at Black’s silence, he added,
“And I did talk to the Colonel. I called him before I called you. In fact, he’s the one who told me I should talk to you. He’s also the one who said I could reach you through Nick Tanaka at the Northern District of the San Francisco Police Department.”
Black scowled.
Manny nodded towards Natani.
“Turns out, my son-in-law already knew your pal, Nick, so I had him make the first call.” Manny shrugged. “So that was a bonus.”
“Or a really suspicious-sounding ‘coincidence,’” Black muttered, giving Natani a harder look. “Especially given this guy claims to hunt ‘people like me.’”
“Only the dangerous ones,” Natani volunteered, that wry smile briefly returning to his lips. “Being an asshole isn’t generally enough to put you on our radar. Although in your case, I might make an exception––”
“My point being,” Manny cut in, holding up a hand to Red before his dark eyes shifted back to Black. “Colonel Holmes okay’d my bringing you into this. He suggested I have you update Red here on what we’re dealing with. According to him, you’re a bit of a subject matter expert on our particular problem. He didn’t elaborate on what he meant by that. He said he’d let you explain.”
Black’s jaw hardened.
Subject matter expert.
Fucking Colonel had thrown him to the wolves.
He knew they wanted him to come work for them again, meaning for the Pentagon. He knew the Colonel wanted him on contract full-time, like he had been before he married Miri.
He was starting to wonder if the Colonel had someone pressuring him about that, too.
Colonel Harrison Hamilton Holmes III was never this pushy about Black running jobs for them before. When Black got out of that prison in Louisiana, Holmes even seemed sympathetic to Black’s desire to do less of that kind of work for his wife’s sake. Apart from floating the idea of some training and contract work for Miri too, he’d mostly gone along with Black’s desire to ease out of military contracts, particularly the wet-work variety.
If the Colonel was getting pressure from inside the Pentagon to bring Black back into the fold, Black definitely wanted to know from who.
Holmes told him years ago that he had some kind of sponsor inside the Pentagon, someone who’d taken a personal interest in Black’s case starting sometime in the eighties, after some of Black’s Vietnam records got unearthed. Whoever that sponsor was, he’d protected both Black and the Colonel internally in the years since, making sure the intel got buried.
Maybe he’d only done that on the condition that Black continue to take jobs for them.
Black only really tested that arrangement recently.
Miri voiced worries about some kind of quid pro quo with the Pentagon, too.
According to her, the Colonel’s hints verged on blackmail when she’d gone to them for help in finding him when he was imprisoned. She said the Colonel brought up the contract work, mentioning that Black had canceled a lot of contracts of late and hinting at some kind of exchange in services for the Pentagon’s help.
Maybe the pressure was coming from the Colonel’s sponsor, or the Colonel himself, or maybe too many fucking people just knew about Black now.
New York likely made that worse.
Either way, Black was starting to feel way too damned visible.
He trusted the Colonel, but the man was getting old for a human.
He was a good decade older than Manny, and he wouldn’t be around forever. Black was starting to wonder if he needed to run an infiltration job on the Pentagon itself, erase everyone who knew what he was, what he could do, and what’d he’d done, then disappear all the records of him, both the black ops variety and otherwise.
Still thinking about this, staring into the fire, he turned towards his friend.
“You could have fucking asked me, Manny,” he said, inexplicably glaring at Detective Natani. “Before I got all the way out here.”
“Asked you?”
“Yeah, asked me. You went to the Colonel. Clearly you had some idea of what this was. He would have told you I’d be unwilling to do it, given that. Is that why you told me nothing?” He glared at Natani, motioning towards him with a hand. “…Is that why you had this joker pull his Buddhist-Jedi mind trick on the ride out here, so I couldn’t even read him and turn around and ride in the other damned direction once I had?”
Manny chuckled, shaking his head.
“Damn, Black. You haven’t changed at all,” he said, grinning. At Black’s frown, he added, “Would you have said yes? If I asked nicely?”
Black scowled deeper, refolding his arms across his chest.
Now that the sun was down, he was cold, just like he knew he would be.
He found himself moving deeper into the room, closer to the fire, and closer to where Manny sat on the cowhide couch. Walking past his old military buddy, he made his way to a stuffed chair that sat closer to the squat adobe fireplace with its blackened mouth.
Lowering his weight into the chair, he frowned.
“What am I doing here, Manny? What am I really doing here? Do you want me to kill these things for you? Is that it? Or just confirm what they are?”
“We wanted you to try and talk to it first,” Manny said.
“Talk to it? Talk to what?”
“We caught one of them,” Manny explained. “We have him in the local jail, locked in one of the cells. We want you to try and talk to it. Find out what they want. See if you can figure out what they’re doing here, where they came from, since it won’t talk to Red here.”
He glanced over at Natani, nodding.
“…We want to know more about them before we call in the Colonel for some kind of straight-up purge scenario.” Shrugging his still-large shoulders, he added, “The Colonel said they’ve got facilities for these kinds of things. We hoped you might be able to assess if there’s any way to negotiate with them. You know… massive death and destruction versus letting the Pentagon study them for a while in exchange for free food and lodging. The Colonel says they might be close to some kind of cure. Maybe not for these things exactly, but something a lot like them.”
Black’s jaw clenched more. He didn’t look up from the fire.
Slowly, he shook his head.
“Why the fuck would they do that, Manny?” he said.
“Because the alternative would be death,” Manny said, puzzled. “I thought I was pretty clear about that. Either they come in voluntarily, or the Colonel says he’ll have to deal with them in a significantly less… cooperative way.”
Black let out a humorless sound.
He didn’t know how to tell Manny that if this was what he was beginning to think it was, “negot
iations” wouldn’t do shit. Their only option would be to cut the heart out of every damned one of them. That, or the Colonel would have to come in, like Manny said––run some kind of bag and tag op.
Sighing, Manny opened his hands, resting his forearms on his thighs.
“We haven’t been able to figure out what language it’s using,” he added. “But I knew that wouldn’t matter to you. I knew you could understand it and could make it understand you. Well enough for us to send a message back to its clan.”
“How big?” Black said, still staring at the fire. “The clan. What numbers are we talking? You said there’s a group of whatever-the-fuck-these-are, living in the hills––”
“Vampires,” Red broke in.
Black turned slowly, staring at him.
His jaw clenched more.
“Vampires,” he repeated back.
Red nodded. “Far’s we can tell.”
Black was already shaking his head, his lips pursed.
Slowly, he rose back to his feet. He held up his hands.
“Manny, my friend,” he said. “I can’t help you. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
Manny gave him a puzzled look, following him up with his eyes, his big hands resting on the worn cowhide on either side of where he sat.
“Because you don’t believe in vampires? Or because something I said rubbed you the wrong way?” Frowning, still staring up at Black, he asked incredulously, “You won’t even look at it? Or take a look at its mind for us?”
Black gave him a hard stare, not answering. His eyes shifted to Red.
“Can you get me back to my Jeep?”
Red frowned, looking at Manny. “Is this guy for real?”
“Black.” Manny stood, following Black when he started to move away from the recliner. When Black kept walking, making his way back toward the front door, Manny stared after him, his voice still holding that bewilderment. “You’re all the way out here, Black. You won’t even look at the damned thing? Really?”
“I don’t need to look at it.” Black aimed a hard stare at his friend. “If it is what you’re saying it is, I can’t read it for you, either. It was a waste of time, bringing me out here.”
“What do you mean you can’t read it?” Manny said.
Black To Dust: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 7) Page 4