The Black Knight Chronicles (Book 6): Man in Black

by John G. Hartness

  “You’ve got Abby,” Greg said.

  “But she’s not you. She hasn’t been there with me all this time. You have.”

  “I know, Jimmy. And that’s one reason I can’t be there now. This is your fight, bro. You gotta figure this one out on your own. I love you like a brother, and I always will, but I can’t work with you until you figure out which side you’re on. Are you gonna take over Tiram’s stuff and run Charlotte like he did? Are you gonna try to play it straight and run all the bad guys out of town? Or are you gonna end up somewhere in the middle, trying to do the right thing as best you can?”

  I didn’t have a good answer for him. “Probably that last thing, the part where I don’t know shit and it shows. That one.”

  “I’m not kidding, Jimmy.”

  “Neither am I, man. Neither am I. I know one thing, though. There’s a hell of a fight brewing, and I’d feel a whole lot better if I knew my best friend was going to be by my side when the shit hit the fan.” I stood up. “I gotta go. There’s a gang war to stop, and since Batman’s on vacation, I’m elected.”

  Greg stood and held out his hand. I pulled him into an embrace, feeling his arms wrap around me in a bear hug that would have crushed a normal person. “You know I got your back, bro. When you need me, I’ll be there.”

  I pulled away and looked at him. I searched his face for any admission of already having my back to the tune of a sniper rifle from a water tower, but his poker face was rocking it. I decided to let him think I didn’t know. At least for now. “I’m gonna hold you to that. If I get killed again because you weren’t there to haul my ass outta the fire, I’m gonna haunt your PlayStation for the rest of your life. Your save games won’t be safe, no matter what you try.”

  We laughed, and it felt good. Almost like it was all okay again, even though we had just started down the road toward okay and I knew there was a long way to go. I stood there until it got awkward, with us just standing there, looking into each other’s eyes like the heroes at the end of some Lifetime movie, and I turned to walk away. When I got to my car, I looked back. Greg was kneeling, his forehead on Mike’s stone. From fifty yards away, I could hear him crying as he apologized over and over to our best friend, begging Mike to forgive him—not for trying to turn him, but for not having enough faith in God to believe Mike was going someplace better. I watched him for a few seconds, then wiped the tears from my own cheeks, got in the car, and drove off to face my battles, rolling solo, but feeling a lot less alone.

  Chapter 24

  I PUT MY PHONE on speaker and tossed it in the cupholder between the seats as it dialed my place. “Hello?” came from the little speaker in a cultured voice.

  “Hey, William,” I said. “I need info on the Bloods. It’s time to put this part of our little scrap to bed.”

  “Are you sure? You only have a few hours before sunrise, and they may be heavily fortified.”

  “Yeah, but if I can appeal to Gator’s ego I should be able to get him to come at me one-on-one and get this settled quickly.”

  “And if not?”

  “Then it might take a little longer,” I said. “And probably be a lot bloodier. So what do we know about them?”

  “The Bloods seem to be more active in the part of town near Seventh Street and Pecan, an area of town—”

  “Formerly known as Stanleyville, originally enough,” I said. “And the building on the corner was the old Stanleyville Drug Store, converted to a bar in the eighties and nineties—ran a great open mic night for years until developers bought the strip mall. Now it’s a salad restaurant. Great comic shop next door, though.”

  “And you know all of this how, exactly?”

  “I grew up here, remember?”

  “Then why did I bother doing all this research? I have data on club membership, finances, known associates, historical businesses both legitimate and otherwise. If you already know where to find them, what did I just waste my night researching them for?”

  “It wasn’t wasted, William,” I said, grinning at the phone. “Especially that list of known associates. Put them on my list of people to visit and have a little conversation with once I’m done with my current issues.”

  “Assuming you live that long and the Bloods or your own employees don’t kill you. How are you going to deal with Gator’s grudge toward Owen? I assume that a war with a vampire gang and the city’s most powerful human crime boss is not what you’re looking for out of this meeting.”

  “Less a meeting than a very one-sided conversation,” I said. “The kind of conversation where my fists do a lot of talking, and the other people involved to a lot of listening. With their faces.”

  “Sounds like you’re going in looking more for a fight than Gator’s surrender, sir,” William observed.

  “I don’t really give a shit what beef Gator has with Owen. That’s between two grown men, and that’s their business. But he murdered that girl live on video, and he did it with his fangs out. That’s not how we do things in my city. He put every supernatural being in this town at risk for a grudge, and he murdered a human for nothing more than his own anger. That shit does not play in this town. Not as long as I’m running things.”

  “Then I have discovered something that may be of particular interest to you,” William said.

  “I’m all ears. Well, there’s a fair amount of fang, too. But for the moment, I’ll only use the ears.”

  “It turns out that for all the illegal activities the Bloods involve themselves in, there is actually little to no actual bloodshed.”

  “What are you telling me, Willy-boy?”

  “Your earlier assessment of the Bloods is very accurate—they are low-level drug dealers, petty thieves, and occasionally small-time pimps, but they are almost never violent. There are only ten reports of injuries or death associated with the Bloods in the past five years, and those all have one common denominator.”

  “Gator,” I said.

  “Exactly,” William sounded very pleased that I had figured out the answer.

  “So if Gator is the only one who’s really violent, I might be able to talk the rest of the crew into playing by some new rules.”

  “One can certainly hope, sir.”

  “One certainly can, William. So the Bloods have a choice—they can play my way, or they can take a short walk into a bright sunrise. Gator’s choice was made the second he sliced that girl’s neck in front of me and everybody else. He’s done.”

  I PARKED MY CAR behind Jack’s, a popular watering hole on Seventh Street, and walked across the street. No sense in announcing my presence to whoever might be watching the parking lot, but I wasn’t trying to hide anything, either. I kept my head on a swivel as I crossed the parking lot, but the only people I saw were a bum smoking outside the Smile Mart across the intersection and a nosy neighbor across Pecan Avenue, peeking out from behind her curtains. I skirted the corner of the comic shop and walked right up to the door of the Bloods’ main clubhouse, a low-slung cinder-block building behind the comic shop with no windows and no insignia of any kind. If you noticed it at all, you’d probably think it was some type of storage building. Nothing about it screamed, “Bloodsucking Fiends Here!,” which was probably a good idea, all things considered.

  I knocked on the door and waved to the camera mounted to the wall. I heard scrambling inside, and a lot of sounds associated with loading and cocking firearms. When all fell silent, I watched the doorknob turn and the door swing open as if of its own accord. No one stood there to welcome me in, but I heard the shuffling of more than a dozen pairs of boots inside.

  “I’m coming in to talk. How about not shooting me until you decide if you like what I’ve got to say?” I called through the opening.

  “Screw you, buddy. We got nothing to talk about!” A voice I didn’t recognize replied.

  “Look, I know Gator’s not here, so we don’t have to get violent. He’s the one who broke my laws, he’s the only one who’s gotta pay for that.”
<
br />   “Who cares about Gator killing a human? They’re just here for food, anyway.” The voice yelled back. “I thought you were supposed to be this badass Master, and you’re worried about some meat sack? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t give a shit about the human, you jackass,” I yelled back, glad he couldn’t see my face to read the lie writ large there. “But Gator dropped fang on video in front of Owen, all his crew, two dozen cops, and anybody who happened to be wandering within a couple blocks of the stadium tonight. Even he should understand why that’s bad for business, which is probably why he isn’t here. I’d bet he’s holed up in some safe house shitting bricks about what’s going to happen to him. But I don’t have a beef with the rest of the club. So why don’t I come inside and we can figure this out like adults?

  Silence. I squared my shoulders, hoping that I’d at least talked them into giving me a listen, and stepped inside.

  This was my first time inside the headquarters of a motorcycle gang, and I have to say, I wasn’t impressed. I mean, I was expecting something out of Sons of Anarchy, and I got something more like Animal House. There were plenty of empty beer bottles lying around, but the whole place was laid out with couches, video game systems, flat-screen TVs, a couple of different surround sound systems, and a few of the vampires actually were standing beside a long table where I’d obviously interrupted them working on computers. There were no visible automatic weapons, no half-dressed biker babes, not even a single copy of Easy Rider lying around. I felt like the Hells Angels would be very disappointed in the décor. They’d probably like it better when I redecorated with a lot of dead bodies, though.

  A quick glance around the room revealed a whole mess of vampires doing whatever biker vampires did when they weren’t riding motorcycles. Which looked to involve a lot of tequila. One stood behind the bar, his handlebar mustache long enough to tie the ends together under his chin. A couple were shooting pool with a near-empty bottle balanced on the rails, one leaned back on the bar with a pyramid of empty shot glasses by his elbow, watching me, and two bikers stood in the middle of the room just glaring at me. One gigantic thug with red eyes held a hanky crumpled in one head-sized fist—he could have been the double for the giant called Bear that I tussled with earlier in the evening. Next to him stood a medium-sized biker with long brown hair and a clean denim jacket. A skinny little rat-faced dude with a sawed-off shotgun tried to scoot around behind me to the left, but a shake of my head froze him in place. The rest of the crew looked like they were relatively intelligent, for stoner biker-vampires who followed the lead of a guy named Gator, so I took a moment to appeal to their collective sense of logic.

  “Guys, nobody else has to die tonight. Except Gator. He’s pretty much toast, sorry to say. It’s not my preferred management style to kill employees who go off the rails, but that whole breaking the fourth wall in the middle of an NFL stadium means I’m gonna have to kill him to make an example. But the rest of you can walk away from this and see another sunset. Just sit out the fight between me and Gator, then swear allegiance to me as Master of the City. I’ll pick one of you to be the new boss, reset your tribute to the old levels under Tiram instead of the five percent more you’re paying since Gator pissed me off, and we can go on about our merry way, drinking-but-not-killing humans and doing . . . whatever it is that you guys do as a business.”

  “We provide concert security,” a vampire with a dark brown ponytail and a goatee said from my right.

  “Yeah, because cycle gang security worked out so well at Altamont,” I muttered. I got a lot of blank looks, but one older biker knew about the infamous Rolling Stones concert where Hells Angels were hired as security.

  “The Angels couldn’t compel the drunks to behave,” Ponytail said. “We can, so our events go off without any incidents. And there are fewer drugs, too, because we don’t like the way our food tastes when it’s stoned, so we keep the dealers out of the clubs.”

  “Smart,” I conceded. “What do they call you? Snake? Road Rash? Hog Balls?”

  “Jacob,” he said. “I don’t go in much for nicknames.”

  “Well, Jacob, I’ll make you a deal. You sit out my scrap with Gator, and if there are any Bloods left when the sun comes up, you’re their boss. Sound like a deal?”

  “On one condition,” he said, never sparing a glance for Gator or any of his fellow Bloods.

  “What might that be?” I asked.

  “You apologize to Grizzly for killing his little brother. Bear was sweet, just stupid enough to do whatever Gator said.” He jerked a thumb at the teary-eyed mountain, and I let out a little sigh.

  “Sure, I can do that.” After all, what’s a little pride compared to not having to fistfight a walking mountain? I stepped over to Grizzly and looked up, up, up at his face.

  “Grizzly,” I said, but the giant man shook his head. He wasn’t just big; he blotted out the sun with his skull.

  “Stuart,” he said.

  “Pardon?” I replied.

  “My name is Stuart. You, Master of City, you call me by my right name. I am Stuart.”

  “Well, Stuart, in light of the fact that you are the single largest human that I have ever met, and frankly are right up there with the bigger trolls I’ve encountered, I sincerely apologize for my part in the death of your brother. I bore him no ill will, and he fought bravely at the orders of Gator, who he incorrectly believed to be his leader. So I am sorry that he died and that he followed Gator’s orders to his death.”

  Stuart looked down at me for a minute that stretched into at least five hours in my mind, then he reached out with a hand the size of a dinner plate and clapped me on the shoulder. My knees buckled, and I almost went down, but Stuart had an iron grip on my shoulder, so I stayed upright against all odds. “Stuart forgives you, Master. Now he doesn’t have to kill you. You fight Gator. I won’t interfere. I’m going to get drunk now.”

  I spared a second to think about how much alcohol it would take to get a vampire that size drunk, then returned focus to the matter at hand. I heard the jingle of a chain wallet behind me and read the widened eyes of the vampires in front of me, so I didn’t need to turn around to speak.

  “Well, Gator, you want to surrender and die quickly? Or are we going to do this again?” I asked. Then I turned to face the former leader of the Stanleyville Bloods, who stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the glow of the streetlights.

  The refugee from a Three Dog Night concert grinned at me for a second, then his eyes went cold. “Oh, we’re doing this, Master. We’re definitely doing this.”

  Chapter 25

  SO THERE I WAS, staring down the leader of a vampire motorcycle gang, thinking I’d pretty much evened the odds by talking a bunch of his minions out of fighting me, when the garage door at the end of the clubhouse rolled up and five more vampires on Harleys rumbled in. That was not the intervention I needed. They hadn’t been around to hear my offer of amnesty, and I didn’t expect Gator to give me enough time to bring my considerable powers of persuasion to bear on them. I was outnumbered and still tired from the fight with Paulson—since no matter how much blood you drink it doesn’t take the place of real rest, and my odds had just gone from one-on-one to one-on-six. If my week hadn’t already been impressively crappy, I would have been worried. As it was, it just felt like one more thing.

  “Grizzly, old buddy, I don’t suppose you’d like to channel some of your grief into killing a bunch of vampires, would you?”

  The gargantuan bloodsucker looked at me from where he sat on a couch with a handle of Jack Daniel’s in each meaty fist, shook his head, and said, “You’re on your own. I won’t kill you, but I won’t stop anybody else from killing you either. You win, you’re the Master of the City. You lose, nobody cares what you are.” Deep philosophy from a guy who could bench-press Buicks for fun.

  The five newcomers parked their bikes and joined ranks with Gator, who started walking toward me with that slow strut of a man who thinks he
has everything under control. I see that walk a lot, but almost never get to practice it. It irritates me when people try to use it on me, so I took some of my frustrations out on Gator by shooting him in the knee. He dropped to the floor, screaming, and I flipped a pool table and took cover behind it. Bullets whizzed my way, and I crouched behind the table as I listened to the 9mm rounds crack slate inches away from my head.

  One enterprising young vampire decided that storming the beaches was a great idea, so he vaulted over the table and reached down to where I cowered behind the six-foot shield. Except I wasn’t cowering; I was hiding my pistol. I put three rounds in his forehead and slid along the floor to stake him while his body tried to decide if it could regenerate having its brains scrambled like an egg at a breakfast buffet.

  I picked up the dead vampire, and using him for a shield, stood up. More gunshots rang out, and the skinny biker-vamp’s body shuddered with the impact of a dozen or more bullets. For bad guys, these vampires were surprisingly accurate. I stuck my Glock under the armpit of my shield and emptied the magazine. I wasn’t nearly as dead-on as the guys shooting at me, but I did manage to take down at least two of them. Not knowing if they were out of the fight for good or not, I flung the corpse at the lot of them and bolted for the door.

  Gator met me there, stake in hand. He lashed out at my chest, and I knocked his thrust away easily. We danced around each other for a few seconds before he attacked in earnest, feinting at my face, then thrusting at my chest and following that up with a quick draw and an attempt to shoot me in the face. I saw the feint for what it was, and dodged instead of bringing my hands high to block. That left me open to knock aside his thrust at my heart, and I was able to spin out of his line of fire as I followed up my block with a kick at his knees.