“Is that your title?” I said. “Some cops refer to you as the ‘supefather’.”
He smiled with half his mouth. “The Mafia term? Well, I suppose it’s not a bad analogy, as long as you keep in mind that the supernatural community is not made up of…” He let his voice trail off.
“Criminals?” Karl said.
“Yes, Detective,” Castle said, with a little more force in his voice. “Even if some of our number may have committed unlawful acts, they are not representative of our community.”
“Hell, I know that,” I told him. “If all the supernaturals, or even most of them, weren’t law-abiding citizens, there’d be chaos in this city. My job would be impossible.”
“Thank you for that,” Castle said. He sounded less pissed off as he said, “I should not speak of this to outsiders, but you two already know so much, it seems pointless to conceal the rest from you.” He folded his hands over his stomach and tilted the chair back a little.
“The fact is,” Castle said, “there have been subtle challenges to my leadership lately. Nothing concrete, no overt defiance. And yet, sometimes when I give orders they are not obeyed or not carried out correctly. There are always excuses, of course. No one meant to disobey my commands, there was a misunderstanding, amends will be made, and so forth. And yet…” He shook his head.
“Once is happenstance,” Karl quoted. “Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.”
Castle looked at him. “Oh, that’s right. The James Bond fan. It may surprise you, detective, but I also have read the works of Mister Ian Fleming. Mostly, I regard them as light entertainment, but sometimes, as in your present example…” The fingers were drumming again, softly as tears falling on a coffin. “Sometimes, they contain words of wisdom.”
The rest of our shift was fairly quiet, which gave Karl and me some time to talk with McGuire and the other detectives passing through about the latest scourge to afflict our fair city.
I may be the last person alive to refer to Scranton as “our fair city,” and even I don’t mean it. Well, not really.
I got McGuire’s OK to knock off a little early, since I wanted to talk to Christine before she went downstairs for the day – I was hoping she might have found out something about vampires using HG. But I didn’t get to talk to her – not that night.
It wasn’t really my fault. I’m a cop – what am if I supposed to do if I’m driving home from work and hear the rattle of gunfire a few blocks away?
I arrived on the scene a few minutes later. Leaving my car around the corner from where the action seemed to be, I got out and tried to creep close enough to see what was going on without being either spotted or shot. This was a neighborhood full of warehouses, so I wasn’t surprised that a 911 call hadn’t already brought other cops to the scene.
It was still dark enough for me to see muzzle flashes, even though dawn was less than a half hour away. There seemed to be four guns involved. Three of them, located in different places around the street, were firing at a big car parked at the opposite curb. Somebody crouching behind that car was responsible for the fourth series of muzzle flashes. I couldn’t see more, because the street lights in this area had been shot out long ago.
When I’m working, Karl and I keep a selection of special equipment and weapons in the unmarked police vehicle we use. But I don’t carry any of that stuff in my personal vehicle, because I don’t expect to get into gunfights when I’m off duty. One thing I do keep in there, however, is a set of night-vision binoculars. A lot of supes see real well in the dark, and I hate to be at a disadvantage, even when I’m not expected to be out enforcing law and order.
I ran back to the car, opened the trunk, and took out the binoculars. I flicked the “On” switch, hoping that the batteries were still fresh enough for the thing to function. The slight, rising whine of the device booting up meant that I was in luck.
I went back to my vantage point, looked through the dual eyepieces, and scanned the street. Everything was sharp and clear, even if I did seem to be looking at it through a green filter.
The big car I’d caught a glimpse of earlier was a Lincoln Continental, and there was what looked like a dead guy lying on the street near the driver’s-side front door. I focused on the license plate and saw that it read “BATDAD1”.
I recognized the tacky vanity tag – the Lincoln belonged to Don Pietro Calabrese, the Vampfather himself. The corpse on the ground probably wasn’t the Don – if it had been, the shooters would have left by now. Nobody sticks around just to finish off the chauffeur. The gunfire from behind the Connie was probably coming from the Don himself.
And that meant the guys trying to finish him off were most likely members of the same bunch who’d taken out four of Calabrese’s men earlier in the evening. Whoever these guys were, they didn’t seem inclined to let any grass grow under their feet.
So it looked like vamps shooting it out with vamps, again. And judging by the three-to-one odds, I figured the new gang’s hostile takeover of the Calabrese territory was just about ready to succeed. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
I hustled back to the car, got on the police radio, and told the dispatcher what was happening and where. She said, “Wait one, Sergeant,” and a few seconds later I was talking to the watch commander, Captain Fisk.
I explained the situation as I understood it, trying to be as brief as possible.
When I was done, Fisk said, “So, you’ve got four vampires exchanging gunfire in the street?”
“I haven’t got a close enough look at any of them to either spot fangs or recognize their faces, sir. But I know that’s Calabrese’s car, and I also know that an out-of-town vampire gang took out four of Calabrese’s people earlier tonight.”
“Yes, I saw the incident report,” Fisk said. He’s a good cop, but a little too by-the-book for my liking. The rules and operational policies are important, sure, but so is flexibility and the ability to improvise when you have to. Fisk would never grasp that, even if he stayed on the job a hundred years.
“Standard procedure when supernaturals are involved in a situation like this is to call in SWAT,” he said. “But I happen to know that the unit is already involved in a hostage situation involving some werewolves on the north side of town. I’ll try to get in communication with Lieutenant Dooley and see if he can cut loose some of his people to deal with the situation you’ve got there.”
The Sacred Weapons and Tactics unit consists of cops, a few of them clergy from different faiths, who are specially trained and equipped to deal with dangerous situations involving supes. They were just what the gunfight around the corner needed, except for one thing.
“That could take a while, Captain,” I told him. “And I’ve got a feeling that by the time SWAT gets here, the action’s gonna be all be over and the perps long gone. The ones who are still standing, I mean.”
“Can’t be helped, Sergeant. You say you’ve got a night-vision device?”
“That’s affirmative, sir.”
“Then get back in position to observe what happens, and take your radio with you. For their own safety, I’m going to order regular patrol units to stay clear of the area.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll let you know when SWAT is rolling,” Fisk told me. “In the meantime, you are to take no action except to observe and report as necessary. Understand me?”
“Yes sir – I’m not to engage the perps, but to watch what’s going down, and to report developments to you.”
“That’s affirmative. Now get moving, Sergeant. Fisk out.”
I thumbed the radio off and sat there behind the wheel, trying to think.
If I followed Fisk’s orders, Calabrese was going to die in the next few minutes, and the fangsters who’d killed him would get away clean. I might get a license number as they left, but any wiseguys – human or vampire – learn in their first ten minutes on the job always to use stolen cars when they’re planning to commit a crime.
The guidos are all nominally Catholic, and the Church, with its usual tolerance, declared more than fifty years ago that all supes were anathema – cursed by God. So, choosing to become a vampire was considered a mortal sin. Of course, extortion, drug running, prostitution, and murder are also mortal sins, and guys like Calabrese aren’t troubled by those. And vampirism offered the very substantial benefit of allowing him to avoid God’s judgment indefinitely.
Having Don Pietro Calabrese lying dead in the street wouldn’t send me into mourning. But he was at least a known quantity to local law enforcement, who’d worked out some grudging compromises with him over the years.
On the other hand, all we knew about the new bunch was that they were hungry for territory and vicious enough to go after it with the kind of public, in-your-face violence that Calabrese had abandoned years ago. Blood in the streets was bad for business.
That old adage about “better the devil you know than the one you don’t” is something cops understand very well, even if we don’t always like it.
Besides, if a cop was to save Calabrese’s ass tonight, the Vampfather might be grateful enough to tell that cop exactly what the hell was going on with this attempted takeover. That information could save more lives in the near future.
The thing about these Mafia guys, alive or undead, is that most of them still have some old-fashioned notions about honor. They believe in vengeance, alright, but they also recognize an obligation when they incur one.
All this heavy philosophy went through my mind in about fifteen seconds, and the conclusion I reached – about the benefits to law enforcement from me saving Calabrese – was the reason I was about to risk my career by disobeying Captain Fisk’s orders. My decision had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I hate just sitting back and watching scumbags tear up the streets of my town with gunfire. Absolutely.
I ejected my usual load of mixed silver and cold iron from the Beretta and replaced the clip with one that was silver from top to bottom. That gave me fifteen rounds, each one deadly to vampires – and then I thumbed an extra silver slug from the clip of mixed ammo I’d just removed. I jacked a round into the Beretta’s chamber, then removed the clip and added the cartridge I’d just scavenged. Sixteen. Sometimes one extra bullet can make all the difference in the world.
Usually, for a human to take on a bunch of vampires – in a gun battle or unarmed – means an express ticket to the morgue, since vamps are so much faster and stronger than the rest of us. But I’d taken on vamps before.
I could’ve called Karl for backup, of course – and he’d have come running. But it was bad enough that one of us was risking unemployment by defying the watch commander, without putting Karl’s job on the line as well. Besides, dawn was coming soon.
So it looked like I was doing it alone.
I figured if I was going to have any chance of survival against three vampire gangsters, I’d have to take a page out of Che Guevara’s book on guerrilla warfare, which I’d read in high school. It was a phase.
Che called it the “war of the flea”. You bite the dog and then take off before it can scratch. Do it right, and you live to bite another day.
I made my cautious way back to the scene of the gun battle. It looked like Calabrese was holding his own, since muzzle flashes were still coming erratically from behind his parked Connie.
The night-vision binoculars would help me, but only to a point. They would allow me to see exactly where the bad guys were, but I couldn’t look through the eyepieces and the sights of the Beretta at the same time. That meant I’d have to locate the fangsters with the night-vision device, but shoot at them without it. Kind of like a nearsighted guy viewing the bull’s-eye of a target with his glasses on, then taking them off before squeezing off a shot.
I scanned the street to see if the three vampires who’d been firing on the Connie were still in the same positions. They hadn’t moved.
The one closest to me was about eighty feet away, squatting behind a big Buick. Peering at the green-tinted image, I tried to fix in my mind where the vamp was, relative to the outline of the car. That was probably all I’d be able to see with my naked eye. Looked like he was about three feet from the rear bumper, and maybe a foot below the roof – except when he popped up long enough to fire a round at Calabrese. He did that while I was watching: stand up quick, take aim over the Buick’s roof and fire, then squat back down behind cover.
I turned off the night-vision device and put it down carefully on the concrete next to me. I took a minute to let my eyes adjust to the dark, then drew a bead on what I could see of the Buick, which wasn’t as much as I’d hoped. I tried to keep my hands steady, and waited.
Muzzle flash. I knew exactly where the vampire gunman was at this moment. More important, I was pretty sure that I knew where he was going to be three seconds from now. I sighted on the point where his gun barrel had briefly lit the night, then dropped my aim about three feet. I took in a breath, let half of it out, and fired – twice.
The moment I squeezed the trigger, I was violating not only Captain Fisk’s orders, but also established Department procedure. A cop isn’t supposed to shoot a suspect, even an armed one, without first doing the “Police officer! Drop your weapon and put your hands in the air!” routine.
I could just imagine the response of one of those vampire gangsters out there if I’d tried that crap on him, and I’m still too young to die. So when it’s a choice between following procedure and staying alive, I’ll go with common sense and take my chances with the bureaucrats later. As my old partner, Paul DiNapoli, used to say, “Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.”
After getting off those two shots, I didn’t stick around to evaluate my marksmanship. The flea had taken a small chunk out of the dog – or so I hoped – and he’d better change position before he got scratched but good.
I grabbed the binoculars and scuttled back about twenty feet, dropping down behind somebody’s silver Nissan. I raised up just enough to see over the top of the trunk, trying to expose as little of myself as possible, and saw one of the remaining bad guys do something stupid. I guess not everybody in the new vampire gang was a battle-hardened veteran of the streets.
The sky was brightening a little with false dawn. That and my darkness-adjusted eyes gave me a pretty good view of what this idiot was doing. He actually stood up, gun in both hands, searching the area where my two shots had come from. I wasn’t there anymore – I’m sure his vampire night vision told him that. But he must’ve known that I wasn’t far away. The barrel of his pistol kept moving back and forth as he sought somebody to shoot at.
He might’ve found me, too – if Calabrese hadn’t fired from across the street and put a bullet through the dumb bastard’s head.
Two down. What was the third vampire going to do now? If he was smart, he’d jump into his car and get the hell out of here.
Turned out he wasn’t quite that bright. But he was smart enough to get behind me.
The guy must’ve hit the vampire afterburners and sprinted clear around the block in order to go from a few hundred feet in front of me to about twenty feet behind me. Probably took him all of six, maybe seven seconds – after all, it was a pretty big block. But I figured all that out later.
It was when I heard that crisp, metallic noise coming from behind me – the distinctive double click of the hammer going back on a pistol – that I knew I was about to die. There’s nothing else in the world that sounds quite like that, and I guess for a lot of guys it’s the second-last sound they ever hear.
It had to be the third vampire behind me. Another cop would have announced himself, if only so that I wouldn’t do a Wild Bill Hickok and blow him away
before I was sure of my target.
I decided that I was going to try to stand up and turn. The odds against my accomplishing either of those things made the Tri-State Powerball seem like a good investment. But I wanted to die standing upright if I could, instead of squatting there like some Cub Scout trying to take a dump in the woods.
I was barely halfway out of the crouch when I heard the sound of the shot that killed me.
It didn’t, of course – but I was pretty confused for a moment. I even had the crazy thought this was some kind of “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” moment. In that final instant, everything slows down so much that you can fantasize a whole different chain of events – before reality catches up with you and breaks your neck.
Then I figured out that it just wasn’t my night to die, and I decided to just stand up, turn around, and work out what the hell had happened.
I’d had most of it figured right. There was a body on the ground a couple of car lengths behind me. I recognized him as one of the vampires I’d seen through the binoculars earlier, and the only way he could’ve gotten behind me like that was by sprinting around the block with vampire speed. The one thing I’d had wrong was which one of us was about to die.
Life can feel pretty damn good, especially when you were sure you were about to lose it. But once I got my mind working again, I wanted to know who had just killed the vampire gangster. Because there was nobody else around. Nobody.
He could’ve been nailed by a sniper from one of the windows, but who would do that? And why? It couldn’t have been Calabrese, that much was certain. He was too far–
Calabrese. Shit.
I scuttled down the length of parked cars ahead of me, being careful to keep below the line of sight from across the street. It would be pretty ironic to get myself killed by the Vampfather after everything I’d just gone through to keep the bastard alive.
When I was directly across from the Lincoln, I stopped, took in a big breath, and yelled, “Calabrese!”
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