Night and Day (Book 2): Bleeding Sky
Bleeding
Sky
Night and Day
Book #2
Ken
White
Copyright © 2013 Ken
White.
No part of this document
or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any
means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
All characters appearing in this work
are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental.
Administrative
Areas
In the United States of the
Night and Day
series, the country has
been divided into seven Administrative Areas by the vampires after the war
with the humans.
Only Hawaii remains outside of the
vampire’s control.
Though the Federal, State and Local
governments
remain
in place and continue to function, the Governor General and the fourteen
Area Governors/Deputy Area Governors operate as a second, parallel
government with their own agenda and enormous power.
Contents
Chapter
One
“Too
close?”
I
shook my head. “No, three car lengths is about right. Always try to keep at
least one car between you and the target, especially when you hit a stop
sign or red light. Two is better, as long as you still have eyeballs on
the other car.”
His
name was Brenner and he was my latest trainee. I’d gotten a call a week
earlier that he was coming. Goodbye Sandy Tsu, hello Johnny Brenner. He was
the fifth trainee in eight months. General Bain liked to move them in and
move them out.
“What
if the car between us turns off?”
“Then
you keep your distance and be a helpful driver,” I said. “Somebody wants to
get in front of you, let them.”
Brenner
was a quick study, one of the quickest that Bain had sent me. We’d started
off with foot surveillance, and he had that down in three days. Vehicle
surveillance was a little trickier, but he was smart, paid attention to what
I told him and learned from it.
When
he came aboard, he told me that he didn’t have any previous investigative
experience. But he picked it up too fast for that to be strictly
true.
“So
what’s your real story, Brenner? You’re too good at this to be a complete
beginner.”
“Shouldn’t
I be concentrating on the target instead of gabbing?”
“You
need to be so comfortable with tailing another vehicle that it becomes
instinctual,” I said. “Your mind shouldn’t be focused exclusively on staying
behind the other car. You should be running through scenarios. What happens
if the target vehicle hits another car? What happens if the target subject
suddenly stops, jumps out of the car, and starts walking toward you? What
happens if a cop sees you tailing the target and decides to pull you
over?”
He
smiled. “If the target’s in a crash, I go past, pull over a good distance
ahead, watch and wait. If the subject gets out and starts toward me, I keep
driving and do not make eye contact. If a cop stops me, I break off the
surveillance and pick it up tomorrow night.”
“Very
nice. Like I said, you’re too good to be a beginner. You’ve done this
before.”
“No,”
he said. “Not this, exactly. I was in Special Collections in Area One before
I got my transfer orders.”
“Special
Collections?”
Brenner
was silent for a moment. “Sorry. Can’t really talk about it.”
There
was always something that a vampire couldn’t talk about. It had been more
than five years since the war between humans and vampires began, a war that
we lost. Quickly. And decisively. Even now, the Vees were still playing
their cards close to the vest.
It
made sense, I guess. The more humans knew about them, the easier it would be
to find and exploit weaknesses. I don’t know about the rest of the country,
but in this city, there almost half a million humans and maybe thirty or
forty thousand vampires. If we decided to rise up, they’d be easy prey from
sunrise to sunset.
Of
course, after the sun went down, the tables would turn. They can only be
killed in very specific ways, and one can turn ten or twenty humans in a
night. That’s why we lost the war. Every human who fought them became a new
recruit.
I’d
been a Metro cop, plainclothes out of the 83
rd
Street station.
Some of the uniforms went out to man the barricades when the vampire horde
descended on the city, but most just hunkered down at home or ran. At
83
rd
Street Robbery-Homicide, we’d run. Only to get picked up and
tossed in the Delta-5 internment camp outside town for almost three
years.
Some
of the guys in the unit had taken the opportunity to get out when the Vee
recruiters came around in the last months of internment. Somebody high in
the Vee food chain had decided that internment wasn’t working, or was no
longer desirable. But before they released us back to the city, they wanted
a working police department. Specifically a working night shift.
Becoming
a Vee wasn’t attractive, and doing it willingly even less so. I saw a lot of
casual brutality from the guards at Delta-5. It happened too many times for
all of them to have been sociopaths before they turned. Turning did
something to them, changed them. And not just in the obvious ways. Their
minds and attitudes changed too.
So
I stuck it out in the camp for another few months. Met a Vee named Joshua
Thomas, the recently-assigned new commanding officer of Delta-5, who was
different, somehow more human. We struck up a friendship, which became a
partnership in a private investigation agency called Night and
Day.
Me
and Joshua never really went into the whole vampire thing. He was a Vee, I
was human. I ate food, he drank blood. I worked cases during the day, he
worked them at night. We didn’t talk about our differences when we had
enough downtime to actually socialize. And we didn’t socialize as much as I
would have liked. He couldn’t take me out for a drink at one of the
slurp-clubs that opened in the uptown part of the city, where the Vees
tended to live. And they didn’t serve his brand in the downtown
bars.
Then
about eight months ago, Joshua was murdered. A bad cap tried to pin the
murder on me, but I survived, thanks to Phillip Bain, Deputy Area Governor
for Administrative Area Three. Joshua was his bloodson, turned by Bain
during the war, and he wanted justice. With Bain’s assistance and that of
his Security Force commander, Tiffany Takeda, I’d helped him get
it.
But
my deal with Bain required me to take on trainee investigators he selected
to fill the night side of Night and Day. It wouldn’t have been a problem if
he left the trainees in place long enough for Night and Day to actually get
some use out of them, but he didn’t. Every month or two, I’d get a call and
have to watch the Vee I’d just trained leave and a new one
arrive.
At
least Brenner was picking it up quickly. With any luck, I’d get three or
four weeks of useful work out of him before he was replaced by somebody
else.
“Nothing
personal, Charlie,” he said after a few seconds of silence. “Certain
assignments in Area offices are sensitive, and Special Collections is one of
them. I can’t even talk about it with most vampires.”
“Not
a problem. I’ve run into the wall of silence before.” I paused. “So, this
transfer. Was it because they needed somebody for Special Collections down
here in Area Three?”
“Yeah,
they had an opening, and it’s a position they like to keep fully staffed.
Area Governor One called me into his office and gave me my marching orders.
Met Area Governor Three, he let Mr. Bain know I was coming, and off I went.
Had about three days notice before my transport was arranged and I was out
of there.”
“The
Area Three Governor was there?”
Brenner
smiled. “They’re all there, at the Governor General’s headquarters.
Operational command is run through Deputy Area Governors, like Mr. Bain.
Area Governors have their offices in the Governor General’s headquarters
outside Grand Forks and rule from afar.” He paused. “Don’t get all excited
that I’m giving you the inside scoop. It’s not really a secret, at least not
to vampires. I’m not sharing something that I shouldn’t.”
“I’m
sure you wouldn’t do that.”
You’re
right,” he said. His smile was long gone.
“So
where’s the target now?”
“Four
car lengths ahead of us, two cars between us. She’s heading for the
boyfriend’s house.”
“Probably,
but don’t make assumptions. Her husband isn’t paying us for speculation.
Just for provable facts.”
“Come
on, she goes there every night. Husband goes to work, she waits half an
hour, then hops in the car and heads to midtown.”
I
nodded. “True. So far.”
“So
how long do we keep following her to the same place?”
“Her
husband paid us three thousand for five nights, up front. This is night
four. Tomorrow night, he’ll be at the office to get his money’s worth. We
lay the report and pictures on him, he decides if we’ve provided what he
wants.”
“I’m
sure we will.”