“When did you have surgery?” I asked. “You never mentioned that before.”
“Ah, I got gang-tackled during a football game when I was in high school,” he said. “Broke my leg in three places, and they had to operate on me to fix it – put plates in or something. So, yeah, I know what anesthesia’s like.”
“Count backward from one hundred,” Rachel intoned with a little smile.
“Yeah, kinda like that, except without all the counting,” Karl said. “You feel yourself going, and the feeling gets stronger, and then” – he snapped his fingers – “you’re gone.”
“Well, if you start to experience that sensation, be sure and say something,” Rachel said.
“So you can do what?” he asked.
She shrugged tiredly. “Catch you before you hit the floor, I guess.”
I didn’t tell them, but I had a back-up plan ready in case the spell failed. As a favor, Homer Jordan from the ME’s office had loaned me one of those green plastic body bags that they use to transport bodies to and from the morgue. If Karl turned into a corpse at dawn, the way he usually did, I was going to get him into the body bag and find somebody stronger than Rachel to help me carry him out of the building and to the trunk of my car. The deadly sunlight would never touch him.
I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about, the three of us, as we sat in that big, empty room, waiting for the sunrise. Somebody started a conversation about a TV program, but that didn’t go anywhere. Small wonder – we all worked nights, and at least one of us hadn’t seen any daytime TV for quite a while.
Then Rachel mentioned that she was a mixed martial arts fan. That surprised me a little, but then I’ve been accused of stereotyping people in the past. We got into a mild debate over whether supernaturals should have their own MMA league, and that went on until the moment when Rachel glanced at her watch, then looked up and smiled.
“What?” I asked her.
“Checked the time lately?” she said, the smile still in place.
I looked at my watch: 7.26.
Not wanting to put complete faith in either my Omega Spellmaster or the Internet’s posted time for sunrise, I stood up and said, “Excuse me a second.”
I turned left out of the media room and took the next right. Walking another twenty feet put me right in front of a window. I spent a few moments there, looking out at the sun rising over my city. This part of the building was still in shadow, dark enough for me to see my own reflection in the glass. I watch a smile sprout on my face and quickly grow into a full-out grin, like one of those high-speed films that shows a rose going from bud to bloom in only a few seconds.
Damn!
I walked back to the media room and resumed my seat. Trying to sound casual, I said, “Pretty sunrise out there. Looks like it ought to be a nice day.”
Karl gave us a razor-sharp grin. “Shit,” he said. “I never even noticed.”
“Well, that was the object of the exercise,” Rachel said. Although she still looked tired, her face had a glow about it now that made even exhaustion look kind of attractive.
“Eagle, this is Houston,” I said, trying to imitate a super-serious space program guy. “Your mission is a go.”
Phillip Kevin Slattery, the Patriot Party’s candidate for mayor, was one of those guys some people refer to as Black Irish. Although his great-grandparents supposedly all came from County Cork, he didn’t look like anybody who’d be invited to dress up like a leprechaun for next year’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade – besides, everybody knows they use real leprechauns for that.
Slattery’s thick, carefully combed hair was the same dark brown as his eyes, and his complexion wouldn’t have earned him a second look at any Sicilian’s family reunion. I doubted he’d ever known a freckle in his life. He had a heavy beard growth that I’d bet he shaved twice a day to avoid looking like a common thug. That impression would have been misleading, anyway – as far as I was concerned, Phil Slattery was a very special kind of thug.
His blue pinstripe suit was good quality, and the shirt he was wearing – white with thin blue stripes – went with the suit well enough, but whoever had picked out that tie for him must have been either color-blind or demented.
The interrogation rooms that we use to question suspects were way too small for the number of people who’d be involved this time. Besides, the Media Room had the advantage of being windowless – good thing, too, since the sun was well up in the sky now, shining bright and clear.
Slattery had brought three men with him. The thin, balding one with wire-rim glasses had been introduced as Bob Franks, his campaign manager. He had the pinched look of somebody who has ulcers on his ulcers. The stocky guy with prematurely gray hair was somebody I already knew. Jerome Duplantis was a partner in Archer, Duplantis, and O’Brien, the biggest law firm in the city. I guess he was along in case we tried to violate Slattery’s rights or something. His own suit made Slattery’s look dowdy, but then Duplantis wasn’t running for anything.
The last man’s name, we were told, was Robert Brody. Slattery referred to him as “my personal assistant.” In my experience, that’s usually a fancy name for “gofer”. but not this time. Brody had big shoulders and a narrow face, with blue eyes that were colder than a five hundred year-old vampire’s – and I ought to know, since I’ve met a five hundred year-old vampire. He had a way of standing, with feet spread and the right foot slightly forward, as if he was waiting for someone to knock him down – or try to. Personal assistant, my ass – I know a bodyguard when I see one.
McGuire had ordered every detective on the squad who wasn’t on the street that morning to be sitting in one of the media room’s uncomfortable folding chairs, even if it meant he had to pay overtime to several of them. There were even a couple of guys from Homicide there, because McGuire had asked Scanlon for a few warm bodies to fill the seats. The chairs were laid out in twelve rows, with a central aisle running down the middle.
Most of those cops didn’t have speaking parts in the little drama we were staging, but that didn’t make them unimportant. For one thing, they would provide strength in numbers, which McGuire thought might intimidate Slattery and his people a little. Fat chance of that – the Patriot Party crew looked about as bothered as a bunch of cats at a mouse convention.
But more important, such a large group of detectives meant that introducing them all was impractical. We didn’t want any of Scanlon’s group to hear a name that might raise a red flag, and lying about who Karl was could come back to bite us later. Besides, McGuire and I had figured that a crowd this large gave us a chance that neither Slattery nor his entourage would notice one of the detectives in the room was a vampire. Karl knew enough to keep his fangs out of sight, and none of our visitors would be expecting one of the undead, anyway. It was broad daylight, after all, which meant that all vampires were asleep snug in their coffins. Everybody knew that.
Karl had remained in his back-row seat, just as we’d planned. I was down front, since I intended to take an active part in the questioning. As I took my seat, I resisted the urge to look behind me and see how Karl was doing. Being awake during daylight hours must’ve been a weird experience for him. I hoped he could make his Influence work under such unusual conditions.
Four chairs had been moved to the front of the room, and that’s where Slattery and his crew were asked to sit. Once they were in place, McGuire got up from his front-row seat and turned to the audience of cops. “Alright, quiet down,” he said, loud enough to cut through the buzz of a dozen quiet conversations. “We’re about to get started.” The low murmur of voices stopped almost at once.
McGuire then turned to Slattery. “On behalf of the Scranton Police Department, I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to come down and talk to us,” he said. His voice held nothing but formal politeness. Me, I wouldn’t have been able to deliver a line like that without wrapping some sarcasm around it – I guess that’s one reason why McGuire is a lieutenant and I’m not.