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

by John G. Hartness

  “What are you up to?” she asked.

  “I’m gonna take the tunnel to the tower. I’ve got a meeting with a vampire biker gang.” I grabbed Excalibur and my Glock and headed out the secret entrance, Paulson in tow.

  TEN MINUTES LATER I emerged into the basement of Gordon Tiram’s former office tower, now my office tower. I made a mental note to ask William exactly how I could afford an office tower, then took the private elevator up to the penthouse. I guess crime really does pay, I mused, running my fingers along the marble paneling in the private elevator. The doors slid open, and William was waiting for me, a worried look on his face and a stack of papers in his hands.

  “What’s wrong, Little Willie?” I asked as I got off the elevator.

  “Nothing is terribly wrong, sir, but there are quite a few things that will require your attention now that you are more fully assuming the daily management of Mr. Tiram’s business interests. I have several things that need a signature from you to transfer ownership and bank accounts, and I do not have a stamp for you yet.”

  I stopped. “A stamp?”

  “Yes, sir. It is customary in many businesses for the owner to have a signature stamp so that documents can be signed without the owner present. I have one for Mr. Tiram, which I have been using to initiate the transfer of ownership, but nothing for you.”

  “William?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What exactly did you do before you were turned?”

  “I was a CPA, sir. A very good one.”

  I thought about it for a second. I didn’t know this guy from Adam—did I really want him to have control over all my finances? On the one hand, if he was unscrupulous, he could rob me blind and vanish. On the other hand, I’m a pretty decent detective, and it’s really hard to vanish from a vampire. I thought about it for a second longer, then decided if I was going to do this Master gig, I was going to have to trust a few more people than I was used to. Besides, it was only money. If I needed more, I’d just mojo an armored car driver.

  “Fair enough,” I said. I reached out and took a pen from William’s coat pocket, unscrewed the cap, and scrawled my name across one of the pieces of paper he held. “Can you make a stamp from that?”

  He looked at the paper, no doubt something vitally important to someone who cared about paper and didn’t worry about things like naga or vampire biker gangs or fatal sunburn. He let out a weary sigh and said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Good deal. Now let’s go kick a biker’s ass, shall we?”

  I walked through the double doors into my ridiculously large office, and went from zero to fantastically pissed off in about point-three seconds. There was a vampire in my chair. Not just any vampire, but a dirty-looking ode to ’70s hair bands and cheap beer that could only be Gator, the leader of the Stanleyville Bloods. Gator was kicked back in my leather chair, with his engineer boots crossed at the ankles on my oak desk. His dirty jeans were ripped in places, held up with an enormous German cross belt buckle, with a plain black T-shirt tucked into them. He had on a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off into a vest, and patches sewn all over the front of it. I assumed they all made sense to someone in the motorcycle-gang lifestyle, but the only one I recognized was the 1% patch on his left chest.

  He threw his arms wide as I pushed the door open. “Jimmy!” he crowed, like he was greeting an old friend. Gator must have been turned young, like I was, because he looked to be in his mid-twenties, but I knew from William’s research that he partied with the Stones at Altamont and ran drugs for the Angels in California in the ’80s before setting up shop in Charlotte in the late ’90s. He wore his hair shoulder length and straight, and a long handlebar mustache covered his mouth. He stood up and grinned, walking towards me. I didn’t slow, and I wasn’t about to embrace him. I walked straight up to him and grabbed his lapels in my hands. I lifted him up a little so we were eye to eye before I spoke.

  “If your ass ever touches my chair again, you’d better make sure you’ve killed me first.” I growled into his grin. His eyes flashed cold, but the fake smile never left his face. He knew he tweaked me, and now I had to establish dominance. I set him down. “Are we clear?” I asked.

  “Clear as crystal, boss man,” he replied, sketching a little bow as he backed up. “I just wanted to see how it felt, you know? The seat of power and all.”

  “My power doesn’t live in that chair, Gator, it lives in me. And the sooner you come to realize that, the longer you’ll stay alive. Now let’s have a seat and chat like civilized creatures, shall we?” Who says my time around Sabrina was wasted? If I learned anything from her it was how to keep a suspect off his game during an interrogation.

  I walked Gator over to a pair of couches facing each other with a small coffee table between them. There was a folder on the table, courtesy of William. Whatever I was paying him, it wasn’t enough. I pushed the folder across the table to Gator, then poured myself a cup of heated B-positive from the china tea service that sat on the coffee table. I motioned to Gator, but he shook his head.

  He picked up the folder and started to flip through the pictures inside. “What’s this?”

  “Those are photos from a botched ransom drop from two nights ago. Some of your guys were involved,” I replied.

  “How would you know this? None of the guys in these pictures are wearing Stanleyville colors.”

  “No, but two of the others were wearing your cut. And I know you wouldn’t let anybody out on the street wear your insignia without being part of your group. So that brings us back to square one.”

  “Which is?” Gator fidgeted in his seat, then leaned forward and poured himself a cup of blood.

  “Stir that carefully, it’s fresh, no anticoagulants, so there might be a little scab on top.”

  He took a sip, then looked back across the table at me. I said nothing, just continued to look at him. The preternatural stillness usually unnerves humans, but it seldom works on vampires. I guess Gator was more nervous about this meeting than he let on.

  We sat there, and I let the silence grow until Gator couldn’t take it anymore. “It was just a one-time thing, providing security for the drop. We had a meeting, figured since Tiram was gone and there wasn’t really anybody in charge, that it was okay.”

  “It was?”

  “Yeah, we had a meeting of all the membership and everything. It was real official.”

  “And you decided that there was nobody in charge since Tiram was gone?”

  “Yeah, since you ain’t reached out to none of us local business partners, we figured you wasn’t gonna be conducting Tiram’s business, so we’d just take care of this on our own.”

  “You figured that?” I stood, still sipping warmed blood from a teacup.

  “Yeah, I figured that.” Gator leaned back onto the sofa and sipped his own blood, pinkie finger extended.

  “Well, Gator . . . here’s the thing . . . you figured wrong.” I set down the teacup and moved around the coffee table at vamp-speed. In one instant I was standing behind my sofa, the next blink I was in front of Gator and had him hauled back up to his feet by his jean jacket.

  I spoke very low, and very slowly, so there was no question about me being understood. “Here’s the deal, you smelly little shitball. I am the Master Vampire of this city. You are a vampire who wants to remain in this city and relatively alive. That means that you do what I say. It means that you don’t fart without my permission, much less take a gig that puts you in the position of trying to shoot me. It means that you don’t make deals without my approval, and you certainly don’t do anything as stupid as think without my say-so. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand, Master, but I don’t buy it.”

  “What?”

  “You ain’t the Master. You ain’t fit to carry Tiram’s jock, much less try to run this city. You ain’t no kinda criminal mastermind. Hell, you can barely figure out how to tie your own shoes. You ain’t got what it takes to run Charlotte, and you sure as he
ll ain’t got what it takes to run me and my crew.” He pushed off me, got a little separation, and spat a big glob of phlegm onto the toe of my shoe.

  “Now what are you going to do about that, Master?” The biker-vampire sneered.

  It didn’t take me half a second to decide what I was going to do with an insubordinate smelly vampire who hocked a loogie onto my shoe—I was going to beat his ass until my hands were tired. I started with a short jab to the solar plexus, and when Gator doubled up, I twined my fingers in his greasy blond hair and slammed his face into my knee. Then with him still doubled over, I picked him up by the waist, flipped him over my shoulder, and slammed him shoulders-first through the coffee table.

  He grinned up at me, blood covering the lower half of his face like a mask. “Let’s see how tough you are without that sword and gun, Master.”

  I stepped back, unbelted Excalibur from my waist, and slid out of my shoulder holster. I put the sword and gun onto a sofa and held out both hands to Gator. “Come get some, asshole.”

  He reached behind his back and pulled out a long dagger with what looked like a silver blade. Because of course as soon as I divest myself of weapons, the bad guy reminds me why he’s a bad guy and pulls a badass knife on me. I stopped worrying when he jabbed at me, though. This was a vampire who had lived a long time on looking tough and cheating to win, not on actually being able to fight. I’d spent the last three years training in hand-to-hand combat and Krav Maga with a human tough enough to hold her own in a vampire fight, Detective Sabrina Law. So when Gator stabbed at my middle with his pig-sticker, it was nothing to parry his thrust and snap his arm across my knee like a rotten twig.

  The knife tumbled to the floor, and I kicked it aside. I stepped up to Gator, who was clutching his broken arm to his chest and nailed him on the point of the jaw with an uppercut that I think started in Georgia. He flew back six feet, landed on a sofa, and flipped over the back of it. I leapt the distance between us and drove a knee into his ribcage. I heard a very satisfying crunch that told me he had a lot fewer intact ribs than he’d started the fight with, then I stood up, dragging a somewhat more pliant Gator to his feet again.

  “Not fit to hold Tiram’s jock?” I asked, slapping the gang leader back and forth across the face like I was painting a fence. “Barely tie my own shoes?” I asked, planting a knee square in his groin and enjoying the way his eyes bulged out of his face. I let go of his lapels, and he dropped to both knees and his unbroken hand, swaying a little as he tried to get back to his feet. I reared back with my right foot and punted him square in the gut, lifting him off his knees and dropping him back onto his side.

  “How does my shoe-tying look now, assclown?” I said to his writhing figure.

  But Gator wasn’t done yet. He rolled over a couple of times, doubled over from the pain, and came up on one knee with a little hammerless revolver he must have kept hidden in an ankle holster. He got off two rounds, but I wasn’t where he was aiming by the time the bullets got there. Time slowed as I sped up, and while I couldn’t see the bullets miss, I felt them whizz by my shoulder. I was faster than I’d ever been, a new sense of vigor coursing through me that I’d never felt before. Then I was beside Gator, and I broke his other arm just like the first. The snapping sounds were almost drowned out by the screaming, but one more solid punch to the jaw cut that noise off like I’d thrown a switch. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed to the marble floor, out cold.

  I wiped the spit off my boot on his shirt, then walked over to my desk and pressed a button on my phone.

  “Yes, sir?” William’s voice even sounded efficient as he answered.

  “I need someone to return Gator to his clubhouse. Send a couple of someones; he can’t walk right now. And I suppose I need a janitor up here and a new coffee table. Oh, dammit. And a new tea service. I kinda threw a biker on top of the last set.”

  “This is why we can’t have nice things, sir.”

  “I know, I know. Just send everybody in, please.”

  “Yes, sir.” William clicked off, and I sat in my chair. I spun it around to look at Paulson, who appeared to have stepped off the elevator just in time to see the big finish. “How was that, Oh Grand Evaluator?”

  “I would have killed him. It would have taken less time and sent a clearer message.”

  “But then I would have to learn everything about the Bloods’ business to figure out who to appoint in his place. This way I don’t have to train anyone, and Gator will never step out of line again.”

  “You hope.”

  “I know. He’s not exactly ancient, but he’s been running this little gang in this little town a long time, and he likes being a big fish here. I’ve just shown him that he can’t take me one-on-one, and after he talks to the rest of his gang who were at the ransom drop last night, he’ll know that I’ve got backup for my backup.”

  “Even if you don’t know who that backup is.”

  “Irrelevant. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know who was behind the scope of that sniper rifle last night, it just matters that the sniper was shooting the people who wanted to kill me, instead of the people trying to help me. Ergo, the sniper was working for me.”

  “It all sounds good, Black, but I still would have killed him.” Paulson said.

  “I think that’s one we’re going to have to chalk up to differing management styles,” I said. Then my cell phone rang, because heaven forbid I get a quiet moment to myself to savor even the tiny victories.

  Chapter 12

  I TAPPED THE SCREEN of my cell phone. “Yeah?”

  McDaniel’s voice came on the line. “Jimmy? Good, I need you to take care of something.”

  “I don’t think this is exactly how the Master-to-Mortal-Minion relationship is supposed to work, but I’m just guessing. I think usually it’s an I-call-you-when-I-need-you thing, not a you-call-me-and-issue-orders thing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I thought for half a second that I detected a note of actual deference in McDaniel’s tone. Either I needed to get my supernatural hearing checked, or I was gaining the good lieutenant’s respect.

  He went on. “I’m sorry to call again like this, but someone has raised a demon at Central Piedmont Community College.”

  Wait, what? “This isn’t about the missing girl? The botched ransom drop? The whole kidnapping thing?”

  “I’ve got people on that. We’re still going over the crime scene for forensics, and Owen is still furious with us both. But right now someone summoned a demon in the middle of the opera Faust at CPCC, and you’re the only one that can deal with it.”

  “I told them a hundred fifty bucks a semester was too much for a parking sticker,” I deadpanned.

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Where is the demon?”

  “It’s in the Halton Theater, the new facility on Kings Road.”

  “I know it. How am I supposed to find one demon in that place? It’s huge.”

  “I’d start looking onstage. My reports say it’s still eating chorus members.” I waited for the punch line, and when one didn’t come, I hung up and buzzed William on the intercom.

  “Have a car ready. I’m headed to the lobby. Got a demon to kill at CPCC.”

  “Yes, sir.” He clicked off without any questions, which made me think he either thought I was speaking in euphemisms, or was way more unflappable than I thought. I strapped on Excalibur, feeling the sword settle around my waist and wondering at the fact that I’d gotten comfortable wearing a sword in the twenty-first century. Then I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out a small velvet pouch.

  I loosened the drawstrings on the pouch and pulled out a leather thong with two silver charms dangling from it. One was a round medal depicting St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, and the other was a plain silver cross. Father Michael Maloney, one of my best friends in the world and the finest human being I’d ever known, died a couple weeks earlier and left the necklace for me wi
th orders that it be delivered after his death. I recognized the cross immediately as the one Mike’s mom gave him when he took his first communion. The medal was because Mike always told me that I was the Don Quixote of our trio, always tilting at windmills. I kissed the cross, strangely feeling none of the normal draining effects of silver. Maybe I was growing more powerful as my connection to the city grew deeper. Maybe there was enough Mike left in the pendant to shield me from it. Either way, I felt a little stronger, a little better with Mike’s necklace in my hand, so I slipped it over my head. Still good, so I shrugged on a leather duster and headed down to the lobby.

  William stood by the car when I stepped out of the building, and I shook my head. “No go, pal. You stay here and keep the business running. I go to exotic locales like community college and meet interesting people, like demons.”

  “Someone needs to have your back,” William insisted.

  “I’m sure Paulson is already in the backseat like Miss Daisy just waiting for me to drive him around and provide his evening’s entertainment. If I get in too much trouble, there’s at least a two percent chance that he’ll bail me out.”

  “I think you’ve given yourself at least one-point-five percent too much credit, Black,” came Paulson’s voice from the backseat.

  “Besides, it’s one demon, and it sounds like some junior college theatre kid summoned him accidentally while singing opera. How big could it be?”

  Ten minutes later, I stepped onto the side stage at the Halton Theater and looked out at the demon, then kicked myself for asking stupid questions. Eight or so feet tall was the answer, with four arms, each ending in three-inch talons that looked capable of turning someone’s insides to outsides with one good slice. Its thick legs were covered in goatlike fur and ended in hooves, and a six-foot tail as big around as my arm split the air with its spiked tip. With its mouth closed, the thing was only butt-ugly instead of hideous, with two curved antelope horns jutting from an elongated skull that held three rows of teeth in a very crowded mouth.