Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon by Ken White Read Free Book Online Page A

it wouldn’t be
    helpful if I was stuck in a car all day.
    “Regular with bacon and white
    toast,” he said. I heard the eggs splatter as they hit the
    griddle.
    He’d left the newspaper on the
    table for me, as usual. I picked it up and flipped through the pages,
    looking for a story on the Beacon Street shooting the morning before. I’d
    heard the basics from Sgt. Olsen, but I was hoping for a little more, the
    kind of human interest stuff that wouldn’t make it into a police
    report.
    Nothing. No mention of it. It was
    as if it never happened. Which was about par for the course. The news,
    whether in the newspaper or on television, was filtered. Anything that
    didn’t fit in with the narrative that we were all one big happy family,
    human and Vee, living together as one, got the hook.
    The news people had probably gotten
    wind of the fact that it might be Resistance related, and that was an
    automatic kill for the story. The Resistance doesn’t exist. There were
    so-called bandits, that preyed on Vees and the occasional human, who
    sometimes called themselves the Resistance. But it was an illusion. There
    was no Resistance. You can’t have a Resistance if there’s nothing to resist
    against.
    I tossed the paper aside as
    Hanritty brought the plate of food from around the counter. “So Debbie
    heard there was some kind of shooting over on the west side yesterday
    morning,” he said, putting the plate on the table. “You hear anything about
    it?”
    Debbie was Hanritty’s wife. She was
    probably a very nice woman, and they’d apparently been married a long time.
    But she had a mouth on her that would make a hyena puke. Non-stop
    profanity, sometimes crude, sometimes imaginative. I was hoping that I’d be
    done with breakfast and gone before she made her morning appearance
    sometime in the next half hour.
    “Yeah, I heard a warehouse on
    Beacon got shot up,” I said, picking up a fork. “They didn’t find any
    victims inside.” Though there was an excellent chance that one of them had
    shown up at my office a couple of hours later.
    Hanritty’s eyes flickered to my
    still-full cup. “Something wrong with the coffee?”
    I put down the fork and took a sip.
    “Nope, just as good as it always is,” I said. His coffee was good, even if
    it was strong enough to cut into slices. But as much as the caffeine would
    have been welcome, coffee makes you pee, and I’d be filling the mayo jars
    just fine without any help.
    “Okay,” he said. He didn’t sound
    convinced, but he walked back around the counter.
    Hanritty’s was where I’d first
    encountered Michael Redmond. He’d been a regular, sitting in the booth next
    to mine, his back to me as he ate the same chicken salad sandwich and home
    fries every morning. At the time, I’d figured him for bent, a thief, a
    hustler, a guy who took his chances on the streets after dark. I’d never
    thought that he might be part of the Resistance.
    Until about a year ago, I’d
    considered the Resistance a bad joke. Kids playing with sticks and
    pretending they were guns. I’d met a few people who said they were part of
    the Resistance when I was interned at Delta-5. And only one of them seemed
    like he had a brain.
    Finding out from Redmond that Dick
    Nedelmann was in the Resistance changed my opinion, just a bit. Dick was a
    Metro cop I’d recruited to help me find my partner Joshua’s killers. He was
    a smart guy, a good man, a good police officer. He might have even been a
    good Resistance fighter. But I never found out. Involving Dick Nedelmann in
    the case had gotten him killed.
    I’d run into Redmond again last
    summer, him and his crew. Or more accurately, he’d run into me. That
    experience had proved that whatever else they might be, the Resistance
    wasn’t just a bunch of toy soldiers.
    I finished my eggs, shoved the last
    piece of bacon in my mouth, and slid out of the booth. I would probably
    hear about the full cup of coffee I was leaving behind