Bring On The Night Read Free Page A

much, in fact didn’t care much for driving at all, but she was glad she owned it. She’d be able to leave for Concord before deep twilight fell, giving her time to take a good look around.
    At first she mistakenly thought this “request” was another order, but in reality it was not. It was an appeal to her sense of honor and justice and her loyalty to the king himself. A vampire that had, for whatever insane reason, joined forces with a werewolf was killing innocent people. Worse than that, vulnerable innocent people. That went against everything this current King of Vampires believed in, everything his followers believed in. Everything she believed in. Jessie may have been a monster, but she was a monster with a code of ethics.

Chapter 2
    The highway passed by in a blur. The bland interstate scenery held no interest for her. Jessie kept her eyes on the road, her mind turning over thoughts and theories about the murders in Concord. As dusk fell, she relaxed her grip on the steering wheel. She wore long sleeves and driving gloves. Once, years ago, she’d been burned in the bright light of the sun, and had no desire to ever experience that again. Even with the car’s darkly tinted windows she took extra caution. Now, with the last light disappearing below the tree line, she tossed her sunglasses onto the passenger seat and peeled off the gloves. Reaching into her leather backpack purse, her fingers searched for a pack of cigarettes and her lighter. She smoked for a while, her mind drifting away from Concord toward a nebulous empty calm, lulled by the boring drive.
    The CD player was set to shuffle. Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth , Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue , John Coltrane’s Blue Train , Dave Brubeck’s Time Out and Chet Baker’s The Italian Sessions , all just for the drive. More were in a black CD carrying case in the passenger seat floorboard. Locomotion cued up and didn’t suit her mood. She pressed the “next” button until she found something that did, Take Five . She lit another cigarette, rolling down the window a few inches to let the smoke blow out. The night air felt warm and inviting, so she thumbed the button to let the window slide down a few more inches, hit another button to open the sunroof. She turned the stereo up louder to hear Brubeck over the rush of wind, playing Take Five over and over as she drove farther into the night.
    * * * *
    Half a dozen or so people loitered outside the Red Eagle bar, smoking. They were all cops, since the bar was a cop hang-out. They would much rather have been smoking inside, but state law made it illegal now and the police commissioner, not being a smoker himself, had no sympathy for anyone who wanted to break that law, even his own officers, so they smoked outside and complained in colorful terms.
    Brandon Ellis parked in the lot across the street and jogged to the bar’s entrance. One of the cops gave him a nod in greeting, a few of them glared at him and the rest ignored him. As a crime reporter for the Concord Post , he was used to a mixed bag from local police. He returned a nod to the cop who’d greeted him as he opened the door and went inside.
    For the most part, the Red Eagle looked like any other bar, heavy on the cop and military decorative touches. Several American flags covered the walls, with framed pictures of local cops who’d died in the line of duty, posters with law enforcement and military themes, and a large painting behind the bar of a red eagle in flight, wings spread wide.
    Brandon surveyed the room and found who he was looking for at the far end of the bar—Henry Gonzalez, veteran detective on the Concord PD and Brandon’s favorite inside source. He was not the lead detective on the Waterfront Murders, as the Post —meaning Brandon—dubbed them, but it wasn’t for lack of ability. Gonzalez didn’t care to chase the attention of his superiors in the department anymore. The lead slot went to a much younger,