I may be the last person alive to refer to Scranton as “our fair city,” and even I don’t mean it. Well, not really.

I got McGuire’s OK to knock off a little early, since I wanted to talk to Christine before she went downstairs for the day – I was hoping she might have found out something about vampires using HG. But I didn’t get to talk to her – not that night.

It wasn’t really my fault. I’m a cop – what am if I supposed to do if I’m driving home from work and hear the rattle of gunfire a few blocks away?

I arrived on the scene a few minutes later. Leaving my car around the corner from where the action seemed to be, I got out and tried to creep close enough to see what was going on without being either spotted or shot. This was a neighborhood full of warehouses, so I wasn’t surprised that a 911 call hadn’t already brought other cops to the scene.

It was still dark enough for me to see muzzle flashes, even though dawn was less than a half hour away. There seemed to be four guns involved. Three of them, located in different places around the street, were firing at a big car parked at the opposite curb. Somebody crouching behind that car was responsible for the fourth series of muzzle flashes. I couldn’t see more, because the street lights in this area had been shot out long ago.

When I’m working, Karl and I keep a selection of special equipment and weapons in the unmarked police vehicle we use. But I don’t carry any of that stuff in my personal vehicle, because I don’t expect to get into gunfights when I’m off duty. One thing I do keep in there, however, is a set of night-vision binoculars. A lot of supes see real well in the dark, and I hate to be at a disadvantage, even when I’m not expected to be out enforcing law and order.

I ran back to the car, opened the trunk, and took out the binoculars. I flicked the “On” switch, hoping that the batteries were still fresh enough for the thing to function. The slight, rising whine of the device booting up meant that I was in luck.

I went back to my vantage point, looked through the dual eyepieces, and scanned the street. Everything was sharp and clear, even if I did seem to be looking at it through a green filter.

The big car I’d caught a glimpse of earlier was a Lincoln Continental, and there was what looked like a dead guy lying on the street near the driver’s-side front door. I focused on the license plate and saw that it read “BATDAD1”.

I recognized the tacky vanity tag – the Lincoln belonged to Don Pietro Calabrese, the Vampfather himself. The corpse on the ground probably wasn’t the Don – if it had been, the shooters would have left by now. Nobody sticks around just to finish off the chauffeur. The gunfire from behind the Connie was probably coming from the Don himself.

And that meant the guys trying to finish him off were most likely members of the same bunch who’d taken out four of Calabrese’s men earlier in the evening. Whoever these guys were, they didn’t seem inclined to let any grass grow under their feet.

So it looked like vamps shooting it out with vamps, again. And judging by the three-to-one odds, I figured the new gang’s hostile takeover of the Calabrese territory was just about ready to succeed. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

I hustled back to the car, got on the police radio, and told the dispatcher what was happening and where. She said, “Wait one, Sergeant,” and a few seconds later I was talking to the watch commander, Captain Fisk.

I explained the situation as I understood it, trying to be as brief as possible.

When I was done, Fisk said, “So, you’ve got four vampires exchanging gunfire in the street?”

“I haven’t got a close enough look at any of them to either spot fangs or recognize their faces, sir. But I know that’s Calabrese’s car, and I also know that an out-of-town vampire gang took out four of Calabrese’s people earlier tonight.”

“Yes, I saw the incident report,” Fisk said. He’s a good cop, but a little too by-the-book for my liking. The rules and operational policies are important, sure, but so is flexibility and the ability to improvise when you have to. Fisk would never grasp that, even if he stayed on the job a hundred years.

“Standard procedure when supernaturals are involved in a situation like this is to call in SWAT,” he said. “But I happen to know that the unit is already involved in a hostage situation involving some werewolves on the north side of town. I’ll try to get in communication with Lieutenant Dooley and see if he can cut loose some of his people to deal with the situation you’ve got there.”

The Sacred Weapons and Tactics unit consists of cops, a few of them clergy from different faiths, who are specially trained and equipped to deal with dangerous situations involving supes. They were just what the gunfight around the corner needed, except for one thing.

“That could take a while, Captain,” I told him. “And I’ve got a feeling that by the time SWAT gets here, the action’s gonna be all be over and the perps long gone. The ones who are still standing, I mean.”

“Can’t be helped, Sergeant. You say you’ve got a night-vision device?”

“That’s affirmative, sir.”

“Then get back in position to observe what happens, and take your radio with you. For their own safety, I’m going to order regular patrol units to stay clear of the area.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll let you know when SWAT is rolling,” Fisk told me. “In the meantime, you are to take no action except to observe and report as necessary. Understand me?”

“Yes sir – I’m not to engage the perps, but to watch what’s going down, and to report developments to you.”

“That’s affirmative. Now get moving, Sergeant. Fisk out.”

I thumbed the radio off and sat there behind the wheel, trying to think.

If I followed Fisk’s orders, Calabrese was going to die in the next few minutes, and the fangsters who’d killed him would get away clean. I might get a license number as they left, but any wiseguys – human or vampire – learn in their first ten minutes on the job always to use stolen cars when they’re planning to commit a crime.

I had no love for Don Pietro Calabrese, who was a professional criminal and therefore a scumbag. He’d been a human scumbag until about twelve years ago. That’s when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – inoperable and almost certainly fatal. So he’d paid a vampire to turn him.

The guidos are all nominally Catholic, and the Church, with its usual tolerance, declared more than fifty years ago that all supes were anathema – cursed by God. So, choosing to become a vampire was considered a mortal sin. Of course, extortion, drug running, prostitution, and murder are also mortal sins, and guys like Calabrese aren’t troubled by those. And vampirism offered the very substantial benefit of allowing him to avoid God’s judgment indefinitely.

Having Don Pietro Calabrese lying dead in the street wouldn’t send me into mourning. But he was at least a known quantity to local law enforcement, who’d worked out some grudging compromises with him over the years.

On the other hand, all we knew about the new bunch was that they were hungry for territory and vicious enough to go after it with the kind of public, in-your-face violence that Calabrese had abandoned years ago. Blood in the streets was bad for business.

That old adage about “better the devil you know than the one you don’t” is something cops understand very well, even if we don’t always like it.

Besides, if a cop was to save Calabrese’s ass tonight, the Vampfather might be grateful enough to tell that cop exactly what the hell was going on with this attempted takeover. That information could save more lives in the near future.

The thing about these Mafia guys, alive or undead, is that most of them still have some old-fashioned notions about honor. They believe in vengeance, alright, but they also recognize an obligation when they incur one.