All this heavy philosophy went through my mind in about fifteen seconds, and the conclusion I reached – about the benefits to law enforcement from me saving Calabrese – was the reason I was about to risk my career by disobeying Captain Fisk’s orders. My decision had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I hate just sitting back and watching scumbags tear up the streets of my town with gunfire. Absolutely.

I ejected my usual load of mixed silver and cold iron from the Beretta and replaced the clip with one that was silver from top to bottom. That gave me fifteen rounds, each one deadly to vampires – and then I thumbed an extra silver slug from the clip of mixed ammo I’d just removed. I jacked a round into the Beretta’s chamber, then removed the clip and added the cartridge I’d just scavenged. Sixteen. Sometimes one extra bullet can make all the difference in the world.

Usually, for a human to take on a bunch of vampires – in a gun battle or unarmed – means an express ticket to the morgue, since vamps are so much faster and stronger than the rest of us. But I’d taken on vamps before.

I could’ve called Karl for backup, of course – and he’d have come running. But it was bad enough that one of us was risking unemployment by defying the watch commander, without putting Karl’s job on the line as well. Besides, dawn was coming soon.

So it looked like I was doing it alone.

I figured if I was going to have any chance of survival against three vampire gangsters, I’d have to take a page out of Che Guevara’s book on guerrilla warfare, which I’d read in high school. It was a phase.

Che called it the “war of the flea”. You bite the dog and then take off before it can scratch. Do it right, and you live to bite another day.

I made my cautious way back to the scene of the gun battle. It looked like Calabrese was holding his own, since muzzle flashes were still coming erratically from behind his parked Connie.

The night-vision binoculars would help me, but only to a point. They would allow me to see exactly where the bad guys were, but I couldn’t look through the eyepieces and the sights of the Beretta at the same time. That meant I’d have to locate the fangsters with the night-vision device, but shoot at them without it. Kind of like a nearsighted guy viewing the bull’s-eye of a target with his glasses on, then taking them off before squeezing off a shot.

I scanned the street to see if the three vampires who’d been firing on the Connie were still in the same positions. They hadn’t moved.

The one closest to me was about eighty feet away, squatting behind a big Buick. Peering at the green-tinted image, I tried to fix in my mind where the vamp was, relative to the outline of the car. That was probably all I’d be able to see with my naked eye. Looked like he was about three feet from the rear bumper, and maybe a foot below the roof – except when he popped up long enough to fire a round at Calabrese. He did that while I was watching: stand up quick, take aim over the Buick’s roof and fire, then squat back down behind cover.

I turned off the night-vision device and put it down carefully on the concrete next to me. I took a minute to let my eyes adjust to the dark, then drew a bead on what I could see of the Buick, which wasn’t as much as I’d hoped. I tried to keep my hands steady, and waited.

Muzzle flash. I knew exactly where the vampire gunman was at this moment. More important, I was pretty sure that I knew where he was going to be three seconds from now. I sighted on the point where his gun barrel had briefly lit the night, then dropped my aim about three feet. I took in a breath, let half of it out, and fired – twice.

The moment I squeezed the trigger, I was violating not only Captain Fisk’s orders, but also established Department procedure. A cop isn’t supposed to shoot a suspect, even an armed one, without first doing the “Police officer! Drop your weapon and put your hands in the air!” routine.

I could just imagine the response of one of those vampire gangsters out there if I’d tried that crap on him, and I’m still too young to die. So when it’s a choice between following procedure and staying alive, I’ll go with common sense and take my chances with the bureaucrats later. As my old partner, Paul DiNapoli, used to say, “Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.”

After getting off those two shots, I didn’t stick around to evaluate my marksmanship. The flea had taken a small chunk out of the dog – or so I hoped – and he’d better change position before he got scratched but good.

I grabbed the binoculars and scuttled back about twenty feet, dropping down behind somebody’s silver Nissan. I raised up just enough to see over the top of the trunk, trying to expose as little of myself as possible, and saw one of the remaining bad guys do something stupid. I guess not everybody in the new vampire gang was a battle-hardened veteran of the streets.

The sky was brightening a little with false dawn. That and my darkness-adjusted eyes gave me a pretty good view of what this idiot was doing. He actually stood up, gun in both hands, searching the area where my two shots had come from. I wasn’t there anymore – I’m sure his vampire night vision told him that. But he must’ve known that I wasn’t far away. The barrel of his pistol kept moving back and forth as he sought somebody to shoot at.

He might’ve found me, too – if Calabrese hadn’t fired from across the street and put a bullet through the dumb bastard’s head.

Two down. What was the third vampire going to do now? If he was smart, he’d jump into his car and get the hell out of here.

Turned out he wasn’t quite that bright. But he was smart enough to get behind me.

The guy must’ve hit the vampire afterburners and sprinted clear around the block in order to go from a few hundred feet in front of me to about twenty feet behind me. Probably took him all of six, maybe seven seconds – after all, it was a pretty big block. But I figured all that out later.

It was when I heard that crisp, metallic noise coming from behind me – the distinctive double click of the hammer going back on a pistol – that I knew I was about to die. There’s nothing else in the world that sounds quite like that, and I guess for a lot of guys it’s the second-last sound they ever hear.

It had to be the third vampire behind me. Another cop would have announced himself, if only so that I wouldn’t do a Wild Bill Hickok and blow him away before I was sure of my target.

I decided that I was going to try to stand up and turn. The odds against my accomplishing either of those things made the Tri-State Powerball seem like a good investment. But I wanted to die standing upright if I could, instead of squatting there like some Cub Scout trying to take a dump in the woods.

I was barely halfway out of the crouch when I heard the sound of the shot that killed me.

It didn’t, of course – but I was pretty confused for a moment. I even had the crazy thought this was some kind of “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” moment. In that final instant, everything slows down so much that you can fantasize a whole different chain of events – before reality catches up with you and breaks your neck.

Then I figured out that it just wasn’t my night to die, and I decided to just stand up, turn around, and work out what the hell had happened.

I’d had most of it figured right. There was a body on the ground a couple of car lengths behind me. I recognized him as one of the vampires I’d seen through the binoculars earlier, and the only way he could’ve gotten behind me like that was by sprinting around the block with vampire speed. The one thing I’d had wrong was which one of us was about to die.

Life can feel pretty damn good, especially when you were sure you were about to lose it. But once I got my mind working again, I wanted to know who had just killed the vampire gangster. Because there was nobody else around. Nobody.