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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