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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