Hard Day's Knight by John G Hartness Page B

the cape completely fastened.

    “Now we chill for a while. Wanna play
Halo
?” I put my feet up on the coffee table and watched his face bounce off his toenails.

    “What? We gotta go! We’ve got a lead! A real one! And we need to be out there chasing it down, man!” He started fumbling with his cape again and I took a little pity on him. I went to the closet and led him back to the sofa.

    We both sat down and I looked over at him. “You’re right. We do need to chase it down. But not at the risk of bursting into flames. I think that would get in the way of our progress.”

    “Huh?” I love it when someone else sounds like the moron. It’s usually my shtick, and I’m good at it, but I don’t mind passing the baton from time to time.

    “Dude. It’s like, noon. We go out there now and we’re flash-fried. So you wanna play
Halo
?” I turned on the Xbox and started killing aliens while Greg started to get out of his uniform. “And what the hell do you carry in that utility belt? Twinkies?”

    “Shut up. If we can’t go thwart evil, I’m gonna take a nap.” My grumpy roommate then tromped off to his room for some shuteye while I valiantly tried to save the world. Again.

Chapter 15

    I finished off Season 2 of
Dexter
on Netflix before Greg woke up, not long after sunset. I heard the shower shut off and a few minutes later, my goofy partner emerged. He was dressed in all black, again, with his combat boots laced tight and his utility belt snug around his ballooning waist. I feel for Greg sometimes. I mean, who knew that turning into vampires wouldn’t change our bodies into perfect examples of studliness and we’d be trapped forever as the dorks we were on the last night of our lives?

    “Really, man. Do you have to wear the utility belt?” I laced up my sneakers and grabbed my shoulder holster by the door. I hid the firepower under a leather jacket as we went up the steps and out into the cemetery. We opened a tool shed that was really a two-car garage and hopped in Greg’s car, a 1967 GTO convertible, black of course. I always gave Greg a load of crap about his less-than-inconspicuous ride, but he’d had a man-crush on that car since we were alive, so no amount of teasing was going to get him to drive anything else.

    “Where are we headed?” Greg asked as I got into the car. I pulled out the file folder with all his Career Day notes in it and started to flip through it. It had been easy to find when he went to bed, because he’d written “ CARREER DAY CLUES” on the outside of the folder in purple Sharpie. Sometimes I really thought my partner was secretly an illiterate twelve-year-old girl. I wouldn’t have been too surprised to find his notes in a Trapper Keeper covered in unicorn stickers.

    “I looked through the Career Day files at each school, and there were three companies that had a table at every event: AmeriBank, Joe’s World of Tires and the Police Department. AmeriBank makes sense, since their corporate headquarters is here, the owner of Joe’s World of Tires is on the school board, and I think the cops were just looking for middle-school weed. But we should check them all out regardless.”

    “Sounds good, but why do we need to check out the cops? They’re investigating the crimes, you don’t think a cop could have done it, do you?” My partner has a simple view of the world – police and firemen are good, and bad guys wear black hats. It’s charming, really.

    “I don’t think it’s what happened, but it’s possible. Cops are people, so they’re suspects. We’ve got to look at everybody, bro.”

    “Alright, but I don’t think it’s the cops.” I didn’t either, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t think we were going to find our kidnapper anywhere in this list of companies. It just didn’t feel right, if you know what I mean.

    “So where to first?” Greg asked, gingerly backing the car out of the garage. It’s always amazed me how