Abandon The Night

Chapter Six: Which Gov'nt Was it Again?

Elise was nowhere to be found. But she did get the morning news from her holo-net. It broadcasted while she set about cleaning her front porch. Ridding the body of Domineq was easy enough to do. She enlisted the help of Tierney, who was spared the view since Anca draped a white cloth over him.

Anca was pissed. Anca was determined. Anca was on a mission.

She knew who killed him, knew it in her bones. Aleki knew, just like every other Putcheski, of Domineq thanks to her faux pas of biting that son of a bitch on accident. (How it was accident . . . no one would ever know.) Her flinging Putcheski in Aleki's face was the wrong thing to do. It pissed him off to the point of revenge, of which Anca was determined to enact herself.

There were other things to do at the moment though. More important matters at hand. She had had thrown the fact that Domi needed help into his face two times. (She had thrown away the years of love she felt for him, though that was harder.) And now . . . she was going to help. Help save the humans that hated her so. Help save her fellow dhampirs and vampires. She was going to step down from her path of indifference and actually help her fellow earthlings.

Determined as she was to get to the bottom of everything, from the disappearances of vampires and humans alike to Domineq's death, she had no clue how to start.

Life as a private eye in the sixties was by-far easier than life as an antique shop owner. She had clientele that told her what to do and she just went from there. But now? She needed to get items of ill-repute to make her business strive.

It did make for a nice tangled web of people who she used and was used by. People she now intended to gather info from, and that was where she started.

The holo-net calls were going to have to wait, since not everyone had a holo-net yet. So, it was to be in person, these conversations.

At her desk, she made a list. Elise was at the top, since she mostly sent Elise to get the items. List finished, Anca went home. Shop still a mess, even the next day and the day after that. For . . . two days after Domineq's dead body discovery, Elise was still nowhere to be found. So Anca set out, with her list of people she needed to converse with, to Elise's house. A house, to this day, Anca had never been to nor set foot in.

The worried expression on her face didn't dissolve as she knocked the blasted rounded door. She couldn't go in. She wasn't invited. Dhampir's had a way around that though–unlike vampires, who had to be invited personally by the owner of the home, dhampirs could be invited in by anyone. She knocked and knocked on the door. No one answered.

Her holo-net buzzed. Grabbing the phone-like contraption from her pocket, Anca pressed the home button and a 'cast began. "Natives have been forced to go to the government for protection as half a tribe was discovered missing this afternoon . . ." The 'caster Lady, what Anca would have called a news lady back in the day, went on to say that the natives were now being kept for their own protection in a secure facility until the women and children could be found.

Anca felt memories stirring again. Memories that flowed hastily to the front of her mind as the broadcast faded into nothingness.

There was a mess of stuff happening in Argentina during the seventies and eighties. It was what was entitled 'Dirty War' by America and lasted some ten or twelve years, depending on who told the history. Anca knew it lasted around twenty. She was there. Triple A was a government agency that hunted down and killed left-wing guerrillas, political dissidents, those associated with socialism, and that totaled to over 30,000 people overall on the list. The targets were activists, militants, unionists, students, journalists who reported the issue, Marxists, Peronists, and anyone found to be against the current regime of Argentina. Triple A did a dirty job and did it well. Anca barely survived the camp she was captured and sent off to. Being released was more of her escape as a bat in the night in the early eighties.