POLICE OFFICERS GO radio silent for a lot of reasons, including equipment failure. It doesn’t automatically get SWAT called out, or anything much except more officers dispatched to the scene to check on things, unless preternatural citizens are involved. Words like vampire, werewolf, wereleopard, zombie, et cetera, can be an automatic rollout for our special teams. Unless they’re already busy elsewhere with a genuine situation, not just a maybe one. Some of them were with my fellow U.S. Marshal Larry Kirkland delivering a warrant of execution on a vampire that had moved into our town with a live warrant from another state. He’d killed the last Marshal who tried to “serve” the warrant, so the warrant had been electronically transferred to the Marshal who was next up in the rotation here, which made it Larry’s warrant. A warrant of execution was always considered a no-knock warrant, which meant we didn’t have to announce ourselves before coming through the door. I’d started Larry’s training, but the FBI had finished it; he was all grown up now, married with a kid, and I’d learned to ignore the tight feeling in my gut when he went off on his own into something dangerous. There was also a more routine warrant on drug dealers, suspected of a string of deaths, so SWAT was going in with that one, too. St. Louis is a smaller city; our SWAT had enough men to field one more team, but we wouldn’t get it until we had proof something bad had happened. Until then it was just the officers originally dispatched to the scene and us, RPIT. Frankly, I preferred it that way sometimes. Too many rules with SWAT.

The night was strobed with blue and red lights as Zerbrowski and I pulled up. There were no sirens, just the lights.