Blood Lite II: Overbite (19 page)

Her Lucky Day

ALLISON BRENNAN

Vi stared at the man lying naked on the floor and knew she’d screwed up big-time. What was his name?
Justin
. Justin no-last-name because either he didn’t tell her or she forgot. When you screwed a different man for money every night, who the hell cared about their names?

Just pay me in cash, baby, and I’ll call you whatever you want.

But Justin wasn’t breathing and she feared he was dead, and nothing about dead was good. Especially when the dead body was sprawled on the plush white carpet of a five-star hotel room in Century City under the name of Jaysen Enterprises, a company she did business with on a regular basis at a thousand a pop.

She’d only been having fun with the bastard. He wanted kink; she gave him kink. He didn’t care about her; he only came to satisfy his own cravings. So what if she wanted a little fun at his expense? He was a jerk, he’d
bruised
her flawless skin. No one put marks on her, thank you very much; she’d had enough of that shit from her bitch of a mother.

All she did was drop a little pill in his scotch and take some pictures for her retirement fund. Heidi Fleiss had
nothing
on Vi.

Her real name was Stephanie Violet Browning, but she worked under Vi Brown. She’d forgotten what it was like to be Stephanie. It was the name her mother used to scream at her before slapping her around. But Mommy Dearest was dead. (Was it wrong to celebrate her mother’s death? She still popped a bottle of champagne on the anniversary of Candace Browning’s accident with a tall building. It wasn’t like she’d pushed her or anything, the woman was drunk.)

Stephanie was the name her teachers used when they sent her to the office for whatever stupid rule she’d broken that day. And it was the name the high school vice principal used when he offered her the ultimatum that indirectly changed her life: get down on her knees and suck his dick or be expelled.

She chose expulsion.

So it was perhaps ironic that ten years later, at the age of twenty-five—old for a call girl—she was working the streets. Or, rather, the executive boardrooms and corporate five-star hotel suites that rose high above the streetwalkers who got their meager hundred on a good night getting down on their knees and giving head to a half dozen drunk pricks.

Vi hooked in style. And she would not let the dead Justin No-Last-Name ruin her life.

She didn’t panic. She’d never panicked a day in her life, even when she was seventeen and one of her johns nearly strangled her while he screwed her. The damage to her throat had been permanent, and now she could only speak in a low voice that she’d trained to sound sultry and seductive. Vi didn’t hate men, even after that no-name john—who’d only gotten
ten years
for attempted murder. Ten years for nearly killing her so he could get off. Vi hoped some big burly felon choked
him
all the way while getting off.

Vi looked around the plush room. She couldn’t exactly toss his body off the balcony. She was strong, but she couldn’t lift the big guy. And she knew enough about cops that they’d probably be able to figure out that he’d been dead before he went splat.

Leave him here. Walk out. That was a plan. She dressed quickly, pulling the slinky shimmering blue dress over her head. Sexy, but not slutty. She could be seen in nightclubs and not have the bouncer toss her for solicitation.

She slid on her spike shoes and hesitated. There was the matter of her prints in the hotel room—which sucked because she was in the damn system—and probably a hundred security cameras that recorded their ascent to the fourteenth floor. She could bribe the night manager, but that only went so far—she doubted murder would be on the hotel staff bribe list. Vi’d been arrested twice, no more than a couple hours in the pen, but that was enough time,
thank you very much.
She wasn’t going to do ten to twenty for involuntary manslaughter. And what if some high-and-mighty hypocritical judge decided to go all moral on her and push for more time?

There were her pictures—insurance—but that was her retirement money. She didn’t want to use them to stay out of jail. And she needed time to set up blackmail, time which she didn’t have now with the dead prick on the floor. She mentally went through her clients—there was a prosecutor in there and a defense lawyer. Maybe she could call one of them, show him the photos, tell him to help her or his life was over as he knew it.

In the time it took for her to put it all together, the cops would find the body, pull her prints, see her pic, and she’d be in lockup in twenty-four hours. She could run, but for how long? She had money, but not enough to keep under deep cover. She didn’t have an alternate identity to walk into right this minute.

Well, shit.

The door opened and Vi jumped up, heart pounding, certain it was hotel security or the cops. Instinct had her glancing around for an escape route, but common sense told her there was nothing she could do. She backed into a table and knocked over a vase. It landed with a soft thud on the plush carpet.

A woman entered. Not just a
woman
, but the most gorgeous woman Vi had ever seen. Vi didn’t swing that way—unless her clients paid her enough—but
if
she were going to go lesbo she’d do it with this chick. Golden hair—not blond, not brown, but
gold
. Sultry blue eyes—big and almond shaped and they just sucked you in; you couldn’t look away. This woman knew makeup like nobody’s business. Her perfect face—her
flawless
skin—had been carved by a god. Vi was hot, but this woman was steaming.

Vi had never seen her before in her life. She should tell her to get the hell out of her room, but she suddenly couldn’t say anything.

“Hello, Stephanie,” the woman said.

A chill ran down Vi’s spine. “I don’t know you.”

“I know
you.
”

The stranger walked over—
glided
over—to dead Justin.

“You’re not a cop.”

The woman laughed and smiled down at Justin’s body almost like she was about to seduce him. Vi took another step backward, thoroughly confused and feeling trapped. “It seems like you have a little problem here.”

Vi attempted a feeble lie, knowing as she said it that it was stupid. “I found him like this. I—”

She laughed again. “Oh, Stephanie. I
know
what happened. You can’t lie to me, but it’s sweet that you tried.”

“Don’t call me Stephanie!”

“‘Vi’ is so . . .
common.
But I’m willing to compromise, since we’ll be friends for a long time. Violet is nice.”

Friends? This woman was on crack. Vi just wanted to get out of this room and disappear. “Who are you? How do you know me?”

“We don’t have much time. He’s nearly dead.”

Vi did a double take and stared at Justin. She shook her head. “He’s pushing up the daisies. Gone. No pulse.”

“His heart is slowing down, but still pumping blood through his body. He has three minutes, twenty-eight seconds—or so—left. You have two choices.”

Vi opened her mouth to ask how the
hell
she knew all that, but didn’t.

The woman said, “You can call an ambulance. They won’t arrive in time, and honestly, there’s no saving him. Even if they did resuscitate him, he’d never recover. If
you
had tried to resuscitate him ten minutes ago when he first collapsed, he might have had a shot. But you panicked.”

I don’t panic.

But maybe she had. Just for a minute. His collapse had stunned her.

“You’ll have to talk to the police, probably tell them you don’t know what happened, he just had a heart attack or something, right? You’ll be arrested for solicitation, probably would have gotten off, but when they find the drugs in his glass and his bloodstream, they’ll look at you hard for murder, too. Might be able to plea to a lesser charge, but you’ll be in jail for years. By the time you get out, you’ll be too old to do your job. And those pictures you’ve been saving for a rainy day? No one will care about them in twenty years.”

The woman could read her mind. That was the only explanation for how she knew what she knew. Or maybe it was a set-up. Blackmail. The bitch had a camera in the room, had seen her spike Justin’s drink.

“What’s my other choice?” Vi didn’t trust the woman. She didn’t trust anyone.

“I’ll take care of everything.”

Now it was Vi’s turn to laugh, but her low, scratchy chuckle sounded more scared than humored. “Right.
You’ll
take care of the whole thing. How much?”

The woman laughed again. “I don’t care about
money.
” She wiggled her fingers in disgust. “That’s my brother who’s greedy.”

“Then what do you want? Nothing’s for free.”

The woman was dead serious. “You’re absolutely right. Nothing is for free. I will take care of this thing,” she waved her hand dismissively over the dying man, “and in exchange, I get your body.”

Vi blinked several times. “You want to screw?” Okay, to keep her out of prison she’d do whatever this woman wanted her to do. It wasn’t going to kill her. But why? Why was she helping her? She didn’t have to commit a felony to get laid. Vi was certain that there were plenty of bi hookers who’d happily give this chick everything she wanted without murder in the mix.

The woman laughed again, amused. The back and forth from high humor to seriousness disturbed Vi more than anything they’d discussed. She was chilled to her bones, an icy cold that wasn’t going away.

“Violet, what I propose is far better than
screwing
. I will give you such power over men that they will pay you anything to have sex. They will drain their bank accounts. They will sign over their houses. They will get on their knees and beg for you.”

Vi wondered if this golden-haired woman was moving in on Rachelle’s territory. Rach would be pissed off, but Vi liked the woman’s style. Well, she would have liked it except that she was pretty certain that this gorgeous, bizarre lady would—and could—slit her throat without hesitation.

But did Vi really have a choice? Did she really think she could walk away or take her chances with the criminal justice system? Just the
thought
of being behind bars terrified her. A day she could live with. Years . . . her chest tightened as panic, full panic, hit her.

“You have less than a minute. If he dies, I can’t help you. The second his heart stops pumping, I’m powerless.”

Vi didn’t know how the woman was going to save him, or save her, but she had nothing to lose.

“All right,” Vi said. “If you can clean up this mess, then I’m yours. Tell me what your name is.”

“You won’t be able to pronounce it,” she said. “But you can call me Violet.”

Before the statement sunk in, the woman dissolved right in front of Vi. She turned to . . . smoke. Dark, foul-smelling gaseous smoke that made Vi gag. She stepped back, one, two steps, tripped over a chair, and kept going until her back was up against the wall. This was
not
happening. She was hallucinating. Justin had drugged her. Ha ha, joke’s on her. She was tripping on LSD. That was it. None of this was happening; it was just a big scary figment of her imagination.

The stinky smoke wrapped itself around Justin’s dying body and disappeared. Whoosh. Gone.

Justin sat up and smiled at her. “Hello, Stephanie.”

Vi wished she could faint. Just drop to the floor and forget everything. Wake up tomorrow in her own bed and believe that this was a nightmare. Bad trip, this one. Yes, sir, bad trip. Go away. Wake up. Do
something.

She breathed deeply, the smell still making her gag, but she needed to clear her head.

I’m losing my mind.

Oh, that cleared it all right. Everything in the room sharpened focus. The messed-up bed. The glasses they used. The bright lights of the City of Angels mocked her through the windows, twinkling in laughter, the joke’s on you, baby.

And Justin stood there and leered at her.

He’d been dead, dammit! Now he wasn’t. What was a dead guy who walked? A zombie? There was no fucking thing as zombies. Right? That was Hollywood and freaky sick writers who thought up that stuff. Not real.

Vi would check herself into rehab if she like
drank
or took drugs or anything. That was it, she’d shoot herself up with heroin and pretend she was strung out and check herself into a nice facility with padded white walls.

“I don’t like this vessel,” Justin said. It was Justin’s voice, but not his tone. “Do what I say and I’ll solve your problem.”

Vi could only nod. What else could she do? Justin was dead. Now he was alive. She was going insane.

“Get your things.”

Vi grabbed her purse and then her jacket.

“Wh-what about the cameras?” Vi asked. She couldn’t believe she was talking to Justin as if he was the golden-haired woman. That wasn’t possible.

And Justin rising from the near-dead was?

“I’ve already taken care of the cameras.”