Racing the Devil (26 page)

I
T TOOK SEVERAL MINUTES
for my heart rate to return to normal. Then I went up to the office and bolted the door behind me. I’d planned to stay just long enough to check my messages and clear up some paperwork, but before I left, I made a quick call to the sanitation department and learned that Avery’s garbage pickup was on Tuesday morning.

I couldn’t search his house, but garbage is fair game.

The phone rang a heartbeat after I’d flipped it shut. Elisha Casale.

“I think I have something,” she said when I answered. “Can you pick me up in a half hour? Wear black.”

She gave me her address, and I pulled up in front of her split-level brick house thirty minutes later wearing black jeans and a black silk shirt I’d borrowed from Jay. She was waiting on the sidewalk, a small fringed purse slung over one shoulder.

No tangle of auburn hair. No blue eyes. Instead, she had caramel skin, wide green eyes, and molasses-colored hair that tumbled to the middle of her back. She wore tight black pants and a black peasant-style shirt edged with black lace.

Her smile was dazzling.

I got out of the Silverado and came around to the passenger side.

She held out a slender hand with short, perfectly manicured nails. “Hello, Mr. McKean,” she said. The top of her head came to the bridge of my nose.

“Miss Casale.”

“Elisha.”

I opened the passenger door for her and she swung onto the seat.

“Where are we going, Elisha?” I said.

“His journals had a lot of references to a place called the Razor’s Edge. I talked to some of the kids, and they say it’s their code name for a little club just off Elliston Place.”

“I was down there the other day. I didn’t see anything called the Razor’s Edge.”

“It’s off the main drag. And it’s called The Masquerade. I think they call it the Razor’s Edge because a guy named Razor hangs out there. The kids call him the Vampire Prince of Nashville.”

“We have a Vampire Prince?”

“Watch and learn, Grasshopper,” she said. “Watch and learn.”

ELISHA DIRECTED ME ONTO I-40
, down Broadway past the West End split. We cut down Louise to Elliston Place, where the Elliston Place Soda Shop served the best milkshakes in town and where, just down the street, Rotier’s famous burgers had been immortalized by Jimmy Buffet’s song, “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”

“Turn there.” She gestured toward a side street, and after a couple more turns, pointed to a stonework building with a flashing neon sign that said “The Masquerade.”

A small group of Goths, both male and female, clustered by the door, smoking and talking in low tones. We parked across the street and walked over, the thump of the bass already vibrating beneath our feet. We eased past the Goth kids, and I paid the five-dollar apiece cover charge.

Inside, the walls were draped in crimson velvet and lit by electric candles. Black tablecloths covered the tables, and in the center of each was a black rose in a crystal vase. Kids dressed in a blend of modern and medieval styles danced to death metal music. Some had painted fake wounds on their throats or foreheads.

Posters on the wall announced bands with names like Switchblade Symphony, Christian Death, Red Temple Spirits, and The Shroud. Elisha pointed to one called Creaming Jesus and said, “Classy.”

At one table, a young man sucked loudly at his girlfriend’s neck. At another, a girl held a razor blade between her thumb and forefinger, and sliced a thin line of red horizontally across her boyfriend’s wrist. As I watched, she lowered her lips to the wound.

“I was going to suggest we get a drink,” Elisha said, “but if that’s what’s on tap, I think I’ll pass.”

“We can probably do better than that.” I showed my photo I.D. at the bar, ordered a couple of $7.50 rum and Cokes, and handed one to her.

“I see one of Josh’s friends,” she said. She took my hand and tugged me toward a table where a heavyset girl in garish makeup was sharing a clove cigarette with a wild-eyed young woman in red.

Elisha said, “Absinthe,” and the heavyset girl stared up at us with undisguised hostility. The other girl plucked the cigarette from Absinthe’s hand and stalked away.

“Just because you’re wearing black doesn’t make you one of us,” Absinthe said. She was squeezed into a black gown with a froth of lace at the hem. In spite of her weight, she might have been pretty if not for the death’s head makeup. She nodded toward me. “Who’s this?”

“I’m looking for Josh,” I said. “Joshua McKean.”

“Or Joshua Nightbreed,” Elisha added. “He might be calling himself that.”

Absinthe shot a furtive look toward the back of the room. “Can’t help you. If he wanted to be found, he’d get himself found. Why don’t you just go home? Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

“Justice never sleeps,” I said, scanning the crowd for a glimpse of my nephew. “And neither do I. Not until Josh comes home.”

That’s when I saw him. He came out of the men’s room wearing a purple, lace-front shirt, tight black pants with D-rings down one side, and a short black cape with a deep blue lining. He looked like a bruise.

Halfway across the room, his head came up like a young deer scenting a mountain lion. His gaze met mine, and his muscles tensed. I could see him thinking it through. Make a run for it? Brazen it out?

My own muscles tightened, ready to sprint after him if he bolted. After a moment, maybe sensing that running would just delay the inevitable, he sighed and trudged over to us.

“Why don’t you just leave him alone?” Absinthe said.

I didn’t answer. Elisha pulled a couple of chairs up to the table and sat down in one of them. Gestured for Josh to take the other.

“I’m not going back,” Josh said to me, sliding into the proffered chair. “You can’t make me.”

I arched an eyebrow, and he sighed and crossed his legs at the knee.

“All right,” he said. “I guess you can. But you can’t make me stay.” He gestured to his crossed legs. “Does this bother you?”

“Should it?”

“I just wondered. You and my father. So irredeemably masculine. It bothers him.”

“Josh, I live with a gay man. This isn’t about you being gay.” “Then what is it about?”

“If you’re gay, Randall will learn to accept it. But this other . . . You’re really into this scene? Sharing blood?” His cheeks flushed. “What if I am?” “Ever heard of AIDS?”

He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “I’m not going to get AIDS. But what if I do? Look around, man. The world sucks. Life sucks. Things are getting worse and worse, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Death’s not something to moan and cry about. It’s . . . it’s something to be embraced.”

“Yeah? Jay might disagree with you.”

He looked down at his lap, eyes glistening. “I didn’t expect you to understand.”

“I understand,” I said. “I understand that you’re sitting here like a spoiled kid while your parents and Caitlin grieve their guts out for you.”

He couldn’t meet my gaze.

“Leave him alone,” Absinthe said.

I softened my voice and said to Josh, “I know you think your dad is mad at you right now. I know you think he’s a hard-ass who doesn’t understand or care about you. But the morning you left home, he cried.”

He wiped at his eyes with his sleeve. “Yeah, sure. Like he cares.”

“He cares so much it hurts. Look, he isn’t like you. We grew up in a different time. We didn’t cry. We didn’t talk about our feelings. We just sucked it up. This is hard for him.”

Josh stared down at his lap, arms folded across his body like the sleeves of a straitjacket. “If you make me go back, I’ll just run away again.”

“Josh,” I said. “You run away a hundred times, that’s how many times I’ll find you.”

“Why? Why can’t you just let me be?”

“Because,” I said. “I promised you.”

“Me? When did you promise me?”

“You were about seven, remember? You’d seen something on TV about some kid that got kidnapped. And you asked me—you remember what you asked me?”

“I asked you if I ever got lost, if you would find me.”

“There you go.”

“But I’m not lost.”

“That’s not how it looks to me.”

He looked across the dance floor to where the wild-eyed girl in red was undulating in front of a man in a purple pirate shirt.

Vampire Prince
, mouthed Elisha.

“All right,” Josh said. “All right, I’ll come home.”

Except for the call to Randall and Wendy, no one talked much on the ride home. Elisha squeezed into the front seat between me and Josh, smelling of soap and some sweet, musky perfume. I pulled into my brother’s driveway and turned off the ignition, and we sat in silence for a moment. Then the porch light flicked on and Wendy and Caitlin hurtled out the door in their bathrobes. Wendy stopped in the driveway, hugging herself, gnawing at a thumbnail. Caitlin stood behind her, hair tousled, eyes uncertain.

“Give them a chance, Josh,” I said. “No one could love you more.”

He nodded slowly and pushed the car door open.

“Josh?” Wendy’s voice cracked. Then she opened her arms and he stepped into them, tucking his head into the arc of her neck.

“Thank you,” she mouthed over his shoulder.

As Elisha and I pulled out of the driveway, Randall stepped out of the house and strode across the lawn like a conquering king. He looked at me for a moment, his expression unreadable. Then he turned his face away and gathered his family into his arms.

I
WAS GLAD JOSH
was home, but still, sleep didn’t come easy Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Tara’s broken body behind my eyelids, the splashes of red on Katrina’s white lace.

I’d been away from the job for awhile, long enough for the protective veneer to crack. But I was a good homicide cop. I knew how to detach, and finally, fitfully, I slept.

On Monday morning, I settled in for another surveillance of Samuel Avery. When the black sedan pulled out of the driveway, I sighed and steeled myself for another exciting Piggly Wiggly run. This time, though, the sedan rolled onto I-40, edged into the downtown traffic, and made its way to West End, where a series of convoluted twists and turns led him to a dirty white clapboard building with a sign in the window that said, “Massage.”

Ministering to the whores of Babylon?

I snapped a couple of photos as he went in and a few more when he came out an hour later, dabbing at his bald pate with a handkerchief. There was a spring in his step that hadn’t been there when he went in, and while a good massage could do that, I suspected he’d had something a bit more intimate.

I stuck with him until he pulled into the driveway of the parsonage. Then I drove on past, stopped at an ATM to make a withdrawal, and headed back to the massage parlor.

A bell tinkled as I pushed the door open, and a pale woman with tortured white-blond hair looked up from the scarred desk where she was polishing her nails.

“Help you?” she asked.

“What are your prices?”

“Thirty dollars for an hour. Swedish or Oriental.”

I cocked my head and grinned. “What if I had something else in mind?”

She pursed her lips. They were fire-engine red. “We’re not that kind of business.”

“Friend of mine says you are.” I gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Heavyset guy. Mostly bald. Mid fifties, early sixties. He was in here just a little while ago.”

“You a cop?” she asked. The standard ritual.

“Nope.”

“‘Cause you look like a cop.”

I laughed. “What does a cop look like?”

She made a wry face and fanned her wet nails. “It’s the way you walk. You walk like Marshall Fucking Dillon.”

“I’ll give you fifty for a blow job,” I said, and she visibly relaxed. A police officer wouldn’t have made an offer. “Or whatever my friend had.”

Now she was all smiles. “Sammy? He likes Leona. Hundred-and-fifty for a full massage and a blow job or hand job. Fifty more if you want to get laid.”

I whistled. “I didn’t know Sam was such a big spender.”

“Yeah, well, you can never tell.” She held up her hands to admire her nails. “So, you want to book Leona or not?”

I pretended to think it over. “Why not? You only live once.”

The massage room was cramped and dingy, with the dank smell of sex and mildew.