SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (49 page)

That's what he'd tell them.

~*~

He had meant to go home. He even drove in that direction, automatically entering the freeway and watching for the exit sign, but the image of high school kids with so little conscience they could take out a human being by using his head for a baseball kept flooding over into his thoughts.

Jerry Lee Lewis's “Little Queenie” came on the Oldies station on the radio and Mitchell thought of the dark-haired topless dancer. She was one little queenie he'd love to take home with him. And that was an idea almost as crazy as a bunch of kids deliberately killing a man just because of his sex life. You didn't take home topless dancers. Some of them you paid to spend a little time with you in the comfort of a motel that charged by the hour, but you didn't take them home for the night.

He exited the freeway, turned under an overpass, and headed the car back the way he'd come. Back to Montrose. To the club where she danced. To see her again.

And he would not follow her out.

He'd just look. Think about her. Try to see into those veiled eyes, if she'd look at him.

He checked the dash clock. Almost midnight. It was too early. He could drink until the best dancers came on stage. He should celebrate the break in his case, shouldn't he? Wouldn't the lieutenant be happy to get this thing off his desk?

What if Big Mac gets sick and dies?

The thought came unbidden and spooked him. Tomorrow he'd see if she was better. If not, he'd take her to a clinic himself. Dose of penicillin would fix her up. He had to keep Mac healthy—well, breathing anyway—to testify. Maybe the department could take up a collection . . .

Chuck Berry sang, “Nadine, honey, is that you?”

What was his obsession with the dancer? If he could answer that, he should be getting million-dollar grant money from scientific organizations that tried to determine what made people attractive to one another. The curve of her lips, was that it? The way her legs moved? That delicious dip at the base of the spine where her hips began to swell? Her look—tough, hands off, and yet sometimes vulnerable?

“You're lost, man,” he said, twisting the wheel to the right to park the Buick at the curb.

He visited two other clubs before strolling into the one where Shadow danced. He was worried he might have scared her off. He was sure the girls had told her he was the heat. What else might they have told her? That he had this . . . quirk? A taste for nearly nude women he never expected to touch?

He wasn't drunk, not even close, but an effervescence bubbled up through his mind the moment he stepped over the threshold into the room where she would perform. He had it bad. It was a real catastrophe, this thing propelling him across the room to the table that afforded the best view, without being too close to the runway where he'd be expected to play with their G-strings.

“Hey, Chief,” a regular said low over his drink.

Samson recognized Jimmy the Head and stopped, returned to the pusher's table. He leaned down close and said, “Ecstasy, Jimmy? When you gonna learn, man?”

Jimmy never batted an eyelash. His unusual head was shaped like a spade, wide and square in the chin, pointed toward the top, the crown of his floppy mud-brown hair beaten down flat.

“I'm talking to you.”

Jimmy raised a drunken pair of brown eyes to stare at the detective he'd called Chief. “I hear you already,” he said.

“I guess I have to tell Narcotics. Let them put the moves on you. And here you just got outta TDC less than a month ago.”

Jimmy said, “Don't. I'll drop the stuff.”

“In a toilet?”

“Like that,” he said.

Samson nodded and moved on to the table he'd chosen. He heard a blues tune begin to wail and he knew it was her because that was the music she preferred. It was the Shadow.

It was his heart beating hard enough to choke him.

Seventeen

First thing she saw was the cop. She almost returned to the curtains and left the club. Only B.B. King and the rhythm of his guitar held her grounded in place.

Screw it. She didn't have to look at him. She didn't have to acknowledge his presence. He followed her outside this time, she'd yell harassment. The club manager didn't care you were homicide or the mayor, he didn't allow his girls to be hounded.

She played the opposite side of the club from where the cop sat. She kept her back to him. The place was packed, as it always was lately, and men pushed past one another to get up to the stage to stick money in her elastic wisps of cloth. She smiled. The first time. She had never smiled before. But this was almost like revenge, playing the crowd away from the cop, letting them get close enough to her to stroke the backs of their fingers on her waist as they stuffed the money there.

She moved slow, not with any lewd intent, just working the music, and she could see what it did to the men. They mouthed things to her, the music so loud they couldn't possibly speak over it, and she smiled and smiled.

One man, broader in the shoulders than the others, pushed aside smaller, shorter men, and brushed his gut up against the stage edge. She didn't like his face. It was of a brutal cut, all nose and mouth, small ball-bearing eyes beneath beetling brows. He reached out with a bill folded knife-thin along its length. He waved it at her. But his eyes were saying something she didn't like at all. His stare wasn't playful, it wasn't even sexual. It was the look of a starving dog two seconds away from taking off your hand. She looked from his eyes to the thick moist lips. He might be saying, “You.” Just that. “You.” Then: “C'mere.”

She used the song's ending as an excuse to move to the runway and down toward the front of the room. The lights stayed with her while a rockabilly song by Reba McIntyre came on and she started taking off the costume a piece at a time. To the beat. Exactly to the beat. Avoiding eye contact with both the cop and the big scary guy, watching a spot on the wall behind the crowd where someone might have thrown a beer bottle one time and cracked the plaster. It was necessary that she pretend she wasn't doing a striptease, that she was alone, parading her nakedness before a mirror. That was the only way she'd ever been able to strip in public and many of the other girls had told her it was the same for them.

She had the things off her arms, her breasts. She finished up on the last note, turning to exit in a perfect pirouette wearing the scarlet G-string.

The abrupt silence lasted a millisecond before they whistled and hooted and called out suggestions to her retreating back. In all that cacophony she heard it again. “You.” Then: “Hey, you.”

In the dressing room she asked Maybell, the older dancer with the puckered nipple, what she should do if the cop was waiting at her car out back.

“Come inside and get Bertram. He'll fix it.”

“What if someone else is waiting. Someone . . . dangerous.”

Maybell halted in putting lipstick over her stretched-thin lips and checked Shadow's eyes in the mirrored reflection. “Freak? Someone out front?”

“Yeah. Big guy. Tried to give me a hundred, I think, but I moved off. He scared me.”

“That case, have Bertram walk out with you.”

He said, when Shadow asked him, “I got to do that shit tonight? The place is full, two girls ain't come in, and I gotta walk you out?”

“Oh, just fucking forget it, you don't have to fucking whine about it.” She should have been startled at what a bad mouth she had developed, but everyone in the business talked that way. The word fuck meant no more than hello and goodbye. She threw the gym bag over her shoulder and thought about getting a gun. A big gun.

She checked both ways at the dancers' exit into the alley. Empty. Her fist tightened on the bag. Someone came out of the dark, she'd swing the damn thing. She had stiletto heels in there, cans of hairspray and hair gel. She wished she had a brick in it.

She slipped down the alley, sure now she was going to get a gun, and made it to the Toyota's door before the voice stopped her.

“You. Going. Somewhere?”

He was on the other side of the car. Lounging against a tall wood fence that separated the parking area from a residence, a bear waiting to make a run for her. She turned and moved into the alley again, her breath dead in her lungs. It was a long way back to the door.

Too long.

He was very fast, faster than she could have imagined. He pinned both her arms at her sides from behind. Her feet came off the pavement a half-inch. He said in a whiskey slur, “I offered you a hundred bucks. You think my money's different from those other geeks'?”

“No.”

“How ‘bout a date, then?”

“Maybe some other night.”

For a half-minute he didn't respond. He just held her in place. She thought, I can't swing the bag. If I kick up and back, I might hit his balls, but I might also hit his leg, and that would make him hurt me.

“Soon then,” he said. “Here's a down payment.” He let go one arm and she almost rammed her elbow into his fat gut, but something stopped her. His hand came in front of her face with the hundred in it. Still folded stiff along the length. As if he'd had it behind his ear, waiting to hand it over. “Take it,” he said.

She took it when he let go her other arm. A cold aura spread over her and she was no longer afraid. Her mind had slipped—someway, somewhere—and protected her from fear. She detested this man, but she knew he couldn't get to her, the real her, not when she went away into the dark corners of her mind.

He turned her around to face him and before she could stop it, he mashed his lips into hers, his tongue up hard against her teeth. He let her go and left the alley, away from where she was parked.

She spit twice, getting his saliva out. “God,” she muttered, sickened.

On the way home across the city to Seabrook, she never lost the coldness that had seized her. Instead, she found herself obsessing about the fat man and the way he had treated her—like a commodity—and her fury at this injustice burned harder, colder. Never mind that she was a titty dancer, flaunting her body before the public. Never mind that what she did for a living left an impression open to interpretation. She was a person, wasn't she? She had rights, didn't she? You couldn't buy her off a counter in Woolworth's. The last time she'd looked, there was no price tag on her back.

The big guy must have hung out at the club every night because no one knew, not even the manager, when Shadow would decide to dance. Some weeks she danced two days, other weeks she danced four or five, depending on how much money she needed. But whenever she danced now, the man was there in the audience with his hundred-dollar bill. She had the manager walk her to her car. The gorilla didn't accost her again. Not until the fourth week after the first time. When her guard was down and Bertram was too busy and too pissed off to walk her out.

This time the fat man hurt her.

“What do you want?” Again she was putty in the vice of his monstrous hands. She never had purchased that gun. She wished now she had.

“I want you, that's what I want. I'm tired of this fucking around. You gonna come across or am I gonna have to convince you?”

His fingers tightened. The flesh of her arms was crushed to the bone and then it began to hurt. “Stop it!”

He swung her around to face him and slapped her so hard she saw stars drifting down into the alleyway to lie pulsing on the pavement.

“I paid you a lotta money these last few weeks. I want something in return.”

She thought of telling him she'd call the cops, but she knew it wouldn't scare him off. He was like a natural disaster. Was there any way to stop a tornado?

“All right.” She was still wincing from the blow to her face and the pressure on her arms.

“Now?”

“I won't be dancing again until Saturday night. Meet me after work.”

Then he released her and she almost slumped to her knees. She wobbled and ground her teeth to remain upright. She heard his footsteps leaving the alley. She knew what she must do, for now she hated him—hated him enough to kill.

She brought her hand to her cheek and felt how hot it was where he'd slapped her.

A series of questions she'd like to ask the jerk began forming in her mind. They took over from the hate and gave her something else to concentrate on. There were so many questions she would like to ask that she couldn't keep them straight. She drove fast and loose on the freeway, lucky not to see a police cruiser.

Once in the mansion on the bay, she strode to the counter in the kitchen where Charlene kept a large yellow legal pad and a cup of pens for taking notes on the phone. She found a black ballpoint. She took it and the pad to her room.

Charlene padded behind her, wringing her hands. “What's the matter? Something's the matter. You get hurt? Shadow, what's wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said, shutting Charlene out.

From behind the door: “Something's wrong. I know it is.”

“Nothing,” she said again, an edge of anger making her clip the word.

“I'm sorry.” Pause. Shuffling of slippers at the closed door. “If it's me, I'm sorry.”

Shadow didn't trust herself to explain how the heavy man accosting her in the alley had flashed her back to the night her children had been shot to death. How it was men, always fucking men, who ruined every goddamn thing in a woman's life. You had to watch them like fucking hawks or they were right there, in your face, trying to hurt you one way or the other. All they wanted to do was steal away your babies or rape you in the dark of night or frighten you with so many threats you couldn't refuse.

She needed to be left alone.

To write those questions down. And the plan involving the questions.

Her head came up and she said, “Charlene, you there?”

A small abashed “Yes.”

“Saturday night I'm bringing home company. Man company. When I do that, I'd appreciate it if you stayed in your room when you see us drive up after work.”

“Okay.” Still smaller, hardly a squeak.

Shadow wrestled suddenly with an impulse to fling open the door and reassure Charlene, but she couldn't, not the way she felt right now, not with this cold ice locking up her heart.