The Girls With Games of Blood (27 page)

Fauvette smiled. “Yes, as a matter of fact. And she had no choice on that, someone followed her home from the club and she didn’t want to risk involving you. I said you’d appreciate that.”

Zginski looked at the walls. They were decorated with posters featuring handsome young men, apparently star athletes and popular entertainers. He shook his head; poor Fauvette was trying to mimic what she imagined a girl her apparent age might have in her room. “Then please inform her I would like to reschedule our meeting.”

“You can tell her yourself, she’ll be at the club tonight.” She leaned out the bathroom door and grinned knowingly at him. “Isn’t that why you offered to take me to work? So you’d have an excuse to see her?”

“I do not employ such subterfuge.”

“Of course not.” She withdrew and, in a moment, the hair dryer’s whine drowned out any other noise.

Zginski sat on the edge of the bed. When the dryer shut off he said, “I would like to ask you a question.”

“Sure,” she called.

“Since our sharing of blood at the warehouse, have you felt anything . . . unusual?”

She leaned out again. “How do you mean?”

“Out of the ordinary. Different from how you were before.”

She thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. Why, have you?”

“I am uncertain,” he said honestly.

She came out of the bathroom, her hair blown dry and enormous. She went to the closet, dropped the robe to the floor, and stood naked as she selected her clothes. Not that it mattered, since she’d change into her uniform once she got to work, but having a wardrobe made her feel so grown-up.

Zginski gazed openly at her bare form. He recalled the night in the warehouse when he’d taken that body, using his influence to arouse her so much that the breaking of her maidenhead was no more than a twinge instead of the agony she usually experienced. He’d touched her there, and there, and kissed her there; the passion had been brutal and rapacious, but also genuine. Yet now he felt, not feral lust, but a kind of tenderness that he could barely comprehend. He wanted to take her again, but he also wanted
her
to want it. He had no clue how to express that feeling.

She dressed quickly in bell-bottom jeans and a red button-up blouse tied above her navel. She slipped sandals on and said, “How do I look?”

“Typical,” he said.

She grinned. “Perfect, then. Let’s go.” She headed for the front door without waiting for him.

He stood to follow. From beneath the bed where he’d sat, a fine cloud of something drifted into the air. Curious, he lifted the ruffly, secondhand mattress skirt.

Dirt dribbled out from between the mattress and box spring. A layer of soil had been evenly spread there.

“You coming?” she called from the front door.

He smiled. The grave soil was pathetic. And oddly, also touching.

Byron Cocker sat in his rented ’74 Chevy Impala down the block from the Ringside. He sipped soda from a cup and munched his way through an order of McDonald’s french fries. His rebuilt jaw sent familiar twinges of pain through him as he chewed. He’d gotten used to that, because the doctors only wanted to treat it with pills that made him dopey. Getting drunk was one thing, but he wasn’t about to get hooked on drugs, legal or otherwise.

The stakeout was not an investigative task at which he
excelled. It was late afternoon, and he’d been here since before lunch. He knew Zginski would spot his normal vehicle at once, so he’d rented the Impala as a disguise. It handled okay, and the air conditioner kept the heat at bay, but what Cocker really wanted was to kick in a door and bust some heads. His failure to get information out of Patience, and the ridiculous fear that seized him in her house, chagrined him.
You don’t have a badge anymore,
he kept reminding himself.
You could go to jail if you did that, and most likely your cellmates would include some of the men you once sent there.

At last the tricked-out Mustang appeared at the red light, and moments later pulled into the bar’s parking lot. Zginski got out, walked to the passenger side, and opened the door.

The little jail-bait waitress Fauvette emerged. There was no way to hear at this distance, but they were in midconversation, the kind that only people who knew each other well conducted in public. Cocker wondered exactly how these two were connected.

“It will never work,” Zginski said.

“It works for her,” Fauvette replied. “Why are you so against it?”

“Because it leaves our victims . . .” He paused as a couple emerged from the Ringside and walked to their car. When they were safely out of hearing range he concluded, “With too much free will. I do not know exactly how she does what she does, but I suspect it is all a charade, and she secretly feeds in the traditional way.”

“I’ve seen her do it. I’ve felt it.”

“The power of suggestion. You told me you heard about it before you saw it, so were primed to accept it. I was here briefly on her first night, remember, and I saw nothing.”

Fauvette shook her head at the absurdity. “And why would she fake something like that?”

He looked at Fauvette seriously. “People often do inexplicable things in order to feel unique. Becoming one of us does not necessarily change that urge.”

“So you think she’s lying?”

“Or deluded.”

With a jealous whine even she found distasteful, Fauvette said, “I thought you liked her.”

“Finding someone attractive does not blind me to their faults.”

She glared at him. “I’ll be sure to remember that.”

“She was to teach you her technique. Have you been able to replicate her results? That should tell you something.”

Fauvette felt a surge of shame and anger. “You know, I think you have a problem with anyone who doesn’t agree with you. You felt the same way about Mark.”

Zginski held up his hand. “That is a different, and unrelated, topic.”

“It’s an
unfinished
topic.”

“And will remain so until Mark returns from wherever he has gone.”

Fauvette started to fire back a reply, then thought better of it. “Well, I have to get to work. Are you coming in?”

“No.”

“Are you at least coming back to see Patience’s show tonight?”

“Possibly. I have not decided.”

“I’ll plan to find my own way home, then.” She stamped toward the door, then looked back at him. “Rudy, tell me the truth: do you ever want to have another time like we did in the warehouse basement?”

He kept his face impassive, even as his emotions churned and roiled. “I do not believe that is an appropriate conversation for the five minutes before your shift begins.”

“It’s a yes or no question. That only takes a second.”

“No, it is a question that masks the true question.”

“Huh?”

He was stalling, and doing it badly. He snapped, “We will discuss this at a later time, Fauvette,” and turned to walk away. Then he stopped. His tone softened. “But I will say this: it has become one of my fondest memories.”

She shook her head and snapped, “I swear, sometimes I wish I’d never met you.” She slammed the door behind her.

Byron Cocker watched the Mustang pull out into traffic. His urge was to follow it, but he had no idea what the Impala’s 4093 six-cylinder engine would do in such a situation. The Mustang was a V8, and chasing it now would be as pointless as it had been the time before.

Instead he forced himself to consider what he’d seen. Zginski had dropped off Fauvette, and they’d had some kind of intense discussion before she went inside. Surely they weren’t a couple; the age difference was just too much. Besides, a man like that wouldn’t allow his woman to work, let alone take a job where she was publicly ogled. What then?

Father,
he decided,
and daughter.

He leaned back against the seat and smiled. Well, that was handy. As a parent himself, Cocker knew one undeniable truth: nothing he could do to Zginski, no humiliation he could inflict, would compare with the pain of seeing his
child
hurt. Fathers protected their sons, but they
treasured
their daughters. And Cocker knew just how to hurt a girl so that she would never be able to look a man, even her own father, in the eye again.

He drained his soda in triumph. There was no need to sit here anymore; he had time to drive home and clean up before returning for the evening show. And this time, he was damn sure he’d stay awake to follow little Fauvette.

P
RUDENCE GAVE HERSELF
a final once-over in the foyer mirror. According to the magazines Cocker brought with her groceries, she now looked like a slightly eccentric, old-fashioned version of a typical modern woman of her apparent age. Thanks to the relatively youthful, vigorous blood of Clora Crabtree and Byron Cocker, that age was now somewhere around twenty-five. Since she was nineteen when she was turned, it was certainly closer than her recent withered, dried-up self. Fresh blood could do wonders.

She spent the previous night after Leonardo left scavenging the many closets full of ancient clothes, in search of something that would look at least somewhat contemporary. She settled on a pink top with billowing angel sleeves and matching pants. A belt emphasized her tiny waist, and made her recall how much Patience hated having her own round form laced into a corset. She wore a necklace of dark brown wooden beads and matching earrings. Her eye shadow was also dark, and heavy. She did her best to match the effect on the model’s face, but worried that she’d actually made herself look rather raccoonlike.

She winced against the afternoon sun as she went to the
freestanding garage beside the house. A call to Privitt’s gas station in town had gotten slack-jawed old Herm Privitt to come out and charge the battery, check the oil, and do whatever else needed to be done to get her seldom-driven 1958 Ford Thunderbird ready for the trip to Memphis. It would be her first journey to the city since the car was new.

The T-bird started on the first try, and she pulled the long, narrow shifting lever down until the little indicator stopped over the “D.” It was completely unlike the first car she’d owned, and her left foot still sought the clutch. She eased the vehicle out so slowly it barely raised the dust along the unpaved driveway, and when she pulled onto the highway she soon had four other annoyed drivers bumper to bumper behind her.