“Why, Mr. Smith-Jones,” she said, looping her arm in mine, smiling her wry one-sided dimpled smile again, “I find that difficult to believe.”
The elevator, a silver-gray chamber, rose to the fourth floor and opened onto a red-painted door in a cream-colored plaster alcove.
“We’re in one of the guest towers,” she said. She stepped out into the alcove with me, still arm-in-arm. “These are your quarters . . . you’ll find everything you need, I think. I just guessed on your size. If I’ve got it wrong, just pick up the phone and ask for me. We can accommodate you. Then, let us know when you’re ready to dine . . . ”
She smiled—both dimples this time—and ducked back into the elevator, whose doors slid shut, and she was gone.
“I’ll be damned,” I said, and in the little alcove, it echoed.
The red door was unlocked, and opened onto a vast modern living room—plush white carpet, round white leather sofa, deep white armchairs, sleek decorative figurines, black-and-white decorative framed prints, a fireplace, a complete bar, a radio console, you name it. Everything but the kitchen sink. Everything but mirrors.
Beyond the living room was a bedroom; it was another white room, with one exception: the round bed was covered with red silk sheets. On the wall, over the bed, was a huge, bamboo-framed, sleekly decorative watercolor of a black panther, about to strike.
In the closet hung a full-dress tux—white tie and tails, pip pip. And the size was right, down to the black size nine and a half shoes, so shiny I could see my face in ’em, but probably not hers . . .
I tossed my kit bag on the bed, and checked out the bathroom; it was bigger than most apartments. On the white marble counter (and there was a mirror in here, at least) I found a straight razor, a brush and cup and shaving soap, and fancy French imported after-shave cologne. Also deodorant powder, and toothbrush and Pepsodent.
She apparently wanted me clean and smelling good, for dinner.
I made sure the guest-room door was locked, and stuck a chair under the knob to make double-sure, before stripping down to take a long, elaborate, very hot bubble bath. After two weeks of the hobo life, I was ready to take advantage of Miss Radclau’s hospitality and soak off the slime.
Dressed to the nines, looking like neither a hobo nor an undercover cop in my white tie and tails, I picked up the phone and said, “Mr. Smith-Jones is ready to dine.”
Within minutes, a knock at the door announced the chauffeur, who was serving as a room-service man this time; he wheeled in a cart with several covered dishes.
“Please wait for the lady, sir,” the chauffeur said, in a voice as dead as his eyes. “Madam is still dressing.”
“Sure,” I said.
It was another ten minutes before another knock came, and I hadn’t even peeked under the dull, nonreflective lids of the hot dishes. I didn’t want to be an ungracious guest.
I answered the door, bowing, with an arch, “Enchante.”
But it almost caught in my throat, because as I was bowing I found myself staring into her round, ripe decolletage.
I backed up awkwardly. “You’re sure a sight.”
She floated inside. Madam still looked undressed: her astonishingly low-cut gown was a vivid dark red and clung to her as if wet. Her waist was tiny, her hips flaring, but she was too tall, too longlegged, to have an hour-glass shape; she was wearing open-toed heels that brought her to my eye level. Her toenails were the same bright red as the dress and her lips.
She gestured theatrically to herself, with both hands. “I trust this is better than the apron?”
“Than the apron and the gray uniform,” I said. “Maybe not just the apron . . . ”
Her laugh was long and sultry. She was draped in an exotic, incenselike perfume, which was making me feel woozy.
She gestured with a slender red-nailed hand toward the tray with the covered food.
“Please dine,” she said.
I pulled up a comfy chair that was a little short for the tray; it made me feel like a child. Before I sat, I asked, “Aren’t you joining me?”
“I’ve eaten.”
I doubted that.
“Please,” she said, “I take great pleasure from watching you enjoy yourself. The carnal pleasures are so . . . ”
“Pleasurable?” I offered, lifting a round lid; the fragrance of prime rib rose to my nostrils like a cobra from a snake charmer’s basket, only I was the one doing the biting, sinking my teeth into the tender, very rare, succulent meat.
“I know I promised you the work of a five-star chef,” she said, perched nearby on the arm of the couch, legs crossed, giving me a generous view, hands clasped in her lap, “and that is the work of a master, but . . . I could tell that you had . . . basic appetites.”
She rose and switched on the radio and drifted back to her perch on the couch arm. A dance band was playing “Where or When.” She swayed gently to it, her black hair shimmying.
“This is swell,” I said. The prime rib, Yorkshire pudding, and browned potatoes were, in fact, delicious. No salad, no vegetable. But what the hell—it was free. So far.
She watched me with what seemed to be genuine pleasure, eyebrows raising as she savored me savoring every bite, her thin, pretty mouth tied up in a cupid’s bow of shared bliss. Why she was getting such a vicarious glow out of watching me dig into the rare roast beef, I couldn’t say. But I had a pretty good hunch . . .
I touched my napkin to my lips, sipped the red wine she had risen to pour for me, in a goblet-sized glass, and aid, “This is a hell of a public service program you got here, lady.”
“I don’t single just anyone out, you know.” She looked almost hurt by my remark. “Once in a while, working in that line, serving up soup . . . I see someone . . . special. Someone who shouldn’t be there. Someone who . . . deserves better. Deserves more.”
She leaned in and the incenselike smell of her was overwhelming; her mouth locked onto mine and her kiss as sweet, much sweeter than mere wine . . .
The lights were off, suddenly, as if she’d willed it, and she led me into the bedroom, where the red gown slipped off and confirmed my suspicion that there was nothing, not even the slightest, wispiest step-in, underneath. A window allowed some moonlight to filter and her slender, yet full-breasted, wide-hipped, long-limbed frame was like some artist’s dream of female perfection. And a horny artist, at that.
She drew me onto her bed, and laid me down on it cool silk sheets, and climbed on top of me, to grant my yet another gift. The erect blood-red tips of her breasts were as hypnotic as the intoxicated and intoxicating almond eyes, as she rode me, and I kept waiting, lost in her as I was, with my left hand dropped down along the side of the bed, waiting for her head to dip toward my throat, but it didn’t, and when her face lowered, it was merely to kiss me again, deeply, passionately, as we flew together to some high, fevered place . . .
Maybe she was just some rich-bitch society girl who felt sorry for (and had a yen for) poor down-and-out schmucks like me, or like the poor down-and-out schmuck I was supposed to be. Maybe the suspicions that had brought me here were unfounded. Maybe I was the only dishonest one in this bed.
It had seemed a reasonable theory—what better place for an ancient monster to hide than behind the mask of a modern monster? The mass murderer that the city took the Butcher of Slaughter Run for would be the perfect disguise for a demon of the night.
And how better for the beast to gather its victims than behind the mask of an angel of mercy?
She seemed to be sleeping; the perfect globes of her bosom rose and fell, heavily, gloriously, in what seemed to be slumber. But as I stared at her, leaning on one elbow, her eyes popped open, startling me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was just . . . admiring you.”
She smiled a little, a pursed-lipped, kiss of a smile. “In what way?”
“Physically. You’re a handsome woman. The handsomest I’ve ever seen. But it’s m
ore than that.”
“Oh?”
“I admire what you’re trying to do. Helping guys like me out.”
She laughed. “I told you—I don’t make love to all of them.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t mean that. Not everyone who’s . . . advantaged takes the time to give a little back.”
“I know. Please don’t take this in a condescending manner, Mr. Smith-Jones, but the ‘little people’ of society, they’re the life’s blood of the ‘advantaged.’ It seems to me the least an advantaged person can do is, now and then, make life a little better for someone less fortunate.”
“Well, you’ve certainly made my life better, tonight “
She smiled, and it seemed, suddenly, a sad, bittersweet kind of smile; the thin red lips looked black in the near dark. “Good. That was my desire.”
She leaned forward and kissed me, gently, tenderly, then buried her face in my shoulder, and I had a sudden flash of what was about to happen, and pulled away. Her fangs were distended; her eyes were wide and here was no longer any difficulty in telling the pupils from the irises, because the latter were a ghastly yellow.
Naked, I jumped out of the bed; she was poised there, on all fours, as if mimicking the panther on the wall looming over her.
“You are from a privileged, moneyed family, aren’t you, Miss Radclau?”
Her response was a deep, throaty snarling sound; I wasn’t sure she was capable of speech, at this point.
“You think just ’cause I’m a bum, I can’t do a damn anagram?” I asked, and I swung viciously at her, and it landed.
A punch on the jaw, even with all my weight behind it, wouldn’t be enough to knock her out—she had metamorphosed into something beyond human, stronger than a mere man—but it had surprised her, and threw her on her back, which was where I wanted her.
The kit bag was out from under the bed in a flash and the pointed stake and the mallet were in my hands in another flash, and I drove my knee into her stomach, and the stake into her heart. She yowled with pain; it was a wolflike sound. Blood bubbled from around the stake, and I hammered it again, and it sunk deeper, and she yowled again, but her eyes weren’t yellow anymore.
And they weren’t savage, anymore, either.
Her expression was sad, and maybe even grateful.
She was still alive when I raised the machete—heaving under the pain, her hands clutching the stake but unable to remove it, slender fingers streaked with her own blood, a perfect match to her nail polish.
“I know you acted out of compassion,” I said. “I know you gave me, and the other men, the best night of their lives, before taking those lives, when you wouldn’t have had to. You could have just been a beast. Instead, you were a beauty.”
She seemed to be smiling, a little, when the machete swung down and severed her head from pale, pale shoulders.
I had no trouble getting out of the place. I took the elevator down to the wine cellar passage to the garage with the bloody machete in hand in case I had to ward off the gorillalike chauffeur or any other minions of the night who might appear.
But none did.
I found a button in the garage and pushed it and the door swung up and open and I ran out into a cool, clear night. At the first farmhouse, I called in to the station, and told them to wake the chief.
“He’s not going to like it,” the desk sergeant said.
“Just do it.” I couldn’t tell him I’d stopped the Slaughter Run Butcher or I’d be up to my eyeballs in reporters out here. “Understand, sergeant?”
I could hear the shrug in his voice: “If you say so, Lieutenant Van Helsing.”
Road Dogs
NORMAN PARTRIDGE
PART ONE
Kim Barlow was two months in the ground when her brother first learned she was dead.
Glen got an e-mail from a deputy sheriff up in Arizona. Of course, the message had been gathering virtual dust for a couple of months in Glen’s inbox, because Glen hardly ever checked his mail. Not because he couldn’t. Sure, the rig was forty miles off the Texas coast, but there were computers around. What there wasn’t was anyone Glen Barlow heard from that way. Except for Kim, and Kim had been pretty quiet since Glen tossed her boyfriend through her living room window last Christmas Eve.
Glen had only clocked a couple months with the company, but the Installation Manager liked him well enough to okay emergency leave. Some young suit from Houston was headed back to the mainland after touring the rig, and Glen caught a ride into Galveston on the company chopper. Seventeen hours later he parked his truck in front of the El Pasito sheriff’s office. He’d already talked to that emailing deputy on a cell phone he’d forgotten in the Ford’s glove compartment when he ditched the mainland for his time offshore. Glen used that cell phone about as much as he used his e-mail account.
The deputy—whose name was J. J. Bryce—had spent most of the day waiting for Glen to show up. One look at the guy and Bryce shook his head. He shook his head when he saw Glen’s pickup, too. Try to describe that old hunk of Ford in a report, he’d note the color as rust or primer, take your pick. And the guy who drove it was pretty much the same way. Headed towards forty with the years starting to show. Bryce was real familiar with the type. A drifter—one of those guys who was wiry as a half-starved animal. And that might mean you were talking jackrabbit, or it might mean you were talking coyote. Sometimes it was hard to tell going in.
But Bryce already had an opinion about this guy. He’d heard all about Barlow tossing Kale Howard through that living room window last Christmas Eve. In fact, he’d heard more about it than the talk that went around the cop shop. Not that any of that mattered right now. The way the deputy saw it, right now things were all business.
The two of them sat down in the deputy’s cramped office and ran the drill. There wasn’t much to look at. Not in the office. Not in the file Bryce had on Kim Barlow’s death. But Glen looked, and he took his time about it, and that wasn’t something the deputy much liked.
After a while, Glen closed the folder and slid it across the desk.
“Having a hard time buying this,” he said.
“No buying it, really. It’s what happened.”
“You don’t have a suspect?”
“You read the report, Mr. Barlow. You don’t have a suspect in a case like this.”
“You talk to that asshole Howard?”
“Yeah. I talked to Kale. Read his file, too.”
“Then you know he used to beat up my sister.”
“I know that. But I also know that Howard didn’t do this. No man could have.”
Glen just looked at the guy—kind of grinned, didn’t say one word—and Bryce all of a sudden felt his pulse hammering, because it most definitely wasn’t the kind of look you got from a jackrabbit.
Glen Barlow said: “You’d be surprised what some men can do.”
There it was. Cards on the table, and all in the space of ten minutes. But the gents named Bryce and Barlow hadn’t quite played out the deck, so they went a few more hands. Bryce reminding Glen about the restraining order, warning him how hard he’d go if Glen went after Kale Howard. Glen asking questions, the deputy batting them off or not answering them at all. The words exchanged weren’t getting either man anywhere he wanted to go, or anywhere he wanted to take the other. The two of them were running neck and neck, and neither seemed to like that very much.
Finally, Glen said: “I want to see the pictures.”
“Look, Barlow. I understand that your sister was your only living relative. You know the land out there. As far as we can figure it, she was alone, rock-climbing at Tres Manos. She must have taken a fall. After that . . . well, she was hurt pretty bad. She had a broken leg. It was a couple days before anyone found her. Something got hold of her before then . . . a pack of coyotes, or maybe a big cat. We had some experts in and they said—”
“I don’t care what they said. Kale’s mixed up in this some way. Wouldn’t surprise me if he wanted a
little protection after I tossed him through that window. Maybe he got himself a pit bull.”
“We checked that out, Mr. Barlow. Kale doesn’t have a dog.”
“That doesn’t change anything. I still want to see the pictures.”
“Trust me on this. You don’t.”
“How many times you want to hear me say it?”
The deputy drew a deep breath and tried to hold his temper.
“You want me to, I’ll say it again.”
Bryce was so pissed off, he could barely unclench his jaw, but he got the job done. “Okay, Barlow. You want pictures, pictures is what you’ll get.”
The deputy yanked open a file cabinet harder than he should have and tossed another manila folder across the desk. Barlow looked at those photos for a long time—the way Bryce figured time, anyway.
“All right,” Glen said finally. He closed the folder, slid it across the desk, and got up so quickly that he took Bryce by surprise. There was more that the deputy needed to say, but Barlow didn’t give him the chance. He slammed Bryce’s office door before the deputy could say another word, and a handful of seconds later he slammed the door to his busted-ass pickup hard enough to leave a shower of rust on the ground. Then he drove straight out of El Pasito, foot hard on the gas. Past the town’s lone bar . . . past the funeral home . . . past the gun shop . . .
Two miles into the desert, Glen Barlow laid rubber and pulled over.
The goddamn deputy was right about those pictures.
At the base of a dying yucca tree, Glen puked his guts dry.
J. J. Bryce filed the folders on the Kim Barlow case and shared the story of his run-in with her older brother with the sheriff. He sat around the office killing time, but he just couldn’t take it sitting there with the sunset slicing through the Venetian blinds and the edge of the desk marred by cigarette burns from the lazy-ass deputy who’d had it before him.
So he clocked out and got in his own pickup, a brand-new Ford which was a hell of a lot shinier than the one Glen Barlow drove. That didn’t make Bryce feel any better, though. He was still boiling, and there wasn’t much he could do about it at the moment—El Pasito only had one bar and Sheriff Randall didn’t like anyone who wore a badge drinking there.
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