Once Bitten

by Reinke, Sara

  “I’ll give you a thousand dollars not to stop,” he moaned, his eyelids fluttering closed. She laughed and he said, “No, really.”

  “Not necessary,” she murmured in reply. As she worked her way up from the base of his spine to the slope of his neck, she inched her way up with her bottom, as well, leaning over to put all one hundred and fifteen-some odd pounds into the sweeping, grinding movements of her hands.

  Her slim fingers spread through the nape of his hair, up beneath his shirt collar, working at his scalp. His mind had slipped into that murky, brackish in-between state of semi-lucidity when her hands at last fell still. “There you go. All better now?”

  “Much,” he mumbled, aware of the fact that he’d drooled again and the square of cheap, short-napped carpet beneath him was now soggy. He opened his eye and watched her step back into her sandals, balancing first on one foot, then the other, as she slipped the back-straps into place behind her heels.

  “I can see up your skirt, by the way,” he said, muffled against the floor.

  “It’s called a sarong.”

  “Really?” Another appreciative glance. “Looks like a thong from here.”

  She leaned down long enough to swat him on the head. “See you in the morning,” she called as she bounced toward the door.

  “Harlowe is a lucky man,” he told her.

  “Yes, he is,” she agreed without turning around.

  ***

  The next morning, he folded the top down on the Galaxie and took the main island highway to South Shore. “Hey, you,” he said, propping his cell phone between his shoulder and ear. The wind buffeted through his hair and he had to practically shout to make himself heard over the rush of it.

  “Hey, yourself,” Sandy called back cheerfully. “You on the road?”

  “On my way to that bar where Ruth Weston said her daughter worked. After that, if I have time, I’m going to check out Lucy’s apartment. Her mother gave me a set of keys. Anyway, I probably won’t be back in the office today.”

  “I won’t wait up for you, then.”

  He laughed. “How was dinner?”

  “You were missed,” Sandy said. “You know Gracie adores you.”

  “No, I mean, how was the food? The Asian fusion?”

  Without missing a beat, Sandy replied: “You were missed.”

  John laughed as he snapped the phone closed.

  ***

  When he arrived at shortly after ten o’clock in the morning, the Show Me! was closed for business, empty of patrons but still had staff on hand to accept food and liquor deliveries, again, exactly as he’d hoped.

  “I wish I could help you,” said a pretty young blonde with unnaturally large breasts that threatened to burst through the buttons and seams of her button-down white blouse. He had found her behind one of the bars inside the main stage area with a clipboard and pen in hand as she checked off the contents of a large stack of deliveries, all boxes of bottled liquor, near as he could tell, and all of the top-shelf variety. She had introduced herself as Britney Wilson, the assistant manager.

  He leaned across the bar to show her the five-by-seven glossy of Lucy Weston her mother had given him, and Britney obligingly leaned forward to study it. In the process, she awarded him a sneak peek down the front of her shirt, the generous cleft of her cleavage.

  “Mr. Harper, did you say it was?” She glanced up at him, brows raised, and he cut his gaze back to her face.

  “Harker,” he said. “Jonathan Harker. But please, call me John.”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “Private investigator.”

  “Oh.” Britney nodded. “We get a lot of turn over here. I probably couldn’t pick half our waitresses out of a lineup.”

  “Do you think one of the other employees might recognize her?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe,” Britney said. “The wait staff doesn’t come in until three o’clock to get ready for happy hour.”

  “Can I come back then?”

  She shrugged. “You can come back. I can’t promise anyone will talk to you. But you could always come hang out at the bar, keep me company.” A quick wink. “I’ll comp you a drink.”

  “I’d like that, thanks.” He winked back. “How about Boyd Wilder?”

  Something shifted in her face. Her eyes grew momentarily cool and a slight indentation appeared in her cheek, fleeting, as she reflexively tightened her jaw. It was nearly imperceptible, and if he’d still been distracted by the overflow of her cleavage, he would have missed it entirely. By the time she answered him, less than two seconds later, she was smiling again. “What about him?”

  “This is his place, isn’t it? Does he ever come in?”

  Another shrug. “Sometimes. He doesn’t keep regular office hours, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Lucy Weston’s mother told me they were personally acquainted,” John said. “She seemed to think that if Lucy has gone off to California, it was because Mr. Wilder had promised her modeling work.”

  Britney laughed, flapping her hand dismissively. “Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about that. You’d have to ask him.”

  Her tone remained light, her voice friendly, her smile playful, but there was definitely a change in her demeanor that wasn’t imaginary. Her eyes hadn’t averted from his face since he’d mentioned Boyd Wilder and they’d remained pinned to his own with a thinly veiled stoniness that he found curious, if not disconcerting. “And like I said,” she continued. “He doesn’t keep set hours or anything.”

  “Well, maybe you could give him this. Have him give me a call?” John fished his wallet out of his pocket, a business card from the billfold.

  Britney took it without cutting her eyes from his own, not even sparing the card a glance. “I’ll see that he gets the message,” she said and still, her smile didn’t touch her eyes. As he was leaving, she called him “Mr. Harker,” as good a sign as any that he’d worn out his welcome.

  ***

  “Well, look what the cat dragged in.” Davis Monroe looked up from his desk at Sister Islands Police Department headquarters. Though his mouth stretched in a languid sort of smile, that seeming good humor didn’t quite touch his eyes, which had always reminded John of a shark’s: deep-set and round, with large dark irises, nearly black from a distance, glittering and somehow doll-like, predatory.

  Monroe held up his hands. “Don’t shoot,” he said, then laughed loudly.

  “Ha, ha,” John said, tucking his sunglasses into the breast pocket of his shirt. “You know, that joke never gets old, Monroe. It’s funnier ever time I hear it.”

  “Glad I could help out.” Monroe’s black, beady eyes fixed on him, his smarmy smile still plastered across his face. “So what brings you out to this neck of the woods?”

  “Just business,” John replied casually. “How’s Bevi?”

  “Tight as a drum,” Monroe replied easily. He was a big, strapping son of a bitch, built like a pit bull and every bit as mean, only just now beginning to soften in the latter half of middle age. A well-groomed mustache and goatee graced the bottom quadrant of his square-shaped head. He’d started banging John’s ex-wife, Beverly, almost from the moment they’d moved to the island.

  “I’ll tell her you said hi,” Monroe offered.

  “Yeah, tap that ass once for me,” John replied, wiping the condescending smile completely from Monroe.

  “What do you want, Harker?” he growled, his brows narrowing.

  “I told you. I’m here on business.”

  Monroe uttered a bark of laughter. “You telling me someone actually hired you?”

  “Maybe you’re familiar with the name,” John said. “Ruth Weston?”

  Monroe’s laughter withered.

  “She hired me to look for her daughter, Lucy,” John continued. “She said she’d already been to the police here on South Shore about it. Since you’ve always been the go-to guy for missing persons, I figured Ruth would’ve come to see you.”

  “She did.” Mo
nroe’s large fingers began to tap restlessly, irritably against his desk blotter, the opened file folders loosely collected there. “I worked the case. I closed it.”

  “Yeah, in what? Less than twelve hours? That must be a record, even for you.”

  Monroe continued drumming his fingers. “Lucy Weston ran off to California. I’ve got an e-ticket receipt for her airfare and confirmation that her boarding pass was issued for the flight. I’m sorry Ruth Weston doesn’t want to accept that, but those are the facts.”

  “You find anything else when you checked her apartment?”

  Monroe shrugged. “A stack of mail, some bills. I hate to tell you, but everything was on the up and up.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it pains you.”

  Monroe smiled, faux sympathetic. “A whole lot, Harker. Look, Ruth Weston is trying to find a way to blame the girl’s boss for everything.”

  “Boyd Wilder,” John said, and Monroe nodded.

  “The Boyd Wilder, as in the guy whose great-great-granddaddy has an island just north of here named after him, not to mention a bridge, a couple of boulevards and a half dozen shopping centers.” Monroe leaned back again and laced his fingers together behind his head, revealing a pair of damp patches in the armpits of his shirt. “Ruth Weston works as a housekeeper at the Gulf Shores Resort earning maybe six, seven bucks an hour. You ask me, she wants to turn this into some kind of Natalie Holloway incident. She thinks she’s going to get big-time media attention if she keeps pointing the finger at Wilder, some money out of the whole deal, either from his family to shut her up, or from some network somewhere who wants to make a movie-of-the-week out of it. But you know what?”

  He leaned forward, frowning. “Lucy Weston isn’t some cute-faced teenager vacationing on her spring break. She’s a grown adult. She can come and go as she pleases. And she doesn’t have to tell her mother a thing.”

  John ignored the diatribe. “May I see the case file?”

  “Why? You think you’re going to find something I missed?” Monroe laughed again. When he stood, his chair creaked as if in abject relief, and he went to a nearby file cabinet. After flipping through one of the drawers, he pulled out a manila envelope and tossed it to John. “There. Pick it apart. You’re not going to find anything.”

  “Can I make copies?” John asked.

  Monroe shrugged again. “It’s a closed case, public information. Unless Ruth Weston can come up with something that proves foul play or eminent danger, I’ve got no reasonable, good faith belief the information in that file is going to lead to any revelation of criminal activity.”

  John smiled wanly. “You sure sound pretty when you’re quoting public policy, Monroe.”

  “Yeah, fuck you, Harker. Go make your copies and bring that back. There’s a pay-copier down on the first floor, by the hall of records.” It was Monroe’s turn to smile wanly. “Twenty-five cents a page.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lucy Weston lived in a small, one-bedroom apartment at the Oceanside complex on the west end of the island. It had only been a stone’s throw, no more than a half-dozen blocks, from the small bungalow she and her mother had shared as she’d grown up, and easy walking distance of the community college she’d been attending.

  Once inside, John found, the bedroom to his left, a small galley kitchen to his right, separated from the conjoined dining and living area by a breakfast bar. From the outside of the building, he’d suspected the apartment would be light-filled, judging by the large windows and patio doors he’d seen. But inside, he was surprised to find it shadow-draped and dark, as if all of the curtains had been tightly closed, the blinds snapped shut.

  He flipped the nearest light switch impotently up and down. That’s odd, he thought.

  The electricity hadn’t been turned off in the apartment. Lucy hadn’t been gone long enough to miss a payment, and a glance into the kitchen as he walked past revealed the digital clock on the flat-top stove still aglow. Even so, when he tried the light switch in the dining room and living area, nothing happened, and when he looked down at the nearest lamp, peering past the edge of the shade, he could see that there was no bulb inside.

  The apartment had an odd smell about it. More than just the musty odor of a small space that had been closed off for a week, there was something underlying and foul, like spoiled food.

  His eyes adjusted to the gloom and he realized why the apartment was so dark. It looked like someone had taped overlapping layers of black plastic over the windows and glass patio doors.

  Not just plastic, he thought as he approached the doors. Trash bags. The heavy-duty lawn kind.

  “What the hell?” he murmured, running his fingertips lightly down the tautly drawn bag.

  He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped back the lid. It took him a bit longer to fish Monroe’s business card out of his wallet, considering he didn’t make it a habit to call his ex-wife’s boyfriend. Monroe answered the line mid-way through the second ring, his voice muffled and moist, like he spoke around a mouthful of ham salad.

  “Monroe.”

  “You know, you really have to be about the stupidest, sorriest excuse for a police detective I’ve ever seen,” John remarked mildly.

  “Well, hey, Harker, nice to talk to you again, too,” Monroe replied. “This makes, what? Twice in one day? People are gonna think you’ve got a crush on me.”

  “Like I’d ever be that hard up,” John said. “Hey, you know that little report of yours on Lucy Weston’s disappearance?”

  “The one that probably cost you a good, what? Twelve bucks to copy?”

  “Fifteen,” John said. “You completely forgot to mention the fact she’d taken stock in the Hefty garbage bag company and used it for window dressing in her apartment.”

  “Did I leave that out?” Monroe said. “I could’ve sworn I typed a report on it.” John heard the momentary rustle of papers, as if Monroe put on a show of rifling his desk top. “I must’ve filed it somewhere else by mistake. Sorry. I thought that was kind of weird, too.”

  John frowned. “Weird? It didn’t raise any kind of red flags with you, Monroe? Like between that and the fact this whole place smells like rotten eggs, maybe she was up to something in here, say, oh, I don’t know. Cooking drugs?”

  Homes in which methamphetamines were being produced frequently had foil or trash bags layered over the windows to keep prying eyes away. What kind of Barney Fife dipshit doesn’t know that?

  “Oh, it raised flags all right,” Monroe said. “I did a search on the spot based on probable cause. There was nothing there I could find, no chemicals, no tools, no cook kits. I even called in a drug dog from Key West, had it do a sniff sweep. No dice.”

  “Oh,” John said, deflated. Apparently Monroe wasn’t as Barney Fife as he’d thought.

  On the other end of the line, Monroe chuckled. “Maybe she just liked things dark, Harker.”

  With a frown, John snapped the phone shut then shoved it back into his pocket. “Asshole,” he muttered.

  He heard a strange sound from behind him, near the bedroom doorway. When he’d first started dating Bevi a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, she’d had a cat named Prince Humperdink that had hated just about everyone, but especially John. In their later divorce hearings, Bevi had once remarked that she should have better trusted the cat’s judgment.

  Prince Humperdink had a habit of hiding beneath the recliner Bevi had kept in her living room, and whenever John had spent the night with her, he’d have to walk past that chair in the dark to get to the bathroom. During those late-night excursions, he’d invariably hear Humperdink from beneath the La-Z-Boy, a low, throaty, somewhat high-pitched growl emanating from the darkness. The sound he heard coming from Lucy Weston’s bedroom was very much the same.

  What the…? He pivoted, brow raised, curiosity piqued. Neither Ruth nor Monroe had mentioned anything about Lucy having a pet. And surely the girl’s mother would have taken a cat or dog home with her instead of leaving
it at the apartment.

  When he saw the figure standing in the bedroom doorway, silhouetted against the backdrop of shadows, he froze.

  And then he realized.

  “Lucy?”

  During his tenure as a cop, he’d seen all kinds of people who’d been all kinds of fucked-up: meth addicts and crack heads, strung out and slavering, staggering drunks who’d pissed or puked all over themselves; schizophrenics who’d abandoned their meds or hadn’t started them to begin with. But nothing in his life had prepared him for the woman who now shambled more fully into view.

  The sunny-faced girl from Ruth Weston’s photograph was gone. Her pale hair hung about her face in a tangled, matted, disheveled mess. Her shoulders were hunched, her footsteps shuffling and slow, her hands dangling limply at her sides. She looked haggard, her cheeks sunken and gaunt. She wore only a bra and panties, but there was nothing titillating in the view. Her body looked emaciated, the bony prominences in her collar, sternum, rib cage and pelvis all starkly apparent. Her skin looked like mottled putty, ashen grey with purplish patches of shadowed bruising.

  John drew back, stumbling over the wrought iron frame of one of her dining room chairs.

  Her mouth hung open, slack-jawed and agape, her lips cracked deep enough in places to reveal red, raw meat beneath. Saliva crusted the corners and frothed along the edges.

  But the worst thing was her eyes—sunken deep into the recesses of her sockets, shadow-rimmed, nearly black, the visible slits of corners so bloodshot, they looked vermillion.

  “Lucy,” he said again and as she took another clumsy step toward him, he matched it in reverse, reaching behind him and pawing at the edge of the table, easing his way around it. “Lucy, my name is Jonathan Harker. I’m a private investigator. Your mother hired me to search for you.”

  Again, that guttural, cat-like growl rose from her throat. Again, she lurched forward, and now the foam at her mouth began dripping against the floor in fat, frothy droplets.