“Well, Fanny Baws is your Scottish name,” Halladay said, “so I’ll call you that. But we’re looking for a big hairy guy by the name of Shinsky who buys from you. Has he been here recently, Fanny, or is he coming by anytime soon?”
“The only illegal purchases I’m involved in,” Spenser/Boursier said, “is for the blood I need to survive.” He fingered a brightly colored button that was attached to his lapel in the middle of a collection of Gothic pendants—it said RIGHT TO BUY on it. “Because the government you work for discriminates against us by not allowing it to be sold in stores.”
“Oh, so you’re a real vampire—whatever the hell that is.” Halladay looked at Jon, nodding his head and pursing his lips. “This is a nice development, actually. Squeezing you about your drug business won’t get you to tell us anything, because you’re smart enough to not keep anything on you, and you send your buyers to another room to get it … maybe even to another club.”
As he said this he glanced over to the wall to the left of them on the balcony, where there was an interior entrance to the next club over, with a sign saying SWEETS above it.
“But I think we do have some leverage here,” Halladay continued, “because the bags you have in your refrigerator at home are still illegal in New York, and what you just said is enough for us to get a warrant and send a car over there while we make sure you stay here and don’t call anyone to hide them. And that’s not to mention the assault charges that we’ll bring after an investigation into your ‘bloodplay.’”
“We only feed by mutual consent,” the man said, agitated now and maybe even a little scared.
“Yeah, right. Tell me you’re gonna completely give up one of the biggest appeals of your new identity. We’ll find and interview everyone who’s been bitten by you, Fanny, and we’ll see if they all wanted you do it.”
“Okay, okay,” the dealer said, waving his pale hands with their long black fingernails in front of him, then flashing a fanged smile when he saw something behind the cops. “Oh, looks like I won’t actually have to tell you anything.”
He nodded ever so slightly toward what he was looking at, and the two police turned around to see Shinsky coming in the direction of the table from the other end of the balcony, literally head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd. Unfortunately, the big hairy suspect noticed them looking at him and veered off to the left toward the entrance to the adjacent club called Sweets. Jon and Halladay immediately headed that way themselves.
Just inside the entrance to the other club, they were greeted by a bouncer asking for the cover charge and their online invitations. The cops flashed their badges and confirmed that Shinsky had just passed through, asking the bouncer how he got in if an invitation was required. The man said that Shinsky had a “universal card,” which they took to mean a pass that allowed him to get into any and all of the clubs on Party Row.
“He could go into any of the series of clubs in that direction,” Jon said to Halladay, “or circle back this way without having to go out to the street. And he could exit on either side of the street. So I doubt calling for backup to cover exits would do any good.”
“Who would we call, anyway?” Halladay said, as he moved forward into the second club. “Let’s just find him.” But Jon grabbed his arm to slow him down.
“Be careful,” the younger detective said in his ear. “We know he’s killed in public, and if he has a gun he could just wait for us to turn a corner and open fire. Let’s keep our distance from each other so he couldn’t take us both out as easily, but not so far that we get separated.”
Halladay nodded, and they both stepped out onto a balcony similar to the one they had just been on in the Starlight club, with the main dance floor ahead of them and down on the ground level. The ceiling was not nearly as high as at the former club—in fact, it was just above them. But when they moved closer to the railing, staying about ten or fifteen feet apart from one another, they could see most of the club from there, so they both stood still for a while and scanned the crowd for the suspect.
This club was better lit than most, and after a few moments of checking out the clientele, Jon found out why. He had noticed that the couples talking or dancing with each other were almost all older men with much younger women, and the few exceptions were older women with much younger men. The people who were not paired up yet were all young and attractive, or older and not, seemingly without exception.
“What is this place?” Jon yelled across to Halladay, over the noise of the music and conversations. He had to yell loudly enough that some of the customers milling around them stopped what they were doing and gave him a nasty look.
“It’s a Sugar Daddy club,” Halladay shouted back. “Old farts with money come to get some young fud, and the young fud come to get the old farts’ money. Just another modern version of the oldest profession.”
Now they were really getting some looks, and the surrounding crowd started slowly parting from them. Apparently they didn’t like how the big Scotsman’s frank description cut through whatever mental spin the customers had used to justify what they were doing there. But the cops stopped talking, realizing that they were drawing attention to themselves and wasting precious time, and went back to scanning the crowd. There were a lot of men who were older, like Shinsky, but not very many as big, so it wasn’t long before they spotted him on the bottom level dance floor, moving toward the entrance to the next club over. This move on the perp’s part made sense, because Sweets was too wide open for him to hide effectively. It was also too well lit, because the clientele had to be able to see the merchandise.
The next establishment in the Row, into which Shinsky disappeared and the cops pursued him, was the exact opposite when it came to lighting, and that was even reflected in the name. It was a sex club called Dark Desires.
13
“In here we have to worry about a knife,” Jon said after they wove through the crowd at Sweets, flashed their badges at the entrance of the sex club, and saw how dark it was inside. “He could be hiding anywhere in here.”
He had noticed a bed near the entrance, which was only slightly partitioned off by three small temporary walls, and he could vaguely make out others like it in the darkness ahead.
The two cops proceeded farther into the club, spaced like they were before but with guns drawn now, and Jon noticed that there were a variety of places that couples could choose. In addition to the cubicles, there were doors to private rooms along the outside walls and mattresses lining the floor in between the doors. The rooms were obviously for those who preferred privacy, the mattresses for those with an exhibitionistic streak, and the cubicles for those somewhere in between.
There seemed to be only one other exit from the big room, in addition to the door they had entered. Even though it was on the far side, Jon could see that no one was entering or leaving it currently, because the stairwell going up behind it was more brightly lit. He could also make out direction signs pointing up the stairs that said, BAR, DANCE FLOOR, and EXIT.
Jon knew that Shinsky might possibly have run right for the stairs as soon as he’d come in, and disappeared up them before he and Halladay had gotten there. But the big killer could also have found a good place where he could hide, hoping that the cops would go straight through the room and allow him to escape by circling back. Or, as Jon had suggested to his partner, he could have found a good spot for an ambush and planned to take each of them out under the cover of darkness. So Jon kept his eye on the exit, but bore to the left behind one of the cubicles to spread out the search more. As he did, he started to notice the smell of sweat that was mixed in with that of the many scented candles that were burning at various places in the room, but not really doing the trick.
As he was passing a second cubicle closer to the left wall, two men suddenly stepped out of it, fully clothed and obviously finished with whatever they’d been were doing in there. This made Jon jump slightly, but the men were much more frightened themselves when t
hey saw his gun. They instinctively raised their hands and then backed away from him toward the exit when he gestured that way with the weapon. There were two couples on an oversized mattress along the wall as he continued farther, and they were completely naked. But Jon didn’t find this stimulating in the least, first because he could only glance at them briefly and second because it only took that brief glance to see that they were not very attractive people. All four of them were seriously out of shape, to put it nicely.
Then Jon jumped again, and much more violently this time, because the overhead lights abruptly flashed on and illuminated the whole room. After waving his gun around during the initial startled screams and shouts, he saw Halladay at a bank of light switches near the exit, smiling from ear to ear. The noise died down when the big cop held up his badge and people throughout the room saw it and started to dress and file out, even though he’d never told them to do that. Jon noticed that the plague of unattractiveness wasn’t limited to the two couples he had seen on the mattress—it seemed that it was true of almost all the people there, except for a few, whom he surmised might have been prostitutes.
“Reminds me of the old saying about nude beaches,” Halladay yelled across the room at him, either reading his mind or thinking about the same thing. “Those who should don’t and those who shouldn’t, do. That’s why they keep these places so dark—nobody wants anyone to see their bodies.”
Some of the people filing out of the room between the two cops grunted and scowled at Halladay, and Jon was amazed at how accomplished the big Scot was at offending even total strangers.
After a minute or so of scanning the customers and checking any possible hiding places, which was much easier now that the room was awash in light, they concluded that Shinsky wasn’t there and pushed their way up the stairway to the next floor, which turned out to be the main one. They talked briefly with a woman in management who told them she had seen someone fitting Shinsky’s description linger in the lobby for a few minutes but then take off into the next club in the Row—presumably because there wasn’t a big enough crowd in this one in which to get lost. The killer made a big mistake, however, when he tried to hide in the next club.
It was called Continuum, and they entered onto a balcony like they had with the first two. But this one was different in that it stretched across parts of the whole top floor in a seemingly random pattern, leaving some large holes through which the bottom floor could be seen. Jon and Halladay took up positions at the railing in two different spots that they thought would afford the best combined view of both floors, and started panning them for Shinsky.
The club was more crowded that any of the other three they’d been in, but even before they spotted him, Jon knew that the big hairy guy wouldn’t be able to hide for long in this place. That was precisely because he was big and hairy—especially the latter—since it became apparent after a few moments of scanning the customers that this was a “pan-gender” club. Everyone there was as androgynous and sexless as they could possibly make themselves, except for the perp, who had taken a seat in a crowded area at a downstairs table in an attempt to hide his height and bulk. But he looked so unlike the constituency that they probably thought he was a cop himself, and started giving him a wide berth. It was only a matter of time before Jon and Halladay identified him by the expanding circle of space around him, and then he himself realized it was a bad hiding place and took off for a doorway nearby.
“Not the sharpest tool in the shed,” Halladay said with his patented smile, as they pushed their way down the stairs to go after him.
The doorway led into a large, unused industrial kitchen on the north side of the building, and after running halfway through it with their guns drawn again, the two cops could see a door standing open on the far side. They ran to it and through it into a short alley, at the end of which they could see people milling on the brightly lit Thirtieth Street.
“Wait,” Jon said, holding Halladay back from running down the alley. He turned back to the open door to the kitchen. “Why wouldn’t he close the door? He had time.”
Jon slowly moved to the left so his view extended farther into the kitchen, even as far as the doorway through which they had entered it from the club. Sure enough, as he watched, a silhouetted figure flashed into view from somewhere on the side of the kitchen and went back through the door into the club.
“Come on,” Jon said, and they both ran back through the kitchen, reaching the door in time to see Shinsky exiting the club through the side door that led into the next establishment. He was obviously sticking to his plan of trying to lose his pursuers in one of the long row of clubs. But there couldn’t be too many more on this block.
And as it turned out, the next establishment in the Row wasn’t actually a club. It was Jayne’s Day Care—an ironic name, given the endless night—and it provided a place for people to drop off their kids while they partied.
“Only in New York,” Jon muttered under his breath again, but he didn’t have much time to marvel at this, because he and Halladay stumbled into a scary standoff when they ran inside the day care’s main room, which was populated by a few inflatable slides and trampolines, and a lot of now-screaming kids being herded to the corners by staff members.
Shinsky had pushed his way through and grabbed a little girl as a hostage when the security guard at the door pulled a gun and told him to stop. When the two cops arrived, the killer and the guard were about twenty feet apart, both pointing their guns at each other. Shinsky held the preschooler effortlessly in front of his chest with his other hand. She was one of the few kids in the place that wasn’t screaming, possibly because she was in shock.
Now that there were three guns trained on him, the big man backed slowly toward the exit behind him, which according to a sign led into another club called The Jungle. Jon and Halladay moved forward at the same pace to where the stationary guard stood, and Jon motioned to him to remain there, noticing a Gotham Security patch on his uniform.
“Don’t come after me,” Shinsky shouted, “or I’ll kill her.”
He backed through the door and disappeared while the two cops continued to move slowly forward, but when they got close to the exit they stopped and looked at each other, unsure of what to do. Then a couple shots rang out from inside The Jungle, and that settled it. They rushed inside, fearful of seeing a little girl’s bloody body, but instead they saw an older man lying on the ground, clutching his wounded gut. He was dressed in a uniform that looked like a safari outfit, and it became obvious that Shinsky’s universal card wasn’t enough to get him into the club while holding a little girl hostage.
Speaking of the girl, she soon stepped out of the shadows nearby as other staff arrived to help the wounded man. A relieved Halladay told them to take care of her, and the two policemen proceeded with caution into the interior of the club. It was huge and elaborate inside, which made Jon think that it was likely the last club in the Row, because it would make sense that the end properties were reserved for big businesses like the Starlight and this one. All throughout the massive room there were large and small trees, which looked real to Jon, and UV lamps high up on the ceiling that seemed to confirm his guess. There were various food and drink stations made to look like grass huts, and even one in a tree house built into the upper branches of one of the bigger trees, with a wooden staircase that led to it spiraling around the trunk.
They progressed quickly but with caution on the path Shinsky had almost surely taken, judging by the ripples in the crowd, and Jon noticed that the owners of the club had truly spared no expense—or excess—to achieve the atmosphere they wanted. Jon passed a large tank with a Burmese python lounging next to a small pool and an even bigger cage with some brightly colored macaws sitting on perches and periodically letting out their unique screams.
He and Halladay had made fun of Shinsky’s intelligence, but neither of them realized how smart a move he’d made when they heard a couple more gunshots ahead of them. They though
t he had shot another person, or maybe fired into the air to cause panic in the crowd and slow them down, but what he actually did was far more clever. He had shot the lock off a cage of monkeys and opened the door, letting the little animals out to terrorize the customers. By the time Jon and Halladay got to that part of the club, people were slamming into them to get away, and one screaming woman even had one of the critters attached to her shoulder, holding on to her hair and obviously enjoying the ride.
This was fairly effective in slowing down the cops in their pursuit, and Shinsky’s next trick was even more so. The shrieks of fear on the far west side of the big room, close to the exit, were even louder after three or four more shots rang out and everyone on that side of the club ran past the cops to get away from whatever had been released this time. Jon and Halladay rounded some bushes and now faced a dark, empty section of dance floor, the music still thrumming and the colored lights still flashing. On the far side of the floor was the biggest cage they had seen yet, with the words BAGHEERA THE BLACK PANTHER shining from a sign above it.
Jon soon realized that the dance floor was not really empty, because when certain lights flashed on it, a dark shadow with two bright eyes became visible. A big Indian leopard was moving toward them across the floor.
“This is a new one,” Halladay said.
“You go around to the left,” Jon said after briefly surveying the scene, “and I’ll go right. Hopefully it’s been fed recently and isn’t hungry, but worst case scenario … one of us might have to shoot it.”
“Worst case scenario is we lose our suspect,” Halladay said, and promptly put about five bullets into the panther.
Jon looked at him incredulously, but the big Scot just shrugged.
“Nooo!” yelled a safari-clad female employee who was arriving behind them and was probably a caretaker of the cat, because she ran to its side while Jon and Halladay ran past it toward the exit.
Dayfall Page 9
