Devil Dead

by Linda Ladd

  Claire shrugged. “No reason. Just thought it was kinda creepy that she just up and disappeared like that.”

  “Yeah, it is creepy. What about you? You married?”

  “No way.”

  “Got a boyfriend?” Lydie asked Claire.

  “There’s this guy I hang with some, but he’s outta town a lot. You with somebody?”

  “Nobody. Unfortunately for me. I’m all alone in the world.”

  After that, they talked some more about work and stuff, while Claire watched the door for Clarence Carver and his devil-worshipping friends, but they never showed up. Almost an hour later, they left Devil Dead and walked down the street to another bar called the Wagging Dog, where they spent another hour in the noisy, crowded dive, which was the last place on earth that Claire wanted to hang out, but all the while she was subtly pumping Lydie for information about girls who had disappeared from Tit Tats and getting to know as much about the other waitresses as humanly possible. She didn’t want to have to keep the job any longer than she had to. And she did find out a lot, but mostly about the other girls, where they lived, who they dated, why they had to work in such a disgusting place. Lydie didn’t give up her own address so easily, and Claire wondered why.

  More important, she discovered that there had been three or four girls who at various times during the past year failed to show up one day, without a word to Daddy the Creep, and who nobody ever heard from again. Even when the other girls tried to get hold of them. Which was quite a bevy of coincidences in Claire’s book. After a while, she got tired and was about to beg off and escape the sordid barhopping routine, when Lydie kept staring at something behind Claire’s back.

  “Wow, look at that guy.”

  Claire turned on the stool and glanced over at the front door. Black looked good, all right, and he was staring right back at her, too. At first, of course, he didn’t even recognize her. Well, crap and damn it. What the hell was he doing there? And then and most unfortunately, it dawned on him that the sleazy black-haired vixen at the bar was his very own personal honeybunch and was sitting at the bar with her very bare legs crossed and drinking booze with a similarly attired floozy. His eyes traveled down her body and up again, lingering a long moment on her black hair and in much the same way that had been happening to her all day long. However, Black didn’t really look as pleased with her as all the other guys had. She almost laughed to herself at his stunned expression.

  “He’s really giving you the eye, Tammy. You interested? Or is your boyfriend a serious thing?”

  “No, no, just somebody I hang out with. Know what? He is looking me over. Think I’ll just go over and check him out. You mind?”

  “No, I just wish he was looking at me like that. Okay, I’m tired anyway. I’m heading home. Thanks for hanging out with me, Tammy. And good luck with that guy.”

  Grabbing her grocery bag full of grotesque Tit Tats togs, Claire slinked herself straight over to Black. He waited beside the door, still looking her up and down, and not in a sunny, happy kinda way. “Hello, Daddy,” she said when she got to him.

  “Oh, God, I’m afraid to even ask what that means. Or what you’ve been doing tonight. But I will. And who’s your new friend?”

  “I’m undercover, sweetheart. You know, since I’m private now, I do undercover work. My name is now Tammy Jones, and I’ve come over here to pick you up because my friend over there thinks you’re as hot as hell. She thinks you’re interested in taking me home with you. Are you?”

  “I am rather interested in why you’re dressed like that. And what’s with the Liz Taylor wig?”

  Claire laughed. Poor Black. “It’s not a wig. I dyed my hair black, and I’m dead on my feet and I need to get out of here and take a very long shower to lather all the degradation still clinging to my skin.”

  “Please tell me that horrible color is going to wash out before the wedding.”

  “Of course, it will. I think. Okay, enough about the hair. Act like you’re propositioning me for sex so we can blow this dump, and try to make it look good.”

  “I don’t have to try.” Black put his arm around her waist and swiveled her quickly around until her back was pressed up against the wall. He propped his left arm over her head and grinned down into her face. “Know what? I find that outfit rather stimulating, now that I’ve seen it up close. You look nice and slutty. Maybe you can wear it around the house every day and see what happens.”

  “I know what will happen.”

  “Damn right.”

  “You’re pretty good at this kind of thing, Black. What’s up with that? You got lots of practice pickin’ up hookers in bars? That it?”

  “Is that what you are? I thought you were going for the exhausted-stripper-after-work look.”

  “Just keep up the smiling and look like you want me so Lydie won’t get suspicious. What are you doing here, anyway? You’re supposed to be in Miami.”

  “Got to thinking about you and what you probably looked like in this outfit, and so I came home early to get a look at you. My patient’s on the right meds now and calmed down enough to sleep.” He nuzzled her neck and whispered close to her ear. “Appears that I made the right decision.”

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “I called Will since you turned off your phone. You know, just like I asked you never to do. He said he was tailing you in case of trouble and that you ended up here and that you’d been working as a waitress all day, and that you were dead on your feet and probably wanted go home but that you never knew when to hang it up. He didn’t tell me you were dressed so provocatively.”

  “Don’t give me that. I told you about this getup on the phone. What do you think two-bit whores wear, Black?” Claire tried to smile seductively as she said it, or at least gave it a shot since she’d never done it before. “And he’s right about the tired thing. I’ve been working at Tit Tats all day long. My feet hurt like you wouldn’t believe. All I want to do is soak in a hot bath and take a couple of handfuls of Excedrin.”

  “Tit Tats? What the hell is that?”

  “Just this real classy gentleman’s club/hamburger joint kinda place.”

  Black leaned down close, his lips touching her ear, and yes, it gave her a chill down her arm. “You do look rather sexy, I must say. Let’s go home and let me take that little crop top thing off you and burn it in the backyard. Then we’ll catch up in the bedroom.”

  Claire laughed softly. “I’d love to, believe me. But sorry, Charlie, romance is not in the cards tonight. My feet hurt too much.”

  “Don’t be cruel. I’ve been gone a long time.”

  “You’ve been gone one day.”

  “One day can be a long time when you are dressed in that.”

  “Oh, brother, that is just so massively lame, I can hardly believe you actually said it. C’mon, let’s get outta here. Novak’s right, I’ve had enough for one day. I’m hangin’ it up.”

  “My pleasure.” Black put his arm around her waist and led her outside, as if well practiced and adept at escorting loose women out of bars. Once they were outside, she waved good-bye to Novak, who was still watching from inside his truck across the street. They both walked down the sidewalk about a block and got inside Black’s Range Rover, and Black instantly forgot to bitch and/or drool over her outfit and became quite the inquisitor, wanting to know everything about the Andrea Quinn investigation, especially if they had any leads that would give a ray of hope to Jonas Quinn and his minuscule wife. She told him what little they knew so far, and then he said they needed to get home and let him admire her outfit while he took it off.

  Claire smiled to herself because she wondered if he would admire her disgusting and even worse Tit Tats outfit with as much aplomb. Which by the way, was the stupidest name for a restaurant that she’d ever heard in her life. More important than any of that, however, lay the pertinent question: Why would Andrea Quinn want to work there? Her father was rich enough to float around on a giant luxury yacht wi
th a bunch of white-uniformed, cretin-like, gun-slinging henchmen, was he not? He had to be sending her all the money she could ever want or need, and probably supplying her with credit cards galore, too.

  Andrea’s parents doted on her, said she had lots of friends in Paris and in Sydney, so why would she degrade herself by working at the most humiliating place in the whole southern U.S. of A., Tit Tats? And what exactly was going on with Andrea’s French friend, Pierre? Were they in cahoots about something illegal, maybe? Maybe she should give Jonas a call and see what he knew about Pierre Dubois’s extracurricular activities and if they landed in the realm of criminal variety?

  “Hey, Black, when did you say you were leaving for Paris?”

  “Next day or two, not sure exactly.”

  “Mind if I tag along?”

  Black stopped at a stop sign and leaned on the wheel when he looked at her. “Are you serious?”

  “Oh, yeah. Not quite sure yet, but the investigation might be headed to Gay Paree. You do have some contacts over there, don’t you? Some who might be able to get flight information on passengers coming in and out of Paris from the U.S. since Andrea’s been missing?”

  “Yes. As far as that goes, I can find out who has flown out of Louis Armstrong, too. Jack Holliday can get that info. His company’s based at the airport, and he’s got connections in aviation.”

  “Then do it. I’m gonna put a call through to her parents and see exactly what Pierre Dubois is to her and why he followed her to Louisiana to get into an argument. You need to get on the phone with Jack Holliday and have him see if this guy flew home to Paris in the last week or so. He was the last person anybody at the restaurant saw her with, and they were arguing. Tell him to get any kind of surveillance tapes that he can, too.”

  “Who is this Pierre?”

  “Some guy who liked to come see her at the restaurant and jump all over her for working at such a sordid place. What time is it in Tahiti?”

  “Doesn’t matter what time it is. Call them. Jonas has been phoning me twice a day for news, sometimes more often than that.”

  Suddenly Claire felt really excited about pursuing the new lead. Private work was not turning out so bad after all. In fact, other than aching feet, she was rather enjoying it. And Black didn’t even mind that she was dressed like a gross and nasty-looking prostitute and frequenting crummy bars and dives with similarly attired girlfriends. Of course, he couldn’t say much, even if he hated it worse than poison. After all, this P.I. stuff was his brilliant brainchild. No matter what she stooped to, he’d just have to live with it. But the Paris trip was certainly an option now. And the Frenchman was their best lead to date. Maybe Andrea was more than a regular college girl. Maybe she had some kind of serious trouble chasing her to New Orleans from Paris. Maybe she wasn’t the angel everybody thought she was. That would certainly throw a wrench in the works, all right, but again, the case was getting more interesting every day, to be sure. And now she had Novak working with her. He could hold down the home front and continue investigating on his own if she had to go to Paris. Maybe, just maybe, things were beginning to fall into place.

  Witch Way

  Diana tried to forget the bleeding man named Frankie. She tried to forget what her mommy did to him. She wished Luna hadn’t killed him. She wished Luna hadn’t gone crazy and become evil. She wept hard when she was alone and was sure that Luna wouldn’t find out. But when Luna was around, Diana did whatever she said. She was very afraid of her now. So when Luna wanted to pray, they’d pray in the Sanctuary, and when she wanted to hunt, they hunted and fished and stuffed the animals they caught so they could sell them.

  And then Luna told Diana that she could never again talk to anybody but her. She could say nothing to anyone, not even the neighbor ladies who sometimes brought them food or the big man who lived down the road. Luna had begun to let him come visit them because he brought them groceries and comic books and magazines for Diana to read and sometimes he gave Luna some money, but he never stepped foot inside the house after that first time when Luna had invited him to supper. He never went anywhere near the barn or the Sanctuary or anywhere else on their property. He would climb up on the front porch but he didn’t say much when he came by, and he didn’t try to talk to Diana again because Luna had told him that she got upset if people talked to her.

  So he just came and put the grocery sacks on the porch and looked pityingly at Diana, and then he went away again in his truck. Diana didn’t care about him. It was getting where she didn’t care about much at all. Luna had taught her to read, but it took a long time and the letters and the words were hard to remember. There were so many of them. She learned to write her name, first and last, and Luna was very proud of her for doing that. Diana was proud that she knew most of her letters, too, even if she had trouble pronouncing some words.

  And she had learned to find better hiding places out in the swamp for when her mommy turned into Bad Luna and stormed around and screamed her name. Diana and Spirit would hide deep in the swamp until her mommy took the shot in her arm and went off to sleep. She would sleep a very long time, and Diana was glad. She still gave the little pills to Diana but Diana didn’t take them anymore. She just threw them in the bayou when Luna wasn’t looking. They made her sick and made her do terrible things that she didn’t want to do. Most of all, she dreaded when Luna went down to the tavern, for fear that she would bring a new man home to sacrifice to Satan.

  There came a day when Diana was sitting on the swing on the old oak tree in the side yard and twisting around and then letting go and letting it spin until she stopped, because it made her feel kind of dizzy and light-headed and she liked that feeling. That was the day when her whole world changed. Her mommy had caught a ride into a distant place called Houma with the lady up the road, so she could buy Diana a birthday present for the next day when she turned eighteen. So Diana was all alone and she pushed the swing lazily back and forth with her toe, daydreaming about what her birthday present might be. She hoped it would be her own private radio that she could take up to her room to listen to, one that played lots of fast music that she could dance around to. She didn’t want any more sharp knives, or guns, or arrows to kill things with. She was sick and tired of killing things, like her mommy had killed that poor man Frankie. Luna had burned his body in their burn pit and shoveled all his ashes into a coffee can and thrown it far out into the bayou, and then she had acted like it had never happened. Diana wondered where he had come from and why Luna killed him and if she really was Satan walking the earth like she said she was. She was really evil now. Diana knew that for sure. But she hadn’t killed anybody else since the night that Diana had first taken the drugs. At least, not that Diana knew about. So maybe it was over. Maybe she would never kill and sacrifice people ever again. Maybe she was back to being a good Wiccan instead.

  Suddenly Spirit jumped up from where he was napping in the shade against the tree trunk and started up with some shrill and scared kind of barking. He was looking down the gravel road that led to the bayou road. She jerked her attention in that direction, and that’s when she saw two people just walking right up to her house. They were almost to her now. It was a girl who looked to be older than Diana, and a boy who was probably pretty much older because he had some whiskers growing on his face. He was really cute, though, cuter than anyone she had ever seen. She just couldn’t seem to take her eyes off him. He looked like all those handsome super heroes in her comic books.

  Both of the other kids were dressed in flip-flops and long shorts and loose Tshirts that had a word written across the front in big red letters. It said T-U-L-A-N-E, whatever that meant. The girl’s shirt was dark blue; the boy’s was green and had a big kind of wave, or something on it. Diana grabbed Spirit’s collar and held him back. He didn’t like strangers to come up their road. He would attack them if they tried to hurt her, so she held on to him tightly. Luna would be so mad that they were there. She’d probably kill them like she had killed that man
named Frankie.

  “Well, hello there, good lookin’,” the really, really cute guy said to her. “You live here?”

  Very afraid now, Diana wasn’t so sure what she should say. She had never spoken to anybody but the ladies up the bayou and the big man, and she hadn’t talked to them in a long, long time. What if Luna found out? What if she shot them with her arrows? Or stuck her Bolin in their necks and made the blood spurt? So, after a little while, she just nodded and kept quiet.

  “That dog bite?” the cute guy asked her.

  She shook her head.

  Then the girl smiled and said, “Hey, what’s your name?”

  Diana looked around, but no one else was about. Then she said, “Diana.”

  “Well, hey there, Diana.” The boy glanced around at the house and the yard. “You live here by yourself?”

  Diana shook her head.

  “Well, hey, how ’bout you lettin’ us swim down there?” He pointed off behind their house where the bayou widened and turned to the west. “Think that’d be all right? We saw that little dock thing of yours on the bank down that way. But I thought we better come up here and ask you first.”

  “I guess. If you want to.” It seemed really strange to be talking to people, but Diana kind of liked it.

  “Any gators out there, you know, the kind we need to worry about?”

  “Gators are plumb everywhere around here. Just gotta be careful, and stuff.”

  “How old are you?” the guy asked suddenly.

  “Eighteen. Well, I’ll be that old when tomorrow comes.”

  “You look older. You’re pretty damn hot, to tell you the truth.”