by R. J. Jagger
She pulled her shoe on as fast as she could and ran. At the end of the alley, London came around the corner. Her stance was wide. Her gun was out and pointed at Shade’s heart. A silencer was screwed into the barrel.
Shade stopped as fast as she could.
Five steps away, that’s how far she was.
Too far to charge.
Her instinct was to turn and run but an image of the bullet burying itself into her spine stopped her.
She froze.
She couldn’t go forward.
She couldn’t go backwards.
All she could do was stare into the woman’s eyes.
They were dark.
They were filled with intensity.
The barrel of the weapon rose from the heart to the face.
“You left me no choice,” London said. “Number three.’
Then the gun fired.
78
W ilde had a bad feeling about Jennifer Pazour’s raven-haired friend in the photograph. Every time he closed his eyes he pictured her dressed up in some pinup outfit and sprawled out on top of a roof. The plan was to call every phone number that they’d found in the victim’s apartment and find out who answered.
Wilde picked up the phone.
Before he could dial, Alabama snatched it out of his hand. “I’ll do the talking.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the one who knows how to be nice,” she said.
“And I don’t?”
“You’re okay but you’re not me.”
“You almost shot me once,” Wilde said. “Did we forget about that?”
“That was a warning shot and you know it.”
She dialed the first number. As it rang she added, “Don’t stop arguing just because you always lose. One of these days I’m going to let you win.”
“Let me?”
She nodded.
“It might even be this week. You never know.”
Over the next hour they got a lot of empty phone rings. The few people who did answer didn’t have much to say. None of them were particularly close to Pazour. Then something happened that they didn’t expect. A ringing phone was answered with, “Law firm.”
“Law firm?”
“Yes, Stuart Black’s office. Can I help you?”
“Is Jennifer Pazour there?”
“Nobody by that name works here.”
“We’re trying to find her and this number was in her notes,” Alabama said. “Maybe she’s a client.”
“Hold on.”
A hand went over the phone.
The woman on the other end was shouting something to someone.
Then she was back.
“I just talked to Stuart. He’s never heard of anyone named Jennifer Pazour and neither have I. Sorry.”
“Why does she have your number?”
“I wouldn’t know. Maybe someone referred Stuart to her.”
Right.
That made sense.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
79
A fter dark Friday night Fallon and Jundee drove past Vampire’s house. The woman’s car was in the driveway, most of the lower level was lit and two upper rooms had lights on. “She’s getting ready to go out,” Jundee said. “That smaller window on the upper level is probably the bathroom. The one next to it is a bedroom.” They pulled to the curb as far down the street as they could while still maintaining surveillance and killed the engine.
“Maybe she’s just going to bed,” Fallon said.
Jundee tapped two Camels out of a pack, lit them both and handed one to Fallon.
“No,” he said. “If she was doing that she would have turned the downstairs lights off first. She’s going out. Her wild side’s calling her.”
“That’s right. It’s Friday night, isn’t it? You know what? After we do this we should go out somewhere and get drunk.”
“Deal.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Nothing changed at Vampires while they smoked their cigarettes.
Fallon wore black shorts, white ankle socks, tennis shoes and a dark blue sleeveless blouse. The streetlights were a good distance away.
The interior of the car was dark.
Jundee flicked his butt out the window, still lit, and watched it bounce across the street. Then he squeezed Fallon’s knee.
“Take your shorts off.”
She hesitated, then pulled her shoes off and wiggled her shorts down.
Jundee twirled them on a finger and tossed them on the dash.
Then he put a hand on each one of her knees and spread her legs.
She let him.
She wore white cotton panties.
“Don’t move a muscle.”
“Okay.”
He got down on the floorboard between her legs and nibbled on her knee.
It tickled.
She wiggled.
“No moving.”
“Sorry.”
“Stay perfectly still.”
“Okay.”
He nibbled his way up to her panties but didn’t touch them, not with his tongue, not with his chin, not with anything. Then he did the same up her other leg. Her breathing was deep and she started to moan.
He brought his face up and pressured his mouth and chin between her legs.
She spread her knees wider.
He nibbled on the cotton, soaking it.
Then he put a hand on each side of her panties and ripped them off.
He threw them out the window.
Then he ran his tongue up and down between her legs and didn’t stop until he owned her.
80
T he bullet passed so close to Shade’s head that the vacuum actually moved her hair. “If you ever make me pull this trigger again the results won’t be as pretty,” London said. “Do we have an understanding?”
Shade knew the right answer.
What came out of her mouth was the wrong one.
“No we don’t have an understanding. You’re either going to have to kill me or let me go.”
She turned and walked.
“Stop!”
She didn’t.
“Last chance!”
She braced for the bullet but kept walking.
“Damn you’re a little bitch.”
Shade stopped and turned.
“I’ll make you a deal,” London said. “We’ll stick together until this Visible Moon thing is done. You don’t try to shake me and I don’t kill you. When the time’s right, though, after it’s all over, you come back with me with no resistance. You don’t try to escape. You don’t do anything to force me to kill you.”
Shade chewed on it.
“I made a promise to ferret out a mole,” she said. “If I let you take me back, the mole wins.”
London made a mean face.
She pointed the barrel straight up in the air and pulled the trigger.
“You’re not making this easy for me.”
“Do this,” Shade said. “Help me find Visible Moon. I won’t escape or sneak off. We’ll work out the rest of it later.”
London frowned.
“Like I said, you’re a little bitch.”
Shade nodded.
“I trust that means we have a deal?”
London unscrewed the silencer and shoved it in her purse, followed by the gun.
“It looks that way,” she said.
“Good. You won’t be sorry.”
They walked down the alley to the main street.
“You were right about what you guessed before,” London said. “It was Penelope Tap who hired me. She didn’t do it directly, she did it through a chain of command, but she was the one at the top of that chain.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Is she the mole?”
“I’m almost positive,” Shade said. “Maybe you can help me get the proof.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
No.
She
wasn’t.
Not even a little bit.
“You have ties to her,” Shade said. “Maybe we can use that somehow. She’s playing you for a sucker. Don’t let her.”
81
J ennifer Pazour was a taxi driver before she disappeared. “I’ll bet dollars to donuts the guy who killed her started out as a fare,” Wilde said, grabbing his hat. Fifteen minutes later they walked into the main office of the Yellow Cab Company and asked to speak to the main guy in charge.
“That’s Gunny Bob. He’s out back.”
Out back they found a man bent into the open hood of an earwax-yellow vehicle with grease up to his elbows and a cigar dangling from his mouth.
“You Gunny Bob?”
The man looked up, first at Wilde then at Alabama.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Someone said you’re in charge of this place.”
“I am. You want to shake my hand?”
Wilde fixated on the grease, pictured it migrating to his suit in spite of his best intentions, but extended his hand anyway. Gunny Bob pulled back at the last second and said, “Okay, you passed. What can I do for you?”
“Jennifer Pazour worked here,” Wilde said.
The man nodded.
“Worked is the right tense,” he said. “She stopped showing up, never called or nothing.”
“We know, we’re trying to find her,” Wilde said.
It was a lie but it made things simple.
“Why, did something happen to her?”
“She disappeared,” Wilde said. “I’m a P.I. and this is my assistant.”
Alabama grabbed Gunny Joe’s hand and shook it.
“Actually I’m his boss,” she said. “He just has a hard time admitting it.”
The man smiled.
“I’ll bet you are.”
He handed her a rag.
Alabama took it, wiped her hands and said, “We were wondering if she picked up the wrong fare.”
Gunny Bob frowned.
“She was too pretty to be a driver,” he said. “I told her that a hundred times. She always dressed down, never wore any makeup or anything like that, and kept her hair tucked under a baseball cap. She tried to look like a guy as much as she could. Even with all that, though, she was still a looker. It always bothered me that she was too pretty for the job, especially driving nights.”
“She drove nights?”
He nodded.
“Four nights a week,” he said. “She liked to keep her days free.”
“For what?”
“Modeling,” Gunny Bob said.
“For magazines and stuff like that?”
Right.
That.
“Plus she modeled for art classes,” he said.
Wilde spotted a rusty Coke can by his feet and kicked it. “What about her fares? Did anything weird happen before she stopped showing up for work?”
Gunny Bob didn’t hesitate.
“One guy, she complained about,” he said. “He was paying with a $5.00 bill and it dropped into her lap. He reached down and picked it up before she even knew what was going on. In the process he made contact, if you catch my drift. He didn’t grab her or anything, but there was a brushing involved.”
“Tell me about him.”
“That’s it,” Gunny Bob said. “I don’t know any more than what I just told you.”
“Did she describe him or tell you his name?”
“No.”
“Where’d she pick him up?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “She never said.”
“When did it happen? How long before she stopped coming to work?”
Gunny Bob wrinkled his forehead and scratched his nose.
When he took his finger away grease marked the spot.
“I’m guessing so don’t quote me on this,” he said. “It was a week or so ago.”
Walking back to Blondie, Alabama said, “Do you think the crotch guy killed her?”
“Maybe but it’s more likely he was just a pervert,” Wilde said. “I’m a lot more interested in the modeling she did for art students. If the killer is the pinup painter, maybe that’s where he meets his victims.”
He hopped in, fired up the engine then shut it off.
“Be right back,” he said.
He trotted around to the back, pulled Gunny Bob out of the engine compartment and showed him a picture of Jennifer Pazour and a raven-haired woman.
“Do you know her?”
The man nodded.
“That’s Jennifer.”
“No, I mean the one with the black hair.”
The man studied it.
Then he shook his head.
“No, a face that pretty, I’d remember. I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
“Okay, thanks for everything.”
82
W hen Vampire’s upstairs lights went out, Jundee pointed and said, “She’s done primping. We’re getting close.” Five minutes later a black car pulled into the driveway. The headlights stayed on, no one got out. The mansion door opened and the silhouette of a woman appeared, a woman wearing a long tight white dress and a large fluffy hat.
“That’s Vampire,” Fallon said.
“She’s not what I expected.”
A red scarf dangled off the woman’s right shoulder. She slid into the passenger seat and the car pulled away almost immediately.
Jundee and Fallon ducked down as it drove past.
After the taillights disappeared around the corner, they got out and headed for the house on foot. The lower level was still lit but no shadows or movements played behind the window coverings.
The gate was open.
They walked up the driveway and knocked on the front door.
No one came.
They knocked louder.
Jundee tried the knob and found it locked.
“Come on.”
They headed around to the back.
The privacy was absolute.
No one from a street or house could see them.
All the windows at ground level were closed and locked but the upper floors were open. Fallon climbed a trellis, which brought her four feet to the left of a window. She took a deep breath and jumped. One hand bounced off the sill but the other got a grip. She muscled in then came down and unlocked the back door for Jundee.
They were in.
“We’re officially insane,” Fallon said.
“Shit,” Jundee said.
Fallon followed his eyes to her leg.
Blood was tricking out of the bottom stitch, not rampant but already trailing past her knee and halfway down her calf.
She looked around for something to wipe it with.
A washer and dryer were to their left.
In the corner was a large basket of dirty clothes. Fallon grabbed whatever it was on top and wiped her leg. What she used turned out to be a white blouse. They could wash it for two days and still not get the blood out.
“We need to take that with us when we leave,” Jundee said.
“In that case—”
She ripped off a strip and tied it around her leg. The rest of the garment got stuffed into her back pocket as far as it would go, with the rest hanging out.
“Let’s get this over with.”
“Right.”
They headed into the guts of the structure, across the first floor, under a crystal chandelier, past a large saltwater aquarium and up a winding oak staircase with a fancy oriental runner.
“It’s up here,” Jundee said. “I can smell it.”
“Something doesn’t feel right.”
Jundee halted in the middle of a step.
He heard nothing he shouldn’t.
“It’s okay,” he said.
Fallon shook her head.
“No, something’s wrong.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Something.”
Jundee continued up the stairs.
“Your nerves are playing tricks
on you.”
She didn’t follow.
“Let’s just forget it and get out of here,” she said.
“No, we’re already here.”
83
S hade told London everything she knew about Visible Moon—how the woman was abducted, how Tehya was scalped, how Mojag was in Denver trying to spot the man he saw in the bar that night, how she hired a PI named Jack Wilde, how she found the rental house down south where Visible Moon had been held captive and, most importantly, the scribbling on the floor to the effect that Visible Moon would die that night.
“Mojag said he didn’t feel Visible Moon’s presence in the world any more after last night,” she said.
London pulled her baseball cap off.
Her hair was matted and sweaty.
She ruffled it.
“What about you? Have you felt her presence?”
Shade wrinkled her brow.
“In the end, that’s all just mind play. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I’ll take that as a no,” London said. “How about before? Did you feel her presence then?”
She nodded.
“I hate to say it, but yes.”
London put her hat back on.
“To me, none of that mind stuff is real. It has no basis in reality. What we need to do is focus on why the guy took her in the first place. What’s his agenda?”
“Unknown.”
“You must have some idea.”
“I do, but it’s not grounded in any facts,” Shade said. “I picture him as a snake. He ate Tehya, which got him full. Then he took the remaining food and is keeping it alive for later, when he gets hungry again.”
They were near Market Street and swung by the mailbox to see if Mojag had marked it.
What Shade saw she could hardly believe.
There on the back of the box was a big red X.
It was written in lipstick.
“I can’t believe it. He actually spotted the guy.”
“You think?”
“It’s either that or something’s going on that’s so important that he wants to meet tonight,” Shade said. “I can’t imagine that anything happened since this morning other than he spotted the guy.”