Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Jean-Claude had also found underwear, again it was thong, but it was actually comfortable, because it was made of soft T-shirt material, even the bit that went between your cheeks. Most of the girl thongs I’d looked at had had elastic or lace running up your ass, and that just didn’t look comfy at all.

  I had to flash the badge just to get through the crowd. When I got up to the line, the officer closest to me didn’t really look at me. He saw a woman in boots and a short skirt and a leather jacket and said, “Club’s closed for the night, you won’t be working.”

  I shoved my badge into his face, and he had to back up to focus on it. “Actually, Officer,” and I read his name tag in the bright lights, “Douglas, I think I will be working tonight.”

  He looked down at me, because he was taller than me. I watched his face try to wrap around the look of me and the badge in one package. He wasn’t the first police officer to have a problem putting it all together, and he wouldn’t be the last. I might think like a cop, but I don’t really look like one. Especially not tonight.

  “I’m Marshal Anita Blake, Sergeant Zerbrowski called me.” Always good to remind people that I hadn’t invited myself into their party. I had the authority to do it, but I tried to do as little uninvited butting in as I could. No cop, no matter what the flavor, likes someone horning in on their case. Especially not a big one.

  Officer Douglas stared at my badge like he didn’t believe it was real. “No one told me that the feds were coming.”

  “Ya know, it’s four in the morning. I asked your permission to cross this line as a courtesy, but this badge is a federal badge and it gives me the right to cross this line, enter this crime scene, and do my fucking job. If you stop me, Officer Douglas, I will charge you with obstructing a federal officer in the performance of her duty.”

  He looked like he’d swallowed something sour, but he waved another officer over. He had him take his place at the barrier and held the tape for me. “I’ll walk you through, ma’am.”

  I guess I couldn’t blame him. I mean what if the badge wasn’t real, or wasn’t mine? Of course, if I’d been a big, strapping guy, he wouldn’t have-had a problem with it. You can always tell a new cop from a veteran. New ones still judge a lot on appearance, once you’ve been on the cop for a few years, you stop doing that. Because by then you’ve learned that what’s on the outside doesn’t tell you that much about what’s on the inside. A cute little old lady can pull a trigger just as well as a big scary looking guy. Rookies don’t know that yet. They haven’t learned the lesson that you can’t tell by looking.

  Officer Douglas didn’t shorten his stride for me, and he didn’t need to. I was used to walking scenes with Dolph, who made Douglas look petite. I kept up with him even in the high-heeled boots. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. Probably just as well.

  Some of the police on this side of the river don’t know me on sight. They thought what Douglas had thought, that I worked here, because they catcalled after us, “Hey, Dougie, going to get a piece. No lap dances on company time, Douglas.” And worse. I ignored it all. It was four in the morning, and I hadn’t been to bed yet, I didn’t care. Besides, I’d learned the hard way that the more attention you pay to shit like that, the more you have to shovel. Ignore it, and it usually goes away, because it just isn’t any fun if they don’t get a rise out of you. Besides, they were teasing Douglas more than me. I was just the nameless girl who gave them an excuse.

  He ignored it, but his face was blazing by the time we got to the main doors. He actually held the door for me, and I let him. There’d been a point in my life when I would have not let him hold the door. But with his face already burning with embarrassment, I wasn’t going to arm wrestle him for the door. I might have to work with him again, so screw it, he could hold the door. Besides, if I put him on the spot about the door, it would have given his coworkers more to tease him about, and I didn’t want that.

  We went through the glass doors into a little entry area that reminded me of the front of a nice resturant, complete with a little desk and a maître d’. Though that probably wasn’t the tall guy’s official title. But hey, he was wearing a white suit jacket with a tie, he did look like a maître d’. When I’d seen him last, he was tall and self-assured and had taken my name and Asher’s and called on a phone to have a “hostess” escort us in. Now he leaned on his counter, head in his hands, looking ill.

  There were bathrooms off to the left, and a short hallway that led into the club. From the door you really couldn’t see into the club. It gave them a last chance to keep out the undesirables, or the underagers, before someone saw breasts. The color scheme was muted blues and purples, and if they hadn’t had silhouettes of naked women on the walls, it would have looked like a restaurant, oh, and the poster advertising that Wednesday was amatuer night.

  I couldn’t remember the big guy’s name, just couldn’t remember it. But it didn’t matter, because Douglas took me past him without a word. Up the little ramp, and the club spilled out around us. There was a good solid bar area to the left that would have done any club proud, but the rest of the room was all strip club. I mean, what else do you use little round stages for? The room was mostly blues and purples, and maybe other colors. I couldn’t tell for sure, because most of the big room was lit by black light, or other odd lighting, so that the room was lit, but it was still terribly dark. I’d been surprised the first time I was here, it was as if light could be dark, so that though there was no actual shadowed area, the whole room seemed like it was in a shadow.

  It was a weekend night, the place was packed, but quiet. They’d had to turn off the music, and the DJ’s endless prattle was mercifully absent. In fact, the room seemed wrong this quiet, as if the noise was part of the decor. There were men, and more women than you’d think in the audience, huddled now all together like mourners at an unexpected funeral. The dancers were all in one corner with a plainclothes detective that I didn’t recognize. A big man in a uniform that matched Officer Douglas’s strode toward us, with a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. He still had his hat on, as if his round face would have been incomplete without it.

  “Douglas, what the fuck are you bringing me another stripper for? We got all the girls that were in the club tonight over there.” He motioned with his thumb over his shoulder. He had small, beady eyes, or maybe I was just tired of being called a stripper, and discounted like I didn’t matter, just because I happened to be a girl and not in uniform. “Unless, you saw some-thin’ outside. Did you, girlie, see anything?”

  I raised my badge so he could see it, and stepped around Douglas so I was facing what had to be his boss. “Federal Marshal Anita Blake, and you are?”

  I could see his face darken even in the odd lighting. “Sheriff Christopher, Melvin Christopher.” He looked me up and down, not the way a man will if he thinks a woman is pretty, but like he was sizing me up, and wasn’t impressed. “You know, if you don’t want people thinking you’re a stripper, you should dress better, miss.”

  “That’s Marshal Blake to you, Sheriff, and in the big city, this is called date clothes. Dresses down to your knees went out of style a few decades back.”

  His face got a little darker, his eyes went from unfriendly to hostile. “You think you’re funny?”

  “No,” I said, and I took a deep breath in and let it out slow. “Look, you stop calling me a stripper, and I’ll stop making cute remarks at you. Let’s both pretend we’re here to solve a crime, and just do our jobs.”

  “We don’t need federal help here.”

  I sighed. I looked around the room and didn’t see anyone I knew. “Fine, you want to do it this way, we can do it this way. If you prevent me from questioning all the vampires before dawn comes, I will charge you with obstructing a federal officer in the performance of her duties.”

  “Some of them your friends, that it? I heard you were coffin bait.”

  I shook my head and walked wide around Douglas
, which put me out of reach for the sheriff.

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  “To question the witnesses,” I said, and I kept a little bit of an eye on the sheriff, because I wasn’t sure what he would do.

  “How do you know where they are?”

  “They aren’t out here, or out in the parking lot, so they’ve got to be in the Sapphire Room.” I was almost to the little raised platform in front of a pair of nice wooden doors. There was another uniformed officer in front of the doors. I had been in there before, so I knew the sound was muffled inside the room. That’s why I hadn’t yelled for Zerbrowski already.

  I unzipped the leather jacket as I went up the steps. I had my badge in my left hand, held where the uniform on the door could see it clearly. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do if the sheriff told his man not to let me in. I’d learned that just because I had the legal right to be somewhere, didn’t mean the local police would make it easy. They wouldn’t actually lay hands on me, or boot my ass out, but if they wanted to be uncooperative, they could be.

  “Please move aside, Officer.”

  He actually started to step to the side, but the sheriff said, “You don’t work for her. You move when I say you move.”

  I sighed and thought, Well, shit. Then I had an idea. I reached into the pocket of the leather coat.

  “Be careful what you reach for,” the sheriff said from far too close behind me.

  I turned so I could see him and the other officer. I held up my cell phone. “No need to get excited, Sheriff. Just going to make a phone call.”

  He had his hands on his hips above his Sam Brown belt. He hadn’t unsnapped his gun, so he wasn’t serious. He was just trying to see if I’d spook. If he thought this kind of shit could intimidate me, he’d been playing in the shallow end of the pool for too fucking long.

  I hit the buttons, keeping an eye on the officers in the room. A lot of them had stopped questioning or guarding or whatever they were doing, to watch our little show. Zerbrowski answered on the second ring. “I’m in the club, just outside the doors.”

  “And why aren’t you inside the doors?” he asked, sounding puzzled.

  “The sheriff has ordered his man not to move away from the doors.”

  “Not true,” the sheriff yelled, “but you sure as hell can’t order my man to do shit.”

  I sighed loud enough so Zerbrowski could hear it. “A little help here.”

  Zerbrowski opened the door with the phone still in his hand. “Thanks, Sheriff Christopher, I think Marshal Blake and I have it from here.” He clicked the phone shut, smiled at everybody, and moved aside enough for me to pass through, but not enough for the sheriff, who stood at the bottom of the steps glaring at him. I finally realized that the pissing contest had started before I got there, and I’d just gotten caught in it.

  Zerbrowski shut the door behind us, and leaned against it shaking his head. He’s 5' 9", with short black hair going more and more gray every year. When his wife makes him get it cut, the hair is short and neat. When he forgets, or she’s busy, it’s curly and wavy, and as untidy as the rest of him. His suit was brown, his tie was pale yellow, and so was his shirt. I think it was the first time I’d seen all his clothes match in all the years I’d known him. Okay, match and not have food stains on them.

  His glasses were silver and helped hide that his eyes were tired, but not that he was pissed. He took me off to one side by the fountain with a once-real-live stuffed lion crouching beside it. The Sapphire Room is a cross between a hunting lodge, a safari room, and other things people think men think is masculine. Most of the room was carpeted in leopard print, so that my first thought was, always, Oh, no, a leopard blew up and plastered itself all over everything, but hey, animal prints are in this year. People pay hundreds of dollars a night to be back here, so they must like it.

  Zerbrowski turned his back on the room and motioned for me to move in front of him so that no one would see us talking. “Welcome to the party.”

  “Why are you keeping out all of the sheriff’s men?”

  “When we pulled up, they had the vampires in here and were using crosses on them. They didn’t touch them, just made the crosses glow like hell, and basically said, you talk, or we keep crosses out.”

  “Shit, use of a holy item on a vampire for questioning was ruled assault, what, three months ago in federal court?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and he raised his glasses up and rubbed at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

  “Every vamp here could press charges,” I whispered.

  He nodded and readjusted his glasses. “Like I said, welcome to the party.”

  Before the ruling, a lot of police departments had holy items as part of their uniform, like lapel pins or tietacks, but now they were back to carrying them undercover somewhere on their bodies. Holy items were now considered weapons when dealing with vampires. Which meant what the sheriff had done constituted assault with a deadly weapon.

  “Was it just him, or his men, too?”

  “Some of his men. Before we got here, they were all wearing little cross-shaped lapel pins. I got them to remove them, but only after I threatened to call the closest FBI office.”

  I looked at him, because no cop likes to call in what they so affectionately call the Feebies.

  “I’d rather let the FBI take this entire case away from us than let crap like this go down. The vampires are scared shitless now. If there are any guilty ones here, I can’t tell it, because they’re all either royally pissed, or scared. Most of them won’t even talk to us, and legally they don’t have to.” It didn’t really show in his voice, but he was as angry as I’d seen him. I could see it in the tightness around his eyes, the way his hands kept stiffening up. Zerbrowski was usually one laid back guy, but everybody has their limits. “We got a hit from New Orleans and Pittsburgh. Very similar crimes. Two in Pittsburgh, five in New Orleans, then they moved here.”

  “Lucky us,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but that means we have at least three more bodies to look forward to. We need these nice citizen vamps to talk to us.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Do you have anyone you want me to start with? I mean it’s 4:30, we’ve got about three hours or less until dawn. They’ve got to be allowed to go home before dawn, unless you can charge them with something.”

  “We’ve got a woman dead in the side lot here, multiple vampire bites, and they’re vampires. I could probably get a judge to agree to holding them as material witnesses. I know a judge that hates vampires enough to give me a court order.”

  I shook my head. “We’re trying to smooth this over, not make it worse. Right now they can only sue this city, let’s not give them a reason to sue us, too.”

  He nodded then stepped aside and made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “They are all yours, good luck.”

  There was a group of vampires around the big fireplace in the center of the main room. None of them belonged to Jean-Claude. Some of them were clustered around a table set in front of it the fireplace, in huge thronelike chairs, some on a cushioned seat near the fireplace. One of the vampires was clutching an animal print cushion while he sat in front of the fire. His eyes were wide, and he looked shell-shocked. The other five were scared, or angry, or a mixture of both, but they were holding it together better than the cushion-hugger.

  I showed them my badge and explained who I was. But it wasn’t the badge that made the cushion-hugger whimper, “Oh, God, they’re going to kill us.”

  “Shut up, Roger,” a tall vampire with sleek black hair and angry hazel eyes said. “Why are you here, Ms. Blake? We are being held against our wills, and we are guilty of nothing except being vampires.”

  “And you are?” I asked.

  He stood and straightened a rather nice, conservative suit. “I am Charles Moffat.”

  “I know that name,” I said.

  He looked nervous, just for a moment, then he tried to swallow it. He wa
sn’t twenty-years dead, a baby.

  “You’re one of Malcolm’s deacons for the Church of Eternal Life,” I said.

  He opened his mouth, then closed it, and stood very tall, and said, “Yes, I am, and I’m not ashamed of it.”

  “No, but Malcolm has forbidden any of his church members to frequent this side of the river for nefarious purposes.”

  “How do you know what our master dictates?” He was trying to bluff, and it wasn’t going to work.

  “Because Malcolm talked to the Master of the City and got him to agree to tell Malcolm if any of the church’s members frequented his clubs. You guys aren’t allowed to be anywhere this naughty. You must, and I quote, be absolutely above reproach.”

  One of the vamps who was balding and wore glasses, started rocking in his chair. “I knew we shouldn’t have come. If Malcolm finds out . . .”

  “She is Jean-Claude’s servant, and she must tell him, and he will tell Malcolm.”

  “Actually, the agreement was just to tattle about you coming to our clubs. Malcolm didn’t ask us to keep an eye this side of the river.”

  The bald vampire looked up at me as if I’d offered him salvation. “You won’t tell?”

  “If you guys tell me everything you know about this, I don’t see a reason to.”

  The bald vampire touched Charles Moffat’s arm. Charles jerked away from him. “How can we trust you?”

  “Look, I’m not the one who signed a morals clause with my master and has just been caught in a titty bar—you guys have. So if anyone is questioning someone’s word, shouldn’t it be me? I mean a vampire that goes against the express orders of his master, what good is he either to his master or his kiss?”

  “We of the church do not use the word kiss for a group of vampires. Malcolm feels that it is too sensuous a word.”

  “Fine, but my point stands. You’ve betrayed your master, your church, and your oath, or don’t you in the church take blood oath, either?”