Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “Federal Marshal Anita Blake, asshole, back it up and leave us alone.”

  The look on his face said, clearly, he didn’t believe me. Maybe he was one of those men who just didn’t believe women in authority, or maybe he just wanted to see Nathaniel’s hair spread all over his bed so badly, that he didn’t want to believe it. I’d been willing to buy that it was his wife that liked Nathaniel, right up to the point where he’d been the one that grabbed his arm, touched his hair. His wife might like Nathaniel, who wouldn’t? But it wasn’t her who had a serious hard-on about it.

  I let my jacket fall back into place and used my body to sort of push Nathaniel between Micah and me. No way was I leaving him at the end of the line by Mr. Touchie. I put the badge up and started moving us down the narrow hallway, but I moved sort of backward, so I could keep an eye on the couple. Alright, on one half of the couple.

  The wife was pulling at his arm trying to get him to move away. He jerked away from her and just kept looking at me. It was not a friendly look. In fact, there was enough heat in his eyes to cross that line to hate. I hadn’t done anything to make him hate me, except tell him no. There are men that see no as the ultimate insult, but usually it takes more than a rejection during a bar pickup attempt to get this level of reaction. I kept my attention on him until we were swallowed by one of the curtains that hid the deeper rooms.

  “That was just creepy,” I said.

  “I know him,” Nathaniel said in a small voice.

  I looked at him. “How?”

  He licked his lips, and his eyes looked haunted. “When I was on the streets. He used to pick up the older boys, the ones that were almost too old for the trade.”

  “Too old?” I asked.

  “Most of the men that came down there weren’t looking for men, Anita. They wanted boys. Once you looked too grown-up you had to move where you worked. A different clientele.” He said the last with a bitter little twist of his mouth. “He’s older now, and he didn’t recognize me, but I remember him. I remember one of the older boys warned me about him.”

  “Warned you?”

  Nathaniel nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Did he hurt them?”

  “Not yet, but sometimes everyone gets a feeling about a customer. He can ask for really standard stuff, but after awhile everyone just gets creeped. It’s like you can smell the sickness on them, like you just know that it’s only a matter of time before they hurt someone.”

  I touched his face, and he looked at me, and his eyes held that sadness that he’d come to me with. That look that said he’d seen it all, done it all, and it had destroyed something inside him. I put my hands on either side of his face and kissed him gently. It helped chase some of that lostness away, but not all of it. Some of it clung around the edges.

  Micah made a sound. “Anita, she’s your friend, but . . .”

  I turned and found that Dallas the dancer was on the floor with Ronnie on top of him. She was still dressed from the waist down, but he wasn’t. Her shirt was unbuttoned, and if she’d started the night with a bra, it was gone now.

  I’d had enough. Enough of strangers pawing my boyfriends. Enough of Ronnie dragging our asses down here. Enough of her self-destructive indulgence. I got enough of that kind of shit from Richard, I didn’t need it from her.

  “Veronica Marie Simms,” I said.

  She blinked up at the voice and the sound of all three of her names. “Who are you, my mother?”

  I grabbed the belt of her jeans and lifted her bodily off of the man. It startled her, and me, because I didn’t have to fight to lift her. She was bigger than I was, taller, just bigger, and I lifted her like she weighed nothing. I got her stumbling to her feet.

  Dallas said, “Hey, we weren’t finished.”

  I showed him my badge. “Yeah, you were.” I kept the badge in my left hand and threw Ronnie over my shoulder. I had to bounce her once up in the air to get her settled better, then we were fine. I walked down the hallway, Nathaniel got the curtain and followed us, Micah brought up the rear.

  She didn’t struggle, but she argued, “Anita, put me down!”

  The creepy couple was not waiting for us in the little area in front of the rooms. I was glad. I had my badge out, but I’d have to throw Ronnie on the floor to go for my gun. I scanned the room as we entered it, and the couple was nowhere in sight. Even better.

  “Anita, I am not a fucking child. Put me down!”

  The bouncer came our way, and I flashed my badge at him. He held his hands up, as if to say, no trouble here. We kept walking for the door. The music was still blaring loud enough that it hurt my skull, but the people noise died down as they watched us pass. I don’t know if it was the badge, the fact that a girl was carrying a girl, the fact that Ronnie was probably flashing breast to the entire room, or everybody was mourning the fact that I was taking the two best looking men in the room with me. Whatever, we walked in a strange well of stillness, as everyone stopped dancing, stopped talking, stopped drinking, stopped and watched us.

  I had to use my badge hand to help steady Ronnie as I went up the steps to the platform in front of the door, but we made it just fine. Nathaniel went ahead and got the door that led into the cloakroom. Micah went through the door and hurried in front of me to get the outside door. We went out into the cool autumn air. The door shut behind us, and the silence left my ears ringing.

  “Put me the fuck down.” This time she struggled, not well, not like she could have, but I’d lost patience. She wanted down, I put her down. I dumped her on the gravel on her ass.

  I think she might have yelled at me, but a funny look crossed her face, and she was suddenly scrambling to her feet and running, stumbling toward the grassy field that edged the parking area. She fell onto all fours and started to wretch.

  “Shit,” I said, softly and with feeling. I started walking toward her, and the men came at my back. I motioned them to stay by the last line of cars, as I waded out into the grass to Ronnie. The dry autumn grass made that whish-whish sound against my jeans.

  Ronnie was still on all fours. The sour sweet smell of vomit reached me before I reached her. She had to be my friend, because I went to her, and I swept her hair back from her face and held it like you do a child. Only true friendship would have kept me there while she threw up everything she’d drunk that night.

  I was trying to think of something else, anything else, while I stood there. I’m not good around people who are throwing up. Something about the sound of it and the smell of it leave me fighting not to throw up, too. I looked out across the field, trying to find something else to think about. Nothing was interesting enough, until I looked almost straight out from where I was standing. At first I thought it was a deadfall, a tree, but my eyes made more sense out of it, and I realized it was a person. A pale line of arm, one hand pointing skyward, as if it was propped on something I couldn’t see. It didn’t have to be a dead body. Someone could have come out here and passed out.

  I looked back at Micah and Nathaniel, I motioned them over. Ronnie was starting to slow down. She’d reached the dry heaves, at least.

  “Stay with her.” I knew that by walking up to it, I might be destroying evidence, but I also knew that it could be a mannequin, or someone passed out. I had to be sure before I called in the cavalry. What did it say about my life that I thought dead, murder, before anything else? That I’d worked on homicides too long.

  I walked through the dry grass, and I was moving slower, watching where I put my feet. The grass didn’t make a sound against my jeans, because I was creeping along. If there was a weapon anywhere I didn’t want to step on it.

  The more I saw of the body, the more I thought, dead. The skin had that paleness in the distant halogen lights and the cold light of the stars. It was a man, lying on his back, with that one arm propped up against a dead tree branch. If the hand hadn’t been propped up, I might not have seen it so quickly. Like the girl’s hair at the first scene, someone had taken a little extra
effort to say, hey, look at me. Yeah, it was a man instead of a woman, but he was wearing a leopard skin thong that had been pulled aside so we wouldn’t miss the fact that he was shaved, very shaved. The chances of him not being a stripper that worked at Incubus Dreams were almost nil. Vegas wouldn’t take those odds.

  The fang marks on his neck were black against his skin. More at the bend of his arm, his wrist. I didn’t touch him to move his head to see if he had matching marks on the other side of his neck. I didn’t move his legs and see if they’d marked him low. I just squatted down beside him, trying not to touch the ground anymore than I had to, and touched his arm. Yeah, I’d like to say I was searching for a pulse, but that wasn’t really it. He was cold to the touch, but his arm moved when I pressed, oh so gently. Rigor had either not set in, or it had come and gone. Different things can affect that, but I was betting that he’d died earlier tonight. That they’d been killing him while we questioned Jonah Cooper at the Church of Eternal Life. Looking at the dead man, boy almost, he looked so young, I didn’t feel so bad about killing Cooper. Funny.

  I stood up and fished in my jacket pocket for my cell phone. I dialed a number I knew by heart.

  “Zerbrowski here.”

  “I hope you’re not at home,” I said.

  “Why?” and he sounded positively suspicious.

  “Because I’m over the river and through the strip clubs, looking at another damn body.”

  “No one notified us.”

  “I’m notifying you.”

  “Are you telling me that you found the body?” he asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  I told him a short version. I didn’t leave out that the bartender had told Ronnie to get a ride home, just that she was shit-faced about breaking up with Louie. I left out the creepy couple, but that was it.

  “Shit,” he said, “I’ve got to call this in. The Staties or the local sheriff are going to get there before we do. The sheriff didn’t like you much.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  I could almost feel him thinking on his end of the phone. “I’d almost say send your people home, but we’ll need them to corroborate your story.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I do, but I won’t be first on the scene, Anita. Do you understand?”

  “I think so, I’m going to need an alibi to explain how I just happened to find the next murder victim when they’ve got people patrolling all the clubs. They’re going to think that someone tipped me to it.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “You believe me, Zerbrowski.”

  “Yeah, but I know you. If any woman could go out to a strip club trolling for guys and accidentally find a murder victim, it’s you.”

  “I was not trolling for guys,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, I’ll be sure and tell all the guys here at RPIT that you were just doing a favor for a friend.”

  “You bastard, don’t tease me about this.”

  “Would I do that?”

  “Fuck you, Zerbrowski.”

  “I’d say yes, but what would Katie say?” His voice got serious all of a sudden. “I’ll put the call in, tell them that one of our people is on the scene, but if the sheriff gets there first, be nice.”

  “I’m always nice,” I said.

  He laughed. “Yeah, and hell is cool in the summertime. Just try to behave until we can get there to back you up.”

  “I’ll behave, if he does,” I said.

  “Great. I’ll be there as soon as I can, Anita.”

  “I know you will.”

  “Long damn night,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He hung up. I hung up and started walking. I heard sirens before I even made it back to the parking area. I had time to give Nathaniel and Micah a thumbnail sketch of what had happened and what was about to happen. Ronnie was sitting on the ground, moaning and holding her head. I’m not sure she would have heard me even if I’d tried to talk to her. Then cars squealed into the gravel parking lot, and in the lead car was Sheriff Melvin Christopher. There wasn’t a state cop in sight. Perfect.

  73

  THE EMTS, EMERGENCY medical techs, had given Ronnie a blanket. They seemed to think she was suffering from shock. That wasn’t it. She was sobering up. Sobering up in the middle of a murder investigation, when she’d drunk more in one night than she’d consumed in the entire six years I’d known her. They had her sitting in the open back of their ambulance. I think partly it gave them something to do. It’s good to keep busy.

  Physically Ronnie felt the worst, but none of us were having a good time. Sheriff Melvin Christopher’s opening shot to me had been, “Almost didn’t recognize you with more clothes on, Miss Blake.”

  I smiled sweetly and said, “That’s Marshal Blake to you, sheriff, and you are awfully interested in women’s clothing for a heterosexual man in a rural area.” It had gone downhill from there. I even admit that part of it was my fault. I shouldn’t have made the comment about women’s clothing, or questioned his sexual orientation, but, hey, his face got all the way to this awful maroon color before he started yelling at me. For a second, I thought I’d given him a stroke or something. Deputy Douglas had to separate us and take his boss for a little walk around the parking lot.

  It gave me time to go check on Micah and Nathaniel. Micah was saying calmly, patiently, but in a tone that said it wasn’t the first time he’d said it, or the second, “I do not work at this club.”

  The deputy who was questioning him was too tall for his body, as if his joints and hands and feet hadn’t had a chance to catch up yet. He was either well under twenty-five, or needed to eat more. “What club do you work at, then?”

  Micah looked at me. The look said, help me.

  I tried. “Deputy,” I said.

  He looked at me. His eyes flicked to the badge in my hand, but since his boss hadn’t been too impressed with the badge, it was hard for him to be impressed, either. The boss sets the tone. He had pale bluish eyes. They weren’t friendly, almost mean. “I’m questioning a witness here.”

  I smiled and tried to push it all the way up into my eyes, but probably didn’t manage it. “I see that, but, Deputy,” and I read his name tag, “Patterson, the witness has answered your question several times.”

  “He won’t tell me where he works.”

  “You never asked where I worked,” Micah said.

  Deputy Patterson looked back at him, pale eyes narrowed in what he probably thought was a hard look. It wasn’t. “I did ask where you worked, and you won’t answer.”

  “You asked what club I work for, I do not work at a club of any kind. I do not strip for a living, is that clear enough?” Micah asked. His voice had an edge of impatience. He was one of the most easygoing people I knew. What had Patterson been saying to put that tone in Micah’s voice?

  Patterson’s face showed that he didn’t believe it. He was really going to have to work on the blank cop face, right now everything he thought spilled across his face. “Then what were you doing inside this place?” A look of near evil joy crossed his face. “Oh, I get it. You like to look at other people’s beans and weinies.”

  “Beans and weinies,” I said, “what the fuck does that mean?”

  “Dick and balls,” he said, with a tone that implied everyone knew that.

  Micah looked at me, and even through the dark glasses, I could picture the look. I was beginning to see what had gotten on his nerves.

  “Patterson, I allowed you to question my friends out of courtesy. This is my crime scene, not yours, and if you can’t ask a single question that could help us solve this crime, then you need to go somewhere else.”

  I don’t know what he would have said, but I felt Sheriff Christopher coming up behind me, even before I saw the look of satisfaction on the deputy’s face. His look said clearly that the sheriff would sort me out, and he’d enjoy a ringside seat.

  Patterson said, “He won�
�t tell me where he works, Sheriff. Says he’s not a stripper. Says he just came to watch a little fag wag.”

  I made a small sound in my throat. “I’m going to say this just one more time. We got a call from my friend Veronica Simms that the bartender at this club told her she was too drunk to drive and she needed a ride home. Micah came along so that he could help me with her.”

  “And what about the other one?” Patterson asked. “He says he’s a stripper at Guilty Pleasures.”

  “Nathaniel came along to keep us company,” I said.

  Sheriff Christopher gave me a flat cop look. It was a real look. He might be a prejudiced, woman-hating, good ol’ boy, but he was a cop, too. Underneath all the crap was someone who could be good at the job, when his personal agenda wasn’t getting in the way. It made me feel better, that look, but of course, his personal agenda was raining all over us.

  “Why’d you need two friends,” and he stressed the friends, “to help pick up one drunk girlfriend?”

  “Nathaniel had just gotten off work, and we hadn’t gotten to talk, so he came along, so we could visit.”

  Sheriff Christopher frowned at me. “You said you were home.”

  “I was.”

  “I thought this one was your boyfriend.” He pointed at Micah.

  “He is.”

  “So what’s that one?” he asked, pointing a thumb in Nathaniel’s direction. Nathaniel was talking to the last deputy. He seemed to be having an easier time of it than Micah or me, maybe his deputy was smarter, or just less prejudiced.

  “My boyfriend,” I said.

  “They’re both your boyfriends?”

  I took in air, let it out slow. “Yes.”

  “Well, my, my,” he said.

  I said a small prayer that Zerbrowski would get here soon. “We’ve got another victim, Sheriff, or don’t you care?”

  “Yeah, that’s another thing,” he said, and he put those hard cop eyes on me. If he thought it was going to make me flinch, he was wrong, but it was still a good look. “You just accidentally found our serial killer’s next vic.”