by Margaret Carter, Crystal Green, Erica Orloff, Patricia Rosemor
“Ms. Van Doren.” He had taken off his tie and shoved it in his pocket. Maybe Williams was right about that tie. Still his pants were wrinkled and so was his shirt.
“What brings a detective of your stature to my humble little nightclub?”
“Humble nightclub? This is Studio 54 all over again. My guess is there’s almost as much coke in the bathrooms. Or is it Ecstasy these days?”
“I throw people out for doing drugs. Ask anyone.”
“I’m sure you do. That’s probably what the owner of Studio 54 said, though. You know, this place is so popular, I think people would kill to get past your velvet rope outside.”
“That’s their foolish prerogative.”
“You don’t much care about the people in this club, do you.”
Tessa shrugged her creamy porcelain-like shoulders, shown off nicely in her gown.
“What? You think they’re beneath you? Not in your league?” Flynn always found himself baiting her. He didn’t know why. It was like when he was in junior high and he thought he was in love with Maryanne Mooney; he used to tease her relentlessly about her freckles until he made her cry.
She stiffened. “No. They’re not beneath me. But this is a business. I’m not caught up in the thrill of having my name on Page Six in the Post each week.”
“I thought people like you lived for that shit.” His voice dropped an octave with anger.
“Other people, maybe. Not me, Detective.”
“No. You want to know what I think? I think because you’re a classy lady with diamonds and a fancy club, you think you’re better than the rest of us, including this working-stiff detective. Which is why you never give me a straight answer.”
“I always answer your questions honestly,” she said with mock innocence.
“Then how about telling me if you remember seeing Claude Montegna in your club the night he was found murdered. You were going to check your credit card receipts.”
Tessa moved closer, until she was just a few inches from him, her scent not overpowering him but still making his stomach churn. He had a knot forming in the back of his neck. It always took all his energy to avoid being sucked in by her. He had to keep it in the forefront of his mind that he was investigating her. This wasn’t a social call.
“It appears Mr. Montegna used cash,” Tessa purred. “That’s still legal last time I checked.”
“You know, I could get a search warrant for those receipts. Don’t fucking push me, Tessa.”
“Oh, now it’s Tessa?” She smiled smugly, obviously loving the way she got under his skin.
“I meant Ms. Van Doren.”
“I like it when you call me Tessa. Or you can call me Tess. That’s what my closest friends call me.”
“Look…it doesn’t matter what I call you. I’ll call you busted if you don’t watch out. The last thing any legitimate—and I use that term loosely—club owner wants is her books being pored over.”
She touched his hand as he held his scotch glass. “You seem very hostile, Detective Flynn. A little edgy. How come?”
“I’ve got two unsolved cases.”
“I have nothing to hide. I told you once before that Montegna was here. Jorge remembers him. But neither of us knows what time he left or with whom he left. I’m a club owner, not a baby-sitter. Maybe you should have gotten him one of those attractive little electronic ankle bracelets last time he got out of prison. You lost your man, Detective. I didn’t.”
“Well, he’s the second high-end drug dealer killed in the last three months who’d been a regular here. And both of them had the blood drained out of them, their throats garroted. Ugly crimes.” He put his now-empty scotch glass down on the desk. “How do you know you’re not next?”
Tessa leaned still closer to him and whispered, her breath hot on his ear and causing him to become even more aroused, “Because I have you watching over me. You’re my guardian angel.”
She pulled back from his ear and smiled. He stared into her eyes. They were green and slanted slightly at the outer corners, giving her the faintly exotic look of a wild feline. He was convinced she was playing him for a fool—a poor fool with lousy suits and a detective’s salary who couldn’t afford to come to her club. But then when she smiled, it seemed so real.
“Let’s have another drink.” She took his glass and walked over to a wall faced with custom mahogany cabinets. She opened a double set of doors, revealing a bar, then poured herself a cognac and Flynn another scotch.
“May you find your killer.” She raised her glass.
“I will, eventually.”
“Perhaps you’re closer than you even know.” She winked at him.
They sipped their drinks. She didn’t say anything, and neither did he. That was another thing that drove him crazy. The entire time he was married to Diana, they never had a single moment of “companionable silence.” They just didn’t fit together, and it was clear they’d made a huge mistake before the ink was dry on their marriage license. But Tessa…each time he came here, they ended up in her office, and each time they had a drink, or two or three. And each time, they fell into a silence that was…comfortable. As if they could talk to each other without saying anything out loud. He didn’t even tell Williams about these silences ’cause his partner would give him shit about it forever.
After a while, Flynn asked, “How come you don’t have any pictures on your walls?”
“I don’t need pictures to tell me the Night Flight Club is successful. And I don’t need to be poised on George Clooney’s arm, or, heaven forbid, wrinkled old Mick Jagger’s, to know who I am. I don’t define myself that way.”
“No family pictures? No boyfriend?” He regretted bringing it up the minute the words left his mouth. He expected her to mock him, but she didn’t.
“No.” She smiled but looked mournful. She stared at him, as if weighing whether or not to say something.
“What?”
Tessa shrugged those perfect shoulders again. Then she crossed behind her desk. “I do have one photo.” She took a key from the bracelet around her wrist and unlocked her top desk drawer. She removed and then held over to him a small four-by-five photo. It was a candid shot of him and Williams at the bar in black and white, a bit blurred.
“My surveillance camera took it.”
Flynn was puzzled. “Why?”
“If you have to ask, then I’m afraid you’re not as smart a detective as your press clippings seem to imply…. Well, if that’s all in the matter of Mr. Montegna, I need to get back to work.”
Flynn was still looking at the photo. He looked terrible in it, haggard, as if he hadn’t shaved, of course. “Here’s your picture…Tess.” He handed her the photo.
She showed him to the door of her office. “Always a pleasure, Mr. Flynn. Don’t be a stranger.”
She leaned over to him and kissed him, not on the cheek but on the neck. It was more intimate. And it took all his discipline to keep from kissing her back.
As Tony Flynn returned to the noise of the club, he instantly missed being in Tessa’s company. He missed the silence between them. He searched the club until he found Williams at a back table seated next to a beautiful redhead. A natural redhead by the looks of her, with slightly freckly alabaster skin and rosebud lips.
“Time to go, Alex. She ain’t giving anything up.”
Alex whispered something to his new companion, and she scribbled a phone number on a napkin.
Outside the club, Flynn was unusually quiet.
“What’s up, man? She’s got you bewitched, doesn’t she. I never thought I’d live to see the day when Tony Flynn would be gaga over a woman. This from the guy who thinks a great date is dinner at the pizzeria with a pitcher of beer.”
“I think she knows more about Montegna. I just have a feeling. I can’t shake it.”
“So we keep digging.” They got back to the car, and Williams asked, “Wanna go get a drink at that place on 86th?”
“Nah.” Flynn sho
ok his head.
“Did you know you’ve got red lipstick on your neck?”
Flynn wiped at the spot with his thumb. “It was nothing.”
“Whatever you say, partner.”
“I said it was nothing.”
“Sure. Okay. Nothing.”
“I mean it!”
“Yup. Sure you do.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Now, there you’re wrong…”
“You should have gone to law school, Williams.”
As Flynn drove the two of them away, all he could think about was the silence. How good it had felt to share the silence. And that damn perfume of hers.
At three o’clock that morning, a man squirmed in a chair in the basement of the club. He was tied up in a room covered in tile, similar to a mortuary.
“So…do you like hitting women?” Tessa asked, her eyes full of ice-cold rage.
He shook his head, sweating, nervous, trying to shake off the drugs he’d taken.
“I don’t like when men hit women. Not in my club. And I especially don’t like men who think they can get away with trying to rape someone in my alleyway.”
The man’s oily skin grew slicker. Tessa drew closer to him. She was so close she could hear his heart beating. “And you know what else? I know you’ve been trying to deal coke in my club. I can also tell this isn’t your first time to throw a woman against a wall and rape her. You’re a very bad man. I like the taste of very bad men.”
She smiled as she drew back and then sank her teeth into his neck, her canines growing longer as she fed. He struggled against her, moving his neck back and forth, fighting the terror consuming him now. She was like a dog with a limp mouse in its jaws. Though the man shook from side to side as much as his ropes allowed, she never relaxed her jaw. Her heartbeat and his became one in a dizzying struggle. It was like a bird’s wings beating against the inside of her rib cage—a hawk’s wings, by the strength of the pulse inside her. She felt his blood being drawn into her. Eventually, his heartbeat stopped and hers grew stronger. The wings against her rib cage stopped. The air grew still once more.
When she finished feeding, she had, as always, that moment of remorse. She thought of Hsu and the long journey that had brought her here, to this club, to this moment, always on some quest she couldn’t quite define, to rid the world of a scourge. She would pray to Buddha later. This time, the remorse for the drug dealer before her also mingled with something else she hadn’t felt in a long time.
She’d dispose of this victim. Then she’d sleep all day. She never dreamed. She likened her sleep to someone losing consciousness. But sometimes, after she’d seen Flynn, she’d wake up the following night aware of him, with the feeling of longing that she had now, as if somehow he’d invaded that lost consciousness. It was the closest she ever came to dreaming.
And it was only and always about Flynn.
Chapter 2
The phone rang at seven o’clock the next night. Tess heard it from the recesses of a deathlike sleep.
She had once tried to describe her sleep to Hsu. But it was impossible. Though she did not sleep in a coffin, preferring to create a vault of her bedroom, her sleep was coffinlike, suffocating, dark, deep. Almost comatose. Rousing herself from it was difficult. After a feeding, she always slept well, though, the incessant craving that was like a frantic buzzing in her heart and head quieted.
She stirred now and answered the phone.
“Hello?” Her voice was raspy.
“It’s Hack.”
“If it isn’t my favorite computer vigilante. How are you?”
“See today’s Daily News?”
“No. I just woke up.” By now she had gotten used to reading the “morning paper” after supper.
“You’re the only person I know who’s more of a night owl than even I am. Listen…it’s another small item about a drug overdose. And word is, the cops don’t know quite what to make of it.”
Tessa sat up in bed, her eyes perfectly attuned to the darkness. She reached, rather than fumbled, for her bedside lamp, though she didn’t need it, her eyesight was so keen. Next to the lamp was a glass of water. She drank gratefully, her throat always dry after such a deep sleep.
“What do you mean, they don’t know what to make of it?” She ran her left hand through her hair and then rubbed her eyes.
“It’s something new, the drug…like a hybrid. Something they haven’t seen before. At least, that’s what I’m picking up in e-mails I hacked into. I can try to find out more for you.”
Hack was a compulsive junk-food lover, and an equally compulsive computer hacker.
“What are you eating?” Tessa asked.
“Hmm-mph” came the muffled reply.
“I’m almost afraid to ask, you know.”
“Box of HoHo’s.”
“A box. Not just one or two. I don’t understand how you can eat that crap.” Of course, she fed on blood, so the irony wasn’t lost on her.
“I’d have a seizure if I ate something green. Listen…I gotta go, Tessa. Did you get it for me?”
“It’s winging its way to your apartment as we speak.” Hack refused payment for all he did for Tessa. But, over the course of many nights on the telephone and computer, she had discovered that besides HoHo’s and fried Twinkies and pork rinds, he loved a hard-to-find soda. Tessa soon started sending him cases of Manhattan Special soda from a distributor in Brooklyn. Like most night-owl techies, he thrived on caffeine, and the rich black coffee soda was a particular weakness of his.
Tessa had originally hoped to entice “Technofreak”—his online handle—with champagne and models at the Night Flight Club, but Hack wasn’t interested in clubbing—just revenge, like she was. Either way, she wanted to keep him happy because when she wanted information, he was able to get it. She never asked how, but he was brilliant at what he did…if a little quirky. She had never been to his apartment, but she assumed it was wall-to-wall gadgets and equipment. And security systems. Not unlike the abode of a vampire, she mused.
“You’re killer, Tess.”
“Thank you…I think. Ciao, Hack.”
“Fight the good fight.”
“Always.”
Tessa had met Hack in an alternative drugs newsgroup on the Internet. She was Nightlady. Over time, she and Technofreak discovered neither was interested in learning how to make homemade methamphetamine—recipes that called for mixtures of prescription pills and over-the-counter caffeine pills.
Unlike the other members of the newsgroup, they were both against drug use. One night, well over two years before, around three o’clock in the morning, they had met in a private chat room Technofreak set up. Over the next two hours, she learned his story.
Technofreak: U say U want to know my story.
Nightlady: I do. Sincerely.
Technofreak: I’ve never told anyone.
Nightlady: I’m good with secrets.
Technofreak: I can tell…. I don’t know. I’ve got a feeling U R cool, ya know?
Nightlady: U 2.
Technofreak: OK. So here goes…I’m 24. And I haven’t left my house in three years.
Nightlady: How come?
Technofreak: I can’t.
Nightlady: Why?
Technofreak: I wish I knew. Agoraphobic. Like, I step outside my apartment and I just freak. Get it? Techno-freak. When I go outside, I feel like I’m having a fucking heart attack.
Nightlady: I know a little bit about feeling trapped.
Technofreak: Yeah?
Nightlady: Long story. Go on…
Technofreak: So I had a brother. A twin brother. Identical. Only way to tell us apart was he had a small scar over his left eye where our dog Huck scratched him once when we were kids.
Nightlady: Cool. I don’t have any siblings. U close?
Technofreak: Super close. Were close, that is. We grew up with a crazy-as-shit stepfather. It was me and my bro against this dude. This asshole beat my mother. He beat my brot
her Roger. He beat me. Left big-ass bruises. Starved us. It was really nuts. Always too clever to get caught by Social Services. I have cigarette burns, scars, on the inside of my thighs. Hidden. He thought he was so fucking clever.
Nightlady: Depraved piece of shit. It’s no wonder U don’t want to leave your house. U went through hell. I’m so sorry. Though I know that sounds so weak.
Technofreak: It doesn’t. I know U mean it. Thanks. Yeah. Shit. This is hard. OK, so we both turn 16. Me and Roger. We’re athletic (I am one handsome dude, Nightlady) and we beat up the bastard. Bad. We go in one night when he’s passed out half-drunk. I had a bat and my brother had a golf club, and we just go to town. We beat him up and break one of his legs at the kneecap, and kick him out and tell him if he friggin’ shows up on our doorstep again, we’ll kill him. Meant it too. I would have done it and not looked back.
Nightlady: Good for U. You were brave to do that.
Technofreak: We just had reached our limit, and we had grown. We weren’t going to be pushed around anymore.
Nightlady: What about your mom?
Technofreak: She was relieved. So, we think we’re free. Man, months go by. Months. We start to laugh. Relax. Mom is smiling. She just is this new person. It was like the best fuckin’ four months of my life. And then the motherfucker just shows up at the restaurant—this little diner—where Mom works and blows her away in the parking lot as she’s locking up for the night.
Nightlady: Shit. I am so sorry. I am so sorry. Fuck. I don’t even know what to say.
Technofreak: I know. So after he shoots Mom, he shoots himself. Right in the head. So he doesn’t even go to jail. Doesn’t suffer. Doesn’t pay for his crime.
Nightlady: U ever study Buddhism?
Technofreak: A little.
Nightlady: He is paying for that crime wherever he is.
Technofreak: I hear you, but still. Anyway, my brother and me, we graduate high school. We both get football scholarships (did I tell U what a hunk I am?) to a school in Connecticut. We try to hold ourselves together. But more and more, I’m afraid to go out in open spaces. And more and more, he’s using drugs.