by G A Chase
“Would you please, for once, be a gentleman and get me a towel?”
He got up and pulled the beach towel from the back of his chair. “I’m sorry. I thought as a mermaid you might prefer to be wet and naked.”
She snatched the terrycloth from his hands. “I’m not a fucking mermaid.” I’m a creature from hell. Yeah, that should make for a more believable explanation. She wrapped the towel around her body and bent down to grab her bag.
He stood with his arms folded. “Well, I can’t wait to hear your explanation for this situation.”
She opened the bag and pulled out her clothing, which she slid on under the towel. “What makes you think I owe you one?”
“This is my cabin. Since you were headed out to clear your name the last time I saw you, I’m guessing you’re still in trouble with the law. I wouldn’t want to be charged with being an accessory after the crime.”
Once again dressed, she regained some semblance of composure. The shotgun didn’t hurt either. She made a show of swinging it into the holster behind her back. “Fine. But you asked for it. I found Larry’s murderer, and I was there when he slit Kelly’s throat. She’s lying dead on the floor of some abandoned hunting cabin a few miles downstream.”
His snarky arrogance mellowed to something resembling caring. “That must have been horrible.”
“I’ve seen worse. The murderer headed this way in a broken-down skiff. Did you happened to see anything like that while you were out here jerking your morning rod?”
“Nice,” he responded to her jab. “If he’d have come puttering this way, I’d have heard him.”
She looked around the bayou. “There must be a hundred waterways out here he could have taken. Damn it! I had one good shot at that asshole, and I missed.”
Bart looked her over then peered over the edge of the dock. “So what’s your plan now? Gonna hunt him down on foot now that you couldn’t outswim him?”
Shit. “I need to get back to my motorcycle. It’s behind Riley’s bar. Mind giving me a lift?” Asking Bart for help stuck in her throat like swallowing an angry crawfish.
“Wow. Did you hurt yourself just now? Asking me for help is something new.” He hitched up his jeans as if he’d just scored a conquest. “I feel like we’re making some progress in our relationship.”
“Toward what? I need a ride twenty miles down the road. It’s not like I agreed to give you a blowjob as payment.”
“Maybe not,” he said, “but you are the one who keeps showing up without her clothes on and making all the sexual innuendoes.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything. You’re the one who keeps following me like some creeper.”
He waved at the dock. “This is my house. You’re the one who climbed up here naked. I really can’t see how that’s my fault.”
She was desperate to change the subject away from her repeated embarrassments. “Can we please just go? I’ve got a murderer to catch and a sheriff to keep off my tail.” Not to mention the loas of the dead, who were probably all too interested in hearing how Kelly had died and who had been present at the time.
He led the way up the dirt path to the garage beside the cabin. Once he opened the overhead door, she stood face-to-face with his Ducati Monster. I’ve ridden on the backs of alligators. I can certainly ride on you. As he got on the beast and fired it up, she realized it wasn’t the bike that intimidated her—it was the prospect of riding on the back. He pulled the motorcycle out into the light and motioned for her to climb on. You could at least make it look like you were scooching that muscular ass of yours up to make room for me. She’d had too much of him making her feel self-conscious to ask for the additional space.
Climbing onto the elevated back end, she pressed her feet to the passenger pegs and forced her crotch tightly against the top of his rock-hard glutes. She grabbed him around the waist and ground her body aggressively against his. “Make it fast.”
Bart released the clutch and hit the throttle so hard Sere had to lean her chest down onto his back to maintain her balance. So this is how it’s going to be. Fat chance, bucko. Once she regained her composure, she bent her head over his shoulder to anticipate the road ahead. Like any good horse trainer, she needed to see what he could do before showing him who was really in charge. His mastery of the motorcycle through town was pedantic at best, but then, he probably didn’t want to show up his Harley-loving patrons, who were probably all still groggy from their hangovers. I guess I should be grateful he isn’t advertising my presence.
But being the sweet, submissive girl on the back of some big muscular guy’s crotch rocket was never Sere’s style. As soon as he hit the gentle bend out of town, she swung her hips hard to the side of his, forcing the bike from the mild angle into a far more aggressive cut through the turn. Bart had to hit the gas to keep the bike steady.
“Do you mind if I do the driving?” he yelled over his shoulder.
“A little bit, yeah.” She hooked her fingers into the belt loops of his tight jeans and yanked his butt hard upright while shifting her hips farther onto the seat. “This bike didn’t seem to be slow while you were chasing me. What’s the deal? Can’t perform when someone else is on board? I always figured these crotch rockets weren’t much more than masturbatory aids.”
“Shut up and hang on.” He ran through the gears so fast that she wondered if he ever fully released the clutch handle. The lazy pastoral highway became a high-speed slalom course. But no matter how hard Bart took the curves, Sere leaned her knee even farther toward the blurring white lines on the pavement below.
When Kelly’s Diner came into view, Sere turned her face away, but the image of police cars, yellow warning tape, and men in uniforms had been instantly and indelibly imprinted on her mind. Bart hit the brakes, causing her crotch to ride up under his jacket and against his bare back.
She clamped her arms and thighs around him. “Get me out of here. If the cops see me, I’m toast.”
“That’s why I slowed down. My cousin on the force will assume I’m just scaring some innocent young thing to get her to swoon over me. So long as he thinks I’m flirting, he’ll tell his buddies I’m not a problem. Had I punched it, he might have come after me with sirens blaring.”
That made sense, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging his consideration for her safety. “Think you can find a way around Larry’s machine shop?”
He patted her on the leg as she settled back onto the seat. “No problem.”
She kept her hands on his hips as he guided the powerful bike through the city streets, but she refrained from taking the lead again. Each house they passed could have been Kelly’s or Larry’s—each person a friend or relative. People in small towns stuck together, and she was responsible for the community losing two of its best. She buried her face in the back of Bart’s leather jacket in shame. I’ll never show my face in this town again. For the rest of the ride, she let his hips direct the action.
When they entered Riley’s parking lot, she edged toward the back of the seat. “You can drop me off here.”
He stopped the motorcycle and stood upright with his hands on his hips like a virgin who’d just been given it hard, doggy style. “I thought your bike was parked out back.”
That’s what she said. Sere smiled at her private joke. “It is. I’ve got something I need to attend to first.” She hopped off the rear of the Ducati with a new appreciation for the bike’s hard, vibrating ride. As she walked up to Cody’s truck, she pulled out her knife. With quick, penetrating blows, she slashed all four of his tires. Each time she thrust her blade into the thick rubber, she envisioned the sharp tip plunging into the fat asshole’s gut. “If you’d just hung around, maybe Kelly would still be alive,” she grumbled.
“I almost hate to ask, but do you want me to come with you, or was this just a wham bam thank you ma’am?”
She slipped the blade back into her boot with a feeling of sexual release. “Don’t you h
ave some drinks to mix or bottles to pop open?”
“It’s eight in the morning. Even my regulars don’t show up until ten.”
Sere wasn’t sure what transportation Monty would find, but she was positive of his destination. “I’m headed down to New Orleans. I won’t be back this way for a few days at least. Do what you can to keep the sheriff off my ass, but don’t go getting yourself in trouble. Tell him about Kelly. I can’t stand the idea of that poor woman’s body left out there for the vultures.”
“How am I supposed to explain what I know about her location without mentioning you?”
“You’re clever. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”
He sat back on the bike and scrunched his butt into its familiar location on the seat. “That may be the first semicompliment you’ve given me.”
She gave him a seductive smile before heading for the back of the building. “Consider it my thanks for the ride.”
The humid air that rose from the swamp and battered Sere’s face as she raced down the highway tasted like fresh gumbo, rich with the smells of mysterious spices and seafood. She swung the motorcycle from side to side like a dance partner, happy to no longer be dependent on others for her transportation. Now that she once again had time alone to think, she hoped to make sense of the rush of people who’d been streaming into her life lately.
Larry and Kelly had been kind, generous, decent people. And they were dead because they’d met Sere. The couple would forever be a reminder of her responsibility to protect the living from the demons that had followed her out of hell.
Cody and Riley were assholes who only looked out for themselves, and they’d weathered meeting Sere with little more than a few days’ worth of irritations. Not everyone in this strange realm was worthy of Sere’s protection or in need of it. Identifying the difference, however, had to be more involved than separating out those who had been nice to her from those who had pulled out a gun.
Bart needed his own category. For Sere, sexual desire while living in hell had been easily satisfied with any doppelgänger she found attractive at the time. Like looking at porn, she simply focused on whatever her libido took a fancy to and bent the puppet to her desires. Bart, however, wasn’t some mindless drone for her to have her way with. He had his own longings. Dealing with him versus the sex bots was comparable to playing poker instead of solitaire. And she only enjoyed competition when she knew she could win. If I keep up this flirtation, one of us is going to get hurt or killed. Why the hell are people so damn confusing?
The threat focused her back on Monty. She straightened the bike and laid into the throttle so hard the front tire momentarily came off the pavement. His first two murders were effective but messy. If he expected to take over Montgomery Fisher’s life after killing him, the murder would need to be much more elegant and leave no possibility of someone finding the body. A hundred miles stood between Jackson’s Bluff and New Orleans—with plenty of small hamlets in between for Monty to refine his technique in seclusion. Chasing after him would only put Sere at the scene of each crime, and she already had one sheriff who had his sights on her as the most likely psychopath. Others, like Larry and Kelly, would die. There wasn’t much she could do about that. Saving them wasn’t her job. Killing the demon from hell was. And if I fail? It wasn’t a question she could contemplate while speeding her way to New Orleans.
Focus on your desired result, not on the failure you fear. Joe made an art form of boiling down a complex idea into a simple sentence. Fake Monty had no soul. That made killing him the wrong term. She wasn’t killing anyone because he wasn’t human, or even animal, for that matter. Creatures working on pure instinct, however, could be notoriously hard to find and destroy. Without a consciousness to appeal to, Monty would kill to watch the effect it would have on Sere—just as he’d done with Kelly.
There was another, far more ominous solution, one that would cross the line from defender of humanity to self-appointed executioner. Monty might be impossible to stop before he killed again, but Mr. Fisher, CPA and member of New Orleans business community, would be a sitting duck.
“I’m not murdering Montgomery Fisher.” Saying the idea out loud worked like a sign post to turn her destructive thoughts to a more productive direction. Having watched Kelly die, the idea of killing Monty’s real to see if it would make the serial killer disintegrate was no longer an option. “I’m not a killer—I’m an exterminator. I have to end Monty and save his real. There’s no other way to keep the loas out of my business.” Besides, if she and Joe were correct, the doppelgänger believed killing Mr. Fisher would clear the way for Monty to take his place. There was just no way to know how life worked on demons from hell. Doing Monty’s dirty work could create exactly what she was trying to prevent.
But it wasn’t just her soul’s fate that was at risk. Monty might be the problem standing front and center, but somewhere in hell were answers to the much bigger questions of how he’d become sentient, who’d helped him escape, and what nightmare that entity intended to unleash among the living.
“One thing at a time, girl. Monty has already seen me, so I’ll need a disguise.”
Well before hitting the suburbs of New Orleans, she swung the Triton onto an off-ramp lined with shabby strip malls. The danger and—she had to admit it—the allure of continuing a few more miles to the middle-class mall and risking running into Jennifer Cranston was too strong to ignore. Sere’s fashion-conscious real, however, wouldn’t be caught dead in the ’60s-era buildings that housed businesses catering to women who wanted a throwaway persona. Sere pulled into the parking lot filled with twenty-year-old beater sedans. Looking through the windows at the empty fast-food containers and blankets that filled the back seats, she wondered how many of the cars qualified as primary residences. Based on the condom wrappers on the floors, some of them could well have doubled as places of employment.
She hit the buzzer to Harry’s House of Wigs and waited for the cashier to push the corresponding button unlocking the security steel-bar door. The gate popped open as if the hinges had been bent out of place by an abusive client. “How can I help you, sweetie?”
Sere ran her fingers through her short, thin, helmet-flattened locks. “I need something to cover this red hair. I stand out like a carrot in a produce bin of yellow and brown potatoes. Nothing too expensive, but something that will help me blend in without looking like I’m hiding.”
“Gotcha. So no neon-purple with glitter tips.” The woman walked out from behind the counter and looked over Sere’s face. “Brunette is usually best for passing unobserved, but if we go too dark, your light eyebrows and complexion are going to be a tip-offs that the do is fake.”
Sere thought back to the image of her real that had haunted her during her leg’s reconstruction. Jennifer had long hair that she struggled to infuse with body. She also dyed it as light as she could while maintaining a hint of red. Fucking vain woman. Sere needed to be as far from recognizable as possible to anyone Jennifer might know. “I’ll wear dark glasses.”
The shop attendant nodded knowingly. “I’ve got a shoulder-length black number with bangs. It’s straight like your natural hair. That’s about the best I can do on a budget. The previous owner had to get out of town in a hurry, so you might not want to be seen around Kenner wearing it.” She took the ratty-looking wig off a white Styrofoam head.
Sounds like I’ll be trading one dangerous persona for another. Sere held up the fake hair, wondering when it had last been cleaned. She pulled it over her head and fluffed up the black locks. The shop attendant handed Sere a mirror. I look ridiculous.
“Not bad.” The saleswoman took a pair of oversized dark glasses from a rotating display next to the counter and slipped them on Sere’s face. “Not bad at all. Add a change of clothing, and no one will recognize you.”
“At least not anyone I know.”
“Isn’t that the point?” The woman headed back for the register without waiting for a reply. “Cash or c
harge?”
Sere pulled out the twenties Kelly had given her. Looks like you were more right than you knew about me needing this money.
The cashier gave Sere a knowing smile. “There’s a discount for cash. Most of my clients like to stay anonymous. If you take the next freeway off-ramp, you’ll run into an outlet mall. They have a couple of reasonably priced clothing stores.”
Sere stashed the change in her jeans. “Thanks for everything.”
Once outside, Sere caught sight of her reflection in the shop window. The sales girl was right. In her jeans, leather coat, and alligator boots, her hair color didn’t make much of a difference. Monty would spot her a mile away. With Sere straddling her Triton, the attempted disguise of wig and glasses was laughable.
“Okay. One thing at a time. It’s not like Monty is barreling down on me. A change of clothing shouldn’t be that hard.”
The wig under her helmet made for awkward riding. With each change in wind direction, the layers of protection slid around, forcing her to slow down and readjust her skullcap. She gratefully took the next off-ramp and parked her motorcycle among the throngs of SUVs and family sedans. The interconnected concrete boxes a city-block long didn’t have a single window.
“What a god-awful-looking place.” She got off her bike and set her helmet on her saddlebags. Her wig needed to be rotated a quarter turn to sit correctly on her head. “The snakes should be glad I’m not hauling them around with me, though lord knows I could use the emotional support.”
The rattling from against the inside of the leather saddlebags was all the answer Sere needed. Large air-conditioned concrete cities were no place for swamp creatures, be they reptilian or human. Walking across the field of hard black asphalt hurt her feet. Boots were meant for use on grass and soft dirt, not imitation solid rock. The wig and glasses made her self-conscious. Monty wouldn’t be anywhere close to the mall, and the odds of running into Jennifer were pretty remote, but Sere needed to get used to the disguise.