“No.”
“Why are you so sure?”
She fished in her purse and produced a pink cell phone. She flipped it open and pressed a few buttons to call up her text messages. She pointed to the number and then handed me the phone.
“That’s David’s cell number.”
The text read: Tonight.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me see what I can do.”
“What can you do?” she asked.
“Well, the best first thing to do is go have a talk with him. See if I can convince him to back off.”
“And if he won’t?”
“I can be pretty convincing.”
“But what if he won’t? What if he’s…I don’t know…too crazy to listen to reason?”
I smiled. “Then we’ll explore other options.”
The Crypt is a big ugly building on the corner of South and Fourth in Philadelphia. Once upon a time it was a coffin factory –which I think would have been a cooler name. Less trendy and obvious. The light snow did nothing to make it look less ugly. When we pulled to the corner, Mrs. Skye pointed to a sleek silver Lexus parked on the side street.
“That’s his.”
I jotted down the license plate and used my digital camera to take photos of it and the exterior of the building. You never know.
“Okay,” I said, “I want you to wait here. I’ll go have a talk with David and see if we can sort this out.”
“What if something happens? What if you don’t come out?”
“Just sit tight. You have a cell phone and I’ll give you the keys. If I’m not out of there in fifteen minutes, drive somewhere safe and call the name on the back of my card.” I gave her my business card. She turned it over and saw a name and number. Before she could ask, I said, “Ray’s a friend. One of my pack.”
“Another private investigator?”
“A bodyguard. I use him for certain jobs, but I don’t think we’ll need to bring him in on this. From what you’ve told me I have a pretty good sense of what to expect in there.”
As I got out my jacket flap opened and she spotted the handle of my Glock.
“You’re not…going to hurt him,” she asked, wide eyed.
I shook my head. “I’ve been doing this for a lot of years, Mrs. Skye. I haven’t had to pull my gun once. I don’t expect I’ll break that streak tonight.”
The breeze was coming from the west and the snow was just about done. I squinted up past the streetlights. The cloud cover was thin and I could already see the white outline of the moon. Nope, no accumulation. Typical Philly winter.
I crossed the street and tried the front door. Place didn’t do much business before late evening, but the doors were unlocked. The doors opened with an exhalation of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes. There was probably an anti-smoking violation in that. Something else to use later if I needed to go the route of making life difficult for him.
It was too early for a doorman, and I walked a short hallway that was empty and painted black. Heavy black velvet curtains at the end. Cute. I pushed them aside and entered the club. Place was huge. David Skye must have taken out the second floor and knocked out everything but the retaining walls of the adjoining properties. The red and white maximum occupancy sign said that it shouldn’t exceed four hundred, but the place looked capable of taking twice that number. Bandstand was empty, so someone had put quarters in to play the tuneless junk that was beating the shit out of the woofers and tweeters. Whoever the group was on the record they subscribed to the philosophy that if you can’t play well you should play real god damn loud.
There were maybe twenty people in the place, scattered around at tables. A few at the bar. Everyone looked like extras from a direct-to-video vampire flick. The motif was black on black with occasional splashes of blood red. White skin that probably never saw the sun. Eyeliner and black lipstick, even on the guys. I was in jeans and a Vikings warm-up jacket. At least my sneakers and my leather porkpie hat were black. Handle of my gun was black, too, but they couldn’t see that. Better for everyone if nobody did.
The bartender was giving me the look, so I strolled over to him. He knew I wasn’t there for a beer and didn’t waste either of our time by asking.
“David Skye,” I said, having to bend forward and shout over the music.
“Badge me,” he said.
I flipped open my PI license. “Private.”
“Fuck off,” he suggested.
“Not a chance.”
“I can call the cops.”
“Bet I can have L and I here before they show. Smoking in a public restaurant?”
Another smartass remark was on his lips, but he didn’t have the energy for it. He was paid by the hour and this had to be a slow shift for tips. I took a twenty from my wallet and put it on the bar.
“This isn’t your shit, kid,” I said. “Call your boss.”
He didn’t like it, but he took the twenty and made the call.
“He says come up.” The bartender pointed to another curtained doorway beside the bar. I gave him a sunny day smile and went inside.
There was a long hallway with bathrooms on both sides and a set of stairs at the end. I took the stairs two at a time. The stairs went straight up to his office and the door was open. I knocked anyway.
“It’s open,” he yelled. I went inside; and as I looked around I hoped like hell that the office décor was not modeled after the interior landscape of David Skye’s mind. The walls were painted a dark red, the trim was gloss black. Instead of the band posters and framed ‘look at who I’m shaking hands with’ eight-by-tens, the walls were hung with torture devices and S and M clothes. Spiked harnesses, leather zippered masks, thumbscrews, photos from Abu Graib, diagrams of dissected bodies. A full-sized rack occupied one corner of the room and an iron maiden stood in the other, one door open to reveal rows of tarnished metal spikes. The only other furniture was a big desk made from some dark wood, a black file cabinet and the leather swivel chair in which David Skye sat. He wore a black poet’s shirt, leather wristbands, and a smile that was already belligerent.
“The fuck are you and the fuck you want?”
The man was a charmer. I could just taste the charisma his wife had mentioned flowing like sweetness from his pores.
I flipped my ID case open. “We need to have a chat. It can be friendly or not. Your call.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
So much for friendly.
“That whore send you?” he demanded.
I smiled but didn’t answer.
He had a handsome face, but his wife was right when she said that he’d lost weight. His skin looked thin and loose, and he had the complexion of a mushroom. More gray than white.
“Did my wife send you?” he said, pronouncing the words slowly as if I’d come here on the short bus.
“Why would your ex-wife send me?”
His eyes flickered for a second at ‘ex-wife’. I strolled across the room and stood in front of his desk. He didn’t get up; neither of us offered a hand to the other.
“She makes up stories,” he said.
“What kind of stories?”
“Bullshit. Lies. Says I slapped her around.”
“Who’d she say that to?”
He didn’t answer. He did, however, give me the ninja secret death stare, but I manned my way through it.
“What are you supposed to be,” he said.
“Just what the license says.”
“Private investigator. Private dick.”
“Yes, and that was funny back in the 1950s. Why do you think I’m here?”
“She’s probably trying some kind of squeeze play. The club’s doing okay, so she wants a bigger slice.”
“Try again,” I said, though he might have been right about that.
“Oh, I get it….you’re supposed to scare me into leaving her alone.”
“Do I look scary?”
He smiled. He had very red lips and very white teeth. “No,” he said,
“you don’t.”
“Right…so let’s pretend that I’m here to have a reasonable discussion. Man to man.”
Skye leaned back in his chair and stared at me with his dark eyes. It was a calculating look, and I’m sure he took in everything from my slightly threadbare Vikings jacket to my cheap black sneakers. Put everything I was wearing together and it would equal the cost of his shirt. I was okay with that. I don’t dress to impress. Skye, on the other hand, smiled as if our mutual understanding of my material net worth clearly made him the alpha.
I smiled back.
“What does she want?” he asked.
“For you to leave her alone.”
“What is she afraid of?”
“She thinks you’re trying to kill her.”
“What do you think?”
“What I think doesn’t matter. I’m not a psychic, so I don’t know whether you’re trying to kill her or if you’re playing some kind of mindgame on her. Whatever it is, I’m here to ask you to lay off.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I asked real nice.”
He smiled at that.
“Because it’s illegal and I could build a harassment case against you and you could lose your club and sink a quarter mil into legal fees. Because I know inspectors who can slap you with fifteen kinds of violations that will hurt your business. I can have your car booted by accident three or four times a week, every week.”
“And I could have you killed,” he said, the smile unwavering.
“Maybe,” I said. “You could try, and I might fuck up anyone you send and then come back here and fuck you up.”
“Think you could?”
“You really want to find out?” When he didn’t answer, I took a glass paperweight off his desk and turned it over in my hands. A spider was trapped inside, frozen into a moment of time for the amusement of the trinket crowd. I knew he was watching me play with the paperweight, wondering what I was going to do with it.
I put it back down on the desk.
“Really, though,” I said, “how long do we need to circle and sniff each other? We don’t run in the same pack and I don’t give a rat’s ass what you do, who you are, or how tough you think you are. We both know that you’re either going to stop bothering your ex-wife and go on with your life; or you’re going to make a run at her—either because you have some loose wiring or because I’m pushing your buttons by being here. If you back off, we’re all friends. I’ll advise my client not to file a restraining order and you two can let the divorce lawyers earn their paychecks by kicking each other in the nuts.”
“Or…?” he asked. Still smiling.
“Or, you don’t back off and then this is about you and me.”
“Nonsense. You’re no part of this. This is about me and—”
I cut him off. “I’m making this about you and me. Maybe I have a wire loose, too, but once I tell a client that I’m going to keep her safe, I take it amiss if anything happens to her.”
“‘Amiss’,” he repeated, enjoying the word.
“But that’s a minute from now. We’re still on the other side of it until you give me an answer. What’s it going to be? You leave her alone? Or this gets complicated.”
“What were you before you started doing this PI bullshit?”
“A cop.”
He grunted. “You sound like a thug. An asshole leg-breaker from South Philly.”
“Thin line sometimes.”
He steepled his fingers. It was one of those moves that looked good when Doctor Doom did it in a comic book. Maybe in a boardroom. Looked silly right now, but he had enough intensity in his eyes to almost pull it off. He gave me ten seconds of the stare.
I stood my ground.
His cell phone rang and he flipped it open, listened.
“I’m in a meeting,” he said and closed the phone.
His smile returned.
I heard the footsteps on the stairs even though they were quiet.
I sighed and turned. There were four of them. All as pale as Skye, but much bigger. “Really? You want to play that card?”
“It’s one of the classics. Though, to be fair, it’ll be more than a typical beating. I…hm, am I wrong in presuming you have had your ass kicked?”
“That cherry was popped a long time ago.”
The four men entered the room and fanned out behind me.
“So, our challenge, then,” Skye said, “is to put a new spin on this. Something surprising and fresh so that you’ll be entertained.”
“Mind if I take my jacket off first?”
“Go right ahead.”
I heard a hammer-cock behind me.
Skye said, “You can put your jacket on my desk here, and take off your shoulder holster and put that –and your piece—on top of it.”
“Sure, whatever,” I said. I shrugged out of the jacket. I bought it the year the Vikings took their eighteenth division title. I’ll buy a new one if they ever win the Super Bowl. Or when pigs sprout wings and learn to fly, whichever comes first. I folded it and set it down, unclipped my shoulder rig, set that down. If I was going to ruin my clothes, then at least nothing I was currently wearing had sentimental value.
I leaned on the desk. “Let’s agree on a couple of things first, okay?”
“Sure,” he said with a grin.
“When I’m done handing these clowns their asses, then you and I dance a round or two.”
“That would be fun,” he said, “but I doubt I’ll have the pleasure.”
“Second, if I walk out of here on my own steam, then it’s with the understanding that you will leave the lady alone.”
“If you walk out of here? Sure. But, tell me something,” he said, and he looked genuinely interested, “why do you care? What is she to you?”
“Maybe I’m the possessive type, too. Maybe now that she’s asked for my help, it’s like she’s part of the family. So to speak.”
“Part of the family? You fucking kidding me here?”
“Nope.”
“You Italian? This some kind of dago thing?”
“I said it’s like she’s part of the family. My family,” I said, “and I protect what’s mine.”
“That’s it? It’s just a macho thing with you?”
“No, it’s more than that,” I admitted. I gestured to the torture and pain motif in which his office was decorated. “But, seriously, I doubt you would understand.”
“Mmm, probably not. I’m not into sentimentality and that bullshit. Not anymore.”
“What happened? What changed you?”
His smiled faded to a remote coldness. “I learned that there was something better. Better than family, better than blood ties. Better than any of this ordinary shit.”
“You found religion?” I said.
“It’s a ‘higher order’ sort of thing that I really don’t want to explain and I doubt you’d understand.”
“I might surprise you.”
“I don’t think that’s possible. But we might surprise you. In fact I can pretty fucking well guarantee it.”
“Rock and roll,” I said.
I straightened and turned toward the four goons. They took up positions like compass points. The office was big, but not big enough to give me room to maneuver. They were going to fall on me like a wall, and they knew it. The guy with the gun even snugged it back into his shoulder rig. They were that confident, and they were smiling like kids at a carnival.
“You shouldn’t have bothered Mr. Skye,” said the guy in front of me. He was the gun who’d holstered his gun. He stood on the East point of the compass. “You should have–”
I kicked him in the nuts. I really didn’t need to hear the speech.
I’m not that big but I can kick like a Rockette. I felt bones break and he screamed like a nine year old girl. Dumbass should have kept his gun out.
I stepped backward off of him and put an elbow into West’s face. It had all of my mass in motion behind it. That time I
heard bones break and he went down so fast that I wondered if I’d snapped his neck.
That left South and North. South spent a half second too long looking shocked, so I jumped at him with a leaping knee –the only Muay Thai kick I know—and drove him all the way to the wall. By the time North closed in I’d grabbed South by the ears and slammed him skull-first into a replica of a torture rack. Blood splattered in a Jackson Pollack pattern.
I pivoted and rushed to intercept North who was barreling at me with a lot of furious speed; so I veered left and clothes-lined him with my stiff right forearm. He did a pretty impressive back flip and landed face down on the black-painted hardwood floor.
If this was an action movie everything would switch to slow motion as the four thugs toppled to the ground and I turned slowly looking badass to face the now startled and unprotected villain.
The real world is a lot less accommodating.
I caught movement behind me, figuring it for Skye going after my gun, so I whirled and made ready to launch into a diving tackle.
Only it wasn’t Skye.
It was East and West getting to their feet. West’s face was smeared with blood from his broken nose, but he was smiling. As I watched he took his nose between thumb and forefinger and snapped it into place, then spit a hocker of blood and snot onto the floor.
North was chuckling as he rose; and behind me I could hear South shifting to stand behind me again. I turned in a slow circle. They were all smiling. They shouldn’t have been able to. They should have been sprawled on the floor and I should have been giving some kind of smart-ass speech as I closed in to lay a beating on Skye. That was the script I’d written in my head.
What the hell was this shit?
“Surprise!” said Skye dryly.
“What the hell are these fuckers taking? ”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you?”
“Try me.”
“Blood,” he said.
“What the—”
And I looked more closely at the smiles. Lots of white teeth. Lots of long, pointy white teeth.
“Oh, balls,” I said.
“Yeah, kind of cool, huh?”
“Vampires?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Actual vampires.”
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