by J. R. Rain
Motion catches my eye down a hallway leading deeper into the building.
Vernon’s half out of his chair, leaning on his desk with a phone at his ear. A good thirty feet of corridor covered in cheap wood paneling, plus a glass door, separates us. He’s heavier than I thought. If he had rubber bands in his squiggly-curly beard, he really would look like an over-the-hill wrestler from the 80s. Our eye contact lasts mere seconds before he slams the phone down and hauls ass, deeper into the building.
Oh, that’s cute; he thinks he can outrun me.
I rush after him down the hall, almost ripping the door at the end off its hinges. A couple guys and two women look up from disheveled desks as I zoom past them. One locked, windowless door slows me down for the moment it takes me to break it.
“Oops.” I drop the knob, stick my finger in the hole, and pull the door aside.
Vernon’s already out the wide-open far end of a garage where a crew performs surgery on a semi-cab. He sprints (impressive for a man of his bulk) across a short paved area and ducks into the covered boathouse, probably heading for an aquatic getaway, which suits me fine.
None of the mechanics do more than check me out as I run by them, clearing the same swath of tarmac in eight strides before shoving the boathouse door open. The structure straddles the Duwamish, with three-quarters of its space over the water. Two narrow piers separate the water into three berths, only the center of which holds a boat. It’s a small self-powered barge, probably used to fetch cargo boxes from larger shipyards and bring them here.
Pallets and crates take up most of the floor space to the left, around a precarious metal stairway with no railings that leads to a second-floor office. Hope OSHA doesn’t see that. I didn’t hear any engines start up or a splash, so Vernon’s still in here. Probably hiding among the cargo, or upstairs.
My warning hum goes off the moment I take a step closer. Again, it’s not freakishly strong, so I press on. Body scent reaches my nostrils, a subtle thread intermingled with the stink of engine oil, diesel fuel, and the aroma of the water itself. I know that smell. The guy who shot me, or at least the one who tugged on my bag.
I’m expecting something bad to happen, so it doesn’t catch me off guard when a blur of red flannel and steel pipe lunges at me from the left the instant I pass the first stack of pallets. I duck and scoot forward, evading the pipe that dents a shrink-wrapped cube of cereal boxes. The man growls, but looks nervous like he’s seeing a ghost. He takes a swing for my head again, forcing me to back up.
Another man runs at me from behind, trying to grab me in a bear hug. The sudden attack startles me into an instinctual sideways maneuver, which gives Pipe Man a clear shot to ring my bell. The steel tube hits my skull with a dull clank. My vision cuts out for a second along with a paralytic flash of pain that wraps around my head. After flying face first into the corrugated steel wall, I wind up on my ass, staring up at the guy admiring the dent I made in the pipe.
Ouch.
Bear Hug grabs two fistfuls of my dress and lifts me upright while I’m still a bit too dizzy to stand on my own. His buddy swings again, but I catch the pipe. The man holding me tries to force my arms down to my sides, but he’s not moving me.
“What the hell?” he yells, grunting.
Pipe Boy yanks his weapon away and swings low, nailing me in the knee. I cringe at a crunch of bone. He winds up again, but when he swings, I kick my broken leg out of the way so he nails Bear Hug in the thigh. At the same time, I ram an elbow back hard enough to crack a rib or two in the big guy’s side.
“Shit!” Bear Hug hurl-drops me to the side and limps to his left.
“Okay, you two are seriously pissing me off now.” I let a hint of growl into my voice while I sprawl there, cradling my broken knee, waiting for it to knit.
The other guy doesn’t get the hint. He charges, taking an overhead two-handed swing that mashes the pipe across my back, breaking ribs and knocking me flat on my chest. Vernon ambles down the stairway from the second-floor office, barely looks at me, and scurries out the door. He must figure me for one dead dame.
It’s going to take a lot of restraint to leave him alive.
Cheerios trickle from the dent in the pallet, bouncing over the concrete a few inches in front of my face. Pipe Boy raises his weapon high again as I push up to kneel and lean enough to redirect the attack onto my left shoulder instead of the top of my head. Another crunch as my shoulder breaks makes me snarl, though I fail to hold back a brief cry of pain. The injury knits back to rights almost as fast as he pulls the pipe away. Regenerating bones snap and crackle louder on the mend than the break.
He gawks.
I take advantage of the opening and spring up into a right hook. My fist pulps his jaw and sends him in a graceful arc to a splashdown in an empty berth. Bear Hug roars and charges me. I stand still and let him tackle me into the water. As soon we plunge under the surface, the flavor of Pipe Boy’s blood picks at my hunger. Dammit.
The big guy braces his right hand on the dock overhead and holds me against his left hip, keeping me under. Oh, he’s trying to drown me. That’s absolutely adorable. Then again, being held underwater by a huge guy would be completely terrifying to a normal dame. I can almost see the silent-movie placards flashing for the audience, telling them all about the desperate ‘struggle for my life.’
Pipe Boy, quite unconscious, floats a short distance away where he’s snagged on one of the pylons while the current tries to pull him out into the Duwamish. He doesn’t have a jaw anymore. Oops. Guess I hit him too hard. It probably flew straight out of the boathouse since I didn’t notice it hit the water.
People can say a woman’s intuition is a myth all they want. Something told me to wear a dress today. The lummox is focused on my face, as much as he can see of me while keeping his head above water. I’m on my back; his left arm encircles me, pinning me against his side. I shift my lower half, my long, chromatic tail flowing easily from my dress. Teasing the guy by pretending to struggle with normal ‘helpless woman’ strength gets old fast, so I fold my arms and give him a bored look.
He initially takes my stillness as a sign I’ve drowned, and puts his face below the surface to get a better look at me. When we make eye contact, he freezes. I can almost see the giant yellow question mark floating over his head at my ‘are you quite done yet?’ expression.
I smile, raise one hand, and stab my index finger toward my tail a few times.
He pivots, staring down the length of my body, at my fins and fluke wavering in the swirling eddies. His head comes back in slow motion, gaze crawling over me to resume eye contact. His expression of WTF is priceless.
I raise my right hand and wave my fingers at him in a dainty gesture. Bye Bye.
My face and mouth shift, giving him a good, close look at my pointy shark-like teeth. When I do this, I can unhinge my jaw like a serpent to take inhumanly large bites. The thug begins to scream like a schoolgirl from a B horror movie, and the stink of urine taints the water.
I sink my claws into his chest and pull him under. The man struggles, but he’s no match for me in my element. With a flick of my tail, I drag him out of the boathouse and dive. The last of his scream flees his mouth in a trail of bubbles, and in seconds, we’re at the bottom of the Duwamish amid a cloud of silt. He thrashes, lost to the panic of having no air in his lungs. It’s much harder to hold one’s breath and resist taking that fatal inhalation of water when the lungs are empty. He grabs and punches at me, but the rapid dive has left him disoriented, unable to tell which way is up.
My teeth close around his neck. One bite decapitates him save for a thin scrap of flesh attaching his mostly-severed head to his torso. I don’t really have a taste for human meat, so I spit it out. Human vertebra are rather annoying to chew anyway, and even Barnaby spat out bones. Since these jackasses got in a few cheap shots, I’m hungry enough to tear out his heart, liver, and kidneys.
I did kind of miss that.
Miss what? I swallow the second half
of his heart.
Human heart meat. It’s the most direct answer to my cravings.
Oh. I offer a blasé shrug and bite off half a kidney. I’m making an exception here, you know. Broken bones make me a hungry girl.
That’s not a request, merely a fond reminiscence. We’re doing well. It’s far easier to avoid unwanted attention keeping a low profile. No one reports fish and lobsters missing. You know, if vampires didn’t require human blood, no one would ever have discovered they existed.
I laugh and take his other kidney in three bites. As soon as I swallow, I feel a bit sick, but it’s only my humanity bugging me, nothing physiological. Or maybe it is? They say a vegetarian who’s avoided meat for many years can get physically sick from eating it. Maybe I’ve managed the same thing with humans?
While pondering this, I idly scratch at my stomach. Nope. I’m fine. All in my head.
The old sitting on rocks and luring sailors to their deaths worked much better in the days of small wooden ships. Giant cruise liners, not so much. They can barely see us from the deck. Not easy to trick those behemoths into running aground.
Seriously? Mermaids really did that?
Do you know why Christopher Columbus discovered America?
Because he had the better public relations team?
What?
There’s evidence all sorts of civilizations visited North America long before him. But, you’re setting up for a joke, so what is it? I grin.
Oh, not a joke. Columbus made his trip to America because I ate the first man who tried. I think it was 1483. And yes, the mermaid I was at the time plus four others used to perch on rocks and wait for ships. The poor guy never even made it past Gibraltar.
Wow. I dart back up to the boathouse to grab Pipe Boy, dragging him under out of sight.
Some of them still try it though.
You’re kidding.
No. Costa Concordia.
I blink. Seriously?
Why else would a cruise line captain do something so stupid?
Somewhere between careless, sleep-deprived, and drunk? There’s a whole bridge crew now, not like you remember with one man at a wheel. I think you’re pulling my leg. I return to where I left Bear Hug, and grab him before powering off along the Duwamish for deeper waters, both bodies in tow.
It doesn’t make sense why a cruise ship would suddenly take such a risky course close to land. I’m only saying it sounds like the old days.
Who knows? Up until the 1930s, I thought vampires were made up.
Well out into the Puget Sound, I leave the two men in shallow seabed graves after biting and mauling Pipe Boy a bit to make it look like sharks got him. I’m sure these two are the same pair from the hospital, and I glean no small amount of satisfaction from mangling them a bit more.
Swimming in a dress is about as awkward as trying to take a shower with my clothes on. Still, it spares me the irritation of having to explain streaking across the property to my Rubi. I take it slow on the trip back to prevent shredding the fabric. At the boathouse, I hide behind the outermost pylon and peek my head above water to check for prying eyes. No one’s around, which makes me wonder how much of this place is under Vernon’s influence. Does the entire yard know he’s having some broad bumped off in here and they should all stay away?
Grumbling, I drift over to the inner end of the dock and hunt around the bottom for my shoes before pulling myself up to sit on the edge. After shifting my legs back to human, I slip my flats on, stand, and drip.
Okay Vern. Game on.
I storm across the tarmac to the garage, radiating ‘ignore me’ at full power. My hands clench in fists from my internal argument. The desire to tear Vernon’s head off for sending a torpedo after Hannah is hard to suppress, but I have to be content with Troy being the bigger fish. Mechanics and desk workers disregard my existence as I tromp past them.
Vernon’s back at his desk with a cat-that-got-the-canary smile on his fat face. I probably looked like a goner when he chickened out and ran. Thanks to my radiant aura, he doesn’t notice me even when I swoop up to his desk. Only after my fingers close around his hair does he startle and look up.
“Hello Vernon. Surprised to see me?” I bounce his head off the top of his desk with enough force that the rebound sends him over backward in his chair.
“Gah!” He wriggles on the floor, arms and legs going like one of those Santa Claus pins with the pull string. “You’re al…”
“Alive? Yes. I am.” Before he can get too far, I grab him by the shirt and haul him into the air. “I know you sent a man to kill a child in her hospital bed.” I lift him as high as my arms will go, but I’m not that tall, born in 1899. Still, his feet dangle a few inches off the ground. “The urge to rip your head off is quite prominent.” I ram his back into the cinder blocks, and let him slide down until his feet touch the floor. My point is made; if someone sees us, the less supernatural looking, the better. “And I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.”
He grabs my wrists and pulls to no avail. These spindly little arms of mine can move cars.
“You don’t know who you’re messing with, bitch,” he wheezes.
Ugh. His sweat stinks of barbeque pork, and his breath is a fetid combination of that, plus beer, plus apple pie.
“Oh, I think I do.” I tease one finger at his side, making him squirm. “You’re a smalltime nobody who’s friends with a lot of other smalltime nobodies. And you think I’m some ditzy tomato, some little pushover who’s gonna scram as soon as you snap your fingers.”
“You’re a dead bitch, you know that,” says Vernon. “Dead.”
I push harder with my finger until the rib under it snaps. “Funny. I don’t feel dead.”
Vernon shouts in pain. He tries to lift me, which works since I’m maybe a buck ten, but I ram my knee into his thigh, breaking it, and he crumples in a heap. Ass on the floor, back against the wall, he stares up at me. The glassy expression on his face is either from shock or agony.
While I find this quite amusing, you’re getting far too much pleasure out of torturing this man. It’s a dark path you’re starting down.
A mental sigh leaks across my brain. She’s right. This isn’t who I am. I’m abnormally incensed over what almost happened to Hannah―like she’s my daughter.
My menacing glower melts into an alluring smile. Vernon slouches when I let go of him, cradling his side. Thick beads of sweat gather on a blotchy, red face that could’ve been carved out of spam.
He wheezes, rasping, gazing up at me in confusion. I don’t think he’s ever had a woman act so unafraid of him before, and my sudden change of demeanor from murderous to ‘bedroom eyes’ has left him flummoxed.
I perch on the corner of his desk like a siren on the rocks, and let my aura out of its cage. If we’d been somewhere secluded, I’d have brought the girls to bear―they make my charm much harder to resist. Alas, someone could walk in on us at any second, so being topless would… oh hell with it. I’ll zap them too. I need Vernon to be complete putty. My charms aren’t permanent, and the harder I hit him, the longer it will last.
The intoxicated, drooling grin on his face widens as I wriggle out of the upper half of the dress and push it down to my waist. There. Classic mermaid outfit, which is to say, nothing from the waist up.
“Hello Vernon,” I coo.
He raises a limp hand and waves while flashing a dumb grin. “Hiii.”
“I need you to do something for me.” I lean forward so my boobs are more prominent.
Vernon scooches closer. “Yes, anything.”
“Think of all the fun we can have together.”
“Ooh, yeah.” He drags himself toward me and puts a hand on my knee.
Ugh. I wonder how the human-eating mermaids deal with slobs like this. I can’t stand the way he stinks, and his touch makes my skin crawl. Still, I keep an outward smile while pouring magical energy into his thoughts. In his mind, I’m the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, or ever i
magined. Normally, a man treated to such a sight would wind up dead within the hour, but humans are kind of my liver n’ onions. I’ll only eat that if there’s absolutely no other option. Second, I need him alive.
“Mr. Baker―” A woman starts to walk in, spots us, gives me an ‘oh you poor thing’ stare, and backs out without a word.
Guess boobs-out isn’t an uncommon happening here. Wow. The outside world is going to be ‘poorer’ for losing you while you’re in prison, Vern.
“Tell me what you want.” He slides his hand up under my dress, rubbing the inside of my thigh. Since he’s kneeling and wide-eyed, the gesture comes off worshipful more than lecherous.
I reach down and caress under his chin with one finger. “What I want more than anything is for you to go down to the police station and tell them everything you know about Troy Robertson, and all the really smart ways you’ve beaten the cops at their own game. I love smart men.”
“I’m smart,” says Vernon, in a drawling, idiot voice.
“Did he hire you to kill little Hannah?” I ask, still scratching under his chin as if he were a dog.
Vernon’s grin is nauseating. He nods. “Uh huh. For fifty grand.”
My blood boils, but I keep a straight face. “Wow, that’s a lot of money. How’d Troy get so much?”
“He said he’s gonna get a couple million soon.” He grabs my hand and mushes it into his cheek, rubbing his face against it like a lovesick kitty.
“Troy hired you to kill me too, didn’t he?”
“Yeah.” Vernon leans away, cowering. “You’re not angry with me for that, are you?”
“Not at all.” My fingers dent the desk where I grip it.
He sags with relief.
“Now we can have all that fun together,” I say in my best ‘excited little woman’ voice while squeezing out every possible ounce of radiant charm. “You and me for as long as you want once you get done with the police. Okay?”
He nods, curly hair flapping all over the place.
“Go straight there and ask for Detective Webb. He knows me, and he’ll make sure we can be together soon. It would please me if you told him every detail of what you and Troy did. You want to make me happy, don’t you?”