Victor J. Banis

by Deadly Nightshade

  “Sugar, when King Kong’s in town, you’re likely to spot him climbing up the side of a building. It’s kind of hard not to notice that monkey of yours when he starts to stir.”

  “Well I don’t care what he was doing, it doesn’t mean anything. He stirs a lot, sometimes for no reason at all, just because he’s restless, looking for attention, maybe. That’s just how he is. The point is, I didn’t like what you did and don’t you forget that, okay?”

  “Uh, while you’re protesting, too loudly, it seems like to me, could I mention something about our case?”

  “Such as?”

  “Did you notice that she was lying? Lovely Lola, I mean.”

  Tom looked after the drag queen. It was dark in the bar, hard to see people when they had gone even a few feet away, but her height made her conspicuous. He watched her weave her way around the tables, pausing now and again to wave or blow someone a kiss.

  “About Hartman?”

  “About both of them.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lola made a point of strolling about the club, seeming to wander aimlessly, but ever so gradually, ever so carefully, making her way back to a small booth in the farthest, darkest corner. Most of the tables had little candles on them, giving off just about enough light to allow the patrons to find their drinks and their credit cards, and not enough to let them read the checks very carefully. The candle at this table had been snuffed out, leaving the booth in almost complete blackness.

  It was the booth saved for the performers when they weren’t working, either on stage or working the floor, wheedling colored-water drinks out of the tourists and getting a husband and wife excited for different reasons.

  There was only one drag queen sitting there now. Tanya wasn’t in fact a performer, though the management was considering her, or so she said. She’d become a regular just in the last couple of weeks, seemed always to be hanging around, and somehow had found her way to the employees’ table. By now, everyone just sort of took her for granted.

  Lola slid into the booth next to her, took one of Tanya’s cigarettes from the pack on the table, and lit up.

  “You’re welcome,” Tanya said.

  Lola exhaled noisily. “Cops,” she said. “Looking for you. They had sketches.”

  “Really?” Tanya looked in the direction of the bar. The light from the stage made it brighter there. “The ones you were talking to? The queen and the straight one?”

  “They had a picture of that John you took out of here the other night, too. Is there something I should know about?”

  Tanya took the cigarette from her hand, took a puff from it, and handed it back. “He had a huge dick.

  That’s about all I remember. You know how they all kind of blur together after a while.”

  Lola peered at her through the gloom. “You aren’t rolling these guys, are you? We don’t want that kind of trouble with the law. You could get the joint shut down, put us all out of work.”

  “I give you my word of honor, I didn’t make a dollar off the guy.”

  “Charity?” Lola was disbelieving. “You don’t look the type to be giving it away either, dearie.”

  “What type do I look, darling?”

  Lola had to think about that. “You know, now that you ask, I don’t know, exactly.”

  Tanya laughed. “Yeah, sure, that’s me, woman of mystery. Excuse me, time to powder my nose.” She got up and sashayed to the ladies room.

  Lola looked after her. She had this uneasy feeling. Something about Miss Tanya said trouble, if she didn’t exactly know what kind. Maybe she ought to talk to the manager. The last thing you wanted, working a joint like this, was trouble.

  Cop trouble especially.

  § § § § §

  The cops were looking for her.

  Well, goodness, of course they were looking for her. She laughed at herself. She had killed a man. More to come, too. She’d just gotten started.

  She frowned at the woman in the mirror. Tanya frowned back at her. She’d need to be someone else, though, for a while at least. At least part of the time. She’d work on that later, figure out who she was going to be.

  She had decided she liked being different people, becoming someone else at will. It was like Halloween, only all the time. It reminded her of when she had been a kid. That was when she’d first started dressing up, becoming someone different. The other kids, it had just been a game, a night’s silliness, but she had always known that it was more to her than that. Way more. And it turned out, she had been right, in ways that she could never have imagined then.

  Tonight, though, was a Tanya night. She felt, looking into the mirror, as if she’d let an animal out of a cage. She smiled at that thought. Yes, Tanya was wild, dangerous—deadly. A jungle cat. A tiger.

  And tonight, she was looking for prey.

  § § § § §

  It had rained some while they were inside, leaving the sidewalk and the parking lot speckled with puddles.

  They were almost to the car, Stanley chattering about something, Tom not listening. Not to Stanley, anyway.

  He was listening to the furtive movements behind them. Footsteps, following them. Two guys. No, three.

  And trying to make no noise. Obviously up to no good.

  “So I told her,” Stanley said, and the next minute he was flying. Tom had shoved him, hard, knocking him down. He hit the wet asphalt on his knees, grunted with shock and pain.

  “Hey, what the hell…?” he started to say, at the very same moment that someone said, “Fucking faggots.”

  A lead pipe cut through the air, caught Stanley’s shoulder instead of his head. Stanley let out a yelp of pain.

  The guy with the pipe swung again, but Tom swung at him at the same moment, threw him off. The pipe crashed into the glass of the car’s window. The car alarm went off.

  § § § § §

  Michael Paterson was uncomfortable standing alone at the bar. A drag bar. The first time he’d ever been in one. A pretty young boy in a dress went by, winking at him as he passed.

  Paterson’s dick twitched in his pants. Guys in dresses turned him on, something fierce. The mere idea of a chick with both tits and a dick gave him an almost instant boner. Just a few days ago, he had never even heard of such a thing, had no idea those people existed.

  Until he’d picked up that hooker off the street corner in the Tenderloin, a couple of nights ago: black, sultry. He had taken her to this motel she’d suggested. Pay by the hour, no questions asked. Tawdry room, dirty sheets, rust stained sink in the bathroom. People didn’t rent rooms like these for luxury accommodations. The only thing that mattered, really, was the sagging bed and the toilet with the Niagara Falls flush, so mighty it could swallow jism-filled condoms without complaint. Possibly, he had thought, watching his own condom swallowed down, a careless sitter too.

  “I’m pre-surgery,” she’d told him in the car, and he’d said, “That’s cool,” without a clue of what she meant—until they had gotten naked, and there it was, double your pleasure, double your fun. Tits, real tits, not the foam rubber he’d been expecting—she was a drag queen, after all. He’d known that all along, he just hadn’t known that some of them had real tits, and big round ones that would make any woman proud—and, what was really a surprise to him, and had him standing at attention almost instantly, the queen had a dick as well, a fat glossy ten incher.

  Tits and cock. Who’d ever have dreamed? What he had dreamed, lots of times, was of a threesome, a guy fucking him in the ass while he worked on a beautiful babe, and now, he discovered, it didn’t take two partners, one was plenty—the right one. He’d practically fired off a load just looking at her on the bed.

  “Is everything cool?” she’d asked him in a wary voice that said you could never be too careful with Johns.

  “Everything is beautiful,” he said, dropping his drawers to show her just how beautiful.

  He’d taken it up the ass, too, that big ten inch Tootsie Roll, the first time he
’d done that since his Boy Scout days, rode it while he squeezed and sucked on those enormous titties and she jerked him off. He’d shot a load like Mount Vesuvius going off, all over her belly and her tits.

  Afterward, he had found out from her that this was where she sometimes hung out. So here he was at Carla’s Web, sipping a beer, looking around, wondering if he would see her. He hadn’t yet, but he saw plenty of interesting looking substitutes. He drank some more of his beer, trying to work up the courage to approach one of them.

  As it turned out, he didn’t have to. She approached him—a petite brunette, long straight hair hanging down clear to her ass. Pretty, in a cheap, over-made-up way. He liked cheap. The slutty look. He hated “nice”

  girls. He could never get it up with one of them. It was like thinking about fucking your sister, or your church-lady mother.

  He hadn’t even seen her approaching. One minute he was alone at the bar, trying to think of a good opening line, and the next, there was this sweet young thing smiling up at him.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Tanya.”

  “Michael,” he managed to sputter, almost choking on a big swallow of beer.

  “New in town?”

  “No. New here, though,” he said. “In the club, I mean.”

  She nodded. “I thought so. I’ve never seen you before. Not that I live here, you understand. It’s just—

  well, most of the customers are regulars, you know what I mean. Same old faces.”

  He glanced around. “That makes sense,” he said. “Place like this, you’d sort of have your own crowd.”

  “You’re nervous.”

  He laughed sheepishly. “Yeah, I am, actually. I’m kind of shy.”

  “I like that in a man.” She gave him a big smile.

  “You want anything? A drink, I mean.”

  “Actually, this is what I want.” She reached for him, groped him through his trousers. His dick sprang to instant attention. “Wow,” she said, running a tongue over ruby-painted lips, “you’re a hot one.”

  “So are… I mean, that’s pretty…” He stammered, his eyes bugging.

  “Brazen?” She cocked an eyebrow at him. “I am. Absolutely shameless. Listen, honey, you’re a hunk. I’ve been watching you for the last several minutes, thinking how good you look. Thinking I’d like to suck you till your nose bleeds, to put it crudely. Why beat around the bush, is what I say. Is that too brazen?”

  “Yeah. No. I mean, right, why beat… you don’t have to stop.” She had taken her hand away.

  She glanced around the bar. “They don’t like stuff like that in here. We could get kicked out if anyone saw us.” Her voice filled with regret.

  “Well, I was thinking, maybe it was time to leave anyway.” He managed to give her a boyish grin, wishing he had the nerve to ask about her tits, if she was pre-surgery. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask. They looked real, though, through the filmy blouse she was wearing. And they were big. He thought about sucking on them while she fucked him. He hoped she had a dick. He couldn’t make himself ask about that, either. He couldn’t stop himself hoping, though.

  “I’m ready, if you are,” she said.

  He put his beer down on the bar, grinned again. “Ready and rarin’ to go.”

  She laughed. “Just the way I like them.”

  § § § § §

  There were three of them. Tom took the one with the lead pipe first, a pumped up skinhead, got the guy’s wrist and twisted it hard. Bone cracked, and the pipe fell to the cement. Tom cold cocked him and the skinhead dropped to his knees.

  Two of them were whaling on Stanley. Tom got one of them by the collar, jerked him around, hit him hard in the gut, doubling the guy over, caught him under the chin, sent him reeling.

  The third one tried a karate kick at Tom’s crotch, missed, and decided things weren’t going their way. He took off at a run. The other two scrambled to their feet and went after him, the skinhead holding his broken arm.

  “Stop,” Stanley shouted, struggling to get his gun out of his jacket. It got caught on something. “Stop right goddam there, in the name of…”

  “Let ‘em go,” Tom said. “We can’t arrest them. We’re undercover, remember? And by the time we could get a black and white here, they’ll be halfway across town the rate they’re moving.”

  “I don’t care, they’re gay bashers, they need to be locked up,” Stanley said in a huff, tearing his pocket and finally getting the gun out. He looked angrily at it and shoved it back into his torn pocket. “Go after them, goddamn it. You can’t let the bastards get away with shit like that.”

  Tom made no move to pursue their attackers. By this time, they had disappeared around a corner anyway.

  “Probably they’re going to rethink their activities after this,” he said. “One of ‘em’s not going to be bashing anybody for a while, that’s for sure.” Tom helped Stanley to his feet, and realized Stanley was trembling like a leaf. “You okay?”

  Stanley clamped his left hand over his right shoulder. “I think he broke my arm. Oh, crap, look at my pants, I just got these at Nordstroms,” he said in a wail that veered into falsetto. “A hundred dollars, on sale, and look at them.” There was a tear in one knee where he’d skidded along the asphalt when Tom knocked him down.

  “Sorry. I didn’t realize the guy was swinging that pipe till the last minute. I wanted to get you out of the way.”

  Stanley suddenly forgot all about his pants and gave Tom an adoring look. “You saved my life,” he said.

  “Ah, those punks,” Tom said, embarrassed. He asked, again, “You okay?”

  “For crying out loud, no, I’m not okay,” Stanley said, his voice shaky. “That guy almost split my head open with a lead pipe and I can’t even move my right arm. How okay could I be, for crap’s sake? Plus my pants are torn.”

  “Come on, Stanley, you’re a cop.”

  “Well, I’m a fucking queen, too, as you never tire of pointing out. Thank you for saving my life, but just for the record I was scared silly. I still am.”

  “Jesus. They’re gone, okay? There’s nothing to be afraid of. They aren’t coming back.”

  “They might.” Stanley’s voice was rising now, a note of hysteria creeping into it.

  “They won’t,” Tom said firmly. “Take my word for it. Calm down, Stanley, take it easy.”

  “I can’t take it easy.” The voice went up another notch. “How can I take it easy after that?”

  “Come on. Just take a deep breath, okay?” Stanley took a deep breath. “That’s it. Breathe deep and slow.”

  “I am breathing deep and slow, Tom.” His voice was still tremulous, too high, on the verge of shrieking or something, but he looked marginally calmer.

  “Okay, okay, don’t get excited.” Tom looked around like someone might be standing nearby to give him instructions. This was entirely outside his range of experience. He’d never partnered with a gay cop before, never had a cop get all screamy on him. He was way more scared of Stanley at the moment, of the fit Stanley looked like he was on the verge of having, than he had been of their would be assailants a few minutes earlier.

  That kind of shit he was used to. “What do you want me to do?”

  Stanley moved his right arm cautiously and winced. “It’s working, at least. I’m going to have a hard time whacking off, though. I never use my left hand. I don’t know, the grip just isn’t right, you know what I mean.

  My friend Chris, he says the same…”

  “You want me to take you to the hospital?” Tom interrupted him, ignoring the whacking off part.

  “I want you to take me home,” Stanley said in a breathless rush, and quickly added, with a nervous little smile, “Like we were on a date.”

  “We’re not on a date, Stanley.” Tom sounded exasperated.

  “I know that. I didn’t say we were. I said like we were on a date.”

  “Well…” Tom hesitated, looked around again, and suppressed a groan. This was really
weird. On the other hand, he didn’t want Stanley going totally ape-shit on him, in a parking lot outside a drag bar. How would he explain that, to anybody? What if somebody called a black and white, and here he was in the parking lot of a queer bar with a screaming queen on his hands?

  “Well, sure, I can take you home,” he said, his voice resigned. “That’s what I was going to do anyway, before we were so rudely interrupted. Come on, get in the car.”

  § § § § §

  Outside the bar, Patterson said, “My car’s about a block down.” He indicated the opposite direction from the bar’s parking lot, a Ford Crown Vic just pulling out of it. The lot had looked too dark to him when he drove up a little earlier. The street had looked relatively safer.

  “Too far,” she said. She tugged him into the shadowy doorway of a closed flower shop. “What’s wrong with right here?”

  “Here?” Paterson was surprised. “You want to do it in a doorway?”

  “I can’t wait any longer,” Tanya said. “I want you now. Ever since I got hold of what you’ve got down there. It was all I could do not to get on my knees in the bar.” She laughed, a throaty sound that sent little shivers up and down his spine.

  “Jesus, there’s all kinds of people around,” Paterson said, excited and scared all at the same time. As if to punctuate his remark, a homeless man drifted by, gave them a not very interested glance. “Anybody could see us.”

  “Let them.” A hand reached down, fumbled with Paterson’s fly, tugged him out of his trousers. Paterson was instantly hard all over again. Excitement won over scared. He groaned, moved his feet apart to brace himself, pushed his hips automatically forward. She was right, the state he was in, this couldn’t wait.

  Tanya knelt, sucked on his dick energetically for a moment, fondling his balls at the same time. He groaned again. Jesus, she was good. All of a sudden she took her mouth off it, let go of his balls and stood, leaning in close against him.

  “Wow, don’t stop now,” Paterson said, “I was ready to shoot.”

  “Me too,” Tanya said with another of those throaty little laughs. There was a feverish glitter to her eyes.