When I’m face to face with a trained attack dog, there’s usually trouble. I hate to kill a dog. I’ll play slice and dice with a person before I’ll open up a dog. Yeah, I know, a psychologist could really have fun with that, but there it is.
That Doberman had the kind of focused, barely suppressed aggression that let me know that it wouldn’t turn belly-up for me. If I wolfed out, then he’d make a run at me. And I’d have to kill him for it.
Club Dante wasn’t filling me with feelings of joy and puppies. Way too much security, the presence of a certain kind of money, and a definite connection to the missing girl. None of that added up to comforting math.
On the other hand it didn’t necessarily add up to involvement in seventeen brutal murders. It was, however, the only lead I had.
And in a way that was only semi-rational it smelled right.
When I stopped at the light I fished in my pocket for the red membership card. I sniffed it, but all I smelled was that guy Gunther. It was possible that by now he’d called to say that I’d taken the card from him. Was that the reason for the heavy security?
No, I decided. The patrols here had a lived in look. I was pretty sure this was their regular security.
Hoping that things wouldn’t play out that way, I drove four blocks away, parked, hailed a cab and had the taxi drop me at the club. I couldn’t risk that the guards would have a list of all of the tag numbers of regular members.
With my Wayfarers on and just enough indolent slouch in my walk, I strolled past the gate and entered through the massive front doors. They had a doorman in a tuxedo right inside. He was roughly the size of Godzilla and I had to lean back to look up at him. He gave me a quick up-and-down appraisal and shifted to stand between me and the door.
“May I help you, sir?”
I pulled the card out and held it up between two fingers. “Been a long day,” I said casually, “and I hear a martini calling to me.”
He was well-trained. His scowl became an agreeable smile and he stepped aside to allow me access to a key-swipe station mounted to one side of a second set of doors. I kept a bland smile on my face but held my breath as I fitted the card into the slot and swiped it.
The little red light on the station blinked from red to green. There was a faint click behind the door, and the doorman’s smile became less artificial and more genuine. He pushed the door open for me.
“Have a glorious evening, sir,” he said.
“Count on it,” I assured him as I stepped through the doors and entered the belly of the beast.
*
The club was pretty much as you’d expect. It was shadowy as a closet, an effect insured by low-wattage indirect lights and lots of dark wood. The motif was, apparently, early dungeon. Wrought iron fixtures, low couches, rough stone walls, rich draperies hung from brass rods. As I passed one of these I glanced at it and then gave it a double-take. What I first thought was a hunting scene of mounted riders, a dog pack and a bunch of frightened deer was actually something a lot less enchanting. The riders all wore burgundy-colored robes, the dogs looked half-starved and ravenous, and the ‘prey’ were men and women scurrying on all fours. Naked, some with antlers tied to their heads. The tapestry was old and woven from thick, rich threads, so it was hard to tell much about the people on all fours…except that the more I stared at them the younger they all looked.
I said, very softly, “Uh oh.”
I made myself turn away from the tapestry to study the room.
There were probably forty men in there. Most of them were dressed in expensive suits. A few had loosened their ties; a few others wore Polo shirts like mine. None of the customers were women. This was clearly a men’s club. Not sure I’d go as far as ‘gentlemen’, though.
The wait-staff were women of a type. Busty, leggy, barely dressed and very young. If any of them was older than nineteen then I was the Tsar of Russia.
I wondered how many of them were even eighteen.
For a few seconds I debated short-cutting this whole thing by making a call to the cops and Child Protection Services. Maybe the press, too. Blow it open. Pedophilia is not a popular crime, not for the common guy on the street. People will sometimes look the other way if politicians or white collar criminals run money scams, or take kick-backs, but when it comes to sex with kids, my fellow citizens have a very admirable tendency toward pitchforks and torches. Look what happened with Penn State. Look what’s happening with all those priests.
But what could I prove?
I mean, right here, right now, what could I prove? That there are possibly underage girls showing their breasts and serving drinks? The news might like that, but I doubted I could get a warrant happening.
And if Bambi was here, then it might encourage the bad guys to dispose of any evidence. That girl was evidence.
So I drifted through the place and pretended to be a part of the debauch. I obtained a drink as protective coloration. I exchanged a few words with other ‘members’. We talked sports, we talked politics. We talked stocks and investments.
Nobody mentioned Moloch. Nobody mentioned dead girls.
I noticed that nobody used names. They didn’t offer or ask names.
There was a small stage at the far end of the cavernous main room. When I’d come in, a redhead was beginning a veil dance. She discarded about a dozen of them until she was stark naked. There was some mild applause and she gathered up the gossamer scraps and trotted lightly off. Then the lights changed and I saw a lot of the men shift their attention more seriously to the stage. Two women came out. Twins with masses of blond hair. They wore stylized bullfighter costumes. Then a pair of very large Latinos came out, both of them wearing bull horns. A small band began playing dramatic bullfight music, and the foursome launched into a variation of the paso doble. But instead of the man acting as bullfighter and the woman, with her swirling skirts, acting as his cape, the men were the bulls and the women the toreadors. They were all pretty good dancers and for a moment I thought that this was a surprising bit of real art in this place. But then the horns of the bulls caught on pieces of the women’s costumes. With each lunge and twist the clothing was torn away, gradually revealing a lot of flesh and turning the women from bullfighters to helpless victims. The bullish men began stripping away sections of their costumes, particularly their pants. I saw where this was going and turned away. I like sex as much as the next four guys, but the theme of this had rolled down hill into a presentation of female defeat and use. I wanted no part of that.
There was a wooden apron that ran around the outside of the main room, with several hallways and doors leading off from there. As the action onstage grew more heated and the club’s members became more focused upon it, I faded to the back and began looking for a door I could open.
Movement to my left made me pause and I saw one of the men get up and walk toward the back of the big room. He threw a few glances over his shoulder at the increasingly X-rated action on stage, but I got the impression he was leaving. He didn’t head for the door, though. Instead he made for a hallway that cut off out of sight on the far corner. A few seconds later another man followed. And another.
It wasn’t an exodus. Only a small percentage of the customers vanished down that hallway. The rest were staring with total attention at the sweaty spectacle on the stage. The timing of it all seemed odd to me. That many guys couldn’t need to use the bathroom at the same time; an assumption supported by the fact that the men didn’t return. As I moseyed nonchalantly in that direction I could see that there was another guard just inside the mouth of the hallway, and beyond him was a door with the same key-swipe station as outside.
If I had spider sense it would have been tingling.
I watched a couple of guys to see what the routine was. They approached the hall, flashed something to the guard, then swiped their keycard and passed through the locked door. It took me three or four times before I realized that all they were showing was their red cards. Nice.
; I waited for a moment when no one else was heading that way and I stepped into the hallway, flashed my red card, got a terse nod from the guard, swiped my card, and stepped through the doorway.
That easy.
As soon as I was inside I met a second security guard. He was even bigger than the Godzilla at the front door. Where do they get these guys? Thugs’R’Us?
He smiled at me. “Good evening, brother.”
Since I didn’t know what else to say, I returned his smile as I walked over to him. “Am I late? Have they started yet?”
He frowned and looked at his watch. “Uh … no, brother, it doesn’t start for another—.”
He stopped talking when I screwed the barrel of my Glock into his ear.
People tend to do that.
“Be smart,” I told him.
He froze into a statue, eyes wide, sweat bursting from the pores on his face.
“Where’s the girl?” I asked. I kept my voice low and level, letting the gun do all of my shouting for me.
I had no idea if he knew anything about anything, but sometimes you go on balls and instinct and a flip of a coin. Most of the times you waste your time. Once in a while though…
“She’s still upstairs,” he said.
I pressed the barrel harder against him. “Is she alive?”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Her fairy godfather. Answer the fucking question.”
He hedged. “Yes,” he said. But there was too much uncertainty in his voice. “They’re getting her ready.”
It was a simple statement that in any other circumstances might have meant something relatively innocent. But it filled my mind with terrible images and awful potential.
“How many are up there?”
His eyes shifted away and I knew he was about to lie to me. Before he could push us both out onto a ledge, I leaned close and whispered. “I don’t mind blowing your head off, slick. You have one chance to walk out of this, but you’re on a short fuse here.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “God’s honest truth. I only came on shift twenty minutes ago and some of them were already up there. Only about a dozen members have checked in.”
A dozen was the number of men I’d seen leaving the action outside.
I moved in front of him and put the barrel under his chin. I wanted to see his eyes better when I asked the next question.
“Do you know what they’re going to do to her?”
His mouth opened but it made a lot of shapes before he finally spoke, trying on different answers, seeing if any of them fit well enough.
“I’m just a grunt, man,” he said at last. “I just work the door.”
I leaned close to him and took his scent, sniffing at his face and chest the way a dog would. The gun stayed in place as I sniffed and I could see the total confusion on his face. He must have thought I was some nutcase. Sniffing like a dog.
I smelled fear on him. I smelled booze and tobacco and hashish. I smelled sweat and sex and blood.
And I smelled Bambi.
Not her blood scent.
Her living scent. The subtle perfume of hormones and skin oils and glands. The scent I’d picked up at her apartment.
He’d been close enough to her to get that scent on his clothes.
No blood, though.
No blood.
It was the only reason I didn’t kill him right there and then.
But it was a damn close decision.
Instead I kneed him in the nuts as hard as I could. His eyes bulged, his mouth puckered into a tiny Oh and he caved forward, cupping his balls. As he bent down over the pain, I clubbed him on the back of the neck, right where the spine enters the skull. It jerks the brain stem and short-circuits the nerve conduction. In the movies James Bond chops a guy there and the man goes out and wakes up ten minutes later with a headache. I’m not James Bond and this wasn’t the movies. He dropped like he’d been pole-axed, and when he woke up—maybe half an hour from now—he’d puke, he’d be dizzy and dazed, and he’d probably have neck problems for years.
Fuck it.
Behind me the door clicked as someone else used their keycard. I lunged toward a set of light switches and slapped them down just as the door opened. A man-shape filled the doorway, pausing in confusion at the unexpected darkness. I grabbed a fistful of his tie and jerked him into the hall, then kicked the door shut. The guy was a businessman in a nice wool suit. About my age, a little bigger, a whole lot richer.
I punched him in the throat.
He dropped, gagging and coughing, clawing at his neck.
The security guard said, “Hey!”
That was all I allowed him to say. I grabbed him by the tie and jerked that as tight as a noose while putting my foot as far through his nutsack as I could manage.
He said, “Oooooof,” in a high, squeaky voice. I used the necktie to pull him into the hallway. I took a one-second look to see if anyone in the main hall noticed any of this, but both couples onstage were going at it loud and weird, and the band’s speakers were cranked all the way up to eleven. No one saw shit.
I slammed the door, pivoted and kicked the key-swipe station off the wall.
The businessman was thrashing around on the floor trying to breathe. The security guy was on his knees, eyes popped nearly out of his head, face purple. I gave him a little bit of a shuffle side-thrust and he flopped back into bad dreams. Then I turned and kicked the businessman in the jewels and in the face. He groaned, rolled over and passed out.
It was suddenly very quiet in the hallway.
I was doing some real damage here and a small splinter of my mind was watching, aghast. The rest of me was remembering the faceless faces of the sixteen dead women, and the boy who’d been stripped of his life and nailed to a wall. And remembering the smell of Bambi, still alive, on the one guard’s clothes.
So, yeah, sure, compassion and all that. But not now and not for these guys. They were lucky I hadn’t wolfed out and really gone to town on them, and believe me that was a very strong temptation.
I paused to listen. If anyone upstairs heard the commotion they weren’t reacting. There was music drifting down the stairs. Drums and some kind of pipes. Very tribal. Voices, too. Some kind of chanting.
Ever since I spoke with Jonatha Corbiel-Newton my overactive brain had been conjuring a series of ugly pictures of what was going on here at Club Dante. I suppose the most dominant one was of frat boys going through some bullshit pseudo-ancient ritual before gang-banging Bambi and carving her skin off, all in some crazy belief that Moloch—fallen angel, demon or half-ass ancient god—was going to make them rich.
I shoved the businessman against the door and then dragged the unconscious guards over. That was more than a quarter ton of dead weight. If anyone tried to get the door open they could manage it, but not in the next five minutes.
Better for them if they didn’t.
Then I spun around and ran up the stairs.
*
I took the stairs two at a time, fast but quiet, thinking to myself, Hold on, kid. Hold on.
There was one more door at the top and one more key-swipe. I chopped the card down through it and then made myself slow down. I eased the door open and slipped quietly inside. The chamber was big, as wide as downstairs though with fifteen-foot high ceilings. Lights in recessed alcoves provided minimal illumination, but overall the room was dark. Shadows lay draped across everything. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment to goose along my night vision.
When I opened them I saw that there were at least twenty men in the room. Most of them were clustered around an open cabinet as one of the staff handed out robes of dark red silk. The men were stripping out of their expensive suits and then pulling the robes on over their naked skin. The expectation of what was about to happen must have been electric because some of the guys had hard-ons. I didn’t need to see that.
Music blared from at least a dozen speakers mounted high on the walls. It was the tribal stuff I’d h
eard downstairs, and the chanting was actually part of it. The guys here weren’t chanting. No idea what language the chant was in. Not Latin. Not anything I’d ever heard.
I faded into deep shadows thrown by a tall wooden carving. When I glanced up at it I was surprised to see that it was a bull. Kind of. The body was human, but the shoulders were massively overdeveloped and the head was that of a massive bull with long horns. I glanced around to see that there were other statues like this one. Not exactly like it, and some made out of stone or metal, but all of a gigantic bull-headed man. A minotaur? I wasn’t sure. My knowledge of mythology was pretty thin.
Another of the bull statures dominated the center of the chamber. At first I thought it was made of polished brass, but the more I stared at it the more I realized that it was gold. Maybe it was gold paint or gold plate, but somehow I got the impression that there was a serious amount of actual gold there.
And in a strange way it fit with the whole Moloch vibe. A demon who was the treasurer of hell. A creature who the ancient Ammonites and Phoenicians believed would guide certain men toward wealth. Would men like these—the financial kings of this city—have a false idol, one painted with sham gold?
No, I didn’t think so.
Somehow that made me a little more afraid.
This was looking a lot less like a frat stunt that got too serious and more like an actual cult. Or, I guess … a religion.
Did people really believe in something like this? Could they?
I mean … a cult that required human sacrifices wasn’t something you simply joined. Every man here risked life imprisonment or death row. At the very least this was felony murder, kidnapping, conspiracy, and a laundry list of capital crimes. I don’t care what kind of big-ticket lawyer they trotted out, everyone even remotely attached to this would go down for the hardest of hard falls.
And yet here they were, putting on robes, waving their chubbys around as they got ready to commit another murder.
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