Blue Desire (7 page)

“Was
it something I said?” asked the blonde as Kat headed for the door.

The
place hadn’t seemed that crowded before, and now everyone in the whole damn
place was between her and her pants. She got to them at last and tugged them
on. Then she headed to the door.

“Katrina,
can we talk?” She knew who it was the moment he put his hand on her shoulder,
but the voice confirmed it.

“We
have nothing to talk about,” Katrina said, shaking the hand off. “Thanks for a
great time, Sir. Have a nice life.”

She
rushed through the curtains. She heard his footsteps following her.

“Red,”
she said, loud enough to be heard. He stopped, as she’d known he would. She
didn’t know why she was so sure, but she couldn’t imagine it any other way.
Even if he did have a collared sub he hadn’t bothered to mention, she still
trusted him at least that far.

She
hurried on into the warm night, got into her car, and started it up. Her old
sedan had made it all the way from California, and now it would take her
“home,” such as it was, where she’d sleep. Tomorrow she was going to start
working on her career. She hadn’t come to Le Petit Mort to find a
dom
or a relationship; she’d come
to satisfy some needs. She’d done that. Now it was time to get on with life.

Brett
couldn’t get Katrina out of his head. She’d been angry with him—he could tell
that—and he didn’t know why. Maybe she was an angry person. He would have left
it at that if it weren’t for the fact that she looked so familiar. He’d
definitely seen her somewhere before.

He’d
been a cop most of his life, first in New York and then in DC, but he’d taken
law classes and was working as a defense lawyer. He had gotten tired of busting
kids for doing drugs while the real kingpins walked free. Drugs were a
bottomless pit, not only for the kids who used them but for the cops who tried
to enforce the laws. There would never be enough cops for the drug problem.
Brett didn’t know what the solution was, but he knew he was tired of being on
the front lines. Maybe he’d busted Katrina for drugs sometime, but he didn’t
think so.

In
his spare time he made corsets. At first it had started as a meditative
exercise, something to keep his hands busy and his mind away from the
disturbing things he’d seen on the streets. Now he was known from Richmond to
Boston in the BDSM community for his skill. He mostly did custom orders, but
when things were slow, he made extras.

The
next two weekends he manned his vendor table at Le Petit Mort. He’d get back to
playing soon, but he wasn’t in any rush. He kept an eye out for Katrina, but
she never showed.

“You
need to get out more,” said Lisa, idly fingering a brown corset. There was no
way Lisa was going to be wearing something brown, so her pretense that she was
chattering while looking at corsets was a failure. She had come over
specifically to tell him that. And she was holding something behind her back.

“I’m
out now.”

“You’re
running a shop. It just happens to be in a club with lots of kinky people.
There,” she said, pointing to the floor where every play station was in use by
a kinky couple, except for the one occupied by a threesome, “is out. This is
in.” She tapped on the desk. “
Here.
” She tossed a
copy of the
City Paper
, Washington’s
local free weekly, onto his table. He picked it up quickly to stop newsprint
from getting on the silk clothes.

“Do
something that gets you out from mooning about that girl,” Lisa said.

“I
am not mooning. And since when did you get to be so bossy?” When he first met
Lisa, she was dressed in nothing but lingerie and wandering the club alone
looking quite lost, the victim of a cruel prank. For a while, he’d thought Lisa
was afraid of him. Not anymore. Lisa might be a submissive, but that only
applied to her relationship with Darren. She owned her own business, and the
longer she and Darren were together, the more assertive she seemed to get.

“Do
something that gets you out from mooning about that girl,
Sir
.” Lisa smiled sweetly.

“Go
pester Master Darren.”

Lisa
shrugged and left. Brett waited until she was across the room to flip open the
paper. Getting out seemed like a good idea. He’d just wrapped up a case, so he
had some extra free time. Lisa was right there was no sense in thinking about
Katrina. He had no way to get in touch with her, and it wasn’t even as if
they’d parted on good terms. The woman had issues. It wasn’t his job to solve
them.

The
ad for the Caravan club caught his eye not because it was striking but because
it was clumsy. Brett would have thought they could do better in today’s
computer age, but it looked like someone had pasted a new act into the ad with
glue and then photocopied it, because it didn’t quite line up with the others.
“Kat, formerly of
Kradle
.”
He had
a few
Kradle
CDs. He’d even seen them live once a few
years ago. Good, hard driving rock and roll that reminded him of the Damned and
the Clash, which had been favorites of his in college, back when he used to
wear all black. The singer was hot too.

The
singer looked quite like Katrina, in fact, except that her hair was white
instead of black, and she wore ripped T-shirts instead of silky blouses.

Exactly
like Katrina.

She
was playing tonight at ten. He could make it there right in time for her to
start if he left now. He packed up the corsets, carried them out, and tossed
them into the trunk of his Chevy sedan, and drove toward the Caravan Club.

It
was in a decent section of town, better than Le Petit Mort actually. All sorts
of bands played there, big and little, oldies and avant-garde. Brett hadn’t
been there for a couple of years, and some of his memories were about drug
busts. Brett paid the cover, hoping Kat got a good cut, and went in.

He
wasn’t sure he’d ever seen such an odd crowd. He’d worn what he had on at the
club—black tee, black jeans—and he fit in okay. There were guys with spiked
collars and studded belts, and girls with torn fishnets and cock rings on their
wrists—although they probably didn’t think of them as such. That was all about
what he expected, and not unlike the
Kradle
concert
he went to. But that was only half the crowd. The other half had Day-Glo leg
warmers, glow sticks, bikini tops, pink vinyl skirts. Brett though he would go
blind just looking at them.

“Do
you know where we can find Molly?” asked a blue-haired girl who looked about
sixteen.

“Don’t
ask
him
,” said her
androgynous-looking date, pulling her away.

I guess I still look
like a cop
.
Molly was the latest name for Ecstasy, this time in powdered form. The girl was
an idiot for asking for it so openly, but if he was an undercover cop, he’d be
dressed like the other ravers. Yet another reason he’d hated working drug
detail.

Whatever
sort of band had been scheduled here originally, he was guessing it wasn’t a
punk band. He decided not to force his way through to get a drink, even though
he thought a scotch on the rocks would probably help him deal with the sea of
color. He was sure the crowd would thin down once Kat started playing, and he
knew which group would be leaving too.

Then
Kat walked out onstage and erased all doubt that she was the same woman he’d
played with in Le Petit Mort. She was wearing a short black vinyl skirt, torn
fishnet stockings, and a fishnet shirt over a black bra. Her stiletto ankle
boots made enough sound on the stage he could hear them over the crowd noise.
As she scanned the crowd, he wondered if she had known what she was getting
into. Then she walked up to the microphone and smiled. It might be an act, but
she had poise.

“Is
everyone ready for some noise?”

That
wasn’t a bad word to describe what punk rock and whatever the ravers had come
for had in common, thought Brett. But the cheers from people wearing black were
louder than those of the neon group. Yeah, getting that scotch would definitely
be easier in about ten minutes.

KAT
HADN’T HAD a good couple of weeks. She’d hired and fired two bassists, because
neither of them could learn the music fast enough. The third one had called in
sick eight hours ago. She’d given up on a drummer completely and programmed a
drum machine. At least she had a guitarist, Cindy, and Cindy was very good
indeed. After dealing with Angus and the boys, it was nice to work with a woman
too. Sadly, Cindy’s girlfriend Amy couldn’t play an instrument.

Kat
had spent the last few hours programming a computer to play the bass lines, and
it sounded like crap to her, but it was better than having no bottom end at
all.
Maybe.
She still wasn’t sure if they were going
to go with it, or try to make do without.

The
gig had been hastily arranged. They were replacing some band called
Sykedelik
, which apparently was one person, a couple of
synthesizers, and a lot of sampling. She’d listened to a couple of tracks, and
it was good stuff, but nothing like what she did. In any case, Mr.
Syke
had apparently decided to go to Ibiza instead. Kat had
known the crowd wouldn’t all be coming to see her, but she hadn’t expected what
she saw. This would be a hard audience to win over even with a full band.

The
response to her opening question wasn’t exactly overwhelming. She was reminded
of the scene in the
Blues Brothers
where the band gets booked in a country-western bar. The good news here was
that this crowd was probably a lot mellower. Possibly chemically mellow. Either
way, she was pretty sure most of them would be leaving soon. She and Cindy had
planned to start out with some of
Kradle’s
more
well-known tunes to win the crowd over before going into the more experimental
stuff. She’d written it, even if it came with some painful memories, and she
wasn’t going to back down from her life’s work. Besides, she didn’t have a
whole show worth of new material. But the fans of
Sykedelik
wouldn’t know any of her playlist at all.

Cindy
came out with her guitar. Kat thought that might make the
Sykedelik
fans happier. Cindy liked pink and was wearing a lot of it, as well as a lot of
black. She looked like she could almost fit in with either part of the
audience. There were unpleasant murmurs from the crowd, though. Maybe the
guitar sent the wrong message. It didn’t matter. It was hopeless.

“Tough
crowd,” whispered Cindy, just loud enough for Kat to hear.

Kat
nodded. Then she spotted Brett.
Great.
Just what I need
.
She didn’t see that sub of his anywhere, but then she hadn’t seen her last time
until it was too late. Cindy was looking at her expectantly. They had to start
playing something. She had to decide whether to have an automated bass line or
not. She couldn’t think about Brett now.

“Bass
or no bass?” asked Cindy.

“Bass.”
The computer was a few feet away, and
she walked over to it and
hovered
her cursor over the
Play button when she got a crazy idea. It wasn’t a good time to have a new
idea, but she thought she could do it. Could Cindy roll with it on the fly? She
hoped so. She walked back to the
mic
, grabbed it, and
said, “We’re going to try something a little different tonight. I know some of
you came to see—” Did one call it a band or an act? Act sounded like she was
deriding it.
Best not to call it anything at all.
“Mr.
Syke
. And some of you came to see me. I’m Kat, for
those who don’t know me, and I used to be in a punk band called
Kradle
. So we’re going to experiment and see what happens.
And it’ll either be the best concert you’ve ever been too, or it will be so
horrible you’ll have a story to tell.” She didn’t wait to get a reaction,
because she knew she’d lose her nerve. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw
Cindy looking at her like she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had.

“Do
what seems right,” she told Cindy as she walked back to the computer with the
microphone. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll go back to our planned set without the
bass.”

Cindy
nodded. Cindy, she’d noticed, didn’t lose her cool very easily. Kat had never
worked with anyone like that before, and it was a pleasant change.
Although Cindy looked scared now.
Stage fright, maybe? Cindy
was so good that Kat forgot how little experience she had at playing in front
of an audience, and now she was going to have to improvise. She pulled Cindy
with her so that Cindy could see what she was doing, because she’d sound stupid
explaining.

She
was having one of those moments of clarity when she could envision how an
entire piece of music would sound without even playing it. She quickly
programmed some loops into the main track of “The Little Death.” With a touch
of a few buttons, she changed the crappy-sounding imitation bass guitar to what
she hoped would be a passable imitation of a Roland synth. She looked at Cindy,
who looked aghast.