Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee (20 page)

"About ten o'clock."

"Your time's up then, right?"

Clements nodded.

"So why don't you take me back now? Unless you wanna
pay me to sit here with you for another hour and not even
give you head. Don't get me wrong, it's fine with me if you
do. I've never said this to a john in my life but I'm starting
to feel like I'm ripping you off."

Clements laughed at that one. Of course, he knew how
strange this situation must seem to her. "How about tomorrow? Same thing. I need to come back out here, and I want
you to come too."

She frowned. "What time?"

"Around noon-"

"Noon! I get up at noon, man."

"I'll pay you five hundred bucks-"

"You're so fuckin' weird ... But, yeah, of course."

"Great. I guess it's time for us to go home-"

He put the binoculars under his seat. He leaned back.

"Well?" she said.

He sat a moment longer and lit a cigarette.

"You just said it was time to get out of here," Connie objected. "What gives now?"

"How much.. . ," Clements faltered, "for you to go
home with me?"

She twirled in her seat, almost astonished, put her hand
on his leg. "I was wondering when you'd finally come
around. You must know some other john who's had me,
right? And he told you I was good?"

"No, I don't know any other johns." Her hand on his leg confused him. "And I don't even know if that's why I want
you to go home with me."

She was shaking her head again but before she could
speak, Clements put his arm around her and kissed her. She
didn't retract at first; after a moment, though, she put her
hand against his chest and pushed him back.

In the moonlight, her face looked very sad. "What are
you doing?" she whispered. "Nobody kisses us, ever."

What could I possibly be thinking? "I like you," he groaned.

"We're just meat. We're things johns fuck or get head
from-that's all. Nobody ever likes us."

Clements pulled her close to him, and her arms slipped
around his shoulders, and then they kissed for a long time.

He wanted to fall into her right now, forget about everything else: Hildreth, the mansion, Debbie, the murders. It
felt so good, in fact, to just be with Connie and clear his
mind of all those other things.

He'd worry about those other things tomorrow, when
he'd sneak into the Hildreth Mansion.

Westmore didn't like the mood of the house when he and
Karen cooked dinner. Something felt wrong, too much silence, something. "Are we just going through the motions
here?" he asked Karen, who had just finished preparing a
make-shift cob salad. "Dinner's ready but no one's around."

"I don't know. This place screws with people's moods."
She listlessly lit a cigarette, sitting bored now on the
kitchen's expansive butcher-block table. "And don't forget
the mentalities of the others."

"What do you mean?"

"They're all half-nuts. They're a bunch of paranoid,
scared-shitless psychics. "

"Oh, that," Westmore said. "At least the dinner we busted
our butts making looks good." He picked up the tray of grilled
lobster tails and put it in the oven to keep them warm.

"I guess there's no reason why we shouldn't eat," Karen
said, getting some plates. The plates were shiny-black. "The
others can get theirs when they're ready."

It sounded like a good idea to Westmore. He was about
to get a plate for himself when the doorbell rang, a bright
clanging bell.

Karen and Westmore looked at each other. "Who's that
at this hour?" Karen said.

"Vivica?"

"She never comes here..."

The bell rang again.

"Who knows where Mack is?" Westmore took off his
cooking apron. "I guess I better answer it."

He strode to the foyer, still addled by the mansion's
damped silence, and unbolted the doors to find a robust, attractive brunette in a blue jumpsuit standing on the stone
stoop. She held a clipboard close to a sizeable bosom and
gripped a black toolbag in the other hand.

"I'm here about the safe," the woman said in a tired but
seductive voice.

Her sexy curves and contours-contrasted by the
slovenly work clothes and clunky boots-sidetracked Westmore. In the cul-de-sac sat a van: PINELLAS LOCK &
KEY. "Oh, the locksmith," he finally snapped to. "It was a
guy I talked to on the phone."

"That was my boss. I was coming back from another job
when he dispatched me." A patch on her top read: Vanni. She either seemed peeved by the late call, or just disturbed
by the ambience of the house; she didn't look happysomething else to contrast the stunning body and very feminine face and hair. Westmore let her in and when he turned
after dosing the door, he saw her staring up along the curving stairwell. At once, she shuddered.

"The a/c too cold for you?" Westmore asked.

"No, I'm fine. What a strange place. It's gorgeous
but ... well, strange, I guess."

"I suppose it is." Did she know about the murders?
Whether she did or not, he could tell at once that she didn't
want to be here. But he was curious about the safe. "The
office is on the third floor. Sorry, there's no elevator."

"That's fine, I need the exercise."

She didn't need any exercise, not in Westmore's view. He
followed her up the stairwell, gritting his teeth at the shape
of her rump as she rose. This is all I need, another bombshell
walking around this joint. By now, between the porn and all
the attractive women his vision had been inundated withit was all starting to get on his nerves. Oh, great, he complained more to himself when they got to the office. Plump
breasts strained against the jumpsuit top. Of course she's not
wearing a bnt. Westmore admired attractive women as much
as the next guy, but this was getting to be too much.

"You said the safe's not wired, right?"

"It's not wired." He let them in, first, to Karen's former
office, then to Hildreth's office behind it.

"Good, 'cos if it's not wired, I can open it," she assured.

"Your boss said the same thing."

He took her around to the oddly placed space behind
where the cabinet had been, which reminded him of the
strange way Hildreth had hidden the safe: pictures beneath
pictures, old engravings, and the pastoral oil painting of the young, dark-haired women whose snapshot he'd also found
in the desk. "There it is," he said, and pointed to the safe.

Vanni looked right at it, slumped, and said, "I can't open it."

Westmore was bewildered. "But you just said-"

"Sir, that's a custom Sec-Lock safe. Same company that
makes bank vaults. I couldn't get into that with dynamite"

"What? Dynamite?" Suddenly Mack was in the room, his
youth clearly perked by the sight of the attractive locksmith.
"I heard the bell and saw the lock van outside. Hi, I'm
Mack."

"Vann." She shook Mack's hand with little interest.

"She can't open it," Westmore said. "It's a special kind of
safe."

She looked back at it. "I'll bet that thing cost twenty or
thirty thousand dollars. And guess why it costs that much?
So no one can crack it."

"There must be some way," Mack said, idling about the
office. He appeared more interested in the safe-cracker than
the safe.

"Can't you use a stethoscope, like on TV?" Westmore
suggested.

Vanni frowned hard. "That's a myth. The pins on the
combination don't make noise anyway, and they're magpins, not gravity pins. It's biradial, the most advanced pintumbler system made. Nothing will drill through it, and if
we tried to cut through it, the temperature would go so
high that anything inside would be burned."

"So it's impossible?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe means maybe you can open it," Mack said.

She set her bag down. "Yeah, maybe. It could take all
night, and there's no guarantee."

"We need this safe open," Westmore stated.

"And we don't care if it takes all night," Mack added.

She turned to them both. "I'll be honest with you, guys.
I got two kids and a mortgage, I need the money in a big
way, and I charge a hundred bucks an hour for special jobs
like this. You want to pay me that kind of money for no
guarantee, then great. I'll do my best. But I'd feel almost
like I was stealing from you. You could have the manufacturer open it for a lot cheaper. It might take a week for verifications but you'd save yourselves hundreds of dollars."

Mack whipped out the $10,000 stack Westmore had
given him earlier, peeled off a thousand, and gave it to her.
"Go to it. If it turns out you need more, that shouldn't be a
problem."

Vanni tried to subdue her disbelief. In her eyes, though,
she looked overjoyed. "I- Okay." She glanced to the CRT
behind the desk. "I'll need to use your computer to go online. I need to get the basic specs of the box and try to find
out how many numbers the combination might have. Probably either three, five, or nine."

"We'll leave you to it, then," Westmore said. He turned
to Mack, "Let's go back down while she's working. Dinner's ready."

But Mack was hovering over Vanni where she sat. "Can I
get you something to drink?"

"Uh, sure, thanks. A Coke would be fine."

He touched her shoulder. "How about something to eat?
I think we're having lobster for dinner. I could bring you
up some."

"Well, if it's no trouble, yeah. Thanks."

Westmore withheld his amusement when he and Mack
left the office and proceeded down. "So, what? You're putting the make on the safe girl?"

"Are you kidding? That body on her could start a riot in a seminary. I don't know about you, man, but I haven't had
any action in a week. I sure as hell don't want to mess with
any of those weird chicks downstairs."

Westmore couldn't believe his audaciousness. "The
woman came here to open a safe-she's not a date."

Mack chuckled, eyes thinned with male arrogance. "She's
hot, and she's hot for me. We'll see where it goes from
there."

Westmore lit a cigarette. "Oh, so she's hot for you, huh?
And you know this ... how?"

"It's in the eyes, man, the eyes." Mack slapped him on the
back, as a linebacker might slap the quarterback after a sack.
"Hey, no hard feelings. I can't help it that she was scoping
me out instead of you. But I'll bet you could score with
Karen."

Westmore had to laugh. "I didn't come here to scone,
Mack ... "

Back downstairs, Nyvysk, Willis, Cathleen, and Karen had
already set dinner on the study table in the atrium.

"It's happened to me before-not a big deal," Cathleen
was saying over her plate. She looked disheveled and tired.
"Just not with this intensity. God, it was just so predse."

"What was precise?" Westmore asked, sitting down next
to Karen.

Nyvysk filled him in. "It's been a trying day for some of
us, Mr. Westmore. Earlier, Cathleen suffered what we call a
transitive paramental contact-or a pan-planar rape. Willis,
whom you assisted after his ordeal in the parlor, experienced what he describes as the most intense taction transference of his career. And I experienced positive EVP
activity-all within the last several hours."

Westmore's mind held onto the first mention: "Paraplanar. From another plane of existence is what you're say ing? You were raped by something from another plane?" he
asked Cathleen.

She finished chewing some lobster, and answered: "I
thought it was Hildreth-because when I began my divinations I was right in front of his grave. But when I came
to ... I was outside of the graveyard fence."

"You're saying you were raped by Hildreth's spirit?"

"Yes ... or ... I think so. I'm not sure"

Westmore rolled his eyes. He retraced his steps to something more objective. "You found Hildreth's grave?"

"Yes," she said. "There's a clearing in the woods right
behind the house."

"I'd like you to show me where it is later, if you're up
to it."

"Oh, I'm fine. I'm used to transitive contacts."

Westmore wasn't even sure what a "transitive contact"
was; still, he was surprised by the casualness of her regard
to an apparent trauma. For a girl who was just sexually assaulted, she's taking it well. Cathleen was eating voraciously,
finishing the entire lobster tail and knocking out her salad
and potatoes.

Willis, on the other hand, looked starving yet didn't seem
to notice that there was food in front of him. He sat
slouched at the table, circles under his eyes, depleted. "Well,
I'm not fine. This house is definitely charged. We all know
that by now"

"I agree," Nyvysk said.

"What exactly does that mean?" Westmore inquired.

"That's our way of saying haunted," Nyvysk offered.
"It's a technical reference. A bunch of people sitting in a
house, for example, each emit a trace electromagnetic field.
Anything alive, including plants. Detection equipment, such
as ion sensors, thermographs, and radiometers, can detect the presence of that field. Even though you can't see it, it's
there, it's measurable and therefore verified. Now, if you
take all the plants and people out of that house, and there's
still evidence of that electromagnetic energy-you've got a
charged house. People with psychic acuities such as Cathleen and Willis, have their own sensors, if you will, in their
minds. They can feel and see aspects of that charge."

"What about you?" Westmore asked.

"I don't have those same sensitivities. That's why I have
my equipment, to provide another avenue of verification."

"No, no, I mean what you said a minute ago," Westmore
backed up. "You said you experienced something too."

Nyvysk diddled at his food too. "Positive EVP activity.
Audio recordings."

"Of ghosts, you mean."

,.Yes„

Westmore looked at him. "And you actually have these
recordings?"

"Oh, yes. I've been getting readings all day."

No one else at the table seemed alarmed, which bothered
Westmore. "I want to hear them." Westmore looked around
at the others, dismayed. "Excuse me, folks, but this sounds
like kind of a big deal to me. Doesn't anybody else want to
hear these tapes?"